Ix-Nay on the Entinels-say!
Damn Fenris, it is really good to have you back. Took the words right off of my keyboard.
Of course, I’m referring to post #238.
First off, Mtgman, please explain how a test which everyone must take to gain benefits would have any sort of equal protection violation going on. I simply don’t see it.
That’s true, but I’d propose that part of the training would consist of monitoring, and that this monitoring could help catch the dangerous ones in advance. The supervillain types would get their own training anyhow–motivated evil mutants have, without access to the training, had no difficulty harnessing their powers for evil already. The unmotivated ones, sure, would learn to use their powers under this program; but the fact that they’d probably be obvious delinquents (IME, lots of folks are obvious delinquents, and I suspect mutants would be no exception) would make their regular contact with trained professionals fairly useful to law enforcement.
THat’s true, but that’s also true for all sorts of stuff: kids with learning disabilities, kids with behavioral issues, kids with amputated legs, kids with perfect pitch (if they join orchestra), and the kid you mentioned above with the physique perfect for martial arts. There’s nothing special about being a mutant in this regard. The only special aspect of being a mutant is that mutants are socially ostracized, and this proposal would help to diminish that effect.
At any rate, parents are responsible for their kids at that age, and that is (I think) the most dangerous age for a mutant with a strong power, inasmuch as it’s the age at which the power is most likely to act uncontrolled and hurt the mutant or her family or neighbors. I see no special problem with giving the decisionmaking power to the child’s guardian.
This is actually a fairly strong argument, but I don’t know the circumstances of the world well enough to judge it. Is Xavier’s school sufficient for the US’s needs for mutant kids? Does he reliably catch all kids who have mutations and ensure that their families know? Are his resources stretched?
If not, then I concede the point: this program has very little to offer to mutants, and you’re probably right that few would take advantage of its benefits; given that, it would have few benefits above and beyond those offered by the private sector.
But I suspect that, as the number of mutants grows, they’ll outstrip the resources that Xavier offers. And his model isn’t exactly one that’s easy to replicate, inasmuch as it depends on his very specific talent (the ability to identify all mutants). Unless we’re set for the foreseeable future, I say we ought to start planning ahead.
To sum up:
- No equal protection violation, since everyone needs to take the test, and there’s a legitimate government interest in having everyone take the test.
- The perils of training the next generation of villains is minimized, since the supervillains will probably acquire their own private training anyway, and the mookish villains will probably be more easily identified if they undergo a monitored, government-sponsored program.
- The only aspect of mutancy that separates it from other disabilities or abilities is the social disdain toward it, and this program helps to eliminate that. As such, a parent’s decision to obtain training for a mutant kid is comparable to a parent’s decision to obtain orchestra lessons for a musically-brilliant kid.
- If Professor X can truly handle all mutant training for the foreseeable future, this proposal is probably impractical. If not, though, we need to have some sort of plan to offer to those kids he can’t help.
Professor X would, however, be more effec
Daniel
But you’re proposing training everyone. Right now, only a small percentage of mutant kids are found by evil mutants, usually accidentally. Your proposal would be like laying out a buffet for evil mutants AND you’re upping the number of trained mutants for them to choose from. And given that at least one known evil mutant is a shape shifter, 5 gets you 10 that your super-secret list of mutants is compromised 24 hours after going active.
And there’s also the problem of what happens when you actually DO train that many mutants. Say you have someone who has very, very, VERY low level telekenisis–they can, with LOTS of effort, affect a dice roll. Untrained, they might not ever learn that they have this power. Trained, they can use it to be a near perfect assassin: pinch someone’s coronary artery shut for 3 minutes and POOF. Instant heart-attack. You’ve used the 'gifted pianist" analogy elsewhere, but the worst case scenario with training a gifted piano player is that it increases the odds that we’ll get another Liberace. Worst case with training (say) 10,000 mutants is that we’ll have a greater number of trained assassins running around loose than we would otherwise.
