Notes on a Bad Editorial

Most recently, our editorialist has set his sights on marriage. Titling the editorial "The 21 covenant," (which, it turns out should be the "2-1" covenant, he writes as follows:

And so the saga continues in California. First gay marriage was in and then it was out. After making a comeback the people of California – by a slim majority — passed a state constitutional amendment that said that marriage is between a man and woman.

Now a federal judge has deemed that the amendment is unconstitutional in the national sense [note the redundancy--was a federal judge supposed to make a decision about California's constitution-amending process?] — that the state amendment is in fact discriminatory and the people that voted yes for Proposition 8 are misguided people [again, redundancy--those people are people] with out-dated beliefs in what is right and wrong.

The first paragraph is mainly boilerplate. Our author tips his hand only by describing the passage of Proposition 8 as a "comeback." It will turn out that our editorialist really has little interest in gay marriage at all. This is just a hook to get our attention. A good thing, too, since he doesn't appear to have acquainted himself, even minimally, with the case in question. This shows in his one description about the recent decision. The judge, of couse, makes no judgment about the various beliefs of Proposition 8 supporters. A good thing, too, since the only task set before him was one of deciding whether Proposition 8 conflicts with the Constitutional provisions of due process and equal protection. Of course, you'll read nary a word about those provisions here. Instead, you get a blatant misrepresentation of the judge's decision. (Had the judge derided the religious beliefs of the proponents of P8, or used those beliefs to reach his decision, he would have been violating the separation of Church and State. All he could legally do was decide whether those beliefs, taken together or separately, could provide the state with a compelling, non-sectarian interest that would be furthered by banning gay marriage. He found that they could not, often using arguments straight out of a series of opinions of a prominent member of the Supreme Court's conservative wing, Anthony Kennedy. You'll read nothing of that here.)

We get the main thesis in the next paragraph, and it's a doozey:

The main problem that we as a people are having [why the present progressive here?] is that the idea of marriage has its roots in faith and in the United States in particular that faith is Christianity and the Bible. The line that is the First Amendment in the United States Constitution that separates church and state was broken by the state — not the church. [lines are "crossed," not "broken"]

Now this is just cringe-inducing sloppiness. Note, first, that when you slice through the horrible grammatical construction of the sentence, it reads as follows: "The main problem...is that the idea of marriage has its roots in...Christianity and the Bible." This is clearly the opposite of what he intends to say, but there it is. Of course, this doesn't identify a problem; it rather is supposed to be a historical claim to the effect that traditional marriage in the US is rooted in the Christian religion. Put like that, it amounts to little more than a tautology, since "traditional" is functioning as a synonym for "religious." But of course, as a matter of history, the claim is simply misleading. It is an overgeneralization, since it has never been the case that all married couples in the US are Christian. The first Amendment also prevents the government from establishing any state religion, so insofar as marriage is recognized by the state at all, that recognition cannot grant special privileges to Christians over, say, Jews or Muslims. Jewish marriage has Jewish religious roots, etc. That said, let's just grant the contention, for the sake of argument.

(As an aside, it would be silly to count this as any achievement. To show that some practice has its historical roots in some other practice tells us precious little about the value of either. So the practice of smoking meat has its roots in ritualized animal slaughter and the practices of organized sports often have their roots in military training, but now that we've seen that, we still have to independently evaluate the different practices as they arise.)

The second main sentence is similarly a model of sloppy writing. The First Amendment to the US Constitution confers onto people (and not just citizens, as our editorialist is fond of claiming in other contexts) falling within US jurisdiction five distinct rights: (1) freedom of speech; (2) fredom of the press; (3) freedom of assembly; (4) freedom of religion (enabling people to practice religion unmolested by the state, under the so-called "free exercise" clause, and barring the state from establishing a state religion, called the "establishment" clause); and (5) freedom to petition the government for redress. Our author means only to refer to the fourth provision, but ambiguously writes of a single "line" that, he informs us, was "broken" first by the state.

