Legal observers have noted for some time that the laws governing defamation in the United Kingdom are far more plaintiff-friendly than similar laws in the U.S. In the U.S., anyone claiming they were libeled has to prove that the allegedly libelous statements were false. But in the U.K., the burden of proof is reversed: the defendant in a libel suit has to prove that the statements they made were true. This creates a serious hazard to free speech: rich, litigious individuals can file lawsuits and win just by prolonging the court battle until the other side runs out of money to fight, at which point they instantly lose - and then must pay damages and court costs.

This is precisely the strategy that thin-skinned billionaires and powerful business interests, many of them not even based in the U.K., have been using to shut down anyone who criticizes them. It's become so common, it's acquired a name: "libel tourism". Most infamously, the Saudi businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz sued journalist Rachel Ehrenfeld in the U.K. courts for her book Funding Evil, which alleged that bin Mahfouz financially supported Muslim terrorist groups - this even though Ehrenfeld doesn't live in the U.K. and her book wasn't published there. Another example is the case of Simon Singh, a science journalist who wrote an editorial saying that there was no evidence for the effectiveness of chiropractic - and was promptly sued by the British Chiropractic Association. That case is still ongoing and has already cost Singh tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours defending himself.

And now, the U.K.'s libel laws are being invoked yet again in what promises to be their most outrageous and absurd application so far. Atheists might have guessed that this was coming:

A Saudi Arabian lawyer has threatened to use British courts to overturn a Danish free speech ruling by bringing a defamation case over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that depicted Islam's founder as a terrorist.

Faisal Yamani, a Jeddah based lawyer, is planning to take a case to London's libel courts on behalf of over 90,000 descendants of Mohammed who have claimed that the drawings have defamed them and the Islamic faith.

...Mr Yamani demanded last year that 11 Danish newspapers remove all cartoon images of Mohammed from their websites and issue front page apologies along with promises that the images would never be printed again.

Yes, it's those Danish cartoons of Mohammed again. Five years after they were first published, the Muslim world just can't move on, and is still demanding that someone, anyone, must be made to pay for their hurt feelings. From angry mobs in the streets and ax attacks on cartoonists, to libel lawsuits and pushing defamation resolutions at the U.N., it's clear there's nothing they won't try to censor and intimidate anyone who criticizes them in any way at all.

But even under the U.K.'s plaintiff-friendly defamation laws, this suit looks even less meritorious than its predecessors. First of all, on what basis does anyone assert the right to sue on Mohammed's behalf? Can a many-centuries-dead person be libeled? And what "factual statement" was made by these drawings that the plaintiffs claim to be defamatory?

But whatever legal issues are raised by this lawsuit, the question of its merit is irrelevant. Like all libel tourism, its purpose isn't to prevail on the merits, but to intimidate and harass media organizations with protracted, expensive litigation and the threat of a catastrophic judgment, thus chilling their speech and making them afraid to offend any deep-pocketed individual. Whether it's pseudoscience groups protecting their cash cow from scientists' criticism or the perpetually aggrieved Muslim mob and their petulant demand that no one be allowed to express any opinion they disapprove of, the strategy is the same, and the result is too often the same as well.

America has this problem too of course, with so-called SLAPP lawsuits - but in our system, with the burden of proof the right way round, it's much more difficult for cults and corporations to succeed in silencing their critics. Britain's libel laws, on the other hand, are far too easily abused by those who flee from criticism and avoid open debate - but eagerly use thuggery and coercion to shut down their opposition if given the chance.

Fortunately, the U.K. has seen the rise of a broad coalition seeking to overhaul the libel tourism laws and put the country back on a more rational footing. But too much damage has already been done, and more is being done, so reform can't come soon enough. If you live in Great Britain, contact your MP and tell them to support this effort! We need to take action before any more scientists, atheists or freethinkers are silenced by the allies of corruption, censorship and superstition.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 8

The best place to settle a scientific debate is in the peer-reviewed journals and the larger research community - a strategy which, as we've noted, the creationists have steered well clear of. This means, when they inevitably attempt to push their beliefs into public schools anyway, that we have to take them to court, and that's where most direct encounters between science and creationism take place.

However, though it's not an ideal forum for the advancement of scientific knowledge, the trial format does have its advantages. For one thing, we can cross-examine creationist witnesses and force them to answer direct questions - an opportunity not available on the internet, where they can hunker down behind the ramparts of their blogs and avoid all hostile or critical feedback. And when they've been put to the test in this way, they haven't come out of the experience covered in glory.