It’s not that they’re unmotivated, it’s that they’re evil (to use the comic/movie term). And you’re proposing teaching them how to be more effective and increasing the pool of people trained in these talents. To use an analogy, let’s pretend that 10,000 kids (I just guessed at the number: I don’t know how many mutants there are in that universe) across the country have guns hidden (unbeknownst to the kids) sewn into the lining of their backpacks. The guns are loaded, and the safeties in this magical model of gun are on, but on rare occasion it will break and allow the gun to go off accidentally.
Right now, a significant portion of kids don’t discover that they have guns at all. They go through life and while the occasional weird thing happens (the metal detector at the school goes off when they’re around or they notice their backpack is heavier) they simply don’t realize that they’ve got a loaded gun hidden on them and live a normal, happy life.
Of the kids who discover their guns, a huge percent do so by accident but without incident. They bend over, and the gun falls out, or they bump into someone else who’s found their gun and passes on the information by word of mouth, or they’re idly tugging on a loose thread on their backpack and they discover the gun.
And there’s the remaining few, a very small number, for whom the gun goes off accidentally (remember Rogue at the beginning of movie 1) causing property damage or worse, shooting someone.
Once they’ve discovered their guns, one group finds their guns are either water pistols or very, very small calibre BB guns–they’re too wimpy to be used for defense, but they’ll get the kid in a world of trouble if they’re discovered with them. And there’s an evil organizatin (led by Magneto) looking to exploit them (even ‘useless’ mutants can be used as living shields or cannon fodder).
Another group realizes that they have the gun, and just tuck it back into the backpack and ignore it, hoping no-one will notice.
And a very, very few actually take out their guns and use them either to police their schools OR to attack their schools.
Under your proposal, every single one of those kids would become a trained marksman. The ones with water-pistols would learn to use that water pistol as effectively as possible (fill it with pepper-spray or ink or acid, for example). The ones with better guns would learn to use those to their fullest capacity as well.
In addition, they’d all be known to the general public as someone who’s packing a loaded gun. Goodbye to any chance to socialize normally. Would you want a kid who’s carrying a pistol to go to on a date with your daughter? Especially if you didn’t know if it’s a water pistol or an Uzi? Remember your list only says “Joe Smith: Mutant”. It doesn’t say “Joe Smith-Mutant who can make his toenails grow 10% faster than normal”. The “Put 'em on a list and isolate them” method just turned every single one of these kids into a outcast teenager with a loaded gun and training on how to use it.
I disagree: we know from the Jean Grey’s testimony before congress (in the first movie) that humans resent mutants: your proposal would increase that resentment. In addition, I can hear the cries from the Heritage Foundation now: “You’re taking OUR tax-dollars and using it for midnight basketball games for mutants?!” I can also hear the howls of outrage from the Teacher’s Unions: since the only people qualified to teach mutants are other mutants: who but a teleporter can explain what mental muscle to flex to teleport.
I do, when the choice will affect the rest of the child’s life, irrevocably. We don’t permit parents to give their kid an obscene word for a name. We also shouldn’t allow a parent to put a child on a list that will stigmatize them for life.
I don’t know the circumstances for the movie world either. Things are different in the comcs, but they’re also self contradictory in many cases. Sticking with the movie as best I can though.
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“Sufficient for mutant kids”? I dunno. We don’t have enough data on it. It’s certainly big enough to handle a couple of hundred kids without too much strain. And since many mutants seem to have ‘useless’ powers, that should be enough for the moment. Not every mutant needs training, only those who’s powers are a potential danger to themselves or others.
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“reliably catch all kids”? The movie cerebro seems extremely potent. I’d say yes, with the caveat that he doesn’t bother with kids who are below a certain power level. Our hypothetical toe-nail growing mutant from above, for example.
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“do their families know”? If we allow ourselves to be informed by the comic (and Professor X is very similar in both versions), then the answer is “sometimes.” He’s been know to intervene if the parents pose a serious risk to the child (including tampering with the parent’s mind) to protect the child–in the comics, some parents have actually tried to kill their mutant children for the ‘sin’ of being born a mutant. Giving him a quasi-governmental status would remove that need. Usually though, yes the parents know.
