Time to follow the money

Rowan County Senior High School Band.  I dunno; I just like high school bands.

This has now turned into farce:

With Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis in jail on civil contempt charges for defying a judge's order to resume issuing licenses, deputy clerk Brian Mason ended the office's two-month license ban by politely serving Yates and Smith on Friday, even congratulating them and shaking their hands afterward.

Hours later, however, attorneys for Davis said the marriage licenses issued by her office Friday were void because only Davis has the authority to authorize a marriage license and she refuses to do so.

"They are not being issued under the authority of the Rowan County clerk's office. They are not worth the paper that they are written on," said attorney Mat Staver after meeting with Davis in the Carter County jail in Grayson.

Rowan County Attorney Cecil Watkins has previously dismissed that argument, saying deputy clerks can issue valid marriage licenses without the approval of their boss.

Marriage equality protesters shouted "Love won!" outside the Rowan County courthouse as Yates and Smith emerged. Across the sidewalk, a crowd of people who support Kim Davis stood mutely, save for one man screaming quotes from the Bible about Sodom and Gomorrah.

Do they think they're scaring people with that line?  Do they plan to sue them for living in sin?  Do they imagine this is really a 40's madcap comedy (marriage and bigamy are surprisingly common topics in '40's comedies.  Somebody oughta do a study....)?

These are the legal geniuses who lost their case from the trial court to the Supreme Court, and now they threaten not only to appeal the contempt charge (good luck with that, fellas!), but want to put the fear of their God into people coming to Rowan County to get marriage licenses, not all of whom have to be gay (since Davis, for some reason, was refusing to issue any licenses, under the mistaken impression it would protect her from a charge of discrimination.*).  And now they think nobody involved in this case, including the federal judge, knows the law of Kentucky except them?

Really, this is just ridiculous now.  I'm honestly wondering if the voters of Rowan County want to pay a clerk a salary to sit in jail.  That may be the real reason she refuses to quit her job.  Wonder if it will become the reason she gets removed from her job?

*Neither federal law nor Kentucky law recognizes homosexuality as a protected class for civil rights purposes, so you can discriminate against homosexuals in Kentucky with abandon.  What you can't do is ignore a court order.

The Wit and Wisdom of a former Cowboys Quarterback

It's worth noting Kim Davis seldom said much in her defense; mostly she hid in her office, away from cameras and reporters and people demanding marriage licenses (which she refused to issue on some confused notion that not issuing any at all was a "Get Out of Jail Free" card because she was not discriminating against gays, which is not illegal in Kentucky).

And now her husband is speaking for her:

Joe Davis said that he plans to travel to confront Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D), who has refused to call a special legislative session to address marriage licenses for gay couples, according to The Courier-Journal.

"You ain't no governor because you have no backbone," he said of Beshear.

He has also criticized U.S. District Judge David Bunning, who ordered Kim Davis to jail on Thursday.

"Bunning cannot bully me, my wife or my son," Joe Davis said on Friday, according to Louisville television station WDRB. "I taught my son how to stand up for what's right and what he believes in at any cost. Bunning doesn't know how to pick on somebody that can handle him. The only thing he
knows how to do is to pick up on the weak people."

On Thursday, after his wife was sent to jail, Davis told a New York Times reporter, "Tell Judge Bunning ... he’s a butt."

This is what's going to launch a thousand internet funding efforts and land Kim Davis a job as a commentator on Fox News?

Besides, marriage licenses are already flowing from the Rowan County clerks' office; so why, again, do we care that Kim Davis won't let herself out of jail?  And her husband's comments are a sharp contrast to the actions of Ms. Davis herself:

Davis stood and thanked Bunning after he ordered her to jail, pausing briefly to search the crowded courtroom for familiar faces before she was led away.

Turn out the lights, the party's over.....

Nope.

I've seen this argument already in comments at Salon:  that Kim Davis gets rich and famous now because she's a "martyr" in jail for her "sincerely held religious beliefs."

