AS257: Andrew Torrez on Christian Mingle

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 257, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, I hope you can listen while you're playing Pokemon Go. Seems to be what all the kids are doing. Ah, no, see, I can't even say that. Seems what all of the everybody, the humans, all the non-me, are doing that. So, I don't even have anything against it, it's just I don't need a thing to do. I guess my thing is a hundred podcasts, so I don't really, but anyway. Hopefully you can avoid getting hit by a car while you are seeking out the latest and greatest PokeMan, or whatever that is. Okay, so, here's the thing. I had already told you guys that I had Andrew Torrez on for an incredibly lengthy but amazing Second Amendment breakdown, like the history, how Scalia basically screwed us over, all that stuff.

0:01:23 Thomas: I was trying to figure out what to do because first world podcasting problems, when you have a guy like Andrew where we record for so long, 155 minutes or something, and every bit of it is golden, what do you do? Well, I released 30 minutes of it early to patrons, but that was not the Second Amendment. That was about the Christian Mingle case and about the David Smalley interaction. That part was, like I said, 30 minutes and then the rest was over two hours. So here's what I'm doing. This episode, so I've decided I'm not going to go three episodes of Andrew, but I'm kind of cheating. I'm going to two and a half because I'm going to do the half hour that was about Smalley and Christian Mingle. That'll be today. And then I have some time left over to do some commentary on some stuff.

0:02:11 Thomas: So it's going to be kind of half and half there. And then the next two episodes will be the monster Andrew Torrez' Second Amendment. I think that's the best way to do it. And as always, patrons over at patreon.com/atheist will get everything right away. So as you're hearing this, the patrons can already listen to the full file with Andrew Torrez. And it's a good thing because they've already heard 30 minutes of today's episode that they got last week, so that's how it goes. Patrons get stuff early, everyone else has to wait, but that's no hard feelings, that's just something I can do extra for my wonderful patrons who I appreciate so much. So with that said, let's go to a really interesting 30 minutes with Andrew Torrez on the Christian Mingle thing, and you'll remember last week I commented that I was pretty critical of how Smalley handled that, and I talked to Andrew Torrez about it, and here it is. Thank you for watching.

0:03:15 Thomas: I am so happy to have back for, who knows, the fourth, fiftieth, seventieth, I don't even know. Doesn't matter, it's not enough times. Andrew Torrez, how you doing?

0:03:25 Andrew: I'm great, Thomas. How are you?

0:03:27 Thomas: Well, I think people would be a little disappointed if we didn't at least summarize, maybe address the elephant in the room by the name of David Smalley.

0:03:39 Thomas: We so this, this is, we're recording this just so people know, the day after I released that episode, which will be about a week ago for people hearing this. But so not a lot of time to react or to, who knows if if Smalley will respond or anything. I doubt he will. But yeah, that was a very curious incident. And while I consider you a friend, at least on the Internet, as far far as internet friends go, we haven't met and everything. I really think I would have done the exact same episode had it just been any lawyer who I didn't know who had commented and then Smalley had lost it at. So I just want to let people know, to the best of my knowledge, I was doing what I would've done otherwise. But it was particularly, I think, egregious to me because I know that you're such a nice guy.

0:04:29 Thomas: And seriously, Eli and I were texting each other like, Like, I don't believe it. Like, Andrew's the nicest guy. How could this happen?

0:04:38 Andrew: Well, look, let me be particularly fair to David Smalley here. I understand if I were making the argument of, hey, I'm a lawyer and you're not, and so therefore my opinion is better than yours on philosophical aspects of law. Yeah, I get that. But I really try pretty hard not to say, say that, you know? And I didn't think I was saying that in this case. And I suppose for background, which I should say, I mean, we're talking about the christianmingle.com settlement and David Smalley put up a blog post. And, I mean, there are a lot of problems with the blog post. There are a lot of philosophical arguments in it, but the whole thing in my mind is predicated on kind of a fundamental misconception as to what's happened here, right? And what's happened I mean you you know you explained this in the commentary episode uh that dropped today

0:04:44 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Right.

0:05:36 Thomas: Did I do okay? Did I miss anything? Did I explain it okay? I cited you as a source. I used you as the source. So, this would be an interesting trap I laid if you were like, now you are terrible. Who's giving you your info? Fire that person.

0:05:39 Andrew: Again I mean if right right yeah Yeah yeah I I think you did fine um And and you know I think you quoted this that I said to David Smalley, like, I've made no secret of my political opinions on on your show, right? I would openly describe myself as a left-leaning Democrat. I'm sort of too conservative for my very liberal friends and too liberal for my conservative friends, but I'm definitely left of center, right, and we're going to get into that today when we talk about some political stuff, but I mean, I honestly think you can pull up, I mean call a dozen lawyers and just ask them, you know, if a party engages in a settlement, does that have any precedential effect on the merits of the underlying lawsuit that the settlement was about? And, you know, they'll say, no, of course not, right?

0:05:53 Thomas: Okay, good.

