Santorum on Gay Marriage and Polygamy

It looks like Rick Santorum is going to be around for a while.  In fact a horrible thought has entered my mind: he's eventually going to be Mitt Romney's running mate.  So we're going to have to listen to him on the subject of gay marriage and abortion for some time to come.  It's heartening that he was booed over his stance on gay marriage at a New Hampshire event yesterday.  But better push-back is needed.

The audience in New Hampshire let Santorum get away with the silly argument  that goes "if we allow gay marriage we'll have to allow polygamous marriage."   Listen to the video.  Santorum says "Are we saying that everyone should have the right to marry?"  Audience:  "Yes!"  Santorum:  "So anybody can marry several people?"  Audience erupts.  Santorum:  "So if you're not happy unless you're married to five other people, is that OK?"  Santorum keeps pressing the point:  "If it makes three people happy to get married, what makes that wrong?"  The audience says it's irrelevant.  Santorum says we should employ reason:  "Reason says that if you think it's OK for two, then you have to differentiate with me why it's not OK for three."   The audience doesn't rise to the occasion, but instead boos him as he leaves the lectern.

Liberals need to be better prepared for this sort of tussle.  The answer to the opening question--"Are we saying that everyone should have the right to marry?"--should be "No".  People can have whatever relationships they want, but legal marriage is an institution societies use to honor and incentivize relationships that are valuable to the society.  Two-way marriage, whether straight or gay, is socially valuable in a way that polygamy is not. Here's the differentiation Santorum was looking for:

In a two-way marriage, both people involved are desirous of the marriage.  The marriage is a kind of contract or exchange--I'll do certain things for you if you'll do them for me.  There are benefits to this for the society as a whole.  People need government support less when they have a long-term, intimate partner.

In polygamy, as it's actually practiced in the real world, three or more people don't suddenly decide to get married.  Rather there's a first marriage, and then more wives are added to the marriage (yes, wives--polyandry is extremely rare). The first marriage is mutual in the usual way, but then more wives are added to the marriage, contrary to the preferences of the first (second, etc) wife.  (If you think first wives welcome additional wives, dream on!)

It stands to reason that the additional wives put the welfare of older wives at risk.  And yes, of course the new wives do tend to get younger and younger.  Certainly, there's nothing consensual and mutual about the relationship created between the wives--they didn't desire a co-wife.  This non-mutuality does not pertain to gay marriage at all. Gay marriage is just as mutual as straight marriage.

Next differentiation: for each additional wife a man takes, some other man is deprived of the opportunity to marry.  This is bad on a personal level for bachelors, but also bad on a social level.  Bachelors have poorer health, but they also commit more crime.  The problem of the bachelors isn't a fantasy--it's a reality in countries like India and China where gendercide is commonly practiced. In southern Utah, where Mormons practice polygamy, bachelors wind up having to leave the community. One man's gain is another man's loss.

Same-sex marriage doesn't have that drawback.   When gay people marry each other, there aren't more bachelors and bachelorettes as a result, because whether they marry or not,  gay people are going to be in same sex relationships.   Only polygamy gives the benefit of marriage to some people at the direct cost of taking the benefit away from others.

Next differentiation:  men with lots of wives have lots of children.  With each additional wife, the father-to-offspring ratio becomes less favorable.  And it's just not true that a man can nurture and provide for two children as well as he can for 12 or for 24.  Gay marriage does nothing to worsen the ratio between parents and offspring, but polygamy does.

There are lots of reasons to honor and incentivize only two-way marriages.  So it's just not true that, in all consistency, we must legalize polygamy if we legalize same-sex marriage.  Polygamy is different in lots of ways, and you just have to think about it a bit to see why.

Another argument conservatives make is that if gay marriage is legalized, we'll have to let people marry their dogs.  Seriously, people say that, as if there's no conceivable reason why a society might honor and incentivize marriage between two men or two women, but not between a man and his golden retriever.  Help!

The Perp Walk and the Perf Walk

There was a lot of wailing last week about photos of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's perp walk (top).  How unfair for newspapers to publish pictures that make him look guilty!  Now I wonder--if that's a problem, what about showing him looking like a perfectly nice man on the way to a business meeting (bottom)?  There he is, looking confident as he's transferred to a $50,000 a month rental, where he will await trial on rape charges.  Surely his accuser has a right to be presumed honest, but the perf walk gives us the impression she made it all up.  I say: fair is fair. No complaining about one picture unless you also object to the other.

