Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 608

Why Not Polyamory?

The Spectator, a British weekly which claims uninterrupted publication since 1828, covers cultural and political topics with a moderately conservative bias. (It also cultivates excellent writing, sometimes spiced with the distinctive nastiness that is the product of higher education in Britain.) In its issue of August 8, 2015, The Speccie, as its fans call it, published a story by Owen Matthews, “Putin and the Polygamists”. The story deals with an episode in Chechnya, which was brutally reconquered by Russia from an Islamist insurgency. It is ruled by Ramzan Kadynov, a mini-dictator installed by Putin and closely allied with him; the province is described as “a self-ruling sharia state within Russia”. Thus polygamy is legal in Chechnya, illegal in the Russian Federation.

What happened recently in the Islamist enclave is that a middle-aged police chief forced a family to hand over their daughter Khedia to become his second wife. Kadyrov, who apparently practices what he preaches, has called polygamy “a part of traditional Muslim culture”; he hailed the rape of Khedia “a wedding of the millennium”. The state-controlled Russian media also celebrated the event. Putin’s domestic policy toward Chechnya has a parallel in his foreign policy: In a recent session of the UN Human Rights Council Russia and Muslim states introduced a resolution in favor of “traditional marriage” (which seems to mean marriage between heterosexuals—never mind how many—as against same-sex marriage). In reaction to American and European sanctions, Russia has on other occasions made nice to Muslim states. There is obviously some tension between these policies and the icon of Vladimir Putin as the champion of Orthodox tradition and Christian values in opposition to the decadent culture of Western democracies. At the end of his article Matthews asks whether political expendiency trumps all of Putin’s alleged beliefs and values. I assume that the question is asked rhetorically. (Perhaps Putin is not aware that there may be a possibility of justifying polygamy in terms of Orthodox tradition: Prince Vladimir of Kiev, who brought Orthodox Christianity to Russia, is reputed to have had a harem of hundreds of concubines, and was described in a twelfth-century chronicle as “insatiable in fornication”.)As far as I know, the one earlier time that polygamy was given public attention in America was in the debate over statehood for Utah, which was granted by Congress in 1896. The problem then was, precisely, the Mormon peculiar institution of what they called “plural marriage”. This had been described as a divine commandment by Joseph Smith, the founder of the faith, and enthusiastically practiced by Brigham Young, who led the faithful on the famous trek to the New Zion out west. (It has been asserted, I think with some exaggeration, that all those claiming descent from Young could fit into the huge Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.)Fortunately for Utah statehood, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has had since its early days a ruling body capable of receiving new divine revelations. Well in time before the Congressional vote on statehood such an amendment was received, rescinding the mandate of “plural marriage” in favor of the monogamy clearly endorsed (then) by the great majority of Americans. Since then the LDS Church has been in the forefront of opposition to same-sex marriage in defense of “traditional marriage” (as understood, say, by the Southern Baptist Convention—better not quibble about just whose “tradition” is meant).Insofar as news about polygamy has bubbled up in the American media in recent years, it has typically been about some dissident Mormon group who, in defiance of the official LDS position, have been practicing the banned form of kinship in some remote area, and have gotten into trouble with state authorities (often over alleged mistreatment or neglect of children). Recently Mormonism has gained much more favorable public attention. Two very popular television series have shown Mormon polygamy (dissident, of course) in a favorable light: “Big Love”, first shown in 2006, about a caring husband of three wives; and “Sister Wives”, a 2010 documentary about one Kody Brown with four wives and seventeen children.In 2011 a successful Broadway musical had mild fun in depicting Mormon missionaries sent to Africa (Salt Lake City also reacted mildly, and someone pointed out that a religion has really made it in America if Broadway or Hollywood can make fun of it in a friendly way). Of course the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney in 2012 also drew attention to his Mormon faith (none hostile, except for some by preachers in the fever-swamps of Protestant fundamentalism). Survey data up to and including the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage show beyond dispute how public opinion has changed on all aspects of homosexuality. It is an interesting question how much the media reflect this change and/or how much they have helped cause it. Probably it is a matter of mutual interaction. In any case, for some time now one television sitcom after another featured a sympathetic gay character, who gives wise romantic advice to the women who befriend him. (How much television do Supreme Court justices watch?!)The “slippery slope” argument has long been made by American conservative opponents of same-sex marriage. Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2006 in The Washington Post: “If, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender imperative is nothing but prejudice, exclusive and arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choice, on what grounds do you insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?” In other words, the “slope” is from polygamy to polyandry to what is now called “polyamory”—the mutual commitment to love one another by any number of consenting adults. (Perhaps then slipping further to polyspecies—“Jack and Jill and their puppy Pluto”) There now exists an association for the promotion of polyamory (its logo is the mathematical symbol of infinity superimposed upon a heart). Apparently Unitarians, ever in the forefront of progressive causes, have shown particular interest in this new sexual ideology, but the official Unitarian Universalist Church (its headquarters is on Beacon Hill in Boston) has stated its disapproval. However, polyamory is not limited to the metropolitan centers of sophistication: On August 15, 2015, a newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, reported that a local married couple had declared (I’m not clear to whom) their intention to open up to a polyamory arrangement.If monogamy is mandated by either God’s will or by natural law, polygamy and its alleged slippery consequences can be confidently rejected. If God’s will is deduced from the legal portions of the Hebrew Bible, there is the problem of all the rather troubling provisions there, leaving aside the fact that the Tenth Commandment considers a wife to be her husband’s property. If one turns to the New Testament, Jesus had little to say about marriage (other than that its provisions do not extend to the hereafter), while the Apostle Paul wrote that it’s better to be married than “to burn” (not much of an endorsement). The problem with natural law is that the enormous variety of kinship arrangements collected by anthropologists make it difficult to decide which one is somehow universally inscribed in human hearts. Turn to natural science: If one takes a look at the two genders’ genitalia, it seems rather clear that they fit quite neatly into each other. But if the so-called “selfish gene” is assumed to determine behavior, then it is unclear what it would demand after at least one ovum had been fertilized. Or could it be the polygamous maxim “the more, the better”? Or alternatively would we have the option of ignoring the shrieks of the “selfish gene”? Perhaps the basic problem in all of this is the phrase “traditional marriage”, whether bandied about by either its advocates or its critics. Yes, there is a “tradition”—that of the modern bourgeois marriage (one man, one woman, and their offspring residing in a household separate from the extended family): It is about as old as the steam engine. Perhaps it is best to ask what makes this “tradition” so unique—the particular linkage of a sexual act with the sequence of generations. Perhaps grandparents can supply relevant evidence: As they look at a newborn infant and look for physical resemblances to themselves!In a society that is both pluralist and democratic different beliefs and values will have to co-exist. There will also be an overarching value system (Emile Durkheim’s “collective conscience”) to which at least the great majority of citizens will adhere and for which they will be ready to sacrifice (be it in treasure or in blood). It is probably helpful if this “conscience” is theologically neutral, but inevitably it will be explained differently by different faith communities. The first article of the German constitution, the Grundgesetz instituted in 1949 by the new Federal Republic: Die Wuerde des Menschen ist unantastbar/”The dignity of man is inviolate”. This sentence would not have been placed where it was if it were not for the monstrous violations of human dignity by the recent Nazi regime and, slightly less monstrously, committed even then by the Communists regimes in the Soviet empire. Christians could and did base their assent to the sentence on the belief of man as the image of God. But non-Christians, including those without religious faith, could assent on the basis of their perception of the human condition. Very often such a clear and compelling moral perception comes from confrontation with its opposite (as it did in Germany in 1949). Back to the “marriage wars” of our own time: Religious believers and non-religious humanists can agree in their moral revulsion against the regime of sexual slavery set up by ISIS; such revulsion can change the tone in which the debate over the nature of marriage is discussed—and suggest ways of understanding it with reference to the core value of human dignity,What is avoided in such a discussion is demonization of all who disagree with one’s own views. If at all possible, democracy seeks reasonable compromises. I think that one can learn from the reaction of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after the British Parliament legalized same-sex marriage. Although he has been conducting a very respectful dialogue with Rome on various issues, he said that he would not follow the Roman example of fighting same-sex marriage without compromise. Rather, Parliament has acted, in accordance with a new consensus in the public. Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land, and one should accept this fact. However, the Church of England continues to believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. If you want to be married in an Anglican service you better be such a couple. If not, there are plenty of other churches in the country where same-sex couples can be married. Beyond that, in fidelity to the basic right of religious freedom, there must be strong provisions defending Anglican clergy who refuse to conduct same-sex weddings and defending anyone’s right to disapprove of this practice. (I understand that there are such provisions.)It seems that one can still have confidence in the old British tradition of practical compromise. And, I suppose, also in the related sense of humor. I recently saw a cartoon in another British publication (I forget which). It shows two middle-aged men sitting side by side, apparently distressed. A tearful little boy is addressing them. The caption reads: “Dads, I’m homophobic!”

