My year nine English class wrote me a joint letter once. It asked me to kill myself in order to improve everyone else’s educational experience (I was disinclined to acquiesce to their request).
It was the culmination of a two-year program of uncontrolled bullying at a supposedly “good” Australian GPS school that included the more usual name-calling, chair-saving (as in “sorry you can’t sit there I’m minding it for someone” who never comes), mockery and outright theft together with a complex campaign of psychological warfare and periodically, piss in my locker. I had to put up with it for a further two years until I dropped out at the end of year eleven.
During this time my “friends” would helpfully sit me down every six months or so and try to explain what I needed to do in order to fit in better. Pretend to be less smart. Join in the cliques. Pass.
There was just one problem – I couldn’t. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
I wasn’t concerned by principles (religious or profane) or some growing teenage awareness of my rights to freedom and liberty, I simply found it constitutionally impossible to be other than myself. Faking it would have been WRONG. I can play perfectly well with others it’s just that most of the time I don’t actually want to and I’ll be quite frank about it.
Was it just that I was so obviously a loner? I wasn’t obviously disabled then or over-performing academically. I would come third or fourth in the swimming carnival but wasn’t good enough for the school team. I wasn’t overweight and we all had to wear the same uniform so it wasn’t my choice of clothes, and it certainly wasn’t my sexuality as I’m a pretty extreme hetero-normative who has never fancied another girl in her life. I was utterly average in every way. I still have no real idea why the hate campaign continued for so long, or why it got to the stage where staff began joining in, but once I’d become the target it was apparently impossible to simply leave me alone.
It felt particularly unfair as the “difference” wasn’t my fault. It was never a choice on my part, just an observable fact. I was probably the last student in that school’s history to be given detention for “dumb insolence” (no I’m NOT that old, I’m apparently just that expressive). In fact the only other area in which I felt something similar is religion. I had a pretty clear view pretty early on about what I believed as well as who I was, though it took me a while to discover that it was actually called “being a Quaker” rather than “having an attitude problem”.
It’s also why I get such a laugh at part of Pilate’s address from the bench in Bring Laws and Gods where he’s talking to counsel after a witness has been excused.
‘The Jerusalem Temple offers services and sets prices. If they set those prices in our currency then there would be no problem at all, but they demand scrip and control the exchange rate. That’s just another way of setting a high price.’
‘Exactly, Procurator.’
‘That’s not the point. If people don’t want to pay that high price, they should worship a god that accepts cheaper offerings. The god-market is competitive. Your client’s attacking the right of merchants to set prices.’
Claudia repressed a strong desire to collapse in a fit of the giggles. She’d suspected her husband would say something like this when the money making exercise otherwise known as the Jerusalem Temple had first been exposed to public scrutiny in the wake of the riot.
‘There aren’t a great number of alternatives in Jerusalem, Procurator.’
‘Are you suggesting that the Temple is a coercive monopoly, Don Linnaeus?’
‘I am, Procurator. Jews are born to their religion, and in this city at least, the law suppresses alternatives. And if they want to make sacrifice, they have to come here.’
As Pilate doesn’t seem to understand, religion isn’t always voluntary. For a start there’s fashionable speculation even by prominent athiests like Richard Dawkins that religious belief may in fact be an evolutionary adaptation. Archaeological evidence certainly shows that Early Man has been burying his dead with prized tools and food for a journey, for anywhere up to the last 350,000 years – which would seem to suggest that they at least accepted the possibility of some kind of life AFTER death. Historic thinkers like Jefferson have been careful to make a clear distinction between what we’d now consider “spirituality” and specific church doctrine. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson describes him as having
… little use for the “sectarian dogmas” which were commonly called “religion,” yet he believed that “the moral precepts, innate in man,” were essential. The latter constituted “true religion.”
Gods and churches may come and go over the eons as mankind’s understanding has evolved, but religion lives on. These days sectarianism can be generated over issues as ephemeral as sporting teams but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that historically, most wars have been over religion and theological differences (with the possible exception of the pagan Far East). Internecine rivalry has been especially bloody in intra-religious schisms, such as Catholic/Protestant Christianity or Shia/Sunni Islam. The Christian Reformation was so bloody that the Anglosphere (particularly US founding fathers like Jefferson) have been determined to separate the institutions of The Church from those of The State ever since, having witnessed the bloody results when one makes a tool of the other.
The argument becomes one of how to balance the conflicting rights of one group over another without the bodycount. My Jurisprude-in-residence (SL) has tried to explain to me that this is simply a matter of Claim Rights vs Liberty Rights…
A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder. In contrast, a liberty right is a right which does not entail obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder. The distinction between these two senses of “rights” originates in American jurist Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s analysis thereof in his seminal work Fundamental Legal Conceptions, As Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays.
Liberty rights and claim rights are the inverse of one another: a person has a liberty right permitting him to do something only if there is no other person who has a claim right forbidding him from doing so; and likewise, if a person has a claim right against someone else, that other person’s liberty is thus limited. This is because the deontic concepts of obligation and permission are De Morgan dual; a person is permitted to do all and only the things he is not obliged to refrain from, and obliged to do all and only the things he is not permitted to refrain from.
In the case of competing religious values, belief itself would be a Liberty Right but your specific theism and related practices might potentially be downgraded to a Claim Right in the interest of public order.
SL and I have disagreed about the negotiation of minority group rights where Islam and Assistance Dogs are concerned for example. Her argument is that it becomes a question of capacity – the Liberty Right to religious belief has to be downgraded to a Claim Right in this instance because the Muslim belief that dogs are “unclean” is trumped by the rights of disabled people to have a life, basically because you can choose your religion whereas “no one has ever said please God, make me disabled”. I have to disagree with her on this. For a start because there are recognised sexual fetishes around disability and amputees (sometimes mistaken for apotemnophilia which is actually a form of Body Integrity Identity Disorder) but mainly because I’m honestly not sure how voluntary religion actually is. For example I have absolutely no idea how it is possible for someone to “convert” to a religion in order to marry the love of their life. If I believed in what Catholics believed then I’d be Catholic (or Jewish, or Muslim etc), not a Quaker. For some of us religion isn’t software that you install as you go along in life, it’s more like an operating system that provides the platform on which you build and install all your IRL apps.
