Tag Archives: culture wars

“If you can’t hear it from me …” — 3 voices that might get through to your conservative friends

May 21, 2012 – 1:23 pm

If you’re a liberal who has any conservative friends or relatives, you know how well defended they are against anything you might say. Any fact you know is wrong. Any source you might quote is biased: Academia is biased (except for institutes funded by the Koch Brothers). Major newspapers are biased (except for the Washington Times). TV news is biased (except for Fox). Government agencies are biased (unless a Republican president has had their reports vetted by a political appointee) … and so on.

Here are three points of view that might sneak under the conservative radar, because of where they come from and how they’re pitched.

Now let’s look at those one-by-one.

BYU’s Barry Bickmore on climate-change denial. Bickmore’s talk isn’t about climate change. It’s about “How to Avoid the Truth about Climate Change“. (If you don’t have time to watch, scroll down the comments to Anna Haynes’ notes on the talk.) In other words: What techniques make it possible for honest and intelligent people to deny something that virtually all the experts in the field believe?

Bickmore knows why people don’t believe in climate change, because he used to agree with them on two points: There’s lot’s of scientific controversy about global warming, and the is theory based solely on complex computer models which are easy to screw up.

When he looked into the issue more closely, though, Bickmore discovered that each of those points is wrong: Around 97% of actively publishing climate scientists believe that human activity is causing the planet to get hotter, and their opinion is verified by a variety of techniques that may not give exactly the same projections, but do agree within the bounds of the published error estimates.

He wondered: Why didn’t I already know that? What led to my confusion?

First, there were those “thousands of scientists doubt global warming” articles. Bickford explains the strategy that generates them: First, expand the field of “experts” to include a lot of people who aren’t really experts at all, and second, report a raw number that sounds big rather than doing a poll and getting a percentage.

So the Oregon Petition (claiming there is “no convincing scientific evidence” of human-caused global warming) claims 30,000 signers. But signers don’t have to be experts or even scientists. They need only have a bachelors degree, not necessarily in a relevant field.

So why is this impressive to people — 30,000 scientists? … People think about scientists as “Well, you know science, so why don’t you tell me?” Right? But in reality we’re much more specialized than that. If you have cancer, you don’t go to your podiatrist. You go to your oncologist.

Ditto for the 900 peer-reviewed journal articles skeptical of climate change. It sounds like a big number, but in what universe of journals? Apparently, a universe big enough to include journals that publish “research” articles on dog astrology and UFO abductions.

Bickford continues, similarly destroying the “What about Galileo?” and “We don’t need experts” objections, leading to this conclusion:

There’s always room for doubt. But there has to be a point — if we’re going to make any attempt at all at trying to be objective — that we have to admit that we’re trying too hard [to avoid the truth]. And I think that for people who are on the side I was a few years ago, I think we should admit that we’ve reached that point.

Rachel Held Evans on the damage Christianity is suffering from the culture wars. After reviewing some research showing how young adults (even those raised in Christian households and even young church-goers) view Christianity’s anti-gay image negatively and are shamed by what they see as un-Christ-like hostility towards their gay and lesbian friends, Evans gives her personal observations. When she speaks at Christian colleges, she finds that “every single student I have spoken with believes that the Church has mishandled its response to homosexuality.“

On the evening when North Carolina’s anti-gay Amendment One was passing by a wide margin, Evans saw a pattern in her Twitter feed:

Christians over 40 were celebrating. Christians under 40 were mourning. Reading through the comments, the same thought kept returning to my mind as occurred to me when I first saw that [pro-amendment] Billy Graham ad:

You’re losing us.

I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again…(though I’m starting to think that no one is listening):

My generation is tired of the culture wars.

Back when gays were in the closet, you could make them out to be any kind of hobgoblins you wanted. All the scary talk about a “gay agenda” depends on that image: sinister conspirators out to destroy everything good and decent in the world.

But to folks under 40, gays and lesbians are their friends from high school. They decorated homecoming floats together and washed cars side-by-side to raise money to send the French Club to Paris.

We know too many wonderful people from the LGBT community to consider homosexuality a mere “issue.” These are people, and they are our friends. When they tell us that something hurts them, we listen.

Evans says her generation wants to “stop waging war and start washing feet”. Translating for those who don’t speak Christian: They want to help people rather than beat them down, and practice their religion humbly rather than be authoritarian ideologues. If they can’t do that inside the church, she says, they’ll do it somewhere else.

Nick Hanauer. This guy was an early investor in Amazon, and then made several other piles of money by starting little-fish companies that he eventually sold to bigger fish like Microsoft. In other words: not a communist, not a fifth-generation Rockefeller who has forgotten where his trust fund came from, not an academic economist who has never made or sold anything.

Hanauer’s 6-minute TED talk addresses one question: Who are the job creators? You might expect him to answer, “People like me.” But he doesn’t.

If there was no one around who could afford to buy what we had to sell, all those companies [I helped start] and all those jobs would have evaporated. That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs. Nor do businesses, large or small.

Jobs are a consequence of a circle-of-life-like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary consumer is more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

… Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a course of last resort for capitalists. It’s what we do if and only if rising consumer demand requires it.

After displaying graphs of rising income and falling tax rates for the rich since 1980, he comments:

If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth for the wealthy led to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.

But when the middle class thrives, businesses grow and everyone does better. So he concludes:

In a capitalistic economy, the true job creators are middle-class consumers. And taxing the rich to make investments that make the middle class grow and thrive, is the single shrewdest thing we can do for the middle class, for the poor, and for the rich.

At first, Hanauer’s talk didn’t appear on the TED website — not all of them do — leading National Journal to bill the talk as “too hot for TED“. This prompted a TED official to post “the real story“, claiming that the audience gave the talk mediocre ratings:

a non-story about a talk not being chosen, because we believed we had better ones, somehow got turned into a scandal about censorship.

Even that spin, though, implies that TED and its audience are not very representative. Once the YouTube got out, it quickly went viral and has been seen (so far) by over 400,000 people.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (11)

Everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030

May 14, 2012 – 12:36 pm

OK, everybody may be an exaggeration. Let’s just say every politician of any significance: every presidential candidate, every governor, every member of congress, and the leadership of every party in every house of every state legislature.

Two charts tell you all you need to know about the politics of same-sex marriage. First, it has long-term momentum:

Second, it has the most inexorable kind of momentum there is: generational. Each day a few more supporters turn 18 and a few more opponents die. That’s how it’s going to be for a long, long time.