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“Resources stretched?” They never actually seem to be, but realistically and in the movies, probably. Perhaps we could funnel some black-budget dollars to him. A few hundred million off the books tax dollars (along with some surplus air-force equiptment) would certainly be sufficient and it would never be noticed…
But as we saw in movie 2 (I think), anyY telepathic mutant with sufficient training (there’s the key though–only Jean Gray is anywhere close to that level of training and she’s not there yet) has the potential to use Cerebro.
Everyone takes the test but only mutants are put on the list…and they’re on it for something they are, not something they did? Imagine a test that everyone took that identified people with sickle cell anemia somehow. And all it did was put them on a list. Still think it there’s not “equal protection” issues? How 'bout a test that could somehow relibly check to see if someone’s gay…especially since anti-gay prejudice is very, VERY analogous to anti-mutant prejudice in the movie and comics…
Addressed above. You’re increasing the population of trained mutants, thus you’re increasing the number of potential mutant terrorists, plus you’re creating a whole group of kids who will never be able to join society or socialize normally during the critical teen years. A group of trained super-powered disturbed loners isn’t a happy recipe for human-mutant relations.
This is liberal social-engineering at it’s worst. We’re willing to sacrifice the kid’s privacy for the rest of his life by bribing his parents with a free eduacation for the kid–and if the kid doesn’t like it, tough–it’s for ‘tolerance’ after all. And there’s not a wide-spread social phenomena of kids getting bashed for using leg-braces. They do get attacked just for being mutants.*
Given that we haven’t even established that there is a problem yet, this sounds like a “We’ve got to do SOMETHING! ANYTHING!” statement. Look, in the course of two movies, we’ve seen 1 (one) kid who’s power manifested accidentally and harmed another person (Rogue). I don’t think this one incident justifies big government solutions and midnight basketball programs for disadvantaged mutants. I submit you’ve bought into Senator Kelly’s scare-tactics. *
Fenris, Mutant Privacy Rights Advocate
*Tongue totally in cheek again. I’m really, really having fun with this discussion! 
Can’t get too specific because I don’t have a real wording of the statute yet, but here’s a first stab.
Equal protection: Because what you do with the results affects only one class of people. Their names go on the registry and everyone else’s go in the trash. The only people kept on the list are the mutants. They are subject to being singled out as a class based on immutable characteristics they have no control over. The application of the test may be fair, but the use of the results is not. According to the US Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans "the Constitution ‘neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.’ "
Plus if you’re making it a requisite for public education, which is a right in the US, then you open yourself up to those who refuse to take the medical test on privacy grounds. The state can order you to vaccinate because of the overwhelmingly positive nature of vaccination on society. Still, even vaccination has limits. Religious objections and in some states even concientious objectors can recieve exemptions from vaccination requirements and still attend public school. If the state is going to deny access to public education(every citizens right) on basis of refusal to undergo a medical procedure(given that medical decisions are the inherant right of individuals, especially refusing treatment they don’t want) then the state has to show a damn good reason for mandating this procedure. Even vaccination is subject to a slew of exceptions ranging from religious(in 48 states) to “moral or other objections”(18 states IIRC).
Enjoy,
Steven
No, no, no! The sequence is this:
- Everyone who wants government benefits must take the test. Once you’ve taken the test, your name goes on the list of those who have taken the test. Results of the test are not recorded.
- When you take the test, you’re given sealed results. The machines that do the testing record the result unattached to your name (and independent programmers audit the machines to verify that there’s no hanky-panky going on in them), but merely in your region–statewide, perhaps, the machine will add another tally to the list of mutants, without any indication of when that talley was made or more specifically where.
- WHen you get results, IF the results are positive, then you have the option of revealing them to the government. IF you choose to reveal your positive result to the government, THEN:
3a) Your name is recorded, alongside whatever powers you eventually learn that you have; and
3b) You become eligible for government assistance in training and controlling this power.
At no point is anyone coerced into getting their name on a Mutant list.
Fenris, that’s an excellent post; I don’t have time to respond to it now, but I’ll try to respond later today.