I respectfully dissent.

First, Kim Davis is not Sarah Palin, which is to simply say, she doesn't look anything like Tina Fey.  Sorry, but being attractive matters, especially for instant celebrity.  She resembles the mother (I know she has a name, but I never watched the show) of Honey Boo Boo, a show people watched because it was a train wreck and the characters on there were so bizarre as to be almost interesting.

Nobody's watching Honey Boo Boo anymore; that ship has sailed.

Nor is she eloquent.  The report from the courtroom today had her answering briefly the questions put to her, until she spoke about her religious beliefs.  She speaks from the heart about her religious beliefs, but she sounds like people I grew up with, people as nondescript and otherwise uninteresting as Kim Davis.  Nothing against Ms. Davis personally, and I won't join in comments on her appearance or her marital history; but she's not a charismatic person who's going to excite interest for very long.  She's ordinary; she's not electrifying.  She's a symbol, which is how she's being treated by her lawyers.  But she's not an interesting person with something to say.

She's a woman who suddenly found herself on the world stage, and she seems to still be blinking in the klieg lights.  Now she's going away for what could be as long as three years.  Courts don't generally imprison people for contempt for years on end, but that's the outside number on this issue, as she doesn't come up for re-election until 2018.  I don't know the law in Kentucky, but it may be the office can't issue marriage licenses without the signature of the elected clerk, and unless there's some provision to declare her unable to complete her duties, there's nothing to keep her from blocking the issuance of marriage licenses in Rowan County until 2018.*

There are no cameras in jail, and no microphones.  More to the point, Ms. Davis hasn't sought out the cameras and microphones.  Reports are that recently she's been hiding in her office, coming out briefly to address crowds of people, and then retreating behind closed doors again.  She isn't seeking the spotlight now, and she won't command it from a jail cell.

Her lawyers and "supporters" may try to make a martyr of her, but I think they'll find they have no raw material to work with.  She isn't a particularly sympathetic character (my sympathies are with her because she reminds me of people I've known all my life.  I have no sympathy for her stubbornness that put her in jail, and I think she expected things to go differently when she started this.), and she won't become more so when she's once again locked away from public view, a public view she's never really tried to exploit.

Other people can only exploit someone for their own publicity for so long, and then they have to move on.  Ms. Davis' 15 minutes are down to about their last five.**

*There is undoubtedly some provision in KY Law that will eventually replace Ms. Davis and get the work of the county flowing again.  Or it may be pressure simply builds on her to resign because the entire county can't come to a halt while she serves her martyrdom in jail.

**The problem with commenting on a "breaking" story is that you never have all the information at one time.  Now it seems the deputy clerks, save Davis' son, have promised to issue marriage licenses, so the work of the county clerk's office will go on without Ms. Davis.  She won't be released from jail immediately, but I also wonder if the Judge will soon release her with instructions that if she blocks the issuance of licenses again, she's back in jail instanter.

Of course, if she's not in jail for long, and if the licenses flow, then whither her martyrdom?  Or even if she is there for long, it will be only her stubbornness that keeps her there.  She won't stop the marriages from happening.

Watch the doughnut, not the hole

Mark Joseph Stern makes an excellent point:

Now the Liberty Counsel has filed an angry, rambling application to the Supreme Court that is little more than an anti-Obergefell rant dressed up as a legal document. The fact that Davis’ lawyers couldn’t tone down the animus for long enough to pen the application is distressing but not surprising. More and more, it’s beginning to look like the Liberty Counsel is taking Davis for a ride, using her doomed case to promote itself and its extremist principles. Davis has certainly humiliated and degraded the gay couples whom she turned away. But I wonder if, on some level, she isn’t a victim, too.

