What’s Wrong with the World

Lydia
1) I'm not quite sure what your advocating, are we going to fire closted homosexual math teachers who've never talked about anything other than Y=X+2 ?
2) I agree that in an ideal world where society hadn't quite forgotton the 10 Commandments and the law of God was observed Ms Defanti would at the very least be severely dicisaplined and/or given treatment for her prediliction to film herself engaged in sexual acts.
3) The inclusion of this material appears to have been a mistake (albiet one which will probebly harm young minds)
4) As it's a public school I'm not sure that there's much that can be done (however I agree that its not unreasonable for Catholic/Protestant private schools and collages to require a Biblical Standard of behaviour from their staff and to be able to fire those who don't comply (perhaps Professor Beckwith would like to weigh in here?)

Jack, it used to be that there were these general notions of morality such that no one thought a school had to be specifically Christian (!) to fire a teacher who filmed herself having sexual intercourse. Go back fifty years or perhaps only twenty or thirty and plenty of American public schools would have fired this woman for being of bad moral character as well as horribly negligent. In a heartbeat, no questions asked. No one would have thought of doing so as a specifically religious act. The notion that common decency is religious in some narrow sense is an invention of relatively recent years, and it is an invention that has left us in a bad, bad mess. There _should_ be _much_ that can be done in a public school. Time was when someone who was revealed to be in the habit of making sex pictures of herself would never have taught again in any school, period.

As for what I'm advocating in the post, I'm using this horrific case as an example of why we can't trust the general public to tell us what firing decisions are reasonable and to legislate them across the board. We can't trust them, because the world is full of idiots like the spineless father in this story who is merely whining about how the school should be offering his children counseling, for goodness' sake! The first words out of everyone's mouth in this story are, "I'm not saying she should be fired." Why not? Of _course_ she should be fired. So thank goodness there may not, yet, be a law that says that _every_ school is bound by the insanity that apparently constrains this public school to keep this teacher on its staff teaching the young.

Lydia

I don't dipute anything in your last post, in my first post I was merely ruminating on the situation as I see it today. As an observation however I would say that the flaw which allows this sort of thing to go unpunnished lies in structure of the American Legal framework. Becasue of the common decency you mentioned your founding fathers never anticipated the ways that radical leftists would use the constitution to justify their various perversions (take your pick)and therefore didn't see the need to write in various safeguards. Now admitedly since we Europeans stripped our monarchs of any real power things haven't be great here either, for example the EU's 'Human Rights Act' can be used to justify absolutely anything including most recently assisted suicide (American judiceries haven't gone quite that far ....yet)

Actually, since you mention it, I believe Montana's judiciary did just that recently.

We can, however, breathe a sigh of relief that the DVD contained nothing about intelligent design. :-)

Lydia,

Moralists have always been held in low regard by most societies and civilizations even though the moralist is the only bulwark against the rapid or gradual degeneration of the mores.

Of course, one great thrust of communist subversion of a stable society is to turn the so-called "scold" into public enemy No. 1. The Left has done its job well will the help of the USSR which spent a good deal of money infiltrating Hollywood and the Media.

More pathetic and repulsive than even the amateur porn star masquerading as a teacher, and through her negligence and incompetence splicing a porn scene into a documentary of the school year, is that simpering gelding of a father who, in response to the debauching of the mind of his son, is capable only of mewling impotently about counseling - counseling, moreover, that the school district should provide, his impotence extending to an inability to counsel his son that what he saw was wrong, that it consisted of people treating one another as things instead of persons, and that he ought not emulate in any respect what he saw, let alone to resolve to seek her dismissal, on the grounds that degenerates have no place in the company of children and civilized men. One is even moved to observe that the father's unmanliness is perhaps more damaging still than the initial exposure to amateur smut.

If she gets fired, it could possibly mean that the elementary school at which she worked may not be able to advertise in Jobs for Philosophers. :-)

There's an Al Capone angle to this:

The DVDs she distributed, and the software she used, may very well be school property. If that's the case, then she has engaged in misuse of school property.

Reminds of an old Hadley Arkes story:

Not too long ago, some friends in Denver brought the news of a man who showed up at the county office seeking a marriage license for himself and his horse. And the clerk found herself in the situation of one who applies the law, but no longer remembers the reasons. I take some pride in reporting to you that, when the story was told to me, I did guess the reason that that clerk finally gave for refusing to issue the license: the horse was not yet 18.

(You can find the Arkes piece here: http://www.fww.org/articles/wfpforum/harkes.htm )

My guess is if this were a male teacher, he'd already be on the sex offender registry and wearing county blues.

This is what happens when chastity is not recognized as an object of education. I suspect most people have lost any sense of "public morals," in part since they aren't taught in public schools.

