The Clean Power Plan, Presidential Candidates in the US and Taiwan, and Jimmy Carter

There are a number of current topics that I’d love to have to time to talk about in some detail, but due to lack of time I will just offer a few brief comments on each. In some cases, I may find a chance to come back to them and talk about them in more depth in the future. In my last blog post I talked about the Iran nuclear agreement, which, as I observed, is imperfect but worth supporting, especially given the lack of realistic alternatives. Aside from the nuclear agreement (which is the work of a number of countries, not just the US and Taiwan), US President Barack Obama has announced another important initiative in the last few weeks, one which is at least as important as the Iran deal, and that is his (or rather the EPA’s) Clean Power Plan. This takes a big step toward fighting climate change and reducing pollution by setting strict limits on carbon emissions. As might be expected, there has been loud opposition from polluting industries and the right wing politicians in their pockets, but the truth is if put into effect the plan will be to the benefit of almost everyone except those who directly profit from polluting industries like coal. It won’t even be that difficult for most utilities to comply with the plan, and of course it will make the air much cleaner, not to mention reduce the US’s carbon emissions and thereby help reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change. In fact, if anything the plan may not be ambitious enough. The truth is we need to quickly reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane if we are to avoid warming that will have dramatic (and in the near term at least mostly negative and even highly destructive) effects all over the world.

Speaking of President Obama, much of the news from the US has been focused on the candidates to take over for him when he leaves office, even though the actual election isn’t until late next year. Taiwan is also having a presidential election, though it is at the beginning of the year, so the similar focus on election politics is a little more justifiable. In both races the most likely winners are women who are imperfect but acceptable choices, if not super exciting (Hillary Rodham Clinton in the US and Tsai Yingwen in Taiwan). On the other side there are some completely awful choices (the entire bunch of Republican candidates in the US and Hong Xiuzhu and James Soong in Taiwan). The US race also has at least one quite exciting candidate and a couple others who have some excellent positions on certain issues (Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and possibly Lawrence Lessig), though their prospects for actually winning are uncertain. At some point in the future, I would like to go over these races in more detail. For now regarding the US race I will just note that while I think Clinton has said many of the right things on numerous issues and I expect that I will vote for her if she ends up winning the Democratic nomination as expected, Sanders is better than Clinton on the majority of issues and offers a much better prospect of real change – if he could get elected. O’Malley stands out especially on the environment, having gone into even more detail than Sanders on the steps he would take to deal with climate change (though what Sanders has said so far on the issue has also been great, whereas Clinton has been good but regrettably vague on a few key points). Lessig, who only announced his prospective candidacy, is running on the single issue of making a radical overhaul to the US election system, promising to resign once he gets his program passed. Though the seems like a rather quixotic campaign, he is perfectly correct about the need for major reforms, and I’ll admit that the idea that someone I’ve met and briefly spoken to (I helped translate for him in an interview session with a few reporters in Taiwan when he came to promote Creative Commons) may run for president of the US.

Talking of US presidents, a sadder piece of news is that former US President Jimmy Carter announced the other day that he has cancer that has already spread through much of his body. Since he is already 90 years old, his prospects of surviving advanced cancer are probably not very good. But he has done a lot of excellent work since leaving office in 1980, and indeed is one of the best ex-presidents the US has ever had, so he can look back on a life of real accomplishment. The job he did as president is not highly rated by most people, but even this is a bit unfair. He did have some flaws, particularly his inability to delegate well and his difficulty in establishing good relations with Congress, though some of the fault for that was on the side of Congress. Carter was a true outsider, unlike some politicians since who have run under that label, and that made it harder for him to get things accomplished. But many of the problems that he faced in his presidency were not his fault and it is questionable whether he could have done much else about them. Many of his ideas were good, such as making human rights a more important factor in foreign policy, even if the execution left something to be desired. In fact, if he had been reelected it’s quite possible that in a number of areas the US (and even the world) would be considerably better off. In Carter’s day there were some prospects of a move away from rampant capitalism and excessive reliance of fossil fuels, for instance, but with the election of Ronald Reagan that all went out the window and instead the US got supply side economics and severe backsliding on the environmental front, not to mention an overly aggressive foreign policy. Movement toward renewable energy basically came to a halt for the next two decades. The parody newspaper The Onion captured the contrast well on its faux front page from 1980. Under the article headline “Campaign ‘80” there are pictures of Carter and Reagan and quotes representing their political agendas. Carter’s is “Let’s Talk Better Mileage” while Reagan’s is “Kill the Bastards”. In the article, Carter talks about renewable energy, urban renewal, mass transit, job, infrastructure, and job training programs for disadvantaged minorities while criticizing Reagan’s proposed cuts to social programs and tax breaks for the wealthy, but Reagan just keeps repeating “kill the bastards.” The article is subtitled “Which Message Will Resonate with Voters?” Of course we know which one did, but even granted that the article greatly exaggerates the contrast for comic effect, I can’t help wondering what the world would be like if things had gone differently. Perhaps we wouldn't even need a Clean Power Plan. In any case, today Americans would do well to heed some of President Carter’s recent messages, such as his warning that the US has become an oligarchy. Maybe the US really does need to elect someone like Bernie Sanders, who at least would attempt to put America back on the path towards a greener, more egalitarian and more democratic society.

Some Thoughts on the Nuclear Deal with Iran

Now that an agreement has been signed with Iran on its nuclear program, the inevitable debate over whether it’s a good deal is raging in the US (interestingly, I haven’t heard anything about intense opposition to the deal in the European countries that are party to it, though there must be at least a little). Since it is a fairly far-reaching agreement and if implemented it has the potential to transform US-Iranian relations and the politics of the Middle East, numerous aspects of the agreement are being discussed and argued about. Those who favor the deal consider it the best chance to avoid even more conflict in that part of the world and prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, not to mention putting the US and Iran on a path toward more friendly or at least less hostile relations. Opponents call it capitulation to the Iranians, argue that Iran can and will cheat, and warn that reducing or ending sanctions on Iran will free it to cause more trouble in the region by backing violent regimes and terrorist groups. They also lament the agreement’s failure address issues such as Iran’s support for terror, its unlawful detention of several American citizens, or its poor human rights record in general.

I will address the latter concern first. I agree that Iran’s human rights record is terrible, its detention and treatment of both Iranian dissidents and the American citizens currently in its prisons is deplorable, and its support for terror groups and particularly the hideously bloodthirsty Syrian regime is appalling. However, those issues are not what the agreement was negotiated to address. Just as the US negotiated arms control treaties with the USSR that didn’t address human rights issues in the latter, there is no reason to expect an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program to address unrelated issues. This doesn’t mean that these issues don’t have to be addressed, though. It is my understanding that US sanctions imposed due to Iranian sponsorship of terrorism, for instance, will remain in place. It is quite possible, even probable, that the US government (and European governments) could and should do far more to pressure Iran over human rights issues. Many Western governments have shown a bad tendency to prioritize economic ties and business interests over human rights in their dealings with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and others, and we should put pressure on them to act differently not only in Iran’s case but others as well. But the nuclear agreement should be judge according to its purpose, which is preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons rather than for issues it is not designed to fix.