I’ve been thinking about these issues this week whilst financial warfare has raged across the Australian blogosphere over what appears to be a conflict about the opinions of two minorities about each other – those who are Christian and those who are LGBT. Easy argument you might think – you can choose your religion but you can’t choose your sexual orientation therefore Christians should just shut up and cede the Claim Right of religious belief to the trumping Liberty Right of the LGBT community to a peaceful and equal life.
Peace and Equality are two of the four Quaker testimonies – the Religious Society of Friends actually has no creed beyond the universal agreement “That there is that of God in everyone” – so I’m all for a peaceful and equal life. But in fact I believe in equality not because I am a Quaker, rather, I am a Quaker because I believe in equality. That is significant. In 2009 we became the first church to publicly support gay marriage which is unusual given the traditional hostility of the three main monotheisms towards same-sex attraction. Personally I feel extremely offended by Muslim behaviour towards my dog… but I have difficulty denying them the Liberty Right to feel that way even though we disagree. I wish I had a solution.
But I’d like to suggest an experiment to those in the LGBT community who’d like to see Christians like those commenting on the Muehlenberg article over at OnLineOpinion excluded from public discourse entirely. What if people like Muehlenberg don’t believe that homosexuality is a perversion or abomination because that’s what their specific scriptures tell them, but from a deep instinct that same-sex attraction is WRONG? What if that instinct comes from the same well of conscience and conviction that your understanding of your own sexuality comes from? And if it does, or even might, how does this make you any better than those who want to bully you for being “a fag”?
I really despise bullies… because it’s been my experience that when we can’t live with difference, people are inclined to die.
76 Comments
DEM, I too was bullied in school. Yes, it was partly because I was disabled, I think, but it was also because, like you, I couldn’t be anything other than myself, and I am an unusual person. People often told me that I should do things to fit in, but the only way I could fit in was to try not to not speak at all, because as soon as I spoke, the real me came out…
My weird view of the world didn’t come from my religion (I have none) but because I tend to question things. I do it in all innocence, not meaning to upset people – but ultimately I often do. I’ve noticed that my daughter is the same, and I know my Mum is the same too – so I think it’s an inherited characteristic.
I can’t actually adhere to a religion because I can’t stop questioning and I just don’t seem to have a capacity to believe, although my fave religion is probably Judaism because the Talmud is a set of (mostly) guys asking questions about religious laws and ethics. At least they allow questions! And I enjoy the legal aspect. I always have the feeling that the Talmudic Sages wouldn’t have found me so odd.
Still, I’m a bit like Pilate, in a way – I take the bits I like from various traditions, and ignore the rest. If I were gay and religious, I’d make up my own church, snaffling bits I liked from other religions and traditions.
On DEM’s thought experiment: I don’t think it /is/ scripture that “informs” the bigots about morality – they simply pick the bits supporting their bigotry and ignore the more general messages about love and tolerance. They cannot read their own scripture with any competence or the notions of love and tolerance sprinkled through the gospels would not be so ignored.
Now if there’d been a bit of the sermon on the mount saying “blessed are the heterosexual…”, it might be different.
(and besides, any product of virgin birth in a vertebrate is female, so if Jesus dressed as a male, Jesus was a cross-dresser)
WRT sexual orientation, the bigots are denying empirical evidence that (1) it does no harm if no coercion is involved (2) it’s common in the natural world, a
Nd (3) brain scans show sexual orientation is significantly dependent on brain structure.
They should be given the same voice in public affairs as people who think the moon is made of green cheese, and that this allows them to call astronomers evil.
And, by the way, DEM’s “bit of god in all of us” might seem pretty mild, but it’s just the kind of gnostic notion that caused countless deaths at many stages of history.
Dave, its worse than just picking the bits which support their bigotry. It involves going to the next level and assuming a right to impose their bigotry through legislation. Jesus could hardly have been clearer about the separation of church and state (“Render unto Caesar” and all that).
Similarly, he could hardly have been clearer about worrying about your own soul rather than policing others.
There is certainly a neurological basis to a feeling of the noumenal – and irrational belief can afford some group cohesion useful in Darwinian terms.
The thing is that picking the bits of religion you want, whether you are LE, or DEM, or a bigot, is dependent upon cognitive ability to criticize what you are force-fed with, and a desire to seek coherent and benevolent beliefs, or just to justify your own evil nature, or even just to bolster an undeserved sense of superiority in the manner of a flag-wearing bogan.
The bigots choose the bits of scripture, or indeed the religion, they are capable of understanding and that suits their prejudices. Rowan Williams and DEM choose other bits.
I’d hope if people were given free and informed choice of religion, something religious types are usually afraid of, the more tolerant and tolerable religions would crowd the bigots out of the market – but then, so many people love being bigots.
Imagine if the ACCC got into anticompetitive and collusive behaviour in /this/ market! Well, it /is/ a market.
Humans create gods in their own image. Not very flattering most of the time.
I’ve generally supported the notion of publishing the article and I think you’ve proposed an interesting thought experiment.
However, there is a significant difference between these two inherent instincts. As Dave points out, homosexual acts do not generally cause harm to those who engage in them and certainly do not harm third parties. The belief that homosexuality is wrong or an abomination is likely a key factor in many wrongs inflicted upon many homosexual people. There is a need to weigh the potential gains from discussion about these beliefs and engagement with the people who hold them, against the risks of incited violence or other harms posed by their publication.
The common law has for centuries punished incitement of violence. As for “other harms”, that’s where the difficulties start. I think the point that is being made on one side of the debate (that being the one with which I agree) is that once you get into the other “harms”, for the most part you’re talking about claimed rights of classes not to be insulted or denigrated.
As for markets, Dave, I’m sure you’ve seen this before but its apposite to your comments.
Well I must say, DEM, that I think you are very game to be running with this area of discussion again. Your comments are very thoughtful (no surprise there) but I just hope that this particular thread does not degenerate into a waste of time and space as several others here and there seem to have.
That discussion of claim vs liberty rights is most interesting, and I did smile, thinking perhaps SL might gift a copy of her forthcoming book to Mr M. with the phrase “the god market is competitive” circled, and referenced with one of those “stickies” lawyers use for contract documents. Apoplexy is always funny if watched from a safe distance.
The only point I would like to make on this is the continuing disappointment I always feel as I see and read of anyone either attacking, or self-defining, based on a single issue. I am of course interested, but I’d also like to know if you’re an engineer, or a builder, or writer, or actor, plus your thoughts on the GFC, cricket, Egypt, Queensland floods response, etc. People are fascinatingly complex, not one dimensional.
