Monday, August 9, 2010

More on Perry v. Schwarzenegger

David Boies, one of the lead attorneys for the plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger on Face the Nation on Sunday:

Well, it's easy to sit around and debate and throw around opinions appear -- appeal to people's fear and prejudice, cite studies that either don't exist or don't say what you say they do. In a court of law you've got to come in and you've got to support those opinions. You've got to stand up under oath and cross-examination. And what we saw at trial is that it's very easy for the people who want to deprive gay and lesbian citizens the right to vote [sic], to make all sorts of statements and campaign literature or in debates where they can't be cross-examined.

But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that's what happened here. There simply wasn't any evidence. There weren't any of those studies. There weren't any empirical studies. That's
just made up. That's junk science.

And it's easy to say that on television. But a witness stand is a lonely place to lie. And when you come into court, you can't do that. And that's what we proved. We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost.

Perhaps this is what bothers me so much about they anti-gay marriage people. Robert Procter, Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University, coined the term "agnotology" to describe the construction of ignorance. The important thing here is that Proctor is not describing being ignorant; rather, he is pointing to a deliberate effort by someone or some group to create ignorance. One succesful manufacture of ignorance is in the area of global warming. Belief in human-caused global warming declined from 52 percent to 42 percent between 2003 and 2008. People are actually becoming more ignorant about global warming than there were. The anti-gay people are guilty of pushing the same agenda. They want to make us more ignorant. Well, I'm against ignorance.

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