When two factions (or more) within one nation decide to contend with each other with bullets and bombs instead of through the political process, we are told that there is a civil war. At least, that’s the case in Iraq. Now if, say, two factions (Hamas and Fatah) in, say, the Palestinian territory also resort to the bullets and bombs approach to negotiation…well, it’s not quite a civil war. (How could it be? After all, the U.S. isn’t “occupying” their country). No, that fighting is just “gunbattles” and “clashes.” And even though “[t]he fighting has renewed fears of civil war in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank,” well, it isn’t really a Civil War yet. (Via Instapundit)
[Open full post]Dan Quayle was taken to task many years ago for his “Murphy Brown” speech, in which he said:
Ultimately however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this.
It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown – a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman – mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another “lifestyle choice.”
I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood; network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in , this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong…It’s time to talk again about family, hard work, integrity and personal responsibility. We cannot be embarrassed out of our belief that two parents, married to each other, are better in most cases for children than one.
As Quayle said, we social conservative are often pooh-poohed as moralizing busy-bodies. But there’s a reason why we care about such things as promoting traditional families. No matter that we can all point to specific, acute examples of imperfect “traditional” families–and there is no “perfect” family–conservatives believe that the basis for a sound family is having a parent of either sex. Dan Quayle voiced those beliefs 14 years ago and since then, many people–both liberal and conservative–have conceded that Quayle was right:
Ten years later, most anyone involved in child development agrees that two parents are preferable. He beamed while pointing out a recent New York Times headline that read “The Controversial Truth: Two-Parent Families Are Better.”
In 1992, discussing illegitimacy was taboo. Most politicians had steered clear of the subject since 1965, when a then-obscure assistant secretary of labor by the name of Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a report linking poverty among black children to the prevalence of out-of-wedlock births. The report was denounced, and Moynihan was labeled a racist.
During the 1990s, the climate changed.
Due to a push by conservatives — and some liberals — and to a growing body of research, the subject of illegitimacy became legitimate.
Press coverage of the topic grew. And, as welfare reform emerged as a major policy priority in Congress, Democrats and Republicans agreed that the government needed to take concrete steps to reduce out-of-wedlock births. A 1993 Atlantic magazine cover story was titled “Dan Quayle Was Right.” And later that year, Clinton declared, “I believe the country would be a lot better off if children were born to married couples.”
“We finally removed the gag,” says Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Rector has helped draft many family-formation provisions of Republican welfare reform bills in Congress. In the 1996 federal welfare reform law, Congress approved federal funding for sexual-abstinence programs and a bonus to states that reduce their ratios of out-of-wedlock births
Now, all of this expert opinion is fine and dandy, but a new set of voices is making themselves heard. The kids who have lived through the experience. Katrina Clark was one of those kids:
[Open full post]When she was 32, my mother — single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family — allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child.
And for a while, I was pretty angry about it.
I was angry at the idea that where donor conception is concerned, everyone focuses on the “parents” — the adults who can make choices about their own lives. The recipient gets sympathy for wanting to have a child. The donor gets a guarantee of anonymity and absolution from any responsibility for the offspring of his “donation.” As long as these adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?
Not so. The children born of these transactions are people, too. Those of us in the first documented generation of donor babies — conceived in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when sperm banks became more common and donor insemination began to flourish — are coming of age, and we have something to say.
I’m here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn’t ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It’s hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won’t matter to the “products” of the cryobanks’ service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.