Germany’s “Green” Transition Is Gouging Its Poor

Germany’s vaunted energy transition—its energiewende—has been extraordinarily costly to the German consumer, and those costs aren’t going anywhere. German newspaper Handelsblatt reports that the bill for this rapid transition towards renewables and away from nuclear power is costing the country some €28 billion every year (translated):

The costs of the energy transition amount for the current customer at 28 billion euros per year. A household with an electricity consumption of 3,500 kilowatt hours thus pays 270 euros a year for the implementation of the energy transition. This is the result of calculations from the Institute for Economic Research (IW) for Handelsblatt. The calculations include not only the costs of the promotion of renewable energy, but also costs of network expansion. […]

Ulrich Grillo, president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), has sounded the alarm: “The calculations make it clear what the costs of the energy transition really are. Companies fear that they will actually continue to rise,” he told Handelsblatt.

Germany rashly decided to shutter its nuclear reactors after Fukushima, spooked by risks its own plants, sited far from major tectonic plate boundaries, will never have to contend with. It had the gall to package this decision as part of a “green” plan, despite the fact that these reactors are one of the only sources of zero-carbon baseload power the world yet has. So while it’s been able to boost renewables through government subsidies called feed-in tariffs (the big reason why electricity bills are rising), it isn’t reaping huge emissions reductions because the country has been forced to burn coal at near-record levels to replace the shuttered nuclear plants. That Gordian knot of incompetency would be difficult to tie even if it was your intention to create a disastrous energy policy; it’s remarkable that Berlin stumbled into its current situation with (presumably) good intentions.

And so now, the average German household is being gouged 270 more euros a year on its power bills. For the wealthy, this extra expenditure will by and large go unnoticed. But for Germany’s poor that’s a lot of extra money to be shelling out. In this way, expensive energy is a particularly pernicious form of a regressive tax on a fundamental household need. Not only is Germany’s energiewende failing to make the green strides expected of it, it’s also hurting the country’s most vulnerable in the process.

Is Turkey Going Nuclear?

The recently concluded P5+1 negotiations with Iran about the status of its nuclear program have raised concerns that rival regional powers may choose to pursue an independent nuclear weapons capability. Neighboring Turkey is often listed as a potential proliferator, owing to its historic concerns about Iranian empowerment, and its on-going proxy war with the Islamic Republic in neighboring Syria. Turkey’s recent efforts to develop nuclear energy thus seem to some to be Ankara’s first step toward securing the option of developing a nuclear weapon.

