It's difficult to know what to say about this:
US president Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, classified documents made available for the first time reveal.Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene. ...
It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington policymakers.
It certainly merits mulling.
The pictures of those Fallujahideen savages in Iraq evoked such an emotion that holding comment seemed prudent. (For one thing, I've the presence of mind to note that, by "savages," I mean to indicate only the specific people involved.) How we should react officially is complicated. Above all, we cannot retreat. However, we don't want to respond such that deprivations push fence-sitters and otherwise malleable Iraqis toward the scumbags.
Dan Darling offers a reasonable suggestion:
Might I suggest that Fallujah be cordoned off immediately, strict curfews imposed, and house-to-house searches instituted after 24 hour weapons amnesty, after which time anyone found to be possessing such weapons be promptly arrested. Then announce that any planned improvements or reconstruction efforts to the town will be indefinitely suspended and those resources redirected to communities whose populations are more supportive of the coalition's efforts. Offer a $2,000 reward for the perpetrators and make it quite clear to the general populace that the only thing they're going to get is food until they cough up the perpetrators.
He goes on to suggest hanging the perpetrators from the same bridge as they hung the American citizens. That, I'd say, goes a bit far. We want to present a clear difference in choices between ourselves and the return of the Ba'athists. But it might present some worthwhile symbolism to hang something there... a sign, an effigy of Saddam, or something.
Just yesterday, I had a discussion about international high-tech job outsourcing, and this finding would have been extremely helpful:
According to the Study, U.S. spending for offshore outsourcing of computer software and services is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of almost 26%, increasing from approximately $10 billion in 2003 to $31 billion in 2008. During the same period, total savings from the use of offshore resources will grow from $6.7 billion to $20.9 billion. Using offshore resources lowers costs and boosts productivity. As a result, inflation is lower, interest rates are lower, and economic activity is higher. The increased economic activity creates a wide range of new jobs, both in IT and other industries. While there are some dislocations that affect both industries and regions, the overall economy adjusts so that offshore IT outsourcing actually creates new jobs. Over 90,000 net new jobs were created in the U.S. through 2003. The number of net new jobs is projected to grow by 317,000 in 2008. The impact on U.S. jobs does vary by industry sector, with the major beneficiaries for the next five years being construction, transportation and utilities, education and health services, wholesale trade, and financial services.
I can't believe I've never seen this point made or thought to make it:
Yes, free flow of labor and capital are both important. ... But the major problem we have in the US is that there is no free flow of labor because health insurance is tied to the job. If health insurance were sheared off from employment, so many people would strike out on their own, establishing new businesses, and the economy would be rejuvenated.
I've been only temporarily employed for a few years now (not counting freelancing and odd jobs), and for a while I was a few hours per week under the minimum to gain health insurance benefits. Looking around, I discovered that there isn't really any area of life other than the workplace through which to secure it. Perhaps there's some aspect to the entire system that I haven't noticed, but I still don't understand why any large group (a Church, say) couldn't combine to negotiate health benefits for members.
At any rate, now that I'm working enough hours to gain the benefit, I can absolutely attest that it adds some unquantifiable degree of disincentive to risk leaving. (That's not to say that doing so is an immediate desire of mine, but one continually thinks about options.)
Philip Terzian reacts to coverage of the storming of Karl Rove's home, which most bloggers apparently thought too typical to note with much outrage. What's notable is that Terzian pointed his finger by means of a mainstream paper, the Providence Journal:
The Washington Post treated the incident as mildly comical, although one has to wonder what the tone would be if a crowd descended on the home of a Post editor, threatening violence and frightening his children. ...... I am tempted to apply the reliable Reagan-Bush Test. Imagine if the mob had represented not a left-wing "community improvement" coalition, but the Young Republicans, or an anti-abortion organization, or Rush Limbaugh's enthusiasts, and had surrounded the home of, say, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, or Harold Ickes, or Sen. Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.), screaming obscenities and pounding on windows, threatening violence.
Would that be treated as a light-hearted lesson in the perils of politics, or a symptom of the ugliness now rampant in public discourse?
It is precisely in coverage such as that of this incident that the media's bias-driven storyline is most evident. Rove is a bad guy in their world — not only a political operative who knows the game, but a Republican political operative who knows the game. It would be an outrage were those whom Terzian lists the subjects of the same "activism" because they're the Good Guys. Even if they're crooked or mean or what have you, their intentions are good (according to this way of thinking).
You know, it seems to me that there's an inherent admission in this discrepancy that conservatives are the mature adults. It's as if, deep down, media-style liberals know that they're acting out emotionally on unsupportable convictions. We treat children and adults with the same sort of distinction between maturity and fragility, and John Hawkins highlights how apt the analogy really is:
So you have busloads of kooks encircling Karl Rove's house, yelling, & banging on the windows. His kids are quite understandably terrified and then after a furious Rove finally meets with these lunatics, their leader Palicios is crying and trembling like she's the victim. Poor her! Karl Rove yelled at her for bringing a mob to tresspass on his property and terrify his children over some bill that probably 500 people outside of the loons who were protesting know or care about.
It's increasingly clear that those who argue for and against same-sex marriage really do agree about what its proponents are trying to do. They just say it as if it ought to lead to different conclusions.
This applies to various rhetorical offshoots of the debate, too. So, when opponents of SSM complain that proponents fling about loaded words like "bigot" to make themselves seem correct by definition, those who do so, such as Barry Deutsch, just agree and declare that they really don't mean anything hostile or unfair by it:
One area of miscommunication in the marriage equality debate is about words like "bigot" and "homophobe." Marriage equality opponents, quite understandably, don't like being called bigots and homophobes. They might genuinely have nothing against lesbians and gays; some of them have good friends who are lesbian or gay, and some of them are lesbian or gay themselves.The problem here, I think, stems from two different definitions of "bigotry." Marriage equality opponents think "bigot," in this context, means "someone who hates lesbians and gays."
Speaking for myself, that's only one possible meaning of "bigot" or "homophobe." Another meaning, which is how I tend to use those words in the context of the marriage equality debate, is "someone who favors an unequal legal status for lesbians and gays." And by that latter definition, it makes perfect sense to describe those who oppose marriage equality as homophobes and bigots. ...
If the stigma bothers them that much, they can avoid it by changing their minds and favoring equality between gays and straights.
Well, that's prima facie moronic bullshit. By "moronic," I mean "not adequately reasoned," and by "bullshit," I mean "something that is incorrect." If Deutsch wishes to cease being a bullshitting moron, he just has to admit that words have meanings and connotations that expand beyond his own personal usage. And if he sincerely wishes to debate public policy, rather than ram his preferred solution through by means of name calling, he need only acknowledge that "bigot" requires unreasoning obstinacy and "prejudice," in this context, requires blanket hostility.
Such people are free to argue according to whatever presumptional and definitional universes they wish to inhabit, but it's simple semantic truth that, by describing all people who come to a given conclusion using words that suggest motivation, they are proving themselves to be the bigots.
(via Marriage Debate Blog)
I don't believe that Andrew Sullivan has any real sense of this blog. He's surely come across its name, and mine, and he may have read a post or two over the years. Today, however, he's written something that almost seems a direct wink in my direction. What it means that this is most definitely not the case is actually a bit more saddening than the fact of my limited reach.
Toward the end of a post on March 1, I predicted that Sullivan would make the following "outrageous argument":
A lot of the initial gutsy moves required to kick off the War on Terror have already been made. Once in office, Kerry wouldn't pull back on that progress, and what we need now is a President who will refocus international cooperation toward the group effort of the more-subtle work that lays ahead
On March 19, I wondered whether he had already come close enough. Today, I'm glad that the judges never returned a ruling; Sullivan offers the "strongest argument" for Kerry:
we have already gained as much as we can for the time being with hard power and war; he won't pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he won't be able to duck a serious response to another terror attack; but he might help ease some of the hatred of the United States that this president has - undeservedly, in my view, but still undeniably - ratcheted to unseen levels.
Rationalization? I'd say so.
The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Vituperative," by Gary Bolstridge.
Among my favorite psalms:
A song of ascents. Of Solomon. Unless the LORD build the house, they labor in vain who build. Unless the LORD guard the city, in vain does the guard keep watch.
It is vain for you to rise early and put off your rest at night, To eat bread earned by hard toil-- all this God gives to his beloved in sleep.
Children too are a gift from the LORD, the fruit of the womb, a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children born in one's youth.
Blessed are they whose quivers are full. They will never be shamed contending with foes at the gate.