In chapter 8, Lee Strobel gives Michael Behe the opportunity to repeatedly make assertions like this one:

"Complex biological systems have yet to be explained by naturalistic means. That's a fact." [p.216]

In the cozy environment of Strobel's interview, this claim meets with no skepticism. Not a hint is given that evolutionary biologists have made any progress in explaining the origin of any complex biological system. But on another occasion, Behe had to defend these views in a considerably less friendly forum, and he didn't fare nearly as well.

In 2004, the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania voted to include references to intelligent design in their biology curriculum. The ensuing lawsuit, Kitzmiller v. Dover, became a landmark in the evolution wars - not least because several prominent creationists agreed to appear as witnesses for the defense, among them Michael Behe.

The Talk.Origins Archive has complete trial transcripts, which you can read through if you want. However, I want to highlight an exchange from day 12, when Behe was cross-examined by Eric Rothschild, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Behe had claimed in his testimony that "the scientific literature has no detailed testable answers to the question of how the immune system could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection".

Even compared to all the other falsehoods told by Behe, this stands out as his wrongest claim yet. The origin of the immune system has been a topic of active research for decades, and we've made enormous strides in our understanding of how it evolved. The key hypothesis, called the transposon hypothesis, makes several surprising predictions that have been verified by subsequent work. This seemed the ideal point to attack Behe when he took the witness stand, which led to this exchange:

Q. I'm going to read some titles here. We have Evolution of Immune Reactions by Sima and Vetvicka, are you familiar with that?

A. No, I'm not.

Q. Origin and Evolution of the Vertebrate Immune System, by Pasquier. Evolution and Vertebrate Immunity, by Kelso. The Primordial Vrm System and the Evolution of Vertebrate Immunity, by Stewart. The Phylogenesis of Immune Functions, by Warr. The Evolutionary Mechanisms of Defense Reactions, by Vetvicka. Immunity and Evolution, Marchalonias. Immunology of Animals, by Vetvicka. You need some room here. Can you confirm these are books about the evolution of the immune system?

A. Most of them have evolution or related words in the title, so I can confirm that, but what I strongly doubt is that any of these address the question in a rigorous detailed fashion of how the immune system or irreducibly complex components of it could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection.

...Q. There's also books on the immune system that have chapters on the evolution of the immune system?

A. Yes, and my same comment would apply to those.

Q. I'm just going to read these titles, it sounds like you don't even need to look at them?

A. Please do go ahead and read them.

Q. You've got Immune System Accessory Cells, Fornusek and Vetvicka, and that's got a chapter called "Evolution of Immune Sensory Functions." You've got a book called The Natural History of the Major Histocompatability Complex, that's part of the immune system, correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And here we've got chapter called "Evolution." Then we've got Fundamental Immunology, a chapter on the evolution of the immune system.

A lot of writing, huh?

A. Well, these books do seem to have the titles that you said, and I'm sure they have the chapters in them that you mentioned as well, but again I am quite skeptical, although I haven't read them, that in fact they present detailed rigorous models for the evolution of the immune system by random mutation and natural selection.

Q. You haven't read those chapters?

A. No, I haven't.

Q. You haven't read the books that I gave you?

A. No, I haven't. I have read those papers that I presented though yesterday on the immune system.

Q. And the fifty-eight articles, some yes, some no?

A. Well, the nice thing about science is that oftentimes when you read the latest articles, or a sampling of the latest articles, they certainly include earlier results. So you get up to speed pretty quickly. You don't have to go back and read every article on a particular topic for the last fifty years or so.

Q. And all of these materials I gave you and, you know, those, including those you've read, none of them in your view meet the standard you set for literature on the evolution of the immune system? No scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system?

A. Again in the context of that chapter, I meant no answers, no detailed rigorous answers to the question of how the immune system could arise by random mutation and natural selection, and yes, in my, in the reading I have done I have not found any such studies.

The list of books and papers that Rothschild piled up on the witness stand, as you can see from the photograph, is extensive, and Behe admitted that he hadn't read any of them. Yet despite this, he continued to insist that it was not possible that any of them contained an explanation good enough to satisfy him. If you want to see the list for yourself, the NCSE has an annotated bibliography - listing all the titles and excerpting their subject matter, to show how they directly address the origin of the immune system - the kind of detailed, testable scientific hypothesis that, according to Behe, does not exist. (See also Evolving Immunity.)