To fully understand his point, you should know Ms. Davis' lawyers have actively advised her to defy the court's orders.  That is what we lawyers call "unethical," a word that means you probably shouldn't be practicing law and, at a minimum, should have your license to practice in federal court revoked.*

No one wants to think of Kim Davis as a victim.  She has humiliated individuals; her personal life has been splashed across the internet; her husband has responded belligerently to death threats (no surprise, actually; I'd do the same for my wife, except I'd have to buy the gun first.).  She hasn't done much to deserve our sympathy.  And, you will say, she's walking into this with her eyes open:

“I owe my life to Jesus Christ who loves me and gave His life for me. Following the death of my godly mother-in-law over four years ago, I went to church to fulfill her dying wish. There I heard a message of grace and forgiveness and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I am not perfect. No one is. But I am forgiven and I love my Lord and must be obedient to Him and to the Word of God. I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage. To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a heaven or hell decision.”

She may be sincere in her belief, but she's being taken for a ride by her lawyers.  I could see that, and all I know of this case is from news reports.  I haven't read any of the pleadings, but just what gets reported made it clear to me the lawyers in this case were political, not legal.  They shouldn't be allowed into a court of law; and now it appears they are actively putting their client at risk.  It is perfectly clear they have never pursued this case for their client's interests, but only for their own.

She'll be the one paying the fines and going to jail (if it comes to that).  Sure, maybe they can crowd source the fines (for a while); but nobody can go to jail for Ms. Davis.

This does not make her innocent; but she is being misled, and abused.  Our internet ire should land on her lawyers, more so than it does on her.  She will eventually fade from our attention.

The all but anonymous lawyers will move on to their next victim.

*not the same as losing your license to practice law.  Federal courts require application and licensure before you can appear before them, a "license" the Federal court can revoke.  They don't like people playing games in their system, and they don't have to put up with it.  Lawyers can lose their ability to go to federal court, but can still practice in states where they are admitted to the state bar.  If that doesn't happen to these lawyers, it still should.  Their actions are indefensible.

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Does anybody know what Rand Paul is talking about?

"I think one way to get around the whole idea of what the Supreme Court is forcing on the states is for states just to get out of the business of giving out licenses," Paul said. "Alabama has already voted to do this, they’re just no longer going to give out licenses. And anybody can make a contract. And then if you want a marriage contract you go to a church. And so I’ve often said we could have gotten around all of this also in the sense that I do believe everybody has a right to a contract."

First, best I can tell, Alabama is still issuing marriage licenses (can't be married without one!).  Second:  marriage has always been a contract under civil law.  Marriage licenses just allow  the ordering of that contract, the registration of it, and prevention of bigamy.  It also allows the state to determine paternity, and assign responsibility for children of the marriage, as well as ownership of property from the marriage.  Which is why Alabama Probate Clerks issue marriage licenses; marriage often ends up involving probate.

So if states "get out of the business of issuing marriage licenses," what happens to all that property and family law?  Not to mention health laws and tax laws?

Is this guy really that big a moron?

Unphilosophical Investigations

I've never gotten around to reading Philosophical Investigations (I prefer the more fragmentary works, lectures notes, etc., published posthumously), but this quote is marvelous, if only because I love coffee and I like Wittgenstein:

“Describe the aroma of coffee—why can't it be done? Do we lack the words? and for what are words lacking?—But how do we get the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have you tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded?” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

The Slate article is good, too, although I could do without the back-handed slap at "bloviating deconstructionists."  Then again, analytical philosophers are engaged in a constant feud with Continental philosophers; although I've always thought of Wittgenstein bridging that gap somewhat (which is yet another way of reading him, and yet another controversy about how he should be understood.  Oh, read the article, you'll see what I mean.)

I'm always asking my students to describe a flavor, and then asking them why they can't.  It has something to do with composition and rhetoric, of that I'm sure.....

Blessed are....

My take on this is not that of Charlie Pierce.  To the secular world, this announcement by Pope Francis can seem patronizing and paternalistic, and even the demand for contrition can seem too much.

But this applies only to Catholics, not to all women in the world.  If you want the official blessing of your church, this is what you do.  And it doesn't seem like much to me, considering we are all called, if we are Christians, to be contrite and to humble ourselves before God.