Health Care for 9/11 First Responders

One of the great mysteries of the universe--how can Republicans in the Senate say no to funding medical care for 9/11 first responders?  Second great mystery:  why are they getting away with it?  Where's the outrage?  

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Sarah Palin's Killing Spree

If you haven't been watching Sarah Palin's Alaska, you're missing something!  It's fascinating on a lot of levels. Turns out Sarah is quite likeable and appealing, up close and personal.  It's amusing the way her kids talk back to her just  a bit.  Bristol makes fun of her prom hair, the youngest daughter disses her hunting prowess.  I like her get up and go, and I mean it.  I kinda do strongly suspecting gallavanting all over Alaska isn't standard procedure for this tireless family, but look--she's gutsy. Must give her credit.

Part of the show's fascination is that it makes you think (constantly)--This is a prelude to a presidential run?  This woman (whatever her personal qualities) sees herself as suited to the job?  It's mind-boggling.  For which reason I do not apologize for the fact that we have Sarah Palin magnets on our refrigerator (brought to you by The Unemployed Philosophers Guild, no less).

We all enjoy dressing up Sarah and giving her suitable accessories. I keep saying: if she just stops the business about becoming president, we will take it down and say nothing but nice things about her...but this is our way of coping for the time being.

Now about all the killing on the show.  It really is relentless.  She blows away a "young cow" (her Dad's description) in one show, bashes halibut to death in another. There's shooting practice every other minute.  Which raises a very interesting question.  Surely (surely!) everything on this show is meant to enhance Sarah Palin's prospects as a presidential candidate.  But what about all the killing?  You'd think that would hurt her image, but apparently someone's making the calculation that it helps. Why?

 Maureen Dowd was contemplating the same question this week, and writes (in a column called "Pass the Caribou Stew"):

The poor caribou in the Arctic Circle, a cousin to Santa’s reindeer, had to die so Palin could show off her toughness to voters and try to boost ratings on her show that have slipped since its premiere. (Next Sunday, she’s dragging up nine Gosselins to go shooting and camping.)

Sarah’s view of America is primitive. You’re either a pointy-headed graduate of Harvard Law School or you’re eviscerating animals for fun, which she presents as somehow more authentic.
In movies with animals, they often have a line in the credits assuring that no animals were harmed. In “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” they should have a line at the end assuring that “almost every living creature involved in this show was harmed.”

The caribou that waited too pliantly in the cross hairs is doomed to become stew for Palin and an allegory for politics. The elegant animal standing above the fray, dithering rather than charging at his foes or outmaneuvering them, is Obambi. Even with a rifle aimed at him, he’s trying to be the most reasonable mammal in the scene, mammalian bipartisan, and rise above what he sees as empty distinctions between the species so that we can all unite at a higher level of being.

Great stuff, but I'm not 100% satisfied. It's one thing to be tough--like Sarah was when she was climbing in Denali National Park on the first show.  But killing is just a bit troubling, even to people who don't officially disapprove.  How then, does it get to be a political plus that Sarah's doing so much killing up there in Alaska?

I think I get it, thanks to reading Jonathan Haidt a lot in the last few weeks, and seeing a TED speech of his from 2008. You can watch from 4:30 to 10:30 and get the main idea--

Haidt's account of the "moral minds" of liberals and conservatives explains both why liberals are likely to find the killing spree morally unappealing, and conservatives are likely to find it morally attractive. A liberal like me will tend to react negatively because I live (for the most part) in a 2-dimensional moral space, defined by concepts of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity.  Sarah's harming animals, not caring about them; and it doesn't seem fair to sneak up on an unsuspecting "young cow" and blow her away.

Conservatives live (more, anyway) in a 5-dimensional moral space, defined by those already mentioned, but also by authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/pollution.  I suspect killing animals is morally attractive to them because of the authority/respect dimension.  Sarah's killing spree confirms her belief in the hierarchy that places humans over animals.  This also explains the bizarre (to a liberal like me) coupling of guns and God, in the conservative mind-set.  What, huh?  No mystery after all.  It's all about two hierarchies.  Humans over animals (that's the guns part), and God over humans.

Now wait, wait, wait.  There's something to what Maureen Dowd says about Sarah shooting Obambi.  If you're big on hierarchical thinking, shouldn't you show a lot of respect for the president?  So why the conservative disrespect for Obama?  Look away, if you're a conservative who's easily offended.  But I think one factor here is racism.  Remember, the conservative lives in a moral space partly defined by purity/pollution. I think they're none too happy about a (gasp!) black man in the White House, and sad to say, that's what their anti-immigrant fervor is all about too.