After forty days and forty nights of testimony (really), the Kitzmiller trial concluded, and Judge John E. Jones - a conservative George W. Bush appointee - issued a strongly worded decision which concluded that ID was religion, not science, and that teaching it in public school would be an unconstitutional state endorsement of religion. Behe's testimony was singled out for criticism, as Judge Jones wrote:

...in Darwin’s Black Box, Professor Behe wrote that not only were there no natural explanations for the immune system at the time, but that natural explanations were impossible regarding its origin. However, Dr. Miller presented peer-reviewed studies refuting Professor Behe’s claim that the immune system was irreducibly complex. Between 1996 and 2002, various studies confirmed each element of the evolutionary hypothesis explaining the origin of the immune system. In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fiftyeight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.”

Christian apologists like Lee Strobel go out of their way to present ID advocates in the best possible light, asking them easy, leading questions and ensuring that their answers go uncriticized and unchallenged. But in an open environment where they don't control the terms of the debate and must confront the evidence, creationists meet with disaster time and time again. Is it any wonder that scientists have little regard for ID advocates, considering that their major arguments, like fragile hothouse flowers, must be carefully shielded from contact with the evidence lest they collapse?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

Scarcely two days into 2010, we've gotten a stark reminder of how free speech is still threatened by religious fanatics: Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who drew the image of Mohammed depicted to the right, was attacked at home Friday night by a murderous, ax-wielding religious fanatic. Fortunately, neither Westergaard nor his 5-year-old granddaughter, who was with him at the time, were harmed. They escaped to a panic room built into the house for just this purpose and summoned police, who shot and wounded the attacker when he refused to surrender.

This isn't the first time Westergaard's life has been threatened by crazed Muslims. As I reported previously, he's been the target of multiple death threats since the Mohammed cartoons were first published in 2005, and in 2008, three other men were arrested by Danish police and charged with plotting his murder.

In an October interview with the conservative National Post (which notes ruefully that Westergaard isn't much of a fan of Christianity, either), the artist was unrepentant:

"As I see it, many of the immigrants who came to Denmark, they had nothing. We gave them everything - money, apartments, their own schools, free university, health care. In return, we asked one thing - respect for democratic values, including free speech. Do they agree? This is my simple test."

The best way to defend this brave man is to ensure that he's not the only target. There has been too much embarrassed silence and self-censorship over this affair in the halls of Western journalism. We need more images and drawings of Mohammed, not fewer, to show Muslim thugs that their religious laws have no power over us - and to ensure that they'll have no single target, if they persist in the belief that they can avoid criticism by murdering all their critics. (Any Daylight Atheism readers have artistic talent?)

It's not just lone fanatics, but governments that are getting in on the anti-free-speech game. Sadly, Ireland's new blasphemy law, which criminalizes the publication of matter "that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion", has just taken effect. (Atheism is not similarly protected from offense, in case you were wondering.)

However, we should count ourselves fortunate for having the smart freethinkers at Atheist Ireland - who promptly challenged this idiotic piece of medievalism by publishing 25 blasphemous quotes, against a wide variety of religions, as a way of testing the new law and exposing its foolishness. Will the government dare to prosecute them? Stay tuned!

I've got to give the government credit: they've been doing an excellent job cracking down on criminals who try to hide behind religion. Between Kent Hovind, Warren Jeffs, and now a new conviction, federal prosecutors have been diligently enforcing the law against creeps, con men, and petty tyrants who claim that the law of God gives them license to break the laws of society.

This month's creep is Tony Alamo, former head of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. On Friday, Alamo was convicted on ten counts of taking girls as young as 9 across state lines for sex between 1994 and 2005.

If you're not familiar with Tony Alamo, this report by the Southern Poverty Law Center gives plenty of sordid details. The high points include intense hatred for Catholics (including Jack Chick-esque pamphlets denouncing the Vatican as a demonic conspiracy), a past conviction and prison sentence for tax evasion, and daily radio broadcasts by Alamo defending polygamy and underage marriage. Based on the SPLC report, the Alamo compound was run with the vicious, authoritarian attitude standard for all cults:

The following year, the Alamos purchased the property in Saugus and built sex-segregated dormitories for their California followers, who today number in the hundreds. Members collected spoiled food from supermarkets and Dumpsters to prepare communal meals. Living conditions were squalid. Punishment for stepping out of line ranged from fasting to beatings to being kicked out of the group and losing your spouse and children, many ex-members say.

And what would a good cult be without a heaping helping of hypocrisy and greed among the leadership?

