I just watched the latest episode of Moyers & Company with Bill Moyers. He interviewed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a forthcoming book titled The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. It was a fascinating program. I recommend it, if you haven’t watched it already.

This part of Moyers’ intro sort of sums up Haidt’s premise:

His ideas are controversial but they make you think. Haidt says, for example, that liberals misunderstand conservatives more than the other way around, and that while conservatives see self-sufficiency as a profound moral value for individuals, liberals are more focused on a public code of care and equity.

The thing about any of the social sciences is that they’re tricky to study. You can stick water in a beaker on a hot plate to measure its boiling point, but how do you measure a society’s boiling point? The social sciences are littered with the corpses of theories, plausible and crazy alike, that attempted to explain why we behave (individually or collectively) the way we do.

This Haidt guy has some interesting ideas. Is there any truth to them? I don’t know. I like things that can be measured objectively, and this isn’t it. I know I’m more partial to the ideas of George Lakoff, but I don’t know that he’s right either.

Haidt’s ideas are based on his Moral Foundations Theory. He describes it on its website:

In brief, the theory proposes that six (or more) innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. [emphasis added]

These six foundations are:

1. Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2. Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]
3. Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.
4. Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
5. Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
6. Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

When they asked liberals and conservatives how strongly they felt about those issues, this is how it came out:

I guess my biggest concern is how neutrally the questions were worded. It’s extremely difficult to write bias-free questions. Even his choice of labels raises some questions. In the list above, the first word of each pair is clearly the “better” or more desirable trait. But when I see the word “authority”, for example, I have an immediate negative reaction.

I’ve always disrespected authority. And what is “legitimate authority” anyway? There is very little in this country. The politicians have authority by virtue of occupying the roles defined in the Constitution, but it is not legitimate in my view. They have not earned that authority. They bought it with massive campaign contributions from Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, and a few other unelected billionaires.

Or maybe he is referring to actual legitimate authority, which would result from free and fair elections. I’m all in favor of that, but we don’t have too many of those.

I score low on one perception of the definition, but high on the other. Since I don’t know how free of bias (conscious or unconscious) his questions were worded, I don’t know how much stock to put in his results.

It sure is peculiar that the liberals are so extremely lopsided and the conservatives are so evenly distributed.

Despite my doubts, he nevertheless has some interesting things to say in the interview. It’s worth trying to listen with an open mind and learn what we can from it.

Oh, and notice at the end of the interview that he shares my opinion that the system is extremely broken. He is of the mistaken opinion that it is fixable, though.

This blog, at its core, has always been about civil liberties. Historically, I have focused on the threat to those liberties by Christian fundamentalists, because I viewed them as the biggest threat to those liberties. I have included politics since the beginning, although I have tried to de-emphasize it where possible. Coverage of fundamentalism cannot be completely uncoupled from politics, because the fundies and Republicans have merged so completely that it is often impossible to tell one from the other.

I have recently expanded the scope of this blog to the coverage of all civil rights abuses and threats. I still plan to focus on fundies, I’m just no longer excluding other stories.

Since January 20th of 2009, the biggest threat to our civil liberties has been Barack Obama.

I am not going to change the focus of this blog away from the Christian fundamentalist threat. That is where this blog belongs. I’m just not going to ignore the other threats.

So for clarification of that last article, and to more precisely enumerate the reasons for my displeasure, here is an excerpt from an article by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic:

How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

1. Codify indefinite detention into law
2. Draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process
3. Proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens
4. Prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets
5. Reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible
6. Enter and prosecute such a war
7. Institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports
8. Oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots
9. Wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy
10. Invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits
11. Preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries
12. Attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed)
13. Reauthorize the Patriot Act
14. Select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

The discussion in the Rick Santorum comment thread has veered into whether Obama is worth voting for.

He’s not. Not one bit.

