Law.com has an interesting article that I really am at a loss with how to respond to.[1] Bartenders at a casino somewhere on the west coast (Ninth Circuit) are required to conform to a personal grooming policy.

Five years ago, the company changed its appearance standards to require female bartenders to look more feminine by wearing their hair down and using nail polish and makeup. Male bartenders had to keep their hair above the collar, keep their nails clean and neatly trimmed and couldn’t wear makeup, ponytails or nail polish.[1]

Clearly it should be legal for an employer to require that employees such as waiters, waitresses, and bartenders, conform to the image the restaurants (or casino) wants to send to its customers. The grooming of the waiter, waitress, or bartender will clearly reflect on the establishment, and on the willingness of patrons to return (would you return to a restaurant if the waiters were all filthy?). Are there limits on this? I am not sure. It is a burden to require waiters to wear a tux, but I have seen that (we had a gift certificate to a fancy restaurant once). And clearly the grooming for men and women will be different, must be different, and yet both policies would reflect the same overall standard. A man with long hair sends a different image from a woman with long hair; the latter may be acceptable without the former being so. Is it a burden then that the man has to get his hair cut more often? Make-up is even messier. I have no clue how to approach that one. Does society require makeup of a well dressed woman? I really do not know. Is it fair to ask it of her? Beyond my ability to judge.

But these seem to be different questions from “This is a different burden than is placed on the males, is that allowable?” Clearly the standard, and thus inevitably the burden, must be different. Men and women are not the same and different does not necessarily mean unequal. Is it unequal after all that the bathrooms are segregated by sex? I hope not…

[1] http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1119431121751

A couple days ago, I wrote an entry in response to a pair of articles I read on Townhall.com.[1] I pointed Andrius at this entry because it deals with the State Department, and he instigated a further look at it on my part. Specifically, I found what I am fairly sure is the article that Ms. Mona Charen was writing about.[2] Both articles at least partly miss-characterize the article in question. I think, reading them again today, that I disagree with Andrius that Ms. Charen’s article was an irresponsible miss-characterization.

Polemical writing has its place in political debate. While rightly considered a lesser form of debate, it is never the less a tool that can be effectively used to stir people to act on a topic of importance where a more reasoned approach would bore the listeners. In that respect it is much like satire. So I am not too upset about Ms. Charen’s reporting. I do take the hint that I need to be a little bit more credulous when reading about organizations (such as the State Department) about which I am inclined to dislike anyway.

My overall point however is not undermined by the reality of the article. It is entirely possible to look at the move towards dressier clothing and better grooming, if such exists (I have my doubts), entirely separately from the metrosexual disorder. Consider how long the devolution of men’s’ fashion has been going on to reach its present point. The tux of the present day was the standard formal wear of the past. The three piece suit, now relatively rarely seen, was standard means’ wear for anyone with a “white collar” job. Even the “blue collar” worker would have worn a suit coat away in many settings, away from his actual employment. He would certainly have often worn a button down shirt. Note that this held true at times and in places where women were far more strictly restricted from the workplace than has been the case in decades.

Similarly, the great architects of the past have been men, and often men with skill in engineering. Some of them have been artists as well. While the Aristocracy of the 17Th Century is often labeled effeminate, you still see numerous other examples of the value of being dressed well in history. The well tailored suit never really stopped being critical for the lawyer in the courtroom for example, and the oriental cultures provide an example of one where personal grooming has been considered important without as much blurring of the genders.

So it is clearly bias that causes the Hi magazine article to refer to what they call “Fashionable Men” as being the result of an influx of women in the workplace, and an adoption of women’s values and women’s practices. As such, my comments that this is highly objectionable fare for our State Department to be funding remains entirely accurate.

[1] http://www.schierer.org/~luke/log/20050621-0953
[2] http://www.hiinternational.com/articles/art1_en.cfm?topicId=1&id=392

Ederlyn managed to aptly demonstrate what is insane about PETA today. She stated that a human is more valuable than a pigeon.[1] I will never forget hearing a PETA representative state on a radio program that given a choice between hitting a baby and a rat, she would choose to hit the baby.

[1] http://www.livejournal.com/users/baranoouji/216584.html

In some sense Mr. Cal Thomas is correct: you cannot legislate morality, or effectively use government to enforce it.[1] Government is, however, not utterly disjoint from morality, as is seen with laws against murder, which is an enforcement of morality, and yet one that no one really objects to (except perhaps murderers). While he admits that government can do some things, I wonder how much he really understands the role it plays in shaping society. Do I agree with the FCC’s attempts to regulate broadcast? No, they are not really my favorite, and we are seeing just how ineffective such regulation can be. Still, is there any doubt that the media would be worse without them? I think not, it seems to be well known that the state of European broadcast, like European culture, is filledwith even more filth. As flawed as the movie rating system is, I think that fear of increased government regulation has prevented it from being even less effective, from being dropped, and credit must be given where credit is due.

Yes, the Church would absolutely be more effective in spreading its message if each Christian household, or even a significant majority of them conformed more fully to its, their, ideals. But to try to reform just the Church going without attempting to reform the society they live in would be nearly impossible. Last night mom and I were talking about schools again, and she was saying that we need campus ministries for each of the public schools. I disagreed. The answer is not to try to bring faith into the schools, but to bring the children out of them. Let the children see that there is more to learn than the philosophies of their teachers. I said that a campus ministry would not change the fact that we now have ten year olds committing sex crimes,[2] and getting sex education. Mom responded that with what they see on TV, perhaps they need sex education. I disagree. Is the rightanswer to equip a ten year old to handle what he sees on TV and in the movies today, or to shelter him from such content? And how can we adequately do that without trying to change society? Sure, you can simply not turn on the TV much at home, but what aboutwhen he goes to a friend’s house? Are you going to regulate who he can visit to only let him go to the houses with like-minded parents? You could, but is that a reasonable approach? Is it not better forus as well as them, if the unnecessary sexual content simply is not in all the television, all the movies? And why notwork to reform the culture?

