Heritage of Rhode Island has overcome intitial objections put forward by the RI Dep’t of Education and has received approval to implement it’s “Right Time, Right Place” abstinence education program in RI’s schools. The key concession seems to be that the “only” of the heretofore proposed “Abstinence-only” program has been dropped.
“Heritage’s ‘Right-Time, Right-Place’ curriculum offers positive information that will empower our teens to take control of their lives,” [Lidia] Goodinson said at the event that Heritage sponsored to commemorate World AIDS Day yesterday.
“This abstinence program can only help our present situation and help brighten our children’s futures,” she said.
Heritage says its program is intended to supplement, rather than supplant, current HIV/AIDS instruction in the public school system. Heritage instructors provide abstinence-only sex education only in the presence of regular classroom teachers responsible for teaching the broader curriculum required of local schools.
The group operates on an invitation-only basis, offering about 5 hours of instruction, down from the 6½ hours that the instruction lasted when the program was first introduced. {Unfortunately, the Journal’s story, despite this clarification, referred to it as an “abstinence-only” program later in the piece.}
This study shows that abstinence education works, while this study disputes the effectiveness of abstinence only. (Again, note the difference). Given that Heritage’s program is only part of a broader sex-ed program, protestations from the ACLU ring a little hollow:
But the Heritage program still emphasizes marriage as the only safe setting for sex, and that tends to marginalize not only gay and lesbian students but also children being raised by gay and lesbian parents, Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said.
The Heritage program also tends to understate the effectiveness of condoms as a form of contraception and means of protection against sexually transmitted diseases, Brown said.
For both reasons, Brown said, the ACLU is drafting a letter to McWalters expressing concern that the program has been approved.
This seems like carping to me. The ACLU was initially concerned that this would be an abstinence only program, and now their moving the goalposts. Besides, it seems a bit ironic that the ACLU is arguing that Heritage’s program discriminates against Gays and Lesbians because it emphasizes that marriage is the only safe setting for sex when the ACLU is also arguing that Gays and Lesbians should be allowed to marry. So where does their objection go if their latter goal is accomplished?
Regardless, it seems like the program will go forward and all options will be put on the table for our kids. So, through compromise, RI students will have it reinforced that abstinence is the only method of pregnancy prevention that “works every time it’s been tried.”
I post to defend the honor of Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association’s Executive Director Robert Walsh. This is the headline of his op-ed that appeared in Sunday’s Projo…
Robert A. Walsh Jr.: Straight-party option serves R.I.Yet beneath the headline, the op-ed makes no claim of the sort…
Second, [Edward Achorn] implied that public-employee unions encouraged people to vote a straight Democratic ticket. This, too, is inaccurate, as almost every Rhode Island union that represents public employees, including the National Education Association Rhode Island, supported candidates from both parties, and often took positions in non-partisan local races, which would not be included when voters “pulled the lever” for one party or another.The second excerpt almost certainly represents Mr. Walsh’s actual view, the discrepancy resulting from the journalistic practice of having someone different from an article’s author write its headline.
Therefore, encouraging straight-party ballot voting would have been counter-productive to the expressed views of these organizations.
However, it may be possible to blame Mr. Walsh just a wee bit for the fact that Projo staffers apparently assume that NEA officers will automatically be advocates for straight-ticket voting. [Open full post]
Somehow the fact that Illinois Senator and potential 2008 Presidential contender Barrack Obama’s middle name is “Hussein” became a minor story this weekend. (I think Maureen Dowd is to blame).
In the spirit of bi-partisanship, let me state that I believe that worrying about whether someone’s middle, first, or last names fits into certain transient social conventions is the height of narrow-mindedness and a symptom of a culture, perhaps an entire society, in decline.
Recent days have brought a series of powerful editorials on the Iraq Study Group. This post presents 5 of them, none of which looks favorably on the Group’s report. Be sure to read McCarthy’s piece at the end.