0:06:19 Thomas: Yeah. Right,

0:06:42 Andrew: I mean, yeah,

0:06:43 Thomas: Right. Right, this wasn't a question of, just so people know who aren't lawyers, and what I'm understanding from reading your lengthy and really good description of everything, it's not, this isn't really an opinion thing. Like, he's wrong on a, there could be elements of law where it's opinion. I mean, obviously, like he referenced, you could have a Supreme Court decision, most of them are kind of split down the middle, but this isn't really that. It's like a, it's just a procedural kind of fact that any lawyer pretty much would just know.

0:07:10 Andrew: And I care particularly about this because this is exactly the kind of thing that I do every day, right. I represent, I'm am a commercial litigator. I represent small businesses, large businesses, individuals in lawsuits over business dealings with other businesses and individuals. And so, I mean, there's kind of a unique wrinkle here that I think maybe was the source of the confusion, and that is ordinarily, with the exception of what I'm going to talk about in a minute, If you sue me in a business capacity and you present your allegations, and then over the course of that lawsuit, you and I decide to settle, we can settle on any terms that we want,

0:07:20 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:34 Thomas: It literally couldn't be more down your alley. Yeah, anything.

0:08:13 Andrew: Pretty much. Yeah. And in fact, I mean, I've had cases, right? I had a commercial settlement involving a business that hired somebody to go run their Midwest operations. And he went out and he started, I don't want to get too much of the details, but my client was alleging that he failed to do all of his duties, that he did things that were disloyal to the company. And he started a competing business.

0:08:44 Thomas: Uh-huh.

0:08:45 Andrew: Typical commercial litigation. And our settlement was held up for three months. I'm not kidding. It was held up three months based on their request that my client apologize. And my client said, no, I'm apologizing. We had totally agreed on the financial terms. We were ready to settle. We were ready to move. And they wanted the settlement to include an apology. And my client said, no, I'm not going to do that. And now, you know, if he had, and eventually we settled without that. But I like to think so. But, I mean, the point is that you can put any condition that you want into a settlement, even if it's

0:09:06 Thomas: Wow.

0:09:24 Thomas: It's because you're a damn good lawyer. Right. Yeah that didn't become precedent that there was an apology during it. Yeah exactly.

0:09:36 Andrew: Totally unrelated to the the lawsuit. I had another case that, again, settled. And let me say parenthetically, I mean, 99% of commercial cases settle, right? There are just, there are too many lawsuits and not enough courtrooms.

0:09:51 Thomas: Right. And there and there's those, you know, sort of predatory groups that just look for these lawsuits, or like patent trolls. I mean, there's people where they just sue everybody and then people say, ah, to hell with it, I don't want to pay for all the trouble, so we'll just settle, you know, and that'll be cheaper than paying for a bunch of Andrew Torrez's times billable hours.

0:10:09 Andrew: Yeah, no. If you get, I would say, if you get that kind of a patent troll calls you up, I do defend people in those situations. So yeah, give me a call. And those, you know, know, the law winds up creating these sort of weird for lawsuits. I say this as somebody who, like, I think that in general, sort of the conservative backlash over plaintiffs lawyers is overblown, even though I'm principally a defense lawyer. I'm sort of politically sympathetically sympathetic.

0:10:20 Thomas: Oh. Cool. Mm-hmm.

0:10:46 Thomas: Can you explain that a little more? I'm not totally sure I know what you're talking about. There's a backlash over what? Oh.

0:10:47 Andrew: Yeah, sure. I mean, if you think about like kind of the Democratic-Republican divide on this, Republicans tend to be in favor of laws that restrict punitive damages. They rail about frivolous lawsuits. They want to restrict certain industries from being able to be sued at all. I mean, you know, there's kind of a general sense that, you know, plaintiffs lawsuits have gotten out of hand and I would say from from my perspective that there are there are a couple of areas where that's true.

So for example, asbestos plaintiffs lawsuits really skyrocketed when, in the late 1970s, there was there were medical articles that were published that said you can have asbestosis as a disease and not manifest any symptoms and so and you know so I had a kind of figure insurance litigation involving kind of the history of asbestos litigation. And And what happened was, you look at the projection of cases in the early 1970s, the projection of asbestos cases that are mesothelioma cases that involve cancer are exactly what the doctors predicted in 1975, 1985, 1990, you know, for the next 30 years. The model tracks as good as any prediction in the 1970s about the 2000s could possibly predict. And that's because in order to have mesothelioma, you have cancer, right? You have a diagnosis that all medical practitioners will agree on.

0:11:04 Thomas: Right, right. Oh.

0:11:53 Thomas: They

0:12:43 Andrew: Asbestosis can be asymptomatic. Um, and so the original practice of diagnosing asbestosis was undertaken by these people called Bee readers who drove around, I'm not kidding, they drove around in vans to work sites and would say, hey, did you used to work here? Uh, they've got asbestos, come on into the van, we'll take a little scan.

