Speaking Natalie  

To Speak Natalie. v.
1. To speak another's idiosyncratic dialect of English.
2. To understand//appreciate who that person is.


Natalie Comfort of the Day
Seeing the Hills of Home.
I've never actually seen hills like home: grassy but studded with rocks, rising steeply against the horizon. This is the skyline that still feels like home.

Previous Comforts of the Day
. Driving Betsy
. Roleplaying
. Waltzing
. Requested Back and Shoulder Massages
. Getting Complimented on Your Dancing
. Hot Cider
. Singing
. Being Held
. Finger Jello
. Violins
. Unsolicited Back and Shoulder Massages

On Spirituality

"But I thought you agreed that Spirit was the good - the end of the whole process? I thought you religious people were all out for spirituality? Didn't we agree that God is a spirit? Don't you worship Him because He is pure spirit?"

"Good heavens, no! We worship Him because He is wise and good. There's nothing specially fine about simply being a spirit. The Devil is a spirit."
- C.S. Lewis

On Honor

In the late twentieth century, you couldn't seriously ask other people to think that you believed in

honor
and truth
and the purity of the body
the defense of women
the sanctity of true love
and all the rest of it.

But apparently, Andre really had believed it.
- Michael Crichton

On Duty

Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.

(This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)
- Robert A. Heinlein


"A Woman's Question"

Do you know you have asked for the costliest thing
Ever made by the Hand above?
A woman's heart, a woman's life -
And a woman's wonderful love.

Do you know you have asked for this priceless thing
As a child might ask for a toy?
Demanding what others have died to win,
With the reckless dash of a boy.

You have written my lesson of duty out,
Manlike, you have questioned me.
Now stand at the bars of my woman's soul
Until I shall question thee.

You require your mutton shall always be hot,
Your socks and your shirt be whole;
I require your heart to be true as God's stars
And as pure as His heaven your soul.

You require a cook for your mutton and beef,
I require a far greater thing;
A seamstress you're wanting for socks and shirts -
I look for a man and a king.

A king for the beautiful realm called Home,
And a man that his Maker, God,
Shall look upon as He did on the first
And say: "It is very good."

I am fair and young, but the rose may fade
From this soft young cheek one day;
Will you love me then 'mid the falling leaves,
As you did 'mong the blossoms of May?

Is your heart an ocean so strong and true,
I may launch my all on its tide?
A loving woman finds heaven or hell
On the day she is made a bride.

I require all things that are grand and true,
All things that a man should be;
If you give this all, I would stake my life
To be all you demand of me.

If you cannot be this, a laundress and cook
You can hire and little to pay;
But a woman's heart and a woman's life
Are not to be won that way.

- Lena Lathrop


Fere. n. A companion, comrade, mate.

"Ballad of the Goodly Fere"

Ha' we lost the goodliest fere o' all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O' ships and the open sea.

When they came wi' a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
"First let these go!" quo' our Goodly Fere,
"Or I'll see ye damned," says he.

Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
"Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?" says he.

Oh we drunk his "Hale" in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o' men was he.

I ha' seen him drive a hundred men
Wi' a bundle o' cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.

They'ss no' get him a' in a book I think
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.

If they think they ha' snared our Goodly Fere
They are fools to the last degree.
"I'll go to the feast," quo' our Goodly Fere,
"Though I go to the gallows tree."

"Ye ha' seen me heal the lame and blind,
And wake the dead," says he,
"Ye shall see one thing to master all:
'Tis how a brave man dies on the tree."

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha' seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.

He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.

I ha' seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o' Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi' his eyes like the grey o' the sea,

Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
I ha' seen him eat o' the honey-comb
Sin' they nailed him to the tree.
- Ezra Pound


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Tactical

A few months ago, I had a conversation with my dad about my Warhammer 40,000 army. It was a thought-provoking experience. Now, Dad is the person who taught me everything I know about wargaming, and my oldest playmate, so it was a lot of fun to talk with him about the use of my orks on the battlefield. But what was thought-provoking was the fact that we could have the conversation at all.

You see, Dad doesn't play 40K.

He doesn't know the rules, either. Has barely ever even asked about them. This is the thought that our conversation provoked: what is the quality of the game that allows Dad and I to have an intelligent conversation about it when only one of us has made a study of the rules?

My answer is this: 40K is a tactical game.

"Tactical" is a buzzword when discussing games, particularly nerdy games that depict violence. "Tactical" the buzzword often means nothing more than "has choices associated with it." I don't find this to be a very helpful definition, since all games present the player with choices to make, so this definition usually ends up focusing on what the speaker things are the important choices. Compare Dawn of War 2 to StarCraft. Both are real-time strategy computer games. In the latter, one of the high-level choices players must make as they play the game is how much of their time and energy to devote to the holy triangle of engaging the opponent's forces in battle (offense), building their own forces (economy), and defending their means of production from the opponent (defense). By and large each of these three tasks is independent from the others, and finding the right balance among the three is one of the most important challenges of the game. Dawn of War 2 does not have this triad of decisions (a triad which has become one of the hallmarks of RTS games), focusing instead on decisions such as when to preserve and when to sacrifice troops, and which territory must be taken and which can be ignored (or abandoned). Because Dawn of War 2 does not present the player with the offense-economy-defense triad of choices, it might be (and has been) criticized as "not tactical."

The U.S. Army Field Manual, wikipedia helpfully informs me, defines tactics as "The employment of units in combat. It includes the ordered arrangement and maneuver of units in relation to each other, the terrain, and the enemy in order to translate potential combat power into victorious battles and engagements." With this as our understanding of "tactics," then, I propose the following definition of a tactical game: A game is tactical to the extent that it admits of analogies between tactics that can successfully be used within the context of the game and tactics that have been or are successfully used by real-world combatants.

One of the obvious implications of this definition is that you can learn about the tactics of a tactical game by learning about the tactics of its real-world analogue(s). In fact, if that analogue is a popular one, by learning about it, you might be learning about multiple tactical games at once, before you even know what they are. One of the less obvious implications is that learning about real-world analogues always teaches you at least something about all tactical games, because all successful real-world tactics have certain things in common. This is the quality that 40K has that allowed Dad and I to discuss the game even though Dad knows nothing about "the game" in the sense of sequence of play, how to read a unit's statline, etc.

You might think that a "tactical" game in this sense is boring, because you can learn about the game without actually playing the game. To some extent this is true; a large part of the appeal of a tactical game is in attempting to put one's tactical ideas into practice - the fun is in the application of knowledge to form a plan and execute it, not in gaining the knowledge in the first place.