...[Members] toiled as field hands on farms in nearby Bakersfield, turning their entire paychecks over to their cult leaders. The Alamos directed their followers to build them a large, lavish home on a nearby hilltop and drove a fleet of black Cadillac sedans (today, Tony Alamo favors a black Escalade). Ex-members report that Susan Alamo spent thousands of dollars on fur coats, fake eyelashes, plastic surgery and wigs. Tony wore turtle-leather platform boots, diamond pinky rings and a bearskin coat with bear claw epaulettes.

At its peak, Alamo's ministry was taking in millions of dollars per year. But his career took a bizarre turn when his first wife, Susan, died in April 1982. For months, he kept her embalmed body and ordered his followers to pray around the clock for her resurrection. The failure of this effort may have been what snapped Alamo's already tenuous grip on reality, and soon afterward, according to ex-members, he began taking multiple wives, some barely into their teens, some even younger. Repeated complaints to the police by former members who'd escaped finally spurred prosecutors to take action.

Just in case you had any residual sympathy for Alamo, permit me to wipe it out with this report of his behavior at trial:

He blurted out a reference to the Branch Davidian raid at Waco, Texas, muttered expletives during testimony and fell asleep even while alleged victims were testifying.

..."I'm just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the Gospel," Alamo called to reporters afterward as he was escorted to a waiting U.S. marshal's vehicle.

Why do I bring this up? It's not just to exult in Alamo's downfall (although there's more than enough reason to do that). It's because this case is another object lesson on two important, interrelated points.

First: Being religious does not make you a good person. If anything, it worked in the opposite direction. Alamo's extreme religiosity allowed him to justify, to his followers and himself, why he should wield unlimited power over them, and their faith in him is what permitted this sex abuse to go on as long as it did. And, it must be said, the Bible does support polygamy, and says nothing about age of consent. A morality based on reason, not on blind faith and obedience, would not have led to this.

Second: This is why atheists criticize religion. Too many people who should know better persist in believing that religion is beneficial and harmless - even when confronted with stories like this one. We speak out because we want to tear down this facade, tear down the societal illusion that anything with "faith" in the name automatically deserves respect. That's the belief that allowed Alamo's cult to flourish. We want to instill the attitude that claims require evidence, that it's worth being skeptical when a two-bit hustler claims to be a prophet of the one true God. If more people thought this way, there's a much better chance that future Tony Alamos might be prevented.

In 2005, the constitutionality of teaching "intelligent design" was tested in court in the landmark case Kitzmiller v. Dover. The lawsuit was triggered by the school board in rural Dover, Pennsylvania, voting to require a statement to be read in science classes which said, in part:

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

The ensuing trial centered around the question of whether intelligent design was an inherently religious idea, and thus barred by the First Amendment from being promoted by public schools. For advocates of ID, as well as defenders of evolution, this was a crucial battle.

A ruling that ID was religion, although it would only be binding law in that region of Pennsylvania, would set a precedent that could influence courts across the U.S. and deal a fatal blow to the nascent intelligent-design movement. Conversely, a ruling that ID passed constitutional muster would almost certainly lead to a rash of copycat actions by school boards in conservative and rural districts throughout the country, greatly weakening the teaching of evolution.

One of the key issues at trial focused on whether intelligent design was just another form of creationism. The Supreme Court ruled in 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, that teaching creationism in public schools was unconstitutional because it represented an establishment of religion. Naturally, the Dover school board and their legal representation, the Thomas More Law Center, argued strenuously that ID was a brand-new and genuinely scientific movement that had nothing to do with creationism. As defense lawyer Patrick Gillen said in his opening statement:

The board believed that intelligent design was not creationism. They knew what that was, the Book of Genesis. They concluded that intelligent design was science. They looked at the text of Pandas and People. That's not the Book of Genesis.

...The evidence will show that Dr. Behe takes these positions and posits his thesis of irreducible complexity pointing to design not because evolutionary theory is inconsistent with his religious beliefs. It's not. Not because he believes in creationism. He doesn't. And as he'll explain, creationism and intelligent design are two very different things.

...Dr. Fuller will explain that intelligent design theory is not creationism. It is not inherently religious.

...Taken together, this expert testimony will confirm the defendants' judgment by showing that intelligent design theory is not creationism. Indeed, it does not even require the action of a supernatural creator, that intelligent design is not religion or inherently religious, that intelligent design theory is science.

