The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis goes out on a limb in this brief video clip and decries those on the Left who lamented the death of Hugo Chavez this week. These are people, he says, who remind him why he could never switch teams and become a liberal rather than the stout-hearted conservative that he is. And the reason, of course, is that Chavez was an authoritarian dictator and we should all be glad that he’s gone.

Of course, then Bill Scher brings up the ouster of Hosni Mubarak and how some on the Right lamented it. And Lewis, who admits that he had a “nuanced position” on Mubarak’s loss of power in Egypt, opens up and explains the real issue:

Mubarak was a bad guy … but he was our bad guy.

He might have been a corrupt dictator who abused the rights of his people, but he did what we wanted him to do. And Chavez? Well, he also might have been a corrupt dictator who abused the rights of his people. But he didn’t do what we wanted him to do.

So what Lewis initially dresses up as some sort of pro-democracy or pro-civil rights stance that maps perfectly onto his ideological position on the American political spectrum — he could never be like one of the empty-headed Lefty socialist types, who condone authoritarianism as long as it waves a red flag — is, in fact, nothing more than the classic “I like what’s good for me.”

In other words, there’s nothing pure in the stance that Lewis takes here and his decrying the people on the Left who had anything good to say about Chavez is disingenuous.

Why? Because the only thing that was wrong with Chavez was that he wasn’t good for the U.S.

Lewis doesn’t actually have an anti-authoritarian dictator position; he has a position against dictators who aren’t in America’s pocket.

In this Bloggingheads diavlog, which came on the heels of Todd Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape,” Michael Brendan Dougherty and Zack Beauchamp discuss abortion.

In this particular clip, Dougherty attempts to make an argument about why exceptions for rape are problematic. He begins by recognizing what a difficult position he’s in, as someone who opposes abortion in all cases but who also doesn’t believe in a right to life. His argument against abortion, generally, is based on the notion of parental responsibility. In other words, he wants to claim that parents have a responsibility to care for fetuses they conceive.

But the rapist, he argues, is an unfit parent — and thus shouldn’t be involved in the lives of the child or the mother — and the woman didn’t make a conscious choice to conceive a child (or even to have sex, which might result in conception).

So, what’s the basis for her duties to the child? He has no answer to this question … so instead he argues that the fetus “has some moral worth that precludes the possibility of ending its life deliberately.”

Thus, Dougherty is allowed to side-step a defense of an incredibly odious position (one that he recognizes as such, incidentally) so that they can instead debate the moral worth of fetuses generally for the better part of an hour. Dougherty ought to have been honest and made clear that his argument about the impermissibility of abortion in all cases simply does not hold in the case of rape, and that as a result he needed to make a different argument about the inherent moral worth of fetuses (which holds even in cases of rape, where parental responsibility fails).

But this wouldn’t have gone any better for Dougherty because he doesn’t really have an explanation for why a fetus — from the moment of conception (or, as he later argues, even before conception) — has “some moral worth that precludes the possibility of ending its life deliberately.” His argument, such as it is, relies on the idea that a fetus is a human life and, presumably, all human life has “some moral worth.” On what basis? That is it human life.

This circular reasoning is so painful to watch … but I suppose it’s the best that Dougherty can do, given that — without turning to religion — there’s really no other way to defend the grotesque idea that rape survivors ought to be compelled to carry to term the fetuses that might result from the terrible crime of rape.

This clip is almost a month old — it comes from a Bloggingheads diavlog about the Chick-Fil-A controversy — but I just got to it the other day and I’m still sort of amazed by the way it concludes.

“Let’s leave aside the question of whether or not being gay is a choice,” says Daniel Foster of the National Review Online, and then he proceeds to simply assume that it’s a choice or a behavior such that people can simply choose not to be — or act — gay.

For Foster, this is the central reason why the struggle for gay and lesbian equality shouldn’t be compared to the civil rights struggle: Being black isn’t a behavior, but being gay apparently might be. The presupposition here is that gays and lesbians are making a behavioral choice and they could simply choose to have a nice, traditional marriage instead. This is fairly preposterous … but, of course, Foster is only playing a hypothetical game here so he won’t get himself into trouble.