His civil liberties record is one of the worst in history. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, writing in the Los Angels Times, wrote:

Civil libertarians have long had a dysfunctional relationship with the Democratic Party, which treats them as a captive voting bloc with nowhere else to turn in elections. Not even this history, however, prepared civil libertarians for Obama.… Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities.
…
However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the “just following orders” defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
…
Obama may have flown by the fail-safe line, especially when it comes to waterboarding. For many civil libertarians, it will be virtually impossible to vote for someone who has flagrantly ignored the Convention Against Torture or its underlying Nuremberg Principles. As Obama and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. have admitted, waterboarding is clearly torture and has been long defined as such by both international and U.S. courts. It is not only a crime but a war crime. By blocking the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for torture, Obama violated international law and reinforced other countries in refusing investigation of their own alleged war crimes. The administration magnified the damage by blocking efforts of other countries like Spain from investigating our alleged war crimes. In this process, his administration shredded principles on the accountability of government officials and lawyers facilitating war crimes and further destroyed the credibility of the U.S. in objecting to civil liberties abuses abroad.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals. Obama is an accessory to war crimes.

It isn’t just the non-prosecution of the Bush administration war criminals. More importantly, the problem is also the prevention of the abused to seek redress through the courts. Matthew Payne, at The Paltry Sapien, eloquently writes:

The Obama Administration has closed the court house doors to numerous civil rights suits by those detained, tortured and kidnapped in the name of “national security.” Not to belabor the point, but any country whose national security needs to be protected by illegal detention, torture and kidnapping is not a liberal democracy. It is not even a civilized state—it is a rogue nation in every sense of the word and the Kafka-esqe equivocations of Obama’s Department of Justice grossly misusing judicial pettifogging such as “standing” do little to hide this reality. And the relentless expansion of the surveillance state makes Barack Obama the director of a nightmarish remake of The Lives of Others.

It is the police state that the United States has become that bothers me the most. We were already rapidly heading in that direction. Obama, somehow, managed to accelerate that sprint even more.

Matthew Payne continues:

As bad as Obama has been in prosecuting the Forever War…

He’s referring to the “Global War on Terror™”, not the other Bush wars Obama has continued.

…and its concomitant attack on civil liberties…, he has been a full-on disaster for the protection of civil rights.… The Democratic Party will not rein in the power of their “own” president, and many strong critics of the assault on civil rights have been silenced by either the taint of association of this rights-ignoring administration, or fear to stand up to the bullying of an arrogant and callous President for fear that a bigger bully, in the form of a GOP neo-McCarthyism, awaits in the wings.… Civil libertarians are demonized by the GOP and marginalized by the Democrats; far too many of them chose a vapid “pragmatism” by staying with the political faction that pretends to listen to them, at least around primary season.… Unfortunately in living this lie, that choosing the lesser of two evils is not choosing evil, these liberals have made themselves moral eunuchs.

Show some balls. Don’t vote for Obama.

We helped Iran acquire nuclear technology, strictly for peaceful purposes, you know. Even though:

…a 1974 CIA proliferation assessment stated “If [the Shah] is alive in the mid-1980s… and if other countries [particularly India] have proceeded with weapons development we have no doubt Iran will follow suit.”

Or, to paraphrase FDR, the Shah may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch!

It’s a good thing giving dangerous technology to puppet dictators never backfires.

Rick Santorum has some very dangerous ideas, but I’m not at all concerned about his strong showing in Iowa. The Republicans have been cycling through all of the non-Romneys. The white Christian Iowa Republicans are so horrified that a Mormon could get their party’s nomination that they’ve been frantically searching for anyone else to vote for. Just about all of the other candidates have each spent a couple of weeks as the front runner, only to be doomed by the fact that the Iowans eventually realize that these other candidates are even more reprehensible than a Mormon!

Maybe it’s time for the Republicans to actually read the Constitution, specifically Article VI, paragraph 3, which states, in part:

…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Santorum can attribute his strong showing in Iowa solely to the luck of the calendar. He just happens to be the non-Romney du jour. This near-win will give him a boost that will carry him a few days longer as non-Romney than he would have reached otherwise, but his record, statements, and platform will doom him to the same fate as all the others.

