Juan Cole, professor of History at the University of Michigan, is the current darling of many. The man oozes arrogance, from that obnoxious picture on his webpage with his right hand holding his chin up as if his jaw wouldn't stop dropping from the awe he inspires in himself to the title of his weblog "Informed Comment". A favorite first-line argument of his about people he disagrees with seems to be to attack that they don't speak Arabic or Persian. And he is guilty of one of my pet peeves, misusing the phrase "to beg the question" (for such a self-styled intellectual this should be grounds for severe ridicule).
I shouldn't call him uninformed. He clearly isn't. He has a tremendous amount of knowledge floating around in his head. However, I think his ability to take that knowledge and form arguments that are strong, coherent, and useful isn't very well established. That is a skill though that not everybody has, and it is as much innate as learned. I think his critical thinking skills are underdeveloped, and parroting back what he's read in the press if often the extend of Cole's best analysis. Related to that, I think Cole gets easily convinced by similarly weak arguments based on skewed rhetoric.
I may be a little too hard on the professor (that picture really bothers me), but even when I agree with him, sometimes I wish he would just keep his mouth shut. He has a gift for making the argument most likely to lead nowhere -- or worse -- make your shared position sound foolish. I first began to notice disagreements with him when he didn't make critical distinctions between the different forces inside Iran and treated the rulership as of a single voice. Some other links he gave to poorly argued positions were also disheartening. However, Cole's latest is his post in gay marriage. As he says "sometimes readers complain if I stray into other subjects." I'm not complaining that he does stray into other areas, just that he doesn't do it very well.
The professor comes out the door swinging at air, misrepresenting the position he intends to attack:
The religious want to pass a Massachusetts law making gay marriage illegal.
No, they don't. They want to prevent the widening of the the definition of marriage that a court unilaterally expanded. Supporters claim that marriage has been defined as between a man and a woman. "Gay marriage" doesn't exist by definition. Some queer boy can get married if he wants, but according to the definition of marriage it is to a woman. The distinction in small, but still important because we are not talking about a religious contraction of marriage, but a secular expansion of the definition of marriage, so the Lemon Test doesn't apply and neither does much of his rhetoric of banning gay marriage.
In a more national (or even world) sense without the Mass. court muddying the issue, this is made clearer. There doesn't need to be legislation outlaying marriage between two women, because there is nothing to allow it in the first place.
Immediately after mishandling this, the professor burries himself when trying to rebut Sen. Santorum:
And that is my reply to Senator Rick Santorum and others who argue that gay marriage is equivalent to many deviant practices frowned on by society. There is a secular purpose for forbidding marriage of close relatives, since it exposes the offspring to heightened genetic danger.
Make him stop, please. If genetic danger is the reason we do not allow marriage between close relatives, then we would forbid the marriage of two people that carry the Tay Sach's chromosonal abnormality that give a child a 25% chance of being afflicted with the disease, far more likely than any genetic problems associated with inter-family conception. Or more terribly, you can use the good professor's reason to make a law preventing them from marrying or from two handicapped people that carry genetic defects from being married.
Marriage to a close relative is probably an area that is safe to say is the legislation of morality, and laws do legislate morality in general. You can say they shouldn't, but Cole doesn't do that. He tries to defend an instancen where it is clearly the case that happens.
More subversive though is that this argument implicity says that marriage is about offspring, since the only reason two close relatives cannot marry is because of the risk to any children coming from the union. It does worse than ignore the other legal rights of marriage, it disposes of them as a reason for marriage. Since two gay people cannot have children, much like the two relatives cannot safely have children, Cole seems to have built an argument against his own position. Cole must love holes.
He ties up his thoughts with some pointless rambling about constitutionality and poorly equating the instituion of marriage with personal activities. His tying people who oppose gay marriage to those what would fly planes into buildings killing thousands of innocents just shows how weak is argumentative skills are and how he really isn't good at making thoughtful discussion but more of preaching to the choir.
The only useful piece of his post is when he actually gets to the one of the major issues, new liberties:
The ball of liberty is not some known quantity that we control and the limits of which are immediately apparent, in this view. It has a will of its own and goes places we may not have initially intended. We just "set it in motion."
This is tangentially an argument for expanding the definition of marriage to include same-sex relationships instead of the misapplied legalistic nonsense he pushes in the rest of his writing. And that is where this discussion will be won, on the idea of expanding liberty beyond previous norms. We shouldn't be happy with keeping the boundaries of liberty where they are at or where they were defined in the past, but should be constantly trying to open any institution of the state to its fullest inclusive possibility.
Juan Cole may be have the information, but he certainly doesn't seem to know how to use it very well.