Month: April 2007

[Ross] Courtesy goes a long way, apparently. (via Bruce Schneier)

[Ross] Even though he thought it was too personal to post on this site, I think Reihan’s meditation on ethnicity, depression and Cho Seung Hui is worth your time and then some. Rod Dreher has related thoughts.

[Ross] I was initially inclined to agree with Megan, and dismiss the notion that the Virginia Tech tragedy should have been averted by, say, an alert creative-writing teacher as a classic case of hindsight bias. Maybe I still do – but the more I read, the more it seems like somebody should have done, well, more than they did to protect themselves and others from Cho Seung Hui, and protect him from himself. Rich Lowry has a good roundup here.

[Ross] Daniel Larison versus Jane Kramer.

[Ross] If you’re not at least somewhat conservative, you probably shouldn’t go to work for a magazine called, um, The American Conservative. And if you do, you probably shouldn’t get all outraged and resign in protest when they turned out to be, um, conservative.

[Reihan] Earlier this month, Louis Theroux, my personal hero, unveiled The Most Hated Family in America, a documentary on his time with members of Fred Phelps’ infamous Westboro Baptist Church. It is some of the best, most compelling television I’ve ever seen. Start watching it here. 

[Reihan] I’m obsessed with Chipotle, like many of you. (Specifically, I’m mad about the vegetarian burrito bol. I find tattoos garish and unsightly, but I have considered tattooing a stylized burrito bol across my back. Not really.) And while I’m in Chipotle, there are few things I enjoy more than thumbing through The Northwest Current, a neighborhood paper. The Washington I know is a transient town, and the neighborhood paper makes me feel like the one of Upper Northwest’s respectable burghers (which, suffice to say, I am not). Recently I read a short piece on Councilmember Mary Cheh‘s efforts to impose a trans-fat ban. Now, I don’t have the article in front of me, but I was particularly struck by one aspect of the legislation: groups that serve food for free to the very poor are exempt from the ban. And so it seems that the non-poor, those of us who can for the most part choose what we eat, are no longer allowed to consume trans-fats. But those who have far less of a choice … are to be served foods rich in these supposedly deadly particles of doom? 

Surely there’s something wrong here. I have to assume this has something to do with easing the financial burden on charitable groups, and yet wouldn’t we be better served by allowing middle-class Washingtonians to look after themselves and use a small slice of our general revenue to provide food banks with slightly more nutritious fare? Or am I missing something?

[Ross] Andrew has made much, lately, of polls and anecdotes suggesting that Republicans are losing the younger generation, and everything I’ve seen and read suggests he’s right. I’m curious, though, how to square that reality with data like this.

[Reihan] Jack Balkin and I don’t see eye to eye on Roe v. Wade, but he happens to have a very sophisticated interpretation of the politics surrounding Roe that I fear is more accurate than not.  This comes to mind in light of today’s Supreme Court ruling concerning the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.

For Balkin, Roe plays a critically important role in keeping the Republican coalition together.  And so it will remain in place, hollowed out slowly over time.

A far more prudent strategy, and the one the President and his advisors will likely adopt, would be to appoint Justices who will preserve Roe but chip away at it slowly, for example, by devising new procedural rules that make it difficult to challenge abortion regulations in federal court, by upholding restrictions on particular medical procedures like partial birth abortion, and by further limiting abortions for minors and poor women. Moderates and independents may not like these changes, but such rulings will be much less likely to induce wholesale defections from the Republican coalition than wiping Roe v. Wade off the books. The latter is a simple, easy to understand result that people can get angry about and rally around. Procedural limitations on abortion, by contrast, are hard to explain to voters and therefore risk less political danger for the Republicans.

Chipping away at Roe slowly not only allows the party to keep moderates and independents from bolting, it also preserves a hated symbol for the party’s base of religious conservatives to struggle against. As long as Roe remains law, religious conservatives can point to it as a example of what is wrong with America and with a liberal activist judiciary (which is, of course, increasingly staffed by conservative Republican Presidents!). Thus, the reverse litmus test not only holds the party’s winning coalition together, it’s also good practical politics. 

So is Balkin right?  A lot of frustrated pro-lifers I know think this is spot on.

This scenario is particularly interesting for this reason: if Balkin is right and Roe evolves in such a way that it "provides the practical right to abortion only to relatively educated and affluent women with resources and connections," we’ll increasingly see the abortion battle fought over women on the margins.  I’m reminded of Alexander Payne’s dark culture-war farce Citizen Ruth, in which pro-lifers and pro-choicers fight ferociously over the fate of a quite sympathetic glue-sniffing petty criminal. 

I used to believe that technological solutions would render the abortion debate obsolete, but Ross and Megan, over dinner, convinced me otherwise.  Insofar as there is a place for paternalism, towards the most vulnerable and least capable segments of society, it is going to a bitterly contested place. 

[Ross] Speaking of Europe, the prolific Philip Jenkins has an exhaustive and impressively evenhanded new book out on the continent’s religious future (and particularly the tensions between a rising Islam and a fading Christianity), which I skimmed in galleys and highly recommend. And if you don’t have time for the whole thing, or even if you do, you should read Richard John Neuhaus’s review essay, which praises the book but suggests that Jenkins may be a little too evenhanded, to the point of missing the forest while trying to give a fair-and-balanced account of the trees.