At a superficial geopolitical level, and with some deep history in ancillary support, this interpretation is logical. But it is wrong.While Turkish-Iranian tensions have spiked in recent months, Ankara’s nuclear weapons policy—and support for nonproliferation—has remained remarkably consistent since it was first articulated in 1959 under a government still beholden to a staunchly Kemalist military. Turkey’s approach to the Islamic Republic—and to proliferation in the Middle East—has also remained static since the 1980s. Turkey and Iran do compete in the Middle East: Each supports different political proxies in the region, and each is engaged in an indirect proxy war in Syria. Nevertheless, the two sides retain working bilateral relations and have a mutual interest in deepening trade ties.Furthermore, Turkey under the AKP remains a strong supporter of the international nonproliferation regime and views these multilateral instruments as the best way to ensure that Iran is prevented from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Turkey’s approach to the Iranian nuclear issue is multifaceted, blending Ankara’s economic interests with its concerns about Iran’s support for non-state actors hostile to Turkish interests. This has resulted in the adoption of a compartmentalized approach. Ankara will not hesitate to use associated political and military proxies to check Iranian power in the region, but will stop short of threatening its economic interests inside the Islamic Republic.For these reasons, Ankara has championed diplomatic engagement with Iran since 2002, and now views the successful nuclear negotiations with Tehran as validating its preferred approach. Ankara has thus not taken any steps so far that would suggest an interest in acquiring nuclear weapons to balance the Iranian threshold/breakout threat. Turkey remains committed to nonproliferation, has evinced little interest in developing nuclear weapons, and is rather pursuing civil nuclear energy policies first articulated in the 1950s.After signing and then ratifying the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in the late 1970s, Turkish policymakers have internalized the nonproliferation norm, viewing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as a key pillar of its defense policy. Ankara has paired its embrace of nonproliferation with the development and procurement of conventional weapons, designed to defend against—and target—ballistic missiles and sites suspected of producing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This policy dates from 1991, after the revelations about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program following the first Gulf War, and has remained in place ever since.Turkey’s policy is premised on its understanding of the Iranian nuclear threat and its interpretation of international nonproliferation norms. Turkish officials believe that diplomacy can be used to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue peacefully and that inspections can prevent Iran from cheating on a nuclear agreement. Ankara has always been skeptical of the efficacy of military action, arguing that the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities would ignite a regional war that would destabilize Turkey, while also pushing Iran to withdraw from the NPT and build a nuclear weapon.The AKP has indicated that diplomatic engagement strengthens Iran’s “moderates” at the expense of the “hardliners.” Thus, to resolve the Iranian nuclear dispute, the international powers needed to make a concerted effort to engage Iranian moderates diplomatically. A strengthened moderate political movement, Ankara has long argued, would be more amenable to making the compromises needed to resolve Iran’s outstanding issues with the IAEA. By contrast, the reliance on coercion would only strengthen the hand of the Iran’s hardliners, who reject compromise and are more amenable to the development of nuclear weapons.Turkey’s policy is based on three interrelated factors: (1) Turkey is a unique Middle Eastern state owing to its membership in NATO and its hosting of 60–70 U.S. nuclear weapons at Incirlik Air Force Base; (2) Ankara has an interest in deepening economic cooperation with Iran; (3) Iran and Turkey have an interdependent energy relationship. For these reasons, Ankara has come to rely on the NATO-provided security guarantee to deter regional proliferators, while the security services begin the long process of acquiring conventional weapons designed to give it some protection from ballistic missiles and WMD. At the same time, Turkey has also worked to deepen its trade relationship with Iran and has therefore resisted the implementation of U.S. and EU sanctions.Despite claims to the contrary, Ankara values its defense relationship with NATO, viewing the arrangement as the critical link to its most important ally: the United States. Nuclear weapons play an important role in Ankara’s approach to NATO and shape its approach to the Iranian nuclear issue. Ankara has hosted American nuclear weapons, deployed under the aegis of the NATO alliance, since 1957. Since then, Turkey has relied on the concept of deterrence, first directed at the Soviet Union, and then the Middle East, for defense.In 1959, Foreign Minister Fatin Rüştü Zorlu first articulated Turkey’s nuclear weapons policy: the Soviet Union, Zorlu argued, intended to dominate the world, and therefore the relaxation of the arms race would embolden it and could have troubling consequences for the Free World. While Zorlu did not rule out disarmament, he indicated that the process should be based on mutual reductions and transparency on the Soviet side.This policy has since become Turkey’s de facto approach to arms control, with Ankara championing the step-by-step approach to disarmament as recently as at this year’s NPT Review Conference. For Turkey’s leaders, the maintenance of forward-deployed nuclear weapons in Europe is an important component of NATO’s emphasis on burden sharing, owing to the fact that 16 out of 28 member states (including Turkey) participate in the nuclear strike mission. Turkey’s current position on the withdrawal of nuclear weapons is similar to that of Zorlu’s position in 1959: Ankara would not block the removal of these weapons if NATO were to reach a consensus on the issue, but removal should come only after Russia limits its own arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. That is clearly not happening; Russia relies on tactical nuclear weapons to offset NATO’s conventional military superiority, deploying a greater number of weapons than the total number of U.S. gravity bombs in Europe. Russia has shown little willingness to disarm, tying such a policy to conventional weapon limitations and issues of strategic stability.Nevertheless, since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has decreased its reliance on nuclear weapons in favor of the development and procurement of advanced precision strike weapons. In 1995, reportedly for economic reasons, Ankara chose to decertify the pilots it had hitherto relied upon to deliver U.S. nuclear weapons. These trends mirror those of NATO, which has decreased its nuclear readiness considerably since the end of the Cold War.This means that Ankara hosts American nuclear weapons, has the aircraft needed to deliver them, speaks in favor of maintaining these weapons in Europe, but no longer has pilots certified for the nuclear mission. Ankara has maintained this posture now for twenty years despite the growing threat of regional proliferation in three neighboring states: Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Turkey’s previous approach to these three cases helps shed light on the AKP’s approach to the current Iranian nuclear issue.Ankara first became concerned with the proliferation of ballistic missiles and WMD during the 1980s, when Iraq turned to these weapons to aid its war with the Islamic Republic. Iran’s subsequent acquisition of ballistic missiles further raised concerns in Ankara, particularly after reports surfaced in the late 1980s that Iran had begun to explore the development of nuclear weapons. During the conflict, however, Ankara chose to remain neutral and resisted U.S.-backed efforts to limit its trade relationship with either country. In doing so, Ankara set a policy precedent that it follows to this day: it resists enforcing even multiple and coordinated unilateral sanctions, especially when deemed detrimental to Turkish economic interests, and will only enforce sanctions after a UN endorsement.Nonetheless, Ankara borders three states that are known to have pursued weapons of mass destruction. During the 1980s, Iraq used chemical weapons and had a relatively well-developed nuclear weapons program. During that same period, Syria amassed a large chemical arsenal and was cooperating with North Korea on the construction of plutonium production reactor. Finally, Iran began its nuclear weapons program in 1985, long before the bulk of its undeclared nuclear facilities were revealed in August 2002.In the case of Iraq, Turkey supported the international efforts to draft a more robust inspection regime, designed to prevent the clandestine building of nuclear weapons-related facilities. This voluntary inspection regime, since dubbed the Additional Protocol, is intended to give the IAEA more tools to prevent the clandestine development of undeclared nuclear facilities.For these reasons, Turkey supports the robust inspection provisions included in the July 14 Joint Plan of Action (JCPOA). In addition to Iran’s voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol (and the expectation that the Iranian Parliament will formally ratify the AP once the agreement is implemented), the JCPOA includes strengthened inspection provisions in excess of the AP, including: limits on Iran’s centrifuge numbers for ten years, the extension of some of the limitations on Iran’s overall separation work units (SWU) total for 15 years, and the monitoring of the infrastructure needed to support the front end of the fuel cycle for 25 years. These provisions mean that Iran will be subjected to extraordinary inspections for 25 years, before giving way to the enforcement of the Turkish-backed Additional Protocol in or before 2040.The JCPOA also envisions the removal of economic sanctions, which would help to strengthen Turkey’s trade ties with the Islamic Republic. Turkey currently imports 20 percent of its natural gas from Iran, which accounts for 90 percent of the Islamic Republic’s gas exports. U.S. and European Union sanctions forced Turkey to decrease its energy imports from Iran and surreptitiously pay for Iranian energy with Turkish Lira through a state bank, which Tehran then used to purchase gold, which was then shipped to Iran. This arrangement ran afoul of U.S. sanctions, but Ankara has nevertheless continued to pay for Iranian natural gas with gold exports currently routed through Switzerland. Turkey would favor an agreement that would allow for overt payment for Iranian gas. This would help to decrease the cost of doing business and to ease the American pressure on Ankara to further curtail its business dealings with Iran.The sanctions have also hurt other areas of the Turkish economy. In Turkey’s lucrative textile industry, many producers were forced to dissolve trade ties with Iranian businesses after the post-2012 EU sanctions led to the depreciation of the Iranian Rial and banks could no longer process Iranian wire transfers. These small businesses are an important part of the AKP’s electoral base and—up until the recent depreciation in the Turkish Lira—had supported the party for its deft handling of Turkey’s economy. Thus, the expected end of financial sanctions will strengthen this key sector of the Turkish economy.These shared economic interests are independent of the proxy war that Iran and Turkey have been fighting in Syria. At the outset of the Syrian crisis, Iran and Turkey shared the same goal: to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power. The AKP had invested much political capital in tightening ties with Syria and had come to view Assad as an important AKP ally, not least because the Syrian regime helped it check the power of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The Syrian connection also seemed to support Ankara’s overarching ambition to influence the Middle Eastern states bordering the Mediterranean. Lastly, Syria afforded a vital route for overland trade to Gulf Arab markets, which Ankara was loath to lose.Iran, in contrast, views Syria as its entry point to the Levant, and the principle means by which it supplies its most potent proxy: Lebanese Hizballah. These two actors, in turn, are important cogs in Iran’s so-called alliance of resistance against American, Gulf Arab, and Israeli interests in the region. For much of the AKP’s time in office, Ankara favored engaging with these actors to help diffuse regional tensions and, eventually, try to de-radicalize the regional political agenda. This policy began to break down in 2010 after events in Iraq empowered Iranian-backed political actors at the expense of those allied with Turkey. Then, in September 2011, Turkey broke with the Assad regime and almost immediately thereafter began to support the rebels fighting to unseat him. This placed Turkey at odds with the Islamic Republic; since then a proxy war has developed, pitting the two sides against one another in Syria and, to a lesser extent, Iraq.Despite these tensions, Ankara’s approach to Iran’s support for proxy groups in the region differs from that of many of the Sunni-majority Arab states. Unlike Saudi Arabia, for example, the AKP accepts that Iran has a place in the regional order. Turkey also accepts that Iran is the dominant power in the southern Shi’a majority area of Iraq. However, the AKP believes that Turkey’s zone of influence in the northern Sunni and Kurdish areas should be respected. Hence, after the rise of the Islamic State, Ankara has argued against the further empowerment of Iranian-backed Shi’a militias playing a large role in the northern parts of the country, and instead has sought to further empower Sunni actors that cooperate with Ankara. The conflict in Iraq mirrors that of Syria, where Ankara’s support for Islamist rebels—including al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra—have battled the Iranian-backed Syrian Army and Hizballah.These dynamics, in turn, suggest that Iran and Turkey have adopted a strategic working relationship that aims to deepen trade ties, while at the sub-state level the regional powers will use allied militias to check each other’s regional ambitions. This portends continued instability and foreign policies that do not interact with countries as sovereign entities, but instead work with allied militias that operate more or less outside of state control.This suggests two things for the overarching nuclear issue: (1) Iranian-Turkish disputes reside at the sub-strategic level; (2) at the state-to-state level the two sides retain a mutual incentive to deepen economic ties and maintain working relations. These tensions—and overlapping interests—have little to do with Turkey’s approach to nuclear energy. In both cases, Ankara relies heavily on NATO/U.S.-provided deterrence to de-escalate tension and, during times of crises, counts on the alliance to forward-deploy assets to protect Turkish territory.This security policy is completely independent of Turkey’s civil nuclear energy plan. As with the case of Turkey’s approach to nuclear weapons, the current nuclear energy policy has not changed since it was first implemented—and thus Turkey’s recent nuclear energy ambitions are unrelated to Iran’s development of enrichment technologies during the 2000s.In as early as 1954, Turkish policymakers expressed an interest in developing commercial nuclear power reactors with American assistance. Turkey first developed its nuclear energy plan in 1965, but the nuclear bureaucracy failed to win government approval for it at that time. This plan was eventually implemented in 1973, after the dramatic rise in global energy prices severely affected the Turkish economy.However, by 1977 Turkish officials had adopted a unique financing model: The government required that the nuclear vendor provide 100 percent of the financing needed to build the nuclear reactor. In 1983, this vendor-financing provision was expanded upon and signed into law. Dubbed Build, Operate, Transfer (BOT), the law required that the vendor provide all of the financing needed for construction, operate the plant for 15 years, and then transfer the facility to a local partner company.This financing requirement proved controversial and prevented any nuclear vendor from securing the required construction loans—and thus prevented Ankara from finalizing a contract with any major nuclear vendor. Turkey eventually altered the BOT model in the late 1990s, with the new provision using the same basic financing model, albeit with the vendor operating the plant in perpetuity. This model, dubbed Build, Operate, Own (BOO), has since been a key component of Ankara’s nuclear tenders, with the AKP using it to finance its two different reactor projects in Mersin and Sinop. This means that Turkey’s future nuclear power plants will be foreign owned, operated, and maintained. Thus, if Ankara were to decide to use these reactors to proliferate, it would first have to kick out the foreign operator and then separate the foreign-owned spent fuel stored on site, before fashioning a crude implosion bomb. This is simply not feasible.Furthermore, Turkey has had a small nuclear research program since 1957. If Ankara had any desire to develop a nuclear weapon clandestinely, it would make far more sense to cull scientists from its own indigenous program, rather than from those working should-to-shoulder with foreigners at large reactor sites. There is no evidence to suggest that Ankara has ever seriously entertained such an idea. The risks are enormous: If Ankara were caught, it would lose its relationship with the United States, anger its neighbors, and cripple its economy. Ankara therefore has a huge incentive to remain non-nuclear and to continue to focus on maintaining its security relationship with the United States and pursuing a civil nuclear energy program.This is especially true now that Washington and Ankara’s approaches to the Iranian nuclear issue have more or less aligned. Unlike Saudi Arabia or Israel, Turkey has much to gain from the easing of Iran-related economic sanctions. Furthermore, the P5+1’s current approach to the Iranian nuclear issue is similar in style to that of Ankara’s previous emphasis on diplomacy. Turkey ultimately stands to benefit from Iran’s reintegration in the world economy.For strategic reasons, then, Turkey supports the final agreement and has taken no steps to acquire an independent nuclear infrastructure, let along a weapons capability. However, on the sub-strategic level, Ankara will continue to work to limit Iranian influence in areas deemed to fall under Turkey’s sphere of influence. Thus, for the foreseeable future, Iran and Turkey are bound to pursue a compartmentalized relationship wherein conflicts play out through proxies, while more robust economic ties are pursued. This policy is a continuation of the status quo through the advent of other means, and sometimes the same means. Turkey will therefore continue to rely on NATO and the United States for security, while it pursues its own independent capabilities. This rules out a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