Now, if we don’t leave aside the “debate” about whether someone is born gay or not, as Foster has asked us to do to play his freshman year philosophy game, then Foster is simply arguing that gays and lesbians are making a choice to act on their sexual orientation when they might choose not to do so. They might be born gay, but they don’t have to behave that way … so why should they be rewarded by society with marriage equality?

Now, I’m not sure if I have a choice in the matter, but I find this line of argumentation pretty offensive.

So … this popped up in iTunes yesterday — since I suscribe to the Bloggingheads podcasr feed so I can listen to their always-interesting shows during my commute to work and back — and I thought to myself, “I’m not sure I’ll even be able to listen to this.”

E.J. Graff (The American Prospect, Brandeis University) and Maggie Gallagher (National Organization for Marriage)

On The Posner Show, E.J. and Maggie debate gay marriage. Maggie argues that sex can’t be separated from reproduction. E.J. believes gay marriage is the result of changing attitudes toward marriage in general, not a cause of that change. What is the purpose of civil marriage, and is it compatible with gay marriage? Maggie explains why she thinks gay marriage could negatively affect marriage as an institution. Finally, they discuss whether children need a mother and a father.

You can click on the links in the description above to listen to the shorter clips of the various topics they cover if you don’t have the time, patience, or love of punishment that the full hour requires. As for me, I ended up listening to the full hour-long discussion this morning and I came away with one thought:

@ejgraff You are a much, much more patient person than … well … anyone I know.

— Ari Kohen (@kohenari) August 24, 2012

It’s really fascinating to listen to what Maggie Gallagher has to say here because it’s an opportunity to hear from someone whose understanding of the world is radically different from pretty much all of the people with whom I choose to spend my time.

Both Glenn Loury and Ann Althouse have gay sons. And, in this clip, both of them argue that we shouldn’t consider opposition to same-sex marriage to be akin to bigotry. Loury goes a few steps farther, in fact, and claims that a charge of bigotry really amounts to demagogic politics and that people who oppose same-sex marriage on religious or cultural grounds are morally serious and ought not to be dismissed out of hand.

But it’s never entirely clear why Loury and Althouse believe that the views these people espouse are so morally serious or why we ought to refrain from referring to their condemnation of homosexuality as bigotry. From listening to them, my sense is that their argument rests on the presumption that religious people are morally serious and, as such, they reflect on the tenets of their faiths before coming to their conclusions about matters like same-sex marriage.

That’s all well and good, if it’s true. But it doesn’t explain why we shouldn’t think of it as bigotry. That someone believes something to be true and arrives at his or her belief in a serious manner doesn’t exempt him or her from being challenged on that belief, especially when that belief might impact the lives of others.

Let’s go a few steps down the religious path and see what happens. After all, I attend a weekly religious service, I associate with many of my co-religionist, and I observe many of the strictures of my religion in my daily life. And my religion, Judaism, is one that seems to explicitly condemn homosexuality; indeed, it’s the Hebrew Bible to which people turn when they’re looking for a religious justification for their opposition to same-sex marriage and homosexuality more generally (even though the majority of these people don’t pay much attention to any of the other dictates of the Hebrew Bible).

But Jews are divided on the question of same-sex marriage, with most Orthodox authorities opposing it and most Reform authorities supporting it. Conservative authorities are divided, with some in support and some in opposition. The Hebrew Bible says that one should not lie with a man as one lies with a woman … but the Hebrew Bible also says, for example, that the death penalty should be employed as a punishment in hundreds of circumstances (from homicide to children who curse their parents) yet the vast majority of Jewish authorities oppose capital punishment. After much study and debate, religious authorities have found that the text can be read in more ways than one. And that’s why it seems to me that we can take issue with anyone who claims that their religion mandates their opposition to same-sex marriage or their condemnation of homosexuality. The Orthodox, after all, are not agitating for the ability to resume stoning their children.