In fact I’d put this particular discussion down at about 42 on the list of interesting things – with a quite deliberate nod to Douglas Adams – because even if you believe you have the one and only answer, you cannot do anything about it, and you have absolutely no right to insist upon it.
And yes – bullying sucks.
I read the other day that the Catholics have decided that confession via iPhone is just not on. SL must have already written “the god market is competitive”.
I mean, how app-t is that?
“The various [pagan] religions of the empire were considered equally true by the common man, equally false by the philosopher, and equally useful by the magistrate” – Gibbon
But bullying – yea as another victim I know it truly sucks. But it really does seem inbuilt – have you ever considered the origin of the term “henpecked”?
Interestingly, I was just reading the Stanford Encyclopaedia entry on the Limits of Law. Apparently Lord Devlin, an English High Court Judge, wrote a response to a government report (the ‘Wolfendon Report’) which recommended the legalisation of homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in privacy. Devlin argued in 1965 that homosexuality gave rise to an intrinsic disgust in a majority of society and thus it ought to be outlawed. As the writer of the entry notes, presumably Devlin would argue the same principles to argue against criminalisation in the present day and age, because the mores have changed. As the author of the entry argues, this makes Devlin’s views logically inconsistent because there is an amalgam of relative and non-relative ideas. The idea of people like Devlin and Muehlenberg goes like this:
1. Activity X is wrong
2. Activity X is wrong in the functional sense i.e. it will threaten the persistence of that society.
3. Therefore Society Z has the right to do what is necessary to preserve its own existence – it may do whatever is necessary to suppress Activity X.
However, the author notes the example of Apartheid in South Africa – similar arguments could be used to maintain a racist society – but very few people would want to argue that there was a moral right to maintain that kind of society. The point is that some societies are so lacking in legitimacy that it may be for the best that they fall apart.
Thus, I believe that arguments stemming from “morality” are problematic, whether that morality be “I feel that homosexuality is natural” or “I feel that homosexuality is unnatural”. Really that’s neither here nor there. As Desipis and Dave say, the essence of the legitimacy of the law in this area is instead Mill’s harm principle – that is, can the law coerce certain people to behave in a particular way when the way of behaviour does no harm to those people? Fundamentally, I don’t much care in morality. I believe that the law should not intervene in private sexual matters unless harmful activities occur and one of the participants does not consent to being a party to those activities. But fundamentally, also, I am like Mill in that I believe that there should be freedom of speech in relation to these matters unless there is harm over and above “mere” offence (eg, incitement to violence, harm to reputation, invasion of privacy etc). Fundamentally, I’m a liberal (in the US sense of the word).
Derrida, the reason I could never accept communism as a way of life was because I saw a show when I was 8 about the way in which various animals had a hierarchy. The one that stuck with me was cows: Middle rank cows are up the front of the herd, high rank cows are in the middle of the herd (safest from predators), and lowest ranking cows are up the back (where stragglers can be more easily picked off by predators). I thought then…if even cows have a hierarchy, how could humans possibly live without one? All we can do is attempt to ameliorate it.
OK, the neurological differences between righties and lefties are now becoming apparent, although it’s more to do with firing patterns than structural differences one can discern statistically between gay and straight brains.
If I had the same attitude as the anti-gay bigots, I’d be wanting all my rightie friends given neurosurgery, calling them abominations, etc, etc. I don’t.
I don’t wrap myself in a copy of The Communist Manifesto and try and stop Smith or Hayek being published, being discussed in class.
Now, I reckon there are acts of greater malice committed in markets than on mattresses, so if my leftie brain can be polite to well-intentioned righties, then the likes of Mullah-berg have no excuse, regardless of how their brains are wired.
It’s also fair to note that the most vocal religious types, the likes of the pentocostals might well be wired that way – they proudly give a symptomatology of visions and voices that would be diagnostic for psychotic episodes but for the politically protected label they use for their hallucinations.
DEM’s question on how brains are wired opens up a can of worms. It’s a good question, with many scary answers.
Dave, there’s righties and there’s righties, just as there are lefties and lefties. (OK, that makes no sense whatsoever, but hopefully the following will make it clearer). On both sides of politics there are people who wish to try and coerce people to behave against what I think is basic human nature, whether it be Muehlenberg arguing that homosexuality is illegal, pro-lifers arguing that abortion should be totally outlawed in any circumstance whatsoever, communists trying to argue that all humans are equal, or whatever. In their heads, they all believe that they have the best motives and that morality is behind them.
I am not that species of person. I do not believe it is legitimate for me to coerce anyone to think in certain ways, unless they harm other people. (There’s a nice question of what harm is, but we’ll leave that aside). By all means, I can argue against them and attempt to persuade them otherwise, but forcing someone to change their point of view by holding them at gunpoint, or putting them in a gulag, or even by withdrawing advertising from the blog which they frequent, doesn’t really change the person’s mind.
I think that in this regard, I am moderate liberal left wing. However, I’ve seen people on both the right and the left who believe that there are those who should be forced not to think in certain ways or to behave in certain ways. I don’t actually like that kind of person very much, regardless of whether they are from the left wing or the right wing. There’s a reason why I would rather blog with a right-wing libertarian rather than a left-wing authoritarian, despite the fact that some of my ideas may well overlap more with the latter. I vastly prefer the former, because like DEM, I have been bullied throughout childhood, and I don’t like being forced to behave or think in certain ways. Okay, SL and I don’t really agree on gun-control, social welfare and a whole raft of things, but she doesn’t try to force me or anyone else to accept her point of view, she just argues the point with me, which goes a long way in my book. When people try to tell me I have to think in a certain way, it really gets my back up. Thus, I try to give other people the same respect even when I do not agree with their point of view (do unto others as you would have them do to you).
Jonathan Haidt has done much research in the area of liberal/conservative, ingroup/outsider, etc. His Moral Foundations Theory posits that there are at least five foundations of morality:
1) Harm/care
2) Fairness/reciprocity
3) Ingroup/loyalty
4) Authority/respect
5) Purity/sanctity
Liberals only lay emphasis on the first two but conservatives on all five.
Bullying is a manifestation of who belong to the in-group and who should be persecuted for being an outsider.