China’s Economic Crisis Gets Political

When China’s financial markets began to melt down last month, we argued that the government wasn’t just facing an economic crisis—that it was facing a political crisis as well. The Chinese Communist Party, which systematically manages large swathes of the country’s economy, has staked its legitimacy and popular support on the ability to deliver white-hot economic growth, year after year. This system has worked brilliantly for decades, but when growth falters, the whole political-economic edifice is called into question. Before an economic crisis snowballs into a direct challenge to the Chinese political system, however, we would expect the heads of specific Party officials to roll. As Walter Russell Mead put it in July:

The Chinese government plays a huge role in systematically managing the country’s economy, and it has staked its legitimacy on its ability to make the economy grow. Moreover, it has taken a very clear position on the stock market crash: this shouldn’t be happening and the government will make it stop. Therefore, the government’s failure to stabilize stock prices is going to be seen as a failure of official policy. Criticism of the stock market will turn into criticism of the political leadership, and it must be said that the political leadership hasn’t demonstrated great skill in the early days of the crisis. Premier Li has allowed himself to become identified with the efforts to stabilize the stock market. If those measures succeed, he looks like a hero. But after the latest rout, a lot of people in China don’t think the policies are working.

By now it seems clear that Premier Li’s efforts have emphatically not succeeded, leaving him especially exposed to the upcoming political ramifications of the market slowdown. The Financial Times reports:

The China-led turmoil that has rocked global markets in the past two weeks has also shaken the ruling Communist party and left Li Keqiang, the prime minister, fighting for his political future, according to analysts and people familiar with the internal workings of the party.

Among party officials and politically connected people in Beijing, the hottest topic of conversation is whether Mr Li will take the fall for Beijing’s perceived mismanagement of the stock market crash and the country’s broader economic slowdown…

But even if Mr Li is blamed by the party elite for his handling of the crisis, most analysts and serving officials believe his removal from power would be too damaging to party prestige and credibility and that he is almost certain to remain in office, at least until the next five-yearly party Congress in 2017.

It appears, in other words, that China’s economic crisis is beginning to spill over into the political system. The market failure is being perceived as a failure of official policy. Accordingly, official policy—or the policymakers—will have to change. The severity of this change—from a reshuffling of leadership to something more comprehensive—will depend on the extent of the economic damage. If things don’t improve, it looks like Premier Li will be one of the first to go, as we predicted last month.

Of course, it’s possible that the Chinese technocrats will figure out a way to get their economy out of this particular pickle, at least for now, and that Li’s star will consequently rise. But even if this happens, it shouldn’t obscure the broader troubles that China faces over the long term. China’s hothouse growth cannot last forever, even if the latest meltdown is not “The Big One.” When the economic bubble finally does burst, China’s entire political system will be in trouble as well.

South African Economy Hits Wall

Brazil and China aren’t the only BRICS having trouble lately. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

[The South African] economy contracted an annualized 1.3% in the second quarter, data released on Tuesday showed, far worse than the 0.6% expansion economists had expected. South Africa’s economy grew by 1.3% in the first quarter.

It was the worst quarterly performance in a year and the second-worst since the global financial crisis. The dip means growth this year will likely fall near the 1.5% mark recorded in 2014.In South Africa, such tepid growth feels like recession. A quarter of the workforce is unemployed and more than half of people under 25 years old. Widening inequality has driven an increase in crime and violent attacks on shop owners and laborers from poorer African countries. A failing power grid has forced residents of Johannesburg and other cities to adapt to traffic snarled by darkened signals and shops that are closed for lack of light.