In other words, Jews have options (and I presume that Christians and Muslims do too). Despite the injunction against homosexuality in Leviticus, there is no need for a Jew to join a congregation that condemns homosexuality or even makes gays and lesbians feel in any way unwelcome. And so, as a Jew, I gravitate toward congregations that are welcoming to gays and lesbians and toward rabbis who speak out in favor of equal rights and equal treatment.

Religions aren’t monolithic; if people really are involved in deep spiritual reflection on the matter of homosexuality, then they will surely be able to find an interpretation of their religious texts that allows for the kind of evolution that President Obama described. This doesn’t mean I’m not serious about practicing Judaism; it means I’m serious about finding a way to reconcile my belief in the teachings of Judaism with my belief that people should be treated equally. But, obviously, one must actually have both of these beliefs.

What do we call someone who either fails to consider the alternative teaching of his or her religion or rejects that teaching because it doesn’t lead to continued condemnation of gays and lesbians, someone — in other words — who doesn’t actually have both a religious belief and a belief in equality?

With apologies to Loury and Althouse, I think I have to call it bigotry.

This clip, excerpted from a much longer Bloggingheads diavlog with Robert Wright and Ann Althouse, is about three weeks old. I didn’t watch or listen to it when it first came out because I had the sense that Althouse’s take on the Trayvon Martin shooting would really bother me.

Three weeks later, I finally listened to the diavlog in its entirety. And, lo and behold, I was right about how I’d feel.

I’ll discuss my thoughts in what follows, but I should note first that the clip is only ten minutes long; I hope you’ll listen for yourself.

Althouse begins by opposing the entire idea of latching onto an individual case instead of looking at all of the evidence about violence, gun violence, race, and so on. Her claim is that appeals to emotion by focusing on one case has no place in a democracy because it dampens down the prospect for rational discourse about important issues.

From there, she proceeds as follows: She doesn’t understand Wright’s use of emotive language; she wants to know why the national discourse became all about this case rather than all of the others; she alleges that liberals are exploiting Martin’s death; she worries about due process for Zimmerman and bemoans vigilantes in pursuit of the original vigilante; she doesn’t understand why it matters that Zimmerman was carrying a gun and ultimately shot Martin with it; and she moves the remainder of the conversation to a discussion of whether Zimmerman was originally arrested or just detained and to an argument about the benefit of carrying guns.

Ultimately, Althouse does her level best not to actually talk about the Trayvon Martin killing. In no small part, that’s because she has no response at all to Wright’s argument that there’s a problem for society if a person has a concealed weapon, follows someone who hasn’t done anything wrong, ends up killing him, and avoids some sort of punishment. All she can manage is a claim that Wright’s position isn’t fine-grained enough and that there’s more texture that he hasn’t stated. “We should be more cool-headed,” she says at the very end of this clip.

I’d say there’s a big difference between jumping to conclusions about a case and being emotive about it. Wright doesn’t jump to conclusions and the conclusions he reaches here seem, to me at least, to be pretty cool-headed. What he fails to do, I think, is to really push back against Althouse, to ask her directly how she would respond to his central claim about what the shooting and its aftermath say about our society. She intimates that she actually agrees with his claim, but nothing in the rest of the diavlog demonstrates any agreement.

What’s more, Wright could have said a great deal more to dispute Althouse’s opposition to using individual cases to draw attention to a broader societal problem. For Althouse, this is an appeal to emotion that calls to her mind a totalitarian state. But, for me, the Martin case garnered so much attention because it laid bare the problem of the Stand Your Ground law and the problem of racism that persists (sometimes overtly and sometimes under the surface) in this country. Indeed, Althouse even gets away with talking about carrying guns for protection against thugs in her diversionary discussion of the virtues of concealed weapons. But this is precisely the sort of language — about dangerous thugs (who, we can be sure, are young black men) — that led Zimmerman to follow Martin, that led Geraldo Rivera to speak out against the scourge of the hooded sweatshirt, and that many people used to describe Martin in an attempt to allege that Zimmerman had some reason to follow him.

This is language that needs to be continuously challenged.

This report by Matthew Lee about Shavendra Silva, a Sri Lankan war criminal who has now become an advisor on peacekeeping to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is worth your six minutes this morning.