Michael Williams informs readers of a pair of identical bills making their way through Congress with two central themes:
Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element's or officer's acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government. ...In interpreting and applying the Constitution of the United States, a court of the United States may not rely upon any constitution, law, administrative rule, Executive order, directive, policy, judicial decision, or any other action of any foreign state or international organization or agency, other than the constitutional law and English common law.
"The Constitution Restoration Act of 2004" also includes text about impeachment. The teeth inserted by that language's inclusion mean that the legislature, if this passes, would be taking an actual stand rather than essentially petitioning its judicial betters to behave.
Perhaps it is the strength of the move, combined with potential for increased ease for subsequent measures of the same sort, that makes Michael qualify his support as "tentative" and suggest a sunset provision for the restriction. The prudence of such specifics is open to debate, but the degree to which a sunset might undermine the purpose of the step is a necessary consideration against the perceived need to insert a date for automatic cessation. The law can change according to future circumstances, and if any government branch is going to be too powerful, it's best that it be the legislature.
Subsequently, Michael makes a point that could be seen as arguing for the "permanence" of a sunsetless act:
I don't know how effective such a law would be because I'm not confident that judges' rulings are always honestly tied to the explanations they give. Judges could still rule based on these un-American factors but simply stop saying so and cloak their reasoning behind more acceptable justifications. Still, it might make their jobs more difficult.
Through such legalistic maneuvering, the judiciary could force both other branches to combine efforts to restrain it, if the courts so desire, with the executive finding it necessary to publicly declare a refusal to enforce a particular ruling. A sunset might merely delay the showdown. In contrast, perhaps the best way to avoid such a turn of events would be through various smaller measures that amount to hand-slaps (in their judiciary-facing provisions), such as the Constitution Restoration Act and the Federal Marriage Amendment.
If nothing is done, however, it just might be that the currently unthinkable judicial coup would arise quickly with the support of a global central government. Even in the initial efforts of the legislature, we see the reflection of this potential struggle. Note that both themes of the act have, essentially, to do with sovereignty: protecting officials who proclaim that belonging to God and restricting judges who wish to chip away at that of the United States of America.
"One nation under God" doesn't seem like such a superfluous verbiage to the Pledge in this context, does it?
ADDENDUM:
Just a note on a stratagem of which James Heflin, who was quoted for the WorldNetDaily report to which Michael links, is surely just an early practitioner. Writes Heflin:
The restricting of Supreme Court jurisdiction is a strange maneuver, but one which the hazy language of the relevant part of the Constitution may allow.
The first step in disregarding pieces of the Constitution that one finds disagreeable, rather than working to amend them, is to portray them as "hazy," almost accidental words that somehow slipped into the crucial founding legal document. Here's the offending sentence for the debate at hand, from Article III:
In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.
I can only presume that what makes this language hazy to Heflin is that it doesn't offer any guidance as to what those "exceptions" and "regulations" can be. The simple answer, if that is his objection, is that they can be whatever the legislature decides they can be within the limits of the rest of the Constitution. As I said, if any government branch is going to be too powerful, it's best that it be the legislature.
ADDENDUM II:
Mr. Heflin has (I think) replied in the comments section, and I realized that I was remiss in not seeking out and linking to his piece.
His first reply, here, is that "the many opinions of the legal community [he] read about that passage were anything but unified." I'm neither a legal scholar nor a journalist, but having read and written about similar matters with fair regularity, I can say that I've yet to come across legislative language that doesn't generate fundamentally conflicting opinions among the legal community. Almost invariably, those opinions happen to coincide with the preferred policy of the speaker.
In this case, Heflin suggests that "the Constitution 'Restoration' Act might well open the door for abuse of Article VI, which disallows religious tests for office." And yes, somebody, somewhere, is almost certain to put forward the proposition that proper "acknowledgement" of the Deity requires each employee to profess it. This, however, ignores the difference between acknowledging something and taking further action based on that acknowledgment. Note that the Act does not forbid the Court from hearing cases that seek relief by reason of an element's or officer's refusal of acknowledgement of God, something for which the Constitution makes specific provision.
Ultimately, though, this gets at what could be seen as the genius of our system. It admits human nature and seeks to ensure that it is channeled and checked where it presents worries for the community. In this case, as far as I know, the courts themselves will decide what constitutes "acknowledgment," tempered by the risk of impeachment. If Congress wishes to broaden the word, it will either have to pass additional language or impeach judges who overstep its desired boundary. Both of these actions, not being immediately procedural, will take place in public view, where the representatives are accountable.
Patrick Sweeney notes a couple of articles, about thwarted terror attacks, that suggest two points. Patrick notes one:
The media wing of the Democratic party will bury these stories as it reminds people that the other side in the war on terror has not surrendered.The terrorists will not always be caught before they launch an attack. We are still vulnerable.
Somewhat counterintuitively, the second point is that instances of prevention indicate success. There are more than enough examples of similar (relatively) small-scale victories for the press and opinion leaders to tell a wholly different story than the one with which they are bombarding the people of the West. (That story, by the way, is also known as "the truth.")
The joint realities suggested by the preempted attacks are not, actually, counterintuitive at all; the requirement to fight is inseparable from the ability to win. It ought to be universally troubling that so many among the cultural and informational elite are willing to diminish each of these so as to diminish the other. And of course, whispering about battles won while shouting about those lost is apt to color the public's overall impression.
Here's a prediction premised on a big, shudder-inspiring IF: If Kerry wins in November, look for Terrorists Thwarted stories — and even less significant successes — to climb toward and perhaps beyond their rightful place in the media kaleidoscope.
Mike Adams's Townhall columns are often simultaneously disturbing and refreshing in the way in which they offer a conservative's inside view of academia. In the current column, he reacts to having been chided for making some of his fellow professors "uncomfortable" by discussing his political views:
When it first hit me that while in the office I could no longer talk about gay rights, feminism, religion, Darwinism, affirmative action, or any issue I discuss in my column, I was outraged. In fact, I got so mad that I raised my voice before storming out of my superior’s office. I never thought that the right of each university employee to feel comfortable at all times would ever actually be enforced against me here in the workplace (a.k.a., the public university).But after I thought about it for a while, my anger turned to elation. Surely, the power to trump the First Amendment rights of others in response to "discomfort" is available to all employees, not just a select few. Since that must be the case (because our public university is committed to equality), I decided to make a list of every situation I had encountered at UNC-Wilmington where I felt "uncomfortable."
Even as he exposes the vapid laziness that the tenure culture can engender, Adams makes a case for it. The overarching threat of an ideological homogeneity can squelch the will to stand in opposition to it enough without the added cudgel of possible unemployment.
One grimace-worthy response is to actually pursue with all seriousness the return of like for like that Adams humorously feigns. Generally, I'm an idealist on such things, believing that the tool snatched from those who abused it can be a too-tempting possession. Glenn Reynolds, however, makes a good point regarding the leveraging of "hostile environment" legislation to protect the very group that was meant to be restrained by it (i.e., white, male Christians):
I don't approve of such things, but there's no better way to put an end to this asinine speech-suppressing body of law than to start enforcing it evenhandledly.
The danger is still too great, I'd say, that we'll discover that the craven gutterswumps who pushed for the legislation in the first place have long since transferred their devotion from the intention to the mechanism and are perfectly happy to leave the laws in place.
Lane Core has come across yet another flip-flop from the Democrat who would be President:
And that is what Kerry himself did in Miami this very month: he tried to pass off an earlier, preliminary vote as if it had been the final vote. Moreover, he did it again — quite baldly and very clumsily — in West Virginia a few days later:Mr. Kerry added, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it," referring to an amendment he supported that would have rescinded some tax cuts to finance the war.According to the judgement of Lt. John Kerry in 1971, Sen. John Kerry's attempts at trickery in 2004 mean the senator is not acting as the representative of the people.
Of course, we are all inclined to lighten ideals — particularly behavioral ideals — when our own actions conflict with them. The important points of discernment, therefore, are the way in which we trumpet the ideals as a means of diminishing others who do not follow them and the way in which we react when caught in violation ourselves. Kerry flunks in both respects, in ways that suggest that he's an opportunist and a demagogue.
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "A Look at Us" by me.
"A Look at Us" Justin Katz, Pop/Rock
Stream (HiFi) 
Download
Some light visual political humor seemed just the thing, this late Monday night.
Jeff Miller offers excerpts from Richard Clarke's next book. When the book comes out, Mr. Clarke might do well to keep an eye out for Donald Rumsfeld.