The Republicans—even the batshit insane fundie Republicans—will soon come to their senses and nominate Mitt Romney. Romney is the only Republican candidate who could beat Obama, and it would be a cakewalk. Obama’s record on issues that matter to liberals is so dismal that he will receive few votes from that side. Moderates, of course, will realize that they’re no better off now than four years ago, so those votes are gone. Conservatives will decide that Mormon is better than Muslim. Romney could sleepwalk through the campaign and still pull off a victory.

All of the other Republican candidates are so extreme that if one were nominated, it would force moderates over to Obama, and it will be Obama who cakewalks to victory. Enough Republicans know this that Romney’s nomination is almost assured.

Almost. What a funny word. So fluid and undefined. You can actually sail a supertanker through an “almost”. You could probably squeeze a planet through an “almost”. You see, all Romney has to do to get the nomination is to not do or say anything extremely stupid! The funny thing about American politics, though, is that these self-destructive meltdowns happen with surprising frequency.

So now we sit back and watch for a meltdown. There’s so much carbon in the air these days, we just might see one.

Brian just left a comment on my old Rick Santorum article, which was one of the first things ever published on this blog. I’m surprised he found it.

I just wrote a serious article about Rick Santorum’s near-win in Iowa, which I’ll be posting immediately after this. I tried very hard to avoid any double-entendres, intentional or accidental. That’s more difficult than you might think.

Since snickering at fundies is what you guys really want to do when you come to this blog, I’ll swipe a few jokes from Greta Christina. A few days ago, she posted this on her Facebook page:

Not sure which is funnier: the fact that the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote the headline, “Santorum Surges From Behind In Iowa”… or that fact that Rick Santorum re-tweeted it.

And now she has posted an entire article full of Santorum jokes. Most of them are tweets from her and Jen McCreight, as they watched the Iowa Caucus results come in. But my favorites are tweets from others:

@JoeMyGod RT @MSignorile: Tomorrow’s headline: Santorum Surges from Behind in Messy Late Night Three-Way.

@Mowgli3: Santorum gushes forth in the polls after Romney finishes early. @jennifurret

I’m sure there are a lot of others.

Since I have a second oddly-suggestive photograph of Kim Jong-Il, I need to write a second article. Here are some comments I found on a fundie “news” site about the Christmas trees that the South Korean fundies are putting on the border to piss off the North Koreans.

A Christian calling himself A_Proud_Infidel says:

Overseas, the Commies persecute Christianity worse than their ACLU brethren in the USA!

I don’t think the exclamation point means he’s shouting the entire comment. I suspect that’s how he always writes USA.

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

Along those same lines, raffaro writes:

SHIT aren’t atheists pigs trying that here in America.Looks like they have alot in common with those Staliist pigs after all !!!!!!!

Camarottajr says:

I guess we have to wait for the “JackAss In Chief,” barack hussein obama to weigh in on this after he finishes his meeting with the mu slimes about tolorance…! My bet is JackAss In Chief barack hussein obama won’t say a word, what say you?

I say he needs to meet with the Christians about tolerance.

Orent asks why we allow North Korea to continue to exist, to which Lilly Maus replies:

“Allowed to continue?”…Did you know they have the bomb??? did you know they don’t have morals ???…Now add bomb + no morals = KABOOM…

I’m not sure what evidence the “no morals” claim is based on. I’m guessing it’s because communists are atheists, so of course they have no morals!

glenp827 writes:

CHRISTMAS TREE is a pagan symbol coopted for the holiday

to which Violet asks:

Is that why makes atheists so angry? We stole their Yule Logs and conifer trees.

Yes. That’s exactly why. It has nothing to do with fundies trying to turn the United States into their own version of North Korea.

Elsewhere on that page, Violet also says:

Guess South Korea is getting a taste of what it is to be an American Christian. We deal with this all the time. Somebody is always yapping about how Christians offend them.

Actually, Christians don’t offend me, and I don’t know very many non-Christians who are offended by them. We’re just offended by their actions.