There has been very little press on Silva — or the massacres in Sri Lanka in 2009, really — but, as Lee argues, this move into the UN peacekeeping apparatus by a war criminal who is specifically named in a UN report brings the idea of impunity to a whole new level.

In this short clip, Shadi Hamid and Gregory Gause agree that it’s not anyone’s place to tell Islamists to respect women’s rights. I suspect that this point about women’s rights will be regarded as off-putting by a whole bunch of people. It came across that way to me.

That said, this point is part of a larger discussion about the difference between democracy and liberalism, in which the Hamid and Gause do a nice job of highlighting a point I frequently raise in my classes. Simply put, democracy is a great good but democracy by itself certainly doesn’t guarantee a liberal outcome. The distinction between liberalism and democracy is a big, important one and it comes up all the time when I talk about human rights because, if we care a whole lot about human rights then we might be concerned about illiberal democratic outcomes.

Relatedly, as a piece in The Economist pointed out just last week, “Of the seven countries that impose the death penalty for homosexuality, all are Muslim. Even when gays do not face execution, persecution is endemic.” I’m someone who’d like to see substantial liberalization on this issue and a host of others — both in Islamic societies and also here in the U.S. — and so I worry about the effect of democracy in the absence of liberalism.

Hamid and Gause seem content to approve of democracy, irrespective of what the people democratically choose. For me, the story is a whole lot more complex. I want to argue that choosing one’s own government is a human right, but I’m opposed to seeing that right put to use to then squelch others’ rights. This won’t be particularly surprising to anyone who has read my first book or who reads this blog: I’m a political liberal who believes that we ought to work at every opportunity to minimize human suffering by expanding respect for the idea of human rights.

So I’m in the somewhat precarious position of wanting people to be able to vote, but also wanting to push — at least to some extent — liberalism on them (in effect constraining their choices). What I mean is that I’m not going to argue that you can’t vote for the things you want; I’m simply going to try to get you to change your mind about what you want. This is a form of imperialism, I suppose, but I’ll hope that it’s seen as a soft one.

Richard Rorty, who never really seemed to shy away from ethnocentrism in arguing for changing the hearts of those who abuse human rights and those who don’t do anything about such abuse, puts it this way:

The right way to take the slogan ‘We have obligations to human beings simply as such’ is as a means of reminding ourselves to keep trying to expand our sense of ‘us’ as far as we can. That slogan urges us to extrapolate further in the direction set by certain events in the past – the inclusion among ‘us’ of the family in the next cave, then of the tribe across the river, then of the tribal confederation beyond the mountains, then of the unbelievers beyond the seas (and, perhaps last of all, of the menials who, all this time, have been doing our dirty work). This is a process which we should try to keep going. We should stay on the lookout for marginalized people – people who we still instinctively think of as ‘they’ rather than ‘us.’ We should try to notice our similarities with them. The right way to construe the slogan is as urging us to create a more expansive sense of solidarity than we presently have. The wrong way is to think of it as urging us to recognize such a solidarity, as something that exists antecedently to our recognition of it. For then we leave ourselves open to the pointlessly skeptical question ‘Is this solidarity real?’

This is the way I tend to think about human rights, at least when I think about it theoretically rather than thinking about international law and organizations. And it’s undoubtedly because I think of human rights in this way that I raise the issue about liberalism and democracy. It’s not sufficient, to my mind, to say that democracy is a great good and then not to think about the effects of all that voting on individuals and groups, especially those that have traditionally been targeted for abuse.

If you have any interest whatsoever in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I recommend watching the entirety of this Bloggingheads episode.

Robert Wright has done a series of really interesting interviews with members of the Israeli Left over the past couple of months and, with each one presenting a different solution or solutions, all of them taken together nicely highlight the myriad ways in which Israelis are themselves sharply divided over the politics of occupation.

While the Israeli government seems committed to what I regard as an incredibly foolhardy and costly enterprise, then, it’s good to hear these voices from Israel discussing human rights and moral obligation.

This sure seems like a super-creepy nine minutes right here.