Now, if we cut through the misleading language, we can convey a clear picture of our fellow's argument: Marriage is a religious practice that has been unjustly infringed by the state. Now, in fact, this claim is rather interesting. As any good history buff can tell you, marriage *has* been a long topic of contention between the church and the state. We need look no farther than Henry VIII's long battle with the Catholic Church to see that. In fact, it is precisely against the backdrop of state-religious interference with the religions practices of smaller sects that our First Amendment religious rights should be read. A number of our early colonists *did* come here to escape persecution for their religious beliefs and practices, and it would be a real shame were we to find that religious people in the US were now suffering under some form of state-sanctioned discrimination for their marital practices. So let's approach our next paragraph hopefully:

Churches for the longest time were in charge of marriage. Up until the last 50 years or so, a certificate of marriage from an ordained minister was considered a legal document. In fact, up until those airplanes flew into the World Trade Center, a baptismal certificate in the state of Kansas was considered proof of identity.

Now "for the longest time" is a pretty sloppy boundary, and "in charge of" is vague, but ignore that. The former sentence pointed to church/state separation, and this new paragraph seems to be trying to establish the independence of church practices from the state. Unfortunately, his examples prove not that the church is *independent* of the state. In fact, they show just the reverse. To say that a religious instrument is "considered a legal document" is just to say that the church is in the business of representing certain facts to the state. To say that the documents are legal means that they confer certain rights or obligations upon the individuals that they represent: when churches produce such legal documents, they are, in effect, petitioning the state to recognize those rights and responsibilities. If the intent of our author is to show how the state first crossed the church/state line, this is a poor start.

But what of the "50 years or so" claim? To what is our author referring? Given the fact that in the US, marriage laws vary from state to state, this tells us absolutely nothing. Worse, marriage certificates are virtually always either on the same form as, or issued at the same time as, marriage licenses, and *still* often need to be signed by the figure who officiated over the wedding, who is often a religious official. These are still legal documents. Worse, a two-second Google search reveals the absurdity of this whole line of thought. Here's the text of a marriage certificate from Medina County, TX, from the year 1892:

Marriage License
State of Texas
County of Medina
To any Regularly Licensed or Ordained Minister of the Gospel, Jewish Rabbi, Judge of the District or County Court, or any Justice of the Peace in and for said County, Greeting:
You are hereby Authorized to Solemnize the Rites of Matrimony
Between Mr. T. C. Edwards
and Miss B. A. Yarborough
and make due return to the Clerk of the County Court of said County, within sixty
days thereafter certifying your action under this License.
Witness my Official Signature and Seal of Office,
at office in Castroville the 22nd day of March 1892
August Kempf Clerk of County Court Medina County
By (left blank) Deputy

I Valentin Haass do, hereby certify that on the 22nd day of March 1892,
I united in Marriage Mr. T. C. Edwards
and Miss B. A. Yarborough the parties above named.
Witness my hand, this 22nd day of March 1892.
Valentin Haas, Justice of the Peace of Med. Co. Texas

Notice, first that the document is both a marriage license and, when completed, a certificate of marriage. This means that Texas has been in the "marriage business" since at least 1892. (A little more searching reveals that licensing is as old as the state itself.) Notice also that the certificate contains a list of the kinds of officials who are qualified to officiate over the wedding. The list includes, in addition to ordained ministers, Rabbis, county and district judges, and Justices of the Peace. This hardly looks like a model of "church control."

From here, things only get worse.

The state got involved in marriage because of money and revenue. The counties charge for marriage licenses and if you have ever filled out a tax return you know how the federal government is invested in the marriage business.