Homosexuality, male homosexuality in particular (with overtones of anal intercourse) is a gross offence against purity/sanctity.
The wsj.com feature on teapartiers is here.
Haidt was recently in the news with an interesting observation of academic discrimination:
Only in certain cultures/religions – this is by no means a universal taboo. Some other cultures and religion focus on entirely different aspects of purity. Have you ever read Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger? That has some very interesting examples of purity taboos in all kinds of different cultures. All cultures have purity taboos, but they vary widely.
As a legal academic, I found that latter research you mention very interesting, and I’d say that my colleagues and I generally conform to that stereotype, or if we don’t, we don’t broadcast it publicly! (I don’t run around shouting my more controversial views from the hilltops, certainly). Students do not conform to the stereotype: and I’d say I get a much broader set of views in class discussion. I try to foster this as much as possible.
LE@13: I know there are righties and righies and lefties and lefties. I was trying to answer DEM’s question, by pointing to a domain with many similarities, even to a neurological correlation and notions of good/evil involved, and a domain that /doesn’t/ attract spambots as much, and where even the most “politically correct” will not infrequently get abusive. (Yes, I’m guilty at times)
Well, I didn’t understand @12, and I didn’t understand @14, and now I don’t understand @16 either. Roll on 18, it is all quite odd.
Why is the conclusion drawn by a social psychologist from a “hands up” at a conference of other social psychologists anything more significant than my thinking it is probably the least harmful use of their time? In a room of 1000 I expect the guys down the back thought they were just ordering the vegan for lunch.
Yes, DB, but LE seems to me to have made two points, neither of which you have really addressed. The first, explicitly, is that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and so if we were to start making a list of people whose contributions were too noxious to be heard, authoritarian lefties would be just as high on it as anyone else. To wit:
Her second more subtle point (since it was in here last sentence and so most people didn’t read it) was to evoke JS Mill’s theory on bad ideas and the value of exposing them to public examination.
My variation on the sauce for the goose part would be to point out the role of religion as a force for good, as demonstrated by Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, to name two bleedingly obvious examples. In fact, most people I know who actually do anything to help the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us are motivated by religious belief.
So perhaps a bit like belief in collectivism, which at least facilitated some of the greatest evils ever known on Earth, religion has some redeeming virtues.
Unlike collectivism, of course, the religious have some real examples to illustrate their virtues, as opposed to collectivists who are reduced to constantly pointing to the same inchoate incipient fantasy state in which collectivism achieves a perpetually ill-defined something.
Haidt’s research is interesting, although his purity/sanctity division is more characteristic of the monotheistic civilisations. The big pagan division (that seems closest to it, at least to me) is self-control/prudence. This paired view is pervasive in Stoicism and forms the basis for Musonius Rufus’s attempts to get married Roman men to be monogamous and (probably) underlies Roman law’s very harsh (progressive to us now) views on rape: it evinced a lack of self-control.
A side thought: while I’m not religious, I reckon a childhood obsession with Lord of the Rings might have given me some religious ideas…by the back door… Tolkien did it more effectively than poor C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books did – while I loved Aslan, my absolute favourites in Narnia were the heathen Calormenes, and that was who I would have wanted to be. After all you got curly toed shoes and sherbert, and really awesome curse words.
Dave: in the New Testament (Luke), scholars historically mistranslated the Greek word for ‘boy lover’ pais as ‘servant’ which means that one of JC’s bigger miracles was to save the life of a Roman Centurion’s boyfriend!
Derrida@9: Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe’s observations about Dominance Heirarchy in chickens (literally, the ‘pecking order’) is a fact of biology, but I’m not sure that means bullying is unavoidable or is the only way of expressing social rivalry. Like violence, it often seems the easy solution to conflict resolution but it’s seldom the only one.
MikeM@14: thanks for that interesting link. I tend to disagree when you suggest that Liberals only emphasis the first two values, while conservative emphasise all five.
Ingroup/loyalty – or in fact its opposite, hostility towards outgroups – may, as DD has pointed out, be biologically unavoidable. It would explain the ‘shy conservative’ phenomenon (which has also been demonstrated in political polling). The Liberal Gospels come from the thinkers and philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment and their decendents, people like Adam Smith, Jefferson, JS Mill and FA Hayek who are given as much Authority/respect as the writers of the New Testament. Purity/sanctity is expressed in the promotion of pacifism and non-violence rather than abstinence.
Nick@6:
While there were those that alluded to anti-vilification legalisation, I don’t think this was primarily an issue about the law. Rather than one about when it is or isn’t appropriate for a third party (the state) to interfere with free speech, it’s about the responsibilities writers and publishes have themselves if they are going to claim they are a positive influence for society. Or perhaps more specifically a framework in which we can judge for ourselves whether the contributions of a writer or publisher are a net positive to society and/or worthy of support and respect. (I’d guess however, that the actions taken were much more to do with money than philosophy).
kvd:
I think I see your mistake. They’re not odd, they’re even.
Patrick, my opinion is that the only people “too noxious to be heard” are those advocating violence or attempting to co-opt the law as a tool to force their views on others.
The Romans had a huge multicultural empire and managed this in two basic ways. First, they had a very strong public/private distinction. Standards of public behaviour were quite high and reinforced by a complex class system and state religion (you didn’t have to believe, but you were expected to go through the motions and complete the right rituals) but once you were at home, it was full-on “get off my lawn” castle doctrine. It might actually be useful for modern society to try a return to this (at the moment in Britain you can get sued if a burglar injures himself while breaking into your property). It would mean absolute separation of church and state, plus an acceptance that religious belief (like sexual practice since the decriminalisation of homosexuality) becomes part of the private sphere. In Britain many of those fighting the disestablishment of the Church of England would argue that it fulfills the same ‘symbolic’ function as Roman State religion, but like the bishops who have seats in the House of Lords, other denominations can rightly ask if history is sufficient reason for the Anglicans alone to get this perk. The French manage a wholely secular system with rigid distinction between church and state, even controlling personal expression in public areas by banning the niquab and removing headscarves/skullcaps or other religious indicators in schools.
Secondly, they had a philosophical structure that seperated the public/shared part of the world into three distinct spheres: culture, law and nature. Monotheisms are particularly bad for claiming that their cultural traditions are in fact natural law and should be the basis of human laws, but are often easily disproved by basic observation of the natural world (homosexuality exists in the animal kingdom, for example).