Daniel
I refuse to take the test on grounds of personal autonomy and control over which medical procedures I have done to my person. Now you say I can’t get access to the public education which is my due as a citizen. I file a suit based on having this right denied. Show that merely taking the test, with no results being accessible to the state at this point, is a substantial enough boon to the government to require a medical procedure before being able to recieve the rights of a citizen. This would actually be a due process challenge in this stage of the process.
I challenge the revocation of access to entitlements on basis of refusing a medical procedure. This challenge has been routinely defeated by vaccination statutes, but your list(with no guaranteed information on positive/negative results) is much less valuable than an immunized population.
Enjoy,
Steven
Vaccinations - required before a child can enter school. (As you acknowledge below). These is an excellent analogy. Now, you say that the benefit to the government is not great – but the legislature says it is. The legislature advances rational arguments in support of its view. If you’re advancing a procedural due process claim, the state has to show that it has provided a particular process, and said process is sufficient to meet the needs of the state, balanced against the rights of the individual, with sufficient deference given to the legislature’s weighting of the priorities.
If you’re arguing a substantive due process claim, you’re breaking new ground. (No great shock there). Upon what authority do you rely for the proposition that refusing a miniammly-invasive medical procedure is sufficient to trigger your substantive due process rights?
I challenge the revocation of access to entitlements on basis of refusing a medical procedure. This challenge has been routinely defeated by vaccination statutes, but your list(with no guaranteed information on positive/negative results) is much less valuable than an immunized population.
Enjoy,
Steven
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Okay, Fenris. Some of your post is very persuasive after I’ve thought about it for awhile, and other parts make me say, “Hey…WAITaminute!” I’ll deal with the latter parts first :).
First. I note that, in showing how deadly it could be to train mutants, you compare it to the worst-case scenario with training musical prodigies. Hmmm…I offered several different analogies, and I think you chose yours very carefully. How about comparing it to the worst-case scenario with training mathematical prodigies? Or science prodigies, or legal prodigies? Worst-case scenario here, we end up with a team of people who invent deadly weaponry and use lawyers to take over the country and start horrific wars–and that’s worse than your worst-case scenario with the mutant-training. Yet we continue to train math whizzes, science nerds, and little lawyers.
Why? For several reasons:
- As a society, we’ve decided it’s good for our individual members to have the opportunity to explore their potential to the fullest, and we want to help them do that. The analogy with mutants holds.
- As a society, we’ve decided that it’s good for the rest of us for individuals to be performing at their highest level: more scientists (we’ve decided) create useful products than create deadly wars, and so on balance we all benefit from their trianing. The analogy with mutants probably holds, inasmuch as for most powers I know of mutants having, there’s a socially beneficial use of that power.
- As a society, we’ve decided that in public education we can include values lessons, as a way of inculcating the powerful with a sense of social obligation. (How successful we are at that is, of course, debatable; but as a society, we’ve decided that it’s worth trying). The analogy with mutants holds.
So let’s guard it. Has Magneto ever obtained the list of students for Professor X’s school? If not, see below.
I am certain the Heritage Foundation will howl. I have a longstanding tradition of not giving a shit. I am not so certain the Teacher’s Unions will howl: I’ve never heard them complaining that English majors aren’t allowed to teach Calculus, for example, and this would be a similar situation.
I think that’s assuming the question.
One more “Hey, waitaminute!”: if I understand your position, it’s this:
- Requiring every kid to take a simple scan test, whose results are unknown to anyone except the kid and his parents, is an unseemly violation of the kid’s right to privacy. Bad!
- Besides which, there’s this telepath with a giant mindreading device that can look inside everyone’s heads without their permission. He uses the device already to scan every child without their permission or even knowledge so he can know exactly who is and who isn’t a mutant. When he finds mutants, he tries to spirit them away; and if their parents aren’t raising them right in his opinion, he’ll kidnap the children and alter the parents’ memory (what does he do, trick them into thinking their child died? Destroy all their memories of the child?) and hides them out in his compound where he trains them in his theory. He defends this operation with superscience weaponry and a crack team of soldiers who are fanatically loyal to him. He’s completely unanswerable to any democratic means. Good!
