Round-up...

Just in case I am unable to get a post in tomorrow, I thought I would round up a couple of the the articles/posts I have been mulling over the last few days.

First up we have the controversy over a leaked e-mail from a Harvard Law School 3L (more here).
Andrew Sullivan has been posting the responses he as been getting from his readers here, here, here, here, and here.

With a nice round up of opinions on the Atlantic Wire here.

And here is the relevant section of the email that has cause most of the commotion.
I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair.

In general I would be loathe to even talk about this issue, cause it bothers me on a very fundamental level. And I am not even even talking about the rank racism in the statement. It is the complete lack of any scientific rigor or intellectual honesty that gets to me. Here is the thing that I dislike. I really loathe with people who have no science background hold court on science topics. Especially topics such as this. Why? More often then not, they will claim a lack of information or consensus, when if they had taken the time to consult the relevant material, they could see that is not the case. This is especially true when talking about a subject as nebulous as "intelligence".

As these two writers more astutely point out, your right to an opinion does not equal a right to be immune to others opinions on your opinion.

The free speech/freedom of thought angle:

• Not only did one HLS student write an email literally saying that black people might be genetically inferior to white people, but she is being defended by other legal scholars under the pretense that any idea should be up for debate and no one should get offended and oh also maybe she's right. With no recognition of the fact that ideas of genetic inferiority underwrote slavery in this country ......free speech is not a shield from criticism and consequence. Yes, it is a shield against government persecution for your speech, but it does not mean that other people are not permitted to speak out against you; it doesn’t mean that other people should have to accept what you say without attaching words like "racist" or "sexist" or "bigoted" to what you say.
• Agreed "You have the right to express yourself, not to control the reactions of others," writes political science professor Scott Lemieux. "The underlying premise," he thinks, in this debate, "is that one should be able to express bigotry while being exempt from criticism that might make the person expressing the bigotry uncomfortable. And going along with this is the even sillier assumption that people who defend existing social privileges are the real iconoclasts. Please."

On the science front this I find to be a compelling point:

* Nor Is It a Matter of Scientific Inquiry, adds Jesse Taylor at Pandagon.

If you are going to lead a scientific inquiry about the relative intelligence of racial groups (assuming all definitional problems are solved and that "intelligence" is a single variable), then there are three potential outcomes, generally speaking:
1.) W (whites) are more intelligent than B (blacks).
2.) W and B are equally intelligent.
3.) W are less intelligent than B.
Whenever this tired old debate is brought up, the only propositions that are ever introduced are 1 and 2. ... Nobody I've ever had this debate with has ever mentioned 3. It's because the debate that you're having isn't about science’s ability to measure racial intelligence as a genetic factor - it's about the defense of racial stereotypes as something you can’t disprove and therefore shouldn’t be so damned sensitive about.

So I might take it a tad personally.

Next up a thought provoking piece in the National Journal called "Do Family Values weaken Families".

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved.

The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

The country's lowest divorce rate belongs to none other than Massachusetts, the original home of same-sex marriage. Palinites might wish that Massachusetts's enviable marital stability were an anomaly, but it is not. The pattern is robust. States that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in both 2004 and 2008 boast lower average rates of divorce and teenage childbirth than do states that voted for the Republican in both elections. (That is using family data for 2006 and 2007, the latest available.)

And finally, Sarah Palin does not know anything about history. The fetishization of the Founding Fathers is slightly disturbing.

-Cheers