Writing Annual Reviews

“I have no statistics on this, but I doubt that one student in a hundred, and perhaps far fewer than that, has ever read a serious secular argument against same-sex marriage, and most would be at a dead loss even to imagine what such an argument would say.”

I am stunned at Mr. Wood’s admitted ignorance, stated in the same sentence in which he laments the one-sided nature of the pedagogy that he assumes is presented to most students regarding same-sex marriage. Does he have any self-awareness at all?

In fact, there are a great many studies that have shown that children raised in two-parent, same-sex-parent families have well-being about as high, or higher, as children in married, opposite-sex-parent families. (Check out Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz’s work.) He is correct in that we have no data on the cultural impact of this change over centuries. Of course, this is also true for all of the other recent family changes, such as divorce, nonmarital childbearing, and cohabitation. And there is historical precedent for acceptance of same-sex relationships in other cultures.

It would have been nice if Mr. Wood had bothered to consider the state of the research literature on same-sex marriage before decrying the lack of debate. If he feels that the debate is one-sided, that is largely because the evidence is so strong and persuasive.

It used to be that there were conservatives and Republicans one could respect:  Everett Dirksen, William Buckley, Barry Goldwater.  I usually didn’t agree with them, but I enjoyed listening to these sane, thoughtful, intelligent men.  These days, conservatives, almost to a person, have adopted a hateful, anti-government (unless it benefits me and mine), anti-intellectual position on practically everything. Peter Wood, you seem like a rationale, sane person with thoughtful positions, but you are in the minority, not just on campus, but among conservatives in general.

Pete, although you have written and will surely continue to write in outstanding fashion about academe and especially academic freedom, I (a proud member of NAS) predict that some time–maybe tomorrow, maybe 30 years from now–before you die that you will regret your present stance on same-sex marriage, as our supreme military leader most likely regrets that he did not “evolve” sooner. 

Our Commander-in-Chief took a long time weighing the pros and cons of ssm on the merits–yes, the merits–of the arguments.  Your idea that many people have avoided the hard thinking on this issue is deeply mistaken.  Indeed, your argument comes dangerously close to the thinking of Sidoti in Palmore v. Sidoti (1984). 

The sooner that Justice Kennedy writes the definitive opinion on this equal protection and substantive due process liberty issue (perhaps 7-2 with only Scalia and Thomas in dissent), with Loving as the major precedent, the better. 

It’s about time that hopelessly heterosexual people like you (and me) recognize–nay, celebrate–one of the great civil rights issues of our day.  This is not celebrating a faux diversity, but rather celebrating gay people’s monogamous legal commitment to one another as recognized by the state and by our great nation. 

I hope for that day to happen in NC as soon as possible.     

How large the difference is between “being right” on these issues is far from clear.  Yes, the climate alarmists claim an existential crisis, and invoke a precautionary principle that says, in the absence of certainty, we must act as if the hypothesis is true. This is philosophically suspect.  We don’t operate in a world of certainties.  If the precautionary principle ruled human affairs, we would have no democracy, no industrial revolution, and no vaccination, among many other foreclosed options.  Part of the problem with invoking this principle is that it provides an open-ended warrant for remedial steps–or supposed remedial steps.  Do we satisfy ourrselves with carbon credits?  Move to replace a carbon-based energy economy with non-carbon fuels?  Dismantle the social structure that supports property rights?  As one contemplates the vast scale of social and economic change that might be undertaken in the name of “precaution,” the idea that there is anything “conservative” about the undertaking vanishes.

Peter Wood

This is another silly column from a writer whose bias takes precedence over evidence. If you bother to inform yourself on peer reviewed science and the vast majority of the relevant research, the case for climate change being significantly caused by reliance on fossil fuels is irrefutable. The consequences of doing nothing about it are within a range from seriously harmful to human health, lives impacted by severe weather and rising sea levels, forced migration due to drought, etc., to catastrophic. Saying it is something informed academics are somehow unfairly ignoring the other “side” of the argument about is rather like saying we should give equal time to creation science and flat earth advocates. And those folks are probably the ones who also fund NAS. As for gay marriage, people in academia and out are free to possess and practice whatever religious or non-religious beliefs they may have (except, perhaps, at some religious institutions of various kinds!). But that doesn’t mean it is unfair or a denial of academic freedom to finally recognize equal time for gay rights with other civil rights. We’ve come a long way since finally outlawing bans on interracial marriage in “Loving v. Virginia,” as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, but we still have a long way to go in this country, as evidenced by the sadly misguided North Carolina constitutional amendment last week. It won’t stand, because even this frequently misguided Supreme Court will probably not want to cross that Rubicon and go down as the Dred Scott Court of the 21st century. 