John Podhoretz on Witless Wisdom: Baker’s Worthless Iraq Advice
[Open full post]Yes, it’s been quite a week for the 10 members of the Iraq Study Group, the committee formed last spring to offer recommendations on a path forward in Iraq.
They had a wonderfully invigorating leak session the other day with The New York Times, which was the first recipient of the group’s key top-level save-America recommendation. Co-chairmen James…Baker and Lee…Hamilton didn’t even bother to pretend to brief the president or key lawmakers first.
The president could wait his turn. After all, this is the Iraq Study Group we’re talking about here, buddy. Even the mighty Times was probably kept waiting for its leak, since the only person who could not be kept waiting was Annie Leibovitz, celebrity photographer nonpareil.
As Dana Milbank reports in The Washington Post, on Monday the group’s “co-chairmen, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, found time . . . to pose for an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot for Men’s Vogue.”
The value of Annie Leibovitz’s pictorial scoop might have been reduced somewhat when the president scornfully consigned the Iraq Study Group to the ash-heap of history yesterday with a single dismissive sentence during his press conference in Jordan: “This business about ‘graceful exit’ just simply has no realism to it whatsoever.”
Baker, Hamilton and their crew of old Washington hands…are recommending a “gradual pullback” of American troops but without a timetable. That basically translates into a nice, long, slow defeat…
As one of the study group’s members told the Times yesterday, “We had to move the national debate from ‘whether to stay the course’ to ‘how do we start down the path out’.”
This is the consensus view of the Iraq Study Group, which is very proud that it reached consensus.
Its members also reached a consensus view that Depends is a really fine brand of adult diaper, and that they love reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.”
You perhaps note that I am writing with extreme disrespect toward the Iraq Study Group. That’s because its report is a scandal and an embarrassment; it’s flatly immoral to seek to make or guide policy in this fashion.
Look, if its members believe the war is lost, they should say so. They should bite the bullet and advocate a pullout of American forces sooner rather than later.
If its members could not actually achieve consensus on that point…then it was simple vanity on the part of the Gang of 10 that led to the creation of a “consensus” document that split the difference.
There’s no way to split the difference, unless you’re hurrying off to have your mug immortalized by Annie Leibovitz and want to bang down the gavel so you can get plenty of time to get hair and makeup done.
America and its allies are either going to win this war or we’re going to lose. We will either conclude our military actions in Iraq with terrorists and insurgents dead or fled and an imposition of civil order in the country by its elected government, or we will turn tail and leave the place in chaos and ruins.
What’s even more appalling, if true, is the group’s other key recommendation – which is that America should try to find answers to its problems through an international conference that would include Syria and Iran.
What do Syria and Iran want more than anything else in the world? To see an American defeat in Iraq. To see an America so crippled that they can work their will in the Middle East without fear of retribution…
…that’s Baker for you. Give him a problem and he’ll tell you your best hope of solving it can be found in sucking up to an Arab dictator…
…there’s not much that even James Baker can demand of Israel that Israel’s not already willing to give. Except maybe Jerusalem. Yeah: Israel can give up Jerusalem, and in exchange, Iran and Syria will leave Iraq alone.
Please stop laughing at the doddering old fools now. It’s disrespectful.
This is an extremely dire situation. Half-measures will be disastrous, whatever form they take – and that’s not true only of the Baker-Hamilton “graceful exit” disaster. Continuing as we’re going would also constitute a half-measure with disastrous results as well.
The president treated the Baker half-measures with the contempt they deserved. But he will deserve precisely the same level of contempt if he doesn’t champion a plan for victory immediately.
As occurred last February during a previous cleanup, another cleanup now allows me to pass along an excerpt from an article and two other quotes which I discovered during tonight’s effort:
Patti Davis, President Reagan’s daughter, wrote A Daughter’s Remembrance: The Gemstones of Our Years on the occasion of his death in 2004:
…My father was always more accessible when he was teaching his children through stories…
My father was a shy man; he wasn’t demonstrative with his children. His affection didn’t announce itself with strong embraces of dramatic declaration. We had to interpret it. Like delicate calligraphy, it required patience and a keen eye, attributes I had to acquire. I was not born with them.