There are no doubt flaws in the agreement which Iran can exploit. Iran may be able to avoid coming clean about past weapons programs, and it may find ways to hide things from inspectors, especially given the uncertainty about whether inspectors will have sufficient access to military sites. But it will require Iran to dramatically reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium and its number of centrifuges, which at a minimum will put a bomb a little further from reach. It is true that it may not prove easy to re-impose sanctions should Iran violate the agreement, but I don’t think it will be as difficult as critics claim, nor do I think it will be as easy for Iran to cheat as they are asserting. Iran does have many incentives for adhering to the agreement, and if the moderates remain in charge (a point I will come back to), they probably will do so.

In any case, as I and many others have observed in the past, those critics calling this a bad deal, whether it is Republicans in the US Congress or Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have never laid out specifically what they would consider a good deal. From their rhetoric, a “good” deal would be unconditional surrender on the part of the Iranians, involving a complete dismantling of their entire nuclear program. Of course, there was never any chance that Iran would have agreed to such a deal, regardless of the pain sanctions might have been causing. After all, look at how tightly the North Korea clings to its nuclear bombs, even as its economy collapses and its people live at the edge of starvation. If the Iranian leadership is as sinister and power-mad as those most hostile to it claim, they would most certainly not hesitate to continue to pursue their nuclear ambitions in the absence of an agreement regardless of the sanctions, especially if they perceived the West as unremittingly hostile. It is also unlikely that the sanctions regime could be held together for long if the US rejects the agreement, as countries like China and Russia are too eager to do business with Iran. While this is not a good thing, given the authoritarian tendencies of all three, there is not much that the West can do about it at this point.

Given the critics’ lack of a clear vision of what a “good deal” would look like and the extreme unlikelihood of Iran being willing to make more concessions, the alternatives are these. The agreement can be carried out and Iran’s nuclear program can be made at least somewhat more peaceful and subject to a certain degree of scrutiny. Otherwise, the US can reject the agreement, as the Republicans in Congress want. What would follow from that? The Iranians, who are already quite close to acquiring a bomb, would have little reason not to proceed to actually producing one, and the only way the US or Israel could prevent them would be by starting a war. It is by no means certain that a few airstrikes could do sufficient damage to Iran’s facilities to put a bomb out of reach, so we are talking about a major war with a country that is considerably larger and more powerful than Iraq.

Iran’s geopolitical stature is a point worth some additional scrutiny. On the one hand, hyperbolic claims that the Obama administration’s concessions to Iran are equivalent to Neville Chamberlain’s concessions to Adolf Hitler at the Munich Conference are absurd not only in exaggerating the size of the concessions but in implying that Iran is as great a power and as much of a threat to world peace as Nazi Germany, which is not even remotely the case (incidentally, another lesson from that era that many forget is that it was the harsh terms that the Allies imposed on Germany after World War I that facilitated Hitler's rise, which is relevant to a point I'll discuss a little later about the agreement's potential effect of Iranian domestic politics). Conversely, however, Iran is not a small, weak country that the US could easily overpower in a fight. This doesn’t mean that the US should avoid a conflict with Iran no matter what; if, say, Iran actually started assembling a nuclear weapon and declared an intention to carry out the rhetorical threats that some of its more extreme leaders have made in the past against Israel, for instance, a military strike by the US would be justified. But a decision to launch a war should not be taken lightly, and if this agreement is not put into effect, it is hard to see what other options US would have to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Furthermore, it is worth remembering a bit about Iran’s history and its current society. Over most of the past 2600 years, ever since the rise of the Median and Persian Empires in the wake of the destruction of Assyrian power, Iran has been one of the most dominant nations in West Asia. While its power has waxed and waned. Its current position as one of the major powers in the region is commensurate with its historical position. Of course, history does not give Iran an automatic right to any particular status today, much less the right to push its neighbors around (the same point applies to China, which is fond of misusing history in this manner). But given Iran’s size, population, resources, and relative stability, it is not at all surprising that it has once more become one of the strongest countries in the region.

For these reasons, the Western approach to Iran can’t be merely one of containment. This is not to say that containment of a sort doesn’t have its place. The US and other nations should certainly work to counter problematic Iranian actions in the region, such as its support for the Syrian regime or groups like Hezbollah. But it is necessary to engage Iran too. It is worth remembering that despite the fundamentalist theocracy that is currently in power, Iran has a sizable, well-educated middle class, much of which has a quite secular outlook. Even among the clerics, there are moderate voices. It should be remembered that not all of the Iranian leadership has shown the type of unremitting hostility to Israel and the US that is commonly cited by opponents of the deal. The more moderate leaders should be encouraged as much as possible in the hope that in the future, a new Iranian leadership can take charge, one that will be far less interested in the aggressive approach of the hardliners in the current leadership. It is conceivable that in a few decades Iran could even transform into a secular democracy, if it is allowed to evolve in that direction as moderate forces gain more power. And which option is more likely to help Iranian moderates, accepting the agreement or rejecting it? Since the agreement is, on the Iranian side, the work of the moderate faction in the current leadership, if it proves beneficial to Iran and specifically to the average Iranian citizen, then it will certainly strengthen the moderates. Rejecting it, however, would mean that the hardliners would take over completely. They would probably even gain some support among the secular middle class, as an American rejection of the agreement would support the assertions of the hardliners that the US is completely hostile to Iran and no rapprochement with it is possible. Even those who would still prefer a more moderate approach might feel compelled to publicly support the nationalistic hardline view for fear of being accused of traitors.

All this doesn’t mean that an agreement which entirely favored the Iranians would be acceptable. But the truth is, the Iranians made plenty of concessions of their own. As mentioned above, they are giving up their enriched uranium and most of their centrifuges, as well as submitting to a fairly comprehensive inspection regime, if not as strong as would be considered ideal from a Western viewpoint. Also, the Iranian assertion that they have the right to a peaceful nuclear program is not unreasonable, as many other countries, including some with worse human rights records, also have nuclear power (of course I’d say all of them should be focusing more on renewable energy, but that’s another issue). While a lifting of sanctions may boost Iran’s ability to assist destructive parties elsewhere, the US and its allies can attempt to find ways to counter such actions on the part of Iran, including, if necessary, new sanctions. It is worth reiterating that this agreement, the negotiations that it came out of, and the sanctions that helped bring Iran to the table were all directed at Iran’s nuclear program, not anything else it might have been doing. While resolving the nuclear issue might have both good and bad effects elsewhere, this is unavoidable. As I said above, if the agreement makes it at least a lot less easy for Iran to acquire a bomb and at the same time boosts the moderate forces in the country, then it is adequate – especially considering the very unpalatable alternatives.

[Update: An additional point worth noting is not only do polls show that a majority of Jewish Americans support the agreement, a number of prominent Israeli security figures are also supporting it. Perhaps even more telling is the Iranian side of the debate. As discussed in some detail in this article, moderates, reformists, the majority of Iranian citizens and Iranian Americans and even many dissidents and exiled opponents of the current regime support the agreement, while the conservatives and hardliners have for the most part been critical of it. Not exactly what you'd expect to see if, like the deal's American and Israeli opponents claim, the agreement gave away far too much to Iran.]