It may be that for the modern world to achieve the same kind of stable, multicultural, multireligious world as the Romans we need to embrace French-style public secularism and banish religious AND sexual practice to the private sphere (sorry, no more Mardi Gras).
I’m of the ‘free speech extends to the limit of the law’ school. Maintaining the fiction of “freedom from offense” just isn’t sustainable when you have to juggle so many competing interests and beliefs.
Patrick@18: Ummm…. Goose/gander bit, yes, obviously. You used the template of my disdain exactly as someone on the right should use it.
I’ll repeat the bit of DEM’s post I was reacting to:
It’s a great question – religion, sexual orientation, and recently political orientation, all create heated and largely unresolved arguments, and all have as possible part cause in neurological differences associated with deep sincere feelings.
If people like Muehlenberg were as DEM raised in her hypothetical, driven by a sincere, perhaps hardwired, conviction from within, it’s no different from sincere convictions, probably hardwired, on political matters. Patrick and I obviously disagree totally on those matters, we are probably hardwired for this to some extent, but we aren’t’ as far as I can tell, descending to the toxicity of some of the comments on the OLO article.
I can’t see why, in closely mapping domains, person-to-person on a blog, and especially on an up-market forum like OLO, those making toxic comments should not be able to be at least as civil as Patrick is. After all, the anti-gay lobby is largely religious and holier-than-thou, and therefore should easily, inspired by their sky fairy, be *more* loving and tolerant than the subset of regulars here that are totally godless.
This whole Online Opinion affair is increasingly bizarre and distasteful.
Fair enough that Muehlenberg may not be the caricature monster many expect.
But any claims making sex between consenting human adults seem immoral are as close to a factual error as you can get with moral arguments. There is no rational way you can link consensual sex with harm to others, without invoking an external factor (cheating, disease,etc.) I don’t see why this delusion should be fueled anymore than those of creationists or anti-vaccine loons, many of whom also believe deep down they are doing the right thing.
Also, I have my own flimsy hypothesis about why the reactions of LGBTIQZZLOLWTF advocates come across as so distasteful in this affair. Given the unfortunate habit of those groups harboring people with strong collectivist views or ‘for the common good’ attitudes and the apparent paradox: homosexuality is clearly not immoral, yet it is also clearly an act of self-interest ahead of common-need (reproduction,) which should make it wrong (and you can only stretch the “true love crosses all boundaries” line so far.)
Lacking a rational basis for their opinions and thus an inability to defend their position against critics. The only options are to shout louder and shut the critic up.
Don’t you have to pick your morals before you decide what is immoral? Saying something is clearly not immoral is no more rational than saying it is. You can’t rationally arrive at an opinion on this stuff without picking a “grundnorm” first. You have to make an arbitrary – perhaps irrational – choice about what you believe.
Most people have a pretty good idea if something instinctively feels ‘wrong’ or ‘unfair’, even if we then have to deliberately and carefully work out why that’s the case.
There is always something odd about Catholics/Orthodox claiming that the sterility of homosexuality is a problem. Unlike the sterility of celibate priests, monks and nuns.
Muehlenberg is a Protestant, of course. The real issue is that sex is wrong, unless procreative. That is the base monotheist position, hence the problem with homosexuality (which few non-monotheist societies ever worried about).
Movius’s hypothesis (@25) seems pretty flimsy to me.
How pressing is the need for reproduction? In the foreseeable future there does not appear to be any shortage of people.
How do homosexuals prevent others from reproducing?
Do homosexuals have a duty to reproduce? If so, it has been historically pretty easy for most men to impregnate a woman even if they go elsewhere for sexual and affective fulfilment. Would that be a good (or do I mean “not-wrong”) and unselfish thing?
What about straight people who don’t or won’t or can’t have children – are they selfish too?
What about [THOSE INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE MORE INTO D.I.Y. - SOONED BY ADMIN DEM]? (Sorry, couldn’t resist that one. This will probably close the thread down again.)
What is “this affair” and can we be sure (1) what the reactions of “LGBTIQZZLOLWTF advocates” [WTF?] are/were and (2) whether they are really so “distasteful”? I thought this affair was about using the [now renamed] trade practices act to force ANZ and IBM to continue to pay money to a group of internet publishers simply because it was the publishers’ business and somebody influenced ANZ and IBM to stop making payments which ANZ and IBM had previously made, or else to extract compensation from ANZ and IBM in the publishers’ favour and possibly impose criminal penalties on ANZ and IBM as well.
Have I missed some invisible inverted commas around Movius’s hypothesis? LE@15 seems to have graciously if retrospectively put a few round MikeM’s@14, so perhaps I’m just starting at shadows here.
Anyway, back to DEM’s thought experiment. I think it’s misconceived. People who think same-sex attraction is WRONG can just refrain from being same-sex attracted themselves, or if they are conflicted, they can wallow in their own sense of sin. When we get to the point where the matching insult to “fag” really is “homophobe” and it will cause young homophobes to kill themselves in despair, fear and self-loathing, then we can revisit the point.
I agree with Marcellous’ last par, and don’t really have much more to add, except an observation that I’ve made off-blog to Lorenzo: people from the monotheisms thought that they’d won all these arguments (everything from married women’s property rights to contraception to abortion to homosexuality yadda yadda) when they had them with pagans (and believe me, they had them, in vituperative detail).
Then, relatively recently, modern states have sided with the monotheists’ historical interlocutors. That is an enormously powerful rejection and affront, especially as it’s all happened in parallel with the growth in wealth and technology we’ve experienced with industrialization. No-one likes relevance deprivation on that scale, so the toxicity is unsurprising.
Movius@25:
I think you’re mistaken about the political affiliations of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender community (I’m choosing to use LGBT rather than ‘gays’ or ‘same-sex attracted’ as the issues are often a lot more complicated than that, plus it’s readily recogniseable and not offensive). Like disability, homosexuality occurs randomly throughout the population so you’ll find there are plenty of right wingers amongst the left. The gay-rights movement may seem more left because it has adopted the political ‘liberation theology’ and structures that were pioneered by leftwing interests in order to make their organisational task easier.
I do agree with you though, that where there’s no harm there is no public interest so the issue of sexual preference should assigned to the ‘private’ sphere. Vile Nile may want to block the route of the Sydney Mardi Gras, but by the same logic he should be prevented from preaching with a loudhailer in public.