(From the title, I had hoped that this post would be interacting with the Thinking Housewife's blog post "Why we must discriminate" on the place of men, women and the family in the workplace )

This incident reveals why we must have separation of School and State in a nation of free people. Otherwise, freedom of conscience is eroded and each generation that follows is less free.

The notion that common decency is religious in some narrow sense is an invention of relatively recent years, and ... has left us in a bad, bad mess.
--Lydia | July 30, 2009 9:26 PM

I think this is the most insightful remark in all the comments.

The secularists with whom we share this land insist that any moral restraint they chafe against is somehow religious and therefore must be thrown out. "Separation of Church and State," they demand. Theirs is a selective demand, however; they won't (yet) hear of decriminalizing murder even though murder is one of the shall-nots in the Ten Commandments.

We can, however, breathe a sigh of relief that the DVD contained nothing about intelligent design. :-)
--Francis Beckwith | July 30, 2009 10:48 PM

And Prof. Beckwith's comments were funniest.

(I take it the at-will hiring and firing practices of taxi companies keep their Position Available notices out of Jobs for Philosophers too.)

Maybe she can get a better job over at Tele-sex. Her true calling in life, as it were.

On the more general point, Lydia, I think that because morals are misunderstood, people have lost any sense of applying a code of conduct that is distinct from the law. That goes for public institutions especially, but wanders into the private sphere all the time. It obviously has horrible consequences when something immoral but not illegal happens, but harms us in the other direction too: by creating a false urgency to illegalize what ought to remain socially and privately shunned behavior without the benefit of legal penalties - like "hate crimes." It is really bad when the very same entity which thinks it can legislate morality into social behavior is the one that doesn't actually recognize any foundation for morality to begin with. Then it becomes mere tyranny.

Why does this have to be a firing over moral norms? Why not simply fire her for rank incompetence? Part of her job apparently was making a compilation of school videos, and she failed miserably, to the injury of her students. It seems like that's a big enough screw up to get you fired period.

But why do we assume that the video portrayed an immoral act? (Did any of the stories say with whom she was having sex? I didn't read them too carefully). Distributing such a video would of course be wrong, and making it rises at least to the level of "pretty stupid," but is it necessarily immoral for spouses to film themselves? It might very well be, but barring fornication, adultery, or an intent to distribute, I don't know that it's shockingly obvious.

That being said, I agree wholeheartedly with Lydia's point---that it's insane for the government to try and limit the criteria by which a business can retain employees.

I'm just curious about something. I'm sorry for diverting the discussion. Suppose - as is consistent, I think, with the reporting about the story - Mrs. Delfonti and her husband were filming themselves having sex. You all seem to be assuming that such behavior is indicative of "bad moral character", or that doing so constitutes an immoral act. I'm having a hard time seeing why.

Of course, having made the tape, she handled it negligently and irresponsibly. But, why think that she was acting badly - and, that she was acting badly enough to be fired - by making the tape?

Lydia,

Lydia,

Signs of the impending apocalypse -- this is the second time in the past few weeks that I'm in total, 100% agreement with Maximos and I even think he's sharpening his normally somewhat turgid prose!

I also think that both Mark and Tony make interesting points in the context of one of my own hot button issue, out-of-wedlock births:

“Moralists have always been held in low regard by most societies and civilizations even though the moralist is the only bulwark against the rapid or gradual degeneration of the mores.”

One big exception to this that pops into mind right away is Victorian England – just about everyone and their brother were what we now consider “moralists” and they were respected and in many cases, led their country to greatness.

“I think that because morals are misunderstood, people have lost any sense of applying a code of conduct that is distinct from the law. That goes for public institutions especially, but wanders into the private sphere all the time. It obviously has horrible consequences when something immoral but not illegal happens, but harms us in the other direction too: by creating a false urgency to illegalize [sic] what ought to remain socially and privately shunned behavior without the benefit of legal penalties - like "hate crimes."

Hence, my dilemma as it concerns fornication and bastard children – can we really legislate against such harmful practices, or can we restore some sense of decency in people that they begin to become moralists in greater numbers and start to shame sinners into decent behavior?

One intriguing idea I came across recently is in this piece by Mary Eberstadt:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/41599902.html

She compares pornography with smoking and notes how the one has become morally noxious over a comparatively short period of time and that perhaps with concerted effort we can make pornography (and all sorts of associated sexuality immorality) just as noxious over time.

my dilemma as it concerns fornication and bastard children – can we really legislate against such harmful practices

Unfortunately, no, we can't. The states at one time all had laws punishing fornication and placing impediments on bastards, but these have all been struck by our black-robed overlords. A lot of the problems in this area concern a difficulty that Americans often face but rarely articulate: the crisis of subsidiarity and provincialism in this country. Communities can't maintain or enforce norms of any sort because the norms have all been set, at the lowest possible denominator, by someone in Washington.