I celebrated all the things you speak about, by supporting civil unions back in the 1990s and never backing away from that support.

Your legal history may be keen but there are discourses other than juridical that we have to take into account here. If civil unions had been the means of fighting for rights for gay couples, we’d have been out of the brambles much sooner, because traditionalists would not have had so much backlash, the DOMA could have been easily averted, and same-sex couples could have gotten their rights without wasted money and emotion.

There is cultural context going along with the debate that’s important to consider as well. When Proposition 8 was debated in California, gay rights groups called the Proposition 8 supporters liars, when the latter said that gay marriage would be part of a movement to draw homosexuality into the classroom and into our homes. At the time I believed the gay rights groups and thought the Prop 8 supporters were being outrageous and lying. In the last 4 years, they have passed laws forcing teachers to teach about homosexuality in public elementary schools, the Cal State U is now asking incoming freshmen to check what sexual orientation there is, and the “It Gets Better” campaign received government sanction to broadcast tens of thousands of testimonials to minors in order to explain what gay sex is like to kids with disapproving parents. Obama’s first safe schools czar had an earlier pattern of helping teenage boys have sex with men in their 30s.

The more public acceptance rises of gay marriage, the less necessary the legal change seems, but the more problematically other misconceptions proliferate. Now gay couples are seen as normal but it’s taken without debate that everyone is born either gay and straight, and those who are gay but marry the opposite sex are doing something wrong. The logic of anti-miscegenation lives, but directed at “homosexuals” who marry “heterosexuals” and form miscegenated, pathologized “mixed-orientation” marriages.

The legal record now supports the biological classification of sexual orientation as an innate trait beyond the will power of human beings. The policy record pushes sexual orientation into our children’s lives at younger and younger ages.

I’m freaked out by all of this. It’s moving too fast. I was okay with civil unions but I don’t believe people have no choice in their sexual behavior. It is not necessary to use the exact same word to describe relationships that involve very different combinations of bodies. Regardless of the studies about kids adopted by gay and lesbian parents, it is still preferable for us to model parenting on a loving mother and father who conceive of their children together and do not involve the sperm or womb of a third party. 

This is all why I oppose same-sex marriage, and do so with a great deal of resolve. Men who love men and women who love women deserve the protections of civil unions. But male-female relationships remain quite different because of the challenges of dealing with the opposite gender and the risks/benefits of conceiving children. There is such a thing as pushing things too far — this is a clear example. We need to slow down.

We will all of us be in the outgroup if we don’t at some point begin addressing global overpopulation as our common enemy rather than regarding it as an emerging opportunity for economic markets.

Peter, I agree with some of the points you have brought up, particularly that it is not reasonable *only to claim* that there is an existential crisis, then invoke a precautionary principle. However, notice the word “only” that I’ve inserted here, which I believe you have implied. The problem with the argument is that it assumes that the case has not been made, and for anthropogenic climate change it has. This lies in the realm of natural science, not in that of the social sciences where the issues surrounding gay marriage often live, and there are different notions of what certainty means in those broad areas (which is no slur on either – toss in the humanities and you have a third notion of certainty, and all are valid within the realms in which they are applied). Therein lies the size of the difference in being “right” on these two issues – you can quite appropriately continue to have an opinion on the psychological impacts of poverty long after the mathematician has proven her theorem or the physicist has found the argument-settling evidence that the world does not behave quite the way Newton thought.
 