And the point is?  Haidt is, as somebody used to say, a uniter, not a divider. He's not actually trying to make liberals and conservatives see each other as foreign, but just the opposite.  On his view, we are all  born stocked with all five "dimensions" of moral thought, but our environments emphasize some dimensions, and de-emphasize others. I see this in my own household, and the way it compares to other people's.  My husband and I have a hard time caring about the authority/respect thing.  When the kids are disrespectful, we don't like it, but we have a hard time working up a big authoritative fit about it.  We know other parents who (believe it or not) even expect their kids to respond to parental commands by saying "yes, ma'am" and "yes sir."

So underneath it all (the idea is) we are all really the same. Plus, Haidt is asking liberals to stop seeing conservative attitudes as anti-moral--blowing away animals, refusing to respect Obama, and keeping out immigrants all do strike me that way.  Rather, we are to see conservatives as seeing morality in more colors than we two-color liberals do. Sarah's killing spree fits into a certain sort of morality that I don't favor, and others do.  And seeing it that way helps us see her less as an alien, and more as a fellow human being.

Good--it's better to understand one another, not demonize other people as utterly anti-moral.  But surely we shouldn't stop there.  Next, we should broach the question of truth.  Is all that authority/respect and purity/pollution stuff really just rubbish?   Should Sarah really be doing all that killing?  Should she (or people like her) really have political power?  Hell no. But it's a fine thing to understand her way of thinking better.

Laughing at the Misfortunes of Others

Carlin Romano starts an editorial about Chrisopher Hitchens's cancer in scandalous fashion--

If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who's boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

As organs go, it's long and conveniently placed, stretching from throat to stomach, making a good target for an elderly yet determined deity with possibly shaky hands. Its importance to speech heightens the symbolic force intended. And its connection to swallowing suggests the irony some believers think God enjoys too much: You can't swallow me? You won't swallow anything!

What a terrible thing to say!  For shame!  But never fear, he says this stuff to raise...

...the peculiar issue of parallelism that comes up when curmudgeons, contrarians, and provocateurs find themselves on the ropes, as with all violators of society's norms. Just as we can debate whether it's acceptable to use terrorism or torture against terrorists and torturers—those who don't sign on to the social contract by which everyone else lives—we can ask whether it's OK to be scabrously unsympathetic to a stinging gadfly who is possibly in his ninth inning.

Hitchens has said wicked, wicked things about other people.  Is turn-around fair play?   Yeah, yeah, two wrongs don't make a right.  On the other hand, a "stinging gadfly" is in no position to complain.  And if he can't complain, how can anyone complain on his behalf?   This is what Saul Smilansky calls "the paradox of moral complaint" --for more on that, see here.

To make the puzzle about Hitchens even more puzzling, consider an interview (will provide link when I find it) where he's asked how he would define the good life. He lists several ingredients, but focuses on one in particular, mentioning it twice.  What would that be? Laughing at the misfortunes of others.

Oklahoma's Abortion Law

We interrupt regular programming to bring you this important story.  I couldn't be more appalled by the new abortion law just passed in Oklahoma.   Under the new law, all women must have sonograms before abortions--no exceptions.  The doctor must show the woman the screen and describe whatever heartbeat, organs, limbs, etc., they see there.  (On the other hand, women can't sue doctors if they don't mention abnormalities they may see.)  It's one thing to offer women the option of a sonogram. To require it and offer unrequested information is a completely unacceptable violation of a woman's privacy and autonomy.  Appalling.

PETA and Euthanasia

I've got to stop reading Gary Francione.  I'm going to wind up with a permanent frown.  Francione reports that PETA euthanizes 90% of the animals in its shelter.  He draws a couple of conclusions.  First, PETA must be euthanising healthy animals.  He writes, after presenting the statistic--

That is a disgrace. “Euthanasia” is death that is in the interest of the human or nonhuman euthanized. Euthanasia is never in the interests of a healthy being.

Why assume the animals were healthy?  This is what Ingrid Newkirk wrote, after an anti-animal-rights group started a campaign about how PETA kills animals (I discussed the campaign here). 

Second, he surmises that PETA accepts a theory he attributes to Peter Singer. 