Maybe I’m not hearing them correctly but in this recent Bloggingheads diavlog it sure sounds like Ann Althouse and Glenn Loury worry about Herman Cain and how he’s being smeared in the media, suggest that the accusations of sexual harassment and assault are pretty thin, and wonder whether his behavior is just some behavior that’s somehow “ethnic” and thus misunderstood. They follow all of this up by seemingly tilting at windmills, suggesting that some unnamed people out there don’t like the idea of a black conservative. Oh — and then despite professing how much they like Cain, they both agree that there’s no way Cain ought to be President because he has absolutely no experience. At bottom, then, it seems like they just want to be sure that no one out there thinks there’s any such thing as sexual harassment.

Uncomfortable.

“I’m not well informed …,” says Joshua Treviño (of the Texas Public Policy Foundation), mere seconds before announcing that “This is the system working” and “This is a win for the system in general” in the Duane Buck case. As he is saying this, Evan Smith (Editor-in-Chief of the Texas Tribune) can’t nod his head in agreement vigorously enough. This is the case where the Supreme Court finally stepped in to stay Buck’s impending execution on the grounds that racism played a role in Buck’s sentencing (as it did in the sentencing of five other men who were all awarded resentencing hearings. I wrote, at the time, that no one ought to mistake the last minute stay for evidence that the system works:

Even if the Supreme Court kicks this case back to Texas for a new sentencing hearing, and last night’s last-minute stay of execution doesn’t necessarily mean that they will, there’s no reason to presume that Buck will be spared another death sentence. Indeed, each of the five men mentioned just above were resentenced to death. Clearly, the prosecution has figured out that it’s possible to convey to jurors that they ought to be fearful of black men without actually putting someone on the witness stand to say those words aloud.

Treviño goes on to claim that his opposition is a result of a “modified Catholic position,” which he then explains by saying that Catholics think the use of the death penalty is a legitimate power of the state but that the state doesn’t do a very good job of it and so it’s problematic (which is, in fact, his position about everything the state does). Of course, this isn’t the Catholic position on the death penalty … unless the Pope doesn’t speak for Catholics when he calls for the commutation of death sentences and the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.

But the fun continues when Smith takes his turn: “I’m personally pro-death penalty. It may be a factor of having small children … and I happen to be sympathetic to the argument of law enforcement people being targeted as well and the prospect of the ultimate punishment for that.” I have no idea what he’s talking about. Is he suggesting that it’s somehow a worse crime to kill a police officer than to kill someone who isn’t wearing a uniform? If so, why? He doesn’t say. What’s more, like Smith, I have a family; unlike him, I don’t insist that we execute people; in fact, I vocally insist on not doing so. I don’t want my children to grow up in a country where our government has the power to execute some of our fellow citizens, even when those citizens do terrible things. The mere existence of the death penalty brutalizes us as a society, leaving aside the way it’s haphazardly carried out.

That, of course, is the eventual direction taken by the “debate” between Treviño and Smith. No matter how they feel about the death penalty, they can agree that it’s being carried out poorly. Except, of course, that this is the exact opposite of the point with which Treviño began his death penalty comments and with which Smith so excitedly agreed. In other words, when the Supreme Court stepped in to halt the Buck execution, the system worked. When no one stepped in to stop the Willingham execution, there might have been a problem. Buck — who isn’t dead yet — is guilty; Willingham — who has been dead for several years — might not have been. The system isn’t working; some guys just get lucky and some guys just get killed. I have a hard time seeing how any of this demonstrates a properly functioning system, rather than one that is arbitrary and capricious in the way it metes out punishment.

So … I hereby issue a challenge to the good folks at Bloggingheads: If you want to have a serious discussion about the death penalty, invite someone who actually knows something about the death penalty. In fact, invite me. I can talk about the systemic problems, I can talk about the moral problems, I can talk about murder victims’ families, I can talk about my own personal experience. I’ll be very happy to take part in an actual debate about the death penalty with anyone you might choose.

But, please, no more of these people who make a series of bizarre claims about the death penalty and don’t back them up in any way.