"How Bathroom Fears Conquered Transgender Rights in Houston."

The headline in The Atlantic after Houston voted — 61 to 39 percent — against the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or Proposition 1, which would ban discrimination based on gender identity (and 14 other factors, including sexual orientation). The "startlingly simple" opposition message was "No men in women’s bathrooms."

"No one is exempt," intoned a narrator in one TV ad that featured a young girl in a restroom. "Even registered sex offenders could follow women or young girls into the bathroom. And if a business tried to stop them, they’d be fined. Protect women’s privacy. Prevent danger. Vote no on the Proposition 1 bathroom ordinance."...

Supporters pointed out that it was already against the law in Houston to enter a bathroom with the intent to harass someone....

That response doesn't address the problem faced by a business that would like to intervene but can't know the intent of the person following a woman. Also, people frequently want additional protection. I'm thinking specifically of gun control, which tends to be supported by the same people who would like to open up access to women's bathrooms. These people aren't satisfied by the argument that it's already against the law to commit murder and other gun violence.

"I’ve also never Googled myself. It wouldn’t occur to me to do so. It’s the same reason I don’t watch pornography."

"It’s not that I occupy some moral high ground. I just think: Down that road lies madness."

Says the memoirist Mary Karr, who also says "Narcissism is the bacterium infecting all bad writing."

"Many Professors Anxious About Legally Armed Students in Their Classrooms."

"I’m sure that many professors in the past were uncomfortable about having women, or blacks, or openly gay students in their classrooms, too. But happily, progress marches on and people’s visceral fears and dislikes weren’t allowed to rule."

Writes Glenn Reynolds.

I can see how it's disturbing to know that students might have guns, but I'm puzzling over the way knowing there are guns becomes more disturbing when you know that some of the people who have guns have them because it's not against the law. You might say, it's irrational to be disturbed, since using the gun other than in self-defense or the defense of others would be against the law, and if you're only worried about people doing things that are against the law, the legality of having guns should be irrelevant (or should cut the other way, since it's possible that a law-abiding, gun-bearing person might defend you against the law-violating, gun-bearing person).

But — as I was saying the other day — a professor could be worried about students who impulsively become violent and, because they have a gun with them, do far more damage than if they were unarmed when they suddenly become murderous.

Anyway, a student with a concealed weapon is not like a student who is female, black, or openly gay. For one thing, you don't have the easy option of leaving your femaleness, blackness, or open gayness back at home. It's possible to cover up these things, but for most of us, it's not easy. A gun isn't a necessary component of your physical being, and carrying a gun is behavior that you can chose to engage in or not. Schools impose many limitations on behavior, frequently based on fairly superficial distaste about things that involve essential personal freedom, such as how you dress and whether you can talk and move around. It's not the case that teachers must learn to tolerate students exercising their personal freedoms in the classroom.

"Academe has been unfavorably compared to many things: a cult, a bad boyfriend, fraternity-style hazing, or indentured servitude."

"In all of those analogs, victims are bound to perpetrators in such a way that the victims believe they have chosen to stay in dysfunctional relationships, when in reality they have been manipulated or coerced into them."

"Why do so many people think he’s good? Have you looked at his paintings?"

"In real life, trees are beautiful. If you take Renoir’s word for it, you’d think trees are just a collection of green squiggles."

Renoir is considered a good painter because his work is featured in museums, [Max] Geller added. But upon further inspections of his paintings, that line of argument “seems pretty fallacious”....

The Renoir Sucks at Painting... Instagram account... has even received the wrath of Genevieve Renoir, who says she is the painter’s great-great-granddaughter.

On one photo, Genevieve commented: “When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1m dollars … then you can criticize. In the meantime, it is safe to say that the free market has spoken and Renoir did not suck at painting.”

Geller, who turned her comment into its own post on the account, said: “I think that is one of the most absurd and insane arguments for anything, the idea that we should let the free market dictate quality.”

Ms. Renoir's argument — staunchly opposed by Geller — bears an intriguing similarity the old free-speech argument that Oliver Wendell Holmes made back in 1919: "[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

Would you call that — using Geller's words — "most absurd and insane argument for anything, the idea that we should let the free market dictate quality."
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"Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily."

"But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly. Seattle has become so aggressive that the city is being sued by residents who maintain that the inspectors rooting through their trash are violating their constitutional right to privacy."

Writes John Tierney in "The Reign of Recycling," explaining why we should favor the age-old practice of simply burying garbage. That's at The NYT. Tierney is also writing about this at Instapundit, where he says:

I realize that true believers don’t need rational reasons for their religion, but it would be nice to see a little soul-searching in regard to some stats in the article: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in the front of the plane, it’s more like 100,000 bottles — and you have to make sure not to rinse any of them with hot water, because that little extra energy could more than cancel out any greenhouse benefit of your labors....

The boldface is mine. Why doesn't everyone who wants carbon dioxide emissions taken seriously radically curtail air travel? Why aren't people ashamed to fly (other than when it's absolutely necessary, such as to visit a distant loved one who's about to die)? It's like the way religious people focus on one sin but not another and don't calibrate their effort at sin-avoidance to the seriousness or harmfulness of the various sins.