Stop honoring Prince by appropriating his name and intellectual property for your cause.

I'm seeing things like:



That's his trademark. You don't get to use it. Even if you imagine his departed soul agrees with your cause — which it very well may not — you don't honor him by appropriating his trademark, his identity. It's especially bad to use him in what is for you a fight. The one cause I remember him fighting for was his own intellectual property rights.

As for your social issues... he was opaque. From 2008:

Prince is reportedly "very angry" after the New Yorker accused him of making anti-gay marriage comments, with the Purple One alleging that the magazine misquoted him in a recent interview. According to the article, "When asked about his perspective on social issues — gay marriage, abortion — Prince tapped his Bible and said, 'God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out.'" However, a Prince source tells Perez Hilton, "What His Purpleness actually did was gesture to the Bible and said he follows what it teaches, referring mainly to the parts about loving everyone and refraining from judgment." "We're very angry he was misquoted," says the insider.

I think the best interpretation is that he did not want to be part of your politics.

ADDED: According to Van Jones, Prince engaged in extensive charitable activities and had a religious scruple against getting any publicity for it. One of his endeavors was #YesWeCode — "a national initiative to help 100,000 young women and men from low-opportunity backgrounds find success in the tech sector."

"Gay Events That I, Marco Rubio, Would Go To."

A comic piece at The New Yorker — #1 on The New Yorker's "most popular" list — that riffs on a WaPo item that reads:

Presidential candidate and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in an interview with Univision’s Jorge Ramos on Wednesday that he would attend a gay wedding of someone he was close to — while qualifying that he wouldn’t condone the union itself.

It's a good comic idea, which is why I and, I assume, many others clicked on it, which is all that is needed to be "popular" for the purposes of climbing an internet "most popular" chart. The execution of the comic idea is another matter. But that's subjective, and it's going to depend on whether you feel empathy for politicians who need to adopt a namby-pamby pose on gay marriage.

I stopped to contemplate the quality of my own humor. Should I say "a namby-pamby pose"? To help decide, I did a Google image search on the phrase "a namby-pamby pose." #1:



My question is answered. The god Serendipity has spoken.

UPDATE: Speaking of gods speaking, no sooner do I publish this post than my doorbell rings. Though I don't normally answer the doorbell, I go to the door. It's 2 men in suits and a little boy. They've got copies of The Watchtower. Here's how I reacted:



Ah! It's such a perfect day today! I believe in The Universe!

"So stupid. Giving up your own life and your baby's for a fantasy. Guess she earned a Darwin award."/"Go Darwin."

Comments at the Washington Post on an article about a woman who, as a Jehovah's Witness, refused to accept a blood transfusion, and suffered the loss of her unborn child and then the loss of her own life.

Another commenter wrote: "I hope the death certificate read suicide and murder! Stupid, superstitious people! Darwin award for sure..."

And here's WaPo:

The baby died while still in the womb, and the woman then delivered it vaginally...

“Refusal of a lifesaving intervention by an informed patient is generally well respected, but the rights of a mother to refuse such interventions on behalf of her fetus [sic] is more controversial,” [doctors at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Australia wrote in a letter published this month in the Internal Medicine Journal]. “A doctor indeed has moral obligations to both the pregnant woman, and perhaps with differing priority to the unborn fetus [sic].”

Why did the WaPo columnist — By Elahe Izadi— or WaPo editor put "[sic]" after "fetus"? The child died in utero. It seems as though somebody wants to get some distance between abortion rights and religious freedom rights. But that separation is not justified. Abortion rights — in America anyway — are premised on the woman's right to form her own beliefs:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

That's religion. Face it. Should a woman's concept of the universe dominate over the life of the unborn child or not?

"I know this might be something silly to rant about, but my heart is breaking for my son."

"We invited his whole class (16 kids) over for his 6th birthday party today. Not one kid came."

1. Her heart broke and our hearts are supposed to be lifted by this story about the response a Florida woman got when she posted those words on Facebook: 40 strangers showed up at her house on that very day — 15 children and 25 adults — and brought presents for the child. And now there's a follow-on media to-do about the child's suffering and his supposed subsequent happiness and the supposed meanness of some people and the charity of others.

2. Is any of this good for the child — as opposed to us, the consumers of media melodrama? Consider that the child is autistic — autistic and 6.

3. Why invite the whole class — 16 kids — to any 6-year-old's birthday party? Either he has friends who care about him or he does not. Inviting everyone is like inviting no one. Nobody feels he is really wanted or special. How would you feel if your 6-year-old child were invited to a birthday party where everyone in the class was invited? You'd probably ask your child if he was friends with the birthday kid, and you wouldn't pressure him to attend just to avert the possibility that you and he would stand accused of insensitivity on Facebook and other media.