Paul

Why must impediments be placed on bastads? It does seem wrong to punish the child for the sins of the parents, as a Catholic I've never understood the prohibitation on Ordaining bastards.

The thing is, Jeff (Singer), I think the only way we can effectively shun sexual immorality is if we are allowed to. One of the problems with our all-encompassing legislation on all activities having to do with the public--not only hiring and firing but also not creating a "hostile work environment," the distribution of goods and services, and renting property--is that shunning has become all but impossible for anything regarded as having "protected status." And now most things do. My own city's non-discrimination statutes _already_ make it an offense to discriminate on the basis of height or weight. (I am not making this up.) Even though I am a short person, I think this is just silly.

Now, as far as I know, smokers don't yet have protected status, and neither do Republicans. Likewise a vegan owning a health-food store could probably still discriminate against happy spare-rib eaters. But the possibilities for making use of our freedom of association to express social disapproval are constantly shrinking. And most people at least _think_ that sexual conduct has protected status, even if at least heterosexual conduct does not. Interestingly, if Defanti was having sex with another woman, I would bet that in states or localities with laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, she could _not_ be fired even by a private school.

Being of somewhat libertarian proclivities myself, I'm all in favor of general social disapproval and private negative decision-making as a way of influencing people to good behavior. But for that to be possible we have to get back to the idea that people have some leeway in how they interact with one another, yes, even in business.

To those who asked. Yes, I think it is perverted and immoral for a married couple to make a film of themselves engaging in the marital embrace. It objectifies and cheapens an act that should be thought of with, in the proper sense, awe. I'm glad to think there are commentators on this thread who took that for granted. Not that I think Defanti was with her husband. Just a guess. But I would guess not.

Being of somewhat libertarian proclivities myself, I'm all in favor of general social disapproval and private negative decision-making as a way of influencing people to good behavior. But for that to be possible we have to get back to the idea that people have some leeway in how they interact with one another, yes, even in business.

Conservatives need to realize that in a democratic society, if you bring the government into the discussion, the people doing stuff like this and their sympathizers will have a seat at the table. The only effective way is to bypass them by decentralizing the issue. Instead of taking an official stance on employment and morality, schools should have the discretionary authority to fire a teacher on an at-will basis. In some places that will mean that teachers will be fired for speaking out against teaching things like homosexuality to Kindergardeners (*cough*California*cough*) and in others it means that the courts won't have a veto on decisions to fire teachers like this one.

For an educator, morality is a part of his competence, unless one thinks that education is merely about transferring data (to meat machines) but not also about building character (since we're human beings), in which case one would be wrong, as the Christian tradition and even pagan traditions understood. Those who think that a teacher's competence can be adequately evaluated on the basis only of his ability to teach a particular subject to the exclusion of his morality presuppose a reductive view of education stemming from a false anthropology.

In the specific case referenced above, it ought to be a matter then of the appropriate authorities (her bosses) deciding whether Defanti's incompetence reaches the threshold for firing, and making that decision in accordance with their authority.

Public schools create so many problems, Mike. I can understand why the public has more of an interest in the hiring practices of schools they are all forced to pay for. And one gets crazy situations like the both bad and illegal situation I just read about in Dearborn (and was considering blogging) of a Muslim principal who has turned his local _public_ high school into a blatantly Muslim school, punched a kid who converted to Christianity, and is purging it of Christian teachers including, most recently, a wrestling coach. Now, _if_ we have laws against blatant religious discrimination, then they at least ought to be applied sufficiently even-handedly that that guy should be slapped down good and hard.

All of this--both the obvious case where someone should be fired and the obvious case where someone shouldn't--are to my mind arguments for private schools. The Muslim principal should run his Muslim school on something other than the public dime, and normal people with normal morality can run a normal school where Defanti is fired for moral turpitude.

Time was when public schools weren't so very bad and when all of this could have been "winged" as it were--No turning a public high school into a Muslim school _and_ no teachers on staff who make sex videos of themselves, much less accidentally put them on a DVD for the kiddies. Local school boards would have made sensible decisions based on sensible local mores. But unfortunately, local mores are no longer sensible.

Conservatives are often focused on the catalystic courts. How many of the greatest social changes in our communities have happened because of school boards?

Me but harms us in the other direction too: by creating a false urgency to illegalize [sic] what ought to remain socially and privately shunned behavior without the benefit of legal penalties - like "hate crimes."

Jeff:

Hence, my dilemma as it concerns fornication and bastard children – can we really legislate against such harmful practices, or can we

Just for the record, the privately shunned behavior I was thinking of in this context was employment practices like firing someone whom you think acted to the detriment of the organization. Losing your job is not a legal penalty, it is a social one.