Yes, we are called to worry more about our own sins than those of our neighbors. But that does not excuse us of the need, the requirement, to be active in society. Our own imperfection does not excuse us of the need, the requirement, to decry what is wrong. Indeed, our own improvement cannot be achieved without taking our beliefs to the public square, living them, and acting on them. We must work to improve the world around us even as we work to improve ourselves.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/ct20050620.shtml
[2] http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=qw1119357720368B256

Mr. Pat Buchanan, it seems, cannot be satisfied. If President Bush did raise troop levels, he would be certain to be stabbed in the back by the likes of Mr. Buchanan, who has been been very vocal in his advocacy of a isolationist policy. But, having maintained troop levels, President Bush is still bashed by Mr. Buchanan, this time for not doing in enough.[1] Atleast Mr. Buchanan seems to have realized that we cannot pull out now, having started this mess.

[1] http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44926

It appears the Anglican church is still struggling with the decision of the American and Canadian branch(es) to have an openly gay bishop and to bless homosexual unions.[1] It is interesting that even the “traditionalists” are speaking of this in terms of “practice and discipline” when it really comes down to a matter of doctrine. But the Anglican church would have trouble with that one, after all, they split over a matter of doctrine, the primacy of the Pope. ;-)

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4112954.stm

You just have to love Unix. Just when I am starting to get really frustrated with the fact that the only working command line tool to post to a WordPress web log that I can find does not seem to handle line breaks acceptably, I pause and switch tracks. Looking at the available command line tools from the coreutils package, it comes to mind that I have seen “tr” do some interesting things (when I am following the howto for burning audio cds). Sure enough, that lets me simply delete all the end line characters out of my file, which, since I tend to type in enough HTML to cause it to display correctly, is perfectly acceptable, I only have it formatted to 70 characters per line for Aspell purposes anyway. Yay for command line tools! ☺

Mentioned again today,[1] I wonder if Andrius has seen the pamphlet “Real Men Moisturize” that I know about primarily from having read the same column by Ms. Mona Charen that today’s article references.[2] Such a lovely image to be sending overseas. Why was it that Hitler thought the United States would not affect the outcome of World War II (I could be referring to whoever lead Germany in World War I here, not Hitler, my grasp of history is not what it should be)? Might it have been because he thought we were all spineless “playboys”? Might that have been because of the State Department then just as someone reading this current pamphlet might come to a similar conclusion? I wonder…

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Ham20050617.shtml [2] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20050603.shtml

I am not one who needs to be informed of the critical nature of a father in the lives of his children. My own father shaped me to an incredible extent, and is responsible for much of what good there is in my makeup. Our society has trouble understanding this. Most commercials show a clueless, spineless guy getting bossed around and corrected by his wife, without whom he would clearly be lost. There is only one part of such commercials that holds true, most men would be lost without their wives, but not because they need their wives to guide, direct and teach them everything about surviving and succeeding in society.

Mr. Mark Alexander has taken the opportunity Father’s Day presents to note some of the statistics that back up the critical nature of the father in a family.[1] Particularly noteworthy, especially to me who has so often tried to argue, white though I am, that racial discrimination is no longer all that significant, is the fact that when you control for the presence or lack of a father in a person’s life, the correlation between race and crime, and even between poverty and crime, utterly disappears.[2] It is the prevailing lack of a father in the inner city society, in which so many black families are trapped, that, in fact, traps the next generation there.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/markalexander/ma20050617.shtml [2] social researcher Ms. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, quoted in the above.

Mr. Thomas Sowell makes a number of utterly invalid, but unfortunately typical, arguments in favor of the USA PATRIOT act.[1] Most tellingly, and perhaps most compellingly, he compares the Patriot act to the polio vaccine, and to the Cold War. He is correct, people sheltered from polio by vaccination did, historically come to question the need for that vaccine. And that did cause a temporary return of the disease until the use of the vaccine picked back up. And Europe and the left here do typically fail to understand the role that The United State’s military might played in preventing the deployment of our armed forces.

However, it is utterly invalid to use these examples to justify the Patriot act. The logic here is p prevents q, r prevents s, therefor t prevents u. No proof is offered that the relationship between p and q, r and s, or t and u is the same. A “justification” such as this could, then, be used to assert that literally anything was necessary. You could just as easily say that the reason for no new terrorist activity was because people are flying less! Sadly, this failure of logic will escape many people.

Similarly, he tries to pull of a nice switch. The Patriot act is supposedly responsible for the fact that no second attack on the scale of the World Trade Center collapse has taken place. Thus its use to disrupt and crack down on domestic terrorists has been successful and responsible for that lack. Notice the switch there? The World Trade Center did not fall because of domestic terrorists. Rather, it fell because of international ones. So the use of the Patriot act against domestic terrorists has no necessary (it might have an incidental) causal relationship with the lack of a similar attack.

Someday perhaps I will see a valid argument for the USA PATRIOT Act. Until then I will persist in believing that its costs are far greater than its benefits.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050616.shtml