I'm a little perplexed when people think the Pope should not be Catholic, but rather should agree with them and then, if possible, be Catholic; and if not, just don't be Catholic.  It kind of ignores the reason he's the Pope in the first place.

I also think this is a great deal more movement on abortion than I ever would have expected.  Then again, having known women who were getting abortions, I understand this as I think Francis does:  as a pastoral care issue.

The Pope is determined to restore some of the pastoral office to the Holy See.  He can't be the Pastor-in-Chief to the Roman Catholic world, but he is, I think, going in the right direction.  People who seek the blessing of their church in reconciliation need to come with contrite hearts (otherwise what's the point of the blessing?  What good does it do you?).  But they also need to know their church will accept them, that the blessing and the reconciliation is available.

Seems to me that's the heart of the gospel message.

Government: Does Anybody Here Understand How This Thing Works?

Can't wait to see their education policies....

No:

"I'm going to have Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, come work for the government for three months," the Republican presidential candidate said at a town hall event in New Hampshire.

"Just come for three months to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and show these people." Christie said that 40 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country did not cross the U.S. border with Mexico, but instead came into the country legally on visas. "

We let people come into this country with visas and the minute they come in, we lose track of them," he said. He suggested the FedEx model would prevent immigrants from overstaying their visas.

"We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in and then when your time is up—whether it's 3 months or 6 months or 9 months, 12 months, however long your visa is—then we go get you and tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, it's time to go,'" Christie said.

(Because FedEx has custody and control of a package from the moment it is given to them, to the moment it is delivered.  Likewise, the Federal government will take custody and control of immigrants on visas until their visas expire.  The government already does that:  we call them "prisons."  Visas; does anybody understand how they work?)

Apparently:

"And I think this election is largely about the idea -- the idea of America is slipping away in front of us. When it comes to immigration policy, what I’ve experienced and seen is that a smart immigration policy makes our country stronger; a dumb one makes us weaker. We’ve got a dumb one today," Jindal said.

"Yes, we need to secure our border. Stop talking about it," he continued. "I think we need to insist that folks who come here come here legally, learn English, adopt our values, roll up our sleeves and get to work."

(And by borders, do you mean all borders?  Because it seems to me only the East Coast and West Coast are left to propose walls for.  I guess once the walls go up, FedEx will have an easier time telling which of us get to stay.)

Not.

Republican presidential candidate and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said on Sunday that a wall along the border between the United States and Canada is a "legitimate issue" to consider.

(No.  Seriously.  Canadians look just like us!  Well, not like Bobby Jindal, but you know what I mean.  It's the only way to be sure we keep their socialized medicine north of the border.)

Or, they just don't want to.

Rowan County Chief Clerk Kim Davis' lawyers filed an emergency appeal late Friday asking the Court to grant "asylum for her conscience" and allow her to continue to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples, according to The Associated Press.

(Because why shouldn't she be allowed to do her government job in the way she sees fit, and damn the rule of law! Except when the rule of law allows her to do her government job as she sees fit.  After all, it's her constitutional right to draw government pay and refuse to work for it! Is this a free country, or not?  And can the law grant asylum to metaphysical concepts like "conscience"?  Inquiring minds want to know!)

"No matter, never mind."

"Mind" is a metaphysical concept.  So is "consciousness."  Which may be why it is "the hardest unsolved problem in science."  And why "solving" it so resembles the effort to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity:  i.e., it wanders "off into fantasy realms of higher dimensions with little or no empirical connection to our reality."

Which, you will note, violates the fundamental premise of science.  Just like metaphysics does.

Philosophers, especially philosophers of religion, and theologians, have gone to great pains in the last 100 years to jettison "classical" metaphysics.  One effort to replace it was with a non-metaphysical metaphysic based on the work of Alfred North Whitehead after he gave up on mathematics and logical positivism thanks to Kurt Godel and Ludwig Wittgenstein.  That effort spawned "process theology," which never got further than a few American theologians, best I can tell.  We have to discard metaphysics because physics, above all, won't allow it anymore.

