Racist Lying Hecklers

 

On Joe Wilson’s “heckling President Obama” with “YOU LIE!”, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) offered this prescient quotable in today’s LA Times (House admonishes Wilson, A15):

“He (Wilson) did not help the cause of diversity and tolerance with his remarks. I would say it instigated more racist sentiment….I guess we’ll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again and rdiding through the countryside intimidating people. That’s the logical conclusion if this kind of attitude is not rebuked.”

The logical conclusion indeed. Critical thinking made easy, courtesy of one of Georgia’s elected officials.

The logical conclusion of the quote above, I daresay, is that calling a person of color a liar indicates the presence of a racist. It also assumes that “folks” are waiting for a ballsy racist to call someone a liar so they can don the white sheets and run around terrorizing people.

On a sort of unrelated side note, I really do wonder why the content of the accusation itself hasn’t been discussed at length in the media. If Wilson was inaccurate, it should be fairly easy to establish him as an ill-informed blowhard, or an outright liar himself. It’s not exactly possible for Wilson to be telling the truth, and Obama to be telling the truth (at least when it comes to Obama “LYING” or not). A bit ironic that there is so much twinkle-toeing around the meat of the accusation, especially when it all started with someone calling the president of the United States a liar. Perhaps it’s supposed to be an open-ended, postmodern mystery for us to wrestle with. 

On another unrelated side note, the pro-Wilson demonstrator pictured alongside the article is holding a sign that has the word “believe” spelled incorrectly. Just another dumb hick Republican that can’t spell “believe,” I guess.

Dollar Bill Smackdown: Public vs. Homeschool

A month or so ago I stumbled upon an outrageously amusing post about homeschooling, authored by a teacher at the blog Teacher, Revised. The post delivered a series of reasons intended to show why homeschooling was a bad idea. Most of the reasons were so outlandish and c0ntrafactual that they could have been mistaken as part of a parody of the anti-homeschool crowd. Most people took the post seriously, however, since last time I read the post it had garnered somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 hot-under-the-collar-homeschooler comments. 

At least he didn’t claim homeschoolers were in the dark ages technologically.

Now the point of this post: As I reflected on the asininity of point #8–

Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they  greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates.

–I recalled an article in the Winter edition of Education Next that dealt with the issue of comparing household income levels of public and homeschooling families. The findings were surprising to me, since I did not deny the claim that homeschooling households were probably, in general, a bit more affluent than public school families. Instead, the information from the National Household Education Survey Program noted that home and public school households had almost identical yearly incomes. In fact, homeschooling families were actually lower by several percentage points. For example, 21.7% of homeschooling families made over 75,000 a year, as compared to 25.3% of public school families. The quote from Teacher, Revised (and his source)above fails to inform readers that the percentage of public school families making more than 50,000 a year is also nearly identical.

There was a rub, however, and here it is: 54% of homeschooling families with two parents had only one of those parents in the workforce, compared to 19.7% for public school two-parent families. So if you were to break down income individually, homeschooling parents would indeed make much more; however, the bottom line is that both households experience, on average, the same income when it comes to actual dollars earned. Perhaps this has implications for the accessibility of homeschooling as an option for all families, since more public school families have two parents in the workforce. 

A few parting words for point #8 quoted above: More affluent homeschoolers are homeschooling, and therefore homeschooling is selfish? Such a claim is almost incoherently illogical, and I would get lost trying to pull out each fallacious pus-sac. Suffice to say, this quote actually supports the opposite of the claim, since even with the influx of wealthy homeschoolers, the numbers are STILL roughly equivalent to those of public school families. In other words, before the rush of the rich, homeschoolers were actually much poorer than public schoolers, and the USA Today article says about as much. So I guess everyone is selfish.

Also, by this logic, parents of underperforming students should immediately remove them from the public school before they poison the rest of the poor students with their detrimental intellectual and socioeconomic baggage. Because it’s unfair to have poor kids around bad influences, but then which poor kids to you remove because if you take out all the poor kids you won’t have any poor kids to benefit from the rich smart kids….Otherwise, the underlying assumption is that obligations of fairness only apply to those with money, which is a significant insult to the diversity of talents, abilities, and determination nested among people of all tax brackets.

Magic Marker Sex Talk

In a setting where nuance and ambiguity are consistently praised, it is ironic that many participants in academia persist in both of those traits in their opponents–particularly when those opponents run afoul of the university brand of tolerance.

In our final day of class (I’ve made it through a year of graduate study) we discussed a hypothetical case where a student was suspended for wearing a shirt that read “homosexuality is shameful.” Our class discussion was spirited, full of diversity (of ideas), and quite useful. I continue be impressed with how the faculty handles the typical hot button issues. The lean is decidedly left and post-modern, but most professors so far have made a point of providing an environment where ideas can be safely exchanged. I was struck, however, by how several student repeatedly referred to any slogan affirming a negative belief of homosexuality as “hate speech” or “homophobia.” The student in question may well have been a hater and a homophobe, but I fail to see how an affirmation of belief regarding the morality of homosexuality is unequivocally hatred. 

This strikes me as a fallacious blend of straw man and ad hominem attack. I’ll call it “ad strawminem.” At any rate, one would hope those engaging in an exchange of ideas could appreciate that moral objection does not automatically constitute hatred. Casting a moral objector as a bigot (as gay advocates often do to anti-gay advocates) is a convenient, albeit logically flawed method of dealing with the objection. It’s much easier to dismiss, out of hand, the ideas of a raging homophobe than it is to examine the philosophical, moral, and spiritual underpinnings of a belief system that says homosexuality is immoral. Hatred–ironically enough, given our post-modern culture–is almost universally denounced as wrong. Therefore, in order to discredit an individual and their argument, one must simply cast their views as “hate.” 

It’s important to distinguish between the motivations and beliefs of those who, when the lines are broadly drawn, might appear to be on the same side. Those who refuse to acknowledge a nuanced perspective of those objecting to homosexuality outline a multiplicity of views with a magic marker. If we’re concerned with rationality, investigation, ethics, morality, and ultimately truth, we’re better off using a fine tipped pen.