PETA apparently shares Peter Singer’s view that a relatively painless death does not constitute a harm for nonhuman animals because, unlike humans, most nonhumans are not self-aware and cannot grasp what it means to “have a life.” In order to have an interest in your continued existence, you must be human. So those 2352 animals that PETA killed weren’t really harmed. They did not care about their lives anyway. Nothing was taken from them when they were killed.

But this isn't even Singer's theory,  His theory is that death harms human beings in more ways than it harms animals, not that  death doesn't harm animals at all.  For a human and an animal, death harms by taking away future satisfactions.  Death merely harms humans in an extra way, by taking away satisfactions they explicitly want.

This difference does have some practical implcations. If you could run a farm where animals are painlessly killed and bred, so that every bit of happiness lost was replaced, Singer thinks that would be different from running a people farm.  The absence of desires about the future makes animals (of most species) replaceable.  But euthanizing animals at a shelter doesn't involve the combination of killing and replacing.  So Singer's "replacement argument" has no relevance.

Frown.

Report from Santiago

A lot of us have become friends with Amos through this blog (and back at Talking Philosophy), so we immediately thought about him when we heard the news about the earthquake in Chile.  He is fine, still has internet service, and sent me this report:

Feb. 28  Chile has an image and a self-image of being an ultra-competitive, ultra-modern society, a society where each economic agent (the word "citizen" is out of date) with his or her cell-phone, hopefully an I-phone (I have neither a cellphone nor an I-phone), can text their way through traffic jams, through heart-attacks, can text an organ transplant, can text their way out of angst and ageing. It all collapsed. In two minutes. Two minutes in which my bed shook. Two minutes in which everything in my apartment fell from shelves, unto the floor. I'm okay. We have 700 dead, according to the last count and there will be more. There is a blog about the earthquake in Spanish-- things will never be the same. I don't think that they are just talking about physical things.

In general, this was a very serious earthquake, 8.8 in the south of Chile and 8.0 in Santiago. The Haitian earthquake was 7.0, and the scale increases geometrically, that is, the Chilean earthquake was several hundred times stronger than that of Haiti. Lots of people still without water and electricity. Cell-phone service is only half working. Airport is still closed. Supermarkets closed. Looting. Some looters may need food, but in some places, they're looting with trucks, taking TV sets, etc. I never thought that I'd hear the Radio Bio Bio, an excellent progressive radio station, with 24 hour coverage since the quake, call for the army to take control (after 17 years of military dictatorship, under Pinochet), but they are right. In the south of Chile there will be curfew tonight, with the army in charge. I'm okay. We have food for several weeks, although we may have to eat a vegan diet, rice and beans out of necessity, since that is what we have stocked.

Thank you, Amos.  Stay safe.

Corporate Free Speech

I've been puzzled by the response to the Supreme Court's recent decision on corporate speech. The court struck down parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that prohibited corporations from airing political ads shortly before elections. The majority ruled that corporate speech is protected by the first amendment.  In response, many progressives are insisting that only individuals should have a right to free speech.  (See here for example.)

There are lots of good reasons to worry about corporations wielding too much influence, but how can anybody really want to see free speech rights restricted to individuals? Surely a city shouldn't be able to take down billboards put up by advocacy groups like the Sierra Club or Peta, or even the NRA--just on the basis of their content. Right?  We wouldn't want free speech rights not to extend to groups.

I don't even find it obvious that a for-profit corporation should be silenceable. Say that Coca Cola wants to put an ad on TV supporting gay marriage in Georgia--whether for ideological reasons or to sell products or to attract good staff to their headquarters in Atlanta. Or maybe they want to object to gay marriage. Should it be possible for some government entity to prohibit the ads?

The critical question is whether the usual free speech rights of corporations (surely they have some) should be curtailed when it comes to elections. Is it so harmful to our democracy for corporations to run political ads right before an election that their normal free speech rights should be overridden--much like we don't let people yell "fire!" in a movie theater? 

Maybe, but there's a right there to be curtailed. It doesn't seem wise to completely deny the right--if we want to live in a free and open democracy.

There's a further reason to be wary of restricting rights to individuals. That's bound to be interpreted as meaning "human individuals." The fact that corporations are legal entities in this country, with rights and liabilities, opens the door to other expansions. This point is made in Cass Sunstein's very interesting article "Can Animals Sue?"

All around, it doesn't seem wise to insist that rights are for you and me only--that would have ramifications that are bad all around, bad for progressives, and especially bad for pro-animal progressives.