0:13:04 Thomas: Like read your palm. And they're like, oh, your lifelines, your asbestos lines are a little longer than they should be.

0:13:08 Andrew: Almost, right? I mean, there is the, I'm paraphrasing from the literature, but there is something like a 58% correlation between B reader. In other words, when you do a double blind study and ask a B reader to look at another B reader's document and say, is this asbestosis? Is this not not asbestosis. There's a 58% correlation, I think. And when you consider that 50% is what you would expect by chance, right? It's just... And so a result of that, the number of asbestos cases was orders of magnitude higher than anybody predicted. And then a whole bunch of laws got passed to restrict that. And that's why if you see asbestos plaintiffs lawyers advertise on TV now, and if you watch TV at all, you see them, they will say, you can look for this, they will say if you have mesothelioma, give us a call. And the reason is because most states have passed laws that restrict your right to sue, necessarily prohibiting, but basically basically restricting it in such a way that makes it very, very difficult to sue unless you have mesothelioma, unless you have a cancer.

0:13:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:26 Andrew: And the reason is, I should have supplied this, this is the most important part. In asbestosis cases, because it's asymptomatic, the way lots of asbestos plaintiffs lawyers got rich was by packaging together 50,000 asbestoses cases from the local steel plant, uh, you bring it, you get a class settlement, everybody in the class gets 500 bucks, uh, and the lawyer gets 40, gets 40 percent of the total settlement as a contingency. Um, and so boy, all of that is a huge diversion version.

0:14:50 Thomas: And the lawyers get a lot of money. Right. I was going to say, this is a rabbit hole. I do. It is interesting, but only because we have so much more interesting stuff to get to. But long story short, what?

0:15:03 Andrew: Sorry. Long story short on that is, by and large, plaintiffs and defendants can settle lawsuits. But there's a wrinkle when you have a class action lawsuit. And the reason that that you have a wrinkle is because a class action lawsuit is, you probably get these notices in the mail all the time, where the typical class action lawsuit is an antitrust suit that says you bought a product. Somebody then brought a lawsuit in your name against all people who bought the product. And then you're part of a settlement and you have the right to opt out of the settlement. But if you take the settlement, you get like a coupon or that's worth 35 cents off of your next purchase at Best Buy or something like that.

0:15:41 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. I just realized on the list of show, you know, this has been a lot. Recurring theme with your TV shows that you haven't seen that you should see, but you actually shouldn't because you just should be lawyering. But have you seen Better Call Saul?

0:16:02 Andrew: Uh-huh. Uh-uh. No.

0:16:10 Thomas: Okay. I think you might like it, but I'd also be curious to hear from a legal perspective about that show. So you haven't watched Breaking Bad either?

0:16:17 Andrew: And that's on my next list. I have actually, I've watched Game of Thrones.

0:16:20 Thomas: Okay, do that first. Okay.

0:16:25 Andrew: So I, right.

0:16:25 Thomas: So you are human, like there is some partake

0:16:28 Andrew: Yeah. I occasionally am aware of some pop cultural elements.

0:16:31 Thomas: In things that humans think are normal. Okay.

0:16:34 Andrew: And no, Breaking Bad is on my next list and then I, if it's good, I will.

0:16:34 Thomas: Well, better call Saul. Breaking Bad isn't, well, here's my opinion, it's incredibly good, and Better Call Saul is like as good. It's really, I'm so surprised I didn't watch it because I thought, oh, this is some stupid knockoff show that is gonna be true, and then my brother told me like, no, it's actually good, and I watched it, I love it, and it involves, because he's a lawyer, you know, and it evolves a bunch of this class action stuff. So it might be kind of funny to see what you think about it someday, but it's way down on your list.

0:16:59 Andrew: Oh, cool. I will put it on the list. So anyway, I mean, the punchline is, I'm sorry?

0:17:06 Thomas: So the Christian Mingle thing wasn't class action though, right? The Christian Mingle thing wasn't class action, though, was it? Oh, it was.

0:17:12 Andrew: No, it was a class action. Yes. Okay. And that's the only reason that I think there's a misunderstanding here. Because if it had just been two gay men brought a lawsuit in 2013 against Christian Mingle saying, hey you discriminate on the basis of gender and on the basis of sexual orientation, then they could have settled under any reason and nobody would have said or known anything about it. It would have just been announced internally as a public policy that Christian Mingle was going to change how they published their website. But because it was a class action.

0:17:14 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:17:53 Andrew: There's a federal rule of civil procedure, it's 23E, and there's state equivalents. And what they do is they require the court, when you want to settle a class action lawsuit, both parties have to come to the court and enter the terms of the settlement. And the court looks at it because the plaintiff's lawyers are representing theoretically a class of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, right? But those people aren't there. So if you didn't have the court approve the settlement, right, you could have all kinds of shenanigans, right? Like a company, you could bring a meritorious antitrust lawsuit against a company that would cost him a billion dollars. And then the company could go to the lawyer and say, Hey, why don't we settle this? We'll pay all your legal fees, we'll give everybody who's the class representatives, in this case, are two people, 100 grand, and then you agree to dismiss all the the claims against us with prejudice forever, right? And that would screw the million people who were theoretically in the class,

0:18:19 Thomas: So

0:18:53 Andrew: Right, it would you would compromise their claims.