Diogenes reacts to a homosexual Catholic journalist who spontaneously disrupted a mass that he had gone out of his way to attend:
[Chuck] Colbert, who has degrees from Notre Dame University and, more recently, the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, frequently writes news stories for the National Catholic Reporter. Several reports on the clergy abuse crisis in the Boston area have appeared in the NCR under his byline. Well, does the Rosenthal Rule apply here? He might still pen opinion-essays as an advocate, but are we supposed to pretend that Colbert -- who plants himself in a parish he doesn't belong to, who claims he couldn't "sit there and take it" when the video he went out of his way to see is shown, who then stages a bit of calculated agit-prop to further the cause of gay rights -- is a neutral and objective observer of the situation?
I'll admit that the video is a bit over the top in its use of imagery; in fact, it's almost funny at times. But it's hardly "misinformation," as Colbert called it. It simply makes the case as starkly as it can in a few minutes.
A larger story, however, considering that the video hasn't exactly been shown in parishes around Massachusetts, let alone around the country, is the media-event character of Colbert's action. As Diogenes notes, the story hit the AP wire just before 4:00 p.m. on the same day that Colbert attended a 9:00 a.m. Mass. (That's what the story says, but Diogenes found that the church's Masses are at 7:30 and 9:30.) Considering the additional research and quote gathering, that's quite a turnaround time.
To suggestions that the "sit there and take it" line is curious considering that it wasn't his parish, Colbert says that he's free to visit any church and "wanted to see how [the video] was presented." That's curious, too, considering that it seems Colbert might have been aware that the video was online, which would suggest that he'd already seen it. The whole thing seems pretty well organized, to me — right up to the major-media coverage.
Anybody still believe that civil marriage will be the stopping point for many in this movement?
Andrew Sullivan, back from his break, has responded to Kathryn Jean Lopez's suggestion that he's in the market for rationalizations to back for Kerry for President:
I'm mystified by this remark. It has always seemed to me that a political writer is not necessarily partisan. Some of us are actually trying to figure out who's the better candidate for the next four years and haven't made our minds up already. This time in the last election cycle, I was for McCain before I was for Gore. It took till the fall for me to realize where Gore was headed and narrowly opted for W. And one of the unique joys of a blog like this is that a writer can actually think out loud in real time together with the readers. Is that a crime? Am I supposed to stop thinking at all? Now, no one need wonder for more than a few nano-seconds whom National Review will endorse this fall. That's fine. But it's equally fine for others to take a more independent approach. There's a difference between "rationalizations" and "reasons."
Notwithstanding Sullivan's quick recourse to the lingo of victimization and recrimination, nobody has suggested that he isn't free to argue and think out loud whatever he wishes. Lopez was merely alluding to the impression — shared, I might add — that he would like some way around the obvious priority that must be given to the War on Terror.
When one can almost visibly watch a writer struggle between candidates who respectively appeal to his reason and emotion, it is fair to suggest that rhetorical justifications to go with the latter are indicative of rationalization.
A natural first reaction to news that scientists "are finally ready to try their hand at creating life" is to declare the endeavor dangerous and immoral. That, I think, has more to do with the scientists' use of language that makes what they're doing sound more interesting than it really is and the media's tendency to couch things in terms of controversy.
It seems that for the foreseeable future, by "life," we're still talking very basic organisms. One would be somewhat less fearful, I imagine, if scientists announced that a new technology coming out of the botany field had developed a plant from which a self-healing fabric could be made. And even that sort of advance remains somewhat distant. The leap to "live" products would still merit extremely close scrutiny, but from a practical point of view, a large swath of the innovations would hardly be notably organic. This, however, is worth a nervous laugh:
"It's certainly true that we are tinkering with something very powerful here," said artificial-life researcher Steen Rasmussen of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico."But there's no difference between what we do here and what humans have always done when we invented fire, transistors and ways to split the atom," he said. "The more powerful technology you unleash, the more careful you have to be."
"No difference" must be a counter-intuitive technical term, because I can think of plenty of differences between fire and nuclear technology, and presenting "life" technology as the next stage in that trend makes me think that perhaps all such research ought to be conducted on Mars.
ADDENDUM (for comic book geeks):
Putting the peril in "apparel." One memory that comes to mind whenever I hear about the apparel applications for these superadvanced new technologies is from the Marvel Comics Secret Wars. In that 1984 series, Spiderman's costume is destroyed, and an alien machine gives him new threads that can do all sorts of fancy tricks, like transforming appearance and responding to his mental commands. As we all know, that particular costume didn't turn out very well...
When the Hatch marriage amendment first hit the Net, I suggested that, whereas the FMA would be an undeniable rebuke to courts and preserve the definition of marriage until such time as a large majority of Americans wish to change it, the Hatch version seemed more likely to inspire new lengths of parsing from the judge's bench. Maggie Gallagher makes a similar point, today:
By creating a complicated debate over federalism, rather than a simple and clear debate over the meaning of marriage, the Hatch language will provide multiple "hatches" for political officials who either secretly support or don't care about gay marriage to escape the political consequences of their views.Legally, the Hatch amendment's effects are complex and unclear. Politically, its effect is all too clear: By splitting the opposition to same-sex marriage into camps, the Hatch proposal is the opposite of mature leadership. It is a monkey wrench thrown into a serious, difficult, but absolutely critical effort to restore not only the proper balance of the courts, but a common, shared understanding of what marriage is, and how much it matters to this generation and to generations to come.
Which may be why Sen. Hatch made it clear last week that he endorses the original FMA.
This may be one of those moments in history at which two critical matters coalesce such that they can only be adequately addressed together. There's still plenty of time and reason for optimism to stick with the FMA. I suspect the picture will look quite different this summer, and having the Hatch language out there as a "compromise" will make the debate that much more difficult.
The historical storyline that American schools and culture taught many Gen Xers was the Zinnesque one that history is one long example of oppressors (usually white men) using traditional organizations to suppress everybody else. Thus, organized religion was wholly iniquitous, with very little by way of benefit for participants; marriage was a lopsided relationship not unlike servitude for all women — even if they didn't know it to be true. The happy side effect worldview, for academics, is that they can discover the reality of a social dynamic from the early 1900s as if recovering long-lost documents from prehistory.
My fellow Aquidneck Islander, URI history professor Evelyn Sterne has written a book along these lines with respect to the Catholic Church in Rhode Island:
"We think of the Catholic church as a conservative institution and in many ways it was; it was against birth control for women and against an attempt in the 1920s to pass an Equal Rights Amendment," says Sterne."On the other hand, the church provided an institution where women were encouraged to become active in public life," said Sterne. "For many women the church was the only institution it was acceptable for women to belong to. Women were seen as society's moral guardians, a natural extension of the role they played at home.
The religious vision of equality that makes Sterne's "on the other hand" misplaced is just different (better, I'd say) than the flat one with which feminists have squashed our culture. The Church's sociological positions — on everything from birth control to labor unions — don't issue forth from an animus against women, but rather a sustained effort to work toward a society that acknowledges and strengthens that which makes us fully human — fully woman and fully man.
I should note that I don't intend my general scorn for academics to taint my reaction to Sterne; we ought to applaud her willingness to challenge intellectual presumptions. However, this manifestation of those presumptions is worth a wry smile:
"Church wasn't just a place to worship," said Sterne. "For women, who were seen as the moral guardians of society, church was an acceptable place to go to get outside the stresses of family life and meet with other women. Women pushed the church to get involved in public life."
Now, I'm confident that the role of women in the Church has been a crucial part of maintaining and guiding the effort, but wasn't it... well... Christ who pushed the Church to get involved in public life?
It's been awhile, I believe, since the last time I went a whole weekend without a single post. In part, the lapse was a result of being busy combining with a new schedule that actually works rest into my week.
But it wasn't just me, this weekend. Whether everybody's just burnt out from all the Clarke nonsense, or whether we've all taken an anticipatory breath before something big happens (preferably good), the Internet's been relatively quiet. Up here in the Northeast, longing for spring is surely playing a role.
Anyway, beyond habitualizing myself into behavior appropriate to the realization that my life is as it is and as it will be for the foreseeable future, I've been edging along projects that will enable me to put the whole Timshel thing on autopilot until I get some sort of breakthrough — working, in the meantime, in whatever job helps pay the bills. This weekend, incidentally, our debt dipped below a long-anticipated line. It isn't significantly less massive, but it's nice to watch the numbers tick away over the years.
If you'd like to help us out, or if you'd like to help maintain my drive (particularly for blogging), or even (hey why not?) if you'd just like to read more of my work, please consider picking up a book:
Or two:
I sign all books by me, with some sort of personal message. Just imagine the dollar amount when your children or grandchildren bring the book(s) to Antique Roadshow toward the end of the century! No matter the amount, their reactions could hardly be more excited than mine whenever somebody thinks enough of my work to pay for it (even at my supremely reasonable prices).