For the record, I am not trained as a climate scientist (though I do have a degree in physics), and I’ve listened hard to both sides, done much reading in both the scientific and popular literature expressing both viewpoints, and recommend that others do so carefully if they wish to claim that the use of the precautionary principle is inappropriate in this case. I’ll toss out two examples that have been deliberately written to be accessible, S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery’s book “Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1500 years” and Michael Mann’s new book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”. Anyone who has formed an opinion on either side of this issue will find at least one name there that will raise hackles, but in the spirit of the position that Peter and the National Association of Scholars have taken on being open-minded, it is right to give both a hearing. The following is addressed to anyone reading this, not just Peter: Check the arguments in both cases to see whether they justify the conclusions, and (this is particularly important) do some checking of the references to see whether they even say what the authors claim they say; also, see whether the cited references might draw exactly the opposite conclusion from the one the author(s) draw, and when that happens whether the author(s) admit that and explain the discrepancy. This is admittedly a lot of work, and you won’t likely have time to do it for every line and every reference in one of these (though I did it for Steve Goreham’s “Climatism”, and that was an interesting exercise), but particularly when one is taking a public position opposite to that of the vast majority of experts working in a scientific field and one does not have training in the area, then it is important to know why you are disagreeing with the scientificaly-based consensus. I’ve come to the conclusion that the climate scientists have made their case well beyond any reasonable doubt, and that the counterarguments have not managed to get any traction, but this is something that others can also explore for themselves if they are not in the mood to trust the experts.

This does not mean that the folks who are in opposition to the consensus have nothing to say. Roy Spencer, who wrote the ill-fated paper that appeared recently that supposedly blew the theory of anthropogenic global warming out of the water, has also made the case that if we thoughtlessly just try to shut down the global carbon economy in response to the threat, then we could condemn the people who still live outside that economy with a future of eternal poverty with no way to get out of it. On that point, I could not agree with him more, and I am glad that he is making that case – but it does not change what the science says is happening. The questions Peter poses at the end of the note immediately above, and the myriad others that coud be added to the list, are indeed tough ones, as Peter states. (Though, Peter, I do think you should be a bit more cautious when speaking of dismantling the social structure that supports property rights at the same time you accuse others of alarmism – think about that. There are many other ways to start addressing the problem without getting anywhere near such an extreme.) But though the questions are tough, they can’t be avoided if the mainstream climate scientists have made their case. And they have more than made their case.

Rob, thanks for your reply.

You write,

“Now gay couples are seen as normal but it’s taken without debate that everyone is born either gay and straight, and those who are gay but marry the opposite sex are doing something wrong….The legal record now supports the biological classification of sexual orientation as an innate trait beyond the will power of human beings…I don’t believe people have no choice in their sexual behavior.”

You make some points throughout your post with which I agree and disagree, but I’d be writing too much. Hence, concerning your points above, and assuming you’re straight (like me):

First: do you think you could choose to engage in gay sexual acts and feel comfortable doing those acts, since you suggest sexual orientation is not an innate trait?

Second: do you think that those who are straight but (would) marry (or engage in a civil union with one of the same sex) are doing something wrong?

pianiste - my sentiments exactly. If marriage provided legal protection that protection is granted by the government. Yet, most arguing against gay marriage cite religious principles/convictions, when constitutionally we have a separation of church and state. Different religions, even Christian denominations have different beliefs/interpretations. Consider getting married in a Catholic church. You cannot be re-married after being divorced because the church still sees you as married to your first spouse, while the law has considered that first marriage dissolved. 
If we accept that with marriage, as it is generally defined today, come legal rights and responsibilities, let it become a civil union. Beyond not calling it marriage, but rather a civil union, it also makes more sense as marital disputes are handle in civil not criminal court. Thus the state grants rights and responsibilities in acknowledgment of that civil union. It the couple wishes to have their civil union further acknowledged in a religious manner, they can choose to get married in accordance with their religious/church convictions. This adds for they a validation under the eyes of their God, but changes nothing from the legal state concept.

So to quote you directly, and my apologies for not having reply under your post but I discovered that by “liking” you comment I couldn’t then reply, “I advocate civil unions (i.e., civil contracts) for everybody, and marriage as an extra-legal (and usually religious) fillip obtainable by those who want it.”

“Are we being “fair” to the generations to come by taking steps that will
are likely to weaken the bio-social interdependencies of mothers and
fathers to each other and to their children?”
Wow that’s a huge package of assumptions with not a shred of evidence to back them up.

“…I doubt that one student in a hundred, and perhaps far fewer than that,
has ever read a serious secular argument against same-sex marriage, and
most would be at a dead loss even to imagine what such an argument would
say”

I’m not a student and I read widely but I’m still waiting to be enlightened…

Strangely enough, that other NAS, the National Academy of Sciences, has surely taken position on global warming,  

nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf

It agrees that there is, and that it is an important issue.