In a sci-fi context, though, there actually is an element of discovery, because things don't necessarily look like what they are. For instance, consider my orks. Although they are large and green and armed with automatic weapons, they are essentially Napoleonic infantry. They function to best effect when deployed in contiguous battle lines with mutual support. The advance of orky infantry is dependent in large part upon coordinating simultaneous impact with the enemy, in picking a time and place to advance that neither leaves one exposed for too long nor unduly disrupts the formation, and in prosecuting the attack once begun with resolution. All things that would have been familiar to a commander of infantry in the early nineteenth century, I imagine.

Similarly, my ork warbikes function essentially as cavalry - they are highly mobile, but lack staying power, and flounder against a bold defense by infantry unless they have near numerical parity. Warbikes are not to be thrown against the front of an enemy formation unless they have every advantage, and sometimes not even then. And yet my warbike-mounted nobz (bigger, nastier orks on warbikes) function not as cavalry but more like a tank - unlike cavalry, they combine high mobility with high durability and high combat power. Regular warbikers go where the enemy is not. Nob bikers can force the enemy to be where they are not.

Part of the fun here is just the incongruity between what a unit looks like and what it is. Green-skinned aliens on motorcycles don't necessarily look like Frenchmen on horses, but they function the same way. It's not obvious that if you just increase the size of the greenskin he and his motorcycle buddies morph into a single armored fighting vehicle, but there you go. But another part of the fun is in figuring out why a unit is what it is. Nob bikers are "tanks" because they have the speed, durability, and combat power to muscle the enemy aside. But they aren't actually a single tank; they're multiple big orks on Harleys. The mechanism is different but the result is the same, so the two units can be employed in the same way.

The relationship is a little more complex than that, of course; nob bikers aren't tank-like in every respect (they lack the ability to project combat power at a distance, for instance), but if you patch together enough analogies from real-world tactics you can come up with a sound doctrine for their use. Figuring out the proper patchwork of analogies is part of the discovery fun, and then you get the fun of applying that patchwork to devise and execute a plan.

Not every game admits of this kind of analogizing. Many first-person shooters, for instance, bear no resemblance to any real-world tactics. The only way to learn about the tactics of Quake is, well, to play Quake, or other games in the "twitch shooter" genre. No amount of clever analogies will change that, and all the knowledge in the world about close-quarters battle will be of basically zero use. The only way to learn about the tactics of Final Fantasy Tactics is to play that game, or other such "tactics" games. No analogies can be drawn to real world combat of any time period. These games offer lots of interesting choices and skills to master, but they aren't "tactical."

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  posted by Natalie @ 3:04 PM 1 comments


Monday, May 11, 2009  

 
Let's Go Shopping

But all love was troubled and made cold, and Maleldil's voice became hard to hear so that wisdom grew little among them. - C.S. Lewis, in Perelandra

I heard a story once, in law school. I don't know if it's true or not. The story goes that a transactional lawyer much like myself was once at a presentation being given by another lawyer who did public interest work. After the presentation the transactional lawyer, much impressed, caught the presenter and expressed his sincere admiration for the cause he had just heard about, and the work that the presenter was doing. "Why don't you join us?" asked the presenter. "We could always use more attorneys on staff."

Feeling a little guilty, the transactional lawyer declined. "The work I'm doing here is important too," he said.

To his surprise, the presenter agreed. "Yes," he said. "The world needs people that do what you do. But if it ever feels less than heroic, give me a call."

For most of my life I have been - overall - quite content with where I was, and what I was doing. It was enough to keep my eyes on the present, because I was sure that what I was doing now was what God needed me to do, and that he would lead me in due time to what I needed to do in the future. I wasn't caught on the academic treadmill like some. I was fortunate in that I really did like school, but I never felt any pressure to take certain classes or to go to certain schools or even to perform well, except that I wanted to kick ass academically because I knew that I could. Gifts want to be used.

I was also fortunate in that most of my thinking spiritual life was conveniently broken up into bite-sized chunks. More or less the seasons of my spiritual life coincided with the major school changes - middle school, high school, undergrad. I just knew, without perhaps thinking it through very critically, that my life would change at those junctures, and roughly speaking they did. This being my conviction and my experience, it was difficult to feel too adrift. Whatever was going on now was what I needed to be doing now, and now was very probably going to end at or about the next graduation, which was never more than four years away.

I wrote home once that being at Stanford was like being on vacation all the time. From this point of retrospect, my entire life prior to graduation seems that way.

And then came law school, which was the next thing that I knew God needed me to do.
For the first time school was hard, intellectually and morally (not that there weren't intellectually hard things at Stanford, but I didn't feel called to chemistry, thank God, and my classics studies weren't hard - they merely required lots of effort). And not only were things hard, but for the first time, I wasn't sure I could do it. At all.

Something broke inside me during law school that still hasn't been put together. The confidence that I could do anything - maybe not easily, but that I could do it - was shattered. Not obliterated. But fractured. Unwhole. Something else was shattered at the same time: the sense that God was with me.

Please note that I said the sense. The great rhetra upon which Charismatics learn to rely grew hard to hear, and wisdom has perhaps grown little with me of late. And so I am left going to work many days, like today, feeling decidedly unheroic, wondering what it's all for, and not really convinced, deep down, that I can kick this job's ass if I really have to.

Mornings (and afternoons) like that are bleak, especially because I still feel like I'm where I need to be and doing what I need to do. My moral North Star feels like it's grown dimmer, but I'm still sure where it is.

So what's a guy to do?

A lot of things that Charismatics learn to rely on are like sex - they're great, and I think it's stupid to build a relationship without them, but it's equally stupid to build a relationship upon them. So it is with the voice of God. So it's hard to hear these days, is it? Well, what of it? What does that change?

It changes how brave I feel. It changes how safe I feel. But does it change what I know? What I trust?

Depends upon what my trust is founded. If my trust is founded upon the subjective religious experience of hearing the voice of God, then I am a) screwed and b) a great fool. But my trust is not founded upon that; it is founded upon Scripture, and buttressed by experience. And Scripture tells me that while God may speak to me, he won't necessarily - and it suggests that if I find him hard to hear, the problem is more likely on my end than his. Very well, there's plenty about my spiritual life that could be better. Very well, this sucks. Doesn't change what I know. What I trust.

So I don't always feel like I can do it, do I? Well, why did I feel that way before? If it was because I was a cocky smartass, well, losing that isn't a bad thing. If it was because I knew that what I had to do is something God has called me to do, or that my success - indeed, my very competence - rested on him more than me, well, that puts a different spin on the need to front up and get on with it.