The accuracy of this statement would be put to the test in one of the trial's decisive issues, which concerned Of Pandas and People, the pro-ID textbook mentioned in the board's statement. Pandas, it turns out, went through several editions: in its first (1983) edition, it was titled Creation Biology, then renamed in 1986 to Biology and Creation, then renamed again in 1987 to Biology and Origins, finally becoming Of Pandas and People. The plaintiffs subpoenaed the book's publisher, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, to obtain these prior drafts, and found something amazing.

The earlier drafts, as you might expect from the titles, made repeated references to creationism. But in the wake of the Edwards decision, the book underwent a revision: the term "creationism" was replaced - literally replaced, as in the find-and-replace function of a word processor - with the term "intelligent design". And in one draft, a transitional fossil was preserved:

Image credit, NCSE.

Clearly, intelligent design is just a retitled form of creationism. What more compelling evidence of this fact could you ask for than the term "cdesign proponentsists"?

The evidence of ID's creationist antecedents was cited in the strong ruling by U.S. district judge John E. Jones, which struck down the Dover board's policy as unconstitutional and lambasted them for deceptive practices in trying to disguise their religious beliefs as science. To this day, the ID movement has never responded to this devastating evidence - although they're hard at work on a new edition of Pandas, now retitled (again) to The Design of Life. How many times will they try this strategy before they learn that you can't get around the Constitution just by rebranding yourself?

Under pressure from the ACLU, the Obama administration has finally released a set of four Bush-era memos from the White House Office of Legal Counsel. Written by assistant attorney general Jay Bybee and acting assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury, these memos detailed the torture techniques which the Bush administration believed could be used on captured terrorists and terror suspects.

These techniques included "walling" (slamming a prisoner into a wall by swinging them from a collar around their neck), enforced nudity and cold water dousing, shackling in stress positions, sleep deprivation (not to be used "for more than eleven days at a time"), and locking detainees in "confinement boxes" that weren't large enough to stand up in. Worst of all, the memos argue for the permissibility of waterboarding, a well-known torture method used by the Spanish Inquisition, by Nazi Germany, by the Khmer Rouge, and by the Pinochet regime in Chile. That's the kind of company America has been keeping, these past few years.

As an American citizen, when I read these memos, I feel my blood boiling in anger. This was done in our names - sweeping up people from foreign battlefields, imprisoning them for years on end without charges or trial, and eventually releasing them only on condition that they never speak about what was done to them. Worst of all is this - the clinical, lawyerly detachment in these memos, approving torture methods reviled by the civilized world while seeking to bury their evil under dispassionate language. As Andrew Sullivan notes, some of them explicitly adopt the tactics of totalitarianism - tactics that even these memos admit are condemned by the State Department when used by foreign dictatorships, tactics straight out of our darkest dystopias. Here's from Bybee's memo:

"You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him."

And from George Orwell's novel 1984:

"'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'"

President Obama has already issued an executive order banning the future use of these techniques and requiring interrogations to comply with the Army Field Manual, and that's a major step forward, but it doesn't go far enough. Torturing prisoners isn't just unethical or a bad idea: in the United States, it is a federal crime. Those who tortured, and those who ordered torture, committed criminal acts, and it's not good enough to say that there will be no future violations. Justice demands that those who broke the law be held to account; that is the only way to restore our moral standing and make a clean break with the lawless past of the Bush administration.

This moral necessity makes it all the more disappointing that President Obama, upon releasing these memos, also promised that those who followed the advice in them would not be prosecuted. However, short of issuing a presidential pardon, he doesn't truly have the power to make that promise. The ultimate decision lies with Attorney General Eric Holder, whom we know was an advocate for disclosing these OLC memos, and who can appoint a special prosecutor to look into this. We need to apply pressure on him to do the right thing. Firedoglake and the ACLU both have petitions to this end; I've signed them and I strongly urge my American readers to do likewise. If other courses of action come to my attention, I'll update this post.

The major unanswered question, to my mind, is why the Obama administration has so tenaciously resisted the idea of holding Bush's torturers accountable for their crimes. I don't believe they genuinely agree with the doctrines advanced in these memos; if that were so, they would not have released them, or would have done so only with extensive redaction. But if they believed that these actions were unequivocally illegal, they could have started prosecutions already without being pressured to do so.