Somebody named jong (really?) writes:

God bless those that put up the Trees. Throw a bag of rice at North Korea that will shut them up. Or even better put a nativity on the US Consulate and make sure it is well lite(I am sorry I forgot we have a muslim homosexual as President and Sec. of State is also a Marxist little chance of that happening)

Not to mention the fact that we don’t have a US consulate in North Korea.

Doug has a treasure trove of gems for us:

The ungodly will go at any length to stop Christianity at all costs. They’ll even risk a war, if need be. This incident is an example of their insane quest to shut down God in our lives. Outside our borders lays a vast world of hate for Christians. If you are a Jew or Christian, they want to kill you. Bottom-line: The world hates Christians and Jews………

And inside our country, these ungodly’s, have crept in like cockroaches bringing mayhem into our streets. We were once a peaceful nation, and now we’ve become a nation in terror. They want to take God out of the equation. And let political correctness rule the day. You want troubles in this life, leave Christ out of your life, because you will get no blessings from God.

And we’ve become a nation under siege by these ungodly nations. Watch how this Christmas tree issue unfolds in N. Korea, and watch how the media will fold into “political correctness”!

A fundie group in South Korea is going to put up three giant Christmas trees on the border with North Korea. This is part of the stupid back-and-forth provoking that these two immature siblings have been doing since the cease fire 58 years ago. They’re like little kids in the back seat on a long car trip. “Mommy! Kim is on my side!” “No I’m not. You’re poking me!”

Little kids with nukes, that is.

Maybe a better analogy is the crazy old man on the outskirts of town who has a vicious dog in his backyard. The neighbor boy thinks it’s great fun to shove a stick through the chain-link fence and repeatedly poke the dog. Not only is that a bad idea, but an even worse idea would be for someone else to go up to the kid and encourage him to keep at it. Jab that dog even more!

Well, an American fundie group thinks poking mad dogs is a splendid idea! Liberty Counsel tells us:

North Korea has claimed that South Korea’s plan to place three Christmas light displays in the shape of large trees is “a mean attempt for psychological warfare.” Their official site states, “The enemy warmongers… should be aware that they should be held responsible entirely for any unexpected consequences that may be caused by their scheme,” according to the Associated French Press.

Mad dogs are more fun to poke when they’re really mad!

This highlights the extreme hostility towards Christianity and Christmas that is still a daily part of the lives of those living in North Korea. Their government is not just content to ban the celebration of Christmas inside their nation, but is willing to declare Christmas lights seen from their borders to be similar to an act of war.

Wow. A literal War on Christmas™! It’s almost like Liberty Counsel is getting ready to make some sort of unsupportable logical jump.

Here in America, a Texas school banned Santa; a California school went another step and also banned poinsettias and Christmas trees, alleging that each was too religious. In addition, Governor Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island renamed a Christmas tree a holiday tree against the wishes of the tree’s donor and the outcry across his state. It appears Gov. Chafee is well-suited for survival at the North Korea border. His policies are better for kow-towing to the Commies than celebrating Christmas.

And another Gold Medal in the Long Jump for Liberty Counsel!

They actually open their article with this “quiz”:

You might be a communist if…

• You ban poinsettias from a government school;
• You rename a Christmas tree a “holiday” tree in a state building…or
• You threaten your neighbors with unexpected consequences if they want to put up Christmas lights.

They found a couple of instances of people being overly-cautious about merging church and state, and they think we’re on the path to living in North Korea.

Here’s a quiz for you, Liberty Counsel:

You might be a fundie if you equate the defense of the First Amendment with communism.

Last night, while you were dreaming of swimming in oceans of dark chocolate or of fluffy bunnies romping through fields of daisies, I was writing this blog article on parental consent laws. No, I don’t mean actually writing it. I was dreaming of writing it. Needless to say, I woke up exhausted. Just once, I’d like to have a normal night’s sleep.

Anyway, since I did all the hard work last night, I might as well transcribe what my brain already went through the effort of creating.

The controversy is that teenage girls are getting birth control pills, and the fundies are having a conniption. I know what you’re thinking. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. The fundies are always having a conniption. They have so many conniptions they look like an epileptic at a strobe light festival.