The rand is at an all-time low against the dollar, and to make matters worse, many of the tools that government would use to fight these problems are unavailable to Pretoria, or carry significant drawbacks:

The poor growth figures make the conundrum facing South Africa’s central bank even more confounding. The bank wants to raise interest rates to prop up the rand. But tightening credit could freeze up growth even further.

The administration of President Jacob Zuma has demonstrated even deeper policy paralysis, economists say. In the years since the global financial crisis, the government did little to build up financial buffers. External debt has risen steadily, to about 40% of gross domestic product.

South Africa is one of the two biggest economic players in sub-Saharan Africa, and the most stable state in the region. As we’ve written before, it bears watching both as a bellweather and as a bell cow: it will both show where other countries may be headed, and help lead them there. In this case, its economic woes bode ill for it and its neighbors. So if quick fixes from interest rate changes and deficit spending don’t work this time, how can South Africa sort itself out? For an answer to that, keep an eye on TAI for a forthcoming essay from Ann Bernstein, the head of South Africa’s leading market-oriented think tank.

Poll: Ukrainian Support for Independence Higher Than Ever

A poll by a Kiev-based firm found that pro-independence sentiment is even more prevalent after Ukraine’s nasty past year than before it, when the Maidan movement turned from protest to ouster and a new Ukraine began its struggle to be born. In fact, it’s the highest in 15 years. Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe reports:

Andriy Bychenko, the director of sociological research at the Razumkov Center, told RFE/RL the survey reflected a surge of patriotic feelings since the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 and the outbreak of war with separatists about two months later.

Bychenko said that “the fact that Ukraine did not give up” and allow eastern Ukraine to break away from the rest of the country with Russia’s military support was “a manifestation, not a cause, of a high level of support for independence.”

Overall, 72 percent support independence today, compared with 61 percent a year ago.

Yet as the article goes on to note, the top-line figures need a little context: the occupied and breakaway regions of Ukraine were not included in the poll. And even so, the total level of support for independence, though higher than in recent memory—only 53 percent supported Ukrainian independence when the same poll was taken in 2005, a year after the Orange Revolution—is markedly lower than the 90 percent who voted for Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. (Related, and similarly troubling: see this article in The Daily Beast about meaningful pro-Russian sentiment in Mariupol, the strategically significant port city on the Azov Sea currently being defended from separatists by the Ukrainian army.)As Walter Russell Mead discussed back in February, a critical mass of reform-minded, Western-leaning citizens in Ukraine is as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for real change. That the number is higher is good news for those of us that want the best possible future for the country. But the challenges ahead for Ukraine—crushing debt, simmering conflict, rampant corruption, oligarchic control of politics—remain formidable.

Carbon Offsets May Have Dramatically Increased Emissions

That’s the finding of a new report from the Stockholm Environment Institute, which investigated carbon credits used to offset greenhouse gas emissions under a UN scheme. As one of the co-authors of the report put it, issuing these credits “was like printing money.” The BBC reports:

As a result of political horse trading at UN negotiations on climate change, countries like Russia and the Ukraine were allowed to create carbon credits from activities like curbing coal waste fires, or restricting gas emissions from petroleum production. Under the UN scheme, called Joint Implementation, they then were able to sell those credits to the European Union’s carbon market. Companies bought the offsets rather than making their own more expensive, emissions cuts.

But this study, from the Stockholm Environment Institute, says the vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian credits were in fact, “hot air” – no actual emissions were reduced.

The SEI sampled 60 random projects and found a whopping 80 percent of them to be of questionable green merit. The majority of these bogus Russian and Ukrainian offsets were used by the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (the EU ETS), a program already bogged down with problems pricing carbon. “[T]he poor overall quality of [Joint Implementation] projects may have undermined the EU’s emission reduction target by some 400 million tons of CO2,” said Anja Kollmuss, one of the leaders of the study.

This has huge implications, then, for Europe’s green goals. For years EU members have chosen to outsource emissions cuts with these carbon credits, but the lack of proper oversight at the UN level of the projects abroad supposedly generating these cuts now leaves the supposedly eco-conscious bloc in a bind. “If the EU was taking its climate targets seriously, then at least 400 million ETS certificates would have to be deleted to counter that,” Kollmuss pointed out.But perhaps worst of all are the perverse incentives the SEI report alleges these credit swaps have created for actually increasing emissions. According to a study released in the journal Nature Climate Change, plants in Russia “increased waste gas generation to unprecedented levels once they could generate credits from producing more waste gas,” resulting in an increase in emissions as large as 600 million tons of carbon dioxide—roughly half the amount the EU’s ETS intends to reduce from 2013 to 2030.The UN seemingly left it up to national governments to oversee these projects, and now it has a full-blown crisis on its hands. With the Paris climate summit just over three months away now, trust in the international approach to solving climate change is falling to new lows.

Is Polyamory Next?

The Youngs are women in a committed relationship who love and care for and look after each other. They share domestic duties and financial responsibilities. They share a bed and make love. They have a child (courtesy of sperm donation and in vitro fertilization) and intend to have two more. They were united in a ceremony in which they wore beautiful white wedding gowns and were walked down the aisle by their fathers. They are just like any ordinary Massachusetts opposite- or same-sex married couple. Only they’re not a couple. Doll, Kitten, and Brinn Young are a throuple. And, for now at least, Massachusetts, like other states, does not recognize as marriages “polyamorous” unions (romantic partnerships of three or more persons).