We offspring are recognizing the right that was stripped from us at birth — the right to know who both our parents are. {Emphasis mine.}
As it happened, the Monday following a weekend during which my interest was piqued by a study making claims about, as the title states, “Explaining Recent Declines in Adolescent Pregnancy in the United States: The Contribution of Abstinence and Improved Contraceptive Use,” Rhode Island Education Commissioner Peter McWalters announced that a particular abstinence-only curriculum had been approved for use in Rhode Island schools. That such a thing should be considered newsworthy illustrates how misleading it is to conduct effectiveness studies as if abstinence-only programs are broadly in effect. The Guttmacher Institute–affiliated authors of the “Recent Declines” study conclude:
Abstinence promotion is a worthwhile goal, particularly among younger teenagers; however, the scientific evidence shows that, in itself, it is insufficient to help adolescents prevent unintended pregnancies. The current emphasis of US domestic and global policies, which stress abstinence-only sex education to the exclusion of accurate information on contraception, is misguided. Similar approaches should not be adopted by other nations.
Given the paucity of broad and sustained abstinence programs, however, one might be justified in concluding that the obvious effectiveness of abstinence wholly accounts — without the benefit of any educational curricula at all — for the 6.4% decrease in teenage girls who’d recently had sex at the time of the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (PDF), as compared with the 1995 iteration (PDF), and the 9.5% decrease in teenage girls who’d ever had sex. In light of the overwhelmingly “safe-sex” approach of public school sex-ed programs and the sex-saturation of youth culture, it might be that abstinence’s contribution is actually astounding, even were the study correct that, as the news hook alludes, “only 14 per cent of the drop [in teenage pregnancies] amongst 15- to 19-year-olds was linked to reduced sexual activity.”
Of course, to evaluate the study’s claims, one must understand what, precisely, is being said, and as a point of fact, it doesn’t claim that “86 per cent of the decline in teenage pregnancy was due to improved use of contraception.” Rather, the author-created “contraceptive risk index” (CRI) contributed 86% of the change in the author-created “pregnancy risk index” (PRI). The emphasis on the manufactured nature of these statistics is key, because closer inspection reveals that the authors aren’t, in fact, measuring what they claim to be measuring.
In essence, the CRI reflects the effectiveness of sexually active teen girls’ contraception; the PRI multiples that times the percentage of girls having sex. The 14% value is merely the effect of fewer girls’ having sex on that last multiplication, which, as is proven when the findings lead to headlines claiming that “success of abstinence in cutting teen pregnancies is a ‘myth,'” wildly distorts the reality. Interested readers can refer to the Addendum in the extended entry of this post for my mathematical proof, but the upshot is that the Guttmacher study fails to distill the effects of abstinence from the effects of contraception. In other words, the contraception side of the formula actually compounds improvements in contraception with improvements in abstinence.
More important is the pervasive mindset revealed in the fact that the authors don’t approach saying “no” as if it were a form of birth control. The force behind opposition to abstinence-only programs, as habitually exhibited by the ACLU, for one, is a cultural movement that does not really believe that the safest, healthiest sex occurs within marriage; it believes that restricting sex to lifelong monogamous relationships is unrealistic and, therefore, that the act of setting such expectations is, itself, a central source of the harm that can come from sex. It believes that contraceptives and medicine will address diseases, with abortion culling any human lives with the audacity to mistake their creation as the actual purpose for sex. If the stigma attached to deviant and/or promiscuous sexual acts by us scolds can be stamped out, then humankind will be free to experience the sheer joys of our sexual essence.
Since this commentary is on the level of movements, it will not apply to any given individual, of course. Most of those who subscribe to the safe-sex, pro-abortion, anti-religion-in-the-public-square platform do so not out of intellectual conviction, but out of a vague dislike of authority, an affinity for sex, and a disinterest in complicated consideration of consequences more than one step removed from the policies that they end up espousing. For some portion, such as Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the ACLU, when he argues that teaching “abstinence until marriage” can “marginalize” homosexual students, equivalence between homosexual and heterosexual sex allows elision of the connection between sex and procreation, a goal for which the movement has long been striving.
That goal, as the movement has progressed and adapted to a society that is increasingly uneasy with its destination, has found its fruition in the cause of same-sex marriage. If marriage can be defined without reference to procreation, it can become merely another context in which to have intimate relations, only with the variations and trappings of marriage, and as such, it will cease to be the safest, healthiest context for sex. (Perhaps this is an example of progressives’ handling the present as if it ought to conform with a future that they envision.)