Eventually, I grew beyond the girl who wanted more from her father than he was able to give. I began to focus on the gifts he gave me…You content yourself with moments; you gather them, treasure them. They are the gemstones of the years you shared…
…My father belonged to the country. I resented the country at times for its demands on him, its ownership of him. America was the important child in the family, the one who got the most attention. It’s strange, but now I find comfort in sharing him with an entire nation. There is some solace in knowing that others were also mystified by him; his elusiveness was endearing, but puzzling. He left all of us with the same question: who was he? People ask me to unravel him for them, as if I have secrets I haven’t shared. But I have none, nothing that you don’t already know. He was a man guided by internal faith. He knew our time on this earth is brief, yet he cared deeply about making his time here count. He was comfortable in his own skin. A disarmingly sunny man, he remained partially in shadow; no one ever saw all of him. It took me nearly four decades to allow my father his shadows, his reserve, to sit silently with him and not clamor for something more…
Francine Klagsbrun wrote these words in Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce:
Acceptance is a prerequisite for intimacy, and from acceptance grows trust. You trust another to accept you for yourself and, once accepting, not to betray that trust.
And, finally, there is this quote from the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship:
[Open full post]Costly grace is the gospel which might be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it cost a man his life, and it is grace, because it gives us the only true life…
[Cheap grace] is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate….
Yuval Levin has written a piece that is getting some attention around the web. In it, he identifies what he calls the “parenting class” as being the new group to whom politicians will need to appeal:
The worry of middle- and lower-middle-class families arises from a genuine tension between the two things they most eagerly strive to do: build families and build wealth. That tension, and the disquiet it causes, is especially acute for parents. Indeed, Americans in the middle class and what used to be called the working class would be better conceived of today as the parenting class. Their concerns and aspirations are no longer focused on their standing in the workplace, as they were when our political vocabulary was coming of age, but on balancing the pursuits of family and prosperity.
The members of the parenting class do not live on the edge of poverty. But they are anxious about their ability to meet their high aims, like affording a decent college for their children, getting the most from their health care dollar, and (in our increasingly older society) meeting the needs of their aging parents.
This is the anxiety of a successful capitalist economy filled with individuals who want to lead good lives. It is an anxiety produced by the kind of society conservatives seek to promote. It therefore calls for a response from the right, from those who share the aspiration to balance families and free markets…this aspirational anxiety should be the focus of a conservative domestic policy agenda, and the lens through which conservatives understand their challenge in the coming years.
He has his own ideas as to how conservatives can address the concerns of this group. It’s well worth the read.
[Open full post]I posted a couple weeks ago about Arthur Brooks’ findings that conservatives are more charitable than liberals. Last night, John Stossel (via Karen Woods) looked into whether or not we are “Cheap in America” and found that it was a myth. Working off of this, Woods draws a couple conclusions:
Bureaucracies, government ones and even big charity ones (national or international), just don’t do as good a job as private, local donors and charities; and (2) Americans are truly more generous than any other people on the planet–no matter their means. Rich and poor alike give generously…
So one point is clear, defensible, and should motivate that worthy end-of-year giving: Charity does it better. Private donations are more substantial and yield more positive effects on the givers and receivers than any government effort. Volunteerism, direct involvement with those in need, is extremely powerful and productive.
There’s a second, equally critical point, interestingly not in the sites of the “more government money to fight world poverty” campaigns: effective giving. Give to organizations that transform people’s lives and communities.
Woods continues on, but the short and sweet of it is that it’s a more effective use of your money and time if you give to local charities.