I had to come across excerpts in a few places before I actually made time to read David Gelernter's piece about the intellectualization of the elite. It's too good to excerpt. If you haven't read it, yet, make time to do so.
I'm cognizant that Gelernter's message hits me at an opportune time, just now, but even adjusting for that, I found the essay downright inspiring.
Today's Day by Day cartoon reacts to Eric Alterman's appearance on Dennis Miller's show. I have to agree with Sheila Lennon that this wasn't Miller's shining moment. However, given even the beginning of a grumpy mood, I'm not sure I'd have been able to muster the will to argue with Alterman, who has clearly taken the precaution of dismissing the strongest arguments of the other side out of hand.
This is what Alterman is talking about where the online video picks up, and where Miller begins to lose interest:
[Bush] certainly does mislead the country. There's absolutely no regard for truth one way or another... It's sort of an existential question about whether or not you want to call it a lie.
Alterman is toward the top of his heap, and the distilled, for-TV litany — what the New York Observer's Joe Hagan called (on March 24) "laying out his arguments on autopilot" — is a structure of myriad little pieces all twisted out of shape to fit a preordained pattern. There's no denying that Miller was way off his game, and he should have pressed for specifics until something came up that he could address on the facts. However, one can understand his reaction to a guy whose argument, it seems, exists on another plane of reality.
Alterman's one-line description of his book, What Liberal Media, got laughs, for crying out loud. Definitely not a guest for whom one can afford to be underprepared, because there's almost no middle ground from which to wing it.
Lane Core notes some big names of media who helped Senator Kerry to become sufficiently liberal to win them back from Howard Dean's thrall:
In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday [Dec. 4, 2003]. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge.
Among the most fascinating aspects of modern political culture is the degree to which we're supposed to pretend that the obvious is not true. Concurrent with an increase of space between the Republicans and the Democrats in government (and a shifting the Republicans to the political right), it is crucial that the Big Media liberals be toppled, as well.
The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "Granda," by Christine L. Mullen.
In early February, Yale Professor Gabriel Rosenberg wrote in a comment to this post about same-sex marriage in Massachusetts:
I suspect that the court will find a rational basis for banning consanguineal and affinal marriages that has nothing to do with genetic offspring. For one thing, the affinal relations banned in Mass (but not in most other states) have no common bloodline so genetic concerns cannot be the sole basis.
He went on to write two posts differentiating SSM from polygamy and incest. As I suggested in my response, he made some valuable points — which advocates for traditional marriage may invoke a bit further down the slippery slope — but they were judgments with no compelling argument for why courts would care to agree with them.
In support of Prof. Rosenberg's point, one could note that the relevant statute in Massachusetts law includes stepparents and the like along with biological family members as barred from marriage. Furthermore, in the 2000 case Commonwealth v. Smith, the Supreme Judicial Court addressed the matter in the context of a father who had engaged in sodomitic sex with his daughter and whose lawyer argued that it had not been incest because there was no chance of conception. Although it found in his favor on semantic grounds, the court reasoned (internal citations removed):
Limiting "sexual intercourse" to penile-vaginal penetration would be appropriate if the sole purpose of the incest prohibition were the prevention of genetic or biological abnormalities in the offspring of incestuous unions. However, the plain language of the incest statute indicates that its drafters sought to advance purposes different from, and more compelling than, eugenics. For the statute does not define the crime of incest exclusively in terms of sexual intercourse between consanguineous relations, but also criminalizes the intermarriage of persons so related. Moreover, the "[p]ersons within the degrees of consanguinity" to whom the statute's prohibitions of intermarriage and sexual intercourse apply are not limited to blood relations, but include also certain affinal kin as well as stepparents. The Legislature's purpose in criminalizing incestuous conduct must thus extend beyond the prevention of genetic defects, as this goal would clearly not be advanced by criminalizing marriage itself, without more, between blood relations, and still less by prohibiting coitus between affinal kin who do not share a common bloodline. Indeed, the scope of the incest statute, as it relates to both conduct and persons, strongly suggests that its framers valued and sought to promote the sanctity and integrity of familial relationships, as well as to protect children within the family from sexual impositions by their elders.
So, the court didn't even go so far as to find it necessary to judge whether the legislature had a "rational basis" for its decree; it just determined that legislative intent was to include relationships other than by blood in the incest statute — but not to include a variety of behavior, as indicated by its narrow reading of "sexual intercourse." To leave no doubt that the second judgment of its intent was absolutely incorrect, the legislature subsequently expanded the incest statute to explicitly include the whole collection of sexual acts; it left the first judgment, about what relations were included, alone.
Well, on Monday — not quite four years after Smith — the SJC offered this chuckle-inspiring line, about the paragraph I've just quoted, in Commonwealth v. Dawud Rahim:
In rejecting this argument, we stated, without analysis or explanation, that the prohibitions in [the incest statute] extended to "affinal" relationships, thus indicating that the purpose of the incest prohibition is broader than simply eugenics.
Although it is currently immaterial, due to the intervening legislation, Rahim did have that penile-vaginal intercourse. This time around, however, it is not incest because it was with his stepdaughter. The court dismisses its earlier statements as dicta (or excess verbiage) that needn't be considered binding. Furthermore, the court argues that the legislature has used "consanguinity" and "affinity" as distinct terms, elsewhere, so the entire range of banned marital relationships is not covered by the relevant language in the incest statute, which reads as follows:
Persons within degrees of consanguinity within which marriages are prohibited or declared by law to be incestuous and void...
Gone is the endeavor to understand the general intent of the statute — the values it seeks to preserve and the harms it seeks to prevent — replaced, now, with explication of specific linguistic intent. Whatever their justification, the thinking now goes, the legislature knew that it was not criminalizing affinal incest with this statute, and that's what counts. Of course, as the three (of seven) judges standing in dissent remind us:
Two years after the Smith decision, the Legislature rewrote the incest statute to broaden the sexual conduct prohibited to include unnatural sexual intercourse. The amendment was in direct response to the Smith decision. No change was made in the definition of incest contained in the statute. It is obvious from this that the Legislature accepted the definition stated in the Smith case, and expressed agreement with the language therein explaining the purpose of the statute.
That being merely a dissent, it is not necessarily a crime, for the time being, for a stepparent to have consensual sex with his or her spouse's sixteen-year-old child. Perhaps some enterprising prosecuter will charge such a parent under the still-extant adultery law, but one can only imagine that the SJC would make short work of that statute, too.
More disturbing is that it's impossible to know what the court will rule next, in a post Lawrence v. Texas world, about non-coital or sterile sex between even biological family members now that it has contradicted its own recent judgment that the crime of incest is not essentially a matter of the existence of a sexualized parent-child relationship.
Worse yet, contrary to assertions throughout Rahim that marriage is a distinct matter, the precedent that courts around the country are busy building is that the right to have sex with another person is the same as the right to marry that person. Lawrence (the U.S. Supreme Court case making sodomy a right) is mentioned frequently in Goodridge, which legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, including as the first citation supporting this comment:
Whether and whom to marry, how to express sexual intimacy, and whether and how to establish a family--these are among the most basic of every individual's liberty and due process rights
Perhaps the Massachusetts legislature would do well to reintroduce its statutes prohibiting marriage to relatives as a constitutional amendment.
Jonah Goldberg has shared with Corner readers an email from a professor who explains his opposition to the inclusion of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance thus:
The beauty of our country is that it evokes great loyalty precisely because it doesn't demand it. The Pledge is a pointless and anti-American exercise. The fact is, the intention of the fundies is to try to force their God on the rest of us (and why shouldn't they? wouldn't you, if you felt you had access to the ultimate truth?) and we have to fight it where we can. How exactly would it be a 'slap in the face' to take God out of the thing?
While there's a degree of truth to the professor's explanation of America's "beauty," it's a slender abstraction of precisely the sort that intellectuals are so inclined to inflate to the point of hot-air entirety. For most Americans, the "beauty" of the United States of America — what evokes undemanded loyalty — is that we can work to change its laws according to our beliefs about what would make it a better country. Note the professor's parenthetical suggestion that he understands this to be true.
To mention, in non-coercive ways, a God who does not exist is simply silly. To refuse to acknowledge, in any capacity, a God who exists (as the vast majority of Americans believe He does) would be beyond silly, into a realm of enforced, disrespectful dementia. To insist, as Michael Newdow is arguing before the Supreme Court, that the U.S. must do the latter, and that no amount of advocacy and consensus building will be sufficient to change it, is indeed to slap Americans who disagree in the face. Worse, it is to erase exactly that which makes our nation so much more than an aristocracy with pro forma rituals of empty democracy. And not demanding devotion does not of itself result in its being offered... as any atheist should know.