Haiti Relief

I decided to donate to Partners in Health, an incredible organization, but there are lots of ways to contribute to earthquake relief in Haiti.  A list is here--

American Red Cross International Response Fund
AmeriCares Help For Haiti
Direct Relief International
Doctors without Borders
HaitiArise
Haiti Emergency Relief Fund
Mercy Corps
Oxfam
UNICEF
Yele Haiti

Pass it on!

The Danish Cartoonist

A few days ago one of the infamous Danish cartoonists was attacked by a knife and axe-wielding Somali man in his own home, with his grand-daughter on the premises, prompting this editorial from Nancy Graham Holm.  What's so very stupid about the editorial is not, surely, the questioning of whether those cartoons should have been created and published.  That's got to be a legitimate matter for debate.  The problem is the timing.  As people have been saying all over the internet, the author seems to be blaming the victim, Kurt Westergaard.

Analogy. It's perfectly fine for a concerned party to talk to female students about what they wear when they make their way home late at night, perhaps walking home alone from the subway station.  Yes, there's a right to express yourself, but it just might not be worth asserting that right, if it means putting yourself at risk of being attacked.   That conversation is fine.  But if the attack actually happens?  At that point, the issue of what a woman was wearing is no longer fine.  She may have been imprudent, but bringing that up inevitably sends the message that the attacker is to be excused. 

I have to admit, I did learn something interesting from the editorial.  There are 87 men named Kurt Westergaard in Denmark, all now under police protection.  Some enterprising journalist ought to write an article about them, or even make a little film.  It strikes me as somehow poignant that your life could be turned around just because of your name. 

I also learned something from the response to Holm.  When women are attacked for their ideas, they are often attacked in gender-specific terms. She's a bitch, a this, a that (this blog is PG rated--use your imagination).   I should say, rather, something I already knew was confirmed.  Lately I've been noticing the same thing in animal rights quarters.  A man is attacked for being an idiot (or some such) but a woman is a bitch, a this, a that.  No links, because this stuff doesn't deserve a readership.

This Burger Smells Funny

Unbelievable, but true.  If your kid is eating hamburgers at school, or at fast food restaurants, or even in your home, it turns out he or she is eating (in part) a pink slurry formed out of fatty beef trimmings--the bits that are on the surface of a beef carcass, and so most likely to come into contact with feces.  But don't worry that your kid is eating shit.  The slurry is first injected with ammonia.  And don't worry that this might not be effective.  Beef Products, the company selling this stuff, has done its own studies.  In 2007 they reassured the USDA that the product is safe. The USDA took their word for it (wouldn't you?) and exempted the product from pathogen testing.

Last year the school lunch program sold 5.3 milliion pounds of the pink stuff.  It lowers costs by three cents per burger to replace 15% of the regular ground beef with the stuff.  Touchingly enough, the school lunch folks do require pathogen testing.  But about serving kids ammonia... Apparently it really stinks.  A Georgia prison sent back 7,000 pounds of slurry because the smell was revolting to the folks in the kitchen.   When they get complaints about the smell, Beef Products cuts back a bit on ammonia. But then, less ammonia means more E. coli.   In response to test results presented to them by the New York Times recently, the USDA decided Beef Products shouldn't be exempt from testing anymore.  

Little kids are still being served ammonia treated scraps of high risk beef trimmings, but the good guys at the USDA obviously have the situation under control.  Phew.  And it seemed for a moment there like this might be a really revolting, unconscionable situation!

The mastermind of the ammoniated scraps product is one Eldon Roth.  Is he sitting in prison somewhere eating ammoniated meatloaf?  Why no!

Dr. Theno, the food safety consultant, applauds Mr. Roth for figuring out how to convert high-fat trimmings “with no functional value.”

“There were some issues with that,” Dr. Theno said. “But he, and God bless him, amassed a tidy fortune for it.”

Yeah, just a few issues.

More on Obama and the Kids

I'm happy to say that a lot of parents are hopping mad about the success that the Obama-haters are having with their campaign to block schoolchildren from hearing his speech next week. We're writing letters and emails and making phone calls. The President of the United States would like to talk to schoolchildren about working hard and staying in school. Sheer respect for the office means: they watch. And they watch without first getting special permission from their parents.

It annoys me that our first black president is being diminished this way. The locos (and I don't just mean "locals") wouldn't have dreamed of stopping President Bush from talking to school kids. In their minds, I think President Obama isn't actually quite the president. He's "that one"--a socialist, a death-bringer, a corrupter of youth. And our school administrators go along with it! Below--an open letter to our school superintendent, sent yesterday with a long list of signatures.