This, sadly, turns out to be the big government obstacle to marriage: charging for marriage licenses. Really. Our hapless author doesn't even point out that in the great state of TX, this fee is around $35, and will be waived if the parties take an eight hour instructional course on basic marital skills such as conflict resolution. He also, rather shamelessly, fails to point out that most ministers charge significantly higher fees to officiate over weddings! (Why wouldn't they? It's a service, and it sometimes requires quite a bit of time.)

Moving on:

Sadly that is what marriage has become in our society. No better than a contract to be honored or broken [sentence fragment] — either way the various governments get their cut of the transaction.

Here, I suspect, we hit the real bone of the article. It's a sort of lament of the secularization of marriage. But of course, the only practices our writer has pointed at are the very ones that have *always* been a regular feature of marriage in the US. Marriage is complex. It is sometimes a religious affair, but it's always an affair of the state. In either case, it confers on the marrying people legally recognized rights and responsibilities. The recognition, and interest in, those rights and responsibilities is why the state keeps track of marriage. That interest enables single divorced mothers to appeal to the state for child support from their former husbands; recently bereaved spouses to handle the affairs of their beloved; the wife to be notified in the event of emergency; to visit a sickly spouse without fear of harrassment at the hospital; to take part in the administration of care to her incapacitated husband. It also keeps, e.g. uncles from marrying their nieces, and deters the practice of marrying unwilling parties. Marriage invokes a network of overlapping social factors in which the state has an active interest. The state takes this interest precisely because *we* do, as citizens. We *like* it when there are clear lines of obligation, chains of custody, transfers of title and property. We announce these things publicly, and give the state notice, so that we will have a record of our achievements, and so that we can be protected in cases of very real, and all too frequent, failures.

But our author pays no attention to these realities. He instead condemns the secular aspects of marriage, without noting that those are aspects of *every* marriage, and so implicitly (and unfairly) condemns *all* marriages. The claim that (rewording) "marriage in our society has become no better than a contract to be honored or broken" should be *deeply* offensive to all people who treat their marriage as a sacred bond. But of course, in reality, neither the state nor the church can do much to make sure that people honor their marriages. And in a free society, the state may not instruct its citizens on which values their marriages must reflect, for the simple reason that freedom of conscience is perhaps the most important freedom that we possess.

Moving on:

People now get married for a multitude of reasons including tax breaks, love or lust, various legal rights and insurance claims. The thought of marriage as a Sacrament of the Christian Church; as much part and parcel as baptism and communion is long gone. [the phrase "X is part and parcel of Y" is an idiom indicating that X and Y are identical. Because the practices mentioned are clearly different, the logic of the phrase doesn't fit the examples. He means "as essential to the Church as..." The sentence also misuses the semicolon. He only needed a comma.]

This line of thought should be deeply offensive to all those people who *do* treat their marriage as "a Sacrament of the Christian Church" (ignoring again the horrendous grammar of the second sentence). And though our author might lament the perceived decline of this religious motivation, it is simply dishonest ahistorical pandering to insinuate that fifty or a hundred or a thousand years ago people didn't bring all sorts of different motivations to the institution of marriage. The phrase "shotgun wedding," for instance, is a good deal older than either you or I, and things like political marriages are as old as civilization itself.

The only thing that remains for the most part is the ‘traditional’ aspects [sic] of a church wedding.

Same basic problem. This should be merely insulting to people who take the religious aspects of marriage seriously.

The rest of the article does little more than repeat these basic themes, so I won't belabor the point, with one exception. Toward the end, he argues:

Marriage needs to return to the providence of the church. If need be we need [redundant, he means "could"] to call it something else so that the name confusion with the state [sic] does not water down the true meaning of a Christian marriage — as something Holy and gifted by the Father through the Son. I say we call it the “21 covenant,” — a man and woman become one in the sight of God.

Our columnist offers no evidence that the state has done anything to hinder people from having that kind of marriage. That, fortunately, is because the state hasn't done any such thing. It is fine for churches to advocate the kinds of marriages that they prefer; thankfully, in our society, people have the freedom to decide for themselves whether and which ideals they want their lives to embody. We've seen what happens when organized religion tries to wrest this control from them. It's called the Reformation. It was one of the uglier chapters of human history.

