The Radical Secularist

The BBC reports this week that Indonesian Clerics are calling for a ban on morally perilous hairdos.

BBC story

This story seems to be a continuation of the rather strange debate around the morality and politics of the uses of fashion which had as one of its most visible stages the French state, which promoted a debate on French Identity in the aftermath of the ban on headscarfs–among other expressions of religious identity–and their respective political implications.
The indonesian case, offers a way to gauge the scope and reach of the French decision, which had been often ridiculed by both the left and the right on this side of the Atlantic. A substantive difference becomes apparent in looking at the two attempts to proscribe these two different forms of presenting the female body–the female head to be precise. At first blush, both of these demands seem to be of the very same type but, in fact there is an important difference which seems to come down to this: the Indonesian clerical demand is to thwart expression of sexual identity–as they see it–whereas the French legislation attempts to preempt the suppression or rather repression of expressions of sexual identity. So the French are precisely trying to foreclose the political force of clerical orders and demands, which though–as in the Indonesian case–are not legally binding, are, nonetheless, politically forceful. That is to say, by the mere force of the moral authority of the cleric–defined by his religious standing–these fatwas are politically binding. This kind of de facto power, forces one to wonder if a woman who covers herself or changes her hairdo for religious reasons could be said to be taking the cover freely. Unless one thinks that acting under threat of eternal damnation, communal shunning or public stoning is acting freely one would have to say that in fact, it is not.
Now, arguably any one individual woman could choose to cover her face and this one act may be understood in several different registers of identity. One of them, certainly being the assertion of her religious identity. However, the problem is that the headscarf still belongs to a history of the determination of the status of women as objects of possession and the source of moral degeneration. This is certainly by no means a monopoly of Islam, Judaism and Christianity have partaken of this, as when Christianity demands the covering of the female body in the guise of modesty of Jewish orthodox continues to cover the head of women or endorses the shaving of their hair or segregates them in all communal space). The question then becomes if the state has the right to intervene when the de facto statement that head gear makes in public is that women are morally dangerous and that their image is the property of a man for which it is guarded under veils? The answer is: of course. As it turns out, the mere public acceptance of the veiling of the female body by some or other part of society translates into making the veiling of any female body acceptable political practice. For the state to agree to these terms is, de facto, to declare all its female population the type of subjects that can be admissibly treated as property. But much more problematically, this acceptance amounts the state’s tacit assertion of of the moral inferiority of women and of their perilous presence in society as sources of moral danger.

-MJG

ABC News reports on the engraving of biblical references on weapons used by the American military.
ABC News Story

As CNN reports, the ACLU has initiated legal actions against the Patent and Trademark Office, Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation to cancel the grant of a patent for a pair of genes, which appear to be responsible for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.

Holding the patent means that the holder are entitled to limit research and charge for diagnostic tests performed on these genes.

The full article can be found at http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/12/us.genes.lawsuit/index.html

Amidst the controversy over President Obama’s decision to declassify Justice Department memos pertaining to CIA interrogative tactics, MSNBC  ’Countdown’ host, Keith Olberman criticized the president for excusing the actions of those involved in the alleged torture of al Qaeda suspects, on the ground that they were made to believe that their actions were consistent with the law.  Video. Although I’m not one to bestow praises upon journalists whose only claim to political pundicy is a stellar career in sports journalism, Olberman, dare I say, is right.  Not only is he right but he presents an articulate and fairly well-reasoned justification for why the President should reconsider his previously stated decision not to further investigate and, where evidence of wrongdoing, prosecute those responsible for the licensing, encouraging, and enacting of torture.  Olbermann rightly contends that we not only have moral reasons for doing so, but also prudential one’s.  If we limit ourselves to the moral condemnation of those responsible for the licensing and/or enacting of torture, we are liable to send the wrong message: it may be morally wrong, but it is for all intents and purposes permissable.  Unfortunately, neither the pangs of conscience nor the threat of moral shame inspires fear sufficient to deter people from moral wrongdoing.  This is a major reason why we have laws.  Failing to punish not just the moral but the legal wrongdoings of those responsible for torture, as Oblermann rightly implies, will send the wrong message, by making a mockery of the law.  If the President is as committed as he oft says he is to doing not only the morally right thing (putting a stop to torture) but also the prudential thing (helping to prevent the repetition of past wrongs), he must have  investigated and, where demanded, prosecuted suspected wrongdoing.

