Between The Scylla Of Creation Science And The Charybdis Of Militant Rationalism I Steer A Perilous Course

All my Kent Hovind posts  up till now have been on forbes.com, but I decided that this one needs to be here.  Kent Hovind is one of the leading lights in the arguably oxymoronic field of "creation science".  His wikipedia entry  is quite extensive and well sourced.  There is something a little painful about it, but we will get to that.  I began covering him in October 2012 in the wake of a Tax Court decision concerning his wife.

Creation Science Is Funny

In that initial post I adopted a stance that has continued.  Essentially, I find Young Earth Creationism amusing or more like hilarious.  I am not alone in this

In - Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Charles Pierce relates his visit to The Creation Museum which he sees as a "richly appointed monument to complete barking idiocy".  In Charles Pierce's view "admitting that you don't believe in evolution is pretty much tantamount to admitting that you plan to eradicate the national debt by spinning straw into gold".  Among the museum displays he noted a smaller dinosaur "which was wearing a saddle. It was an English saddle, hornless and battered." He goes on to observe:

"Any dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would have worn a sturdy western saddle. This, obviously, was very much a show dinosaur."

I included in my post a Fred Flinstone and Dino video clip to demonstrate we all knew that dinosaurs and humans coexisted and a rendition of the Dubliners "Unicorn" speculating that perhaps the dinosaurs were also off playing silly games at ark boarding time.

I think the humor may be part of what has gotten me in trouble in certain circles, but that is probably not the worst of it.

Kent's Followers Think I Am Hard On Him

It is understandable that people who are committed to Kent Hovind's cause are somewhat upset at my coverage.  I have recently received a challenge from the podcasters at God's Property Radio to have a recorded discussion with Kent

 God’s Property Radio is also issuing a counter-challenge to Peter J. Reilly of Forbes to talk to Hovind himself and give Kent a chance to talk to him man to man. GPR will either come record the conversation or have someone else come meet Mr. Reilly with recording gear to record the discussion and then upload it on the spot un-edited to be fair. In fact we will even put money in an account so Peter J. Reilly does not have to pay for the Call and will attache his phone number to the account so that he does not have any excuses not to talk to Hovind himself. Surely someone who has the guts to slam someone in Articles Daily has the guts to let Kent explain himself to him in a even more respectful manner

Preparations are in the work, I'll keep you informed.

Kent's Critics Think I Love Him

People who support Hovind are not the only ones that have a low opinion of me as it turns out.  It reminds me a bit of period when I was on the governing board of a small Unitarian Universalist Congregation.  Somehow or other the Congregation had become a hotbed of what I considered content free conflict.  People would always be talking about a "them" and it was never entirely clear who "they" were.  I inserted myself into a couple of these conflicts trying to bring peace.  I remember the music director who was something of a lightning rod.  She once told me that my problem was that I was an Aquarian and wanted everybody to get along.  I have this talent, it seems, for getting people of incredibly divergent views to agree on one thing.  Namely that I am a jerk.

So if you go to the talk section of the Kent Hovind Wikipedia entry you will find:

I see that a blog post from Peter Reilly has been added. I think it should be removed because it is not a WP:RS and hurts the quality of the wiki article.
1) Peter Reilly is a Forbes blog "contributor," not to be confused with staff. That is, he is part of the Forbes blogging network, which is not the same as being published in theForbes magazine. Thus, it is not a WP:RS.
2) The blog is an op-ed, sympathetic to Hovind. Reilly even manages to connect Wesley Snipes' case to Hovind. Reilly wants Hovind released and was "saddened" to hear that the government is "piling on" with new charges.
3) The blog's actual text is merely recycled block quotes from wikisource, facebook and court rulings that are openly available with a google search anyway. To put it another way, the facts aren't original and were reported elsewhere
4) His "tax" blog also promotes creationism. Rarely would a RS or newspaper article about criminal charges have a section titled "Some Thoughts On Young Earth Creationism," where tells us about "taking my sister home from Christmas Midnight Mass."

(Here is the post that was being referred to.)

There is more like that some of which I highlighted in this post.

Mainly It Comes From Being A Tax Geek

Here is the thing.  Kent Hovind has probably not ever met a whacky conspiracy theory that he has not fallen in love with.  His main focus is "creation science", but he also embraced whacky tax theories, which is pretty clearly why he is in prison, not because the government is persecuting him for his creation science views.  He has been in for nearly a decade, but has been recently indicted for mail fraud because of filings he made to frustrate the government's effort to sell property that was seized from him.

Many years ago I started trolling through original source material looking for items of interest to my firm's client base.  I would alert my partners and others and sometimes do summaries.  That was really the basis for my tax blog.  What happened though is I started reading more and more things that would never have any practical implications for anybody that could ever conceivably become one of my clients. I just found it interesting.

Ultimately I ended up saying that my criteria for writing about tax material are practical utility, humor and matter for reflection.  The third indicates that tax issues will often shed light on larger issues, such as the First Amendment.  The other thing I noted is that a very large amount of tax litigation has nothing to do with determining the correct tax.  It is about collecting it from people who don't want to pay, even though there is no longer any question as to the correct amount of tax.  A smaller body of material is people appealing their convictions and sentences for tax crimes.