So I don't feel heroic, do I? Well, who does? I don't actually think that heroism ever really feels heroic. Heroism is, as I know perfectly well, usually just getting on with the job in the face of what seem like very good reasons not to.

This isn't to say that there aren't things in me that truly are broken, and need to be fixed. And I do miss the old certainty that all was well because, if we had to, God and I could kick the ass of anything that came our way. But in the meantime, I need to focus on what I know.

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  posted by Natalie @ 8:43 PM 6 comments


Monday, April 27, 2009  

 
Beyond Grace

I had a recent conversation with Marion that brought me back to the subject of Bioshock. Bioshock wins my award for Best Use of Violence in a Long, Long Time. The game's hype touted its "moral choice" system, but what that really boiled down to was whether you killed mutated little girls to increase your power now, or cured them of their horrible condition in order to increase your power later. It was viscerally effective - when you had the little girls in your hands they were so little girl-like you really felt awful about killing them, which is the real reason I never did - but it was trying way too hard. And the fact that you were rewarded for saving the little girls turned the whole thing into a simple economic transaction.

But Bioshock did and does make me think about moral choices all the same. Let me sketch a bit of background first for those who haven't played the game. Yes, spoilers follow. In Bioshock, the player finds himself in a nightmare underwater art-deco city called Rapture, founded by a visionary man named Andrew Ryan with a chip on his shoulder and one too many copies of Atlas Shrugged in his library. Naturally, this Objectivist paradise is overrun in fairly short order by a gifted thug named Frank Fontaine, whose criminal empire ruins the society. Fontaine spends most of the game playing the player for a fool by posing as "Atlas," a revolutionary figure who still struggles to overthrow Ryan's hypocritical tyranny. "Atlas'" wife and daughter are trapped in the hellish underbelly of the city, which is overrun by crazed mutagen-addicts, and he implores the player's aid to save them.

That will do for set-up. It's important to understand, though, that the aforesaid crazed mutagen-addicts (called "splicers" in the game) have some memory of their former selves, and like all drug addicts, are essentially pathetic. The player is forced to kill a good many of them, but none of them want to die, and are still human enough to feel pain and have desires other than killing the player. They cry over lost babies, have loving relationships, and on more than one occasion I felt that in their dying moments (e.g., as they were running around like human torches because I had immolated them) they regretted what they had become. One of these splicers is a boss-type character named Sander Cohen, who believes himself to be a great artist (and probably once was). Cohen is also a really nasty guy, who chains piano players to pianos to "audition" for him by playing one of his masterpieces and blowing them up when they fail to live up to his standards, creates statues out of people by covering them in plaster, that sort of thing. Yet the player must traverse his part of Rapture in order to reach Atlas' poor wife and son. By the end of it you've been forced to do Cohen's dirty work by killing several other splicers who hate Cohen for what he has done to them and their families, and Cohen at last reveals himself to congratulate you and wish you on your way.

So there I stood, with the monster at last before me, a not-inconsiderable arsenal of mutagen-granted powers, and a very powerful gun in my hand. I seriously considered blowing his head off. I had no reason not to; he had given me everything I needed to get past his locked doors. I even suspected he had a key on him I could use to gain some valuable loot. But I didn't. Why did I want to kill him? Because he was a terrible person. Well, so what? Does being a terrible person justify your execution? Cohen was indeed a monster, but was he beyond forgiveness? He was, at heart, like all the other splicers - doing terrible things in his drug-addled thirst for the things humans value most - love, family, art. I stayed my hand and moved on. But the entire Cohen sequence was enormously creepy, not least because I was killing people I had no desire to kill, and no clear reason to kill other than that they were in my way and attacking the intruder in their midst (me). Despite the fact that Cohen was the most morally despicable person in his private nightmare realm, and very nearly the only person I had not killed, it was almost a relief to let him live.

Contrast this with another situation, later on in the game, when it became clear that Atlas was Frank Fontaine, and I had been his cat's paw all along. Fontaine is, as you might guess, the ultimate villain of the piece, and the final act of the game is dedicated to hunting and putting him down. Yes, he has a megalomaniacal scheme to mutate himself into some kind of ubermensch, and for the sake of the few sane people in Rapture one might feel an obligation to stop him. But the truth is that I wanted to kill him because he had been using me, and in some twisted game logic that was an unforgivable sin.

I've experienced this sort of state before, as Danielle Meroit and as Monica Corvallyn. A few other games have had hints of it. It's like grace, but in reverse. If grace is unmerited favor, this is a state in which favor is unmeritable. Where a person (in this case, Fontaine) is beyond redemption, a stain on existence that cannot be blotted out by repentance, good works, or mitigating circumstances. Only death will do, the more callous and brutal the better.

Was Fontaine's wrong any greater than Cohen's? Not clearly. He was a manipulative, megalomaniacal bastard, to be sure, but he wasn't a sadistic artiste. His was a common, almost bureaucratic sort of evil - the cold pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Cohen's was darker, more sinister. But I skulked about Cohen's lair, scared and ashamed, and for all his horrors I was proud to let him live. There was something cleansing about it. Fontaine I pursued like an angel nemesis, and woe betide anyone foolish enough to try to protect him. The horrors of Rapture were expunged in that state of mind. Fontaine was not even a man any more. He was only a thing to be killed, and the clear, brutal certainty that his death was Something That Must Be Done.

I find this state of mind fascinating, because it is in my opinion the most horrific of all states that the human mind can get into. I think it strikes me this way because it really is the opposite of grace, and grace is the great trademark of the mind of God. Forgiveness is always an option, because in the final analysis forgiveness is never fully warranted. It cannot be fully warranted. No action will take back a wrong. We can paper over the wound, but what was done cannot be undone, and so restitution can never truly make a person whole. When forgiveness is taken off the table, whether we realize it or not we are saying that we refuse to forgive them. When we do that, we cut ourselves off from recognizing the very nature of forgiveness itself, and isolate ourselves against the very heart of God.

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  posted by Natalie @ 11:26 AM 2 comments


Monday, February 09, 2009  

 
On Homosexuality

Previously, I mentioned that I had a rant reserved for people who think that the Bible expresses any views about homosexuality, or homosexuals, or "being" homosexual, but that I would skip over that part. Recently, somebody asked if I would elaborate.

I wish that this wasn't a sensitive topic, but I've found that people have an unfortunate inability to discuss theology academically. So if this is a sensitive topic for you, I suggest you just stop reading now. Alternatively, if academic discussions of theology are boring or offensive to you, I likewise suggest that you just stop reading now.