Drawing the Curtain Back on Pluto and Charon

I have been interested in space and astronomy, particularly the solar system, for as long as I can remember; at least since I was in preschool. And of all the planets and other bodies in the solar system, the one that I found most fascinating in childhood was Pluto. Of course I am hardly alone in having Pluto as my “favorite planet”, but as to why I especially liked Pluto, it is a little difficult to say. I think it was in part simply that it was different; it was clearly unlike either the so-called terrestrial planets close to the Sun or the gas giants in the outer solar system. It’s status as the most distant planet, with an incredibly long orbit of 248 Earth years, may have played a role. Or maybe it was just that Pluto was so mysterious. When I first became interested in astronomy, most books had practically no information about Pluto at all, as next to nothing was known. Some of the astronomy books I would check out of the library, books that were already somewhat out of date at the time, even included some of the more wild early theories about Pluto, such as the suggestion that Pluto was in fact a fairly large planet, but was almost perfectly black, so that we were seeing the reflection of the sun off its surface like a mirror. This theory was developed to accommodate the idea that Pluto was indeed the theorized Planet X that was supposedly affecting the orbits of Uranus and Neptune (which would require a fairly massive planet) and yet failed to show a disc in even the largest telescopes of the day. More commonly, books of the time would declare Pluto to have a diameter of about 5000 km (3600 miles), which was in truth more of an upper limit than an estimate based on any concrete evidence, or repeat the then-common theory that Pluto was an escaped satellite of Neptune (this idea even crops up occasionally today in articles by non-scientists despite being long discredited; the truth is Pluto never comes anywhere remotely close to Neptune due to an orbital resonance, and actually gets closer to Uranus than it ever does to Neptune). In truth, even though it had been almost 5 decades since Pluto had been discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, the only things known with any degree of certainty about Pluto in those days was its orbital characteristics and that it had a rotation period of 6.39 days.

The mystery around Pluto began to clear up ever so slightly in the late 1970s. First methane was detected on its surface. Since methane ice is highly reflective, this was the first hint that Pluto was in fact even smaller than had been previously thought (with the constant downward revisions in estimates of Pluto's mass from the time of its discovery, at some point an astronomer joked that if the trend continued, it would soon disappear entirely!). Then in 1978 came the dramatic discovery of Pluto’s satellite - or perhaps companion would be a better term - Charon, which at half the diameter of Pluto is the largest moon with respect to its parent planet in the solar system (how hard it is to get a decent image of Pluto from Earth is illustrated by the fact that in the discovery photos of Charon, it appears as a fuzzy lump on the bigger fuzzy lump of Pluto - it took the Hubble Space Telescope to get a picture of the two clearly separated). The discovery of Charon in turn allowed Pluto’s mass to be calculated with some precision, showing that it was actually quite small for a planet, being considerable less massive than even the Earth’s Moon, let alone Mercury, the smallest inner planet, though still much larger than Ceres, the biggest asteroid. This discovery gave rise to the first arguments among astronomers about whether Pluto should be classified as a planet. But for me, while Pluto was now a little less mysterious, it remained as fascinating as ever, especially with the relative size of Charon making it more like a double planet system, if a small one (see here for an example of how Pluto and Charon orbit each other).

I don’t want to delve into the debate over Pluto’s planetary status in great detail here, but there are a few things worth pointing out. First of all, as I mentioned above, while Pluto certainly is very small in comparison with the eight universally recognized major planets, it is still much larger than any asteroid, even Ceres (by far the biggest asteroid). At least one other recently discovered body in the outer solar system, Eris, is somewhat more massive than Pluto (though slightly smaller in diameter), but that alone doesn’t disqualify Pluto from planetary status, it just means that Eris itself also needs to have its status determined, and that it should be classified with Pluto. It should also be noted that the eccentricity of Pluto’s orbit is also irrelevant to whether or not it is a planet, as quite a few extrasolar planets have similarly eccentric orbits. I am not so attached to Pluto’s planetary status that I don’t recognize that it, along with Eris and several other large trans-Neptunian objects, are distinct from the major planets; in fact way back at the end of the 1980s I distinctly remember doing a high school project in which I suggested that Pluto belonged to a completely new class of objects (even though, with the possible exception of Chiron, an asteroid-like body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, no other similar objects had been discovered at that time) which I think I called cometoids or something like that. But essentially I think both sides are arguing about the wrong question. The argument shouldn’t be about Pluto per se; it should be about the minimum characteristics for a planet, wherever it is located. The definition that the IAU came up with when it reclassified Pluto, Eris and several other objects (including Ceres) as “dwarf planets” is vague and unsatisfactory. While any definition is going to be somewhat arbitrary, I think it makes more sense to define a planet based on its own physical characteristics, instead of vague criteria like “clearing its orbit”, as even in the outer reaches of our own solar system we may someday find an object the size of Mercury or Mars orbiting among smaller objects in the way Pluto does, and extrasolar planetary system will no doubt have all kinds of mixes of objects, whereas I think a definition of a planet should such that the same object would always be a planet if it is orbiting a star, regardless of what else may be orbiting in its neighborhood. What the qualifying characteristics should be is of course debatable, though several good possibilities, such as the object being large enough to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium, would result in Pluto and similarly sized objects being classified as planets. The point is that the definition should not be written either to deliberately include or exclude Pluto, but should be based as much as possible on clearly defined physical characteristics. Probably the easiest solution for the time being would be to keep the term “dwarf planet”, but to acknowledge that, as the name implies, a dwarf planet is still a planet, while we can refer to the eight bigger planets as “major planets” (though in that case we'd still need a definition for "major planets"). But in the end what we call Pluto is not that important, as it remains equally interesting regardless (for more arguments on both sides, see here and here).

In subsequent decades we learned even more about Pluto, first through mutual occultation events between Pluto and Charon, and then in the past few years through observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, including the discovery of four small moons of Pluto, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx. But despite these advances, our knowledge of Pluto and its companions remained extremely limited, and the best images we had of it were extremely fuzzy, due to its great distance and small size. All of that has finally changed with the flyby of the Pluto system by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 14. As a longtime “Plutophile”, it goes without saying that this is an event I have long awaited. But rather than attempting to summarize New Horizons’ discoveries so far myself (after all, one of the most exciting and dramatic things about it is the pictures, which are best seen elsewhere), I am providing some links to articles about the flyby and some of the discoveries that have been made so far, with many more to come as data continues to be sent back by New Horizons over the coming months.

Articles on Pluto's moons from the months prior to the close encounter can be found here and here.

An article on the significance of the New Horizons mission can be found here, and one about how great a value it is for the money is here.

Articles reporting on the flyby can be found here, here, here and here, with articles focusing on Pluto's atmosphere here and here, articles on the strange mountain on Charon here and here, and an article about the first relatively close-up picture on Nix here (one with pictures of both Nix and Hydra is here). A picture gallery of photos from the New Horizons mission, starting from the most recent images, can be found here.