In this case, though, we know the birth control pills are one of the causes of the conniption, because the fundies make sure to tell us about it. Frequently. Here’s just one example. Amusingly, the fundies aren’t just opposed to giving teenagers birth control pills, which affect the body’s hormone levels and could theoretically have adverse health effects. The fundies are also opposed to giving teenagers any form of birth control, such as condoms!

(As a funny aside, one of the reasons fundies give for their opposition to condoms, diaphragms, and other barrier methods of contraception is those methods’ allegedly-high failure rate. Then the fundies turn around and advocate teaching the rhythm method!)

OK, so let’s take a look at these laws that govern the ability of minors to obtain contraception. A website calling itself contracept.org tells us:

Twenty-one states explicitly allow all minors to consent to contraceptive services without parental permission.

The other states have some sort of restrictions, and in some of those states “the physician may, but is not required to, inform the parents.”

My knee-jerk reaction should be to hold the opposite opinion of the fundies. However, I have heard non-fundie parents complain about the laws that allow their kids to secretly obtain birth control pills without the parents needing to be informed. I have not heard non-fundies complain about condoms and other forms of birth control. I wouldn’t be surprised if that makes them uneasy too, but it is primarily birth control pills that get their concern, because it is a medical treatment. They feel that should fall entirely under their control as parents, not the control of the state.

That is my interest in the subject. We expect the fundies to have an irrational opinion, because it’s driven by ignorance and superstition. But what about the opinion of the people who have a rational argument?

First of all, the most compelling argument in favor of allowing teens to get contraception without notifying the parents is that it is in the teens’ best interest. If the teen knows that the parents will be informed, some will prefer to run the risk of pregnancy or STDs.

But what I want to explore here is the argument that apparently bothered my subconscious so much last night that it had to work through all the pros and cons when it should have been sleeping. That argument is whether the state has a compelling need to interfere with the parents’ rights to choose how to raise their child.

I discovered a while ago that I’m that extremely rare thing known as a liberal libertarian. Surprised the snot out of me, but that’s just because I disagree with most of what the so-called “Libertarians” of today are advocating. Those people are actually anarchists, because they want no laws or regulations whatsoever on how they make or spend their money, no matter how much harm it causes to other people. They are sociopaths of the highest order. (At least the extremists in the party are, but that’s all you hear from these days. I know they all weren’t that way in the past.)

I have always been a civil libertarian. I value our civil liberties extremely highly, and I get angry at those who take them away. However, I recognize that rights will always come into conflict in a free society, and I balance the needs of the individual against the needs of society as a whole. That’s why I support the social safety net of jobless benefits, universal health care (In some form. It doesn’t have to be a big-government Canadian-style system. I just want a system that covers everyone at a fair price and works well. The current system does none of those things.), etc. It is in the best interest of society to not throw people under the bus when they have a bit of bad luck. You don’t want welfare queens, of course, but almost none of those ever existed. (That was one of Reagan’s many deluded fantasies.)

So the question is, where in the Constitution did we turn over our rights as parents to the state? By what right or authority does the government think it has to intervene in raising our children?

My response is that that is not the appropriate question.

The real question is what gives you, the parents, the right to violate your child’s privacy?

(Actually, this is all academic to me, since I’m not a parent. Ha! The government isn’t taking my rights away!)

Rights first and foremost belong to the individual. Only when there is a compelling need can some of those rights be taken over by another entity. Therefore, the default condition is that the child has full and total rights as an individual, and has only lost those rights to the parent (or the state) as are necessary for the situation.

Before you go all bonkers on me, I am not advocating that a one-day-old infant has full rights to vote, buy booze, and drive a car. What I am saying is that we as a society long ago agreed that upon birth, a person has some rights that cannot be taken away, and we gradually allow them to acquire more rights as they mature.