The commenter I refer to asked a couple of questions, which I would group as follows:

1. What is my aforementioned rant?
2. What combination of genetic and environmental factors do I think shapes sexual orientation?
3. Do I agree with research showing that orientation can be changed?
4. Do I think the above has any bearing on a theological understanding of homosexuality?

Most of these questions I am not going to address here in any detail. To briefly dispose of those:

2. I am not a biologist, let alone a biologist with a specialization that bears on the development of sexual orientation. I do know that Robert Sapolsky, who meets at least some of those requirements, took only one class to convince me that "genetic vs. environmental" is not a useful opposition. I consider it common sense that sexual orientation is shaped by a combination of genetic and environmental factors, and I consider myself spectacularly unqualified to hold an opinion beyond that.

3. I don't agree with that research for the two simple reasons that a) I have not seen any, and b) I do not have the intellectual equipment to evaluate it critically even if somebody did show it to me. To give an example I'm somewhat more qualified to discuss, if I showed somebody the work of William Tarn on Alexander the Great, and told them (truthfully) that Tarn was one of the great classicists of the 20th century, they might come to the conclusion that Alexander the Great was one of humanity's great heroes. They would probably have little to no knowledge of subsequent work on Alexander that has severely criticized Tarn's vision as idealistic and even naive. In a similar way, showing me research concluding that orientation can be changed, even if done in a reputable way by a reputable research team, would be insufficient. I do not begin to have either the breadth or depth of education to critically evaluate conversion therapy research, and therefore I decline to have an opinion about it.

4. I think that knowledge about the world "bears on" the theological understanding of anything, so yes. But I don't really think there is much of a theological understanding of homosexuality, specifically.

Which brings me to 1: what is my rant?

EDIT: Thayet points out that I never actually summarize my conclusions, which makes this post a pain to read. So here's the summary:

I don't think the Bible says anything about homosexuality or homosexual orientation. This is no surprise; the concept of homosexuality as a fact of a person's identity was simply not an ancient concept, so we should not expect to find anything about it in ancient works. About half of the texts historically used to support a supposed Biblical ban on homosexuality do not even apply to Christian morality. The most I think you can get from the passages that do apply to Christian morality is a disapproval of homosexual sex. This is how I read those passages, but I recognize that that isn't the only plausible way to read them.

So, there's the summary. Here's what underlies it:

Any time a person says that "the Bible says" something, it's important to look at the actual text. In the case of the Bible's statements on homosexuality, we might identify the following passages:

Genesis 19
Leviticus 18:22
Leviticus 20:13
Judges 19

Romans 1:26-27
1 Corinthians 6:9-10
1 Timothy 1:8-11

I'm not going to bother quoting the passages; you can look them up yourself easily enough, and if for some reason you don't have a Bible handy you can still look them up. But I do encourage you to keep the text on hand in the discussion that follows. I hope it goes without saying, but although I am sometimes citing particular verses, I intend them to be read in their larger context.

The first and most obvious thing to notice about the list above is that the first three references are found in the Torah. This should immediately (but alas, seldom does) raise a red flag in the mind of anybody reading those passages for their application to Christian morality (which is roughly what "the Bible says" really means). Anything found in the Law should immediately bring to mind passages such as:

Acts 13:38-39
Acts 15 (particularly vv. 23-29)
Romans 2-8:11 (particularly 6:14)
Galatians 2:15-16
Ephesians 2:14-16

Those passages, and others like them, are the textual foundation for the well-settled but often-ignored Christian principle that Christians, qua Christians, are not subject to the Mosaic Law. Ordinarily this would be a commonsense principle - nobody expects Hindus to imagine themselves bound by the teachings of Islam, for instance - but because of Christianity's peculiar relationship with Judaism people sometimes forget that Christians do not imagine themselves bound by the strictures of Judaism (this misunderstanding lies at the root of the lamentably common "shellfish argument," I shouldn't wonder).

We need to take a digression at this point to discuss why, if the principle that Christians are not under the Law is so well-settled, Christians are so curiously concerned with the Old Testament in general, and the Torah in particular. A simple answer would be to refer to 1 Corinthians 10:11, but let me try to elaborate on one particular aspect. We care, I venture to say, because plainly enough God cared too, at one time, for one people - and we are interested in what God cares about. This is often phrased in Christianese as looking for the "spiritual principle" behind the text. This is commonsensical enough when applied to books like Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, which are in the form of history - even so-called "liberal" scholars of the Bible would agree that the authors of those books wrote them down to illustrate particular principles they considered important. When one conceives of God as having person-like qualities, though ("personal" in Christianese), it makes sense to apply the same type of analysis to other types of books as well. If you want to know what sort of man was Robert E. Lee, reading everything he wrote is a good place to start, even if the letters and orders weren't addressed to you. If you want to know what sort of god is ours, we argue, reading everything he wrote is likewise a good place to start, even if the Law you're reading doesn't apply to you.

But it is of course only a good place to start, and introduces a dangerous amount of reader judgment into the picture. What do you conclude from Lee's writings? Reasonable people could conclude different things. What spiritual principle is behind the Levitical Code? Reasonable people could conclude different things. The text still matters, of course - reasonable people cannot, for instance, conclude from Lee's writings that he considered loyalty to one's home state of no account. But the result is still highly sensitive to the individual reader's personal proclivities and outside influences.

That isn't to say that this sort of analysis should never be engaged in, but it is to say that it calls for a great deal of humility. This is particularly true when discussing the conclusions from such analysis with other people.

With these thoughts in mind, let us return to the text.

Each of the Old Testament passages in question relates to homosexual activity. The reference is always to action, and particularly to sexual intercourse. For instance, Leviticus 18:22 by its terms relates to sex "with a male as with a woman." The most obvious literal meaning of "as with a woman," vaginal intercourse, is impossible, but it seems to me that the text is pretty clearly talking about sex of some sort - perhaps as specific as anal intercourse, perhaps as broad as any sort of ejaculatory activity. The reference is specifically to sex, though. Our definition of "lie with" would need to be very broad indeed to bring, say, homosexual kissing within the purview of this passage (and any sort of ban on males kissing males seems unlikely given the cultural context of Leviticus, in any case).