An article on reactions to the flyby can be found here, and an article on possible future exploration by New Horizons can be found here. Unfortunately, there are no near future plans to send probes to Eris, now the largest object in the solar system that has never been visited by a space probe, or Sedna, which has by far the greatest average distance from the Sun of any known object of substantial size (it probably qualifies as a dwarf planet), but with this flyby of Pluto we have at least begun the exploration of the bodies of the far outer solar system, and after decades of wondering what they were like, I personally am happy to finally get to see what Pluto and Charon look like up close.

Reflections on the Confederate Flag (and More)

There’s been a lot of dramatic news out of the United States recently, including the US Supreme Court’s historic ruling declaring bans on same sex marriage unconstitutional (with a hilariously ironic dissent from Scalia calling the decision an attack on democracy, when the real assaults on democracy came in cases like Citizens United, where he and his right wing cohorts were in the majority), not to mention its ruling against a rather absurd challenge to the Affordable Care Act, its rulings upholding standards for proving housing discrimination and an independent redistricting committee in Arizona, or, on the negative side, their ruling against the EPA’s restrictions on mercury pollution. However, I want to focus on another news item that is unrelated to the Supreme Court, namely the reactions to the mass murder of innocent churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and particularly the debate over the Confederate flag.

Regarding the murders themselves, there is a lot that could be said, such as how they are yet another piece of evidence showing how disastrous it is for a society to allow guns to be so easily available, or how the reluctance of right wingers to admit that racism was the reason for the shootings just says that they have some of their own issues in that area, but my interest in history leads me to focus on the Confederate flag debate. I will, however, mention in passing that it is ridiculous for many, particularly on the right, to refuse to label these murders a terrorist act when they are exceptionally eager to call any attacks by extremist Muslims terrorism. Yes, Dylann Roof probably acted alone and in that sense was a lone nut, but the same was true of Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator in the mass shooting at Ft Hood in 2009, and yet Ted Cruz and his ilk have been adamant that the latter was a terrorist act. For that matter, even the Tsarnaev brothers seem to have acted alone in the Boston Marathon bombing. In all cases, you had one (or two, though it was clearly the elder Tsarnaev brother who was the driving force) disturbed individual, motivated largely or at least in part by a warped ideology, striking out violently at unsuspecting victims. If any violent act, even by individuals unconnected with a larger organization, intended to strike terror in the hearts of ordinary people in the name of some ideology is a terrorist act, then these three incidents could all be described as terrorism. If we restrict the definition of “terrorist acts” to those that are organized or at least directly assisted by a larger organization, then none of them are (though quite a few actions by governments would still fit the definition). But anyone who claims that the Waco and Boston incidents were terrorism but Charleston was not is quite simply full of it. The truth is, right-wing radicals are much more of a threat to the average American than groups like ISIL, though lone nuts of any stripe are a danger – and much more so when guns are easily available.

Getting back to the Confederate flag and the efforts to get removed from public places all around the southern US, I would first like to note that not only did I myself grow up in Texas, but many of my ancestors, at least on the paternal side, were Southerners, and quite a few fought for the Confederacy. My great-great-great grandfather in the direct paternal line, a German immigrant to Texas just after it joined the US, was an officer in the Confederate army, and several other ancestors fought on the Confederate side elsewhere in the South. The battle of Shiloh was fought at least in part on land belonging to members of one of my ancestral lines, the Cantrells. A number of my ancestors were slave owners as well (it’s also probable that at least one very distant ancestor was a slave himself, though that’s another story – and in any case some of the slave owners and Confederate soldiers in my ancestry would have been his descendants). As a matter of fact, I don’t know for certain of any ancestors who fought for the Union, though it’s possible some on my mother’s side did (most of her paternal ancestors were presumably living in the North at the time of the Civil War, though her maternal ancestors didn’t come until after 1900). So my own heritage is much more closely tied to the Confederacy than the Union.

Does this mean that I think the Confederate flag should be flying at state capitols around the South? Not at all. Though they themselves may have been unaware of it, the cause for which my Confederate ancestors fought was wrong. Despite the nonsensical arguments of pro-Confederate apologists, that cause was clearly slavery. Or as someone put it the other day, claiming it was about states’ rights is at best an incomplete statement of the reality, as it was about a particular “states’ right”, namely the right of states to keep slavery legal. This is clear from not only from the history of the years leading up to the Civil War, which were full of struggles between the North and South over slavery (the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and so forth), but the articles of secession of the various Confederate States, which repeatedly cited slavery. Then there was the Cornerstone Speech of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, in which he talked of how founders of the US like Thomas Jefferson considered slavery “wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically” and an “evil” that would disappear over time, then went on to say that they were “fundamentally wrong”, because their thinking “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races.” Stephens (who ironically opposed secession before the war and worked for peace in the later years of the war) declared this to be an error, and that “our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Since the Confederate leaders explicitly stated that slavery was a major – even the major – motivation for their rebellion, claiming otherwise reflects either a complete ignorance of the history Confederate apologists claim to honor, or else a highly disingenuous attempt to whitewash history.

Of course, the North didn’t necessarily treat black people all that much better than the South did, and that was still true long after the war. Their ways of mistreating them were just different. My mother often cites an African-American saying that reflects this: “In the South white folks don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too big. But in the North they don't care how big you get as long as you don't get too close." As late as the 1970s, Randy Newman could still skewer this Northern hypocrisy in his song “Rednecks”. But the fact that many Northerners were both racists and hypocrites doesn’t change the basic fact that the Confederate flag is the symbol of a rebellion that was fought for the right to keep other people as slaves, and even in later years it was used as a symbol of racism (after all, South Carolina only raised it over their capitol building in the 1960s as a symbol of defiance against efforts to end segregation). It isn’t just that Dylann Roof “misused” the flag; the flag itself is inherently steeped in racist ideology. And it isn’t enough to say that it’s “part of our history” either. After all, the flag of the Third Reich is part of Germany’s history, but that doesn’t mean that Germans (other than neo-Nazi idiots) raise it in public. Even when I was young and ignorant (i.e., politically conservative), I found it vaguely disturbing that a popular show like The Dukes of Hazzard (which to be honest I never really watched) prominently featured a car named the “General Lee” with a big Confederate flag on it. If people in the South want to find a symbol of resistance against oppression by corrupt government officials, they can surely due better than a flag that itself stood for the oppression of an entire people in the interest of wealthy landowners.

Finally, I should note, as many others have, that just removing the Confederate flags is far from sufficient. The racism, both subtle and blatant, that still exists throughout the US (not just in the South) has to be addressed as well, as do the many other problems faced by African-Americans in particular due to the legacy of slavery and discrimination. Even if we’re only talking about historical symbols, aside from removing the flags, Southern states would do well to start changing the names of all the roads and buildings named after some of the most notorious pro-slavery leaders. But removing the flags, while a very small step, is nevertheless a step in the right direction.