The dividing line across this broad, rambling series of topics is between those who believe that sex is a behavior and those who believe that it is an activity. For one side, the goal is teaching children how to be responsible sexual beings; for the other, it is teaching them how to have sex safely. Those of a conservative bent will spot instantly the operative phrase — the fatal flaw — of the latter: “teaching them how to have sex.” But rather than recoil from such instruction, we ought to absorb the correctly assessed need to openly address the minefield that puberty requires the young to cross.
What proponents of safe-sex education fail to consider — perhaps deliberately — is that abstinence education does not so much entail the provision of information (it’s pretty straightforward, really) as the expression of encouragement. It’s ridiculous on its face to offer analysis of five-hour programs’ effects on the long-term lives of children. Safe-sex education, on the other hand, provides information — to be learned — on how to do particular things. Thus, the short-term curriculum format is more likely to have measurable results with such an approach. Of course, one of those results seems likely to be an interest in the things that the children now know how to do. (I recall the sense of passing opportunities imparted by the unused condom handed to me in a high school classroom, branding its message on the leather of my wallet.)
Too often, in imparting such knowledge, decreases in sexual activity — versus decreases in STDs and pregnancies — are not treated as a continual goal. Rather, they are handled as temperance might be among alcoholics in a land with no non-alcoholic beverages but water — instructing the audience to fail well, rather than to recover. If abstinence were handled, intellectually, as a form of contraception, then there wouldn’t appear to be this supposedly unrealistic all-or-nothing religious/moral statement of waiting until marriage.
The reason the unbelievable 14:86 ratio in the Guttmacher study caught my interest is that I firmly believe that safe-sex education encourages sex, and that it therefore carries an inherently greater risk of pregnancy, especially as comfort levels increase. In contrast, it seems to me that truly encouraging abstinence could make those who slip feel more pressure to do so safely. The objective, for those who would formulate an optimal policy for public education, should be frank discussion of the biology — and the options — surrounding sex, but consistently and persistently within a context encouraging abstinence.
Studies suggest the counterintuitive finding that even a single pledge of abstinence can have significant effects on teenagers’ behavior. Imagine the results were adults to succeed in overcoming the failure of imagination and personal restraint that prevents them from offering children a mature and maturely sustained vision of their sexuality.
…they make the Providence section just a little harder to find? Are you paying attention, Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix? Here’s at least one blogger encouraging an established media organization to make its web content a little more visible to help facilitate an open and robust civic discussion between old media, new media, and readers. Give people the chance to spot Ian Donnis’ latest, without having to click through two words of 8-point text, rendered in a powder blue font against a white background, buried in the middle of the Phoenix’s crowded top-level page.
Also, the new web design of the Projo is not great. News stories should have a much more prominent position on the website of a newspaper.
And if the folks at the the Pawtucket Times, the Kent County Daily Times, the Warwick Daily Times and most of the other Journal Register newspapers could contact the staff of the Woonsocket Call to learn how they mastered the technique of inserting blank space between paragraphs, that would be nice too.
[BUMPED]
During his interview with WPRO’s Dan Yorke last night (audio not up yet), Governor Carcieri confirmed that current Rhode Island Republican Party Chair Patricia Morgan would be stepping aside. Let the speculation begin.
UPDATE: ProJo 7to7 confirms:
Patricia Morgan said today that she won’t seek another term as the head of the state Republican Party.
“I really have enjoyed being a chairman,” Morgan said, noting that she believes she’s the longest-serving GOP leader in state history. “It’s been challenging at times, it’s been frustrating, but I do think I’ve made a difference – and that’s my legacy to the party.”
The decision to step down, Morgan said, was made “in concert with the governor” during a closed-door meeting at the State House last Friday.
