I believe in the goodness of humanity, in the idea that men and women possess an innate and nearly universal altruism. The means by which we attempt to better the state of mankind, as well as the philosophies that guide us, vary wildly of course. Nonetheless I feel comfortable that my fellow homo sapiens want only the best for me and everyone else. I therefore do my best not to resort to personal attacks when speaking or writing, and I carefully word my arguments in ways that minimize their risk of being perceived as such. But sometimes people say stuff so ridiculously absurd, so ill-conceived-so friggin’ bone stupid-that merely to quote them by itself amounts to ad hominem.

Such is the case with first-term Indiana state legislator Al Morrison, who, in a recent e-mail to faculty members of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, has provided his readers with a veritable fountain of quotable lunacy just begging to be hurled back at him as invective. So given the inevitability of my being accused of personal denunciation, let me just get this out of the way right now and say that Morrison appears to have lodged his head so deeply in his posterior that he might as well skip his next colonoscopy.1

Such a scurrilous statement requires that some background information be given.

As most citizens of Indiana are aware, the Indiana State Legislature has been considering HJR-3 for some time now, a resolution that proposes an amendment to the state’s constitution regarding the definition of marriage. At the time of this writing, it reads:

Marriage. Provides that only marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Indiana. Provides that a legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized. This proposed amendment has been agreed to by one general assembly.

If it successfully finds its way through the statehouse, the citizens of Indiana will find themselves voting on whether to make it part of the state’s constitution.

Many students, alumni, staff, and faculty of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (and by “many” I mean what is most likely a fairly comfortable majority) oppose HJR-3. Despite this, as well as the fact that the college includes sexual orientation as part of its anti-discrimination clause and also grants benefits to same-sex partners of employees, Rose-Hulman has not followed the example of organizations such as Indiana University, Ball State University, Eli Lilly, and Cummins (two of the largest employers of Rose graduates), all of whom have voiced official opposition to HJR-3. (See a list of other HJR-3 opponents.) Sensing that Rose would continue its official silence regarding the issue, many people within the community started making statements on their own. Most notably these include an open letter to Rose’s President and Board of Trustees penned by 2011 Civil Engineering alumnus Tim Boyer; a letter written by the college’s Advisory Council on Diversity and cosigned by 145 members of the campus community; an official statement of opposition by The Thorn, the college’s independent student newspaper; and also a statement of opposition signed by a large group of concerned faulty, which appeared as a paid ad in the January 10 edition of The Thorn.2

Though some minor rumblings have been heard on campus from a small number of people in favor of HJR-3, no counter movement has been initiated, nor have any instances of anything resembling hostility arisen. Rose-Hulman values its convivial atmosphere above almost everything else. It boasts an environment in which people with vastly different worldviews somehow get along swimmingly, and so this absence of animosity comes as no surprise.

Enter Indiana’s 42nd district state representative and pro-HJR-3-tagonist Al Morrison.

Morrison currently works as “Special Projects Gift Officer” within Rose-Hulman’s Development Office, a position into which he was mysteriously moved shortly after winning his seat in 2012, having worked for the previous decade as an assistant director for recreational sports and athletic facilities and director of intramurals. Perhaps emboldened by a sense of legitimacy coming from his new position(s), Morrison apparently could not simply sit back and watch as so many clueless people within the Rose community blindly voiced their opposition to HJR-3 like helpless little sheep. It seems the faculty ad in The Thorn served as the straw that broke the camel’s back, the text of which I include here verbatim:

As educators, we believe that initiatives against marriage equality, such as HJR-6 (renamed HJR-3), contradict our mission to foster scientists and engineers for the 21st century. Rose-Hulman’s ability to recruit talented colleagues and students and to attract top companies to our career fairs would be undermined by the passage of the bill. More importantly, we believe HJR-6 would undermine the campus’ inclusive atmosphere in which all students, faculty, and staff are valued and respected.

Seeing himself as the sole voice of reason, Morrison responded directly to one of the faculty cosigners of the ad, subsequently encouraging her to forward that response to all the other cosigners and even the president of the institute itself. (Read the entire e-mail.)

Morrison writes with all the skill and insight of a fourteen year-old boy who has recently completed his first reading of Atlas Shrugged. In addition to treating words like “Unemployment” as a proper nouns and confusing aposiopesis with ellipsis, he cites a number of contradictory and irrelevant macroeconomic figures, displays a condescending indignation for opponents of HJR-3 as intolerant quashers of discussion, and adds his name to the growing list of non-technically educated politicians (Morrison’s degree is in sports management) who find themselves nonplussed at how “highly educated…people of science” keep drawing such unscience-like conclusions. All the while he pontificates mightily as he forms arguments with as much cogency and cohesion as a racecar assembled with a glue stick.

I particularly love this little nugget: “9/11 of the states with the worst Business Tax Climate [sic.] allow gay marriage.” Of course any mildly educated person would look at such a statement and, in addition to recognizing the manufactured and completely subjective notion of a “business tax climate”, would immediately recognize it as being as relevant to marriage as the number of German Shepherds residing in the state. To Morrison’s credit, however, he does admit that this factoid, along with the other so-called statistics he cites, “do not indicate that those states that allow gay marriage are at the bottom of the US economy because they allow gay marriage.” Well, he’s almost right-they actually don’t indicate anything at all.