Way I see it, if you’re going to oppose the test on privacy grounds, you REALLY need to oppose Professor X on similar grounds.
Sure, you might say, “Yeah, but Professor X is a good guy!” Unfortunately, that’s not how democracy works: that’s called a benevolent dictatorship. For all we know, Professor X is fantastically evil, and is just altering our memories to make us think he’s a good guy. I say we open the process up, subject it to democratic processes. If he’s the public face of the good mutants, it’s no wonder that so many people fear and mistrust mutants!
And that brings us to the part of your post that is convincing. Despite the last three paragraphs, I do think Professor X is doing good work, and the last thing I want is to put an end to the single most positive organization helping out mutants.
So I wholeheartedly endorse your idea of funneling money to his school in order to increase its capacity, with a few modifications:
- No Black Ops Cash. Make this an open, transparent process: let everyone know that he’s a model of mutant training and should be supported as such.
- No More Kidnappings or Other Vigilante Work. If he finds out that a kid’s life or welfare is in danger, he needs to give his information to the police. At the very least, if he must act immediately to save the child’s life, he needs to tell law enforcement what he’s done. Nobody in a democracy may be above the law.
- His scan may replace the required test. Since he’s already doing it, it’d save a lot of money if he’d agree to make his aggregate data available to researchers.
- He should cooperate fully with law-enforcement when a crime has been committed. If there’s evidence that a mutant may be involved, his school records for that case need to be subject to subpoena, just like any other school’s records. (I anticipate that the school will employ a team of crack lawyers to prevent abuse of this authority).
My modified proposal looks like this:
- Professor X and the X-men go mainstream. From now on, they comply with, and are subject to, all the laws of their nation.
- A new department (Department of Mutant Affairs, maybe?) is founded, with Professor X as its head (unless he doesn’t want the job, in which case another qualified candidate is chosen).
- Professor X continues scanning everyone for the mutant gene, and contacts those who have it with the government’s offer of training. If they refuse, he leaves them be and destroys records of their possession of the gene. If he suspects current or potential child abuse, he notifies the authorities, including authorities trained in handling this specific type of situation.
- Those who accept his author are welcomed into one of the academies he founds throughout the country, founded on the principles of his current school.
- Records from these academies will not be public, but will be available to law enforcement when the law requires.
What do folks think?
Daniel
I challenge the weighting of the priorities. The process, at the stage it is being challenged at, does not record test results. Thus the list of who has taken the test is indistinguishable from school enrollment records. There is already a process in place to gather this information. The state gains no benefit from the proposed process over and above what it already has access to but imposes a burden of submitting to a medical procedure on citizens attempting to access the educational entitlements they are due. I don’t care how much deference is given to the legislature’s weighting of the issues. The added benefit of this list is ZERO because it already exists in the form of enrollment records. No matter how lightly they weigh the citizens right of personal autonomy in medical decisions, it HAS to outweigh the big fat goose egg in the other column.
If “sufficient” deference is given to the legislature to set the priorities of a citizens liberty against the legislature’s view of the needs of the state the entirely predictable result is onerous processes with virtually no tangible benefits. This certainly satisifes the “process” part of “due process” but the “due” part is sorely lacking. The creation of a list which is indistinguishable from the enrollment lists of public schools is insufficient basis for requiring citizens to choose between personal autonomy over medical decisions and their educational entitlements.
Enjoy,
Steven
It should also be noted that the vaccination analogy breaks down almost immediately. The voluntary nature of the second half of the database(the results part) hugely decreases the utility of the data. Vaccinations are an either/or. If you get the vaccinations, society benefits. If you take the mutant detection test, society may or may not benefit depending on your whim. Thus vaccinations are a guaranteed benefit for society and the mutant registration process is not. A hit-or-miss process should carry far less weight when stacked against individual liberty, especially in the medical autonomy arena. The benefits of vaccination are overwhelming. The benefits of a wishy-washy list of mutants, stacked on top of the dubious value of said list to begin with, are far less tangible.