On Writing Editorials

I've got a problem. OK, so technically, I've got *lots* of problems, but this one is really annoying me. I live in the middle of a small town in the exurbs of Greater Dallas--which is, in essence, its own provincial region. My small town has its own newspaper. It's called the Herald. The Herald is a small, weekly paper that covers local news. It's reliably filled with information about local food and blood drives, church activities, recent deaths, weddings, and crimes, stories about the city council and local politics. It contains lots of advertisements for local attorneys and restaurants and realtors and the rest. It's got a weekly "message from the minister" segment, where a local religious leader will chime in with a down-home churchy message about life, the universe, and everything.

And its got an editorial page.

Now, by and large, the editorial page is of a piece with the rest of the paper. It touches on local concerns, sometimes talks about important life tasks and big transitions like graduating from high school or the value of playing a sport or getting your regular medical checkup or other such. And that sort of editorial is fine, so far as it goes. For the most part, the editorials are sort of inoffensive, well-intentioned pontifications about life. These sort of things don't usually require much work or research or even evaluation, but people like them because they communicate a general sense of community--a marking of the things in life that we share in common and like to celebrate as a community. About the worst consequence a reader could suffer from this stuff is the opportunity cost--the everpresent possibility that the reader missed out on doing something more important by reading the editorial. But that poses very little danger here, since we're talking about what amounts to a three minute task.

But recently, the paper has started a new trend. They've started running regular editorials by a fellow who calls himself a Dr., professor, minister, and sports reporter. Such a profusion of titles should raise its own red flags, but let's leave that to the side for now. This fellow actually works for the paper, and his main job seems to consist of writing about local sports and school activities. And though his writing is plagued by regular grammatical mistakes, for the most part, his news articles are the stuff of a high school sports and education page. They're largely unexceptional.

But then there are his editorials. Now, sometimes, he pens perfectly harmless editorials of the sort I mentioned above, noting the transition that comes with graduation, or the need to find a new (medical) doctor when you move. These are, again, just fine, so far as they go.

This fellow also likes to write about national political controversies. And there's nothing wrong with that, per se. The real problem is that the paper's editor also chooses to publish those thoughts in a semi-regular column. Why is that a problem? To answer that, I need to step back for a moment to consider the value of an editorial page.

As I see it, a published editorial is valuable when it sheds new or interesting light on some controversy. This can be done in a number of ways. An editorial is a form of persuasive argument, and as such, it can accomplish a number of goals. For example, it can give people reasons to support or reject some policy that they might not have considered; it can try to reframe some debate in order to highlight a distortion involved in an alternative view (whether this reframing constitutes a better picture or a worse distortion then becomes a new puzzle to solve); it can introduce fresh perspectives or considerations into an ongoing debate. There are lots of good things an editorial can do.

Here are some bad things an editorial can do. It can misrepresent basic facts; it can make false claims; it can contain fallacious arguments and inferences. Now of course, debates are complex things, even such that one person's facts can sometimes seem like another's lies. But this is largely cautionary. Though there are lots of rhetorical tricks to dress up falsehood as fact, a good editorialist need not make use of outrightly false claims to make her point. Issues are often complex enough that one can make a case by highlighting a set of examples that illustrate a common theme. This procedure often won't settle the matter, but it will give people a data set for consideration.

Even disregarding these complexities, I think we can agree on a common baseline criterion for the good editorial, which I'll borrow from Hippocrates: First, do no harm. If a reliable consequence of *accepting* the claims of a given editorial is that the reader comes away with a larger number of false beliefs about the world than she started with, the editorial is bad. In fact, I would go so far as to assert that the editorial which tends to sow obviously false beliefs constitues a public nuisance.