This professor is — knowingly or not — engaging in exactly the strategy for which I faulted a talk radio caller yesterday: he is attempting to substitute, ipso facto, America as he would like it to be for America as it is. Frankly, I think Goldberg had it right in the post that elicited the professor's email:
I'm sorry but this country may have been established to protect individual rights, but it wasn't founded to cater to the feelings of every individual. Newdow is unconcerned by the fact that if he got his way he'd be slapping, literally, hundreds of millions of Americans in the face. He thinks that's fair because of his ego and because his capacity for abstraction affords him the ability to shove his head up his own butt and mistake the darkness for a temple of reason.
The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "from Dishonorable Intentions," by Anne Dubose Joslin.
While running a couple of errands, a little while ago, I heard a caller on the radio arguing one of those points that is so dumb it takes a bit of intelligence to find it plausible. In a nutshell, he declared that morality is not, properly speaking, part of the American system of government. Everything is based on laws derived from individual rights.
In some ways, this represents the first lap around the track for those who have rejected the notion of a government based on higher principles of a more religious nature. Essentially, all he's done is to re-label morality as individual rights, without crediting morality as the basis for rights. He's appealing to the same concept of objective, transcendent truth that he thought to leave behind at the starting line, but he's added a layer of obscuring rationalization. At some point, he'll come across somebody's explanation of why this is so or something will trip up his rhetorical structure, and he'll be off again for the next lap.
For one example of his case, the caller tried to make a distinction between the religious Commandment "thou shalt not kill" and laws governing murder. The former is a moral declaration having to do with the sanctity of the individual life, in his formulation, while the latter is an assertion of the legal right of a person not to be killed for no reason. But last I heard, the most accurate translation of that Commandment actually is "thou shalt not murder," and indeed, all religions growing from the Old Testament recognize some form or other of legitimate infliction of death. Moreover, the concept of "no reason" requires a subjective measure and an appeal to morality.
A second example to which the caller made recourse was that judges rule based on the law rather than morality. If only that were true! Even accepted "objective" law leaves room for judgment on such matters as whether discrimination is "invidious." More importantly, judges who do handle the law objectively do so simply because that's their prescribed function within our government system. What do such people think the legislature is for?
At best, folks who take this caller's view are describing their ideal government based on their own moral principles, rather than the U.S. government as it is actually constructed. To the extent that this ideal is both legitimate and feasible, it is as a limited ideal for government within a society that has assigned power to areas of life and culture that more appropriately and effectively dabble in morality. This construction, as I see it, is the nation that our Founding Fathers sought to create, and we've managed to mangle it so horribly in part because we've slipped into legalisms and rhetorical illusions.
The President and his supporters are finding themselves required to address an ever-shifting field of what-ifs — as there has been no shortage of pundits to note. Clifford May makes a great point in this vein:
By contrast, what could President Bush have done between January and September of 2001? By that point, the terrorists had made their plans and were living in the U.S. Even if President Bush had launched a unilateral, preemptive attack against the Taliban and al Qaeda, the 9/11 suicide terrorists might have proceeded to fulfill their missions. Indeed, some would have said that 9/11 was in reprisal for the assaults on al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Moreover, the entire anti-preemption brigade, from journalists to Jesuits, would have swung into action, just as they did when it came to Iraq. In fact, the Taliban had the additional advantage that it didn't have a globally recognized history of border-state invasion and internal WMD attacks, and their culture was sufficiently foreign to cloak its tyranny. (Pious-looking robes are much more conducive to a palatable international image than a military uniform is.)
Of course, we now know that one coal-shoveler for the what-if flames, Richard Clarke, preempted his current assault by making contradictory claims in the past. I can't be alone in my complete astonishment that somebody would publish a book, tour the national media, and testify to Congress as Clarke has done in full knowledge of potential landmines that he himself set years ago. It brings to mind something from a post by Demosophia Scott to which I linked yesterday:
As someone with a fairly good grasp of the situation recently observed, after noting that both Lieberman and Biden had disavowed Clarke's allegations as false and devoid of fact: "Wow, these guys seem like suicide bombers. They destroy their own reputation in an attempt to be part of the angry left."
Donald Hawthorne, a former member of the East Greenwich School Committee, writes, in today's Providence Journal, that the education wing of the Rhode Island government has plenty of fat that it can trim. This way of putting the issue ought to be intellectually accessible to any citizen:
The real debate should be about why state aid increased by $158 million, or 33 percent -- nearly twice the rate of increase in taxpayers' personal incomes. You can thank outrageous demands by public employees and the spineless responses by politicians and bureaucrats for such irresponsible increases.Let's put these large numbers in the context of a family budget. Suppose your income was $45,000 a year. A 33-percent increase means your salary grew to $60,000. Few families saw that kind of increase during the last five years.
After receiving that huge salary increase, you are now being asked to take a 1.25-percent reduction. That means finding a way to live on $59,250 in the next year. Families make such adjustments all the time to live within their means. Government should be able to do so, too.
Surely some bureaucrats, lobbyists, and politicians consider translating government spending into real-person terms to be contrary to the health of the state — in one way of looking at health. For my part, I think this state's government, in particular, has been indulging in gourmet ten-course meals and late-night Big Macs for quite a bit longer than is advisable.
The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Elsewhere," by B.E. Delaplain.
Among the most significant benefits of the Internet, generally, and the blogosphere, specifically, is the broad distribution of interests, knowledge, abilities, and (importantly) schedules. The whole Richard Clarke thing brings that home. Simply put, I don't have the energy to jump into this one — he says one thing, somebody else contradicts him, the media picks his version, et cetera. Not the least, my reaction results from a strong suspicion that Clarke will fade away with neither side of the fight having gained or lost any believers — the only people who will remember Clarke come November. When Clarke's faded to chat-room status, the Democrats and the media will find another someone or something through which to cloud the waters once again.
But fear not. If it is for Clarke info that you lack, you needn't look hard to find it, so there's no need to catalogue sources here. However, there are a few items worth checking out for outside-the-mainstream information. First, Dan Darling notes a disappearing Saddam–al Qaeda connection:
... Clarke played a key role in the Clinton administration's decision to launch a cruise missile attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. That article, if true, puts Clarke's comments about a war in Iraq detracting from the larger war against al-Qaeda in an entirely different context.As any number of media reports indicate from the time period in question, those US officials who ordered the cruise missile attack on the al-Shifa plant did so because they believed that bin Laden was producing precursors for VX there with Iraqi assistance. It is worth noting that the basis for this conclusion even found its way into the November 4, 1998 US indictment of both bin Laden and his military commander Mohammed Atef, stating that bin Laden had formed a non-aggression pact with Iraq and had agreed to work with the Iraqi government with regard to weapons development.
For his part, Scott of Demosophia parses Clarke's political tale to form a picture of the forces that might have really been at play:
In other words he was given the task of challenging his own prejudgments, and what he apparently did in lieu of fulfilling that assignment was to go out and compile what he considered evidence that there was no link, a rather petulant response to an administration that was seeking to comprehend (or perhaps even catch up to) a rather inscrutible enemy. In other words he refused to do what was asked of him, not to "manufacture evidence" but to look for evidence he didn't think was there. This borders on insubordination. He clearly thought he ought to have been employed creating a "grand strategy," not doing this lowly gumshoe work. His methodological ineptitude prevented him from seeing that this is a standard way to test an hypothesis, and is really rather straightforward scientific method.
Meanwhile, John Cole spots something in the 60 Minutes transcript that illustrates how dishonest spin shifts the administration's reasonable behavior into some weird fictionesque obsession with Saddam Hussein:
A failure to attempt to identify any role played by Iraq in the 9/11 attacks by Bush and his administration would have been foolish and irresponsible. Once again, the fierce partisans, ideological blinders on and focussed directly ahead at the 2004 elections, are attacking the administration for doingexactly the right thing- investigating all options.Before you get confused and start to think that perhaps they were trying to rush to war with Iraq post 9/11, as the hucksters would like for you to believe, remember the timeframe. When this memo was written, 18 September 2001, the one in which Clarke has been caught in an out and out lie, it was already pretty well decided that Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan were the target. We know that the choice of action was already decided from the numerous write-ups, most easily accessible of which is this excerpt from the Sept. 18th 2001 portion of the lengthy Washington Post Series titled 10 Days in September.