Explain it to the kids. That’s why President Obama explained his own change of heart this way:

Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents. And Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

This is how taboos fall. One generation genuinely believes in the taboo. The next follows it out of habit, but can’t defend it. And finally there’s a generation that challenges: The kids ask “Why?” and their parents have no answer.

Many of those parents will stay stuck in their ways, but politicians can’t afford to. They have to follow the majority, even if it goes against what they’ve stood for in the past.

We’ve seen this happen before.

Race and the Owens-Louis kids. When Jesse Owens won Olympic gold in Munich in 1936, and then Joe Louis defended his boxing title against Max Schmeling in a sold-out Yankee Stadium in 1938, the rooting wasn’t black vs. white. It was America vs. Nazi Germany.

To many of the white American kids who listened to those two events on the radio, it only made sense to let Jackie Robinson play major league baseball in 1947, and later, to start breaking down color barriers all across society.

When Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? raised the interracial marriage taboo in 1967, the Owens-Louis kids were the generation in between the Tracy-Hepburn parents and their Sidney-Poitier-dating daughter. They knew interracial marriage was still beyond the pale. Most of them would never consider it themselves. But they couldn’t explain why.

When the Owens-Louis generation reached middle age in the 1970s, segregationist politicians had to capitulate. In 1963 George Wallace could pledge “segregation forever”. In 1970 he successfully ran a race-baiting campaign for governor. But by 1979 he was saying, “I was wrong. Those days are over and they ought to be over.”

The 1970s didn’t end racism — racists can still dog-whistle and use code words — but they ended the days when a politician could stake out an openly racist position and hope to win on it, even in Alabama.

Today, the Owens-Louis kids are the old folks, and returning to Jim Crow is as unthinkable as returning to slavery. Whenever same-sex marriage proponents are allowed to make the link to interracial marriage, the argument is over. No public figure will defend banning interracial marriage — a practice that was controversial even to talk about in 1967.

The Willow-Tara generation. In its acceptance of gays and lesbians, sports has trailed the culture rather than leading it. The characters who changed our thinking about homosexuality are more likely to be fictional ones we met through TV and movies.

In the late 1970s, it was edgy for Jack even to pretend to be gay on Three’s Company. Gay and lesbian minor characters started appearing on dramas like Hill Street Blues in the 1980s. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his starring role as a sympathetic gay character in Philadelphia in 1993. From 1998-2006 Will and Grace (cited by Vice President Biden) centered on a gay man’s friendship with a straight woman.

I decided to symbolize this generation with a fictional same-sex couple almost exactly the age of the oldest Millennials: Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose relationship began right around the turn of the millennium.

Earlier pop-culture characters got viewers sympathizing with the problems of gay and lesbian individuals and their same-sex relationships. But for most of two seasons Willow and Tara raised a different question: What if there is no problem? What if two people of the same gender meet and fall in love and are happy together?

Like Willow and Tara, the oldest Millennials are about 50 years younger than the Owens-Louis kids. So as a guess, let’s set the 2020s as the decade of capitulation on gay rights: Every major politician will either leave the business or have a change-of-heart by 2030. Even conservatives, even in the Bible Belt.

Remember the Dixiecrats. Does that seem unthinkable? What about Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and younger politicians who seem eager to follow their lead? But what about Strom Thurmond, who during his Dixiecrat presidential campaign of 1948 said:

that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

In 1971 Senator Thurmond integrated his staff, and in 1983 he voted to honor Martin Luther King with a federal holiday. The sincerity of his transformation may be dubious, but he had to make it.

Biden first. The leading edge of gay-rights capitulation is in the Northeast and among Democrats. So it’s no coincidence that President Obama was put on the spot by Vice President Biden. Whatever happens in 2012, Biden is looking down the road to the Democratic primaries of 2016. No way a Democrat with an ambivalent gay-rights position wins in New Hampshire (where same-sex marriage is already legal) in 2016.

Politicians can read trend lines. If you hope to win statewide office in the Northeast or in California in 2020 — or anywhere in 2030 — you can’t be against same-sex marriage. The question isn’t whether you’ll change, it’s when.

The ancient ship Homophobia has had a long run, but it is going down. While it may take years to sink completely, no politician wants to go down with it. Those with any sense are already checking the exits and plotting their departure.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (12)

77 Cents

May 7, 2012 – 1:27 pm

Last week I linked to a sexist exchange on Meet the Press where Alex Castellanos all but pinched Rachel Maddow’s cheek and told her she’s cute when she’s angry. (He didn’t quite go that far, but it would have been a logical next step.)

Lots of people (including Rachel herself Monday evening) came back to that argument (probably making it one of the most widely viewed MTP segments in some while), asking the proper now-that-the-dust-has-settled question: Forget how outrageous Castellanos’ manner was or how well Maddow responded – who was right?

Context. The subject was the political gender gap, and Rachel was arguing that it is based on policy rather than image. Romney can’t win over women voters just by giving his wife a more prominent role in the campaign or sending other female surrogates out to campaign for him, because his policies give women good reasons not to like him.

To support that point, she brought up gender inequality in the workplace: Women make less than men. President Obama pushed and signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for women to sue for workplace discrimination. Romney won’t say whether he would have signed that bill or not. (But he has promised not to try to repeal it.) So in terms of substantive policy, what is Romney’s plan for ending gender discrimination in the workplace?

She didn’t get that far. As soon as she said “Women in this economy still make 77 cents on the dollar for what men make” Castellanos interrupted, saying “there are reasons” why women make less than men. When asked specifically, “Do women make less than men for the same work?” he answered “No.”

So who’s right? I find this kind of discussion hard to follow on TV, where it’s so easy for each side to talk past the other, shifting the argument to a slightly different issue rather than directly refuting or admitting the point just made by the other side. But now that I’m sitting at my computer, with time on my side and Google and Wikipedia strapped onto my utility belt, who’s right?

First observation: Who’s right about what?