Pope Francis and Climate Change

The Catholic Church has a long history, and in much of that time it has not been a force for good, but rather has stood for corruption, repression and stubborn conservatism. Even in The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century work, the portrayal of the church is for the most part very negative. In modern times, the Catholic Church retains some exceptionally backward ideas about contraception, women, and homosexuality, among other things. I remember once years ago when Time magazine selected Pope John Paul II as its Man of the Year, one political cartoonist parodied their choice by drawing a magazine with John Paul II on the cover as Man of the Year, but with the name of the magazine changed to Behind the Times. While for the most part the Catholic Church is not nearly as radically right wing as many evangelical Protestant churches, given its size as the single largest Christian denomination in the world and indeed the world’s largest hierarchally-organized religious sect, with the Pope exercising ultimate religious authority over a billion people, its conservative bent has meant has acted as a major hindrance to progress on many issues. In other words, my overall view of the Catholic Church has tended to be negative. However, this has changed somewhat since Pope Francis took charge. While the Catholic Church still has many negatives, Francis has shown that with the right kind of leadership it can still be a strong force for good, a message he has reinforced with his recently released encyclical on climate change and the environment.

In the short time he has been in charge, Francis has managed to drastically change the image of the Catholic Church and the tone of its pronouncements, even if the substance of its teachings has not changed much. To a large degree, this has been due to a change in emphasis. Past Popes like John Paul II and Benedict XVI seemed to focus much more on defending some of the Church’s more conservative positions, such as its views on contraception, abortion and homosexuality. Francis, while not actually abandoning or contradicting these positions, except to express greater tolerance of those with views contrary to the Church’s teachings, has chosen to emphasize issues such as social justice and fighting poverty, areas where even in the past the Church has done much good. The problem in past years has been that the Vatican and much of the rest of the hierarchy has seemed to care much less about social justice than fighting for socially conservative positions or even covering up its own flaws, such as all the sexual abuse scandals that have come to light in past years. Symptomatic of this warped emphasis is the fact that many priests who had been found to be guilty of sexual abuse went unpunished, while one American nun who performed an emergency abortion in a hospital to save a woman’s life was excommunicated, though she was eventually reinstated. Another example is the case of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the American association of nuns that was punished by the Vatican for placing too much emphasis on social justice rather than the church’s teachings on issues such as abortion. However, despite initially allowing the inquiry (or perhaps we should say Inquisition) into the group’s work to continue, he ended it in April of this year and met with a delegation of the nuns for almost an hour. Also, he has removed some of the more conservative church officials from power and seems to genuinely be attempting to change the Church’s overall direction, thereby allowing it to play a more positive role in society.

This latest encyclical is a powerful example of the kind of positive role the Church can play in the world under Francis’s leadership. In essence, Francis has declared that fighting climate change and protecting the environment is a moral issue, one that it is intimately tied to fighting poverty and struggling for social justice, as it is the poor and disadvantaged of the world that will suffer – indeed are already suffering – from the effects of climate change, which, as he notes, is "a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods [that] represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day". He reviews the scientific consensus on climate change and points out the urgency of doing something about it now, noting "it is remarkable how weak international political responses have been". He condemns the short-sighted greed that has led to not only to our continued pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere despite our growing awareness of the harm they are causing but also other sorts of environmental destruction in so much of the world and declares that we need to radically adjust our priorities. He calls out over-consumption by the wealthy nations of the world as being a major cause of our current problems and calls on people to stop viewing endless economic growth and acquisition of material goods as “progress”, but instead to work to improve quality of life. Indeed, aside from being a much needed call to action on climate change, the encyclical is also an indictment of the entire system of rampant capitalism that ruins the environment and tramples on the poor and disadvantaged in the name of short term profit, as "economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain". He notes that claims that God gave the world to humans to exploit at will are bad theology, arguing "we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures", as it is clear that the Bible calls on humans to be good stewards of the Earth and its resources and that "responsibility for God’s earth means that human beings, endowed with intelligence, must respect the laws of nature and the delicate equilibria existing between the creatures of this world."

While I have not read the entire encyclical (and at 191 pages I may not ever get around to doing so), I agree pretty much completely with all the excerpts and paraphrases I’ve seen so far, with one notable exception, one that shows that Francis, for all his progressive pronouncements, still holds to some of the Church’s more backward teachings. At one point, he criticizes the view that overpopulation is to blame for the environmental problems we face and that we just need to limit population growth. Of course, few if any people with an understanding of the issues believes that overpopulation alone is the problem or halting population growth alone is the solution. Of course, as Francis says, over-consumption, waste and inequality, not to mention the short-sighted pursuit of profits that leads people to extract and burn destructive fossil fuels rather than search for alternatives, are at least as much the issue as population, if not more. There is no question that we could easily feed, clothe, house and educate all of the world’s seven billion plus people if we distributed our resources more equitably and used them more wisely. But it is also unquestionable that this would be much easier if there were far fewer people, and it will become much harder if the population keeps increasing at anything near the current rate. While so far our food production has managed to keep pace with our population growth, thanks to innovations such as the “green revolution” in agriculture, it is foolish to just assume it will continue to do so. No matter how environmentally sustainable our lifestyles, seven billion people cannot help but create a rather substantial strain on the Earth’s carrying capacity and great pressure on the habitats of other species, and of course it will be worse with eight, nine or ten billion. So even if we do everything else Francis suggests, population growth must still be restrained – not coercively, like in China, but through education and read availability of contraceptives and other forms of birth control, especially to women. This of course is the unspoken reason for Francis’s dismissal of overpopulation as an issue; admitting it was a problem would be an admission that the Church’s teaching on contraception is wrong and even harmful. While Francis appears to be far more willing than his predecessors to tolerate the use of contraception by Catholics, already quite common despite the Church’s position on them, he doesn’t seem to be prepared to actually overturn this, probably the most harmful of the Church’s teachings.

But despite this one notable flaw, if Catholics and even non-Catholics could take what the encyclical teaches to heart, the world would definitely be a better place. Of course, many will not, and even before its release right-wingers, conservatives, climate deniers, fossil fuel profiteers and others (many of which groups also happened to be targets for sharp criticism in the encyclical), began attacking it. Catholic Republicans like Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush questioned the appropriateness of the Pope addressing an issue such as climate change, saying he should stick to moral teachings. This is despite Francis’s convincing framing of human stewardship of the Earth as a moral issue, which makes at least as much logical sense than declaring homosexuality or even contraception to be a moral issue – indeed, I would say that these two only become a moral issue when people attack the former or try to reduce availability of the latter, because it is such attacks that are immoral. These Republican critics decry the Pope getting involved in what they call a “political” issue, but they don’t seem to object to the Church making pronouncements on abortion, which is at least as much a political issue as climate change. Indeed, as everything is some sense political, saying the Church should not express a viewpoint on political issues is tantamount to saying it should not express a viewpoint on anything. Furthermore, climate change is, or should be, much less a political issue than it is; it is only the climate deniers who reject the overwhelming scientific evidence who make it into a political issue. Or rather, the real political issue with climate change is not whether to do something about it, but what exactly we should do, and how we should distribute responsibility for taking action.