Eli looks forward to the coming debate on miscegenation laws led by the National Association of Scholars membership.

“As we just saw in North Carolina, large numbers of Americans doubt the wisdom of same sex marriage;”
 
Extension of marriage rights wasn’t really on the cards in North Carolina as it was already illegal in the state by statute.
 
The amendment was against any legal recognition of domestic partnerships, whether religious marriage, civil marriage civil partnership, or any form of “domestic legal union” (to use Amendment 1′s exact language).
 
I would be interested to see your secular arguments as to how constitutionally banning civil “domestic legal union” is non-discriminatory or threatens religious freedom or moral beliefs.
 
Or perhaps  like the rest of academe, I’d be just too “intellectually weak, factually ill-supported, [and] ethically compromised” to see the case for any rights, let alone equalising (over 1,000 different) rights.

Peter,

I agree, HHeard has actually made your point for you. Thanks HH.

Which science, the studies that have been phonied or just just rife with bad statistics?

Well, the evolutionary outcome of folks not reproducing is a dead end and the loss of those genes from the gene pool.  Thus, if homosexuality is genetic, one would expect that allowing gays to marry each other instead of society forcing them into heterosexual relationships (as was true historically) would “wash” those genes from the human genome and end up reducing or eliminating the trait from humanity.

Hey, I just made an argument for gay marriage that may convince the “anti-gay” set of its desirability  :)….

I am indeed agnostic on the issue.  That means, as a matter of principle, I give space on the National Association of Scholars website to people arguing either side of the matter.  Mr. Masshey misrepresents that practice by citing only posts from one side. 

Peter Wood

“At the time of the dinosaurs, the average world termperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now and the world did not cease to exist. We can adapt.”

I’m assuming that the Earth had millennia to adapt to such wide differences in temperature; we’ll be lucky to have a century.  So we’ll adapt?  Yeah, just like the dinosaurs did when things started getting cold.

“If civil unions had been the means of fighting for rights for gay couples, we’d have been out of the brambles much sooner, because traditionalists would not have had so much backlash”

This is demonstrably untrue.  I’m seeing proof of it right now in Colorado, where an attempt to create civil unions by legislation is being decried by about half of the population as — wait for it — an attack okn traditional marriage.

In this case, the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) trumps the NAS. There is no scientific “controversy”. The scientific community accepts that global climate change is real, it is very bad, it is human-caused, and it’s going to get worse. Those facts are well supported and no longer disputed. Do you think that scientists like giving such bad news?  It may be bad, but it’s the honest truth. Science did not come to these dire conclusions easily. It took years of observations and research. The activity in climate science is currently centered on figuring out how bad it’s going to get. Lately, many of the observed changes have exceeded the predictions made a few years ago.

It does no good to oppose the facts with outdated information and uninformed opinion. The world is changing, and these changes will not bring out the best in humanity. The climate changes will lead to major lifestyle changes, mass starvation, mass evacuations, and armed conflicts.  Scientists can’t solve the world’s problems by themselves.  We need experts in the humanities to help us figure out how to keep the world humane as the climate changes.

 These generalizations might not help cure the cause of your lamentation, you know.

Scientifically, gender is a continuum, not a
dichotomy. Homosexuality is a naturally occurring phenomenon that has
been observed in dozens of species other than homo sapiens. A person
can’t help being L, B, G, or T, any more than a heterosexual can help
being a boy or a girl. It’s not a “choice” or an “illness” that can be “cured.”

Gay marriage is a civil rights matter. Operationally, the existence of homosexual marriages
does not affect hetero marriage in any way. If two homosexuals want to
marry, they already have the religious freedom to do so. There is no
good reason why and their children shouldn’t also have the legal status, rights, protections,
and tax obligations associated with being a family.

If this is the best Dr. Wood can do in the way of brief secular arguments concerning gay marriage and humanly caused climate change, his opponents have nothing to fear….It’s good to have better idea of where he is coming from, however.  And of course he’s right that in the classroom these arguements need to be addressed and taken seriously….

You’re right that it has no place in a serious dialogue, but it’s awfully indicative of, shall we say, a certain mindset in academe.

The statement above is untrue.