You cannot kill an infant (Actually, you can. They’re quite defenseless, and they have a squishy spot on the top of their head. What I mean is you can’t legally kill an infant.). Therefore, we all agree that the infant has the right to life, and probably a few other rights. When they turn 13, they can join Facebook. When they turn 16, we let them drive. At 18, they can vote. At 21, they can buy alcohol. At 35, they can become president.

No so many years ago, we executed a 14-year-old in this country (and after a forced confession, no less!). Although we no longer execute minors, we still lock them up in adult prisons when we don’t like what they’ve done. We’ve apparently all agreed that a teenager is capable of enough rational thought to be held responsible for criminal activity, yet we don’t think they have enough rational thought to take responsibility for sexual activity?

Wrong. We have already agreed that they have they necessary capacity at that age. We have already given them those rights. That’s why the parents should not be told when their little darling is given a prescription for The Pill.

Jesse Helms was one of the most destructive senators we’ve ever endured. One of his little side projects was trying to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, because the angry voices in his head told him that some art is obscene.

The ad above was made by a feminist group called the Guerrilla Girls. Wikipedia tells us this:

Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminists devoted to fighting against sexism within the visual fine art world internationally.

The ad apparently was trying to embarrass the big art museums into displaying more than just white guys’ art, so it’s not really an open letter to Jesse Helms. What does it say about fundie Republicans when they’re being used as examples of shame?

I think the reason the teabaggers and other extremists hate intellectuals and other educated people is they know we’re laughing at them, but they can’t quite figure out the joke.

Since I know a thing or two about school shootings, that image was begging for me to shoot it full of holes.

First of all, like all subjects, there seems to be a diversity of opinion on guns, and that’s fine. Some of those opinions are held by rational people, and that’s even better.

The problem is, there are some people out there with extreme opinions, who think and behave irrationally. Those are the people who bother me. They poison the well. They’re so extreme that they make it impossible for rational people in a rational society to have a rational national discussion on the topic.

There are several topics that seem to attract a disproportionately-massive share of the lunatic fringe. Abortion is one. Guns are another. I don’t know which has the craziest crazies, but I do know which are the most dangerous. Never combine irrational extremist emotion with firearms.

(BTW, just so you know where I’m coming from, I don’t like guns, but I have no desire to repeal the Second Amendment. I do question the sanity and/or logical capabilities of the most rabid of the gun supporters.)

Let’s start with the logic of the argument expressed in the above image.

Problem #1: Correlation ≠ causation. For example, CBS began broadcasting color television signals in January of 1950. Joseph McCarthy began his witch hunts less a month later. Therefore, color television caused McCarthyism!

Problem #2: Children did not take machine guns to school. Therefore, the “fact” that they could, in theory, purchase the gun had no bearing on the safety of their school.

Problem #3: It’s just plain incorrect. There were numerous school shootings prior to 1934! Where’s your machine gun now, Charlton?

For example, the earliest known school shooting was the Enoch Brown school massacre (a.k.a. Pontiac’s Rebellion school massacre) on July 26, 1764.

Wikipedia mentions a few shootings in the 1800s. By the early 1900s, school shootings were all the rage. Wikipedia lists eleven shootings between 1900 and 1934. That’s an average of one shooting every three-and-a-half years. That’s not very rare, is it? Sounds a lot like our modern era, doesn’t it?

So tell me, gun nuts: How is allowing students and teachers to pack heat going to keep our schools safe?

BTW, I just wanted to point out one of the especially unpleasant school shootings of the early 20th century. Read the Wikipedia entry for the San Francisco shooting:

February 12, 1909 San Francisco, California. 10-year-old Dorothy Malakanoff was shot and killed by 49-year-old Demetri Tereaschinko as she arrived at her school in San Francisco. Tereaschinko then shot himself in a failed suicide attempt.

OK. Murder-suicide. We’ve seen that pattern play out numerous times. It’s this last part that’s especially disturbing:

Tereaschinko was reportedly upset that Malakanoff refused to elope with him.

She was ten years old!!! WTF!!! I know standards were different then. I know teenagers often got married, sometimes to much older men. But she was ten freakin’ years old!!!

Who the hell did that guy think he was? Mohammed?