The argument has one major issue in the background: Do women face workplace discrimination? Several similar-but-not-identical factual questions relate to that issue:

  • On average, do working women make less money that working men? This one is easy, and the answer is yes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that men working fulltime in 2011 averaged $832 a week, while women working fulltime made $684 – 82 cents on the dollar. (The 77 cents number came from 2010 and was based on annual earnings rather than weekly. I’m not completely sure why that makes a difference.) In general, things have been slowly equalizing; the weekly-earnings number was 62 cents in 1979.
  • Do women make less money than men for the same quantity and quality of the same work? This is a tougher question, because how do you define “same quantity and quality”? For any two workers, you can almost always find some difference in their qualifications or duties or output. The question is whether we’re talking about legitimate distinctions or ones dreamed up after-the-fact to justify discrimination. It seems undeniable that some women make less for the same quantity and quality of the same work – Lilly Ledbetter, for example. If this never happened, Romney could cheerfully support the Fair Pay Act knowing that it makes no actual difference.
  • How much of the pay gap between men and women is due to discrimination? This has come to be the center of the debate, and it’s what I wanted to focus on, but I can’t because the research either wasn’t as clear or as easy to find as I wanted. So I offer an IOU: I’ll get back to it next week after I’ve had more time to sift through the numbers.

Here’s what I’m looking for: The insidious thing about this argument is that pay-gap-due-to-discrimination is not something you can measure directly. All you can do is start with the 82 cents on the dollar and see how much of that deficit you can attribute to some legitimate cause. After you allow for everything reasonable you can think of, you can say with some confidence that the rest of the pay gap is unreasonable.

So what I’d like to find is a study that chips away: X cents is due to men and women being in different professions. Y cents is due to women entering high-paying professions recently and so still being relatively younger than their male colleagues. Z cents comes from having less seniority because they interrupted their careers to have children. And so on, leading to D cents that is inexplicable unless employers discriminate.

I can find pieces of that, but I’ll hold them for next week in hopes of painting a clearer picture.

In the remainder of this post, I’d like to knock off some side-issues.

The just-so story. On Meet the Press, Castellanos made this argument: If the 77 cents thing were true, then

every greedy businessman in America would hire only women, save 25% and be hugely profitable.

Let me turn that logic back on itself: If Castellanos’ argument were true, then there would never have been any wage discrimination in America against any group ever.

All through the 1930s, any greedy owner of a major league baseball team could have hired can’t-miss stars like Satchell Paige or Josh Gibson for peanuts. (Gibson, the “black Babe Ruth” died at 35, three months before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Paige arrived in the majors in 1948, well past his prime. At age 47, he was still good enough to pitch in the 1953 All-Star game.)

No owners did. Why? You’d have to ask them. But discrimination does happen. It can’t be dismissed with a just-so story about capitalism.

Are statistics the whole story? If gender discrimination happens at all, it’s wrong and should be illegal, independent of whether it happens often enough to affect the averages. Since when do we decide moral issues by statistics? (Compare: Pro-life activists are not mollified by the fact that partial-birth abortions are an insignificant percentage of all abortions.)

What’s reasonable? Kevin Drum was all over this point: A lot of what is considered a “reasonable” explanation of the pay gap is just discrimination by a different name.

When all’s said and done, women are punished financially in three different ways: because “women’s jobs” have historically paid less than jobs dominated by men; because women are expected to take time off when they have children, which reduces their seniority; and because even when they’re in the same job with the same amount of experience, they get paid less than men. All of these things are part of the pay gap. Whether you call all three of them “discrimination” is more a matter of taste than anything else.

What’s a problem? As Kevin pointed out, many women interrupt their careers for children. For the moment, leave aside the question of whether men’s careers should be equally disrupted. I just want to point out that there was a time in American history when large numbers of men had their careers disrupted: World War II.

When they came back from the war, our country decided that those interrupted careers were a problem, and something should be done about it. Hence, the G.I. Bill of Rights, which paid for millions of returning servicemen to go to college or get some other kind of training.

When women come back to the workforce after raising children, though, they’re on their own. That’s a kind of discrimination right there.

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Gays Need Not Apply

May 7, 2012 – 11:41 am

Richard Grenell is gay. Here’s the signal his appointment as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman was supposed to send:

When Grenell’s appointment was announced last month, most observers took it as a sign that Romney was starting to move to the center to win moderate and independent voters in November, a welcome change after a Republican primary process often dominated by religious-right candidates such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.

Foreign-policy-wise, Grenell is a Bush-administration guy with impeccable neo-conservative credentials. So if anything, his appointment made the substance of the Romney campaign even more conservative.

But Grenell is gay. (Did I mention that already?) So he symbolized that Romney isn’t totally under the thumb of the Religious Right.

But then the Religious Right looked under its thumb and said, “Where’s Mitt?”

The reaction of the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is worth watching, because if I just describe it you’ll think I’m exaggerating.

Fischer says this very slowly, so his radio listeners can appreciate just how beyond the pale the situation is:

Richard Grenell is an out, loud, and proud homosexual. And he is now the face of the Romney campaign on national security and foreign policy.

Horrors! Fischer begins by discussing Grenell’s advocacy of same-sex marriage in New York state (which I suppose could become a foreign policy issue if New York secedes from the Union) and then goes off on how homosexuals want to change the marriage laws, but

they don’t actually care about getting married … because they are not about commitment. Homosexuals are about short-lived relationships and frequent anonymous sexual encounters. … Now whether Grenell indulges in that, I don’t know.

Ignorance is never a reason to stay silent, though, so Fischer launches into a minute-long rant about gay promiscuity in general. You know: up to 1000 sexual partners, men having sex in public parks and restrooms, and so on. And then suddenly we’re talking about Grenell again. The segue goes like this:

This is endemic in the homosexual community: these random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters. And that becomes a serious issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.

Finely honed logic like that may be why Fischer’s lead was followed by other theocrats like Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer. And then not-specifically-religious voices like National Review and Daily Caller weighed in against Grenell.

For two weeks — even when the issue-of-the-day was a national security thing like the killing of Osama bin Laden —  Romney kept Grenell in the closet (which kind of nullifies the whole “spokesman” thing) and waited for the storm to blow over. The campaign claims they wanted him to stay, but when Grenell was instructed not to speak during a national-security conference call he had organized, it was too much. He resigned.

Fischer was triumphant:

This is a huge win…. I will flat-out guarantee you [Romney] is not going to make this mistake again. There is no way in the world that Mitt Romney is going to put a homosexual activist in any position of importance in his campaign.

He’s probably right. Mitt learned his lesson — and so should moderate swing voters.

The key to the art of flip-flopping is convincing people that you were lying to the other guy; your true heart is in what you’re saying now. As he heads towards the general election, Romney needs to be retiring severely conservative Mitt and taking Massachusetts moderate Mitt out of mothballs. Because … you know (shrug, wink), you have to say a bunch of crazy shit to get nominated. That was then; this is now.