Having a child out of wedlock is a different matter: the state cannot BUT have an interest in who is creating its new citizens. This one of the strongest reasons why the state has a right to regulate marriage to begin with. But it makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER for there to be legal penalties or social penalties on the child. My own feeling is that when a couple so gravely violate a child's right to be conceived in an act of love between married spouses, that couple loses the right to maintain a relationship of parent to the child. The child should be given up for adoption at birth. The social ramifications of being adopted are no longer severe.

I strongly object to this sentiment about a unmarried teen who is pregnant and refuses to consider adoption, having chosen to keep the child and raise him by herself: "well, that's OK, at least she isn't going to have an abortion, so we'll encourage her." Let's see, the girl has already gravely damaged the child's rights, and, while choosing not to murder the child, is choosing to force the child to live a life without a father and with a mother who is totally unready to take on the burdens of family and financial independence. This is a loving decision for the baby?

Worse yet are those women who choose to get pregnant without either a husband or even stable relationship with a male, wanting a baby apparently because they have outgrown dolls but don't like dogs. Either of these situations are evil and should be shamed by society, but because of the harm they do to others unable to protect themselves, they call for legal sanction as well.

I can't see how videotaping sex necessarily cheapens it. It's not true, in general, that videotaping an act cheapens it. Nor is it true that lusting after your spouse or enjoying sex cheapens it. Of course, there are things that married couples shouldn't do. But, it's hard for me to see why videotaping sex is one of them.

Even if it turns out that there is something wrong with a married couple videotaping their sex, it wouldn't follow that it's appropriate to fire Mrs. Delfanti. I assume that you don't (do you?) think that any moral wrongdoing merits dismissal. We have to make a case for the claim that what she did was bad enough so that she should be fired. While you might make a case for this from her negligent handling of the tape, a similar case relying on the mere fact that she doesn't have the appropriate awe for marital sex - assuming, again, that videotaping sex implies that you do not - seems a stretch.

Lydia,

Now, _if_ we have laws against blatant religious discrimination, then they at least ought to be applied sufficiently even-handedly that that guy should be slapped down good and hard.

It'll never happen until we go back to the old American system of private prosecution and the general public being responsible for most law enforcement. Liberty cannot exist when government police and prosecutors control the ability to determine who goes to prison. Guys like this are a perfect example of why we need to end that monopoly.

Having a child out of wedlock is a different matter: the state cannot BUT have an interest in who is creating its new citizens. This one of the strongest reasons why the state has a right to regulate marriage to begin with.

No, that would be a reason for why all sexual activity should be regulated by the state. If you accept the premise that the state has an interest in controlling the process of procreation, then you are different in degree, not kind, from societies like the Spartans.

We have to make a case for the claim that what she did was bad enough so that she should be fired.

Sorry, Ryan, I'm of the opinion that we ought to have enough of a cultural moral sensibility that the making of such a case is not necessary. Glad you think she should be fired for terminal stupidity for somehow getting it on the DVD, but I think you have a serious case of moral sense blindness-itis that you think videotaping yourself having sex is this minor little thing.

I don't hesitate to say that the p0rn0graphic mindset according to which sexual intercourse is a thing to be filmed and watched is seriously detrimental to the very fabric of society. I realize that so strong a statement will come as a shock to some of my readers. To me it comes as something of a shock that intelligent (and ostensibly politically conservative?) people sit about calmly and say, "What's the problem?"

Lydia - anyone who has done digital video editing knows it's pretty hard to accidently include wildly diverse video clips, prior to running off a DVD. Not saying it's impossible, but highly unlikely, unless she's really horrible at managing things. (And if she's that incompetent, perhaps firing her might still be a good idea!).

I could be wrong, but it seems more likely someone played a rather cruel practical joke on her. That doesn't excuse her actually being in the video, but there might be more to the story than what was reported.

According to the News channel video - her DVD video has a menu interface, and one of those menu items plays and then cuts directly to her sex video. It's a rather quick cut to the sex, so if she tested out her DVD prior to burning off multiple copies, she would have caught it.

A far more likely scenario: she had a close friend help produce the DVD (maybe a boyfriend - soon to be ex, who was the likely recipient of any sex video) who saw this as an opportunity for payback for some prior wrongdoing - perhaps an infidelity.

That seems more probable to me than accidental inclusion of sex videos.

Morally, it's a continual battle, so I'm not surprised at it happening, or the apathetic reaction from the parents.

Chris, that's an interesting conjecture and may be true. I think Auster has a good take on this when he says that when we live in such a non-judgemental society, we make such mistakes (or in this case, perhaps such sabotage) more likely. She believed that there was nothing wrong with her making such a film. Thus the film was available to be used in this way. To my mind there is little moral difference between her accidentally including it and someone else's including it as a joke against her. I was never implying that she did it deliberately in any event; I wouldn't have thought (for example) of putting the word "accidentally" in scare quotes. The story of her calling up the father crying hysterically rang true to me. However she got the thing on there, I don't think she did it on purpose. It was very foolish of her not to check the whole video out first, though, and all the more so if she had such toxic material floating around her video library. Rather like not being sufficiently careful in a lab where you might contaminate something for human use with something poisonous you also have in the lab. But the "poisonous" material should not have been available in the first place, and then such accidents and/or tricks could not happen.