By tradition, Governor Carcieri would make the decision on whether Morgan, 56, should stay or whether the GOP should turn elsewhere for leadership as it tries to rebound from widespread losses in the November elections.
In an interview with The Journal last month, Morgan said she would like to be reappointed to the post she held for the past four years. Today, she refused to say why she changed her mind.
“It’s time to move on,” she said. “I loved being chairman, I loved meeting all the people and helping to build the organization. It’s been a great experience. But maybe it’s time to let someone else have that experience.”
Morgan will lead the Rhode Island Republican Party until March, when the state party will elect a new chairman.
WPRO is reporting this as well. Apparently, Gov. Carcieri said that Morgan came to him to offer her resignation, something that Morgan wouldn’t confirm to WPRO. Interesting.
[Open full post]The ProJo reports that Warwick State Rep. Peter Ginaitt is upset about cost overruns on the Point Street overpass project.
Ginaitt said he was troubled by a Dec. 4 article in The Providence Journal reporting that the overpass project’s cost has grown more than 75 percent and that it is more than two years late. He demanded an explanation from James R. Capaldi, director of the state Department of Transportation.
Dana Nolfe, the DOT’s communications director, said that Capaldi met with Ginaitt Wednesday and that the department will explain the project’s background to him in writing.
“We need to tighten the rules on the construction industry,” Ginaitt said, perhaps by adding standards to make sure the low bidder for a project can build it on time and within budget.
In his press release on the matter, Ginaitt further explains:
Besides requesting a full accounting of this issue from Director Capaldi, Representative Ginaitt urged the DOT chief “to have a process in place to evaluate these projects more thoroughly to avoid such a situation, and to rebuild the confidence of the taxpayers to secure their support for years to come.”
But as ProJo reporter Bruce Landis explains, the idea of having such a “process in place” is not a new one:
Legislation that would have imposed federal standards on state contracting and required that the state take contractors’ past performance into account in awarding contracts were filed by Republicans in both houses of the Democratic-dominated General Assembly last legislative session, but both bills died.
For example, House Minority Leader Robert Watson submitted H7681, AN ACT RELATING TO PUBLIC PROPERTY AND WORKS — STATE PURCHASES, to the House Transportation Committee in February of this year. The act would have “provide[d] that state purchasing laws are consistent with laws applicable to federal funding sources, and that contracts are awarded on the basis of specific standards of responsibility.” In short, “low bidder” would be only one of the criteria, and not necessarily the most important. The ability to perform the work on time and within budget would be just as important. Watson’s bill was referred to the House Finance committee and “Scheduled for hearing and/or consideration” on 05/17/2006.
Guess what? It got considered right off the edge of the table. Such is the fate of minority-sponsored legislation in a one party state. Maybe this year, should Rep. Watson re-submit the legislation, Rep. Ginaitt and some of his fellow Democrats will back the measure, or at least help get it out of committee.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has announced a universal health coverage plan that he intends to introduce in Congress next year. Here’s how the Los Angeles Times describes it…
Wyden’s plan would require employers to continue contributing toward the cost of health coverage, but it would get them out the business of directly providing insurance and limit their exposure to double-digit annual inflation in healthcare costs.It sounds like free marketers and libertarians might actually be able to rally around the Wyden plan in years one and two. However, for some reason, after year two, Senator Wyden wants to stick employers back in between individuals and their health insurance…
In the first two years of the plan, employers who now provide coverage would be required to directly pay workers what they were spending on insurance.
Thereafter, most companies would pay the government a healthcare contribution that resembles a payroll tax.If you can successfully decouple insurance from the workplace for two years, then why does it need to be recoupled at a later date? The payroll-tax provision sounds more like something intended to make the government’s tax collection job easier, or to increase government influence over the healthcare choices that individuals make or, if you really want to be cynical, to make people believe that government is giving them something for free, when they are really buying it with their own hard-earned money, more than it does something intended to improve the delivery of healthcare.