JPM

In an interview with Fox News (Sunday, April 19 2009), Former CIA director Michael Hayden criticized President Obama’s decision to release selected Bush-era memos concerning CIA interrogation tactics.  Click Here For Video. “What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That’s very valuable information,” stated Hayden. What Mr. Hayden conveniently failed to mention is that the U.S. “described” these limits the moment it signed onto the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions.  Whether specific interrogative practices encouraged by the top brass of the Bush administration and practiced by CIA agents are in and of themselves acts of torture is perhaps open to debate.  What isn’t open for debate is whether subjecting a person to waterboarding 183 times constitutes their being tortured.  Choosing to call it and who knows how many similar actions “enhanced interrogation” is purely semantic:  ’Torture’ by any other name is still torture.  Moreover, engaging in a semantic debate over whether the interrogative practices, which by the former administration’s own lights are at the “outer limits” of law are sufficiently enhansive to constitute torture is to be complicit in if not their overt endorsement then certainly in their being enacted.  Indeed, engaging in a debate–as must have occurred among White House advisors–about what practices can be brought to the threshold of torture–which is what we are to hear in a phrase like “the outer limits” of law–without crossing it, seems more diabolical than naively believing that torture is permissible under certain circumstances. 

In his and the Bush administration’s defense of torture,  former General Hayden also rhetorically stated,  ”The honorable position has to be: Even though these techniques worked, I don’t want you to do that. That takes courage.” What’s especially remarkable about this ‘defense’ is not that it is contrary to studies that have been conducted on the effectiveness of torture and other forms of coercive interrogation methods, nor that it is indicative of the deaf ear the Bush administration repeatedly turned to the voices of Americans who vociferously opposed the use of torture on any grounds. Rather, it is the implicit suggestion that torture is something that should be put to a referendum.  However called, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA and encouraged by the Bush administration are not just the outer limits of law!  They are the violation of law: Moral, International, and yes, US law!  The reason why there are national and international laws against torture is not only to forestall the need for a referendum on whether or not specific practices constitute torture whenever some doubt should happen to arise, but also to dissuade individuals and governments from licensing torture under the excuse of extraordinary circumstances.  Hayden is right: it often takes courage to do the morally right thing; unfortunately the moral cowards here were not by and large the American people, but Hayden and his superiors.  Torture is immoral, and it’s also against the law.

JPM

So Mr. Santorum is back and here we have his opinion piece from the Philadellphia Inquirer finally shedding a light on America’s true enemmy: the president and presumably all those who elected him.

Washington Diary: Cryng on Cable by Matt Frei was published today on the BBC website on the current state of American Journalism and the bad habit of confesional public speech and crying in public.

The Obama administration has repealed a federal rule instituted by the Bush administration permiting medical professionals to refuse procedures to patients on the grounds of their moral (read religious) commitments. As CNN reports, Christian physicians are protesting the measure.

So this gentleman, who has no clear credentials or authority, has for some reason decided to honor us by soiling the pages of the NYT with what can only be called absolute garbage. David Brooks, who probably wanted to be an academic but was too lazy to read went instead into journalism where he only had to talk. After all that is what by the dim lights of his, Socrates was engaged in doing. Today this generous soul, decided to give us his take on philosophy and its future.

Brooks’ approach to basic questions in metaethics is simply ominous. Why? Because it amounts to a disingenuously reductive presentation of a problem as a solution, which people like himself and his readers can find to be “nice”, as he say. In this guise, we end up condoning third rate populism which uses, in this case, Humean sentimentalism and its aftermath to support low grade forms of political discourse. There is a serious metaethical question and intuitionism or sentimentalism are questions within that debate, not “nice” answers.

The two most interesting features of this piece? 1) What a great example of begging the question it is. 2. Journalists should be asked to produce credentials to write about the topics they decide to write about. Anything less than that, is just an act of betrayal of the public trusts and intellectual dishonesty.

In reference to this completely idiotic approach to ethics, I would very much like to ask Mr. Brooks if he is willing to say that the proscription of genocide is just a matter of taste. And on what grounds is that we will condemn the inclination of people who happen to quite enjoy genocide if we decide to do so.

MJG