4. When I was a child, back in the 1950s, my mother cited what seemed to be a standard rule for the proper number of children a birthday party: the number of guests should equal the age of the child. According to that rule of thumb, there should be 6 guests at a 6 year old's birthday party. Not 16. And certainly not 40. In those days, parents didn't crank children up into a frenzy of excitement, and you also never heard about anyone's being hyperactive or autistic. Maybe the classrooms and homes of America were teeming with undiscovered hyperactivity and autism. I don't know, but I do think we are depriving children of the child-scale environment where they can develop and flourish.

5. Here's a more radical idea: Don't celebrate birthdays!

[B]irthdays are unlike other holidays, for they are times "when all the presents and good wishes are for oneself. The birthday cake, splendid with colored icing and shining candles is a personal tribute. Other holidays lift the heart, but birthdays warm the ego." Is it a good idea for Christians to engage in celebrations that "warm the ego"? Speaking to the proud Pharisees, Jesus warned that "whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."

"God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, 'Enough.'"

Said Prince, as told by Claire Hoffman in The New Yorker:

Prince padded into the kitchen, a small fifty-year-old man in yoga pants and a big sweater, wearing platform flip-flops over white socks, like a geisha....

Limping slightly, Prince set off on a walk around his new bachelor pad. Glass doors opened onto acres of back yard, and a hot tub bubbled in the sunlight. “I have a lot of parties,” he explained....

Seven years ago, he became a Jehovah’s Witness. He said that he had moved to L.A. so that he could understand the hearts and minds of the music moguls. “I wanted to be around people, connected to people, for work,” he said. “You know, it’s all about religion. That’s what unites people here. They all have the same religion, so I wanted to sit down with them, to understand the way they see things, how they read Scripture.”

Prince had his change of faith, he said, after a two-year-long debate with a musician friend, Larry Graham. “I don’t see it really as a conversion,” he said. “More, you know, it’s a realization. It’s like Morpheus and Neo in ‘The Matrix.’ ” He attends meetings at a local Kingdom Hall, and, like his fellow-witnesses, he leaves his gated community from time to time to knock on doors and proselytize. “Sometimes people act surprised, but mostly they’re really cool about it,” he said....

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Back when Prince was much more popular, his music powerfully enticed us into what he now considers sin. If God is keeping score, Prince should be worried. I think he'd need to go door to door for millions of years to undo all that damage (if damage it is).

Via Gawker, which notes:

If Prince wants to get attention for his views, airing them amid nationwide demonstrations against the passage of a California anti-gay-marriage initiative will probably do the trick. What that does for the "celibate" musician's sales and popularity is another matter.

Celibate, eh?

Tonight, that mood of isolation permeates Prince's luxurious 30,000-square-foot Tuscan-style villa, perched high in a gated Beverly Hills enclave. The royal one, clad in a filmy white sweater over a black shirt and slacks with (shocker!) flip-flops, lives solo in the nine-bedroom home, where a cook is upstairs preparing food for a post-midnight gathering with friends and bandmates.

"I'm single, celibate and sexy," he says with a laugh. "I feel free."

No one promoted sex more than Prince, and now he's celibate. That's rich.

There's lots to talk about here, but don't overlook the assertion that the music moguls of L.A. "all have the same religion." I hope that means that commerce is a religion for business folk.

UPDATE: Prince retracts!

2 buildings, 2 bridges, 2 pedestrians.

An old man with a package is walking up the hill. (This is the hill that makes Brooklyn Heights heights.) A perhaps-young woman with her foot in a cast is walking down the hill toward the overpass that connects two parts of the Jehovah's Witnesses buildings. In the background: the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.

"Argument by impressionistic psychodrama."

I have a review of Jeffrey Toobin's "The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court" in the New York Sun.

ADDED: My main problem with the book is a general problem with popular writing about law (and politics and plenty of other serious subjects). To make it readable and entertaining, you forefront the people, not the ideas, you use a lot of colorful details, and, like a novelist, you make the details seem to express deep things about the characters. Within this rhetorical style, when there are any ideas or events to describe, they seem to arise from the depths of your characters.

Toobin describes Supreme Court cases like that, and because his book is entertaining and readable, many people will get their view of the Court from it. The material analyzing the actual arguments and opinions in the cases is cut way back, as if the author wrote with constant awareness of how little patience you would have for any legal analysis. This is understandable, up to a point. But this extreme minimization of the legal material allows for much sleight of hand, and like a novelist, you are led to take the point of view of some characters over others. He's really making an argument -- an "argument by impressionistic psychodrama."