But Doll, Kitten, and Brinn think that’s unfair and should change. They want marriage equality for themselves and other polyamorists. They are proud that their home state was in the vanguard of legally recognizing same-sex partnerships as marriages, thanks to the bold intervention of the liberal-dominated Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. But they insist that the same principles that generated what they and most liberals (and, it seems, more than a few conservatives) believe to be “marriage equality” for gays should produce the same result for other sexual minorities, especially polyamorous people like themselves.If gender doesn’t matter for marriage, they ask, why should number matter? “If love makes a family”, as the slogan went when the cause being advanced was gay marriage, then why should their family be treated as second class? Why should their marriage be denied legal recognition and the dignity and social standing that come with it? Doll, Kitten, and Brinn love each other and are as committed to each other and their child and future children as are, say, Donald Trump and his third wife, or Elton John and his husband. They find fulfillment in their long-term sexual partnership, just as opposite- and same-sex couples find fulfillment in theirs. The dignity of their relationship, not to mention their own personal dignity, is assaulted, they believe, when their marriage is treated as inferior and unworthy of legal recognition. Their child and future children are stigmatized by laws that refuse to treat their parents as married. And to what end? How does it harm the marriage of, say, John and Harold, the couple next door, if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts recognizes the Youngs’ marriage? Indeed, what justification can be given—what legitimate state interest can be cited—for dishonoring Doll, Kitten, and Brinn and their marriage? Surely, the only explanation, apart from religious scruples of the sort that may not constitutionally be imposed by the State, is animus and a bare desire to harm people who are different?Over the past couple of years, a number of mainstream websites, newspapers, and magazines—Salon, Slate, USA Today, Newsweek, the Atlantic—have run sympathetic stories about polyamory. Newsweek reports that, though polyamory remains unconventional, it is far from unheard of: there are approximately 500,000 polyamorous households in the United States today. Polygamous and polyamorous relationships, often with children in the picture, are depicted as just one more historically misunderstood way of being a family—and those who enter such relationships as an often-victimized minority. The polyamorous partners profiled in the stories sometimes weave discussion of the ordinary challenges and simple joys of domestic life—dealing with disagreements, getting the kids to do their homework or practice the piano, celebrating birthdays and other special occasions—together with peek-a-boo accounts of what it’s like for throuples or larger polyamorous units to share a bed and have sex.Last month, the New York Times published an essay by University of Chicago law professor William Baude urging readers to keep their minds open towards polygamy and other multiple-partner sexual relationships. He noted that they could have some advantages over monogamous partnerships—for example, more parents available to look after the kids and share other domestic duties—and he easily identified the weaknesses in anti-polygamy arguments made by writers like Richard Posner, who support redefining marriage to include same-sex partnerships but want to draw the line there. “We should remember”, Baude observed, “that today’s showstopping objections sometimes come to seem trivial decades later. Very few people supported a constitutional right to same-sex marriage when writers like Andrew Sullivan and [Jonathan]Rauch were advocating it only two decades ago. (Judge Posner, for example, did not.) As we witness more experiments with non-nuclear families, our views about plural marriage might change as well.”Many polyamorous people say that their desire or felt need for multiple partners is central to their identity, and that they have known from an early age that they could never find personal and sexual fulfillment in a purely monogamous relationship. The message is that they are the next sexual minority whose human rights, including of course the right to marriage equality, must be honored. They’re following the same playbook as same-sex marriage advocates in mainstreaming polyamory and putting in place the cultural predicates for its legal recognition. And it’s working. In the most recent polling, fully a quarter of Americans are now prepared to recognize polyamorous marriages, and among religiously unaffiliated citizens (whose numbers are climbing in the United States) the figure is 58 percent. These percentages represent far higher support than gay marriage had within the memory of more than a few readers of this essay.For years, of course, many advocates of sexual freedom and same-sex marriage counseled against openly advocating polyamory—whether in the form of polygyny (one husband having several wives) or in the form of group bonds like the Youngs’—lest the horses be frightened. But not everyone listened. University of Arizona professor Elizabeth Brake, for example, a prominent advocate in the world of academic philosophy for broadening the historic understanding of marriage, has for many years promoted what she calls “minimal marriage”, in which “individuals can have legal marital relationships with more than one person, reciprocally or asymmetrically, themselves determining the sex and number of parties, the type of relationship involved, and which rights and responsibilities to exchange with each.” Judith Stacey—a New York University professor who is in no way regarded as a fringe figure—also let the cat out of the bag in the course of testifying before Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act. She expressed hope that redefining marriage would give it “varied, creative, and adaptive contours . . . [leading some to] question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek . . . small group marriages.” Indeed, as far back as a decade ago, in a statement then titled “Beyond Gay Marriage”, more than 300 “LGBT and allied” scholars and advocates called for legally recognizing as marriages or the equivalent sexual relationships involving more than two partners. Among the signatories were such influential figures on the left as Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Kenji Yoshino.These and other open advocates of polyamory and its legal recognition now look like they were ahead of their time. With USA Today, Newsweek, and other respected publications sympathetically presenting polyamory, more and more polyamorists and allies of their cause will feel safer coming out. The politicians aren’t there yet, of course, but in this late season of our experience we all know that they are almost always among the last to arrive at the party. Soon enough, a small number will break the ice, just as they did on same-sex marriage. They will, to use President Obama’s famous description of his own flip-flop on same-sex marriage, “evolve.”The late and extraordinarily influential legal philosopher and constitutional theorist Ronald Dworkin, a champion of aggressive judicial action to advance liberal causes, taught that law is fundamentally about a society making commitments to certain moral principles and working out their implications over time. Fundamental to that enterprise is treating like cases alike. The heart of the case for same-sex marriage was that gender differences are irrelevant to what marriage actually is, namely, a form of committed sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership. The challenge for same-sex marriage supporters is either to accept polyamory on the basis of the very same vision of marriage, or to offer a new and more specific vision—one that can explain why number is relevant but gender is not.Even as an increasing number of “marriage equality” supporters agree that the time for recognition of polyamorous marriages has come, some still try to avoid that challenge. Only a few same-sex marriage supporters have been willing to take the latter course and hold the line against polygamy as a matter of principle—to say “gender doesn’t matter, but number does: marriage is, as a matter of principle, a two-person partnership; so unions of three or more persons ought to be denied the dignity of legal recognition.” The trouble for those in this last category is that they can’t come up with anything approaching a plausible argument. They either try to make something out of the alleged “fact” that homosexuality is a “sexual orientation” but polyamory is not, or they point to practical difficulties in administering principles of family law for partnerships involving more than two people. Occasionally, you will hear an advocate of gay marriage who opposes polyamory say “a person cannot fully give himself or herself to two people as he or she can to one person.” And even more rarely someone will suggest that polyamorous unions are not psychologically or morally appropriate for bringing up children.From the perspective of polyamorous people and their allies, all of these arguments are weak to the point of being contemptible—thin rationalizations for excluding them from a recognition and status that others in relevantly similar relationships are given. For poly people, being poly is as central to their identity—and being in polyamorous relationships is as vital to their fulfillment—as being gay and being in a same-sex partnership is for persons who are sexually or romantically attracted to persons of the same-sex. Polyamorists object to being the sexual minority that gets thrown under the bus, forced to settle for a relationship that fails to fulfill them or respond to who they are, or denied the social support and legal recognition that others’ relationships receive.As for practical problems, they note that modern law in a wide variety of areas deals with complexities far greater than those that the legal recognition of Doll, Kitten, and Brinn Young’s marriage would pose. Administrative burdens are, they observe, no basis at all for denying them the basic civil right to marry. And they find it insulting when non-poly people claim that being polyamorous is not central to their identity and fulfillment, or assume that people like Doll, Kitten, and Brinn cannot give themselves as fully to each other as gay or straight monogamous people do. Based on their personal experience and what they know from the experience of other poly people, they also reject the view that being in a multiple-partner union increases the likelihood of marital problems arising from jealousy. To them, this is stereotyping, sheer prejudice, dressed up in scientific garb.Finally, they do not buy the idea that polyamory would unavoidably or, in the modern world, even frequently lead to women’s subordination. In any event, why should their rights to be who they are and to have their relationship honored and their children protected be held hostage to a fear that other people will conduct their marriages in morally bad or psychologically unhealthy ways? If forms of patriarchy that were common in the past provide reasons to limit marriage, they equally provide reasons to abolish marriage altogether.Of course, the case for polyamory and its legal recognition presupposes that marriage is in fact what so-called “marriage equality” advocates have depicted it as being: committed sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership. And this is precisely what has been denied by defenders of what used to be known as “marriage” and is now called “traditional marriage” (i.e., as the union of husband and wife). Those defenders are most assuredly right when they say that the new idea of marriage is an innovation—not an “expansion” of marriage but a genuine redefinition, one that treats what has historically been regarded as a relevant difference, namely sex or gender, as if it were irrelevant, not central to the very idea and social purposes of marriage.In our law and culture, marriage has historically been understood as a conjugal union in which a man and woman consent to unite in a bond that is (1) founded on their sexual-reproductive complementarity, (2) consummated and renewed by acts that unite them as a reproductive unit (“one flesh”) by fulfilling the behavioral conditions of procreation (whether or not the non-behavioral conditions happen to obtain); and (3) specially apt for, and would naturally be fulfilled by, their having and rearing children together. Participating in marriage