“Bigot” is your best bet for now, I think Marcellous. People who want to impose their religious beliefs onto people who don’t share them, can best be described as Bigots.
FWIW, “Apotemnophilia” is NOT a sexual fetish. It is an identity disorder. The condition’s proper name is “Body Integrity Identity Disorder” (BIID). People who have BIID don’t need to have a disability because of some sexual kink. And we didn’t ask to feel the way we do either…
Marcellous @ 29: I had the same initial reaction, but I think that MikeM was repeating Haidt’s thesis of why conservatives like Muehlenberg dislike homosexuality, rather than stating a personal view.
The thing which concerns me about homophobia in society is not some stupid random blog comment on OLO, which a teenage person of confused sexuality is unlikely to be reading. It’s more the homophobia I see in young teenage men in particular. I think it’s less prominent in women, although maybe that reflects the women I hung around with in my youth.
When I used to play World of Warcraft, the young teenage male players were constantly “insulting” each other by saying “You fag, you take it up the a***, you’re a homo, you’re gay etc etc” This really shocked me. I could only imagine what it would be like if you were a young man who was confused about his sexuality, having to grow up in that kind of environment. I read in a lot of homophobia a fear of homosexuality because those who taunt are afraid that they may have a touch of same sex attraction themselves. They don’t want to see a gay person in case, zounds, they are attracted to him. They are also worried as to how to respond if some guy makes an unwanted advance on them (welcome to the world of being a woman, learn some lessons from us).
But to change attitudes is complicated, and will take time. If you think how much attitudes have changed since the time of my grandparents, we really have made an amazing shift. No judge would be able to write an opinion like Lord Devlin’s 1965 opinion these days. We’re getting there, but there are always going to be bigots in every group.
LE@33 excellent comment – agree completely. I apologise if I sounded grumpy last night. It’s just that I sometimes get so tired with every topic of discussion being posited in terms of “left” and “right” political beliefs. I do realise this is sometimes just shorthand for underlying social attitudes, but those two terms themselves carry so much baggage that it is tiresome to cut through to what is really being said by the good men and women here of all persuasions.
I said my hypothesis was flimsy.
Forgive the bad joke about the ever growing nature of that acronym, I work in a workplace that officially defines “LGBTI” as the only acceptable version, despite nobody actually using it. This is one of many well-intentioned but so out of touch as to be almost offensive policies relating to same-sex relationships. This is a source of humour to me.
Entering into a relationship with someone is inherently an act of self-interest for you and your partner. This should not be difficult to accept, nor is it a bad thing. If you enter into a relationship for any reason other than your own feelings for the other person, than you are bound for trouble (see arranged marriages or similar for examples of this.)
And I wasn’t commenting at all about the political affiliations of anyone other than a small subset of activists, and more specifically their rhetoric. I know from experience that sexuality is no predictor for political affiliation and vice versa.
Lastly, I have no issue whatsoever with someone complaining to an advertiser about content they sponsor. Whats ‘bizarre and distasteful’ (poor choice of words) is that the individual(s?) involved don’t seem to have anticipated the reaction or that they would be harming those promoting opinions opposite to Muehlenberg’s
Precisely. As I said in a previous thread here:
The law of unintended consequences has bite.
DEM @ 21
Nah, it’s expressed through veganism and turning your lights off for an hour once per year.
Or putting unleaded fuel in your 4×4. =8-)
Sean @32: please accept my apologies for the error, I’ve now corrected the text to make your point about BIID clearer.
O, DEM, you are a tease. I think I should explain your editorial touch to:
For anyone (probably nobody reading this thread) it was a homage to:
JC@37
On the bigotry point, there is the wonderful argument that “stopping us discriminating is an attack on religious freedom”. Here is George et al on why same-sex marriage is bad on those grounds:
To which the answer is yes. Just as providing equal protection of the law for Jews meant classing those who opposed it as bigots, and equal protection of the law for blacks meant classing those who opposed it as bigots.
When bigots are winning the argument, they are “social normality”. When they lose it, they become accepted as being bigots. Which is why the authors’ are not about to argue for the extremely traditional Catholic/Orthodox position that Jews should be denied equal protection of the law.
Bigots always claim to be defending moral decency. Bigotry is always and everywhere a moral claim: a claim about who is in, and who is out, of the moral community; who is up and who is down within the moral community. The authors’ wish to retain the right to claim that queers are metaphysically deformed and so not proper manifestations of the human, so not entitled to equal protection of the laws. Their religious freedom to do so being much more important than any claims queers might make – them being queers, and all.
I was thinking about the “natural/unnatural” argument about homosexuality this morning on the way to work. It seems to me to be a rubbish point. Unless you’re crapping yourself and living off berries and eating the raw squirrels you’ve choked, you’ve departed from what nature gave you to work with. It’s pretty hypocritical to pick one part of someone’s life and say, that’s wrong because it’s unnatural. Meeting that argument by saying “Hey, my male schnauzer humps male dogs, so it can’t be unnatural” is really to grant the premise of a stupid argument.
SL@19 Purity/sanctity works fine in many polytheist and animist societies too. One of the feed-ins to Haidt’s original analysis was a study of moral attitudes in part of India (pdf). The whole notion of untouchability is all about purity and sanctity. See, for example, the Burakumin of Japan.
On the natural/unnatural thing – I wonder if the bigots grant dispensation/sympathy for those males who got hit with unsubtle doses in utero of exogenous oestrogens (such as DES) possibly associated with increased incidence of gender dysphoria and bi/homo-sexuality. (Jury still out on that, but DES is certainly in the frame).
Of course, the DES was only used to stymie Providence that threatened abortions!
Nice little bind for the fundie bigots with that particular case! All in the plan? God threatening abortions once DES invented so there’d be more live births with gender/sexual identity issues?
If the bigots think homosexuality in males is so horrendous, they’d be more effective campaigning to control environmental oestrogens and androgen disruptors. But but but… that’d mean…. cosying up to Bob Brown. Tee hee.
… Unless, of course, it’s the bigotry itself that’s the attraction… and people can have /that/ in firmware, I’m sure.
And anyway, homosexuality might be associated with group selective advantage (perhaps the kids in clans with more non-reproductive adults get more attention – like the grandmother hypothesis). Ooooh – “Think of the children” could be an argument for /encouraging/ gays! Tee hee even more.