You don't get to read how Chief Justice John Roberts analyzed the equal protection precedent in deciding the Louisville and Seattle school integration cases and how Justice Breyer saw the same precedent in a different way. Instead you feel along with Justice Breyer: "Breyer's wan longing for stare decisis will stir few hearts," Toobin writes (at page 339). Wan longing! It reminds me of something Stephen Colbert said on the first episode of "The Colbert Report": "Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you." Anyone can explain the cases to you. Toobin feels the cases at us. And the reader, who's had his feeling massaged for 300+ pages, will read of Breyer's "wan longing" and think: I will be one of the few! My heart is stirred!

But you haven't been given the material to decide if the bad guys are really trashing the precedents. You're just accepting the viewpoint of the judges you've been felt at to think are the good ones. They feel sad, so it must be a calamity. "David Souter was shattered" (page 177), so Bush v. Gore was atrocious.

What is missing is the analytical substance that would let you decide for yourself. In the review, I write:

[H]uman individuals drive the law, as Mr. Toobin tells it. The story of Jay Sekulow, "a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn" whose "ignorance" was "his best weapon," swells the 12-page chapter on the Supreme Court's religion cases, but there isn't a word about the Rehnquist Court's most important Free Exercise case, Employment Division v. Smith. Smith, written by the conservative Justice Scalia, said religion was not entitled to special exceptions from generally applicable laws. (You can't avoid the Controlled Substances Act, for example, by saying you need to use peyote in a religious rite.)

Smith doesn't fit the theory that the conservatives are out to favor religion or the proposition that the religion cases "usually come down simply to ‘What will Sandra do?'" Justice O'Connor opposed the doctrinal shift in Smith, as did the three most liberal justices: William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun. It was a liberal tenet that the Free Exercise Clause relieves religious practitioners from requirements the law imposes on everyone else. To bring up Smith would require Mr. Toobin to acknowledge that conservatives favor equality and liberals want to favor religion and that would mess up the narrative arc of his story.

There's something else in the religion chapter that I couldn't fit into the review. When Toobin writes that Jay Sekulow's "ignorance" was "his best weapon," he's portraying the lawyer as someone who bumbled into using the Free Speech Clause to win protection for religious activities. Toobin writes that Sekulow didn't realize that "cases involving religion were always argued under the Free Exercise Clause."

But a mere 3 pages earlier, he was praising Robert Jackson's 1943 opinion in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette -- the case that said schools couldn't force Jehovah's Witnesses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Toobin doesn't mention that Barnette is a free speech case and that Sekulow competently cited it.

(And what about all the cases based on the Establishment Clause? They involve religion, even if they aren't litigated by Jay Sekulow.)

The pop culture approach Toobin uses demands that the individual, not the case law, governs what happens. It's a little like the "great man" theory of history -- the inferior man theory of the law.

It is fun to read though. Jay Sekulow is "a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn," who moved to Atlanta and out of laziness attended Atlanta Baptist College. There, accepting a challenge by a "Jesus freak" to take the Book of Isaiah seriously, he saw that the messiah must be Jesus and became one of the "Jews for Jesus." Etc. etc.... and that's why we have the recent cases that say it violates the Free Speech Clause to discriminate against the religious viewpoint.

It makes sense if you get caught up in the seductive pop culture reading that is "The Nine."

And another thing....

Writing about Barnette, Toobin enthuses about Justice Jackson's idealistic prose: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." But he makes Justice Kennedy seem foolish for his love of "drama and what he called 'the poetry of the law'" (page (147), "flowery language about the First Amendment" (page 167), and "Kennedyesque flourish like 'the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" (page 223). But Toobin's not much different from everyone else there. Jackson had the knack for high-flown phrases, and Kennedy can't quite pull it off.

And I'm not completely opposed to pop culture writing about law. I do it too, and I follow my own standards of fairness. Like I think it's fair to tweak Toobin for making a big deal out of Kennedy's glasses -- how he changed from "seventies-style steel-framed aviators" to "a Euro-chic frameless model." This supposedly symbolized how much Kennedy is soaking up the influence of Europeans and European law as he travels to various conferences. What I find so hilarious is that on the back cover of the book jacket -- where there aren't any words at all, just a big picture of the smiling Jeffrey Toobin -- he's wearing rimless glasses. Meaningful!

(And aren't steel-framed aviator glasses in style right now?)