It’s worth pointing out that while the extreme right wing views of certain prominent Catholics like Santorum, Bush, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, or the various Catholic leaders who spoke against the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act might give the impression that most American Catholics take very conservative positions on issues such as climate change or homosexuality, polls show that in fact Francis’s position on climate change is more in accord with most American Catholics than with these political “leaders”, and many also support same-sex marriage (something that is true of many Catholics in other countries as well, with Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland being leaders in legalizing same-sex marriage). As is the case with the views of American Jews on Israel, where most ordinary Jews support a negotiated two-state solution and are willing to see Israel receive constructive criticism but many major Jewish organizations (with the notable exception of J Street) take a hardline position that admits of no criticism of Israel, it seems sometimes that the most extreme Catholics are the loudest and so give a misleading impression of the views of Catholics in general (for that matter, the same is true of Protestants, as many mainline Protestant churches favor action on climate change and support same-sex marriage, unlike some of the most outspoken Protestants who wave their opposition like a banner).

This encyclical, with its broad acceptance of the scientific consensus and its solid summary of the science itself, is also a reminder that despite some of the black marks in its past like the suppression of Galileo and the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, Catholics as individuals and even the Church itself has often played a positive role in advancing science. Many important scientific ideas, including genetics and the Big Bang, were first proposed by Catholics, and the Church itself accepts basic scientific ideas such as evolution, unlike many evangelical Protestants. Francis, who apparently has a background in chemistry, has consulted widely with scientists on climate change and indeed seems to have almost as much of a personal interest in science as the Dalai Lama, a religious leader who he has much in common with. Both of them accept that it makes no sense for religion to attempt to oppose itself to science, but rather to use science to help find ways to make the world a better place. With this encyclical on climate change, Francis has helped point out to both Catholics and non-Catholics ways in which we can work together to do just that.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: How Can We Ensure That It Will Be Beneficial?

In the past month or so, one of the biggest political news items from the United States has been the fight of the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP, a massive trade agreement that US President Barack Obama’s administration has been negotiating with around a dozen countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Obama has been trying to persuade Congress to grant him fast track authority, under which, once the agreement is finalized, Congress has to decide to approve or reject it by a simple up or down vote, thereby taking away Congress’s power to modify the agreement. The administration has pointed out that in the past, Congress has usually granted this authority to the executive branch, since if Congress modifies the agreement the other parties to the treaty may not agree to the amendments, forcing negotiations to be reopened and making it difficult to ever arrive at a final agreement. However, there has been considerable resistance against Obama’s push for fast track authority. What has made this particular fight unusual is that most (though not all) the opposition has come from Obama’s usual allies, including most of the Democrats in Congress and a wide array of labor and environmental groups, social activists, and other progressives, while most of his support has come from Republicans (who normally oppose almost everything he does), big business, Wall Street and similar interest groups.

On the surface, many of Obama’s arguments in favor of the trade agreement in general and fast track authority in specific seem persuasive. One of the strongest arguments in favor of the latter is the one mentioned above, namely that without it reaching a final agreement would be difficult. However, the fact that not only do most of Congress’s most progressive politicians but almost every single major progressive organization strongly opposes both the agreement and the granting of fast track authority is hardly reassuring. Of course, there are many on the left who will reflexively oppose any trade agreement of this sort, whereas I try to judge every public policy measure on its individual merits; if it can make the world a better place for ordinary people and ensure strict protection of the environment and human rights, than I am for it. But even if I didn’t know any of the specific arguments against the TPP, the fact that I have received email concerning the TPP from dozens of different organizations that I generally support and largely trust with respect to their particular areas of focus and every single one has been in opposition would make it hard for me to support it, despite the strong support of Obama himself (the only pro-TPP emails I've gotten have been from him), who I support on most issues. But in addition, some of the specific concerns raised by opponents indicate to me that their worries are well founded.

One of the most problematic parts of the TPP is the reported ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provisions. These provisions would allow corporations to sue nations before special tribunals if the government took an action that deprived of anticipated profits, for example by imposing new regulations which hindered its ability to do business. Of course, it is certainly possible that there could be situations where a country unjustifiably put roadblocks in front of a company, perhaps for reasons of corruption (say to extract a bribe or to benefit a rival which the decision maker had ties to), so I am not entirely without sympathy with desire of corporations for some means of redress. However, such a system would be far too easy for corporations to abuse. Furthermore, we can already see instances of such abuse. Tobacco companies have sued or threatened to sue several countries over new health warnings. A mining company has sued El Salvador for stopping an environmentally harmful mining project. With such a system in place, fossil fuel companies could sue over new measures to fight climate change (a particularly dangerous possibility, considering how essential it is to take immediate, revolutionary action to avoid catastrophic changes to the climate), and multinationals of all sorts could sue over new laws to protect workers. Some of the opposition in the US has focused on the possibility of corporations or financial institutions using ISDS to overturn US regulations, with opponents countering that that hasn’t happened in the past, despite the existence of similar provisions in previous treaties. However, first of all, just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it never will, unless the provisions are written in a way that completely precludes such a possibility. In one interview President Obama criticized his erstwhile ally Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the most outspoken opponents of the TPP, for talking about hypothetical situations. But of course we are dealing in hypotheticals; if the treaty makes such a situation even hypothetically possible, then we should be worried about it. Furthermore, while this particular exchange was about potential effects on US law, I for one am not only concerned about the US and its people; if there is a strong possibility that such provisions will be used anywhere in ways that are detrimental to the environment or to ordinary people, then they are unacceptable.

But the ISDS provisions are far from the only disturbing rumored elements of the TPP. There are said to be many other provisions that have been written with corporate interests in mind. For instance, if passed, the TPP will apparently strengthen patent protections, making it more difficult and time-consuming to bring generic drugs onto the market. Since a majority of the world’s people cannot begin to afford brand name drugs but only their much cheaper generic counterparts, such a provision would be harmful to many people. The administration is also unaccountably fighting efforts to ensure that the US can still restrict trade with companies with poor records against human trafficking. People should also be asking how the TPP would impact efforts to hold multinational corporations accountable for disasters like the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, to stop fossil fuel companies from accelerating climate change, or tobacco companies from pushing their drugs on young people worldwide. In fact, there are many ways in which the TPP could potentially be very harmful to human rights, the environment, labor rights and many other very important issues.

Alert readers may have noticed that in the above discussion I refer to “rumored” provisions of the TPP. This is because of another very controversial aspect of this whole process, the fact that the negotiations are being conducted behind closed doors. While members of Congress can read the draft agreement, they can only do so under very strict conditions, and they are not allowed to reveal the contents in any detail. This secrecy is another major concern. Many have called on Obama to release the text of the agreement, but he has so far declined to do so. The chief excuse for not doing so seems to be that it would compromise negotiating positions for parts of the agreement that have not been finalized yet, though it is not clear why that would be the case, nor why parts of the agreement that have been finalized can’t be released immediately. Obama has said that the entire text will be made public before Congress actually votes on whether to approve it (I believe the specific time period is 60 days before it is sent to Congress), but of course this would be after he had obtained fast track authority, and so there would no longer be any possibility of actually changing the text. At most, if the draft agreement proves as bad as some fear it may be, civil society could put pressure on Congress to reject it entirely. But of course in that case there will be considerable pressure to pass it as well, especially since it will be a choice of all or nothing. Furthermore, 60 days is not really a great deal of time for even keenly interested parties to fully digest a massive agreement.