The explanation that seems most plausible to me is they fear that, if they were to commence prosecutions, it would ignite a bitter partisan battle that would consume the country's attention and sidetrack the rest of President Obama's policy agenda. But if that's their reasoning, I'm still disappointed. First of all, the die-hard remnants of the Republican party are already bitterly opposed to the Obama administration and are, as Rush Limbaugh famously advocated, doing everything they can to make sure he fails. Less than 100 days into the Obama presidency, conservative politicians - not just garden-variety right-wing crazies, but actual elected officials - are talking openly about secession, rebellion, and revolution. The Republican party is a movement wholly in thrall to its most extreme and deranged elements, and they will never cease their effort to obstruct and destroy Obama and the Democrats by any means available. There is nothing to be gained by trying to appease them.

But even more importantly: Even if prosecutions would be controversial, so what? Is serving justice merely one more political goal to be weighed against others? Is lawbreaking to be ignored when punishing it would be inconvenient?

America was created as a nation of laws, not of men. If we allow the well-connected or the politically powerful to violate the law with impunity, that founding guarantee will be rendered null and void. We must uphold justice, whatever the consequences. Nothing else is more important. Now that we know what was done in our name, we must show the world that we will not let it go unpunished. Even more so than with the President or the Attorney General, the decision and the responsibility rests with us, the people. We must speak out, loud and clear, to demand that justice be done.

In last August's post "Spread the Wealth", I talked about the justifications for redistributive taxation. I felt that some of the issues raised in the comments deserved to be revisited - and since it's tax time here in the U.S., it's worth a reminder of why we pay them and what we get out of it.

The centerpiece of the libertarian rhetorical strategy is to refer to taxation as theft, robbery, slavery. I've heard these epithets and others like them many times. It's easy to see what purpose this serves: to make your concerns seem more important, it helps to refer to them not as bloodless policy differences, but as raw issues of justice. "The government is stealing from innocent people!" is a lot punchier and packs more emotional heft than any proposal, no matter how passionately worded, to simplify unnecessary regulations and cut down on bureaucratic red tape.

But this overheated claim is being asked to bear far more weight than it can possibly support. Of all the libertarian policy proposals out there (many others of which I agree with), the equation of taxation with theft is the least defensible. The fallacies in this should be obvious to a moment's thought, but some people seem unwilling to take that moment, so I'll go over them again in this post.

Libertarians say that taxation is like theft because it takes property from the unwilling. What they ignore, time and time again, is the crucial role of democratic consent. Taxes are not arbitrary impositions decreed by a faceless government. Rather, taxes are the dues we pay in exchange for membership in a society and access to all the services it offers.

The situation can be compared to a private club that charges a membership fee in exchange for providing benefits and amenities to its members. Obviously, the club is within its rights to charge whatever price it believes fair in exchange for this. If you believe the price is too high, you're free to renounce your membership and leave the club. What you're not free to do is to refuse to pay, but demand that you still be allowed to sit in the club and use its facilities. Nor are you free, if the club doesn't offer this option, to decide that you only use some of its services - only the swimming pool, say, but not the sauna or the tennis courts - and should therefore have the right to pay a prorated membership fee. But these options, clearly absurd in this thought experiment, are the same ones libertarians claim they have a right to exercise in the real world.

The analogy of the club can be transferred in a precise way to society as a whole. Society is the club, and taxes are the membership dues we pay in exchange for the services it provides. If you don't want to pay, if you dislike its terms, you can leave that society and seek another one. But you are not free to unilaterally demand that society rewrite its terms to favor your particular preferences.

Going hand-in-hand with the fallacious equation of taxation to theft is another libertarian fallacy: the belief that a free market is the natural state of affairs and will spontaneously arise if only the economy is left to itself. This is wrong. A free market is a kind of infrastructure, and like all other infrastructure, it requires investment to create and effort to maintain.

As centuries of history show, the natural state of an unregulated economy is not free competition, but stifled and constrained competition. Large, established powers, if given the chance, will do everything they can to suppress competition - whether through means fair or foul. From medieval guilds to industrial robber barons, the tactics are always the same: seizing the distribution channels, the infrastructure, the intellectual property, or the sources of raw material. Governments want to control vital resources in the name of national security; industry groups may take a hand in designing regulations that make it all but impossible for new players to enter the field. Outright intimidation, fraud and violence are often used against those who refuse to play along. Even the staunchly libertarian Cato Institute admits this:

It is no surprise, then, that throughout U.S. history corporations have been overwhelmingly hostile to the free market.

To maintain the preferable state of a free market, we need structure and regulation from the government. Taxation provides, among other things, the resources that are necessary to keep the free market running.