Dave, one thing that’s always interested me is the question of whether homosexuality is hardwired or a matter of mere inclination (albeit perhaps informed by background and upbringing). I’m aware that there is some evidence that it is a physiological thing in males (or at least some of them). As you indicate, it’s a bit hard to cry unnatural if they were born that way.
Also, when you say “nice little bind for the fundie bigots”, I think you’re making some favourable, but unjustified assumptions about them.
NF@44
Oh ye of little philosophical sophistication. ‘Natural’ does not mean in nature, it means following one’s proper nature. The Catholic Church is happy to accept that homosexuality is either congenital or a result of early childhood factors. That just means one is ‘objectively disordered‘: that is to say, metaphysically deformed.
Well, I didn’t know that, and I suspect that’s not what most of those participating in the debate mean. Otherwise, people wouldn’t combat the “unnatural” argument with the observation that animals have been known to putt from the rough. I don’t think the Catholic Church contends that animals have proper natures, does it?
I take it that on the basis of that philosophy, the sin is in the failure to resist your disorder? If that’s the case, then the assertion that you are unnatural doesn’t take the argument any further does it? Heterosexuals are sinful in failing to resist their urges to premarital sex and sex for purposes other than procreation. Is a predisposition towards illicit sex unnatural in the sense you suggest?
Well I guess it would be interesting to know who actually gets to decide that. Absent an overriding casting vote from the Almighty, I supppose it means by majority opinion arrived at by God’s various PR agencies here on Earth. Probably just a majority verdict.
But majorities can be moved, and I remember something SL said elsewhere – something about “if you want freedom, then fight in freedom’s way”. Dunno if the quote is accurate. Or if this helps.
?? I think it is fairly clear that the Pope his God’s emissary on earth. I thought that was about the one bit of Catholic doctrine which was fairly broadly understood.
Patrick I took that as a philosophical statement or premise rather than as a comment specific to the Catholic doctrine. I will accept correction of course.
kvd@42 “who gets to decide that”
Lorenzo@45′s link makes it pretty clear, it’s the
Spanish InquisitionCDF that decide, and any disagreement with them on the basis of scripture is wrong, because only the Vatican can read it properly, so there! (DEM – so your quibble on translation of centurion’s servant or boyfriend is wrong because you can’t read lacunae and flyspots like they can! How arrogant of you!)(Love to get Luther on dot points 5 and 6).
I note that they quote the Pentateuch and Paul – never the gospels. They’d have used the gospels if there was any support for their position to be found there. This is one case where absence of evidence offered is evidence of absence.
It’s an amazing document of circular logic – resting on “we are authoritative because we say so”. Yes… the document assets that the Vatican is equal to, if not more definitive, than scripture.
Seriously Lorenzo, you’d better hope Pell never rises from
Spanish InquisitionCDF member to Pope, or the same politicians who had Mary McKillop mania will go even more lickspittle and pass a few laws for him.Love to see a lapsed ex-Jesuit deconstruct that document… Or Father Bob (off the record).
These guys are worse than fundy bigots – smart enough to know their argument are circular and based on “non-core” scripture.
As for “intrinsic moral evil”…. Ouch!… That’s pretty much, in Vatican-speak, the worst label that can be put – but I wonder if it would get sin-binned as a comment on an LP thread as contravening policy… Awkward…
Oh DEM, I hope you read “how arrogant” in my last comment as tongue-in-cheek. I loved your translation quibble and will be digging around it.
No probs, Dave.
KVD @47: SL tells me that “Fighting freedom’s cause in freedom’s way” was a WW1 Australian slogan used by those fighting for a ‘no’ vote on the conscription referendum. Logic being that if you are fighting a war for “freedom” it needed to be with an equally free volunteer army otherwise you poison the entire enterprise at source, morally.
Patrick@48 : Yes… For some hilarity from papal arrogation see the film Dogma (gotta love the casting for god)
btw: Just thinking… Adam did the deed with Eve, made from his own rib… making Eve genetically XY but surgically altered…
Placing an emphasis on the OT and Paul’s recapitulations can be sooo awkward.
Thinking more about Lorenzo’s definition of “natural” in 45 above, I’m still interested in a basis of that definition. I didn’t realise that homosexuality in this discussion was restricted only to the views of the RC – or even to RC, Protestant, Jewish and Islamic faiths – which is what I meant to encompass in saying “God’s various PR agencies”. But Patrick and Dave seemed to do so in following comments, which is fine – if that was where Lorenzo intended to lead them.
So, was Lorenzo was giving a wider philosophical context? That aside I think Nick@46 was perfectly correct in his understanding of the word “nature” as used in preceding commentary.
DEM – thanks for correction re SL quote. The meaning you gave to the phrase was as I understood it, and I agree with it.
DB@50 If you think Pell is more conservative and rigid than the current Pontiff, you are sadly mistaken. Benedict is, apart from anything else, something of a Platonist: never a good start.
Also, the CDF is the descendant of the Roman Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition was an instrument of the Spanish Crown and much more oppressive.
On the broader issue of natural law thought, Catholic/Orthodox theology is based on a marriage of Scriptural Revelation with natural law theory. It is based on St Paul using ‘para physin’ (against nature) in his Epistles. This is not remotely Judaic concept.
Based on the metaphors and language St Paul uses, he is almost certainly channelling Philo of Alexandria, who married Hellenic natural law theory to Judaic scriptural revelation. Philo was extremely influential on various Church fathers (there was even a, completely spurious, legend he converted to Christianity), notably St John Chrysostom.
If you want to see natural law theology ranting against homosexuality, read no further than St John’s Homily on Romans 1, 26-27. (Compare it to Philo: scroll down to section XXVI.)
As to the question of how we discover something’s proper nature, by direct apprehension of reality and the natural law written on our hearts is the answer. For a modern, sophisticated philosophical statement of the relevant metaphysics, David Oderberg’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Law (pdf) is the go.
The question of “how do we know?” is an excellent one. The notion that natural law identifies the norms built into the structure of the universe I regard as patent nonsense, flatly contradicted by the history of natural law theory itself. Natural law definitions of ‘proper’ nature operate on the basis of norms they themselves project into the phenomena by where they draw their boundaries.