Now, I will admit that, as in the case of fast track authority, I can understand the administration’s position to some extent. It is true that it is a bit difficult to conduct delicate negotiations under the public eye. But on the other hand, a treaty negotiated in complete secrecy that potentially could have serious negative effects on all of us hardly seems acceptable either. This is why I have still been happy to sign petitions calling on the President to release the entire text. There is, however, another possible option that as far as I know no one has suggested, perhaps because it is impractical for some reason that has failed to occur to me. It seems to me that one of the problems is the negotiators themselves. According to opponents of the agreement, corporate lobbyists are doing the negotiating; more specifically, corporations have been allowed to weigh in on sections of the treaty of particular interest to them (e.g., pharmaceutical companies on patent issues). If this is accurate, then of course the final agreement is almost certain favor corporate interests, since we probably can’t rely on the government negotiators to stand firm for the interests of workers, ordinary citizens or the environment. President Obama is asking everyone to trust him not to abandon progressive principles in the negotiations, but while he has been pretty progressive on a number of issues and has taken firm stands on some issues recently, his overall record is not sufficiently reassuring, especially given all the forces dedicated to making the TPP as corporate friendly as possible. But if corporations are being invited to weigh in on aspects of the agreement, why not environmental groups, labor activists, human rights activists and others dedicated to fighting for the interests of ordinary people? If Obama invited a number of trustworthy activist groups to take part in the negotiating process, perhaps that would be sufficient to reassure everyone that the final agreement, even if negotiated in secret, would put the environment, human rights, workers, and the interests of ordinary people in general ahead of profits for a few. Absent the participation of a significant number of such groups in the negotiations themselves, we should continue to demand that the secrecy end and that fast track authority be denied to these unaccountable negotiators.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that when Taiwan’s current government was pushing the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with China, giving rise to the Sunflower Movement in opposition, one of the supposed “merits” of the service trade agreement with China was that according to the government it was a necessary pre-condition for Taiwan to join the TPP. Even assuming that passage of the service agreement would really guarantee that Taiwan could join the TPP (and I doubt that either the US or any of the other governments has given Taiwan such a guarantee), this argument assumes that joining the TPP would be a good thing, an assertion that neither the government nor the media seems to question. But not only is the TPP, like the service trade agreement, a “black box” negotiated in secret without the participation of the public or civil society, there are many reasons to suspect that it would not be a good thing to be a part of. Likewise, the Taiwanese government seems to just assume that the TPP is essentially a done deal, completely ignoring the strong opposition in the US. In any case, many of the problems with the cross-strait service trade agreement and the TPP are quite similar: a lack of participation by the public, a noticeable tendency to favor business interests over the public interest, and attempts by the respective governments to rush the agreements through in the face of serious doubts about their potential effects. As citizens, while we may not necessarily have the time or ability to full understand these agreements and their potential consequences, at their very least, we have to put pressure on our governments to allow full participation by civil society in their formulation in order to prevent the possibility of waking up one day to find that without our knowledge, our rights and our environment have be dangerously or even fatally compromised.

Some Reminders for Taiwanese Drivers and Motorcyclists About Lanes and Alleys

As anyone has spent any time in Taiwan knows, there's quite a bit of bad driving on the roads here. This is an off-the-cuff lecture/rant about misuse of lanes and alleys (the little side streets, mostly residential, off the main streets) by drivers and motorcyclists in Taiwan. This hardly exhausts the topic of bad driving here, so I may revisit the topic someday. I should note that Taiwan is not the only country with a lot of bad driving, and I've been to a few which noticeably worse. But there are also some that are, on the average, much better (Japan, for example). In any case, since this is where I live, this is the place I'd first like to see some improvement in driving habits.

1. Lanes are not highways. Just because there is no traffic in a lane or alley doesn’t mean you can drive as fast as you want. Pedestrians use these lanes. Kids often live along them. The last thing those living and working on the lane need is some idiot barreling down it like they are on the highway. If you want to go fast, go find a highway to drive on. See also 5.
2. Lanes are not for short cuts. They are not there so you can cut through on your way somewhere else. If you have no reason to be there, don’t go down it.
3. Lanes are not there to help you get around red lights. This is a corollary to 2 above. Just because you see a red light at the intersection ahead where you wanted to turn right doesn’t mean you can whip through a nearby lane to make your turn. Stay on the main road and wait for the damn light.
4. Traffic regulations apply as much or more in lanes as elsewhere. Stop signs mean stop. Just because you are on a motorcycle or your destination happens to be just a little way down the lane doesn’t mean you can go the wrong way down a one way lane. See also 7.
5. Lanes are for pedestrians, residents, and others who are going to a building located on or near it. This is a corollary to both 2 and 3. If you are just passing through, stay on the main road.
6. Pedestrians first. Cars and motorcycles have to yield to pedestrians, and pedestrians don’t have to hurry out of the way of cars and motorcycles. If they have to hurry to get out of your way, then you are going too fast (see 1).
7. Drivers and motorcycle riders who are residents don’t get to ignore the above rules. Many years ago I saw a woman who had been driving the wrong way down a one way lane trying to argue with a driver who was going the right way as more cars piled up beyond the latter. She argued that she lived there – as if being a resident somehow exempted her from traffic regulations (needless to say, in the end she had to back out to let everyone else through). If you live on the lane, fine, you get to drive or ride down it, but slowly, and you should get to the main road as quickly as you can. Better yet, get rid of your car or motorcycle and start walking, biking or taking public transportation (or some combination of the three).

Religion Versus Society

The other day when I was walking down the street in Taipei I saw some people burning so-called ghost money, a practice I have criticized in the past. In this case, it brought to mind the efforts by Republican legislators in US states such as Indiana to create a license to discriminate based on religion as well as bans against alcohol in some Muslim countries and the sometimes violent efforts of some Muslims to discourage publication of images of Muhammed. At first glance these things don’t seem to have much to do with each other, but in all cases they involve a negative interaction between some religious believers and the rest of society. They are all violations of the basic principle for religion in society: you are free to practice your religion as long as in doing so you do not significantly infringe on the rights of others.

As I noted in my previous post on the subject, burning ghost money is very harmful to the environment. Aside from being a waste of resources, it contributes to climate change and when the usual varieties of ghost money are used, it adds harmful chemicals to the air. While some people may sincerely believe that it is something they have to do, that belief doesn’t them the right to seriously harm everyone else’s environment in the process. Either find a way to do it without harming the environment (such as by “burning” virtual ghost money), or don’t do it all.