0:18:55 Thomas: That's why we've heard about it, because of this rule.

0:18:57 Andrew: That's why we heard about it. That's Why, if you click on and I just wrote a blog post that hopefully explains all of these things.

0:19:03 Thomas: Oh yeah, patorrez, torrez.com. Check out the blog section.

0:19:11 Andrew: Just click on the blog, click on Understanding the christianmingle.com settlement, I link to the actual settlement that's signed by the magistrate judge in this case. And if you look at it, you'll see, you know, they put forward the terms of the reason that it has to be signed by the magistrate judge is not, doesn't have anything to do with the underlying lawsuit. It just has to do the class action fairness principles that that I explained, right? So in other words, the only thing that judge was looking for is, hey, are you trying to screw over the absent class members? Are you fair to them in compromising their claims? And one of the really simple ways that you can tell is the case itself was assigned to a different judge, right, the case was assigned to Judge Jane L. Johnson on the Superior Court of California. But the person, the judge who approved the settlement was Magistrate Judge Ann Jones.

0:19:48 Thomas: Right.

0:20:12 Thomas: See, this is why we need experts. I would have had no idea about all the, it sounds, it's, so what it sounds to me like is you know more about this than your average person. Law, look, law, it does, not everything's like this.

0:20:25 Andrew: And, well, yeah, I mean, look, again, I want to be humble, but I mean right, I mean, that's what I do.

0:20:30 Thomas: Yeah. Law is one of these things. Like it just, and same With like tax accounting, I took, I was an accountant. I, that's what my my degree is in, just, it's really fucking hard. Like there are certain things that are really complicated that unless you want to do a ton of research and even then you may be misled on, you know, you need an expert.

0:20:34 Andrew: And so it's, yeah.

0:20:54 Andrew: And and so, I I mean, what I tried to do was just sort of bifurcate out the points that have to do philosophically with, you know, what should our equal protection laws look like from where I thought David was making a huge mistake, which was to say, this is, you know, the sky is falling and this is going to lead to a slippery slope and all kinds of terrible things are going to happen if we allow this view to go forward. Because, I mean, hopefully it's clear, I mean we've been down kind of a meandering path to get here. But a settlement doesn't have any precedential value on what happens going forward.

0:21:36 Thomas: Right.

0:21:36 Andrew: And so saying this creates a precedent, if you read David's original blog post, he says this creates a precedent and everybody is going to make all these frivolous lawsuits and it's just going to be awful and I can't do this in my business. And I like that, I mean, it's just not true factually.

0:21:53 Thomas: Right, well that's what I knew, I knew it could not be true that this would mean that you would have to make religious content on your net, like I just knew knew that wasn't true. And then that's, so that's before I even, you know, saw that you were involved in it at all. That's what I was going to comment on, but I'm really glad that you gave me far more insight than I ever would have gotten on my own. So, but, oh,

0:22:12 Andrew: Yeah. So and again, I mean let me let me try and so I start off trying to be fair to David. Let me make one more point where I think I want to try and be as fair to to David as possible. And that is, if you wanted to have a debate about whether California's Civil Rights Act, which is section 51 of the California Code, it's called the UNRRA Act, whether that goes too far, that's a perfectly valid debate to have. And I'm happy to start off, I think it's, I don't side with the people who say that it goes too far. But I want to give them their best argument.

0:22:55 Andrew: In in my blog post and sort of repeatedly raised. Under the UNRRA Act, it's illegal for bars in California, you probably know this, to have ladies night. And the reason is, because the UNRRA Act says if you're a business that is open to the public, then you can't discriminate on the basis of these protected classes, which includes sex, and you can offer a service to one member of a class that you don't offer to people who are not in the class.

0:23:03 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Uh-huh. Right.

0:23:20 Andrew: And on on face, right, the bar says, hey, Thomas, your beer is going to cost $7. Your wife's beer is going to be, you know, $3.50. That is offering a different service to you than they do to your wife. And if you want it, and so the California Supreme Court very clearly said, yep, that's prohibited by the UNRRAC. And that decision is, I think that's a 1975 decision. I mean, It's long-standing, you could, you know, the legislature could have amended the act to exclude ladies' nights if they wanted to, but apparently you guys are fine with it out there.

0:23:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:03 Thomas: I, yeah. And I, I could be, you know, I could be getting this wrong, but pretty sure like sometimes establishments still do it, but then if asked, then they just give the same price to the men. It's like an informal kind of thing.

0:24:14 Andrew: Right, yeah, with all, yeah. And that's, you know, with all laws, the question is, there's a question between what's on the books versus how is this enforced, right? Right. And so, you know, it was probably a shock.

