President Obama supports gay marriage. Will legal gay marriage be part of Obama's legacy? Should we be electing judges? Leonard Mlodinow and the windmills of our minds
Will legal gay marriage be part of Obama's legacy?
President Obama has declared his support for same-sex marriage after years of stating that “marriage is between a man and a woman” or more recently that his position on gay marriage is evolving. This turn-around on the topic is getting whoops of celebration in some quarters, criticism and cynical skepticism from others.
Politically, this statement of support can cut both ways for almost every group. Many long-time gay rights advocates reacted with relief and glee. Finally the president has lived up to his implicit support for gay rights. Others though were angry and critical of the personal nature of Obama’s declaration.
Personally he supports gay marriage but practically he would leave legislation to the states. Not what they had hoped for. African Americans, the president’s most loyal voting block, are deeply divided on the notion of gay marriage and this statement will undoubtedly alienate some black voters who cannot support a president who embraces gay marriage. Would they vote for Romney? Probably not, but many religiously inclined African Americans are already stating that they won’t vote for Obama.
Some are saying the president’s hand was forced on the issue when Vice President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s surprised everyone last weekend publicly sanctioning gay marriage. The theory goes, the president was compelled to make his views more explicit. But this may have been part of the political calculation.
The question is will this help or hurt the president in his race to be re-elected? Also, how far is Obama willing to go? Will legal gay marriage be part of his legacy? Or will he back away from any national right to marriage law?
GUESTS
Ari Shapiro, White House Correspondent, NPR (National Public Radio)
Linda Feldmann, White House Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor
Frank Newport, Editor-in-Chief for the Gallup Poll
Jonathan Saenz, Attorney and Director of Legislative Affairs, The Liberty Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting freedoms and strengthening families
Should we be electing judges?
When you go into the voting booth and open your ballot on June 5, you will be asked to vote for judges. You probably won’t be familiar with any the candidates running for a judgeship, either the incumbents or the candidates challenging the incumbents.
Judge Sanjay Kumar is such an incumbent running to keep his position in LA County’s Superior Court. He is being challenged by Kim Smith, an assistant city attorney in Hawthorne. Judge Kumar contends that though Smith has been designated “not qualified” by the LA County Bar association, his candidacy is viable because many voters will punch the bubble for a candidate with an Anglo sounding name over one with a foreign name.
Judge Kumar’s claims notwithstanding, this circumstance highlights that fact that most voters have no knowledge of these candidates or their qualifications. Initially electing judges would seem to be the best way to go. Appointments are subject to political influence, cronyism and powerful lobbying. But is electing judges we have never heard of any better?
How do you decide which judges to vote for? When voting for a judge you don’t know are you influenced by incumbency, last name, or professional affiliation?
GUEST
Stanley Goldman, Professor of Law at Loyola Law School and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Genocide at LLS.
Leonard Mlodinow and the windmills of our minds
Every aspect of our mental lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, the other unconscious. This hidden aspect, of which we are unaware, dictates our relationships, our decisions, our actions.
Over the past twenty years, scientists have discovered new tools to probe our subliminal minds and uncover its secrets, leading to new understanding of the way we experience the world – perception, memory, behavior and social judgment.
New tools like the fMRI, which became widely available in the mid-1990s, according to Dr. Leonard Mlodinow. With the fMRI, you can see what part of the brain is active and functioning at any given time.
"Before that, psychology was a much softer science. It was based on behavioral studies and people would be put in certain situations and observed and questioned. But without the ability to look into the brain and to connect the behavior to a real physical process, it was very hard to really know what was going on. In the last 10, 15, 20 years we've made tremendous progress in understanding the unconscious," he explained.
In his book, Mlodinow pulls back the curtain that hides the darkest corners of our minds. What’s in your unconscious? How can we access its secrets and use them to better understand ourselves?
Mlodinow said he had a realization about the unconscious as he delved into neuroscience. "We also misperceive our inner life or emotional life, our social perception, if we don't understand our unconscious, because it has a huge effect on all of our thinking," he said.
To Mlodinow, there is almost no such thing as a purely conscious, objective decision. "We have unconscious modules in parts of our brain that are inaccessible to our conscious thought, explicitly inaccessible, that are feeding into all of our conscious though processes," he said.
Mlodinow gave an example of this: The amount of energy your muscles spend if you're running a race, compared to lazing on a couch, goes up by a factor of 100 percent. The energy difference your brain expends concentrating on a tough chess game versus sitting on a couch mindlessly is only about one percent.
"Your brain is always at work, even if you think you're not at work," he added.
The unconscious has its purpose – to help deal with the external, physical world quickly and smoothly, with intuition.
"The difference with humans is that humans are the most social of any species," Mlodinow continued. "So we have a component of our unconscious mind that is analogous to the point that does, for instance, visual processing. It helps you have a clear picture of the world. It's a social unconscious that helps us have a social picture of the world, and it feeds in data we're not aware that we're taking in."
Say you're a swing voter, on the fence about which candidate to choose for in an upcoming election. Mlodinow said that people try to decide based on various data, but they probably don't realize they also factor in peoples' faces unconsciously, looking for whether or not the candidate looks confident, for example.
"In humans, it's actually a very important way that we judge not just peoples' competence, but peoples' character, their emotions, you look at their body language ... it's nonverbal communication," he said.
Though Mlodinow said he recognizes the hazards of unconscious categorizing turning into bias and stereotyping, he said humans can't live without the function.
"It's important to realize that categorization is crucial to our surviving and getting along in the world. If you're getting on a bus, you don't analyze the person behind the wheel to understand that it's a bus driver, you just understand automatically based on the category," he said.
Listen to author Leonard Mlodinow read an excerpt from his book:
GUEST
Leonard Mlodinow, author of “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” (Pantheon Books). He teaches at Caltech.