The efforts in some US states to pass so-called “religious freedom” laws in effort to make it possible for businesses to discriminate against some people (particularly gay couples) for supposedly religious reasons create a similar situation. While people are free to believe that their religion doesn’t allow same sex marriage (and individual religions are free to recognize or not recognize particular types of marriage), that doesn’t mean that they can discriminate in their business dealings. Some conservatives, in justifying these laws, have raised a false analogy, saying that forcing wedding photographers or bakeries offering wedding cakes to treat same sex couples who request their services the same as straight couples is equivalent to forcing Jewish deli owners to sell bacon. Of course it is not the same at all; any business can choose what services or products it wants to offer, but it cannot deny those services or products to some on the basis of their sexual orientation. Or for other reasons – if these “Christian” wedding service providers were truly so determined to follow Biblical strictures, they should also be trying to deny services to people on second marriages. For that matter, as many opponents of these laws have pointed out, once you open the door to using religion as a reason to discriminate, some people will start trying to find religious justifications for discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, or other reasons. Once again, no one’s exercise of their religion should give them the right to infringe on the rights of others. If you choose to be a wedding photographer, you can’t discriminate against certain couples. If you choose to be a doctor, you can’t discriminate against certain patients (like the doctor who refused to accept a lesbian couple’s child as a patient). If that is too difficult for you, chose another profession.

It is this principle that makes the Hobby Lobby decision so idiotic – well, that and the absurdity of the idea that a corporation can have religious beliefs. While the owners of a company are free to practice their religion, when doing so interferes with the rights of others (in this case their employees), then they cannot impose their beliefs on the latter. If you think abortion is bad, don’t have an abortion. If you think, contrary to the medical facts, that certain forms of birth control are the same as abortion, then you are free to retain your delusions. But you can’t deny your employees access to necessary medical treatment on that basis (not to mention the fact that if they truly cared about reducing abortion rates, they should be trying to make obtaining contraception easier, not more difficult).

Another ridiculous aspect of the fundamentalist mentality behind the “religious freedom” laws and efforts to escape contraception mandates is how so many right-wing Christians moan about persecution in the process. Despite such claims, requiring that LGBT people be treated equally or making contraception part of a health plan does not interfere in any way with anyone’s private practice of their religion. Nor are restrictions on overtly religious actions and symbols in public contexts part of any kind of a “war” on Christianity. The truth is, it is precisely because Christianity still has such a dominant position in American society that we have to be particularly careful about how much it is allowed to enter into the public sphere. For example, when players at a school sporting event have a “voluntary” prayer, this is still problematic, because in the majority of schools in the US, Christians vastly outnumber everyone else. If a few Muslim or Buddhist students held a prayer ceremony before a game, the rest of their classmates are unlikely to feel any pressure to join. But if a team only has one or two students who are not Christians, they will be made to feel extremely uncomfortable if everyone else joins in a prayer. Of course to be fair this means that any such activities have to be banned, regardless of what religion is involved or whether they represent a minority. But it is clear that such a ban would not constitute persecution of Christian students but on the contrary it would provide necessary protection of the rights of non-Christian students.

Lest anyone doubt the strength of peer pressure, especially for adolescents, I will give an example. When I was in my early teens, my family attended a conservative Methodist church mostly attended by upper middle class, wealthy white people, most of whom were almost certainly conservative and right wing (in any event, the church library was full of literature with a decidedly right wing bent). I went to a Sunday school class for my age which was full of rather stuck up preppie kids and taught by a young man and young woman with a very fundamentalist approach to Christianity. I always felt rather uncomfortable, for numerous reasons; I was a little late in hitting my growth spurt, so I was smaller than the others, as well as being a little geeky, a bit less well off, and attending a different school (I believe most of the others either went to private school or went to one of the local suburban public schools, while my public school was in the city). In one class, they asked us to vote on which sin we thought was worse, murder or homosexuality. Now at this time I was still fairly conservative myself. I supported Reagan, the Republican party and virtually all the right wing political positions that I mostly abhor now. I was fairly homophobic and as much as I might hate to admit now, I did think of homosexuality as sinful. But even then there was no way I thought it was as bad as murder. From the little I remember, my guess is we were supposed to raise one hand for murder and the other for homosexuality, and I also have the impression that the girls and boys voted separately. In any case, most of all of the girls voted for murder as the worse sin. I was going to do the same, but all the other boys raised their hands for homosexuality as the worse sin, so, I am ashamed to admit, after some hesitation I did the same for fear of how my vote would be interpreted. Of course the teachers, after putting us through this reprehensible exercise, said that in truth all sins were equal in God’s eyes, though if all they wanted was to teach that, it hardly seems necessary to make everyone vote, not to mention the questionable choice of “sins” to chose from (why not murder and theft, say, or coveting your neighbor’s wife and taking God’s name in vain?). In hindsight, it is easy to say that I should have had the courage to vote what I really thought, and even the me of today would be tempted to lecture my younger self about how terrible it was to even passively support the absurd notion that homosexuality is worse than murder or even a sin at all. But frankly, while I’d like to think that if I could go back in time I’d have the courage to stand up and reject the whole premise, probably if I was stuck in the body and mind of my teenaged self, the best that I could manage would be to change my vote, and even that not without some discomfort. So I can easily imagine how hard it must be for a non-Christian teenager in a school full of Christians, if the latter are frequently engaging in “voluntary” religious activities.

On a related note, if any proof is required that Christians are not only not persecuted but still have an unreasonable prominence, we need look no farther than the fact that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible for an openly agnostic or non-believing individual to be elected US President, and it is even quite difficult for an atheist to win election on a local level. It was only recently that I learned that, in clear contravention of the US Constitution (which specifically bans any religious test for office) and the clear intentions of the founders, some states still officially require that anyone running for believe in a Supreme Being. Even aside from this, there are still many people who would not vote for anyone who openly admitted to being a non-believer, no matter how well qualified they are otherwise.

But to return to my original theme, another example of religious people imposing on others through the practice of their religion is how some Muslim countries ban items like alcohol, pork (though I am against eating either pigs or cattle myself, mostly for environmental reasons), and pornography – for that matter, the restrictive attitudes of many Western countries toward pornography and sex work can be traced to Christians imposing their moral standards on the society – as well as the violent reactions of some Muslims toward images of Muhammed. Here, again, while the believers are free to avoid doing things that their religion forbids, or that they think it forbids (as I have noted in the past, the whole idea that Islam forbids images of Muhammed is somewhat questionable, and Islamic images of Muhammed are not unknown), but they have no right to forbid others from doing these things, unless there are rational, non-religious grounds for doing so, such as banning the consumption of pork on ethical grounds (after all, pigs are quite intelligent and the way they are raised and slaughtered in factory farms is inhumane).

In conclusion, religion can never be an excuse for behavior that is harmful to others (such as burning ghost money) or for infringing on the rights of others (by discriminating against them or forbidding them from doing things that are banned by a particular religion). Rather than expending their energy in efforts to infringe on the rights of others, religious people would be much better off attempting to demonstrate the superiority of their religion by exemplary behavior, which in addition to kindness and charity includes the tolerance of and indeed active support for the rights of others even when the latter engage in behavior that contravenes their personal beliefs.