But Your Home is Your Home

(3 posts in as many days! Don't fret, I'll disappear again soon I'm sure.)

UPDATE: See, Obama agrees with me. But man, he went on at length. Somebody is going to take issue (wrongly) with the "police acted stupidly" portion. Even though it was the police "acted stupidly in arresting him after they had discovered no crime taking place." Which is 100% truth.

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There's been a minor news story making the rounds lately concerning Henry Louis Gates, a professor at Harvard, being arrested for (basically) breaking into his own house. You can read more about it here, though most of the story is reaction now.

Mr. Gates has alleged that he is the victim of profiling and racism by the police. Of course, because this isn't a cut-and-dry case, he is now receiving a lot of flack for his own less-than-perfect role in the ordeal.

It broke down like this: Gates returns home from a trip to find his front door jammed. I'm unclear as to why--maybe an attempted B&E while he was out of town, or just weather--but he had to go around back to unlock the door. He did so, and returned to the front door but still couldn't open it. His driver helped him force it open. A neighbor, apparently saw all this and called the police, reporting that two black men were breaking into the house. In broad daylight, of course. And Gates walks with a cane, like most burglars.

I'll stop right there because that, my friends, is racism. I don't know the neighbor's goals or purposes, but calling the police on your black neighbor because he is trying to force open his door is extraordinarily shady. It is not, as some say, "being a responsible neighbor" because if you were responsible, you'd know he was your neighbor.

Skip ahead, though, to where Gates is inside and on the phone to see about repairs to the front door when the police arrive. Now, I don't know the specifics of what they saw, and we never will now that this has become a big deal, but if you see a 60+ bespectacled man on the phone in an allegedly broken-into house, and he walks over to you with a cane, you might assume right off the bat that he's not a burglar.

The problems arose when the police refused to show Gates their badges, and Gates got super pissed about being accused of burglarizing his own house. These were both unreasonable errors; however Gates is a private citizen and is allowed to be pissed off, unreasonable, and generally rude while in his own home. Police need probable cause or a warrant to enter your house, and for good reason. It is your home, and--surprising libertarian bent on my part--you shouldn't be made to do anything you don't want to do inside your own home.

But the police are not entitled to be rude, disrespectful, and unreasonable. They are the police, and to enforce the law with clean hands, you have to play everything above board. If they had simply received his identification and left, Gates could have made a stink about it but he'd have far less ammunition.

Instead, they refused to give their names, and insisted Gates step outside to discuss the situation. That's unusual by itself, because it indicates that the police did, in fact, have an idea that he lived there, because otherwise they'd have probable cause to go in and get him as a "burglar". When he did come outside, they arrested him for disorderly conduct. On his own porch.

That is some serious bull. Gates, and everybody else, is completely allowed to be an asshole to people while in his own home. You don't have to be his friend or visit him if he is. The police do not have a right to pull you out of your home, no matter how belligerent you are, without probable cause or a warrant for your arrest. These guys had neither, and made the colossally bad decision of arresting one of the nation's most eminent scholars on a trumped up charge.

I'm not saying Gates has clean hands here. It is easy to say he should have held back on the race card business, but when you've studied profiling for years, and then find out your idiot neighbor called the cops because they thought you were breaking into your own house, you're allowed to be skeptical. And then the police fed right into his skepticism by harassing and arresting him.

Anyway, ya'll know I'm not black. I don't pretend to understand what it's like to be profiled. But I understand how pissed off I would be if someone--race aside--called the police on me in my own home. It's up to the police to act professionally, and boy did they fail miserably.

Final tally: one racist neighbor, one asshole cop, and one jerk academic. But the seeming tie between the cop and academic goes to the academic, who was at home.

A Fine Whine

The Washington Post had an op/ed piece by a moderate-conservative professor decrying the "lack of diversity" in U.S. universities. But when he says lack of diversity, he means bias--bias towards liberals, that is.

I don't disagree that many professors in the social studies disciplines (such as sociology, economics, and political science) are left-leaning. And a common, but unruly answer to this from the liberal angle is that liberals are more open to ideas and therefore more amenable to the "teaching" atmosphere.

I do not think this is necessarily incorrect, but it sure does piss people off when you say it. Maranto (the author of the op/ed) in particular says it smacks of arrogance, which it absolutely does. That doesn't make it wrong, though.

Maranto compares the tendency to teach Intelligent Design in schools (they don't) to the tendency to teach Marxism economic theory (they do). This seems flawed for a number of reasons, chief of which is that they are not comparable theoretical systems. Yes, both may be fundamentally flawed, but Marxism is a testable theory and ID is completely untestable. Granted, I am neither an economist nor a biologist, but I know that you can look at history and economic theory and study Marxism, and thereby identify its flaws. But with ID, the entire theory is "Evolution isn't real." Not only is it asinine, it's untestable. The phrase, "It was Intelligent design," is the answer to any question you would have about biology, if you adopt the ID approach. "Some sort of higher power did it" is not an answer, because it stops there.

So it is a poor comparison. Marxism may be loved by some liberals, but it is not the same as when conservatives propose Intelligent Design as an answer.

And if this is what makes liberals arrogant--that they know a proper, testable theory when they see one, and conservatives seem happy to spout some untestable nonsense and then stop research--then sign me up for the Ego class.

Not that I'd... need it. What with being liberal.