The theocrats aren’t going to go along with that. And it doesn’t matter which version of Romney holds his true heart, as long as he wears a dog collar and the likes of Bryan Fischer hold a very short leash.

If that’s the case in a general election campaign, when swing voters have the most leverage, won’t it be even more true after Inauguration Day?

And finally, Romney’s willingness to be dominated raises an authentic foreign policy question that even the theocrats should be asking. Bring it home, Bryan Fischer:

if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership.

At last, Bryan, you and I can agree on something.

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The Sifted Bookshelf: “Delirium” by Nancy Cohen

April 16, 2012 – 11:42 am

What if all the conventional wisdom about culture-war politics is wrong? You know the stuff I’m talking about:

  • The social issues favor Republicans. Coastal elites may have progressive attitudes towards female equality, reproductive rights, guns, gay rights, and so on. But the broad mass of ordinary Americans is deeply conservative.
  • Clinton and Carter proved that Democrats have to court the Bubba vote. The angry-white-male “Reagan Democrats” are the key to winning national elections.
  • The public doesn’t trust the moral values of liberals. McGovern and Mondale went down because they were too far left, Gore was tarred by Clinton’s sins, and so on.
  • Abortion caused the Religious Right to rise up. The preachers saw Roe v Wade and knew they had to take action to defend their long-held moral values.

In Delirium: How the sexual counterrevolution is polarizing America, historian Nancy Cohen looks back over the politics of the last half-century and concludes that it didn’t happen like that. This is a rich book, full of forgotten detail, but one over-arching story comes through: It’s the Religious Right that’s unpopular with the larger electorate. When “values voters” win, they win by stealth and re-interpret the results afterward.

The clearest examples are the Republican mid-term victories in 1994 and 2010. In both cases, overall turnout was low, Religious-Right turnout was high, and the public campaigns focused on other issues. Both the 1994 Contract With America and the 2010 Tea Party stayed away from culture-war issues in public, while assuring Religious-Right leaders behind the scenes that they would act on culture-war issues once they got elected (which they have). Candidates who missed the memo on stealth — Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Joe Miller — went down to defeat.

The conservative formula for success is simple: You want the invisible Religious Right networks of viral email and church study groups behind you, and you want evangelicals ringing doorbells and making phone calls for you, but your public campaign should have as little to do with them and their issues as possible. In 2000, all the fundamentalists knew that George W. Bush was their man, but he won with a moderate image as a “uniter” and a “compassionate conservative”.

Conversely, Bill Clinton may speak with a Bubba accent, but he won in 1992 while publicly reaching out to both feminists and gays to a greater extent than any previous major-party candidate. And the more that Republicans tried to make Clinton’s personal sex life an issue, the more popular he got. Clinton left office with a higher approval rating than Ronald Reagan. Al Gore’s biggest mistake was to distance himself from the popular Clinton in an effort to placate the evangelicals who voted for Bush anyway.

The other striking theme from Delirium is that abortion is an issue-of-opportunity for the Right. The original issues are gender equality and sex. To hear them tell it now, the Religious Right was always against abortion because the Bible is against it. When Roe v Wade made abortion legal, leaders like Jerry Falwell knew they had to get involved in politics.

In fact, the causality worked in the other direction. The Bible says next to nothing about abortion, and gives no support to the bizarre idea of ensoulment-at-conception. (As best I can determine, no one held this belief until recent centuries, and Protestants didn’t pick it up in any numbers until the late 1970s, when their politics demanded a clearer theological reason to condemn abortion.) When Roe v Wade was decided in 1972, many conservative religious leaders supported abortion rights or had no opinion on the issue.

The Religious Right actually began when conservative Christian women began organizing against the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. Abortion was not their major issue. Only after Lottie Beth Hobbs had established the grass-roots potential of an anti-feminist religious movement and drew its battle lines did the male preachers join in. Jerry Falwell didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978.

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Girls Heart Republicans and other short notes

April 16, 2012 – 11:25 am

In case you were having trouble figuring it out, Herman Cain explained the Obama/Romney gender gap to the Fox News audience:

Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies — which is what most people disagree with — it’s a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people.

Which leads Digby to ask: “Who are those ‘other people’ (besides men) you speak of?”

You know, Digby: Girls. Those darling little ladies who swoon at pictures of Obama’s cute kids and don’t worry their pretty little heads about manly subjects like health care or the trade deficit. They say all kinds of silly things to pollsters, but come November their menfolk will set them straight and they’ll vote for Romney. (They’ll probably pout about it for a week or two afterwards — and their heads-of-household might want to be careful about eating the meatloaf on Inauguration Day — but they’ll do what they’re told.)

I’m glad Cain explained it so clearly. Otherwise, I’d have no idea why girls might not like Republicans. Well, there’s the whole we-want-you-to-carry-a-dead-fetus-to-term thing. But that’s yucky. I’m sure girls don’t think about stuff like that.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is another Republican girls ought to love. He dismissed the whole war-on-women theme by pointing to female Republican senators who agree with him:

There is no issue. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine I think would be the first to say — and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska — ‘we don’t see any evidence of this.’

Except … well, they actually say the exact opposite. ThinkProgress observes:

Three of the four women McConnell names have already come out against the GOP’s war on women — Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). In fact, Murkowski specifically pushed back on claims like McConnell’s, saying, “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

Doesn’t that make you want to elect some more Republican senators so that McConnell can be majority leader?

You might think that a Republican woman who gets herself elected senator (like Murkowski or Snowe or Hutchison) might finally get some respect, that the men might listen to her (on women’s issues, at the very least) and not just use her as cover in a some-of-my-best-friends-are-dames way.

Think again.

A new study links conservatism to “low-effort thought”.

when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

It makes a certain amount of sense. In situations where you don’t have two brain cells to rub together, you default to stereotypes and justifying the status quo.

If I’m stressed or tired, it’s much harder to think compassionately or generously. Much easier to think like this: Is there a problem? Somebody ought to find out whose fault it is and kick their butts.

As ego-boosting as this study is for liberals, there might be more to learn than that: When somebody who ordinarily seems to be a good person repeats some ridiculous conservative talking point, maybe the right response is just to say: “Seriously?” Don’t slap them down, just encourage them to think a little harder.

