From his website here:

(Boldface is mine.)

In another place someone commented on the Yates verdict. I decline to comment on that, which is a very disturbing situation. Then a discussion followed in which I took no part. Several women denounced Yates's husband for making her have more kids, home school them, and giving her no free time. I presume that is a true statement: as I say the case is disturbing, and happened a long way from here, and I don't have to think about it, so I don't. But then someone else said,



"Sounds like Texas all across the board. I don't think civilization has reached there yet."

That prompted a response from me:

Is it your contention that the state should intervene in these situations? A psychiatrist says she ought not have more kids. The husband insists on unreasonable conditions in the home. The wife doesn't leave, doesn't go to the authorities, broods, and kills the kids. At what point did you want the uncivilized state of Texas to intervene?

How do you draft the legislation that allows the interventions?

Like New York, where a woman telephones a help line to ask if it is normal to get sexually excited when breast feeding her first-born, and hours later Social Services shows up, takes the infant away from her, jails her briefly, and makes her and her husband spend every cent they have getting the child back? Is that a good model of 'civilization'?

A republic assumes its citizens are more or less competent. Other forms of government make different assumptions about the subjects, and put the enlightened in charge on the grounds that everyone else is benighted. Which is "civilized"?

It is, I fear, a serious question. Is it possible to have a 'civilized' republic? Freedom will inevitably leave people free to do things many will not approve of. Where do you draw the line? And, if we are to have to completely secular republic uninformed by religion and religious traditions, why do you draw the line? That is, blasphemy was once considered a very serious crime: it was more serious to defame God than to defame the king, and the punishments were more severe. Civilized countries understood this: only barbarous places made it a worse crime to defame a man, even the King, than to defame God. We today don't consider blasphemy a crime at all. There was a trend for a while to decriminalize defaming the state, but I would not try it today in, say, an airport, and I particularly would not advise defaming the President in his presence: the Secret Service, at least in Clinton's time, routinely handcuffed people who shouted insults at the president. They may still do that, in the name of "security".

[My point here, missing in the original, was that either there is a well-spring of law or law is what the civilized people agree it is; and we have often opted for the 'law is what you can get a legislature to say is law, even if the legislators never intended that result and no one thinks it is good law. Law is following rigid procedures without regard to the intent of the legislation." There's a lot of that going around.]

Texas may or may not be "uncivilized". The Texas system seems to be to make the laws clear and enforce them severely. This is one way to run a government. California, on the other hand, has fuzzy laws and enforces few of them because if every California law were rigidly enforced there would be few of us out of jail. We in California by necessity have a government of men (and women) rather than a government of laws, because there are so many laws they cannot all be enforced.

Well, thank you for making me think about the subject.

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It was, of course, a rant, and I am not sure I even agree with all I said; but it does seem worth putting out for discussion.