I'm a relatively new watcher of the political game, so I can only ask: has it always been like this? Have political operatives always been brazenly willing to reformulate recent history?
Some physicists suggest that, in the Many Worlds Interpretation, there are realities in which history really is inconsistent, in which monuments fade into existence, for example, so that the present has a record of a past that never was. That's the feeling with which the political wrangling of the past three years has left me.
Perhaps it's indicative of apathy, perhaps of a belief that it my limited voice would have no effect, or perhaps I was just busy that day, but I never got around to posting about a shamefully biased report by long-time Providence Journal reporter Karen Lee Ziner. The piece was about a rally for a bill that would define marriage as between a man and a woman in Rhode Island, and a letter from Mark Gordon, executive director of Fidelity Forum, puts my feelings well:
What is disturbing about Ziner's journalism is that she deliberately sought out the most egregious sentiment possible and then proceeded to feature it as the lead in her story. In so doing she cast the entire event in the shadow of D'Ovidio's assertion, painting all of the marchers -- and, by extension, anyone who agrees with their position -- as hateful, intolerant bigots.Ziner has been writing long enough to understand that her piece would achieve precisely the effect she intended. Her story represents the deliberate and malicious injection of a reporter's own biases -- in this case a pro-gay marriage, anti-Catholic agenda -- into the news.
I suggest that if Karen Lee Ziner wants to become an opinion columnist, she should begin her apprenticeship somewhere other than the news pages of The Providence Journal. By the same token, if the editors of The Journal have a point to make they should be plain about it rather than hiding behind the feigned objectivity of reportage.
Regarding the Projo's advocacy, that's been obvious for about as long as the issue of same-sex marriage has been in the news. As for Ziner's piece, my thought was that I should begin "covering" such events, because one simply can't trust a journalist who reports on a rally attended by over 100 people and kicks off the top-most article on the front page of the Rhode Island section thus:
Liliana D'Ovidio believes that God allowed The Station nightclub fire "because there are homosexuals in the state.""He withdraws his blessing," D'Ovidio explained at a rally against same-sex marriage, held at the State House Rotunda yesterday.
A member of Catholics for Life, D'Ovidio held a sign reminding people that "God set fire from the heavens to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah," two supposedly wicked cities described in the book of Genesis.
One reason I didn't mention the piece was that I couldn't tell, from Ziner's phrasing, whether D'Ovidio was just an attendee or a speaker. Researching her on the Net (although I didn't bookmark the pages), I discovered that she's a seventy-something widow who is very active in pro-life events. At this particular event, she was just an attendee. My guess: her sign attracted Ziner's attention, and either pointed questions or mangled context gave the reporter enough to frame her story as she did.
And that framing did have an effect. The state representative who proposed the bill and organized the rally, Victor G. Moffitt, issued an apology, and D'Ovidio has clarified (apparently to Ziner, and not on any front pages, as far as I can tell); even her sign gets a different description in the follow up article:
Liliana D'Ovidio, the woman who made the remarks to a Providence Journal reporter, carried a sign at the rally with a phone number for Courage, a 12-step program for gay Roman Catholics who try to abstain from same-sex relationships because they believe them to be immoral. D'Ovidio said Courage helps homosexuals be "cured of their tendencies."Yesterday, D'Ovidio said her quote about the Station fire was taken out of context.
"It is not because of homosexuals that people are punished," D'Ovidio said. "For one thing, there are some persons with homosexual tendencies who live virtuous, celibate lives."
D'Ovidio continued, "God cannot bless a country and its people that is the greatest exporter of pornography, allows over 60,000 pornographic sites on the Internet available to children, and kills 4,500 babies a day through abortions -- with over 100 a week of these in Rhode Island. Unfortunately, bad things happen to good people because of all of our sins."
Frankly, I could see something very similar to that statement resulting in the objectionable paraphrase, which makes me wonder why Ziner wouldn't offer the full original quotation in the follow up piece. Why, for that matter, do journalists so rarely seem inclined to explain themselves? They just roll on, with the very same woman whose reportage is at issue reporting the reactions to it. Clearly, editorializing or not, Ziner is as much an actor in this story as D'Ovidio.
ADDENDUM:
Although it's only incidentally related, a story about some vandalism in Johnston, Rhode Island, to which Jeff Miller directed my attention, seems to fit as an addendum to this post. As the Projo reports in a Digital Bulletin:
The face of the statue, depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd with a lamb over his shoulder, was painted black. Paint was also sprayed over a carved inscription on the statue's stone pedestal that says, "Pray for an end to abortion." The words "Anti-choice Nazis" were painted on top of a masonry garden box surrounding the statue.
As one might expect, the incident sparked that famous Catholic hatred:
"The parishoners are very concerned. They're saddened," said Rev. Douglas Spina, pastor. "It gives us the opportunity to pray for the people who would do this kind of thing."
PROEM:
Just a note for folks coming here from the Corner: if you find this page design difficult to read, click "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column.
Maggie Gallagher has penned today's SSM must-reading:
The very ideas that are being used to promote single-sex marriage are a dagger pointed at the heart of the marriage culture. Marriage, these people are saying, is not a public, social norm, it is an individual civil right, a benefit-dispensing mechanism. Every small town or county can decide for itself what marriage means, with no damage to anything important in our common culture.The fragmenting of America's marriage culture is going on before our eyes, even as the most stubbornly blind advocates of single-sex marriage continue to insist gay marriage poses no threat. As Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times, "Those of you who are already married, tell the truth: [Gay marriage] won't make your marriage any weaker, will it?"
She covers all the bases, from the likely shift of a successful same-sex marriage movement toward forcing religious organizations into compliance, to the erroneous declaration that all precedent leaves marriage laws to the states. She also argues against the potential Hatch amendment, which would concentrate marriage amendment efforts on the procedural matter of excluding courts, while leaving state legislatures to do whatever they wish. It is to this portion of Gallagher's piece to which Ramesh Ponnuru responds (read up from the link).
The decisive factor of disagreement is whether the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would actually define marriage, has a chance of passing. Everybody else in the debate is more qualified than I am to judge that. For my part, I continue to think that it would have been a better move all around to withhold whispers of an alternative amendment until this summer — a time at which public support for amendment is trending to cross into "overwhelming majority" territory and at which states such as New Mexico and New York will be taking at least the first steps toward importing Massachusetts same-sex marriages.
Whatever the politics of the situation, Gallagher makes a suggestion in passing that seems to be in line with worries about the Hatch amendment that I share:
There is, however, something wrong with leaving marriage to the states. It won't protect defense-of-marriage laws from being overturned by a Supreme Court already signaling its interest in affirming same-sex marriage as a civil right. And in states that adopt same-sex marriage as a civil right, it won't protect Christian and other traditional religious organizations from persecution in the public square if they teach the sanctity of marriage.
To the first half of that paragraph, Ponnuru responds:
State defense of marriage laws typically have two components: They define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and they deny recognition to same-sex marriages contracted elsewhere. Under the Hatch language, the Supreme Court has to defer to the state legislatures on the definition of marriage (sentence one) and cannot use any provision of the Constitution to compel a change in that definition (sentence two). Nor can the Supreme Court use the Constitution to compel recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages, since that would require that benefits be granted in violation of sentence two.
Gallagher seems to be referring to a possibility that I've noted. In short, even as they are blocked from mandating same-sex marriages, federal and/or state courts would have ample room to find pretext to strike down laws that explicitly forbid it. Here's the Hatch amendment, once again:
Marriage and its benefits in each state shall be defined by the legislature or the people thereof. Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to require that marriage or its benefits be extended to any union other than that of a man and a woman.
Ponnuru has argued that this would still forbid anti-miscegenation laws because 1) the first sentence doesn't limit federal courts, and 2) the legislatures would not be "free to ignore other parts of the Constitution." In other words, despite the first sentence, the state legislature cannot define marriage as a union of two people of the same race, because the second sentence only limits the federal judiciary inasmuch as it cannot find that marriage must be "extended" beyond opposite-sex boundaries.
This opens an important crack in Ponnuru's response to Gallagher about what each sentence does. Most obviously, the word "extended" could be construed as allowing the Supreme Court to find that the rights can't be "restricted" to opposite-sex couples. Such reasoning might seem foolish, but as I noted in my earlier post, the Nebraska marriage amendment is already coming under attack on due process grounds — grounds that a U.S. District court thought strong enough to allow the case to go forward. And without further legislation, the courts would decide what the amendment restricts the courts from doing.
If they judge themselves only narrowly restricted, the Hatch amendment would protect the marriage precedent as passed along from common law and as inferable from various statutes and rulings, but courts might bestow the right of activists to perpetually lobby for marriage rights free of explicit discrimination in the law.