I want to emphasize, for this is a theme to which I shall return, that the Old Testament passages refer to homosexual activity, rather than to homosexual states of being. Leviticus does not say, "Thou shalt not be gay." It seems to say something along the lines of "Don't insert your penis into the bodily cavities of a man." (EDIT: Alanna tells me that there isn't even a word for "homosexual" in ancient Hebrew, and points me to this helpful discussion of what precisely Leviticus might be saying and why.) In two cases - the rapes recounted in Genesis 19 and Judges 19 - the homosexual acts were demanded by mobs that were apparently just as happy to rape women as men, which certainly casts doubt on any attempt to label the activity in those stories as homosexual. Indeed, the emphasis in the rape stories seems to me to be on the perfectly obvious horror of rowdy mobs demanding rape victims, rather than on the gender of the victims or the sexual orientation of their attackers. There's also probably an emphasis in the author's mind on the horror of attacking strangers who are under the hospitality of a local - but I don't think there's anything here talking about homosexual sex, let alone homosexuality.

Setting these observations aside for a moment, let us turn to the New Testament passages.

The New Testament passages are of a different character than the Old Testament ones. They aren't stories, as in Genesis and Judges; neither are they in the form of statutes, as in Leviticus. Instead they are almost asides. Romans 1:26-27 uses homosexual activity as an example of a society gone wrong; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 assumes that the reader knows or ought to know that those who engage in homosexual activity are unrighteous persons who will not inherit the kingdom of God, and 1 Timothy 1:8-11 likewise lists those who engage in homosexual activity are not righteous persons.

Let me stop here and acknowledge that these are troubling passages. My commitment to them as the Word of God doesn't make me blind to that fact. I decline to say "troubling passages to modern eyes" because I don't think they are any more troubling to modern eyes than they would have been to ancient ones. Again, if this is upsetting to you, I suggest you either stop reading entirely or at least take a break and come back to this post another time.

The Old Testament passages are, in my opinion, fairly easily dismissed. Two of them have only the most tenuous connection to homosexual sex, and the other two are part of a body of law the New Testament specifically states Christians are not bound by. These dodges are not available for the New Testament passages, though. So what do these passages actually say?

The chief observation I would make about them is that they are, again, about homosexual activity. I have heard it argued that the phrase "burned in their lust for one another" in Romans 1:27 suggests that homosexual desire is also seen as sinful by God. I disagree. That argument seems to me to conflate desire with lust. It is neither surprising not controversial to find Scripture stating that God finds lust to be sinful. The word usually translated "lust" here is orexis, which does simply mean "yearning" rather than "lust" specifically (in fact I don't know of any really good Greek equivalent to the English "lust" in its modern vernacular sense; that meaning usually has to be selected by context). But other words in the passage, particularly "burned," make me fairly certain that Paul meant orexis in the sense of "lust" rather than in its tamer sense of "strongly desired." So the Romans passage appears to use women having sex with women, men having sex with men, and both lusting after the aforesaid, as evidence of a degenerate society.

The 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy passages use a curious word, arsenokoitês, and much ink has been spilled about its meaning. Arsenokoitês is a noun, and it is usually translated something like "sodomites" or "homosexual offenders" in English. Translating it is somewhat difficult because it is not a common word, and ancient Greek is a dead language. The two halves of the word mean "male" and "sleeps with," and it bears a striking structural similarity to mêtêrkoitês, "mother-fucker" (with roughly equivalent profane connotations in both Greek and English). A literal translation of arsenokoitês would therefore be something along the lines of "men who sleep with men." I don't think there's enough context to say for sure whether Paul meant the term as a profanity (something like "men-fuckers") or not.

Religioustolerance.org has a more or less useful discourse on possible meanings of arsenokoitês which probably deserves to be mentioned here, since it's the first hit on a Google search for "Bible homosexuality." I disagree with that article in places - chiefly, I think that arsenokoitês may well have been used in place of a paederasty-related word precisely because the author wanted to get at the homosexual sex act itself, rather than limiting his scope to paederasty or expanding it to include the relational aspects of paederasty, and I don't know how you get "masturbators" out of arsenokoitês - but if you're curious, you can take a look.

It is precisely because arsenokoitês is a difficult word to translate that I prefer to default to the literal definition of men who sleep with men, and indeed that is the definition settled upon by the leading academic Greek lexicon. Religioustolerance.org and I agree on at least one point, though, which is that the word's emphasis is on the sex act.

Which brings us to my main point.

Modern discourse about homosexuality assumes that homosexuality is a status. A person's sexual orientation is a part of their identity. A person "is" homosexual or heterosexual. As near as I have been able to determine, the very concept of homosexuality, or homosexuals, is essentially a 19th-century concept. I am quite certain, from my classics education, that the ancients did not think of things in that way. I have no doubt they would recognize that certain people had sex with men more than with women, or vice versa, but that's just it - the focus would have been on the sex act itself and the gender of the sex actees, not on the sex actor. As my professors at Stanford pointed out, gender itself in the ancient Greek conception wasn't really a binary (or even trinary) concept. It was a continuum. We can see this reflected in ancient Greek sexual practice, where it would not be at all uncommon for individuals we would think of as "heterosexual" having "homosexual" sex, and vice versa. You could phrase it as everybody in ancient Greece being bisexual, but even that is missing the point. There simply was no ancient concept equivalent to the modern one of sexual orientation.

When we keep this in mind, it's no surprise to find our New Testament passages talking about specific types of sex acts rather than about sexual orientation. How is Paul supposed to write about something for which he has no concept, let alone a word? Even if he could, why would he, if his readers had no concept of sexual orientation either? For this reason, I think it's very dangerous to assume that when Paul writes about homosexual activity, he is also by implication writing about sexual orientation.

My personal conviction is that everybody who looks for what "the Bible says" about homosexuality using the modern status-based conception is on a fool's errand, for two reasons. The first is that the status-based conception is simply not an ancient one, which I think is seen plainly enough by the fact that Scripture consistently appears to be discussing sex acts rather than types of people. The orientation discussion simply isn't there. The second is that I'm not at all sure that the status-based conception of sexual orientation is even a good way to think about these issues. Personally I am inclined to take a page from the ancients and think of sexual orientation as a continuum, and I'm also strongly tempted to take another page from them and not think that sexual orientation is one of a person's defining characteristics, period.

If I've convinced you thus far, we've arrived at a point where we see no Scriptural passages discussing homosexuality - in short, we've concluded that "the Bible says" nothing on the subject of sexual orientation one way or another. But what about homosexual sex?

I think you'll agree with me by now that there is some room for doubt when it comes to what I think of as the three main Biblical passages on this issue - the Romans, 1 Corinthians, and 1 Timothy passages we've been discussing. Personally, I think the best reading of those passages is to conclude that God doesn't like homosexual sex. There are all sorts of issues one can raise about that reading (e.g., are we to believe that God is okay with people wanting to have sex but not okay with them having it?), but on the whole I think it's more true to the text than any other. I can certainly see how other people can (and have) reached different conclusions, and to the extent that those different conclusions are the honest results of a good faith effort to read the text for what it actually says, I have no problem with them. As for different conclusions that are otherwise held, well, I have a problem with all opinions held as a result of intellectual dishonesty, and I think most people are with me on that one.