But we still have to solve the problem of consciousness, which is related to mind, which "arises" from a brain, so it must be physical, which makes it science-y somehow.

Right?

60 years ago the popular theory was that brain cells reached a critical mass (much like the "trigger" for a nuclear bomb.  We do love our metaphors, especially if they sound scientific!) and "became" conscious.  Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story about it happening with enough telephone exchanges, the connections of the phones standing in for the connections between brain cells.  Essentially the same idea fuels science fiction tales of world-wide defense computers that "wake up" and decide to destroy all human life in order to enact "peace."  It's been a favorite meme for decades.

And it's utter bollocks.  As well as an attempt to escape metaphysics by pretending the solution to consciousness, or mind, or "soul," isn't metaphysical.

A commenter at Religion Dispatches tried to argue that "mind" arose from the brain, but "soul" was some outdated religious notion.  But "soul" is no more understandable apart from the body than mind is apart from brain.  When we speak of "soul" we were always speaking of the animating force of the body, of what is different between a sleeping person and a corpse, why one will eventually awaken and move, and the other will never move again.  Soul as the essence, the inviolable and eternal person we might now call "personality" started in the West not with religion, but with Socrates.  He gave us the dualism of soul and body, leading to the modern critique that soul cannot be known apart from body and so cannot claim a separate existence from the body.  But of course soul cannot be known apart from the body, any more than "mind" can be known apart from the brain.  Whether soul can exist apart from body is a metaphysical question (and not necessarily a religious one).  Whether it can or not, body cannot exist without soul, without some animating process, some "spark", some motive factor.  Because once that factor is lost, the body begins an inexorable decay.

And yet some still think "consciousness" can be "uploaded" into a computer, because computer=brain; somehow.  Or it will; someday; when our technology finally catches up with nature.

Utter bollocks, and not something most serious thinkers take seriously.  But the idea that the computer somehow reflects our brain, our mind, is still a seductive thought; and it's a metaphysical one.  Why is a sleeping person different from a corpse?  We have known since the dawn of humanity that sufficient damage to the body can cause the animating force to fail.  It doesn't have to go anywhere, but where did it come from?  Why can't we reproduce it?  Mary Shelley knew enough to cloud her Frankenstein's efforts in mystery:  he used alchemy and something that was probably magic to give life to his monster.  It wasn't a lightning storm, otherwise the galvanic response of frog's legs would re-animate corpses around the world.  Where does the "spark of life" come from?  How is it only living things can pass it on?  We can grow cells in a laboratory, keep them alive for years in an artificial environment.  But if they are not alive to begin with, there's nothing we can do to re-animate them.  Why not?

The distinction between living and dead is the same as it's ever been:  between something that will move, and something that will never move again.  We've become more aware of the subtleties of that line, of the difference between corpse and coma, but we've done nothing to erase that line, to change it, to understand how to reverse it.  We speak of "life" but we still speak of something that is not entirely physical; known physically, but not understood physically.

The same way we speak of "mind;" the same way we speak of "consciousness."

Metaphysics is dead.  Long live metaphysics.

Let us now praise famous men

Jimmy Carter is, by and large, remembered as a failed President.  We remember him for MEOW; we remember him for "malaise"; we remember him for the failed effort to rescue the hostages in Iran.  We honor him now for what he's done since he was President.

We don't remember him for the Camp David accords which,even through changes in Egypt's government, including a revolution, the election of a President allied with the "Muslim Brotherhood," and the deposition of that president, has still maintained peace between Egypt and Israel.

We all agree peace in the Middle East is a chimerical goal, that it cannot be achieved; and yet one President achieved it, between two countries, and it has held.

And what we remember is the sweaters.  Then again, who is giving Pope Francis credit for the rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba today?

So it goes.