Jim Robinson, founder of the conservative community blog Free Republic, announces an anti-Romney revolt.

I’ve stated many times since Romney started running for the presidency way back when that I’d never vote for him and I will not. … There will be no campaign for this Massachusetts liberal liar on FR!!

Uh, Jim, why?

Romney is a pathological compulsive liar. Lie after lie papered over with more lies. Doesn’t even flinch when caught in bald faced lies, simply tells another big whopper to cover up or dodge the issue. Funny thing, the man actually seems to believe his own latest lies and simply ignores the glaring record of his past actions/lies.

Check out the comments Robinson gets: overwhelmingly positive, with only the occasional “Are you nuts?” thrown in.

That “liar” meme is catching on. Steve Benen is up to #13 in his ongoing series Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity. Most of it isn’t spin or shading; it’s real that-never-happened stuff.

Crazy Congresspeople #1: Missouri’s Todd Akin explains to a constituent why his fellow Republicans in Congress hasn’t impeached President Obama yet:

I can’t speak for the other 400 and some congressmen, but I believe when they take a look at impeachment the question is do you have the votes to do it?

You don’t need, like, grounds to impeach a Democratic president, just (as Hunter at Daily Kos summarizes): “You know, stuff.”

Crazy Congresspeople #2: Florida’s Rep. Alan West knows how many “card-carrying Marxists” are in Congress: 78 to 81. He later clarified that he was referring to every member of the Progressive Caucus.

Hey, Alan: They did away with cards years ago. It’s all biometrics now. And sub-dermal computer chips. Have you checked for those? Communists have their alien allies insert them into your body while you’re asleep.

Crazy Congresspeople #3: North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who has

very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.

She knows there’s no reason for it because she and her husband graduated with almost no debt back in the 60s, when states gave more support to schools like her alma mater UNC and tuition was much lower. (I’ve already told you what I think about student debt.)

Let’s add a crazy state legislator to the list: Iowa’s Mark Chelgren proposed that child-support-paying Dads should be able to demand that their ex-wives take a drug test. (No War on Women here.)

You know who’s not conservative enough now? Orrin Hatch. Not so long ago he held down the far-right end of the Senate, but the Tea Party has moved past him. “I despise these people,” he says.

Teen pregnancy is down, but it’s still highest in the states that encourage abstinence-only sex education.

A 72-year-old grandmother tells the story of her abortion in 1978 in No One Called Me a Slut. It was a difficult decision, but she was treated with respect and she hasn’t regretted what she did.

I have five grandsons and three granddaughters, and I passionately want each one of them to be responsible and have the same legal right to choose that I had.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See

March 26, 2012 – 1:38 pm

I tend to filter out crime stories, because so often they get more coverage than they deserve, like O. J. Simpson. So I’ve been slow to catch on to the significance of the Trayvon Martin story. But lately this has turned into a meta-story: reactions to the killing say even more about our country than the killing itself did.

The basic facts are simple: A white-Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer (George Zimmerman) got suspicious of a 140-pound black teen-ager (Trayvon Martin) for no apparent reason. He called 911, and the dispatcher told him not to follow the kid. Zimmerman followed anyway. Some kind of confrontation ensued and he shot Martin dead. Martin was unarmed and had nothing easily mistaken for a weapon, but the police accepted Zimmerman’s self-defense claim (in spite of at least one witness who denied it) and let him walk away. That all happened back on February 26, there’s still been no arrest, and the local African-American community is getting pretty upset about it.

The story points out the continuing presence of racism in America. To some segment of the population, being black raises suspicion all by itself. Probably Zimmerman is not the kind of racist who would go out hunting black teens at random. Probably he really believed that Martin was planning some kind of mischief, and that Martin must be armed, so that he had to shoot first once the confrontation started. But why did he think that? Why did he frame the situation in such a way that shoot-to-kill seemed sensible?

And why did the police find his story credible and his actions excusable? You’re an armed white adult chasing an unarmed black teen-ager you outweigh by about 100 pounds. Naturally, you would feel threatened.

That’s the kind of racism that is still endemic in every nook and cranny of America. We’re almost entirely past the “I don’t hire niggers” phase, but still in a phase of “he just doesn’t look trustworthy to me”. What would look like a well-deserved break for a white employee is goofing off when a black does it. An ordinary mental glitch becomes evidence of low intelligence, and so on.

Being black is no longer three strikes against you, but it’s still one or two.

By and large, White America doesn’t want to believe that. Last year a poll found that 51% of whites (also 60% of Republicans and 68% of people who name Fox as their most trusted news source) say that reverse discrimination against whites is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

You can see just how badly White America doesn’t want to believe in its continuing racism by how it has reacted to the Martin story. Fox News did its best to ignore the whole thing. ThinkProgress totaled up how much attention each cable news network gave the Martin story during its first three weeks:

Compare this to Fox’s obsessive coverage of a series of scary-black-people stories. For example, it devoted 95 segments totaling 8 hours of air time to the trumped-up voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

Or check out how the Glenn-Beck-founded blog The Blaze has covered Martin’s death. Searching on the word “Trayvon” got me 15 stories, five of which were about the scary ways black people are reacting to the incident — the New Black Panther Party (of course), Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and the New Black Liberation Militia. The Sharpton post ends by raising more suspicion about Martin. (He was on a 10-day suspension from school, and “Sources sympathetic to Martin say he was suspended for ‘excessive tardiness’.” But the Blaze makes sure we know all the more serious stuff that a 10-day suspension could be about.)

A sixth Blaze post quotes Beck himself, who is worried not about white vigilantes, but about black extremists “winding everybody up”:

“We have this extremist African-American militia group that says they’re just going to come in and handle it. You’re got Al Sharpton winding everybody up. You’ve got Color For Change winding everybody up.” … Beck ceded that the man who shot Trayvon could indeed be a racist, but that many of his detractors are driven by a racial agenda too, and thus are everything they claim to stand against.

Got that? You should focus not on what actually happened to an innocent black teen, but on what “extremist” black groups might do. Zimmerman could be a racist, but blacks and liberals upset by the Martin story are racists.

So the beat goes on: For the part of the media that panders to I-am-not-a-racist whites, the Martin story is just one more example of racism against whites and one more reason for white people to be afraid of black people.

Among the presidential candidates, only Newt Gingrich directly pandered to white racists by turning the incident into a reverse-racism story. President Obama had reached out to Martin’s parents, saying “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Gingrich’s response:

Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. … When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.