It's worth pointing out at the end of this post that the most overwhelming response I have when I search Scripture on this topic is a powerful, humbling response of I don't know. I think we are called to interpret Scripture as best we can, and my best efforts lead me to the conclusion that God has some sort of problem with homosexual sex. Thankfully, not many people crave my approval of their homosexual sex acts (and why should they?), so the issue doesn't come up very often. To the extent that it does, my best answer is this: get to know Jesus, read the Bible, and tell me what you think.

As for the other issues that are current today - such as whether or not it's okay to "be" homosexual, or whether homosexuals can marry - I don't think the Bible says anything specific at all. I can only conclude that either I'm being exceptionally dense in my reading of Scripture, or else God didn't consider those issues noteworthy enough to address in Scripture. I suspect it's the latter, which means I think it would be dangerous for me to make them too big a deal. That leaves me to remember humbly that a) God knows more than I do, and b) God loves "homosexuals" as much as he loves me, and I know from experience that he loves me a great deal indeed. That is enough for me.

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  posted by Natalie @ 2:54 PM 6 comments


Tuesday, December 16, 2008  

 
Tomb Raider: Underworld

Yesterday I played through the Tomb Raider: Underworld demo for the PC one and three-quarters times, and I thought I’d post some thoughts on it. I’m sure there are going to be plenty of reviews of the actual game posted in the next couple of days, but I’m not a reviewer and in any case, gleaning useful information from the miasma of ad-supported, score-bound reviews is like … well, trying to glean anything useful from anything that can be described with the word “miasma.”

The hour or so I spent with the TRU demo (edit: somewhat more time today) was the longest amount of time I’ve ever devoted to a Tomb Raider title, so I don’t really have much of a sense of the history and idiosyncrasies of the franchise. I mention that because I’ve seen some reviews that seem to criticise the game for being basically about … well, raiding tombs. This seems strange to me. I’m no expert, as I said, but I would have thought you criticise a Tomb Raider title for not raiding tombs (as was in fact the case with some earlier titles, as I understand it).

Speaking of things other reviews seem to criticize the game for, I’m not quite sure whether the people who objected to the camera were playing the same game I was. I had enough camera control that I felt in control at all times (in fact the camera control was one of the selling points for me in a way, see below), and the demo never pushed me into “leap of faith gameplay” territory (to quote Yahtzee). It came close once, early on, but I was always able to manipulate the camera in a reasonable way such that I could see what I needed to see figure out where I was going.

Where I was going was, of course, the major part of the gameplay. I classify Tomb Raider as a “movement puzzle” game, alongside such notable favorites of mine as the Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia franchises. A “movement puzzle” game, as I use the term, is any game where the primary obstacle to the player is how to navigate the environment. There may be combat, but the main challenge and joy of the game is the environment itself and how the player moves around it. In the case of the Splinter Cell game (a Tom Clancy franchise involving the adventures of superspy Sam Fisher) the puzzle is how to navigate realistic environments without being seen, using an array of only slightly-larger-than-life acrobatics and gadgets. In the case of a Prince of Persia game, the puzzle is how to navigate fantastic environments using magical weapons and over-the-top, wire-fu acrobatics.

Tomb Raider falls somewhere in the middle. The ruins that Lara explores are more fantastic than realistic, but no more so than you might expect to find in Hollywood. And they were really gorgeous. I’ve read a couple reviews that mentioned moments that really make you say wow, and I have to admit that the first time I rounded a corner and saw the ruins I was headed towards I really did just stop and admire the view. It wasn’t just that the graphics were good; it was that somebody had planned that moment, had framed the shot, for no other reason than to say to the player, “This is where you are going. Isn’t it cool?” In a movement puzzle game I call that intelligent game design. I am playing the game to move around environments, after all. I appreciate knowing that the game designers know that.

Of course, I am also playing the game to move around environments in cool ways, and I must say that in that regard the Underworld demo was cooler than I expected. The actual range of movement was about what I expected—scaling walls, shimmying along ledges, action heroine leaps, balancing along narrow beams, swinging on poles, wall jumping, the usual sort of thing. What was unexpectedly cool was the way Lara did all that stuff. I was impressed and surprised by the depth of Lara’s animation. To give two examples, at one point I stopped on a staircase to look around. Ordinarily games don’t let you stop in between two steps on a stair, but as I was scanning my surroundings to see where I ought to go next, I noticed that Lara had one foot on the next stair up and was looking around as well. At another point, I was shimmying around a sharp corner, and the game let me pause, stretched precariously between the two faces of the rock I was cornering. The game was just full of little things like that that made the familiar process of acrobatic climbing unexpectedly cool to watch. From interviews I’ve seen the animation team is very proud of their work, and I would say they deserve to be. Ordinarily this isn’t the sort of thing that impresses me about a game, but again, this is a game I am playing in order to move around. The mere act of moving had better be cool.

As for the places I was asked to go—in other words, the actual level design—that was pretty cool too. It took me about an hour to get to the end of the demo the first time through. I felt suitably challenged during that time, and suitably badass climbing to, around, and through the ruins.

I also felt suitably badass during the two combats the demo gave me against Bengal tigers, which brings me to the subject of combat. First, the good. The tigers were faster than I was and I was not able to gun them down before they reached me. By itself that’s bad (but see below), but it did mean that I was forced to outmaneuver the tigers through my acrobatic prowess. Targeting was a non-issue; the game did that for me, which is just as well because I was spending just about every second dodging tigers in a pretty spectacular display of gunplay + tumbling. In other words, even the combat was really basically a movement puzzle, and it looked pretty much exactly how I wanted a fight with a tiger to look.

The bad—on the default settings it took an absurd number of 9mm rounds to put down a big cat. Thankfully the game includes a difficulty slider for how much health enemies have (and a separate one for how much damage Lara takes. Big kudos to Crystal Dynamics for separating those two features, which is the sort of very simple thing I’ve been saying game companies should do for years), so I think that will mostly solve that problem. Once I tuned the difficulty sliders to what I felt was more reasonable (less enemy health, more damage done to me), my weapons felt a lot better. Not realistic, but I’m okay if Tomb Raider is less than a simulation.