Enjoy,
Steven
The benefit to the state at that stage is the ability to offer specialized benefits to people who need them, and to do that, it must identify those people. That’s NOT a goose-egg - that’s a tangible benefit. While no list is kept, the result of the test is delivered to the person and his parents, and they may choose to avail themselves of the benefits if the test is positive.
How can the state offer those benefits if they don’t know the results? They certainly can’t initiate an offer, they don’t know who to make the offer to. The most they could do is have a department which has an open door policy for those who are willing to reveal their test results. The department could not be proactive in offering those benefits to “those who need them” because at this stage the department has no information on who tested positive or not.
Enjoy,
Steven
To bring the situation back into the real world, why not have mandatory tests for things like Sickle Cell Anemia, or Tay Sachs, or any number of genetic diseases? This would allow the state to extend benefits to those who need them and who may not discover they even had them without the nanny state checking up on them. If this is a benefit worth the bureaucracy and dollars to implement it then let’s do it.
In the real world these kinds of screenings for diseases/disorders may be offered by the state, but not mandated. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to make screenings for things like epilepsy or Tay Sachs, or perhaps Muscular Dystrophy, mandatory and how it fared. Hmm, there may be some caselaw out there on the government trying to mandate a test to help/protect people from the effects of their biology. May be interesting to do some searches on Lexis-Nexis if I get some time.
Enjoy,
Steven
But…but…if I’d chosen one of them, I wouldn’t have gotten to use the “Liberace” line! 
Seriously though, fair point and I’ll concede this one: training mutants isn’t inherently worse/more dangerous than training science nerds. (Hell, think of all the comic-book mad scientist types that would probably abound in this sort of world).
However, remember that mutations are random: you can’t assume that most mutations will be survival traits…or even useful. Thus for every one mutant with, say, the ability to read minds, or turn to living steel or run faster than sound, you have (say) a thousand mutants who can make their toenails grow fast or change the color of evergreen trees or who can detect cumin being cooked in a one mile radius. Many won’t even notice they have mutations, they’re so minor. Short of being told, how would one ever notice that they have the ability to teleport a 3 cubic micron volume of air 1/16th of an inch to the left…but only when they sneeze?
Mutants are currently subect to terrible prejudice and they’re still a tiny minority. It doesn’t make sense A) spend the time and energy to hunt down and train all these people with weird genentic quirks and B) it puts them at risk, not only from human prejudice and fear, but from unethical mutant terrorists who would have no qualms about forcing a low-talent mutant to act as a suicide bomber in order to increase the fear that humans have of mutants.
Actually, he knows where the school is–but it’s protected by bunches of trained mutants who can defend it. But there are a very limited number of mutants who CAN stand up to someone with Magneto’s power level–there’s certainly not enough to cover hundreds of schools.
Aaargh! Argument…weakening. Must put on…lead-lined…anti-logic… blinders! Actually, I’ll address the mindreading/privacy thing from Cerebro below, and fair enough on the rest of it.
No. Can’t agree here. It is imperative that the very most powerful mutants have a safe, hidden place where they can be *privately trained. Having it public (even if only to congress) allows too many people to know the locaion.
If I’m a mutant teen with a “death-touch” power, and all I want to do is learn to turn it off so I can rejoin society, it is imperative that I have a place where I can do so anonyomously. It will not help me rejoin society to have the newsmedia posting headlines like “DEATH-TOUCH LAD GETS JOB IN SUPERMARKET!” In this case, the public’s right to know is trumped by the individual’s right to privacy and right to have 'life, liberty and the persuit of happiness". (Besides, if we make it less attractive for good mutants to protect us, less of them will. Given that Magneto has nearly wiped out every human on Earth twice in the last four years or so and was only stopped by the (purely volunteer) efforts of the X-Men, I oppose anything that will make their job harder or make them less inclined to help us in the future.
I’ll give you this one, if you’ll grant him some sort of quasi-legal status so he can’t be sued every time he intervenes–something like the protection that policemen have.