Gingrich glossed over the whole walking-while-black angle that makes the story important: If Trayvon Martin had been white, he might not have been shot at all. George Zimmerman “turned it into a racial issue”, not President Obama.

While researching this case, I learned something interesting about the law: Self defense falls into a class known as affirmative defenses. In other words, at your trial you’re not just looking at the state and saying “Prove I did it”, you’re making assertions about facts that are supposed to exonerate you. When you do that, part of the burden of proof shifts to you.

So the state does not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense. In making a self-defense plea, Zimmerman would be conceding that he killed Martin, and he would then need to convince the jury of his self-defense claim by a preponderance of evidence (not beyond reasonable doubt).

Want some background music to read this piece by? Try Eminem’s “White America“:

Look at these eyes:
Baby blue, baby, just like yaself.
If they were brown, Shady lose,
Shady sits on the shelf.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments (28)

The Republic of Babel

March 5, 2012 – 1:36 pm

I owe a debt to this year’s crop of presidential candidates. Time and again, one of them says something so outrageous that it brings my thoughts into focus.

First it was Herman Cain saying, “If you’re not rich, blame yourself!” Until that moment, I had vaguely wondered about the role of shame in keeping the 99% down, but it took Herman to crystalize it for me.

More recently, Rick Santorum has been my teacher:

When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left? The French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.

Yep. Secular government inevitably leads to the Reign of Terror. (If you don’t believe it, go visit some secular hellhole like … just about anyplace in Europe, where mobs roam the streets beheading people at will.) Blue Texan has already exposed Santorum’s ignorance of the actual French Revolution, but I want to go somewhere else with the quote: What the heck is Santorum talking about? What could be burning so brightly in his mind that he needs this mangled French Revolution analogy to express it?

I think Santorum has mushed two ideas together: One is an important insight that I wish everyone would think about, and the other is totally wrong. Here’s how I pull it apart:

  • Important insight: American democracy is losing its language of discourse.
  • Wrong: Until recently, conservative Christianity provided that language.

Put them together and you get Santorum’s point: Unless we get back to God, our democracy is going to fall apart.

But let’s not put them together. Let’s discuss the insightful part first, and then step around the Evangelical rabbit hole Santorum has fallen down.

Language in the broad sense. By “losing our language” I don’t mean English. I’m thinking about all the social and intellectual infrastructure that allows us to talk through our differences: taken-for-granted assumptions, shared frames, common concepts, a portfolio of shared heroes to emulate, and so on.

Sharing a language of discourse with somebody doesn’t mean that you necessarily agree. But it does mean that you can explain your problems to each other and empathize with each other’s difficulties. It means that you have some basis on which you can construct a compromise.

Dictatorships can get along without that kind of language. A master-slave relationship functions just fine with grunts and gestures and maybe a few words of pidgin-speak. Common understanding? Just show the slave what to do and beat him until he does it.

But democracies need to be able to talk. I have to know more than just what you want to do or want me to do. I need to understand why you want what you want, and I need to be able to explain why I want something different. We have to be able to discuss the nuances of our hopes and fears and plans — what’s absolutely essential and what isn’t — so that we can cobble together a solution that we can all live with.

A democracy that can’t do that devolves into mob rule or military coup or Potemkin elections that rubber-stamp decisions already made by a governing elite. That’s when the French Revolution analogy starts to make sense: Without a language of discourse, you can have Robespierre or you can have Napoleon, but you can’t really achieve Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Consensus and compromise. The Bible doesn’t tell us what kind of government developed in post-Tower Babel. But we can be pretty sure it wasn’t a democracy.

As I’ve described in more detail elsewhere, democracy only works when the issues worth killing and dying for — genocide, slavery, the legitimacy of the property system, and a few others — have already been decided by consensus. Otherwise you’ll have civil war, because the 49% will not march meekly to their fate.

In that essay, though, I treated consensus as a static thing — as it is in the short term. But any lasting democracy has to be able to evolve consensus on new issues as they come up. That can happen if you have a language of discourse. You can make temporary compromises and tinker with them over time until they acquire the prestige of tradition.

Think about pacifism, which is as stark a moral issue as any: To one side, war is humankind’s greatest evil. To the other, it’s essential to defending our way of life. What room is there for compromise?

And yet, we have compromised: The nation continues to defend itself, but pacifists who don’t interfere with the military aren’t jailed or considered traitors. They’re allowed to claim conscientious objector status in a draft, but their taxes support the military just like everyone else’s.

No simple principle would lay down that boundary, but each part of it has become time-honored.

Now think about abortion, where the argument has not really changed since Roe vs. Wade. Either you want to kill babies or you want to subjugate women. It’s been that way for 40 years.

What the Culture War is about. When you grasp the Babel problem, you see the Culture War in a whole new light. What we’re fighting about isn’t abortion or homosexuality or traditional values or even religion. We’re fighting about what the language of American democracy is going to be. What worldview is going to frame the issues that we will then debate and vote on?

One candidate is a secular worldview of reason and science. Another is the worldview of conservative Christianity.

Either one could work, up to a point, if we could reach consensus on it. And neither would require that everyone convert to that worldview completely, only that everyone learn to speak that language in the public square.

Other religious worldviews could work as well as Christianity. There’s no inherent reason we couldn’t have an Islamic Republic or a Jewish Republic or a Hindu Republic, if that’s what we decided we wanted.

But what we can’t have is a Republic of Babel. Not for long.

The Language of the Founders. You know whose language of discourse really worked? The Founders.

The Constitution is a masterwork of compromise. Effective government vs. individual rights; state power vs. federal power; the mob vs. the propertied elite — they worked out a series of good-enough solutions that let the country move forward. Only slavery was too much for them, and even then their band-aids held things together for most of a century, giving their children and grandchildren a chance to avert disaster.

You think abortion or same-sex marriage would have stumped the Founders? No way.

That’s why there’s so much Founder-nostalgia today. At the Constitutional Convention, problems didn’t just sit there, and factions didn’t move further and further apart forever. Whatever came up, they figured out how to keep the process moving.

One frustrating part of Founder-nostalgia is the unending clash of examples “proving” that they were either for or against religion: Franklin calling for prayer at the Constitutional Convention (and invoking the threat of Babel), or Adams signing the Treaty of Tripoli declaring that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”.

It goes round and round. If you’re selective, you can quote Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin on either side. Washington was a lifelong Anglican, but he didn’t take communion. No one knows why.