Tony wrote:

"It is really bad when the very same entity which thinks it can legislate morality into social behavior is the one that doesn't actually recognize any foundation for morality to begin with. Then it becomes mere tyranny."

Great quote. It should be hydrolasered into a suitable piece of granite on the National Mall.

If you accept the premise that the state has an interest in controlling the process of procreation, then you are different in degree, not kind, from societies like the Spartans.

Mike, I said take an interest in , not "control". And I meant to imply by reference to "citizens" not just the act of procreating a baby, but producing new completed mature persons capable of taking on the role of citizenship. The state could take enough of an interest in it to see that it is being handled well by clergy and families - if that were indeed the case - and decide to leave well enough alone. For the state to have no interest at all in the development of new citizens is equivalent to saying that the state has no interest in preserving itself for the future.

Given that these citizens cannot be developed outside of healthy families, this means that that the state, while observing the boundaries of its action through subsidiarity, will wish to promote healthy families, not control them. Promoting them includes protecting them from damaging influences that will, in a society of fallen men, creep up on them from other sources. Like pornography. Like procreation out of wedlock. Unlike libertarians, I reject the notion that the state has no interest in helping (traditional) families remain strong.

Considering teenagers are now getting into horrible trouble for sending nude photographs of themselves to irresponsible beaus, a strong stand against a teacher who manufactures private porn is even more necessary.

Lydia,

Having steered the discussion somewhat away from the original topic of the post, I'd like to return to that topic as I think the philosophical idea that we need to let people discriminate (in hiring decisions as well as other private transactions) is an important one. On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to Burke's "little platoons" and the notion that institutions and individuals should be free to form associations/businesses and exclude those that they wish to exclude. All sorts of nonsense has occurred thanks to anti-discrimination laws (e.g. suing Hooter's for not hiring male waiters, penalizing Frank Ricci because not enough blacks scored well on a test, etc.)

On the other hand, I am sympathetic to the original intent behind the civil rights movement and legislation -- was it really fair for a respectable black citizens to be forced to sit in the back of the bus? Forced to sit in a special section at the local diner (or be refused service outright)? One could say, and I have heard conservatives say it, that over time without the federal government getting involved the Jim Crow south would have changed at its own pace. Smart and capable blacks who were refused employment thanks to discrimination would go to States and/or communities that would have them...but that still would make life very difficult for many black folks and I'm not sure how comfortable I am in allowing my fellow citizens to do harm to a different group of my fellow citizens.

But I can also imagine different examples of "little platoons" gone wild. Mike T. hints that we should just let crazy people in California do their thing while the rest of us sensible folk create sensible communities. But what if California's laws and people begin to impact our own "little platoons" -- for example, what happens when I live in a place that thinks marijuana is dangerous and should be outlawed, but my kids can drive a couple of hours and buy all the weed they need in Venice Beach (or whereever). Or what if we could pass a Constitutional Amendment banning abortion -- we would be infringing on the values of certain "little platoons" but we'd be saving a lot of lives. I guess what I'm asking is where you think we can draw the line when dealing with the issue of subsidiary and federalism? And is the right answer that when it comes to businesses, let them discriminate however they want (which in my mind would include discrimination against unions, which would effectively destroy collective bargaining and the power of unions...I wonder what Maximos would say to that)?

On the other hand, I am sympathetic to the original intent behind the civil rights movement and legislation -- was it really fair for a respectable black citizens to be forced to sit in the back of the bus?

I think we have a choice between a society that is unfair and one that is insane. There is no third option. For my part, I'll take unfair all day long. But Americans can't abide anything that is the least bit unfair. Why? Because they're insane. Moreover, the only unfairness Americans seem to be able to live with is that which is at the same time is insane.

But I'm sure things will improve now that we have a black Marxist president.

Tony,

Mike, I said take an interest in , not "control". And I meant to imply by reference to "citizens" not just the act of procreating a baby, but producing new completed mature persons capable of taking on the role of citizenship. The state could take enough of an interest in it to see that it is being handled well by clergy and families - if that were indeed the case - and decide to leave well enough alone. For the state to have no interest at all in the development of new citizens is equivalent to saying that the state has no interest in preserving itself for the future.

The state's interest in preserving itself are often in conflict with the interests of the society that gave rise to it. You seem to have a view of the state where the state is the supreme over society, social institutions, etc. I don't share that view, but rather regard the state as nothing more than a creation of the society that hosts it. As such, it is not incumbent upon parents and clergy to prove to the state that they are being good parents and shepherds respectively, but rather it is up to the state to make a case that it must intervene because they are failing in their natural sphere of authority.