More perplexing is this question: while the wildlife fights felt well integrated mechanically, why was I fighting tigers to begin with? There was no indication I had stumbled into their lair or something, and in any case, tigers aren’t pack hunters. Oh, right, and remember the part where I was shooting the tigers? Other than the immediate motivation of trying to stay alive, the whole exercise felt kind of pointless. This goes back to not having played Tomb Raider games before. I gather it’s a convention of the franchise that Lara fights hostile wildlife. I can only imagine this is the result of some poor misguided soul back in the ‘90s who thought it was more acceptable to kill endangered species than human beings. As Ayudaren says, who could possibly have given that the thumbs up? At least with people you can shape a story so that the player feels that yes, these people need to die.

Fortunately, from what I gather, Crystal Dynamics has. In fact a major reason I bothered to pick up the demo in the first place is because I was excited about throwing Lara’s signature athleticism into the mix with some human opponents in environments other than ancient ruins. I can’t really comment on the story, of course, other than what everybody knows from the press—that Lara is looking for Mjolnir to access the underworld, and that all cultures’ afterlives are apparently the same, and I’m pretty sure the villainess from Tomb Raider: Legend (the Crystal Dynamics prequel to Underworld) is still alive. Which is all pretty standard fare for this genre of storytelling. The question is whether they handle the conventions and formulae adroitly or not, and that of course I can’t say from just the demo.

I can say that the voice acting I heard from the demo was surprisingly good. That doesn’t necessarily correlate with good writing, but it’s a positive sign. And of course it is valuable in its own right because, let’s face it, it’s Lara Croft. And if Lara is lame, then the game isn’t worth getting. Which brings us to the issue of Lara Croft.

First off, to get it out of the way, she looks good. We’ve come a long way since 1996, and Lara looks like a human being by now. A human being with large breasts, to be sure, but a human being with breasts. As opposed to, you know, a blow-up doll with melons.

I’ve never fully understood the fascination with Lara’s breasts, because as graphics capabilities have evolved it’s seemed clear to me that she has always intended to be an all-around attractive woman. She’s tough, independent-minded, smart, well educated, well bred, athletic, is comfortable with firearms, and generally solves problems using her brains instead of her body. In the quasi-mythic mindspace of a videogame, it doesn’t water down such a character for her to be pretty (and she is in this incarnation, to be sure). That would be like saying Achilles’ badassness is watered down by the fact that Athena helps him kill Hector, or that Hector didn’t really beat Patroclus because Apollo knocked him senseless first. It’s getting it all backwards. Really, there is nothing wrong or chauvinist with finding a character like that attractive, in the Natalian sense.

And she is attractive. If she wasn’t, to be honest, there’d be no game. Mechanically, Tomb Raider is a movement puzzle game, and Underworld looks like an attractive one to me. But that gets you to game theory. To move beyond game theory to game design, you need an awesomeness factor that turns the product into a brand. Lara Croft is what makes Tomb Raider awesome. But Lara Croft in a very expansive sense—the way she moves, what she moves in and around, why she’s doing it. And on those scores Underworld seems worth my money.

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  posted by Natalie @ 12:11 AM 0 comments


Friday, November 21, 2008  

 
Breaking News

Two things that are of critical importance:

1. First, and most importantly: I beat Thayet in Scrabble last night (11/18/08), 330 to 277. This was my win at Scrabble ever. It was also my first bingo (using all 7 letters in a single play) - "ditties," on the bottom triple word score, with the S connecting with another word. Archimedes (and Thayet) would be so proud (I think).

2. Second, the Supreme Court has denied the petitioners' request in Strauss v Horton to stay Proposition 8 until the case was resolved. This means that Proposition 8 will be in effect until the resolution of the case against it, although it doesn't necessarily imply anything about how the court is feeling regarding the merits of that case. All it really means is that the court was unpersuaded that leaving Proposition 8 in place for a few months would cause anybody "irreparable harm."

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  posted by Natalie @ 2:37 PM 1 comments


Wednesday, November 19, 2008  

 
Strauss v Horton

I apologize if the profusion of Proposition 8 posts is getting monotonous, but this is an issue I care about a lot, so I’m back for another one. Speaking to Ayudaren shortly before the election, he pointed out (or rather, his mother pointed out) that should Proposition 8 pass it would almost certainly precipitate an immediate federal court challenge. At the time, he wondered if this would be the catalyst that would finally force the federal supreme court to weigh in on the issue.

As it happened, the court challenge did materialize – but surprisingly, it was another challenge in state court. Strauss v Horton is the case, presently proceeding before the California supreme court, seeking to get Proposition 8 overturned.

When I first heard about this I was extremely skeptical. After all, a constitutional amendment cannot itself be unconstitutional. If the constitution explicitly says, “Marriage is between one man and one woman,” then that provision stands even though elsewhere the constitution says everyone has a fundamental right to marry. The effect of the two together is simply to define what that right to marry actually looks like. Declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional on the basis of In Re Marriage Cases would be like declaring the 16th Amendment unconstitutional because Article I prohibits income tax.

Turns out, the plaintiffs’ argument in Strauss is rather more nuanced than that. They are arguing not that the substance of Proposition 8 invalidates it, but rather the way it was passed.

The California constitution can be explicitly altered in one of two ways: by “amendment” or by “revision.” An “amendment” may be put to the people by 2/3rds of the legislature, or through the initiative process. A “revision” may only be put to the people by 2/3rds of the legislature, who may also (again by a 2/3rds majority vote) put to the people the question of whether to call a constitutional convention to “revise” the constitution.

Both “amendments” and “revisions” require a mere majority vote once put to the people for ratification. The key difference is that only “amendments” may be put to the people via initiative, as Proposition 8 was. So the question is, was Proposition 8 an “amendment” or a “revision?” If the former, then all is well and the vote stands. If the latter, then Proposition 8 should never have been on the ballot to begin with and it will not stand.

Unfortunately the constitution provides not a word of guidance as to the difference between an “amendment” and a “revision.” Court cases are rather thin on the ground as well (you might imagine this sort of thing hardly comes up very often).

The leading case, Raven v. Deukmejian, 52 Cal. 3d 336 (1990), concerned an “amendment” put to the people by initiative. The amendment in question was 21,000 words long, substantially altered or outright repealed 15 of the 25 articles of the constitution, dealt with a very broad range of issues, and prevented the state supreme court from interpreting the state constitution in a more defendant-friendly way than the federal supreme court interpreted parallel federal constitutions (the normal rule being that a state supreme court cannot contravene a federal right as construed by the federal supreme court, but is otherwise free to interpret its state constitutional rights as it sees fit – a natural extension of the rule that a state’s supreme court is the supreme authority on that state’s constitution).