Aggregate data? Like “There are 234,483 mutants in the United States?” Sure. Speaking for him, he’ll agree to that. (Note that his scan in anonymous too: he sees a big globe of the world with points of light of varying brightnesses (the brightness corresponds with the power-level). If the “point” is bright enough, he can focus in on it, pinpoint the location and send his X-Men to check on the status of the mutant. Otherwise, all he knows is that there’s someone with the X-gene in that general location. My privacy issues are fine with this.)
Absolutely agree with this one.
I’ll add two more.
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I want Xavier’s (or Dr. Jean Grey’s) help with reverse-engineering Magneto’s anti-telepath helmet. Privacy rights go both ways and I’d certainly like to be able shield areas (and individuals) from any chance of telepathic intrusion by evil mutants and the sooner we can reverse engineer the helmet, the sooner we can mass-produce it. This is especially important given point #2 (below)
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We likely have a ‘mutant gap’ with the Godless Red Chinese and other totalitarian nations. They (probably) don’t share our concerns about the niceties of free will and due process and privacy and I’ve heard dark rumours that they’re working on ‘weaponizing’ their mutants (the low-grade telekenitic mutant trained as an undetectable assassin I mentioned in the previous post, for example). I strongly feel that the CIA & FBI be allowed to recruit on campus once a year (they’d be flown in, blindfolded). With Professor X and other telepaths there’s no possible chance of coersion of the students and it’s a win-win situation: those mutants who wished to serve their country in through government service would be made aware of those opportunities, the country would begin to close the ‘mutant gap’ and there would certainly be no stigma attached to students who chose not to participate.
Any objections to either point?
“Mainstream” is a deal-breaker for me if by “mainstream” you mean “public”. The school (or schools) MUST remain a secret and the X-Men must be allowed to retain their secret identities. Were I a mutant who chose to protect humans from less ethical fellow mutants as purely a volunteer, I wouldn’t want to have to do it 24/7. The only thing that will protect me from that is my ‘secret identity’.
In addition, the “comply with and subect to” laws thing: When Magneto was going to lobotomize every human on earth, the X-Men probably broke a number of FAA regulations, seriously bent the concept of citizen’s arrest, ignored “equal force” rules and who-knows-how many other regulations–there need to be laws designed to protect these heroes when they selflessly defend us. I don’t want to give them total carte blanche, but I think the “comply with and subject to” part needs examination. I agree in principle but we need to re-look at the laws, possibly with the intent of wholesale rewriting. Perhaps if we consider them as soldiers in wartime rather than volunteer police and use “soldier in wartime” rules? This point needs discussion.
Also, there are currently no laws on the books against telepathic spying or using x-ray vision to peek under clothes (to quote Niven: “Hey, if millions of women choose to shamelessly parade around not lined in lead-foil…”) or any of a ton of other mutant->human abuses that the law simply never anticipated. I’d like to see a committee made up of 33% mutants 33%Cato Institute lawyers 33% ACLU lawyers (the Cato guys 'cause I don’t trust the ACLU on the gun control/power control aspect and the ACLU because they’ll worry about individual rights that the the Cato guys will overlook) to come up with a codified set of laws that Congress (or if this is a state issue that states) can adopt or use as a framework for their own laws. To give an example of a worst-case scenario if we don’t address the question of the law and mutants issue, consider how the law is just now barely starting to catch up to computer crimes issues (Hell, we still, as a nation, haven’t decided if making a copy of information is legal or not–and computer piracy has been around for at least 35 years) and the stakes with mutants are much, MUCH higher than Bon Jovi getting .03% less on his royalties 'cause of music downloading.
I wouldn’t want Professor X as the head. It’s not required that the Bureau of Indian Affairs have a native American as it’s head. The head of departments are chosen at the pleasure of the president. Perhaps the head of the department has a chief advisor/liason appointed by the mutant community?
Everyone? Or just those with active genes? Or just those with a high enough power level that they can benefit from training. Again, no system is completely secure and identifying our “grows toenails fast” mutant as a mutant will only endanger him, subject him to prejudice AND paint a big ol’ target on his back.
Agree to both.
(Great post, btw!)
I hope the mods will forgive me for resurrecting this, but I believe that I have found the perfect summary of the argument.
That’s all.
Daniel