GOOD FOR MY MENT\AL HEALTH

I find the decisions handed down by the Supreme Court to be injurious to my mental health and I have decided that the only thing I can do is to explain at length my reactions to them. What I say will obviously have no effect on the world but maybe I will feel better when I am finished.

 

Let me begin with the simpler of the two decisions, that concerning the website designer. Forget about the fact that she has not yet actually designed any websites – that is irrelevant. 

Consider the following series of cases, designed to approach the issue slowly. Suppose that a devout Catholic decides to open a bookstore called The St. Thomas Aquinas Bookstore in which he proposes to stock and sell only books by Catholic authors on Catholic topics. Can anyone attempt to take him to court on the grounds that he does not carry books on fishing or baseball or books on Islam? Of course not. He has a perfect right to open a bookstore that sells books only by Catholic authors on Catholic topics. Does he have a right to refuse to sell a book to a customer who is not Catholic? Of course not. If it offends him to sell books to people who are not Catholic, then he does not have to open a bookstore, but if he does, then he is required by well-established laws to sell books to any customers who wish to buy them, regardless of whether those customers believe that the religious doctrine set forth in those books are true.  By the same token, he can if he wishes open a shop that only sells Yankees memorabilia (like the “bookstore” in downtown Chapel Hill that only sells Tar Heels memorabilia.) But he does not have the right to refuse to sell his wares to a Red Sox fan.

 

Suppose a painter decides to open a business that offers to paint portraits of customers in Orthodox Jewish garb. When a customer enters the shop and asks to have his portrait painted, the salesman shows him a variety of possible Orthodox Jewish outfits and asks which of them he wishes the portrait artist to use in painting his portrait. Does the customer have the right to demand that his portrait be painted in the garb of a Catholic saint? Obviously not. That is not what the owner of the shop is offering. Does the painter have a right to refuse to paint a portrait of a customer who is not Jewish? Clearly not. He has a right to insist that any portrait he paint portray the subject of the portrait in Orthodox Jewish garb because that is the nature of the business he has decided to run. But if a customer is content to have his portrait painted in Orthodox Jewish garb even though he is not himself Jewish, then so long as the painter is offering his services to the public, he does not have a right to choose which customers he will accept.  If the painter holds that it is inconsistent with his religious faith to paint the non-Jew in Orthodox Jewish garb, then the he should not open a shop that offers to paint customers in that garb. No one can compel him to paint portraits of non-Jews in Orthodox religious outfits – indeed, no one can compel him to paint portraits at all. But if he starts a business that is open to the public, then he has no right refuse to serve certain customers on the grounds that doing so violates his religious freedom.

 

Suppose a web designer decides to open a business offering to design websites for people who are getting married. Can she specify that she will only design websites that are appropriate for the weddings of a man and a woman? Certainly. If a gay couple asked her to design a website for them, adjusting the design so that it is appropriate for the wedding of a man and a man, does she have a right to refuse? Of course, she has as much right to refuse to do that as the bookshop owner of the St. Thomas Aquinas Bookshop has to refuse to carry books that are not about Catholicism by Catholics. But suppose that the gay couple agree to have the web designer design for their wedding a website appropriate for the wedding of a man and a woman.  Never mind why they want that, suppose they agree.  Does the web designer have the right to refuse on the grounds that it violates religious freedom? No. She has a right not to open a business but if she chooses to open a business and offer a certain service, she has an obligation to offer to any customer who is willing to pay her price.

 

 

 

 

HERE I AM AGAIN

I have been absent from this blog for the last several days because, like the rest of the world, I have been watching the TV coverage of the series of events unfolding in Russia. Because the events started on a weekend, the usual top-tier commentators were not available for the cable news shows, so they called upon their second tier, third tier, fourth tier, and fifth tier commentators. I listened to retired diplomats, retired generals, retired generals, retired Soviet experts, retired Russian experts, and they all had exactly the same thing to say: “I do not know.” Nobody seemed to have any idea what was going on and they still do not. When I was a boy, living in Kew Gardens Hills in New York City, people my parents’ age would ask softly and somewhat secretly, when something happened in the larger world, “is it good for the Jews?” The question asked over and over again these past several days was, “is it good for Ukraine?” Well, everybody agreed it was not bad for Ukraine but nobody really knew whether it was good for Ukraine.