Regardless of that concern, the idea of giving people the resources they need to choose their own health insurance, rather than having employers choose their insurance for them, is a solid starting point. Here’s the rest of the outline of Senator Wyden’s plan, according to the Times…
Using the money from their employers, individuals would be required to purchase private insurance policies through state purchasing pools. Benefits would be keyed to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Standard Plan available to federal workers. Workers would not have to pay higher income taxes because of the employer contribution.A fuller description of the plan is available from Senator Wyden’s official website.
The uninsured would also have to buy coverage, but premiums for the poor would be fully subsidized by the government, and middle-class families with incomes up to $80,000 for a family of four would be eligible for help on a sliding scale.
Premiums from individuals and contributions from employers would be collected by the government through the tax system and distributed to insurers. Once enrolled, individuals would be covered until retirement. Seniors in the Medicare program would not have to make any changes.
In short, the concept of the Wyden plan is really quite simple (as are most health insurance plans, contrary to what you may have been told. As Ronald Reagan once said, “There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers.”)…
- Change the insurance system so that people within a state are pooled together and can buy health insurance, regardless of who their employer is,
- Require individuals to purchase a mandatory minimum level of health insurance, while allowing insurance companies to sell more coverage to people who are willing to spend more, and
- Create a new healthcare entitlement for people below a certain income level.
Oh, and where is the money for that new entitlement going to come from? [Open full post]
Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (a Clinton appointee, for those keeping score at home) has upheld the section of the Military Commissions Act relating to the Habeas Corpus rights of foreign nationals held as unlawful enemy combatants by the government of the United States, at least in certain narrowly defined circumstances. The Judge ruled that Congress has authority to establish Habeas Corpus procedures for foreigners captured and held outside of the United States that are different from those that must be applied otherwise. In the ruling, however, Judge Robertson emphasized that he was only addressing cases where the petitioner was neither an American resident, nor within the US when apprehended, nor being held within the United States…
As the government argues in its reply brief, his connection to the United States lacks the geographical and volitional predicates necessary to claim a constitutional right to habeas corpus. Petitioner has never entered the United States and accordingly does not enjoy the “implied protection” that accompanies presence on American soil….Judge Robertson’s use (creation?) of the “geographical and volitional predicates” criteria does leave the door open for a future court to apply Constitutional Habeas Corpus protection to non-citizen residents of the United States, including illegal aliens.
My ruling does not address whether and to what extent enemy aliens may invoke other constitutional rights; I find only that the Suspension Clause does not guarantee the right to petition for habeas corpus to non-resident enemy aliens captured and detained outside the United States.
In another part of the ruling, Judge Robertson discussed whether moving Habeas Corpus jurisdiction out of the normal Federal court system constituted a suspension in and of itself. I didn’t understand whatever point the Judge was trying to make…
Congress’s removal of jurisdiction from the federal courts was not a suspension of habeas corpus within the meaning of the Suspension Clause (or, to the extent that it was, it was plainly unconstitutional, in the absence of rebellion or invasion…)So the MCA was either 1) not a suspension of Habeas Corpus and therefore constitutional or 2) an unconstitutional suspension of Habeas Corpus. It’s safe to say that we knew, going in to the case, that the MCA was either constitutional or it wasn’t. How does re-stating this fact provide information that might be useful for this case or future ones?
Finally, I’m uncomfortable with the Judge’s blithe statement that the events of September 11, 2001 did not constitute an invasion…
Neither rebellion nor invasion was occurring at the time the MCA was enacted,…but that the events of December 7, 1941 clearly did. In discussing the suspension of Habeas Corpus that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor as one of the four Habeas suspensions in American history, Judge Robertson tells us…
All four congressionally authorized executive suspensions [of Habeas Corpus] occurred during times of indisputable, and congressionally declared, rebellion or invasion.If the point the Judge is trying to make that there is a difference between the full-out declaration of war that followed Pearl Harbor and the “authorization to use military force” that followed September 11, then the Judge may have a compelling point, but that only explains “congressionally declared”, not “indisputable”. By including “indisputable”, the judge is injecting his personal opinions of the motivations and capabilities of violent international organizations into his ruling on a point of law. That goes beyond the role of a judge.