The reason we keep arguing about this is that we’re asking the wrong question. It doesn’t really matter what theology the Founders believed in their private hearts. What matters is how religion influenced their public language of discourse.

God in the Declaration. The most quoted phrase of the Declaration of Independence is

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights

This mention of “the Creator” is supposed to back up the claim that the Founders’ worldview was fundamentally religious, and to counter the observation that God was completely left out of the Constitution.

God is mentioned exactly two other times in the Declaration: “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the first paragraph and “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” in the last.

Interestingly, these phrases were altered from Jefferson’s original draft. The edits cut both ways. “Self-evident” (an Enlightenment philosophical term) was originally “sacred and undeniable” (a religious term). Rights originally came “from that equal creation” with no personification of the Creator. And “Divine Providence” did not appear at all.

Notice what you don’t find in any version of the Declaration: Jesus Christ, the God of Abraham, or any other sectarian name of God. God is given purely functional names that any monotheistic religion would recognize. (Even a polytheistic Hindu would understand: “Creator” means Brahma, and “Divine Providence” refers to Vishnu the Preserver.) The Declaration finds God in the Laws of Nature, but it makes no no reference to any sect’s scripture.

Now think about the era: 18th-century science provided no well-founded theories of origin — no big bang, no primordial soup in which proteins could randomly develop, no evolution by natural selection. If you talked about origins and foundations at all, you ended up talking in religious terms, because there was nothing else. (David Hume was as close to an atheist as the 18th century allowed. The participants in his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” eventually converge on a theory of intelligent design.)

So here’s what you (and Rick Santorum) should notice about the Founders’ most important products: The Declaration and the Constitution were written in the most secular language that existed in that era.

But weren’t the Founders religious? Individually, yes. But they didn’t all have the same religion, and they knew it. Patrick Henry would fit right in at a fundamentalist megachurch in Virginia today. If he brought Franklin along, old Ben would probably keep his objections to himself and leave everyone charmed. But Jefferson and Madison would get themselves ejected in short order, and an outspoken New England Universalist like Ethan Allen would be completely beyond the pale.

What’s more, the Founders could see the bad example of England, where Anglicans, Catholics, and Puritans had been hanging each other since Henry VIII. That, they knew, is where sectarian government leads.

But unlike the worst excesses of the later French Revolution, the Founders didn’t attempt to eliminate religion or create a new one. Instead, their public gatherings worked in secular language, because that was a language that everyone could understand. If you needed sectarian language to justify what you wanted to do, they figured, the government probably shouldn’t be doing it.

The Secular Tribe. Something important has changed between the 18th century and today: Secularism has developed into a more complete worldview. It has a theory of origins, a psychology, and humanistic ethics. 18th-century secularism did not threaten sectarian worldviews any more than medieval Latin threatened vernacular French or Spanish. One was a rich, earthly language of everyday life and the other a more philosophically subtle language for widespread professional communities.

In the 18th century, essentially no one spoke Secular at home, so it was not involved in the tribal rivalries of the individual sects. But today, many people do speak Secular at home. And so, while I think it’s a mistake to talk about Secularism as if it were a rival religion, it is a rival tribe. Today, secularism is part of many people’s individual identity. And so, demanding that other people express themselves in secular terms in public can mean that I want them to adopt my tribal identity and abandon their own.

More and more, then, the sects are digging in their heels against this threat to their identity. They are building their own parallel institutions and becoming separatist. As they do this, they are developing their own set of acceptable “facts” and establishing defenses against any non-sectarian evidence or logic. (The idea that the Founders established a Christian Republic is one those false “facts” they are rallying around.)

If that trend continues, it will kill democracy. Elections will give one side or the other a temporary advantage, but will solve nothing for the long term. When the options on the ballot are Kill Babies and Subjugate Women, the losing side just reloads and tries again.

How do we save democracy? First, we have to realize what we’re doing. Whether you speak Secular or Evangelical or something else entirely at home, you need to stop trying to use the public square to validate your identity. That’s not what the public square is for.

Second, all sides need to examine themselves for tribalism — secularists most of all, perhaps, because many of us are unaware of the possibility of secular tribalism. We may need to construct a meta-secular language that purges the tribalism out of secularism. Religious people need to keep asking what is really essential to their religion and what is simply a tradition that has become a comfortable habit and a source of tribal identity.

Third, we all need to understand that a compromise that allows us to live together is an achievement and not a corruption.

Finally, we all need to stretch our understanding and strain to hear each other’s deepest meanings rather than react reflexively against whatever we can perceive as an insult. The Republic of Babel cannot last, but it can move in either direction: towards the war of all against all, or towards the struggle of all to understand all.

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Rush’s Apology and other short notes

March 5, 2012 – 1:03 pm

You already know the basic story: Republicans didn’t let Georgetown student Sandra Fluke testify at their committee hearing on religious liberty vs. reproductive rights, resulting in that famous all-men-at-the-table photo.

So Democrats held their own hearing where Fluke did testify. Rush Limbaugh responded by attacking her for several days as a “slut” and a “prostitute” and suggesting that she post sex videos on the Internet.

She’s having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth-control pills that she needs. That’s what she’s saying.

Other members of the conservative media defended Rush against the backlash. Mona Charen, for example wrote:

When the producer asked: “What do you make of Rush Limbaugh’s comments?” I said that his choice of words was crude but that I certainly understood and sympathized with the point he was making.

Mitt Romney missed his chance to have a Sister Souljah moment. “It’s not the language I would have used,” he said. To which Maureen Dowd replied: “Is there a right way to call a woman a slut?”

Eventually, Rush started losing advertisers. Money talks, so Rush issued an apology of sorts:

I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

So Rush and everybody else on the Right agrees that “slut” is an over-reaction to Fluke’s testimony, but they stand by “the point he was making”.

You’ve probably heard all that. But this point isn’t getting nearly enough attention: Rush’s attack on Fluke was fundamentally false from end to end. She was not talking about her sex life. She was not asking for a government subsidy. (Georgetown’s health plan is paid for by the students.) She was exposing the negative impact of Georgetown’s policy on the health of its female students.

This controversy isn’t about using bad words, it’s about telling vicious lies to silence an opponent’s legitimate point. Rush has not apologized for that or even admitted doing it. That’s what the conservative media is defending and Republican politicians won’t denounce.