 Arguments should be weighed on their merits, not on the supposed “authority” of those making them.  In the long historical view (and even the the recent record of scientific literature), the “experts” often turn out to have been mistaken.  The value of expertise–its only value, really–comes from the expert’s advantages in making better arguments.  But those advantages are easily negated by intellectual conformity, laziness, and the usual temptations that we all as humans face. 

I don’t believe in a “fair and balanced” approach that gives balanced treatment to positions that are “devoid of merit,” but I am very way of proclamations that a position is devoid of merit.  Those sorts of proclamations come way too easily from people who have a vested interest in an orthodoxy.  Positions advocated by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin were once dismissed as devoid of merit. At at the historical juncture at which we find ourselves right now, does the “consensus” model on climate change possess the kind of reliability that you would be content to bar all alternatives from active consideration?  For my part, I’d rather keep the door open to the views of physicists such as Princeton’s Will Happer, who, while not an “expert” in climatology, has some pretty interesting things to say about the models on which contemporary climatology is built. 

That’s what I mean by academic freedom. 

Peter Wood

You’re saying we can’t adapt to a few degrees temperature difference in 100 years? Have you ever lived in the North, then had to move to the South, or vice versa? You blood thickens or thins as appropriate within a couple years. Your logical isn’t sound.

Further, global warming is based on predictions. We can’t accurately predict tomorrows weather with 100% accuracy, and we’re supposed to believe a prediction for 100 years from now? Move over Jean Dixon and Nastrodamus, we have more charletons in the room. Additionally, the cyclical history we see in the weather is indication that we have people practicing the chicken little effect.

However, none of this is the point of the article. The article is simply stating the faculties at colleges are pushing their views and agenda, very one-sided views and agenda, down the throats of students with no real debate or support for the arguments. So the academic freedoms have become nothing more than indoctrination venues for the young men and women of the world. It is ironic that the very institutions that speak so highly of debate and discussion don’t allow it and don’t practice it.

But then again, those in power must always resist the temptation to abuse it. Sadly as a whole, they have succumbed.

 I was a tenured professor at Boston University until I resigned in 2005 to become the (untenured) provost of a small college,  I currently work full-time as president of the National Association of Scholars. No one expects to be patted on the shoulder for standing up to voice unpopular points of view.  Those that do stand up often discover that tenure is thinner protection  than many suppose, especially against retaliation by colleagues.

Peter Wood

Could it have been argued that extending the vote to women would:

*  weaken normative structures by which men and women learn how to value political participation?

* weaken the preparation of men to be heads of households?

* possibly make women’s participation in elections a political model in its own right?

* mean the breakdown of the exclusively male franchise as the institution best suited to elect government officials?

* somehow mean that the entire institution of voting was losing its power, and that women voting would somehow only further the trend?

Where’s a North Carolina constitutional amendment when we really need one?

“Barbara Piper,” known professionally as Barbara Tedlock, slanders me in accusing me of embellishing my employment history.  I was granted tenure int he anthropology department at Boston University in 1996.  I await her apology.

Peter Wood

Excuse me.  I’m still trying to imagine a good secular argument against same sex marriage.

There is none.  Which drives the social conservatives crazy. :-)

You progressives want to first molest the minds of children and then molest their bodies later.

People just don’t want to pay public welfare benefits for you lunatics sodding off all day.

Muslims would just kill homosexuals.

Taking into consideration broken clocks tell the correct time twice each day, maybe “spread the other cheek” is not a good public policy.

In your unabridged Oxford Dictionaries, the word “faggotry” denotes the bundling of steel to be hammered or rolled together.

Mammalian evolution is entirely heterosexual.

 Monogamy is not required for evolution, monogamy is a tenet of religion.

To prohibit polyandry and polygyny is an ecclesiastic rule of law.

To establish an ecclesiastic standard of monogamy for homosexuals is nothing but RELIGIOUS FAGGOTRY.

Democrats live in a fantasy world where fairies wave magic wands over their anus and babies materialize out of thin air.

All men are born of a woman.

If you have to tell grown men that babies will not come out of their rectums, there is no hope for any rational discourse…

Sigh.
1) Atomic physicist WIll Happer has yet to say anything interesting about climate change and/or models where it counts, in credible peer-reviewed literature, or at AGU conferences or anywhere else relevant.

2)  Dr. Happer does say things like:

‘“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The
Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda,” Happer,
the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, said in an interview.
“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale
air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant
just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.”’