Obama's Speech to the Kids

President Obama is going to be addressing school children next week about the importance of working hard and staying in school. Did you know that he's going to be giving the speech in the nude? In fact, Michelle will be naked too. When he is done talking up education, they will be demonstrating some of their favorite positions on his desk. Or at least I gather as much from this article in the Dallas Morning News:

A groundswell of parent opposition to President Barack Obama's speech next week to students on the importance of education has forced many North Texas school districts to question whether to air it live in classrooms.
Obama announced the speech weeks ago, but opposition and concerns spread rapidly Wednesday morning through conservative social networking Web sites and radio talk shows.
By midday, local school districts say, they were inundated with hundreds of phone calls from parents urging them to not show Obama's speech at school.
Some parents threatened to keep their children home from school if the video was aired.

Apparently my own kids' school district here in Richardson, Texas, got wind of the X-rated nature of the presentation, and we've been sent the above permission slip. Unless I sign, they don't get to see the speech.

My feeling is: no. I don't think this kind of thing is appropriate for school age children. But me, I'm definitely watching.

Dr. Tiller's Death...

...is on the minds of women everywhere. Feminist Philosophers offers suggestions for honoring him and protecting abortion rights here. I wish I'd known about the vigil in Dallas last night.

Thank You, George Tiller

Gunned down at church, for being an abortion provider. Yes, it isn't pretty, it isn't easy, but millions of women would find their lives blown completely off course, if they couldn't end unwanted pregnancies. Morality would preclude abortion if a fetus really were morally like a baby, but I don't think so, and millions of women don't think so, and Dr. Tiller didn't think so.

Apparently he was particularly controversial because he performed late-term abortions, but we shouldn't give abortion opponents control of what that looks like. A friend of mine had such terrible hyperemesis (vomiting during pregnancy) that she nearly had to end the pregnancy in the last trimester, to save her own life. That's at least one sort of case that should come to mind when we talk about "late-term abortion."

Dr. Tiller could have been a safe and respectable ob-gyn, but chose a hard calling. I bet there are thousands of women today who feel indebted to him, thankful, and bereaved. Symbolically, anyway, I am one of them.

The Joy of Change

The Devil Came on Horseback

For the longest time I couldn't get a fix on what the problem in Darfur was all about. I saw the full-page Save Darfur ads in the New York Times. Had some dim sense of mass atrocities taking place. I am embarrassed to say I was one of the millions who weren't paying attention.

What woke me up was the great novel What is the What? by Dave Eggers. It's the story of a survivor of the 20 year civil war in southern Sudan, but it paints a vivid picture of the Janjaweed, the militias that are now wreaking the same murderous havoc in western Sudan, Darfur. This is a "read it and cry" kind of a book, but extremely good.

Half way through it I decided it was time to know about what's happening now, in Darfur. Luck had it that my synagogue had an opening for someone to run a Darfur project it has sponsored since 2005. You can find out about it here. Since then I've been working hard at understanding the whole thing.

The new documentary The Devil Came on Horseback has added immensely to my understanding. If you have any kind of trust in human nature, which I do tend to have, it's hard to get a grip on extreme atrocities. In fact, the book Not on Our Watch (Cheadle and Prendergast) identifies the feeling that people don't do stuff like that! as one reason why people turn the other way. You have to believe terrible things really are going on before you'll do anything to prevent them. The Devil Came on Horseback will make you a believer.

This is the kind of movie people tend to feel they should see, but gee...won't it be just too depressing? Doesn't the kitchen floor really need a good wash? Yesterday I trudged off to the movie theater, leaving behind a husband and two children who were watching the old Beatles movie Help! I felt more duty-bound than enthusiastic.

But it turned out I was wrong. This is a disturbing movie, but also energizing and uplifting. The directors made a brilliant choice when they decided to focus on the personal story of Brian Steidle, the former marine captain who took the disturbing still pictures that are the core of the film. He starts off as a regular military careerist and what he sees in Darfur transforms him into a passionate and committed activist. It is a moving and literally wonderful story.

One addendum--while googling for an image to go with this post, I came upon an interesting website: We are Mothers Fighting for Others. Parents can focus on their own little marevelous wonders to the exclusion of everything else. (I know about that...from personal experience.) It's cool these folks have a different agenda.