as a conjugal union is regarded as inherently humanly fulfilling, i.e., valuable not merely as a means to something else—even the great good of having and rearing children—but in itself.The idea of marriage as a conjugal union explains the structuring features of marriage in our moral and legal traditions, including (1) the rules of consummation (including annulability for non-consummation, but not for infertility); (2) the requirements of (a) monogamy, (b) sexual exclusivity (fidelity), and (c) permanence of commitment (“till death do us part”); and (3) the treatment of marriage as a properly public matter, something that law can and should recognize, support, and regulate, and not a merely private or religious matter, like baptisms, bar mitzvahs, and ordinary friendships (even the closest and most intimate).This understanding of marriage is radically different from the revisionist conception that one must adopt if sexual-reproductive complementarity is irrelevant to marriage. According to revisionists, marriage is essentially a union at the affective level. What sets it apart is a certain emotional bond. It unites partners in an especially close or intense form of friendship, one which ordinarily involves sex but just as a way of fostering and expressing affection. Sex is thus, strictly speaking, incidental, not inherent, to the relationship. The same is true, of course, of procreation—it is merely incidental. In the words of John Corvino, a leading philosophical defender of the revisionist view, marriage is “your relationship with your Number One person.”The conjugal idea of marriage, by contrast, conceives of persons as unities of body and mind, and of marriage as uniting spouses at all levels of their being: the biological as well as the affective and rational-dispositional. Acts of bodily union fulfilling the behavioral conditions of procreation are the distinctive completion and seal of this uniquely comprehensive union. These acts don’t just produce feelings of intimacy; they literally embody the spouses’ marital union by making them a biological (sexual-reproductive) unit.Sex is thus integral to marriage, which is part of what distinguishes marriage from other forms of companionship. All friendships are unions of hearts and mind; marriage, however, is a union not only at that level, but at the bodily—biological—level as well. It is not distinguished from ordinary friendships, as on the revisionist view, merely by its degree of emotional intensity, but in kind. It is not accurately understood as “your relationship with your Number One person.”As a conjugal relationship, rather, marriage is the type of bond that is ordered to procreation and would naturally be fulfilled by spouses having and rearing children together. On the conjugal understanding, marriage is the relationship that unites a man and woman as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children who may come of their union. Its social role is to maximize the chances that children will grow up in the context of the committed love—the matrimonial bond—of the man and woman whose actualization and renewal of that bond brought them life, linked to their parents and to their parents’ families. It ensures that as many children as possible will be reared with the advantages of both maternal and paternal role models, influences, and care.The revisionist challenge, especially as a result of the sexual revolution and its mainstreaming of non-marital sex and cohabitation, out-of wedlock child bearing, and divorce (especially with the introduction of “no fault” divorce), has eroded the public understanding and support of marriage as conjugal union, though this vision has not been completely lost. The erosion helps to explain why an idea that was quite literally inconceivable as recently as a generation ago—the idea of “same-sex marriage”—has not only suddenly become intelligible to but indeed overwhelmingly dominant among cultural elites. For many cultural elites, it is now the traditional conception of marriage—the idea of marriage as a conjugal union—that is unintelligible, to be explained only by animus, prejudice, or antiquated religious dogmas.Of course, if marriage is distinguished mainly by its emotional intensity, then there really is no reason that two men or two women cannot marry. Any two people, after all, can feel romantic affection for each other, commit to providing support and care for each other in a shared domestic life, and believe that their relationship is enhanced by mutually agreeable sex acts with each other. But so can three men. Or three women, say, Doll, Kitten, and Brinn. Or a man and two women (whether the three are united as a polyamorous ensemble, or the man is in separate marriages with each woman). Or a woman and two men. Or four people. Or whatever.In Obergefell v. Hodges, five justices of the Supreme Court, led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, claimed to find in the Due Process Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment the revisionist understanding of marriage. Now, the actual words of the clause—“No state shall deprive any person within its jurisdiction of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”—seem to be all about justice in criminal cases or in analogous civil or administrative actions. States may not execute someone (depriving him of life), imprison someone (depriving him of liberty), or subject someone to a monetary fine or forfeiture (depriving him of property) without affording him such basic procedural protections as the presumption of innocence, an impartial judge and jury, and so forth. But the Supreme Court instead followed a long, if notoriously intellectually dubious, tradition of reading this clause “substantively” to include unenumerated rights that enough justices believe people should enjoy. Thus Kennedy, joined by Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, announced the discovery of a right to same-sex marriage that would certainly have shocked the Americans of the late 1860s who ratified the 14th Amendment—and even Americans of the 1960s, for all their sexual-revolutionary pretensions.For Kennedy, the conjugal understanding of marriage had to be jettisoned in favor of the revisionist conception because the dignity of persons who construct their identities around same-sex attraction and find their fulfillment in same-sex partnerships requires it. This dignity is conferred by the state and is, in effect, withheld when the state treats marriage as a conjugal union rather than as sexual-romantic companionship.Lacking any warrant in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution—or even any clear and disciplined engagement with other court cases, right or wrong—Kennedy’s opinion merits the condemnation that John Hart Ely, the late Dean of Stanford Law School (and himself a pro-choice liberal) heaped on Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade: “It is not constitutional law and gives no sense of an obligation to try to be.” The four dissenting Justices in Obergefell—Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—had no difficulty skewering, even ridiculing, Kennedy and the majority for failing to identify an even remotely plausible constitutional ground for their decision. Whatever one’s beliefs about the comparative merits of the conjugal and revisionist conceptions of marriage, it is difficult to see how the Constitution can be said to have dictated a choice. In the tradition of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Lochner v. New York, and, to be sure, Roe v. Wade, the decision is a straightforward play by a Supreme Court majority to usurp the authority of the people acting through representatives (and directly, in state referenda). It unconstitutionally imposes on the nation the beliefs of five unelected, unrepresentative men and women about what counts as social progress.But lay all that aside for now. I introduce the case because it forces us to focus on the logical implications of abolishing the conjugal understanding of marriage in our law and replacing it with the revisionist idea of marriage as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership, all by judicial fiat. Here is where Professor Dworkin’s point about the centrality of principle to law has its significance for the cause of polyamory, at least for his fellow liberals who approve of the role assumed by the judiciary in cases such as Roe and Obergefell. Where the same principle requires it, he who says A must say B. And he who says that the judiciary has the power to dictate A must say that the judiciary has the power to dictate B, even if B doesn’t yet share A’s popularity and even if the people’s representatives in the legislature say no to B. The constitutional case for the judicial imposition of same-sex marriage requires belief that the Constitution—somewhere, somehow (perhaps lurking in “penumbras formed by emanations”)—incorporates the idea of marriage as sexual-romantic companionship. But if it does, then there can be no reason of principle for withholding legal recognition from the marriage or marriages of, say, Yemeni immigrants or fundamentalist Mormons who are in polygamous partnerships, or polyamorous people like the Youngs. To observe that 75 percent of the public still opposes legal recognition of such marriages is only to highlight the need for the courts to intervene to vindicate the marriage equality rights of those in multiple-party relationships—people who cannot count on their fellow citizens to treat like cases alike when it comes to sexual partnerships that they happen disapprove of on moral or religious grounds.By constitutionalizing the issue—by purporting to find a certain vision of marriage in the Constitution—the Court eliminated the possibility of accommodations and compromises in the political process. By its own lights, the question is no longer properly left to the moral or political judgments of the people or the vagaries of democratic bargaining. As a matter of constitutional principle, it is an all-or-nothing game—a game that only judges are permitted to play. The American people have been told by the Obergefell majority to watch from the bleachers.If Obergefell stands—and, for what it’s worth, I myself hope it will not—the question of legal recognition of polygamous and other polyamorous partnerships cannot be avoided. The arguments of those who want to retain the idea of marriage as mere sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership while denying legal recognition of polyamorous marriages will sound weaker and weaker, more and more like mere rationalizations for stigmatizing what many people (for now, at least) still find icky. Under the pressure of the natural human desire for rational consistency, the liberal movement and the Democratic Party will gradually come to embrace the polyamorists’ cause. And liberal jurists, though they may swat away on procedural grounds the first few constitutional challenges to marriage laws excluding polyamorists’ romantic bonds from recognition, will eventually have to say B.Will there be a C? Sure. That will likely be the abolition of laws against consensual adult incest (parent-child or sibling) and, correspondingly, the elimination of consanguinity laws forbidding marriage between a parent and his or her adult child and between adult siblings. Western Europe was a bit ahead of the U.S. on same-sex marriage, and is now pointing the way forward for sexual liberals on incest as well. Germany’s National Ethics Council this year issued a report urging parliament to revoke legal prohibitions of incest involving consenting adults, arguing that these prohibitions violate “fundamental freedoms” and “force people into secrecy or to deny their love.” The Council described opposition to consensual adult incest as a mere “social taboo”, and declared that “neither the fear of negative consequences for the family, nor the possibility of the birth of children from such incestuous relationships can justify a criminal prohibition. The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination has more weight in such cases than the abstract protection of the family.”If one grants the premises of sexual liberalism—that consenting adults have a right to enter into whatever types of sexual relationships they like without state interference—and embraces the revisionist conception of marriage as committed sexual-romantic companionship, then what the German Ethics Council says has to be correct. Its logic is impeccable. If there is a flaw, it must be in the premises. And yet the premises are precisely the ones that have been adopted by the liberal movement and the Democratic Party in our time. So C will come in due course, unless A is abandoned.