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/01/12/22506

3) Although Happer is at Princeton, far more relevant is  his role as Chairman of the George
C. Marshall Institute (GMI), whose history is covered in the award-winning Merchants of Doubt (2010):

http://merchantsofdoubt.org

GMI’s President is WIlliam O’Keefe, past ExxonMobil lobbyist and 25-year veteran executive at American Petroleum Institute.  These entities have a certain view on climate change.
Following are top-5  total foundation contributions to GMI and NAS, in $Ks, starting in 2002/2003 until records get spotty in last year or two.

GMI        NAS     Donor
$1,795   $1,950   Richard Mellon Scaife (Sarah Scaife + Carthage
$   910   $  735    L&H Bradley
$   395   $  208    Earhart
$   330   $  —-     ExxonMobil
$   280   $  —-     Claude Lambe (Charles Koch)
———    $ 350    J. M. Olin
———    $ 250    Randolph

GMI is from Foundation Center, NAS is from p.24 of

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/bottling.nonsense.pdf
Of course, the facts that the named foundations have a pervasive history of funding climate anti-science, and that GMI and NAS share the top two funders, may be coincidence.

4) To meaningfully assess any comments by Happer on models, Dr Wood would have to display some competence on this topic.   He is certainly free to express his opinions, but such opinions are worthless without the relevant expertise. If he would like to learn such, NAS is located ~8 miles away from GFDL, one of the premier climate modeling places in the world.  He might drive over to there and, attend lectures, perhaps after reading:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~vb/talks/petageo.pdf
Then he could repeat Happer’s opinions to them and see if they think they are interesting, and if so, they can email them to me.  I eagerly await the results.

 Well, I spent some time reading things by Stanley Kurtz and Lynn Wardle instead of grading last night.  It was quite remarkable how the arguments about how same sex marriages will harm children are nearly identical to those given in opposition to equal opportunities in work and educational arenas for women.  In the 1940s, my grandmother had to hide the fact she was married and had a baby so she could finish nursing school (everyone was told that the baby belonged to her sister).  The argument was that a working mother would horribly damage her children so it could not be condoned irregardless of the fact that my grandfather was missing in action in Europe and she needed to worry about raising a child as a single mother.

The reality is that children need loving committed parents.  Unfortunately, large numbers of children do not have those.  Assuming that heterosexual parents with one parent completely devoted to the care of the children is the only way this can happen is pretty short sighted….

Wood: “If large numbers of our fellow citizens, after years and years of hearing the same arguments, are unpersuaded, might it be wise to look seriously at the grounds for their skepticism?”
As the New York Times reported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”

It was a social anthropology dissertation documenting in considerable detail a robust American religious movement that combined elements of traditional Catholicism with a home-grown spiritualist practice and a variety of folk beliefs, including such things as celestial figures arriving in flying saucers to rescue the faithful.  The use of the word “heretical” in the subtitle was an effort at scholarly precision.  The movement’s loyal adherents (as opposed to many who had once belonged and subsequently quit) regarded it as the genuine heir to the Roman Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church, however, had investigated the founder’s claims and, judging them false, declared that the Catholic faithful should stay away.  Eventually the leaders were ex-communicated.  The movement’s founder then responded by striking up an alliance with an obscure splinter group of an old division in the Catholic Church that provided its own clergy.  

As for the main title of the dissertation, “Quoting Heaven,” I took the phrase from one of my informants in the field who described the founder of the movement as speaking with special authority because when she spoke she was “quoting heaven.”  In my analysis, I emphasized the magpie-like quality of the movement in “quoting” widely from a wide variety of religious and secular idioms, verbal, visual, and ritual.  

It is, of course, just a dissertation and not a work of mature scholarship.  Were I to write it today, I would sheer away hundreds of pages of detail to get down to what I take the essential points.  But in like of Chuckkles’ gibe, it may be worth repeating, it is in no way a work of theology.  It is a contribution to the anthropology or religion and perhaps, secondarily, a work of historical documentation.  I am fairly happy with it as it is and stand in no danger of being embarrassed by the quality of workmanship should anyone today assume the task of plowing through all those pages.