0:24:25 Thomas: Oh, here's what I want to ask you, though. Sorry to interrupt, but just to make sure that we someday get back on track. One thing I forgot to mention that I had asked you in a Facebook message that I think is interesting and is certainly something people might be interested in. I asked you whether the comparison into Grindr and like gay dating apps, what the implications on that were. And you gave me an answer. Why don't you tell the listeners what that was?

0:24:31 Andrew: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-huh. Yeah. And I think the answer, boy, we're a half an hour in and I haven't given my standard disclaimer of, you know, this is not a legal relationship and I'm not giving legal advice upon which you should rely.

0:25:01 Thomas: Yeah, sure.

0:25:09 Andrew: I'm My personal opinion, very little knowledge of how Grindr operates, is that I think it would be subject to the terms of the UNRRAC. In other words, I think if a straight person logged onto Grindr and said, "Hey, I want a a men-seeking-women option," that their failure to provide that option and their failure to provide the same service to a man that they would provide to a woman on their site, it's kind of the exact opposite of the Christian Mingle, I think that could run afoul of the UNRRAC.

0:25:17 Thomas: Sure. Right.

0:25:49 Thomas: So it's just a question of if someone bothers to sue them or yeah.

0:25:50 Andrew: And, yeah, and one of the things that I point out, I mean, that helps sort of buttress this this understanding is Christian Mingle allows non-Christians to register for its website. And they did that because they recognized that they had to. The UNRRA Act specifically protects sexual orientation. Federal equal protection statutes don't. So maybe they were thinking they could get away with it in other states. Only about 20 states have.

0:26:23 Thomas: Actually, yeah, I was going to ask that. How does that work, let's say, the Grindr thing? Let's say the app was built in some other state that's not California. Does that affect it, or is it just because users in California can use it, could they bring a suit that says, you know, this is illegal in our state? How does that work?

0:26:28 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, it's the latter. So what happens is, if you are a business, it works for an individual as well, but it's a little more complicated. If you're a business and you solicit customers and do business in California, then you've availed yourself, you've intentionally availed herself of the California laws for purposes of personal jurisdiction. And so you can be sued in California. And then the question becomes whether that state law applies and for transactions that take place predominantly in California, which is to say, you know, if it's an internet transaction and the customer is in California and the service provider is on the internet, right?

Right? I mean, it doesn't really matter where your servers are, then most courts have held you were doing business in the state of California. And so that's how that happens. Certainly one option is you can have somebody enter their state in a website, right? If you really think that this is particularly onerous, you could calibrate your website to particular states and a really good example of that is right there are online wine and alcohol retailers yeah and so like the laws in California are pretty good the laws in Pennsylvania are terrible the laws and Maryland are mostly terrible

0:27:39 Thomas: Okay.

0:27:57 Thomas: You, like, change it to work differently. Yeah. Ugh. I've heard about this. The alcohol laws, it's amazing how many ridiculous ones there still are all across America. I've been, you know, the beneficiary of being in California as that goes. But I actually, my friend Tracy Moody just posted a picture that they finally can sell alcohol in like a Safeway, like a grocery store in, where is she, Tennessee. And it's the weirdest thing. Like, I just take that for granted. We can just have alcohol in every Safeway and every, you Know, grocery store that there is. But, oh,

0:28:12 Andrew: No no alcohol stores no alcohol sales in grocery stores in Maryland so

0:28:47 Thomas: That really? That is so stupid. Like, why do we have all these?

0:28:47 Andrew: Yep and And the county I used to live in, Montgomery County in Maryland, has state-owned stores for alcohol, for anything that's not beer and wine. So, I mean, that is really, you know, the most draconian. Yeah, yeah, that's bizarre.

0:28:52 Thomas: Huh.

0:29:05 Thomas: State owned. That is really weird. Well, but all this all this legal opinion aside, because, you know, Smalley is a professional debater and you're not right. So that that none of this applies because you're the amateur. Oh,

0:29:25 Andrew: Are. Since I've bent over backwards to kind of be fair, I suppose I could add that not only was I a multiple nationals qualifying high school debater, but I coached a high school debate for Catonsville High School for over a decade. And in fact, if there are high school debating who did Lincoln-Douglas debate, I know there are some out there because those people tend to be. You may remember, if those people debated it from 1998 to 2005, they'll know Catonsville High School.

0:29:51 Thomas: I bet.

0:30:03 Andrew: We were a nationally recognized program. I will not say we were one of the five or ten best schools in Lincoln-Douglas debate, but we routinely qualified kids to all of the national championships and to the Tournament of Champions and won major out rounds. I miss

0:30:03 Thomas: Oh wow.