A Washington Post report on the ruling is available here. [Open full post]
Retired General Barry McCaffrey, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs at the United States Military Academy, and who has toured Iraq several times since the overthrow of Saddam Husein, doesn’t think any plan centered on reducing U.S Forces in Iraq to a small number of advisors as quickly as 2008, as suggested by the Iraq Study Group, will serve American or Iraqi interests. Here’s what General McCaffrey wrote in Wednesday’s Washington Post on what he believes that America’s last shot in Iraq should consist of…
Our objective should be a large-scale U.S. military withdrawal within the next 36 months, leaving in place an Iraqi government in a stable and mostly peaceful country that does not threaten its six neighboring states and does not intend to possess weapons of mass destruction….I think the suggestion here is that a national Iraqi army, with a true Iraqi national identity, needs to be the strongest armed group in the country, if anything else is going to succeed. General McCaffrey continues…
First, we must commit publicly to provide $10 billion a year in economic support to the Iraqis over the next five years. In the military arena, it would be feasible to equip and increase the Iraqi armed forces on a crash basis over the next 24 months (but not the police or the Facilities Protection Service). The goal would be 250,000 troops, provided with the material and training necessary to maintain internal order.
Within the first 12 months we should draw down the U.S. military presence from 15 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), of 5,000 troops each, to 10. Within the next 12 months, Centcom forces should further draw down to seven BCTs and withdraw from urban areas to isolated U.S. operating bases — where we could continue to provide oversight and intervention when required to rescue our embedded U.S. training teams, protect the population from violence or save the legal government.Note that this statement places the well-respected General McCaffrey at odds with the also well-respected Eliot Cohen, who believes that increasing the number of advisors in Iraq is a critical element of success. The General provides a hint as to why he thinks that increasing the number of advisors will not be effective…
Finally, we have to design and empower a regional diplomatic peace dialogue in which the Iraqis can take the lead, engaging their regional neighbors as well as their own alienated and fractured internal population….
Let me add a note of caution regarding a deceptive and unwise option that springs from the work of the Iraq Study Group. We must not entertain the shallow, partisan notion of rapidly withdrawing most organized Marine and Army fighting units by early 2008 and substituting for them a much larger number of U.S. advisers — a 400 percent increase — as a way to avoid a difficult debate for both parties in the New Hampshire primaries….
We need fewer advisers, not more — selected from elite, active military units and with at least 90 days of immersion training in Arabic.
Iraqi troops will not fight because of iron discipline enforced by U.S. sergeants and officers. That is a self-serving domestic political concept that would put us at risk of a national military humiliation.Read the whole thing, for the rest of General McCaffrey’s thoughts on why he thinks this plan is America’s best way forward. [Open full post]
National Review’s new political reporter Jonathan Martin has an article on “the GOP and its Northeast problem” in the print edition of this week’s magazine. Students of conservative history, as well as history buffs in general, may find this summary of some analysis from Dante Scala, a professor of political science at St Anslem’s College in New Hampshire, of particular interest…
There are those who belong to what [Scala] calls the party’s liberal Rockefeller wing, as embodied most recently by [Senator Lincoln Chafee]. They probably won’t ever come back to the GOP, but their numbers are small enough that they won’t be missed. Then there are those who belong to what Scala calls the Goldwater wing. These are traditional Republican voters who have been turned off not just by the party’s cultural conservatism, but also by its mismanagement of crises from Baghdad to New Orleans, and have abandoned the GOP even though it is more in synch with their small-government convictions. With the right message, and the right messenger, and a bit of Democratic over-reaching to remind them why they used to pull the Republican lever, these lapsed libertarians can be brought back into the fold.
Ponder this point for a moment before moving on.
And then…