Peter Wood

When you referred to “…those who are singled out for their failure to conform….include the graduate students in social work or counseling who refuse to profess the current dogma on homosexuality; the religious dissenters who can’t deny their belief in a god who has ordered the universe; the faculty members who expect allegations of sexual harassment to be adjudicated by impartial procedures; and faculty members who have been ill-treated simply because they are perceived to be conservatives. These are all, in sociological parlance, members of “out-groups.” Their views are not positively valued on most campuses and, in many situations, are clearly unwelcome.”

I was with you up to “…the faculty members who expect allegations of sexual harassment to be adjudicated by impartial procedures…”  

Of course allegations of sexual harassment should be adjudicated impartially. Where do you get the idea that those with such expectations are “members of out-groups” whose “views are not positively valued on most campuses”? The same place, perhaps, as the idea that we are being unfair “to the generations to come by taking steps that will are likely to weaken the bio-social interdependencies of mothers and fathers to each other and to their children?” 

I’m willing to listen to well-reasoned and evidence-based arguments, not statements that depend on straw men and supposition.

This falls in the category of argument by accusation.  Nowhere have I denied that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.  Indeed, if rgrumbine had troubled himself to read through the comments, I say right here that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.  As for the arguments against the prevailing view on climate change, I know from rich experience on the topic that AGW proponents are eager to dodge the academic freedom argument and to move as quickly as they can to the strawmen that they substitute for dissenting views. 

As it happens, we are in the midst of another “teachable moment” in the climate debate.  After years of stonewalling, the University of East Anglia has been forced to release the data from Siberia that climatologist Keith Briffa supposedly used to support Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph reconstruction of global temperature change. It is now clear that Briffa based his results on cherry-picked data and that the larger data set flatly contradicts the hockey stick reconstruction.  No one concludes from this that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas, or that there has been no global warming.  We are, however, led to once again contemplate the academic and scientific dishonesty that underlies much of what has passed for mainstream climate science.  The inability or unwillingness of the profession of climatology to maintain genuine standards of evidence and to hold its practitioners accountable for publishing intentionally misleading papers is a scandal that will not go away, regardless of the derision that writers such as erumbine let loose on those who take note of the problem.

It would be a good thing got students to read Briffa’s original papers–but they might best be read along with Steve McIntyre’s and  Ross McKitrick’s critiques, and whatever back-and-forth emerges between the principals.  That would be a much more transparent approach to teaching the AGW hypothesis than the usual practice of teaching one side as thoroughly established “consensus” science and the other as fringe, unsubstantiated opinion.

Peter Wood

Zagros,
I am familiar with economic conservative ”free market” ideas. However, I am also quite familar with the externalized costs which often occur in “freer markets” (I know, many conservatives’ ideas of “free markets” have yet to be realized…). Many of these externalized costs are environmental (other externalized costs promote vast social injustices, at least from liberal persoectives…understanding that economic conservatives may see social darwinism and the death of the “unfit” as just). What is the economic conservative response to the idea that free markets which cannot take into account any non-economic considerations, by marginalizing and not being able to take into account environmental concerns, cannot be the answer to environmental problems (which liberals may say were caused by lack of economic regulations)?

(1) “Social injustice” (which means different things to different people) isn’t an externality.

(2) Conservatives do NOT believe in social darwinism. The difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives believe in private donation (i.e., charity) to causes in which they believe. Liberals believe in public theft (i.e., taxation) to donate to causes in which they believe. In fact, conservatives donate cash about 30% more than liberals do and if liberals and moderates would donate blood at the same level as conservatives, the nation’s blood supply would increase by 45%. The donation gap is even greater when you consider that conservatives, on average, make 6% less money than do liberals. In fact, the more conservative you are, the more you give.  People who on the General Social Survey strongly disagree with government redistribution of wealth give 12 TIMES more (no, that is not a misprint) to charity than do those who strongly agree with that statement (source: Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservativism, Basic Books, 2006). In other words, liberals are generous but ONLY with other people’s money. Conservatives are generous with their own money.

(6) There is no such thing as a “non-economic consideration”. If such a thing does exist, it is immaterial and irrelevant. Quality of life is an economic consideration because people are willing to pay money to improve it. Species diversity is an economic consideration because people are willing to pay money to have it. The environment is an economic consideration because people are willing to pay money to have clean air, clean water, and a stable climate. If you are willing to pay money for it, it is automatically an economic consideration. Liberal arguments that there exist non-economic considerations are cop-outs because they always involve spending other people’s money (see point 2), which automatically makes the issue an economic consideration.