The single biggest argument for spontaneous order is how civilization continues in spite of governmental corruption. Cities like Chicago have governments that are rotten to the very core of their laws and bureaucracies, and yet they continue to function.

All good questions, Jeff. I would take them in reverse order: At risk of derailing the thread in a totally different direction, I would prefer myself that abortion law like murder law generally be at the state level and would worry that a federal pro-life amendment would _limit_ what the states could do. That is, if it were hammered out as some sort of compromise, states might be hindered in passing yet more restrictive laws. If the laws against torture, rape, and forms of murder other than abortion can be passed at the state level, I see no reason why laws against abortion cannot also be. That being said, there is nothing unconstitutional about passing a constitutional pro-life amendment. The amendment process is there to be used if you can get an amendment passed.

Moving back to the question about discrimination against blacks, I agree with you about unfairness. Agreed, we're talking about a lot of bigotry and injustice. In hindsight, though, I've gotta say that the fruits of the civil rights acts have been generally very bad. For one thing, the process stunk. Or stank, whichever it is. The abuse of the commerce clause was blatant and simply set the stage for the most wildly unconstitutional spread of federal power, like the spread of kudzu in a roadcut, into every aspect of the lives and practices of individual businessmen. Ridiculously bad, and completely contrary to the intent of the founders. *At a minimum* such laws should only have been able to be passed at the state level. The civil rights activists, unlike pro-life activists who try to pass a constitutional amendment, couldn't be bothered trying to pass a constitutional amendment. They went for raw power as fast as they could get it, which is always a bad precedent. Second, the laws were deceptive, because I believe many who crafted them _knew_ they would lead directly to quotas but sold a bill of goods to their fellow congressmen. But third, and more directly pertinent to the main post, people got the idea that if some business practice is unfair, it must be illegal. The very notion that it's best for people to be allowed to follow their idiosyncracies in their business because, in an important sense, their business is something very much like their private property, went out the window. And from there everything else has followed. No discrimination on the basis of gender, leading to every sort of insane affirmative action for women. No discrimination on the basis of disability, leading to the Supreme Court's getting to tell us what the essence of golf is! And now, of course, it will soon be no discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation" (which is intended to include sexual practice), which, especially via the rule that a "hostile work environment" is a form of discrimination, amounts to a gag order against the expression of traditional morality in the workplace. All very, very bad. And I'm afraid the civil rights movement is where it all started.

All of which makes me more and more willing to go with George R.--Better to permit _local_ injustices than yield ourselves to _global_ and _enforced_ insanity.

For perspective: I once worked in a restaurant that would NEVER advertise for new help, because they refused to hire blacks. They perceived (rightly or wrongly, I don't know) that if they advertised and received applications from blacks (and still refused to hire), they would be open to lawsuit for illegal hiring practices. Whereas if a black just walked in off the street and submitted an application, they could always say "we're not hiring right now." I was appalled at this approach, and was, at the time, not displeased that there was a civil rights law that they needed to work to avoid running afoul of.

Now I am not so sure. At the time, there probably was a legitimate business case that they could have made that by having blacks serving, they would be losing customers. While this would have been true only on account of immoral discrimination on the part of their customers, there is no law against customers choosing not to give patronage to a restaurant that hires blacks. So the law placed an undue burden on the restaurant forcing it to lose business.

If you turn things around and look at today, a restaurant that is KNOWN to refuse to hire blacks would probably lose customers. Some people might suggest that this latter fact shows that market forces can be a corrective to bad business practices, but in this case the practice only became bad business after 40 years of civil rights law, so it is a pretty shaky argument.

While I can deplore the specific methods used by the civil rights movement, I don't know that less overarchingly federal methods would have left us in a better position today.

But I would say "in a better position" only in that one narrow sense--that law teaches, and federal laws against racial discrimination have taught that blatant and irrational discrimination against blacks is wrong. Okay, well and good. But what else has the law taught? Well, for one thing, it has taught that affirmative action is good, which is _not_ a good thing to teach. It has taught that any process that has "disparate impact" in racial areas is bad, which is a bad thing to teach and has undermined plenty of legitimate testing (as in Ricci and numerous other cases). It has taught that white males have less right to complain if they are discriminated against, which is a bad thing to teach. It has taught that expansion of federal power using an obvious misinterpretation of the commerce clause is good, or even worse, has taught that there is no such thing as a constitutional limit on federal power. How many people even know that the federal government has to have a constitutional pretext for making a law? Most don't. Most just think if something is "important" the federal government should legislate about it immediately. This is very, very bad. And it has taught that the government should micromanage everybody's hiring practices in every way according to the moral norms of the moment, which is bad. And it has taught that "discrimination" is a dirty word, which positively rots people's brains.