0:30:24 Thomas: See, this is why why you're, you're a nice guy. You wouldn't, you didn't even say this to David. You weren't even going to mention it, but I made him. Guys, I made them do it. He told me it in confidence and I said, no, you have to tell people that. I'm sorry. That's too funny. So you, yeah,

0:30:38 Andrew: That. I miss those days. My wife coached the speech program and we would go to tournaments pretty much every weekend and take along my infant son and when he was a toddler, Blair. But once my son hit about three years of age, it was like, okay, now, now he's got his own activities. And I'm sorry that I'm going to give this up. But I still I'm still in touch with a lot of my former debaters, it will not surprise you that many of them go on to become lawyers.

0:30:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:11 Thomas: Be successful. Yeah.

0:31:12 Andrew: And they're, and I always used to, you know, sort of try and, and help everyone. So I, I get a lot of calls and emails from debaters from other schools, too, who say, oh, I remember, you know, now, you know I'm a lawyer, I'm stuck at X firm, and you know what do you think I should do about you know X, Y, or Z.

0:31:33 Thomas: You, I bet you've got a lot of connections now from, as a result of that. That is pretty cool.

0:31:39 Andrew: So it's great. I would say if anybody there is a parent of a high school, you to be a high schooler, or you know is a high-schooler themselves, the reason I stayed behind to coach at the public school that I graduated from is because I think doing debate is, it was by far the most rewarding thing I did in high school. I would recommend everybody do it. Anyway, move on.

0:32:05 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Well, I think that was necessary and I enjoyed it.

0:32:28 Thomas: Alright, that's a great first little teaser of Andrew Torrez on that issue, and then, like I said, next two episodes. They will be long, worth your money for sure, and they will be on the Second Amendment. So much to learn there, absolutely fascinating. All right, well, I'm glad I have a little bit of time here to do some commentary on the recent just explosions of racial tension and just shoot just every really since the last time I talked to you guys, just the world went crazy. And it was pretty, pretty, uh, pretty difficult. I wanna count myself among those of you who are pretty outraged at the difference in how cops treat black men who exercise their open carry rules, or even their concealed carry rights, is what I meant to say, and white men.

0:33:18 Thomas: I mean, I would say that's the most damning meme, really, to come out of this, is the difference in the pictures of cops addressing a white guy with a gun who's got a license to carry it, and, of course, this cop who just shot the guy a lot. I do need to say, just in the interest of, you being skeptical and fair, that the video didn't show the actual shooting of Philando Castile. And so I guess you, I mean, I could imagine a set of circumstances in which it was a justified shooting. I could imagine that. But that's always the issue. I I think it was interesting too that in the days in between these shootings, I can't even keep straight which day was what now, actually somewhat near where I live, cops shot a white guy and killed him.

0:34:03 Thomas: And I don't even think he was armed. He was under a truck. It's kind of weird. Happened in Fresno. I only say that because I really think there is a problem. There's a problem of cops just killing people. There's a problem also of racism. And the numbers that I've seen are that yes, more white people are killed by cops than black people. And conservatives like to cite that statistic.

But then when you control for population, it's uh it's disproportionate it's three times more per capita I guess of black people killed by cops than white people so there's certainly a huge problem so what I started to say was it's really difficult in looking at these cases as as a skeptical person because there's all these sources saying different things, there's, you know, you can always, if you want to, you can give an officer reasonable doubt. You can say, wow, he must have reached for his gun if you want to. He could do that every time, I mean, most times, unless there's like a really compelling easy video. Uh, and the other shooting you can say, well, he must've been reaching for his gun while they were wrestling him if you want to.

You cannot give them any reasonable doubt, you can can say, no way, they killed a black man, they gunned down a black woman, they murdered her. You really can't, and that's a lot of what happened. That's the two sides in a nutshell. I don't want to say, I don′t really want to just say anything other than just honestly express a difficulty as a skeptical person. Because my gut reaction to the, not Philando Castile, but the other shooting...

0:35:38 Thomas: The Alton Sterling shooting was, when I watched the video, I was honestly horrified. I was, well, I had a really hard time seeing that, to be honest. I don't normally watch anything like that. I don't watch, you know, any videos where I know someone's gonna die in them. I just, I can't do it, I don't like it. I watched that one because it seemed to me, from what I had seen, it just seemed like outright almost murder.

I mean, technically it's not murder, really, you know, because there was a struggle, it might be, I guess, negligence or manslaughter, whatever you would call it legally, I'm not sure. But anyway, I just thought it was that, and then I got a little pushback on Twitter from some people, um, saying, like, well, I think you're jumping the gun on this, you, you know, he was had a gun on him, blah blah, and that, and so I had to watch the video. I saw it. I still don't get it, but I ended up deleting my post on Twitter in which I just called it like a straight up murder, because it's just every time I think I know what's happening or I think I know the situation.

There's facts that cause me to reconsider, like the fact that, you know, a homeless man called the cops because Alton Sterling had threatened him with a gun, and, you know, someone will break down the video and tell me, ah, he was reaching for the gun on his right hand. To me, I still don't get how he couldn't have been totally helpless in that situation with two cops on him pinning his arms.