You see, the faculty who signed their names to the three sentences that so rile Morrison, being “highly educated…people of science”, understand the scientific method. They know how to devise and carry out meaningful experiments and how to employ the use of statistics thereof. They understand the difference between means, medians, and modes; how to calculate a confidence interval; and how to perform a T-test. They know better than anyone the fatal fallacy of confusing correlation with causation. They therefore fully recognize the enormous difficulty of connecting economic variables and gay marriage, especially based on the type of cross-sectional data Morrison offers. In fact, they would be the first to point out that the required amount of additional longitudinal data and the associated control of variables makes such a task virtually impossible.

But the faculty have made no such grandiose claims of impending economic doom. Rather, they have made a simple statement focusing largely on the importance of respecting others and their personal choices, even when those choices differ from ours. I am forced to wonder exactly what ad Morrison read, or if it is only that his reading comprehension skills match his rhetorical alacrity.

On the other hand, evidence does exist correlating the attraction of highly productive and knowledgeable employees and an environment tolerant of diversity. Economist and social scientist Richard Florida, professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, gives one of the most famous examples in his highly influential 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida used data on the percentage of same sex couples as a proxy variable for exactly this type of tolerance, and as it turns out, yes, talented employees gravitate towards work environments that don’t make a big deal about what genitalia ones partner has.

How interesting in this regard that Morrison has said that he does not know any gay people. It is statistically impossible for him not to. In fact, I know gay people at Rose-Hulman that Morrison also knows, and I find it most telling that he is either unaware of their sexual orientation or that they have chosen not to share it with him.

Be that as it may, Morrison’s tirade concerning the faculty’s supposed “assertion that this amendment…would be bad for business and make it harder for our state and school to compete in the business world” being “completely false and misleading” is but the tip of the iceberg of craziness that is his assessment of HJR-3. In fact he begins his e-mail with a classic example of the bandwagon fallacy: “There are 30 states that currently have a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman (we would be 31)…Indiana is not an outlier.” Yeah, all the cool states amend their constitutions.

Yet despite his seeming predilection for argumentum ad populum, Morrison ignores the fact that most citizens of Indiana likely oppose the amendment. He says he will most definitely vote “YES” even though he acknowledges that “…according to opposition polling Indiana is at least 55% against this.” Given the sentiment of the people of the state, the electorate whom they supposedly represent, one wonders why Morrison and so many of his statehouse associates have tenaciously sought not just to keep gay marriage illegal in Indiana, but also to see that the state’s constitution is amended so that it virtually has no chance of ever becoming legal.

Naturally Morrison has an answer for that too: “…the house, and then eventually the senate, will simply be voting on whether or not this issue will finally be decided by the people of Indiana.” Champion of the democratic process that he is, Morrison is just bringing it to the people, that’s all. This is because he knows, as all of us learned in our high school civics courses, that the way we govern ourselves in this great nation is not by periodically electing representative legislators to form laws, electing various executives to carry them out, and having a judiciary to interpret said laws. Nay, we decide issues primarily by amending state constitutions, forcing our state legislators to jump a series of cumbersome hoops over a period of many years, so that we “the people” can decide. Furthermore, just to make sure we all clearly understand what it is we’re deciding, we make the proposed amendment a negative, contrary to the popular sentiment, so that our will is done by voting against it. Yes, that epitomizes the efficient, nonintrusive, small government that Morrison and his ilk envision.

We may be willing to forgive Morrison’s dysfunctional ideas regarding the legislative process, as the neophyte politician is largely informed by the Tea Party’s arbitrary coalescence of disparate and logically incompatible dogma, a dogma that unfortunately shows no sign of easing its relentless erosion of both the equanimity and intellectual credibility of my friends in the Republican Party. Correspondingly, Morrison exemplifies all the tell-tale signs of the novice ideologue-chock full of answers, desperately distorting the world around him in a search for questions affirming his perspective.

However, I for one have much less patience for his bully tactics, tactics which he shamelessly masquerades as victimization. In his own words, “I get the feeling that the opposition doesn’t actually believe their own polling because they are fighting so hard to keep it off the ballot…”. One can almost hear him making clucking noises as he flaps his folded arms up and down. But as if it weren’t enough to call opponents of HJR-3 chicken for not silently awaiting their respective representatives to vote against their wishes, Morrison goes on to claim that they “show intolerance and the desire to stifle discussion, debate, and opinions of those with whom they do not agree .” [Morrison’s emphasis.] Even Morrison cannot be unaware of the laughable irony of calling the opponents of a gay marriage ban “intolerant”. In fact I find it quite likely that he purposely uses such language for the purposes of intimidation and inciting umbrage.

On the other hand, I fear that Morrison truly believes his own rhetoric that the opposition’s mere participation in the debate amounts to an active attempt at suppression, whereas actions such as the Indiana House Speaker’s suddenly moving the bill from a doomed committee into one in which it would almost certainly pass somehow constitutes fair play. I have in my mind this picture of a crew of schoolyard ruffians trying to convince themselves that they truly do provide “protection” in exchange for the lunch money they extort.

In all fairness, however, we really should explore Morrison’s perspective more fully. In order to do so let us consider, say, his testicles. Via Morrison’s logic, the prudent political process by which he should keep his gonads intact would be to propose an amendment to the state constitution that calls for his castration. After all, the majority of people in the state (the majority, not all) most likely oppose his neutering. Clearly he would voice zero opposition to such an amendment, subsequently sitting quietly on the sidelines as the Indiana House and Senate bring the issue to the people of Indiana to decide.

Unless he doesn’t truly believe in that majority and/or he wants to show “intolerance and the desire to stifle discussion, debate, and opinions of those with whom [he doesn’t] agree”, that is.

Have a great day.