 

On another matter, totally unrelated, when I was not listening to this deep commentary on Russia and Ukraine, I was hearing over and over again the just leaked audio of Trump at Bedminster rustling papers and showing them – or not as the case may be – to the people working on Mark Meadows’ memoirs.  The text of that audio is included in the document indicting Trump but neither the document supposedly being shown by Trump nor the event itself is actually part of one of the 37 counts of the indictment.  The point of including it is that Trump at one point says of the document that it is classified and that he could have declassified it when he was president but now that he no longer is president he cannot do so. This demonstrates conclusively, first that Trump knew that he had not been reelected and second that he knew the rules governing the declassification of documents, two facts which it is essential to establish in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.  This is a fairly simple point, but for some reason most of the commentators seem completely unable to grasp it.

 

I had a lovely visit on Monday with a summer school class at St. John’s University in Rochester, New York that is using my textbook, About Philosophy. The chair of the department, Tim Madigan, is past president of the Bertrand Russell society, and he wanted to hear my story about the time I met Russell so I shall talk to him tomorrow. In the fall, when classes start again, I shall do a zoom visit with Harvard undergraduates majoring in Social Studies.  I reflected that if I had met an 89-year-old graduate of Harvard when I was an undergraduate there he would have been someone who was born during the Civil War!

 

It is quite lovely today in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Perhaps when the weather is not so fine I shall try to say something about the fact that the United States is now seriously flirting with authoritarian fascism. Even though I have been a strong and very vocal critic of American domestic and foreign policy for 70 years, I confess that until now I had not really feared that America might go the way of Germany or Spain or Italy, or any of the other countries that descended into authoritarian rule.

SELF-ADVERTISEMENTS

I have just reread an article I published in 1989 called "Absolute Fruit and Abstract Labor; Remarks on Marx's Use of the Concept of Inversion."  It appeared in a collective volume called KNOWLEDGE AND POLITICS: Case Studies in the Relationship Between Epistemology and Political Philosophy, edited by Marcelo Dascal and Ora Gruengard.  Some portions are identical with materials in my little book Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, which appeared the previous year, but a good deal of it is original to this essay and has appeared nowhere else. If you have a serious interest in the relationship of Marx's thought to that of Hegel and also in the complex mystified ideologically encoded character of capitalist social reality, I recommend it to you.

A MAJOR DISCOVERY THAT I WISH TO SHARE WITH MY FELLOW SUPERANNUATED TYPES

Playing with my iPhone, I discovered that on it I can listen to news clips from the various cable news channels. The picture is rather small but the sound is splendid. Who knew? I thought I would share this information with others of my generation. Do you suppose young people know about this?

A REQUEST FOR HELP

I am genuinely puzzled about something, and I should like to appeal to the collective wisdom of the readership of this blog for help. It concerns the amount of time it will take before the documents case actually goes to trial. Television commentators who have experience with the courts seem to agree that even if the judge plays by the rules, it is unlikely that the case will go to trial before the election, which is now a bit more than 16 months away. They all mention the necessity of the lawyers getting security clearances and they mention the various motions that the defense can bring up to slow things down and then they wave their hands and say “so it will not go to trial until the election.” I just do not understand that. I can see how these various delays and delaying tactics could push off the trial date six months or eight months or 10 months or even a year, which would postpone it until after the Republican Convention in July of next year. But is there anybody reading this who actually has experience with the federal courts or knows about them who can explain to me what sequence of steps could result in a 16 month postponement?

HOW COULD I HAVE EV ER DOUBTED HER?

Judge Aileen Cannon has set August 14 as the date for Trump's classified documents trial  That is August 14, 2023, not August 14, 2024. She has set an earlier date for motions in the case.  The trial date is not three months before the election, it is one year and three months before the election! It is five months before the Iowa caucuses. I suspect Trump will not be able to appear on August 14. He will probably be in Fulton County, Georgia being charged in that case. But unless something happens that is not now foreseeable, he will be tried and convicted in Florida before the primaries even begin. This is an astonishing turn of events and completely changes all of our speculations about how the next year and a half will go down.

I shall lay in a large supply of popcorn.

HOW TO READ A PHILOSPHY BOOK

I think that everyone who has commented in the previous series on Rawls is approaching his work in the wrong way, but since I have written an entire book on the subject I will simply leave it at that.