I don't understand how that could have happened, but anyway, it caused me enough of a pause to where I deleted that post. And I go through these things, and I just don't, it's difficult as someone, I want to be a skeptical person, I want to go where the weight of evidence goes, I just don't know what to do in this situation.

0:37:22 Thomas: I really don't know what do. I could, I think the easy thing to do- In order to blend in with my crowd, which is liberal atheists, the easy thing to do is to just say it was the cop's fault, definitely, you know, and it might be, I just, I'm an uncertain person, I never, I am rarely very certain about these things, and this is a, literally a black and white issue that each side demands certainty from you on, and I just... I'm not trying to criticize anyone right now, I''m not trying to say either way. I'm trying to say I don't know what to do. I don't know how to handle these situations. So I guess look somewhere else for a breakdown on this. I really don't. It's impossible. Here's what I can tell you.

0:38:07 Thomas: When black men are being killed by police three times more per capita than white people, you've got a problem. You've got problem. Now it doesn't, the hard thing is, it doesn' t mean that each of these individual shootings will be unjustified, I mean it's, you look at these people, you look their records, Alton Sterling was like a sex offender, I think he was a rapist, he was, I think he had charges of selling guns, I mean, just all kinds of stuff. And you go, well, shoot. I mean am I right about this one? Was the cop an asshole? Was he a murderer in this one. I don't know. Well, okay. Let's look at this other one. Well, the cop said he reached for his gun when he told him not to. I mean do I trust that? I guess, I mean I could say no.

0:38:54 Thomas: But it's just I'm not an expert. I wasn't there. I don't know what to say. But I can say that there is a problem. So I get the Black Lives Matter. Matter. I'm fully in support of the protesting and we need to figure out a way to fix this problem of cops killing, well, cops killing anyone really, but specifically killing black men to a disproportionate degree. We need to solve it. It doesn't mean that every shooting we're seeing is necessarily unjustified. Sometimes there are justified police shootings. I don't, I'm being agnostic about that. But nevertheless it can't be argued that we don't have a problem. We do have a problem. So those are my limited thoughts on that. I'm very sorry to be wishy-washy on this. I just I just can't do it, I'm sorry, I can't just declare that I know the truth of what happened.

0:39:44 Thomas: I'm really sorry. I don't know. Here's what I won't do, and what I criticized Peter Boghossian for doing. Boghossian was on a hiatus from Twitter for, I think, a month, a little less than a month. But he said, I'll be off social media. He finally comes back to tweet, and Here's what he tweets after these two shootings that were publicized and the Dallas shooting. He says, he comes, mind you, out of hiatus for this, he says, Prediction, the number of black on black homicides will substantially increase over the next six months. And that's it, that's all he says. I can't figure out the point of this tweet. I can't figure out what Pete Boghossian wants to accomplish here.

0:40:34 Thomas: Is it so hard for him to predict that people will be highly outraged and offended by this tweet? That's sort of his thing. He seems to want to tweet things that can easily be read as callous and then get mad at people for reacting that way. And I don't get it. What is the end game with this? I'm going to try the most charitable view I can even, I can try. So, the most charitable view is that he's just, he's just, he, apropos of nothing except he wants to make this prediction somehow, I don't know what it, what I can do about it, like, but anyway, I'll get to that in a second. He wants to predict that as a result of these shootings, police will not patrol certain areas because they're worried about, um, you know, being accused of racism in what they're doing, or maybe they're worrying about an interaction with a black person going wrong.

0:41:29 Thomas: And then, I guess, I don't know. And then therefore, there will be black on black crime. Seriously, I can't even figure out the most charitable translation of this. I can't. Even if that, even if that is the the right interpretation, that he's just saying, oh, this is bad too, this sucks, here's one further thing that sucks, is I don't know, I can't distinguish, and your average observer of Peter Boghossian isn't going to be able to distinguish the difference between him saying black on black homicides, blah blah blah, and Fox News, who every time there's a killing of a black person by police, every time, there is, they go, oh, well, look at Chicago, look at Chicago, black on black crime, look a Chicago. I don't, I can't.

0:42:14 Thomas: Look, Pete, I would love to know the difference between you and Fox News. I would, I would. I honestly don't. I'm not even trying to be uncharitable. Like, I really don't know what he's trying to do with these tweets. I think what's so frustrating about it is it's so predictable. He knows what's happening. And that's why it's like there are people, there's a certain movement of people. And I don't know what you call it, there is a certain kind of social media person right now. They, I can't just say, wow, my heart's with the black community right now, tough. Which is something I tweeted just because I didn't know it was going on. I don't, I, I'm not an expert. I don't know, but still, I can still say, wow, look at what's happening to the black community right now.

0:43:02 Thomas: People are being killed. People are, are, you know, there's protests, there're riots, there's all this stuff. You can just one tweet, just let people know what, that you at least have, you know, they have your sympathy, it's not that hard, it's, does it cost a lot to tweet, is it what is a thousand bucks a tweet, it's not hard, it's not hard, just one tweet of sympathies with the black community right now, this, we definitely have a problem in our society of racism and and these these shootings that never seem to end, you know, again, after after having said, like, I don't, I'm not willing to say, say, 100% who was at fault in what shooting. Like, I just don't want to say that. However, we have a problem. The numbers show it. We know we have problem.