Modern natural law theory also comes in more ‘agent-centred’ forms such as John Finnis and Robert George. (Finnis and Oderberg are both Australians.) The application of natural law theory to the marriage debate can be seen in George et al‘s What is Marriage?. You will be startled to learn that polygamous marriage is not, actually marriage. Despite what the Bible says.
kvd,
I’m guessing the use of the word ‘natural’ is about evaluating something based on how it meets the functional role it is seen to have within nature. The functional role of sex is seen to be continual propagation of the species. The functional role of sexuality is thus to coerce individuals into engaging in sex, which in turn propagates the species. Therefore sex and sexuality which do not have the purpose of propagation (such as homosexuality) fail to fulfill their functional role and thus could be labeled ‘unnatural’.
Of course making such an assessment involves a superficial interpretation of the purpose of sex and sexuality, ignoring much of the social and psychological functions.
Hello desipis; my thought was Lorenzo was being ironic. With the insight he continues to demonstrate here, I don’t think he would ever so easily cede authority to the Roman Catholic Church via that
Papal bullstatement; and it’s far more a social justice issue than a religious one – as you say.But that’s just my opinion and as I said before, I’m happy to be corrected
DB@50 The Catholic/Orthodox position is that the Church — understood as the body of believers — creates Scripture. This is why tradition is authoritative. Yes, it makes priests really important. But the Catholic Church’s key decision principle has always been what best maintains/protects/extends the authority of priests.
On your point about the Gospels being unhelpful: indeed, for they are the Church of Caiaphias more than the Church of Christ. They want to use God to strip people of moral protections, making them therefore the ‘gatekeepers of righteousness’, when Christ preached precisely the opposite — you are not allowed to use God to strip people of moral protections.
lvd@45 I am explaining the natural law position which, in the Christian tradition, is the Catholic/Orthodox position. But that is where the concept of homosexuality being “unnatural” comes from. So it matters not at all the animals do it. They are acting against the proper function of sex – fulfilling the procreative form. (It was originally fulfilling the procreative function [Aquinas], but that barred infertile couples: prior to that it was procreative intent [Clement] but was also deemed too restrictive — hence my point about the natural law tradition itself failing to demonstrate the ‘direct apprehension’ and ‘definitive moral conclusions’ it purports to.)
D@56
Correct, with the above caveats.
Yes. Lurking behind it all is a “created definitively” notion which is wildly at odds with how biology actually works.
kvd@57 Yes, I am merely explaining. I regard it as profoundly pernicious nonsense with an ugly track record of unilaterally stripping categories of people of moral and legal protections according to the going obsessions. So, in the case of the Catholic/Orthodox tradition, queers, Jews and other religious dissenters and intellectual dissenters (sex, religion and thought).
Aristotle, for example, used it to justify slavery — there were, allegedly, ‘natural slaves’. It has also been used to justify women not having short hair (St Paul) and not working in the fields (Gerald of Aurillac) and not lending at interest (since the function of money is exchange and it is unnatural for coins to self-propagate). Since the conclusion gets to choose the ambit of its premises (remember all those same-sex acts in nature not counting) it can justify anything which one can seize on an appropriate aspect of nature to support: since all the contradicting cases simply become “improper”. Very useful if one wants a technique to support religious doctrine, useless as a serious mode of analysis.
I would also point out that Philo of Alexandria is primarily responsible for the notion that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was about same-sex activity. Not rape, abuse of hospitality, idolatry, hating the people of Israel or the other sins the Old Testament actually ascribes to them. As a reading of Genesis 19, it’s a nonsense. But it fitted in with the Levitical anathematisations and natural law theory’s “the sole legitimate function of sex is procreation” analysis. It also embedded the notion of purifying extermination into Judaeo-Christian thought: that the unilateral stripping of moral protections from a category of persons extends to killing them. An idea which continued to have a life of its own.
Thank you Lorenzo. That simply confirms my respect.
And I want to record that I think it entirely unfair that L@55 pops into place well over two hours after desipis’ comment, and my own reply thereto. Or something
Sorry kvd, the spaminator finds all of you tasty from time to time.
I take it as read anything that has two or more links in it will go into moderation.
Heh, it’s called me not being on top of the blog while I was picking up the kids from school/creche – sorry about that!
Oh and spam has gone CRAZY right now – hundreds and hundreds of the things…
Yes, there seems to be a definite uptick in spamming.
L@55 – my Pell comment was because of how many oz politicians would swoon at the notion of an Oz pope, and forget Zappa’s observation that there’s a big difference between kneeling down and bending over. Conroy would probably put the vatican in charge of the netfilter.
Wow, I just emptied 721 spam e-mails from the spaminator. I’m afraid that I didn’t read through them all. If anyone is missing a comment, please repost and warn me.
And I’ve just removed 892. This is getting really excessive.
Just a guess, but with the amount of cross-linked traffic generated over the OLO thing in the past ten days, I’m guessing you make a more interesting target.
Or SL’s moving a lot of cash out of Nigeria
Maybe get Jacques to institute a shell script which a) disables comments and b) disables the comment form processing script from AEST midnight to 6 p.m. (London 1 p.m to 7 a.m?)
Commenters would get used to it, with goodwill – some of us might be saved from shooting from the lip – and it would give you guys more time to concentrate on the production of content rather than “gardening”.
A script like that is probably four lines of code, which just sits there doing its thing in the background. Write once, and forget till next OS upgrade. (Dave would tell you I’m sure) I used that sort of stuff quite a lot in a prior life.
You could even sell it as a responsible move – keeping “the workers” noses to the corporate grindstone. And that’s another 2c I’ve spent.
DB@67 Quite. It occurs to me that Pell would be competitive: conservative white from outside Europe. Still, it is hard to see the College of Cardinals continuing to ignore Latin America, Africa and Asia. That is where the Catholic Church has most of its believers and, leaving aside Latin America, where it is expanding.
Sorry guys, I’ll email Jacques and see if he can beat the (virtual) hamsters back into submission…
kvd;
It wouldn’t really be possible to isolate the script to a single blog.
There are three contributing reasons to the increase in spam, over and above the “supply side”:
Club Troppo has it worst. In a 15 minute period last week when Akismet stopped working, 110 spam comments were placed in moderation.
From what I could make out, almost all the spam was aimed at a single entry, on which I’ve disabled comments. That should cut back on it for a bit.
One Trackback
[...] ‘Daring’ to be Different DeusExMacintosh, Skepticlawyer [...]