I have recently been out gathering signatures against a local homosexual rights "non-discrimination" ordinance, and I have had people say, "I don't think anybody should be able to discriminate for _any_ reason." Now this is just plain nonsense. If someone walked in with horrible B.O. or refused to dress anything like the business required or was obviously somewhat unhinged or just had an incredibly annoying personality that came out in the interview, _of course_ they would "discriminate." The whole process of deciding whom to hire is a process of "discriminating." But people are such fools now that they think there is this one thought-crime and act-crime called "discrimination," that it is always wrong, and that they are being high-minded and principled by being agin' it in every manifestation. They are so brain-washed that they can't even see that this isn't so and that the only things that get called "discrimination" are the things about which their teacher-masters are choosing to tell them, "Repeat after me. This is discrimination." Now refusing to hire a guy who insists on wearing a dress to work is a new form of discrimination! And there's no telling where it will stop. Because the people, like sheep, will call anything "discrimination" if the liberal media tells them it is. And then they will piously declare, "Well, I don't think anyone should discriminate for any reason" and solemnly vote to criminalize that employment decision.

And all that too, is what the civil rights acts have taught.

And I just don't think overall, taking it all into account, that we're in a better position.

Lydia wrote:

I don't hesitate to say that the p0rn0graphic mindset according to which sexual intercourse is a thing to be filmed and watched is seriously detrimental to the very fabric of society. I realize that so strong a statement will come as a shock to some of my readers. To me it comes as something of a shock that intelligent (and ostensibly politically conservative?) people sit about calmly and say, "What's the problem?"

and I agree. I think her intuitions about this are right on, and that anyone who understands what sex is, personally, should see the same thing.

I am not surprised, though, at the reaction to the case provided. The problem is that in our culture, we've already given up so many of the footholds, intellectually and morally, surrounding the issue of human sexuality, and have submitted ourselves (and our children) to the repeated conditioning required to overturn our intuitions (the source of such conditioning being the stories told within our culture), that our "normal" mode of thinking is actually severely compromised: we are not functioning correctly.

At this point, not only do we need to recover the reasons underlying our intuitions, but we also need to do so in the face of deeply-entrenched practices and institutions that have been built up around the wrong ideas.

If I can make an attempt at a brief case, I believe it has to begin with the acknowledgment that human sexuality is unique and tremendously morally significant. Negatively, it is on the order of the difference in magnitude between rape and other types of assault, all of which are non-consensual. Despite that commonality, the Supreme Court recognized that rape is second only to homicide as "the ultimate violation of self." So the significance of human sexuality is not reducible to consent, and if that is true, then we might expect there to be implications apart from whether or not the parties immediately involved have agreed or not. Indeed, we might even ask if consent qua informed agreement is really happening otherwise.

With that in place, we may be able to go in different ways to show that the practice of filming human sexual relations is immoral and/or wrongheaded because it fails to recognize or threatens that significance.

One way may be to understand that film, and particularly films meant to excite the passions (or scenes from films excerpted for their sexual content), can and often does distance us from the proper context of sexuality - the very context that holds clues to its significance. It isolates certain features and excludes others, and by so doing commodifies sexuality and makes it something fit for consumption without implications for the consumer, without any obligation on his or her part to recognize and respond to its significance.

For example, suppose that a woman and her husband film themselves engaging in sex. They have transferred that act to a medium. Now, suppose that the same husband and wife are angry with one another, and the wife refuses to have sex with her husband at the time. We can imagine a scenario in which the husband takes the medium and uses it, say, to excite and (forgive me) "satisfy" himself. Our culture makes much of the need for consent prior to and during sex. Where is that concern now? Would the wife consent to such a thing, at this moment? In the relevant case, the teacher (we assume) did not consent for all those people to watch her video, despite her prior consent to making the film. But the fact that the act was transferred to a medium by its very nature makes it possible to break down the walls we have put up around human sexuality to protect its significance and the connection it has to the dignity of the people involved.

Another example along the same lines: Couldn't a depraved brother or father find and make use of such media, even if they were recordings of a sister or daughter? Do the vendors of "adult" films require that family relationships be respected by the purchasers? Is there a questionnaire that must be completed prior to purchase, that would rule out certain buyers because of the moral implications?

Transferring human sexual acts to film provides the means of divorcing them from the personal history of the people involved, from their futures (e.g. what is imaginable for a twenty year old is often a great embarrassment to those in their 70's or 80's), from what led up to the specific event (e.g. the reasons that consent was given), from family relationships, from children resulting from the act, and on and on. And it also enables others to enter into that event without requiring the recontextualization appropriate to its significance, without any obligation to the participants themselves. It is a manipulatable medium without regard for the unique gravitas of human sexuality and human dignity, free from attachments, free to be edited and used in any way the consumer sees fit.