0:43:49 Thomas: Odds are one of those shootings probably was unjustified. Maybe both, maybe neither, but we still have a problem. Because he doesn't feel like lifting his fingers a few times to make clear that he at least understands there's an issue, and is sympathetic, I don't know if he's a Fox News dude. I mean, he could be, the direction he's been going lately, I don't know if he's somebody who just wants to not focus on the problem of racism in our society at all, and just say, well, black people kill black people all the time, so why don't you worry about that? Because those people are everywhere, those people are on Fox News, that is a person I'm not making that person up, and I don't know if that's what he's doing. So I tweeted a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but not really, saying prediction, you know, Peter will tweet something callous and unhelpful at a community that's hurting and then will blame people for their reaction to it.

0:44:47 Thomas: And sure enough, next tweet by Peter Boghossian, I want to show my moral community I'm a good person and on their team so I'll interpret tweets uncharitably and accuse tweeters of racism, racism. And granted, if people were just calling him racist, like you're a racist, which I didn't see, but if people weren't, sure. I mean, they probably shouldn't do that. We don't know, you know, like it's not like I know he's being a racist or something just because he had a tweet that I personally didn't like. So yeah, people shouldn't call him a racist. But still, still, how insensitive is it to sort of be mocking people's intention to show support to the black community right now? That's my main thing. I mean, here's the thing, I get it.

0:45:33 Thomas: I'm not gonna call him a racist, I'm not gonna call names and everything. I do think his tweets are insensitive, but I think what the most annoying thing about it is it's just not that hard. It's not that hard to say, to even rephrase that tweet. I'll say, well, you know, let's say he tweeted Really awful about the shootings, I think one of the worst effects is black-on-black crime may go up as a result, or something, whatever it is, I mean, find a way to fit that into a tweet, it's not that hard to at least spend a couple words, or do a tweet first, stating, I'm with you guys, I support you guys... you know... Black lives matter." Whatever. It's not that hard. It''s like, people like Boghossian, which are really driving me nuts on Twitter right now, the attitude is, here's my responsibility.

0:46:23 Thomas: My responsibility, if I'm Peter, I get to tweet whatever I want, not trying, just kind of tweeting a fact. I can just tweet plain words that say, black on black homicides will go up. And then it's everyone else's responsibility to know that I'm not a racist and that I don't I'm not trying to, you know, defer from the problem of, racism in America. I'm just making a prediction just because of what I don't to help people avoid that or something. I don't know what that prediction even does. And then when people inevitably say, dude, why did you just tweet that with no explanation or no sympathy or no anything, he can then ridicule the idea that anyone would even want to show the black community's moral support in that case.

0:47:12 Thomas: And I just, it's just, guys, it's not that hard to just show you support a community first and talk about this stuff later. There's no, there's no reason you can't do both. That's, that's what's so frustrating about it. It's not hard. So, he's made this false dichotomy between you can't be emotional, you can react to these events in a way, you have to just look at the words that I'm tweeting in plain meaning and not extrapolate any of my intention, whatever. It's like, you could just do both. Alright, well, I'm sure I've offended both sides of everything enough now.

I'll just say, for the record, I think... I'm like 70% sure Alton Sterling was, would've been way different if that was a white person, and on Philando Castile, I'd say I'm like, 75% certain that race played a factor there too, because while maybe he made a move for his gun, we don't know, had it been a white person, who knows if he would have been treated the same. We'll say the person who shot him was Mexican. Oh, also, the girl in the car misidentified him as Asian, which I thought was just another weird detail, but anyway, he was Mexican, which adds a little wrinkle to it.

I mean, is, is our Mexicans racist in the same way that we assume white cops are? It's kind of a weird calculation you have to do. But anyway, I, that's what I'll say for the record. I, I am pretty sure it, I don't have to be 100% sure in order to say that black lives matter. Black lives definitely matter.

0:48:43 Thomas: Uh, and any, any black listener listening, I hope, you know, I ha I, you know, you have my sympathy on that. I really wish we could fix a lot of these problems in our society, and I I hope showing that Black Lives Matter and maybe using that hashtag or supporting, you know, the cause, I hope that helps. I don't know, it's so unclear these days what actually can really physically help, but hopefully that does. All right, that's enough from me. Send all your angry messages my way, atheisticallyspeaking@gmail.com if you want to email me or, you know, check me out on Facebook or Patreon, and enjoy patrons at patreon.com/atheist. Enjoy that early content of Andrew Torrez. It's a nice long one.

0:49:29 Thomas: It'll be great. And it's, oddly enough, a much more pleasant topic than what you just heard me rant about for 15 minutes. So the Second Amendment. All right. Thanks for listening, guys. And I'll talk to you soon.