One of the things that I noted is that the behavior of people in the collections cases is often very similar to the behavior of people in the criminal cases.  I became puzzled as to what makes some cases go criminal and others not.  I began following Jack Townsend's Federal Tax Crimes.  Finally I dug into his textbook and got an answer of sorts

Given the limited resources through the criminal tax enforcement system, CES must coordinate and prioritize. CES does that by prosecuting relatively few cases each year (in recent years from 1100 to 1800 per year), but focusing on the strongest cases where conviction is virtually assured and by picking targets with a sufficiently high profile (for whatever reason) that the conviction might be publicized and encourage compliance by persons who become aware of the convictions.

We don't want people getting away with murder.  Thus you can find an article like this one that discusses clearance rates for homicide which apparently run around 80%.  Tax crimes are different.  Only a tiny number of those that are known about are even considered for prosecution.  The point of the whole criminal tax enterprise is to encourage compliance, not punish every instance of willful noncompliance.  So my inference is that if you defy the tax law and brag about it you are more likely to be prosecuted than if you just engage in low grade non-compliance - like skimming cash receipts.  I may well be that the defiant attitude is what got Kent into the CID cross hairs.  Regardless that is water well under the bridge.

Kent Hovind's sentence is almost up, but he is being prosecuted again, this time for mail fraud.  It comes of his filing a lien to interfere with the sale of property that was seized from him.  Essentially, I think it is a mistake on the part of the government to prosecute him.  The reason is that I don't think the prosecution will encourage compliance.  Instead it gives Kent a persecution narrative to stir up people who would content themselves with crackpot scientific theories and move them into crackpot tax theories, which I think are more harmful.

The Militantly Rational

My expression of these views has upset a group of people that I would call the militantly rational.  The militantly rational are probably very disturbed that despite the views of what some would call the reality based community, over 40% of Americans believe that God created human beings pretty much as they are now less than 10,000 years ago.  My own view is that we should look for what is behind that rather common belief.  I've noted that believers in scriptual inerrancy are not the only ones who think "something went wrong" five to ten thousand years ago.  That's when radical feminists date patriarchy.  The people at Deep Green Resistance think that heading down the path of civilization was a big mistake as we are heading to killing ourselves as we kill the planet. By the way the point of the discussion with my sister was to drive home the point that Catholics don't have a problem with evolution.  The recent remarks by Pope Francis on the subject are nothing new.

I Didn't Learn My Lesson The First Time

At any rate I've had it worse.  Whenever I google myself, which is way way too often, high on the list is this gem which you can read or not.  Anyway it was the result of my getting involved in what is probably the most vitriolic dispute on the internet.  There is a fairly small group of radical feminists who are incensed about male to female transgendered persons going into woman only spaces.  Many of the latter are incensed about their exclusion.  It is close to impossible to write about the dispute in a neutral manner, which is what I am attempting to do at the moment.  I started following this dispute a few years ago and never thought I would have a reason to write about it.

Then I got the opportunity to interview Presidential candidate Jill Stein. Of course I mainly discussed tax issues, but I reviewed the Green Party platform and noticed a couple of other things I found interesting like a plank on displaying the Confederate Flag.  Poor Jill Stein, she kept saying that the campaign was only focused on a few issues, but she did her best anyway.

I noted that the Green Party showed some definite radical feminist influence.  It also took a strong stand on transgender rights.  There was no mention of any tension between the two issues. So I asked Dr. Stein about it.  She pretty well came down on the transgender side of the question, so I decided that I should try to get a comment from someone with a different viewpoint. So, frankly with some trepidation, I contacted Cathy Brennan who is kind of the lightning rod for transgender activist concern with what they refer to as TERFs (Trans exclusionary radical feminists).  I've gotten a few good comments from her since on tax cases which touched on issues that radical feminists tend to take stands on.

Well.  In some circles being willing to consider the possibility that Cathy Brennan is anything other than the spawn of Satan is a journalistic sin of the first magnitude.  About half a year later I interviewed her about the difficulties that radical feminists were having with a venue for their conference.  You can go look at the comments section of the post.  I find it still too painful.  Among the reactions was that annoying open letter that still haunts my search results.  It is from a "mens rights acvitist".  At least in reaction to the London conference MRAs seemed to have been lining up with transgender activists, possibly on the enemy of my enemy is my friend principle.  I actually think that the rest of us have something to learn from all three groups, but that's a piece for another day.

Sometime after that forbes contributors were instructed to "swim in our own lanes", so I have not had any call to get into that conflict since.  If I could only figure out how to get that damn MRA letter to page 2 of my search results, I could probably put it behind me.

So I am prepared to step into a crossfire again.  I'm looking forward to my talk with Kent Hovind and am ready for the brickbrats from both sides of the aisle.

Why Can't We All Get Along

Whenever I think about disputes that are really passionate, there is one thing that I never forget.  If something really awful were to happen in my community there would be an outpouring of support from people across the country.  Many of them would have views that I consider preposterous and dangerous.  Regardless, we are still in it together.

Note
That title really should have an irony alert.  It is way too grandiose, but when it occurred to me I could not resist it.