Of course, critical and well-informed readers come with their own anti-nonsense innoculations, but unfortunately, readers who do not spend a goodly amount of their time actively endeavoring to become more informed citizens are often easily misled by falsehoods parading as facts. This is (I hope obviously) not a comment on their intelligence. It is a simple fact of life that people are most easily misled about the things that they don't know much about.

Now on to our editorialist. The problem is simple: His editorials inevitably contain a litany of false or highly misleading claims. And not false in some nuanced way, just straight up errors of fact and of argument. And if we assume that some of the Herald's readers simply don't keep abreast of political discourse, then we can infer that they will be easily misled by our editorialist's nonsense. Now of course, if they had no reason to take the fellow seriously, they could do with the information what they please. It could still cause damage, but if he were simply any given local reader writing letters to the editor, we'd have no particular reason to take him more seriously than anybody else. But this is the deeper problem. He is a reporter, a regular columnist, and bills himself as a Dr., professor, minister, and sports writer. At least three of these titles tend to evoke notions of trust and authority. This is why I deem our fellow a nuisance.

Now I think it would be sufficient to make my case were I to give a *single* example of a falsehood-filled editorial. But the sad truth is that virtually everything the man has to say about our national political scene is straight-up nonsense. Worse still, he tends to write things that are likely to reinforce the worst prejudices and shoddy reasoning on the right, tea-partying political fringe.

In my next post, I'll take a recent editorial apart, line by line, to give you an idea of what I mean.

Webb on Affirmative Action

So Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.)has a new WSJ editorial about the evils of affirmative action. Leiter provides the usual instructive comments. Some commentators have taken Webb to endorse a class-based approach to affirmative action, but the only point he tries to make about affirmative action policies is that they have resulted in unfair treatment of the supposed "white monolith," so it is probably best not to attribute to him a positive case for limited forms of affirmative action, especially since he ends his article with a plea for equal treatment under the law (without, needless to say, providing any notion of what that might imply).


Let me focus on three issues. First, Webb Webb is blurring the distinction b/w (1) geographical disparities of wealth and educational opportunities and (2) racial disparities in educational or economic achievement. So for example, he compares the education of "white Baptists nationwide" with blacks--not, apparently, black Baptists nationwide, but blacks as a whole, before noting that the white Baptist education level is far below that of the white national average--the only figure that should technically be put head-to-head for a comparison to the black national average if our concern is institutionalized racism.

The problem for his position, though, is that there's no clear path between scrapping affirmative action policies and getting rid of (1), while there is (granting that this is a matter of practical dispute) a clear path between keeping affirmative action policies while helping to alleviate the effects of (2), or alternatively, jettisoning affirmative action policies while leaving (1) largely intact and considerably worsening (2).

Second, Webb commits the same error he attributes to proponents of affirmative action, by failing to distinguish how affirmative action actually *doesn't* treat all non-whites uniformly. So, for example, Japanese students don't get preferential treatment for being east-Asian, or (subcontinental) Indian students for being Indian.

Third and least forgivably, Webb indulges in a bit of strongly inappropriate racist imagery. The lead sentence of his second paragraph is: "Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America." Thus Webb uses a notorious image, of a whipping post, but reverses its historical polarity, making White...dominance" serve as the whipping post, instead of the whipping agent. For this, Webb should be ashamed of himself.

Thoughts Past and Future

How is it that almost a year has passed since I last updated this blog? A pity, really. Somewhere between researching and writing a dissertation and the daily routine of life in small town TX, I've lost touch with one of my happier endeavors. I've taken to posting artiles to facebook, of all places, on the (likely) pretense that more people will see that; but of course the expense is that I don't often add any cents at all, much less the measly two that has the weight of tradition. Oh well. Perhaps when I get more time, energy, or enthusiasm toward some given project, I'll come back to this more regularly. Or maybe I'll just start posting my notes on the philosophy texts I'm reading. That might make for fun...but probably not. We'll see. It's a possibility, at least.