In my experience, most libertarians concede that some regulation is needed, but argue that they should only be taxed for services that benefit them directly. This is like demanding that businesses sell their goods to you for exactly what it cost to make them and no more. Just like any business, the government is entitled to "turn a profit" on the services it provides. Just as with a business, these proceeds can be reinvested, resulting in greater productivity and efficiency that ultimately benefit all members of society.

Of course, elected governments can spend tax money unwisely, on pork or boondoggles, and we as citizens have every right to complain about this and to oust officeholders who abuse the public trust. But the solution is not to abolish taxation, just as the solution to corporate fraud and malfeasance is not to ban all corporations. Any power can be abused, but that is not a reason to get rid of all power, which is impossible in any case. If taxes are spent unwisely or wasted, the answer is to elect better politicians or put in place more stringent legislative safeguards.

Why don't we already have gay marriage in all of America?

I mean this as a simple question of law, not a matter of fundamental rights or justice. The reason I ask is because we already have legally recognized gay marriage in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and because Article IV of the U.S. Constitution contains the following clause, commonly known as the Full Faith and Credit Clause:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

The language of the clause is clear and unmistakable: any act or judicial proceeding that's valid in one state must be legally recognized by the other states. Marriage is a government act and comes under this definition, so why aren't all the states required to recognize gay marriages performed legally in Massachusetts? Even if they refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, they have no grounds to deny the validity of a marriage license issued elsewhere, nor to refuse couples with a valid marriage license the same benefits offered to any other married couple.

The obstacle usually cited is that Congress already passed (and, disappointingly, President Bill Clinton signed) a law called the Defense of Marriage Act, which forbids the federal government from recognizing gay marriage and grants an exemption to any state which does not wish to do so. But a simple law passed by Congress can't overrule the Constitution, nor can the mini-DOMAs that many states have enacted on their own. DOMA is plainly unconstitutional, and it should be a no-brainer decision for any court to strike it down. I can't see how even a conservative court, especially one allegedly committed to textual originalism, could avoid coming to that conclusion.

The second sentence of the clause offers no support for DOMA. It says that Congress may prescribe how the validity of a state proceeding is to be proven, but does not give a blanket grant of power for Congress or other states to completely refuse to recognize a valid proceeding. (Analogously, the Constitution gives the government the right to impose some reasonable conditions on firearms possession - "a well-regulated militia" - but not the right to ban gun ownership outright, as the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller). To read the clause in that sense would completely strip it of meaning and is an unreasonable interpretation by any measure. (Law professor Joanna Grossman agrees, calling such a reading of the clause "perverse").

Admittedly, this clause does give Congress the right to legislate what the effects of such recognition shall be. This conjures up the scenario of a legal contortion where gay marriage is "recognized", but offers none of the benefits or privileges usually associated with marriage. However, I don't think that scenario could ever come to pass. For Congress to grant the states a license to withhold benefits from gay couples, but not from heterosexual couples, would be a clear violation of the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment and would run counter to decades of clear Supreme Court jurisprudence. Again, I can't see even a conservative court engaging in such a sweeping negation of precedent by ruling otherwise. The religious right could obtain a Pyrrhic victory by stripping the benefits of marriage from all couples, gay and straight alike, but I doubt they'd consider that outcome a desirable one.

This seems like fertile ground for some enterprising civil liberties group to bring a federal lawsuit, but I haven't heard of any constitutional challenges being filed against DOMA. What's holding us back?

Via ABC, this good news: the California Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that doctors cannot deny patients medical care on religious grounds. The case involved two Christian doctors, working at a fertility clinic, who had refused to perform artificial insemination on a lesbian:

Guadalupe Benitez, now 36, had maintained that the California medical clinic that was treating her polycystic ovary syndrome had "dumped" her when she asked for artificial insemination.

In 1999, after a year of surgeries and hormone treatments — all covered by insurance — Benitez was finally ready to get pregnant. But at the crucial moment, her doctor refused to do the procedure for "religious" reasons.

...Also named in the suit were two of the clinic's doctors — Dr. Doug Fenton and Dr. Christine Brody — who lawyers say had a constitutional right to refuse a procedure that violated their religious beliefs.

As the story explains, Benitez and her partner have since had three children - but they had to pay for fertility treatment at their own expense, because the clinic they ultimately found to perform the procedure was not a member of their health plan. I don't know if this ruling will reimburse them for those medical costs, although it should; but at the very least, it has established a powerful and obviously correct precedent that a person's religious beliefs do not grant them an exemption from anti-discrimination laws.

