On Background Checks and Emotional Appeals

Wednesday, the Senate rejected several attempts at gun control, including expanded background checks, which received a majority 54 votes but not the 60 it needed to advance. The outrage from gun control advocates was swift. “This was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” said President Obama. “Shame on them,” said Gabrielle Giffords. Even the generally calm left-leaning economist Justin Wolfers got a little worked up: “How many kids have to be slain before Congress finally tries to prevent monsters from getting their hands on guns?(Apparently more than 20)”

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The Totally Obvious, Completely Indefensible Media Bias In The Gosnell Murder Trial

Conservatives are outraged at the lack of media coverage of Kermit Gosnell, the “doctor” who performed illegal, unsanitary, dangerous late-term abortions in Pennsylvania, using scissors to snip the necks of babies delivered alive – and that’s just the tip of the horrors to be found there. Most of you, like myself, probably only found about it this week, thanks mostly to Thursday’s scathing USAToday editorial by Kirsten Powers.

Of course, there are crazy conspiracists who talk of a deliberate “media blackout” to prevent discussing a story that makes abortion look bad. I tend to agree with Dave Weigel’s more natural explanation: “members of the MSM [mainstream media] are generally socially liberal, and less likely to notice/devote attention to a story about a rogue abortionist.” Pro-lifers like me tend to ignore stories of abortion clinic bombers; pro-choicers tend to ignore stories about abortionists killing patients with disease-ridden instruments.

But even that’s not good enough for the guardians of the mainstream media, who are shocked – shocked – to hear serious accusations that it might even be possible for there to be any sort of bias in their glorious reporting. After all, conservatives are always complaining about Liberal Media Bias, which often just means the non-Fox-News media isn’t reporting things exactly the way they want. Yet sometimes the bias is so totally obvious, so completely indefensible that the media’s desperate attempts to cover themselves just makes it all look even worse.

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On Minimum Wages And Average Productivity

Elizabeth Warren has some quotes about minimum wages that are making the rounds these days. Here’s one:

elizabeth-warren-wages-productivity

There’s another variant that claims if minimum wage had risen at the same pace as productivity for such and such arbitrary length of time, it would now stand st $22/hour. On the surface, these statements seem like a reasonable argument for raising the minimum wage, until you realize the clever sleight-of-hand being applied here.

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Bitcoins and The Spectre of Deflation

I haven’t really blogged about Bitcoin before, but it’s been impossible to ignore this week as the decentralized, anonymous crypto-currency soared to record values and every pundit piped up to predict its fate. If you’ve never heard of Bitcoin, or want to fill in the gaps, check out these explanations and analyses by Felix Salmon (generally pessimistic) and Priceonomics (guardedly optimistic).

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The Trouble With Gay Marriage

I grew up opposed to gay marriage like a dutiful conservative Christian. Eventually I came to realize that while Paul had a lot to say about what God thinks about marriage; he didn’t have much to say about what Caesar should think of it. I’ve been encouraged to see many young conservatives opening up to the libertarian-esque idea that maybe government shouldn’t be involved in marriage altogether.

Many conservatives, of course, still attempt to defend their opposition to gay marriage with faux objectivity, clinging to the increasingly tenuous connection between marriage and procreation, or grasping at any study that purports to show negative outcomes for children of gay couples. To me, this looks a bit like fighting cultural battles on political turf. For example, there are studies that appear to show negative outcomes for children born out of wedlock, but while many conservatives may hope to convince people to save children (if not sex) for marriage, no one is arguing for a ban on unmarried births.

Political Concerns

There is a political aspect of gay marriage that concerns me, however, and all the more because many conservatives seem to be ignoring it altogether. It seems likely that when we lose the ban on gay marriage, instead of moving to a neutral middle, we will go all the way to the other end and also lose voluntary, conscientious objection to it. In fact, it’s already happening.

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