In holding that the Raven proposition was a “revision,” the court noted that it constituted a “broad attack on state court authority to exercise independent judgment in construing a wide spectrum of important rights under the state Constitution.” The court explained that telling the supreme court how to do its job (mandating that they use the same reasoning as used by the federal supreme court), and altering such a vast swath of the constitution were “far reaching, fundamental changes in our governmental plan.”

By contrast, twice before the court had held that propositions were actually “amendments” rather than “revisions.” One case (People v. Frierson, 25 Cal.3d 142, 184-187 (1979)) essentially put the death penalty back into the constitution, even though the state supreme court had previously held that it violated the fundamental right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. That was held to be an amendment, not a revision. Another (Crawford v. Board of Education, 113 Cal. App. 3d 633 (1980), affirmed 458 U.S. 527 (1982)) essentially overruled a court decision that unintentional but de facto school segregation violated the fundamental right to equal protection. That was also held to be an amendment.

Putting these cases together, the picture that emerges is something like this: revisions constitute fundamental changes to the way our society is put together. Taking away the judicial power from the judiciary is a “revision.” Massive changes to the text of the constitution is a “revision.”

Proposition 8 is, on its face, neither of those things. It has only 14 words. It deals with one specific right (the right to marry) found in one specific section of the constitution. It has nothing to do with the allocation of powers between the branches of government; it alters the text of the constitution but, the supreme court remains as free as ever to interpret that text as it sees fit.

So how is it that the plaintiffs in Strauss argue that Proposition 8 constitutes “far reaching, fundamental changes” to our very plan of government? The argument goes that because homosexuals are a constitutionally protected “suspect class” (true in California, uniquely in America) and Proposition 8 takes away a “fundamental right” (the right to marry), Proposition 8 constitutes far reaching, fundamental change in the constitution’s underlying principle of equality. Moreover, plaintiffs argue, by denying homosexuals the right to marry, Proposition 8 takes away one of the court’s core constitutional roles (that of ensuring equal protection under the laws) and thus constitutes far reaching, fundamental change to our plan of government.

I am in favor of gay marriage in California, but I think these are bad arguments. They aren’t laugh-out-loud stupid, but I think they deserve to lose on their merits. In turn:

The first argument goes that taking away a fundamental right specifically from a suspect class is violating a core principle of our society, and that constitutes a fundamental change to our very plan of government. I do not think this is true. In the first place, Proposition 8 only sort of takes away the right to marry. It takes away the right to marry someone of the same sex, but it does not take away the right to marry someone of the opposite sex. Neither is Proposition 8 actually targeted at the suspect class. It applies equally to homosexuals, heterosexuals, those who wish to marry more than one person, and those who wish to marry partners who are neither men nor women. Of course it happens that at present there are far more homosexuals wishing to get married than people wishing to enter into plural marriages or non-human marriages, but that need not always be the case. There’s a big difference between “marriage is between one man and one woman” and “homosexuals cannot get married.”

I recognize that this argument may strike many as pedantic, though, so let’s grant for the sake of argument that Proposition 8 takes away a fundamental right from a suspect class. Is that really a fundamental change in the way our society works? Granting for the sake of argument that one of our democracy’s core principles is violated, is the very structure of the democracy itself overthrown or substantially altered? I don’t think so. Rights are not the same thing as structure. And while I recognize that taking a right away is different than not having it in the first place, it is difficult for me to imagine that returning things to the status quo of 2007 can constitute a fundamental change to our plan of government (in fact we haven’t even returned to the status quo ante; homosexuals remain a suspect class in California).

The second argument in Strauss goes that one of the traditional core roles of the judiciary is to ensure equality for all, and because Proposition 8 would take away the courts’ ability to ensure homosexuals the equal right to marry, it impinges upon the traditional core role of the judiciary and thus constitutes a far reaching, fundamental change in our plan of government. This argument seems wrong to me for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, it isn’t true that one of the traditional core roles of the judiciary is to ensure equality for all. The judiciary is supposed to ensure equal treatment before the law and, as I said above, Proposition 8 is a facially neutral law.

For another, I don’t see the difference between this argument and either Frierson or Crawford. In both those cases a supreme court ruling based on fundamental rights was invalidated by initiative. The court held those cases to be amendments, not revisions, even though it recognized that the amendments necessarily impinged somewhat upon the judiciary. Once again we have a case where an initiative would partially invalidate a supreme court decision founded upon a fundamental right. I don’t see a meaningful distinction between this case and those.

It is true of course that Proposition 8 takes away the courts’ ability to ensure that homosexuals (and heterosexuals) may marry a person of the same gender. But that is not the same thing as taking away the judiciary’s ability to ensure equality under the laws, or telling the judiciary how to think and reason. Homosexuals remain a suspect class under California law, and the judiciary is free as ever to apply strict scrutiny to legislation that targets or can be shown to have a disparate impact upon them.

Some commentators have made a third argument, which I do not believe has been formally made in Strauss but which deserves to be discussed nonetheless. This is the argument that fundamental rights should not be able to be taken away by a mere majority vote. Elsewise, some argue, the rights of the minority are not really protected from the majority. One could apply this line of reasoning to the amendment vs. revision issue to suggest that any change to the constitution disproportionately affecting the fundamental rights of a minority must be a revision. The constitution doesn’t say as much, of course, but isn’t it one of the fundamental principles of our society that the rights of the minority are protected against the tyranny of the majority?

I would argue not. It is true that one of the reasons society institutes constitutions and governmental branches like the judiciary is to protect the rights of the minority. But those are cases of the majority saying, “We would like to be restrained in the future from doing these certain things, and we shall appoint you, our servants, to restrain us.” The judiciary, and indeed the constitution, remain subordinate to the sovereignty of the people, which is controlled by the majority. If the majority really wants to throw off the restraints it has placed on itself, it is allowed to do so. There is no way to get any other result without also overthrowing the democracy.

This is not to suggest that the fundamental basis of the Strauss challenge is unfounded. It is not; the people of California have asked our servants to restrain us from throwing off certain restraints except in certain very specific ways, and it is absolutely proper for the supreme court to hold us to that. But it is to suggest that there is nothing inherently suspect about the 50%-of-the-electors threshold as opposed to the 66%-of-the-legislature threshold, nothing to suggest that something is a automatically a revision because it affects the rights of a minority.

I’m not nearly as close to this case, the facts and the precedent and the arguments, as are the justices of the supreme court and the advocates. It may well be that there’s something here I’m not seeing. But as I understand the law and the arguments, it seems to me that Proposition 8 really was an amendment, not a revision. I’m sure I’ll post further on this issue as it develops.

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  posted by Natalie @ 6:34 AM 1 comments


Friday, November 14, 2008  
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