Maybe.
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "She" by You.
"She" You, Alternative Rock
Stream (HiFi) Download
Something right at the beginning of an article about the San Jose Mercury News's statistical analysis of gay couples in California raises an eyebrow (emphasis added):
A Norman Rockwell painting they're not. But many of California's same-sex households reflect a more traditional lifestyle than is often recognized in the national debate over gay marriage, according to a San Jose Mercury News analysis of census data.Children from diaper age to high schoolers reside in nearly a third of the state's gay and lesbian households, which also tend to be headed by partners who are better educated and slightly more affluent than married Californians.
More than half of same-sex couples own their own home. And though they can't legally marry, as many as a third have tied the knot before.
As with many of these statistical analyses, tracking down the source data would require some research, and I'm not going to devote the time to the effort. However, I do wonder what, specifically, counted as residing in a household.
Crowley and Rinaldi are among 29 percent of the state's same-sex households that have children under 18 at home, a relatively high proportion considering that more than half the couples are gay men who cannot bear children and face bigger hurdles adopting or gaining custody of children from previous marriages.
It's odd that the influence of custody practices is allowed to pass out of the report so quickly, particularly since it's likely that many of the children in question are from previous marriages:
Like Crowley and Rinaldi, lesbians are more likely to have children living with them, 37 percent statewide, than are gay men, 23 percent. ...The number of gays and lesbians who have been married before is difficult to pin down. The 2000 census found that 35 percent of same-sex partners in California had once been married, but demographers say that estimate is inaccurate because of a flaw in the U.S. Census Bureau's calculation.
This "more traditional lifestyle" seems largely to be preceded by divorce, with mothers — subsequently lesbians — having the larger share of custody. I'd be curious to see what percentage of single divorced people have children in the household. Yes, the "faces" that the journalist puts on these numbers are more varied than the comparison implies (with adoption and lesbian IVF represented), but it's a Media Reader 101 lesson that one can't take representative profiles as representative.
Unforeseen difficulties are already starting to pop up with nothing more than state government attempts to address hypothetical same-sex marriages from other states:
"Business must have the right, within existing federal law, to negotiate wages and benefits with employees. The state of Georgia should not limit business practices and make our state different than almost any other state in spelling out the limitations of employee benefits. This also applies to the beneficiaries of employees."The drafters of SR 595 may not have intended to regulate business, but the language contained in the second part of this bill could be interpreted as denying employees the right to name whomever they choose to benefit from employers' medical, insurance or other personnel practices."
A patchwork marriage solution will not work, not the least because neither side will want it to.
(via Marriage Debate)
Don't miss Jeff Miller's recent copywriting stint for Slippery Slope Publishing:
Investigative reporting for children uncovers the real reason why Mother Hubbard had nothing in her cupboard. Children will learn the reasons why low cost housing is not available and some people are forced to live in a shoe!
Craig Henry has taken a look at his pre-war assessment of the argument for war, and he writes something that strikes a chord with me:
The case for war did not argue that Saddam's WMDs were an "imminent threat" or that he was involved in the 9-11 attacks. Instead, it argued that he was trying to get WMDs, that containment/sanctions/deterrence were beset with problems of their own, and that waiting was worse than acting. Nothing i've read in the past year refutes that assessment.
I don't think I ever got around to writing a similar post, so my arguments and proof of what I thought the arguments to be are scattered over months of posts here and comments elsewhere. However, I remember people arguing against the war by saying that the threat wasn't imminent, and I remember responding that the central argument for war at that time was that we could never know when it was imminent. In fact, as I recall, a paleocon commenter on Mark Shea's blog tried to phrase the argument in terms of stockpiles, and I replied that, although that would certainly make the war even more immediately necessary, it wasn't what made it necessary to begin with.
I'm aware that some will just hold a mirror up to this comment to reflect it back to me. However, I have to say that it's one thing to read long-ago history revised, but another thing altogether to live through the metamorphosis. It's not this issue alone that frustrates credulity thus.
Something that James Lileks wrote in today's Bleat sounded familiar:
These people marched to protest the premature bestowal of freedom by exterior forces. Better the Iraqi people live under the boot for 20 years, and rise up and get slaughtered and rise up again and slaughter those who killed their kin, then have Bush push the FF button and get it over with now. Better they suffer for the right reasons than live better for the wrong ones.
I don't intend a personal assault by pointing this out, but the similarity between the group Lileks is describing and the following quotation from a conservative blogger leads to too important an area of thought to ignore. Here's Steve from Absit Invidia:
Regime change in Iraq was the responsibility of the Iraqi people. God knows their relentless bombing of coalition and civilian targets proves that there was no shortage of explosives and willing 'martyrs' in the Arab world to get the job done.So the question is: "Why didn't they?"
Even putting aside the matter of whether the "relentless bombing" is the work of Iraqis, Ba'athist holdovers, or border-crossing terrorists, one might be tempted to suggest that either way — whether taking the Lileks vision of perpetual revolution or the Absit Invidia implication of a complicit public — Iraq would have been, at the very least, a "breeding ground for terrorists." But again, regarding interpretation and understanding of facts, we're all in different choirs singing to ourselves in soundproofed rooms at this point. We do well, nonetheless, to watch whose key we begin to sing in.
ADDENDUM:
As just about every rightward blogger has noted, LGF has pictures of the folks Lileks is talking about.
Sometimes it seems as if it's more difficult to resolve disagreements when they are with folks with whom one shares a majority of premises. It's as if trying to bring disagreement into line with agreement makes misunderstanding inevitable. This may be the problem arising in an exchange between fellow Rhode Island conservative blogger Marc Comtois and myself. He's updated his post in the exchange, and it is obvious that I haven't adequately stated my point about the degree to which having a single-income has become a privilege.
For one thing, it wasn't my intention to "amplify" my thoughts in the entry to which his update is a response, but to clarify them. (I apologize if I came across as hostile.) I was addressing neither the "toys" that require some families to maintain two incomes, nor the age at which couples marry. As a matter of fact, I agree completely with the point that Marc is making, that giving children a stay-at-home parent is worth material sacrifice; I'm just making a different one.
For both my own household and many of those with which I've personal experience, putting off children while developing "a little of a nest egg" would mean putting them off indefinitely. In this discussion, the nest egg is what provides the leeway for one parent to stay home, and the class of couples who have suffered most from this area of social experimentation are those for whom two incomes are necessary even without toys, new cars, and expansive wardrobes.
Without question, such families have always existed. However, I'd suggest that the two-income standard has raised the class level at which a married couple is free of the burden. Expanding on this, I expressed my belief that — in broad, general terms — it isn't outlandish to suggest that the class of women who most insistently sought the career option is now the same class of women with the option to stay home. They can "have it all," in other words, only if they earn enough to be able to afford it. Those who cannot do so wind up forced to settle for what that they didn't necessarily want to begin with.
Sheila Lennon has emailed to object that I wasn't sufficiently clear that certain statements in the preamble of a post responding to something that she had written were based on inferences. I've modified the language and added an addendum to address her valid concerns.
On the very same day that a Seattle-area United Methodist church steps onto what may prove to be the path to internal discord that the U.S. Episcopal Church has blazed, the Washington Post profiles another congregation of the same Church across the country in Maryland in reaction to this finding:
Late last year, a commission convened by Dartmouth Medical School, among others, studied years of research on kids, including brain-imaging studies, and concluded that young people who are religious are better off in significant ways than their secular peers. They are less likely than nonbelievers to smoke and drink and more likely to eat well; less likely to commit crimes and more likely to wear seat belts; less likely to be depressed and more likely to be satisfied with their families and school.
The article, which I found via Amy Welborn's blog, is well worth reading, despite its length, but something odd creeps in at the bottom of the third html page (of four):
Some girls in the study group don't challenge the Bible or church teachings. Kimbrey, however, is a questioner, and her questions are taken seriously, she says. One discussion she remembers centered on the ordination of gay clergy. Wendy Brubaker, her Bible group sponsor, said gays shouldn't be ordained but Kimbrey argued that "all sins are equal in God's sight." She isn't convinced that homosexuality is a sin, but if it is, she argued, "you can't judge a person just by the sins you see." The church unknowingly ordains ministers who commit abuse and other acts condemned by the Bible. Why should homosexuals be excluded?
The next page picks up:
"I won the argument," she says proudly.
Ah, pride! According to the telling of Post writer Laura Sessions Stepp, Kimbrey really does seem to be a fantastic kid, but two questions come to mind. Did none of her Bible-study peers think to suggest that the problem lies in the degree to which this particular sin is worn as an impregnable, unimpeachable identity? One suspects that open abusers would be somewhat less welcome than even open and active homosexuals.