Watch Fluke’s opening statement and see if you can find any connection between what she said and what Limbaugh said about her.

Rick Santorum’s recent attack on JFK was not only inaccurate and politically odd (how does dissing the first Catholic president rally the Catholic votes Santorum needs?), it was yet another example of the fuzzy thinking that surrounds the corporate personhood issue. Santorum seems unable to distinguish religious institutions from religious people.

Here’s what Kennedy said in his famous 1960 campaign speech to a conference of Baptist ministers:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote

In other words, the Church and the State are separate institutions. Having authority in one does not give you authority in the other.

But this is how Santorum explained why reading Kennedy’s speech makes him “want to throw up”:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes you throw up.  What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

In other words, he interprets Kennedy’s words to mean that the Church and the State must consist of different people; if you’re active in the Church you must be passive in the State, and vice versa.

But the conflict that nauseates Santorum goes away once you understand that institutions are not people. Individuals can be active in both religion and in politics, and we can still maintain Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between the institution of the Church and the institution of the State.

The Santorums reinforce all the worst stereotypes about homeschooling parents. But they aren’t all like that, as this first-person account by Stumblegoat makes clear.

Things everybody should understand about the price of gas:

  • America may have plenty of untapped natural gas and coal, but that’s not going to do you any good if your car runs on gasoline.
  • The price of gasoline depends on the price of oil.
  • Oil is a world market.
  • Gas prices were low when Obama became president because a worldwide recession had depressed demand.
  • New oil production in America will change the world price of oil exactly as much (or as little) as new production in Nigeria or Kuwait or anyplace else.
  • American oil production has gone up since Obama took office, reversing a long-term downward trend.
  • No conceivable increase in American oil production will make a sizable dent in the world market.
  • Anything that took Iran’s oil off the market (like a war) would make oil prices skyrocket.

Therefore: “Drill, baby, drill” is not an answer to the high price of gas, but reaching some kind of peaceful settlement with Iran would help.

The global-warming deniers who published a letter in the WSJ made their argument look serious by quoting the research of Yale economist William Nordhaus. Now Nordhaus explains why they’re wrong.

Last week the NYT talked about why young mothers aren’t married. This week the Atlantic examines why young adults aren’t buying houses.

Derek Thompson reviews a lot of reasons, but finally comes around to the one that makes sense to me: We don’t live in a long-term-planning world any more. The whole idea of a 30-year mortgage sounds absurd in an era where nobody has the faintest idea what their life will be like in ten years.

Kevin Drum has an interesting graph. If you break the federal budget up into Medicare, Social Security, and Everything Else, then graph it as a percentage of GDP, Everything Else is lower than it was 50 years ago and is still decreasing. Remember that the next time somebody starts talking about “out-of-control government spending”.

We don’t have a generalized spending problem. We’ve got an aging population and healthcare costs that are increasing too fast. Solve that and everything else falls into place.

The traditional theory said that the poor were less ethical than the rich. In “My Fair Lady“, Pickering asks Eliza’s father “Have you no morals, man?” and Mr. Doolittle replies: “No, no, I can’t afford ’em, gov’ner. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”

But a new study indicates the exact opposite:

“Occupying privileged positions in society has this natural psychological effect of insulating you from others,” said psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley. “You’re less likely to perceive the impact your behavior has on others. As a result, at least in this paper, you’re more likely to break the rules.”

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When the Priests’ Scandal Becomes Relevant

February 20, 2012 – 10:06 am

In previous posts about the Catholic hierarchy’s War on Obama, I have restrained myself from bringing up the Church’s sexual-abuse scandal. A lot of people do, and most of the time I wince, because it’s a cheap shot.

But there is one situation in which it’s not a cheap shot, and that’s when the clergy is striking poses of great moral courage in face of this “War on Religion” that they’ve made up. (Is the War on Christmas over yet? Who won?) As a Catholic priest said during Sean Hannity’s “Faith in America” segment:

If I’m asked to do something that goes against my conscience, I’d better be willing to die for that.

Brave words. I’m hearing a lot of brave words from priests these days. But it’s easy to be brave during a completely fabricated metaphorical “war”.

Think it through: When in course of the current healthcare proposals will a Catholic priest have to take some specific action that will go against his conscience? Or look at it from the other side: What can he refuse to do that will get him arrested — or punished in any way — for his a Gandhi-style resistance?

Nothing.

Churches were always exempt from the rule that they must provide contraception in their healthcare plans. And under the administration’s new compromise proposal, Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities don’t have to cover contraception either; their insurance carriers have to provide a separate policy for free — which they can do without any subsidy from the premiums paid by the institutions, because contraception saves them money. Matt Yglesias explains:

The point here is simple. While birth control costs more than nothing, it costs less than an abortion and much less than having a baby. From a social point of view, unless we’re not going to subsidize consumption of health care services at all (which would be a really drastic change from the status quo) then it makes a ton of sense to heavily subsidize contraceptives.

The absence of any place to take a stand becomes obvious if you read the lawsuit Belmont Abbey College has filed against the contraception mandate. It is full of vague assertions that the College is being coerced to “violate its deeply-held religious beliefs”, but does not specify any particular belief-violating act that it or its employees will be forced to perform. As the suit progresses towards trial, the College will have a hard time proving that it has standing to sue.

In short, unlike Gandhi or Martin Luther King, priests and bishops can strike heroic poses anywhere they want, and police will never feel obligated to haul them away. The system is already set up to walk around them.

That raises this question: How believable are those poses of great moral courage? And then this one: Didn’t the Catholic clergy just face a moral crisis? How much courage did they display then?

OK, most priests didn’t sexually abuse children or anybody else. But how many knew about some particular sexual abuse and did nothing? How many knew their diocese was just shuffling abusive priests around and letting them rape children somewhere else — and did nothing? How many suspected something and decided they didn’t want to know?

A priest with moral courage would have investigated his suspicions, then gone to his superiors and said, “I’m not going to let you do this. Do the right thing or I’m blowing the whistle.”

That would have been courageous.

How many priests did anything remotely similar? Anybody? That situation wasn’t metaphoric. It was a real moral crisis that required real moral courage.

If you didn’t have it then, don’t posture to me now about how brave you are.

Like the congressional hearing on this issue, Sean Hannity’s panel was all men. Jon Stewart had something to say about about “the world’s holiest sausage-fest”.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

(If you’re not hearing any sound, click on the video box and check that it’s not muted.)

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