If we are going to protect the immense moral significance of human sexuality (which is connected, I believe, to our dignity as human beings), it seems appropriate to put "walls" or boundaries around it. Not to do so is to put something very precious at risk -- why would someone do that? Isn't there something wrong with someone who would?

As I indicated, there are probably other ways to approach the morality of situations like the one offered by Lydia, but I offer this one for your consideration.

Regards,

Steve

Excellent comment, Steve T. One commentator said something like, "Filming other things doesn't trivialize them." But the whole point, which you are emphasizing eloquently, is that sex isn't like "other things."

Your point concerning rape and other forms of assault is also a good one and shows the vestiges of some notion of sexual specialness even in our present legal context.

Perhaps a related point could be made like this: When a person films himself and knows that he is filming himself doing something, he is thinking of how he looks to the camera. What he is doing becomes to some extent or another a performance for the eye of the camera. When he films himself in the act of sex, then, he is at least at some time and to some degree thinking of himself and his wife (even if we assume it is with his wife) "from the outside," and the wife likewise. They are deliberately adding a "third-person" element to what is going on. The camera is an eye in the room looking at the act from the perspective of someone not engaging in the act. But the participants in the marital act should always be thinking of themselves from within the act, from the perspective of the privacy of the act, thinking of themselves in relation to one another, not to an observer, even if that observer is hypothetical and mechanized in the form of a camera.

Hi, Lydia -

Thanks for sharing your thoughts in response.

I owe the central point about the moral significance of human sexuality to Hadley Arkes, who wrote along these lines in a much forgotten book, The Philosopher in the City. It is out of print, but very worth getting if you can find a copy. And he makes some other observations that go right against the "filming other things doesn't trivialize them" claim in the case of sexuality.

I like your argument as well, and I think it dovetails with mine in some ways. If we ask what the ground of that unique significance is, my contention is that the best explanation (after further argument) is in the "one flesh" unity that obtains in sexual intercourse (joining two persons of dignity in an unmatched way), and obtains only for one man and one woman, exclusively. Adding a "third eye" (the camera) intended for a "third person", therefore, would compromise the nature of the act and would be in tension with that significance. In the very nature of filming such acts, then, is that divorce from the proper context of sex.

Take care,

Steve

Lydia:

What interests me most in this thread is the following remark of yours:

The notion that common decency is religious in some narrow sense is an invention of relatively recent years, and it is an invention that has left us in a bad, bad mess.

I appreciate what you're getting at, but I'm not sure you've formulated the problem correctly.

The problem is not that something called "common decency" is now considered unacceptably "religious," but that what now passes for common decency in more "sophisticated" circles, such as the education, media, academic, and arts establishments, is purely secular. Accordingly, such people see no violation of common decency in filming oneself having sex, or even in having consensual sex in a toilet stall, but will take great umbrage at being exposed to tobacco smoke in an enclosed area or in being judged by any standard which THEY consider "narrowly religious." There's no need for me to multiply examples; we are both all too familiar with them.

Another way of putting it is this: it's not so much that standards of common decency have been partially relaxed as partially replaced. What's objectionable about the new standards of common decency is that they are more loosely connected with the objective demands of virtue.

Yes, when I spoke of common decency, sans quotes, I meant what _used to be considered_ common decency. Not just any set of moral norms that happen to have wide support at some momentary point in time (perhaps through recent brainwashing in the schools, for example), but traditional common decency, particularly in the sexual realm. And there, of course, any attempt to hold to standards is regarded as, somehow, and for who knows what reason, "religious."

You are completely right that older standards have been replaced. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so great earnestness about having a low carbon number or not drinking soda or whatever is now the new moralism, and that sort of rather silly Puritanism is coming from the same people who, as you say, see nothing wrong with having sex in a toilet stall. The greatest bizarreness and irony of this is how much of the new moralism is predicated on _health_ concerns. What a joke! When the sexual promiscuity they wouldn't think of condemning comes, itself, with significant health risks.

Hello Lydia
I just came across your site today. I wonder. Have you also called for the resignation of Mark Sanford? Because it seems to me that an elected official, who espouses family values, turns out to be a hypocrite, is a far greater threat to impressionable young people than a teacher who accidentally brought the wrong DVD to school. Did she make a boo-boo? Yea. But Mark Sanford made a boo-boo a thousand times bigger.

Please call for his resignation. Shame on him.

Mark Sanford should indeed resign for many reasons, not the least of which is that he's a disgusting blubberer who tried to make a soap opera episode ("soul mate," forsooth!) out of his common little midlife crisis. Therefore, no one can ever respect him again in a position of leadership.

It remains true, however, that filming oneself having sexual intercourse is not merely a "boo-boo" anymore than breaking one's marital vows is a "boo-boo." There's a better word: Serious sins. And the former, a perversion as well. Welcome to the world of objective values.