During the civil rights era, many whites justified their oppressive and prejudiced treatment of blacks on the grounds that racial minorities were foreordained by God to be inferior. I doubt that anyone claiming a religious right to discriminate against blacks would be given even a moment's consideration today. Yet the same ugly, appalling reasoning is still used by bigots who claim that God gives them the right to hate, and who are willfully blind to the truth that gays and lesbians are human beings deserving of all the same rights - including the right to start a family - as the rest of us.

I'm astounded that such a claim would ever be seriously advanced, even by a religious fundamentalist, but it's still a good sign that the court unequivocally rejected it. The law is clear: doctors can and should be free to exercise their professional judgment in deciding what treatment is medically appropriate; but they cannot arbitrarily deny treatment based on medically irrelevant characteristics of the patient.

This case partakes of the same twisted reasoning used by pharmacists who think they should have the right to deny their customers access to drugs whose use they disagree with. An even more virulent form of insane stupidity is displayed by female Muslim doctors who claim that it violates their religious beliefs to wash up before surgery. This reasoning, and not just in the Muslims' case, is a clear and present danger: it prioritizes rigid adherence to irrational superstition over the lives and well-being of actual human beings. This firm ruling against these practices is a welcome one, but it doesn't go far enough. This needs to be a criminal matter and not just a civil one: any doctor who refuses on religious grounds to perform a necessary medical procedure needs to be immediately sanctioned and barred from further practice of medicine.

The solution to these fundamentalists' dilemma, as I've written before, is a simple one. If your religious beliefs would interfere with your ability to perform the duties of a job, then you are free to seek a different job. You are not free to take the job and refuse to do it while whining about religious persecution. Individual, adult believers are free to subject themselves to whatever religious rules they see fit - but we live in a secular society, and no one should be permitted to impose their personal dogmas on all the rest of us.

After the welcome news of the UC-Calvary lawsuit's dismissal, I'm happy to say I have two other pieces of good news to report on this week:

• The Alberta Human Rights Commission, a group of petty bureaucrats who make it their mission to censor people's thoughts, has dismissed the charges against Ezra Levant that I wrote about last January, in "In Defense of Free Speech". The commission decided that Levant's republication of the Mohammed cartoons was journalistically reasonable, dismissing a complaint filed by a Canadian imam named Syed Soharwardy.

I'm not hailing this as a victory because Levant was acquitted. As Levant himself says, to applaud this decision would be to give legitimacy to the underlying principle: that an arm of the government can punish people for voicing ideas which others disapprove of. I do not grant legitimacy to that principle. No democratic government should ever dare to harass, charge, or punish people for exercising their free speech. Even if this commission has arrogated to itself the power to do that, it does not have the right.

Even if these bureaucrats graciously decline to punish someone for speaking freely on one particular occasion, that does not change the fact that their mere claim to possess the power to do that is tyrannical, immoral and illegitimate. Unless we specifically have the freedom to say things that the government does not want us to say, we do not truly have free speech.

All that said, I'm cheered by this decision for a quite different reason: because the commission's acquittal of Levant may well be a sign that they realize they've overstepped their authority and are fearful of a public backlash. As always, fighting back against bullies is the best course of action. An attempt to punish someone who's so outspokenly opposed them might shine the spotlight on their actions in a way they would not want, and so perhaps they've dismissed this case in an effort to make that unwelcome scrutiny go away. Regardless, I hope that scrutiny only mounts, until this tyrannical bureaucracy is torn down for good. I'll provide further updates on this as they arrive.

• Also, the University of Central Florida has decided it will not suspend or expel Webster Cook. As you may recall, Cook's great crime was failing to abide by Roman Catholic rules for how an ordinary wafer of dry bread should be treated. As a consequence, he was physically assaulted, received a flood of violent and profane threats, was accused of kidnapping and hate crimes, and was impeached from the student senate at his university. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, who makes his living harassing people who won't fight back, demanded the UCF expel Cook for his imaginary crime of failing to bow down to religious dogma. Happily, the disciplinary panel voted unanimously to reject that demand, which was the only rational response given the circumstances.

This just and fair decision won't undo the harm Cook has already suffered from deranged Catholics who've threatened his life and dragged his name through the mud. If any of them are students at UCF, the case for expulsion is far stronger against them than it ever was for him. But at least the UCF, to its credit, has realized that it is a secular body and that it has no role acting as the enforcer of theistic dogma. This case, like Levant's, is a welcome reminder that no religious group has the right to demand that all of society abide by the rules it has voluntarily chosen for itself.