Month: April 2009

Nate Silver looks at this point in the National Review editorial arguing that the government should have no interest in the welfare of its gay citizens: 

Contrary to common perception, however, the public is not becoming markedly more favorable toward same-sex marriage. Support for same-sex marriage rose during the 1990s but seems to have frozen in place (at least according to Gallup) since the high court of Massachusetts invented a right to same-sex marriage earlier this decade.

Yes, there's some backlash, but an idea regarded as absurd twenty years ago when I first wrote in favor of it now has over 40 percent support, and among those under 45, the marriage or civil union option is favored by 64 percent. In California, everyone concedes that support keeps going up – as the 2008 vote was far closer than the 2000 one.

Yes – this would be an excellent idea: a Hollywood biopic of gay conservative Whittaker Chambers. That would indeed help shift some cultural attitudes.

From 1957:

“The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote, period. No right is prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it; from this premise all else proceeds.

That, of course, is demagogy. Twenty-year-olds do not generally have the vote, and it is not seriously argued that the difference between 20 and 21-year-olds is the difference between slavery and freedom. The residents of the District of Columbia do not vote: and the population of D.C. increases by geometric proportion. Millions who have the vote do not care to exercise it; millions who have it do not know how to exercise it and do not care to learn. The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could.”

And today:

“One still sometimes hears people make the allegedly “conservative” case for same-sex marriage that it will reduce promiscuity and encourage commitment among homosexuals. This prospect seems improbable, and in any case these do not strike us as important governmental goals…

Both as a social institution and as a public policy, marriage exists to foster connections between heterosexual sex and the rearing of children within stable households. It is a non-coercive way to channel (heterosexual) desire into civilized patterns of living. State recognition of the marital relationship does not imply devaluation of any other type of relationship, whether friendship or brotherhood. State recognition of those other types of relationships is unnecessary. So too is the governmental recognition of same-sex sexual relationships, committed or otherwise, in a deep sense pointless.”

Or as a reader sums it up:

National Review in 1957: Blacks shouldn’t be allowed to vote, of course, because 10-year olds aren’t allowed to vote. And besides, it wouldn’t do them any good to vote anyway.

National Review in 2009: Gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, of course, because brothers aren’t allowed to marry. And besides, it wouldn’t do them any good to marry anyway.

I wonder how deeply National Review’s editors considered the final sentence of their repellent editorial:

If worse comes to worst, and the federal courts sweep aside the marriage laws that most Americans still want, then decades from now traditionalists should be ready to brandish that footnote and explain to generations yet unborn: That is why we resisted.

Does Rich Lowry believe his magazine’s position from 1957 should be held up similarly today as a prophetic warning? Was Barack Obama’s election the awful consequence of giving the Negroes the vote they didn’t know what to do with?

Maybe that was indeed why they “resisted.” And maybe gay really is the new black.

Anonymous Liberal attacks NRO's anti-marriage editorial:

I also love the casual assertion that "marriage is by nature the union of a man and woman," as if marriage is some sort of naturally occurring phenomenon like evaporation or mitosis. Marriage is a social construct. It's whatever we say it is. And it has meant many different things over the course of human history. For instance, polygamous marriage was once very common (still is in some parts of the world). And for many centuries, marriage was primarily a financial arrangement and a way of ensuring inheritance rights. Women were essentially bought and sold. The modern concept of love as a basis for marriage is of relatively recent vintage. And civil marriage is a very different thing than religious marriage (which itself differs from religion to religion and culture to culture). The idea that there is some sort of platonic essence to marriage is just rubbish. Marriage was created by human beings and human beings can choose how they want to define it.

My take here.

A reader writes:

Regarding the poor, put-upon government employee whose career path is "halted" because of prohibition: The law hasn't changed substantially in his lifetime (he's in his 30s) as far as basic legality/illegality. So there was no sudden, unforeseen illegality in his pot use.

It's a choice!  It's a choice to smoke anything, legal or not. For an officer of the court (and government employee) to blithely decry his lack of career prospects since he daren't submit to a drug test or lie in an interview is just a little ridiculous. Lots of things are illegal; you can choose whether or not to respect the laws, or work to change them, if that makes you happy. But to complain that the choices you make limit your career path is pretty damn disingenuous.

A map by The Scroll Blog using Nate Silver data.

Nick Eberstadt reviews the evidence:

Between 1976 and 1991, the last sixteen years of Soviet power, the country recorded 36 million births. In the sixteen post-Communist years of 1992–2007, there were just 22.3 million, a drop in childbearing of nearly 40 percent from one era to the next. On the other side of the life cycle, a total of 24.6 million deaths were recorded between 1976 and 1991, while in the first sixteen years of the post-Communist period the Russian Federation tallied 34.7 million deaths, a rise of just over 40 percent. The symmetry is striking: in the last sixteen years of the Communist era, births exceeded deaths in Russia by 11.4 million; in the first sixteen years of the post-Soviet era, deaths exceeded births by 12.4 million.

A reader writes:

I’m a researcher (grad student) in a fairly clinically oriented lab.  We have produced technologies that have entered into clinical trials and have a close relationship with a biotech company pushing this research towards in-clinic therapies.  The WSJ article you posted mischaracterizes the difference between academic and biotech research in the realm of medical therapies.  It is not that the White Tower pooh-poohs applied therapy oriented research, but that the academic researchers who are often farther removed from the commercial incentives of industry tend to be less optimistic even about their own research.  Which can be bad when it delays the availability of a promising new drug, but could be good when it prevents the approval of a poorly understood and potentially harmful therapy.

From my personal experiences, industry research tends to drive towards practical results that will produce a marketible therapy soonest, ie. Is this enough data to get approval for the next trial?  Does this trial provide enough evidence to get FDA approval? etc.  Whereas translationally-focused academic research tends to hold out for a more complete understanding of how a particular therapy is producing the results seen in trials.

There is something to be said for both approaches.  If a therapy shows real improvement of disease in real patients through clinical trials, then Big Pharma may be right to push towards a marketible therapy before all the hows and whys of a drug’s mechanism are worked out.  But, as the VIOXX catastrophe showed, sometimes patients would be better off if FDA approval required a more complete and basic understanding of how a drug might be working beyond direct clinical results of effectiveness in a few narrowly selected benchmarks.

I let rip here today. Enough is enough.