[Open full post]For those interested in the “global warming” case (Massachusetts v. EPA) heard by the Supreme Court on Wednesday (which Rhode Island is a party to), Jonathan Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy has been compiling links on the media coverage, the Supreme Court has already posted the official transcript of the oral arguments, and the legal briefs filed in the case are available from the Community Rights Council website.
In one sentence, the case is not directly about the science of global warming, but about whether a) states can sue a Federal agency to force it to enact regulations in areas where they have not been granted express authority by Congress and b) whether anyone has the standing to sue for damages for the broad, collective effects of something like “global warming”. Expect the Court’s four liberal justices to rule that “Statutory mandates on executive branch agencies should be interpreted very broadly in places where we agree with the policy outcomes”, the four conservative justices to say that “Congress must grant specific authorization to a Federal agency before it can act”, and Anthony Kennedy to be the swing vote.
Earlier today, Marc noted the “neat little trick” whereby “moderates” and those to their left claim to tolerate everybody except the intolerant and then define as intolerant anybody with whom they disagree. To my ear, there’s something similar in the recently vogue usage of the term “mandate,” as in:
“The election did show that there’s a mandate to expand embryonic stem cell research,” Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., said Tuesday in a telephone interview.
Putting aside the issue of embryonic stem cell research, what DeGette’s statement highlights is the evolution of “mandate” into a linguistic proof of legitimacy — the implication being that a proven mandate requires our representatives to pursue, or not pursue, a particular policy. Thus, despite the inevitable ambiguity of election results, one side insists that representatives must support a particular cause, or the president must not do as he sees fit when it comes to national security. The side that wins is that which is able to declare most loudly and frequently the yea or nay on a mandate.
Our system would be more effective, I’d say, if representatives did whatever they felt to be right and then faced the consequences, or reaped the benefits, with voters in the next election. Of course, it would also be more effective if the average voter were sufficiently well informed to have his or her own preferred policies and, therewith, a certain immunity to code-word talismans.
I remember during the recent RI Senate race that Senator-elect Whitehouse made much of Healthcare, and, in particular, the “broken” Medicare Part “D” program (prescription drugs). In fact, it was number one on his Health Care reform To-Do list. While he was holding “the hands of seniors who are desperately afraid that they’ll wake up one day to find that the medicines they need the most are beyond their reach,” Whitehouse proposed that the Medicare Part “D” plan be “scrapped” and cited the Washington Post, which reported “only 1.4 million people – a fraction of the 8 million eligible – have signed up for the new benefit, despite a $400 million campaign by the Bush administration.”
Well, now the Washington Post (via Barone) has reported this:
Oooh, I know, I know! An election year issue to scare senior citizens! [Open full post]It sounded simple enough on the campaign trail: Free the government to negotiate lower drug prices and use the savings to plug a big gap in Medicare’s new prescription-drug benefit. But as Democrats prepare to take control of Congress, they are struggling to keep that promise without wrecking a program that has proven cheaper and more popular than anyone imagined…
Polls indicate that more than 80 percent of enrollees are satisfied, even though nearly half chose plans with no coverage in the doughnut hole, a gap that opens when a senior’s drug costs reach $2,250 and closes when out-of-pocket expenses reach $3,600. By the latest estimates, 3 million to 4 million seniors will hit the doughnut hole this year and pay full price for drugs while also paying drug-plan premiums.
The cost of the program has been lower than expected, about $26 billion in 2006, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The cost was projected to rise to $45 billion next year, but Medicare has received new bids indicating that its average per-person subsidy could drop by 15 percent in 2007, to $79.90 a month.
Urban Institute President Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, called that a remarkable record for a new federal program.
Initially, he said, people were worried no private plans would participate. “Then too many plans came forward,” Reischauer said. “Then people said it’s going to cost a fortune. And the price came in lower than anybody thought. Then people like me said they’re low-balling the prices the first year and they’ll jack up the rates down the line. And, lo and behold, the prices fell again. And the reaction was, ‘We’ve got to have the government negotiate lower prices.’ At some point you have to ask: What are we looking for here?”