The second question is why, in a piece about the benefits of religion, Ms. Stepp devotes so much (unbalanced) time applauding a girl who refutes it on this particular issue. To ask this question is to answer it, and the answer carries through to the last individual profile of the piece, a twelve-year-old girl who gets the final word:
Wicca, a form of pagan nature worship, could be the answer, she says. Because "in Wicca, you have a goddess and a god. God will still be there for me."
Thus, the preadolescent sage assists la journaliste sophistiquée in assuring the reader that — while the formula currently eludes the experts — the benefits of religion may yet be distilled away from organizations that insist on tradition, dogma, and stuff.
There may not be another pundit whom I've wanted to like more and wound up liking less than Jim Pinkerton. Don't know what it is — maybe because there were a few months in 2002 during which I watched Fox News Watch regularly and saw him as the decidedly unslick conservative counter to the previous, very smarmy liberal commentator.
But then came the war in Iraq, and some underlying ideological distinction brought Pinkerton to a separate conclusion from those who supported it, and all subsequent events have reinforced both sides in their beliefs. At this point, there's almost too much distance in basic view of the world to attempt much bridging; we're all just choirs singing to ourselves in separate rooms, with time coating the walls with soundproofing.
This, for example, is in tones that I can barely comprehend:
The lesson of Madrid was clear enough. Those Spanish troops currently hunkering down in Iraq, dodging snipers, could have been used instead to secure "soft targets" on the homefront, guarding Spain's borders and transport system.
Does Pinkerton really believe that the Spanish government — before March 11 — saw the options as between working with the United States in Iraq and strolling along train cars looking for backpacks? Frankly — although given his political affiliation, I'm more willing to leave open the possibility that I'm missing something crucial in his thinking — Pinkerton's implication that Aznar's transfer of a handful of troops to Iraq left a foreseeable security gap through which the terrorists snuck strikes me as either dumb or despicable.
Steve, of Absit Invidia, on which I found the link to this piece, says that Pinkerton is "what conservatives used to be." A curious suggestion, that, considering the hopeful view that Pinkerton seems to have of Spanish Socialists:
Here's a prediction: Even as he honors his campaign promise to withdraw his country's troops from Iraq, Zapatero will take obvious and commonsensical measures to improve Spain's homeland security. That is, he will tighten up on border enforcement, scrutinize aliens more closely and improve security around public places. And he will even work closely with allies in "Old Europe."
On the last point, Pinkerton is no doubt correct. However, we can only hope that the people of Spain don't find the flavor of socialistic "homeland security" to be disagreeable. Pinkerton seems awfully willing to expect what he sees as conservative policies from that particular political party. Then again, I can't help but have visions of socialists past upon reading this suggestion:
Indeed, Americans might wish to study Spain's alternative approach to national defense. Voters here might wonder why it's a good idea to have 130,000 American troops in Iraq - while our own borders are sparsely monitored and our own rail system is wide open to terror bombing.
Can you imagine the reaction were President Bush to order troops to "guard" commuter rails? I suspect those scare quotes would become part of the dictionary spelling of the word. And what other soft targets ought the President to fortify with U.S. military personnel? Malls? Mainstreets? For far too many people, including conservatives, it seems that the answer is retrospective: wherever an attack happens to occur, that's where the troops should have been. (Unless the terrorists actually kill them, in which case the soldiers shouldn't have been there to begin with.)
As I said, there's too much distance between worldviews, at this point, to build bridges. When Pinkerton asks whether "the invasion of Iraq really made the United States safer," I give an unhesitant "yes." Even putting that aside, however, it ought to be clear that our options are not, and never were, the same as Spain's. We are the target on the hill, as indicated by September 11 and all of the attacks that preceded it. Were we to pull ourselves into defensive mode, the strategy would quickly become permanent, and increasingly difficult to maintain.
In this, Pinkerton has the luxury of those whose suggestion represents the path not taken: an endless opportunity for unrealistic speculation.
ADDENDUM:
In keeping with the idea of diverged worlds among conservatives, I find my head shaking in bewilderment when, after quoting a report about the most recently coronated media star, former White House staffer Richard Clarke, Absit Invidia Steve writes (emphasis in original):
In a matter of seconds the folks at National Review will be firing up their word processors to label Mr. Clarke an appeaser and they'll, doubtless, call him soft on terrorism - so take a quick look at his record. ... Yeah, this guy has traitor written all over him.
I realize that Steve is using NR emblematically, here, but his sense of its M.O. is entirely incompatible with mine. In fact, what NR did was to quote "an insider" offering a much more detailed version of Clarke's record. (In this post and the one above it.)
Oscar Jr. has an interesting analysis of the supposed generation of same-sex marriage supporters that is currently working its way through higher education. Taking note of my previous post on the issue, Oscar suggests that support for same-sex marriage is inversely proportional to having been married. With marriage rates falling, support for same-sex marriage increases accordingly:
If my theory is correct, then the increased support for same-sex marriage that actually has occurred (as opposed to that expected to occur due to a hypothesized "generational shift" in the future) may be due to the fact that fewer people are getting married these days.
This is certainly a factor, and Oscar is correct to glean that I would include marriage as part of the life experience that makes people more conservative as they get older. However, there are a couple of additional considerations that I would suggest. For one thing, he uses "never been married" data, while currently married — and especially, currently happily married — would be more helpful. It certainly has seemed to me that many of same-sex marriage's strongest supporters have been divorced (or would like to be).
That difference might help to alleviate my second concern. As Oscar's chart shows, experience with having been married slopes gradually according to age, and even more so now than in 1970, according to his data. The lack of a gradual slope in either direction on the question of same-sex marriage was the essential reason that I sought a further dynamic.
Data that would be really helpful to Oscar's analysis would be poll results on some previous marital change, such as divorce or contraception rights. All of the same variables would still come into play, but it would offer another example of marriage's correlation to certain opinions about marriage. And maybe some previous pollster would have had the foresight to gather information about respondents' marital status.
Rev. Sensing takes a look at a sports writer who penned the following:
''The audience at ESPN is presumably a sports-savvy audience which means that in terms of basketball they know the code, ethics and culture of basketball, which is, in case anyone is new to the game like some of these idiots that apparently have responded in a negative fashion, the code is it's a black man's game and the white man is privileged to be allowed to step on the court,'' Ryan said. ''That is known by both blacks and whites."
At least Ryan didn't insult Condoleezza Rice.
To a workaholic, charts are like shots to a drunk.
After my previous post, I thought to take a look at trends in the United States and Northern European nations with respect to childbirth, illegitimacy, and abortion for 1970 to 2000. Live birth and abortion statistics, I took from a source that I've found to be reliable. (It consistently matches up with other data that I find.) Statistics for U.S. births out of wedlock, I took from a CDC PDF. Similar statistics for the European countries, I took from charts in a report (PDF) from a statistics organization in the Netherlands. The most significant quirks of my methodology were that I estimated the European out-of-wedlock percentages from line graphs and that I didn't incorporate miscarriages in my total conception data, but neither of these factors is of much importance for my purposes, here.
The United States has well over twenty times the conceptions of any of the other countries, except for the United Kingdom, than which the U.S. has about six times the conceptions. Overall, the detrimental numbers are waning; abortions are down to late-'70s levels in raw-number terms and early-'70s levels in percentage terms; out-of-wedlock births are still higher than they've ever been, but they are leveling off. There are still too many of each, of course:
In the Netherlands (which I looked at in detail only because it came up in the previous post), births within marriage are being squeezed by abortions and out-of-wedlock births, both of which combined to actually increase the number of conceptions and births, even as births within marriage continue to decrease:
Those numbers made me wonder what the percentages looked like for each category — sort of a rating of the odds faced by conceived children who aren't miscarried. The ugly truth is that, as of 2000, a child conceived in the United States only had a 50% chance of being born within wedlock; for some hopeful news, however, it's also true that abortions have lowered to 25%, while out-of-wedlock births have been leveling off to the same percentage. Children conceived in the Netherlands still had the best chances in 2000 (although there were many fewer of them), with a 66% in-marriage rate, and abortions only crossed the 10% line in the mid-'90s; however, the illegitimacy rate has almost reached the U.S. level.
The Scandinavian picture is more worrying. In Sweden, a baby is 10 percentage points less likely to be born into a marriage than out of one, and almost just as likely to be aborted, a rate that has surpassed that of the United States. While Norway is only slightly better than Sweden, Denmark actually showed