Elizabeth Brake, “Minimal Marriage: What Political Liberalism Implies for Marriage Law”, Ethics 120 (2010): 303.

See Gallagher, “(How) Will Gay Marriage Weaken Marriage as a Social Institution”, 62. “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision For All Our Families and Relationships”, BeyondMarriage.org, July 26, 2006, http://beyondmarriage.org/full_statem.... According to the conjugal understanding, marriage is a uniquely comprehensive union. It involves a union of hearts and minds; but also—and distinctively—a bodily union. Just as bodily union within a person consists in coordination of all the parts for a single bodily end of the whole (survival), so bodily union between two people involves coordination (coitus) toward a single bodily end of the couple as a whole (their reproduction). Hence marriage, the bond embodied by that act, is inherently extended and enriched by procreation and family life and objectively calls for similarly all-encompassing commitment, permanent and exclusive. In short, marriage unites a man and woman holistically—emotionally and bodily, in acts of conjugal love and in the children such love brings forth—for the whole of life. For a fuller account, and a response to criticisms advanced by revisionists against the conjugal understanding (such as the claim that the conjugal view cannot rationally justify its historic willingness to recognize as valid the marriage of a man and woman who, due to infertility, cannot conceive children together), see Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George, What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (Encounter Books, 2013). That is why they are not content with merely revising the law to enshrine “same-sex marriage”; anti-discrimination statutes and ordinances as well as well as informal cultural means (shaming, ridiculing, hounding) must be used to crush those who dissent from the new orthodoxy. We see that conviction at work in the fates of the photographers, bakers, and florists who refuse to participate in same-sex weddings, the counseling student who declined to train to counsel same-sex couples, the fire chief of Atlanta who wrote a book defending biblical teachings on marriage and sexual morality, and Brendan Eich, the technology genius who was pressured to give up the top job at Mozilla because he had contributed to a pro-traditional marriage referendum in California.

NYT Spins Racial Discord with Bad Evidence

In noting the approaching tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s ravaging of New Orleans, the New York Times chose to run with the race angle: “Racially Disparate Views of New Orleans’s Recovery After Hurricane Katrina” screams the headline. And the actual story starts off dramatically:

As the 10th anniversary approaches of Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic levee breaches in New Orleans, a new survey finds a stark racial divide in how residents here view the recovery.

Nearly four out of five white residents believe the city has mostly recovered, while nearly three out of five blacks say it has not, a division sustained over a variety of issues including the local economy, the state of schools and the quality of life.

But the facts don’t fit the narrative, and the story quickly falls apart. Readers who go below the first two paragraphs will discover that the big difference after Katrina is between people who live in neighborhoods that were deeply flooded, who have a less positive view of the recovery, and those who live in neighborhoods where the damage wasn’t as severe. This is hardly surprising. And it turns out that whites outside New Orleans, in parishes where the flooding was bad, are less positive about the recovery than New Orleans residents:

That the extent of the flooding is directly connected to the perception of recovery is also reflected outside New Orleans. The survey shows that people in neighboring Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes, both of which were predominantly white and were catastrophically flooded, have even dimmer views of the extent of recovery than the residents of New Orleans.

So it isn’t a black-white divide; it’s a flood damage divide, and whites as well as blacks fell on the wrong side of it.

A newspaper that wasn’t emotionally invested in peddling racial narratives would have seen another story here: not a story of unfair racial treatment, but a story of a city and a region struggling with an unprecedented catastrophe in which both races suffered depending on where they lived. This is bad journalism, though no doubt the Times editors responsible think they are doing the right thing.It’s clear that there’s a full court press at the Gray Lady to focus on race these days. There’s nothing wrong with that; race remains a major issue in the U.S. But the hunger to fit facts to a narrative ultimately devalues the very concerns that the Times wants its readers to focus on. Good journalism certainly isn’t incompatible with a strong point of view. But far too often, the Times slips into bad advocacy journalism, using the journalistic equivalent of hamburger helper to bulk up a case that otherwise looks weak. That makes for both poor journalism and poor advocacy.It’s hard to tell who exactly is at fault for the story’s framing, but credit does have to go to the writer who at least put together the real facts—enough so that a determined reader can work past the silly and misleading editorial spin.

Turkey May Have Leaked US-Trained Fighters’ Location

When 23 of 60 U.S.-trained fighters were captured by the Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, earlier this month, it appeared to be the result of poor U.S. oversight, unrealistic planning, and plain bad luck. But now, reports indicate something more nefarious might have been going on. According to McClatchy:

The kidnapping of a group of U.S.-trained moderate Syrians moments after they entered Syria last month to confront the Islamic State was orchestrated by Turkish intelligence, multiple rebel sources have told McClatchy.

The rebels say that the tipoff to al Qaida’s Nusra Front enabled Nusra to snatch many of the 54 graduates of the $500 million program on July 29 as soon as they entered Syria, dealing a humiliating blow to the Obama administration’s plans for confronting the Islamic State.Rebels familiar with the events said they believe the arrival plans were leaked because Turkish officials were worried that while the group’s intended target was the Islamic State, the U.S.-trained Syrians would form a vanguard for attacking Islamist fighters that Turkey is close to, including Nusra and another major Islamist force, Ahrar al Sham.

After the fighters were captured, the U.S. abandoned the training program, which had had a budget of $500 million but had produced only the 60 men.

Meanwhile, the Turks aren’t exactly denying the allegation:

A senior official at the Turkish Foreign Ministry, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, declined to respond to questions about the incident, saying any discussion of Turkey’s relationship with Nusra was off limits.

Other Turkish officials acknowledged the likely accuracy of the claims, though none was willing to discuss the topic for attribution. One official from southern Turkey said the arrival plans for the graduates of the so-called train-and-equip program were leaked to Nusra in hopes the rapid disintegration of the program would push the Americans into expanding the training and arming of rebel groups focused on toppling the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The Administration has never quite figured out how to handle Turkey since its dreams of Erdogan leading the way to a soft-Islamist, democratic future for the Middle East crumbled when the Arab Spring collapsed and the Turkish President’s hardliner tendencies started to emerge. If these allegations are true, they further highlight the contradictions and complications underlying our policy of rapprochement with Ankara.

And the alternative to the failed fighter program is supposed to be deeper coordination with Turkey and other groups in Syria. The Administration has to rouse itself to a more active policy with regard to Syria, or come up with a more sure-handed way to handle Ankara, lest we spend the next eighteen months taking little blows like this or worse.