Month: June 2011

Gillian K. Hadfield argues yes:

The U.K. has never had an unauthorized practice-of-law rule: Anyone may provide legal advice, so long as he or she doesn’t call him- or herself a solicitor. So if a serial entrepreneur has discovered a market niche in providing advice on how to navigate venture capital agreements, he or she can provide that service. And, given his or her expertise in startup ventures, the advice may well be of higher quality and lower cost than the legal opinion available from law firms.

A reader writes:

Robbie George said, "What New York now offers its citizens is "marriage" in name only."  Umm, maybe this is an obvious point, but all the state has ever offered its citizens is "marriage in name only". The marriage license to the state is a legal contract. What someone makes of that partnership beyond that has always been up to the individuals involved.

Another writes:

I was shocked by Robbie George's personal attack on Gov. Coumo and Mayor Bloomberg. I had recently just heard this audio clip of Maggie Gallagher talking about Coumo and his girlfriend, stating, "I wouldn't question [Cuomo's] religious convictions, but he's certainly not living the teachings of the Church right now by all appearances."

Aside from obviously smearing his religious convictions, Gallagher is being hugely hypocritical. By all outside reports (the same evidence she uses to smear Cuomo), Catholic Gallagher is married in a civil marriage to a Hindu man. She herself is "living in sin" as the saying goes, with her husband, as the Catholic Church does not sanctify interfaith marriage.

A reader writes:

As a college freshman at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2000, my core intro to social science course ended the spring quarter by discussing portions of your Virtually Normal and Michael Warner's The Trouble With Normal. Having just moved from rural Louisiana where I'd lived in abject fear that someone might catch me  staring at another guy and perhaps beat me to death, to say nothing of coming out of the closet, it was absolutely amazing to me that the university was requiring all freshman to read about and discuss homosexuality as though it were just any old topic of social science interest, like the social contract, or Marxism, or women's rights or the history of labor unions (though 29-year-old me now bristles with indignation at the idea that I, me, and my humanity am somehow a social dilemma that other people have to grapple with somehow).

At the time, Virtually Normal was well-known in Queer Theory circles and wasn't given much credence or viability. SSM was legal nowhere – The Netherlands wouldn't legalize it for another year. Warner's book was less than a year old at the time and my peers gay and straight were absolutely intoxicated by his sexual and minority politics: the idea that there was nothing wrong with us, that we had a right to be as counter-cultural and strange to outsiders as we pleased, that society learned from our unique perspective and creativity, and that co-opting a heterosexual institution like marriage would/could dilute that perspective and creativity.

The first hour-and-a-half of discussion mostly favored Warner's "Don't worry about marriage 'cause it'll never be legal anywhere in our lifetimes, and anyway who cares because look how cool we are" attitude and arguments. I finally piped up just before the end of class and pointed out that Warner seemed to think that this was a zero-sum game where marriage equality for gaypeople is only won at the expense of LGBT people's ability as a cultural unit to critique the rest of society.

Not everyone, I said, has the educational background, personal and financial stability, or ivory tower luxury to sit around and wallow in cultural theory and the politics of sexual expression and shame. I said that when I read the Sullivan excerpts, it was clear to me that he was speaking for couples like ones that I'd left behind in Louisiana: Living under the radar, working blue-collar jobs, in love with each other and just wanting to get married like everyone else could. And the fact that they may never be able to because of millennia of baseless prejudice was an injustice on a human scale that was whole orders of magnitude beyond Warner's issues with being 'normal.' I said that that couple and their family and their right to get married and be treated like the human beings and citizens is, according to Sullivan, not only not at odds with Warner, but is worth fighting for. (Okay, okay, I wasn't nearly THAT eloquent at the time)

The exuberance for Warner suddenly came to a screeching halt, and the classroom was speechless for a few moments, and then class was dismissed. A couple classmates later told me that based on what I'd said they'd decided to rewrite their final papers in favor of Virtually Normal's arguments.

To this day, I don't believe that Warner was fundamentally wrong, but that he was just fighting a different battle in the same war, tempered by SSM's universal illegality at the time. There was the feeling from many on the queer left that you, as a well-credentialed and respected academic, were wasting your time and intellectual resources arguing for something that would never happen when voices were needed in other fights elsewhere. You were right, though: by setting the bar at marriage and using the moral force of arguments in our favor, we moved the goal post so far that we dragged all other issues forward at a much more rapid pace. I mean, DADT repeal and SSM in New York in the same twelve-month period? Wow. Six states and DC and several foreign countries, including all of Canada?? Wow. When I think of how much safer, stabler, and happier all of those ordinary gay couples in New York will be now … Just Wow.

Mike Huckabee on his Freedom Cruise, now that he's no longer a candidate:

I’m not sure a guy like me can win in the atmosphere of the current Republican party. We’ve become a party of such fractured purity. It’s all or nothing, now or never. It’s not whether the government functions, it’s whether the government is ideologically pure.

Adam Haslet tags along.

Frum calls Romney's new ad powerful:

Greg Sargent wonders if anyone will challenge Romney on his claim that Obama made the recession worse:

Mitt Romney is holding a press conference on the economy today in Pennsylvania, where he will likely repeat his frequent claim that Obama made the recession “worse.” This claim has been repeatedly debunked by independent fact checkers, who view it as a non-subjective statement that doesn’t hold up when measured by available metrics.

Yet Romney keeps right on making it anyway, and it has become absolutely central to his campaign message. The assertion continues to find its way into story after story with no rebuttal or even any hint that it is contested, and to my knowledge Romney himself has never been directly challenged on it.

Chait sizes up the politics of the 14th Amendment option:

[I]t's not even clear that the Republican leadership actually wants the enormous and destructive power it now demands. Its base may be demanding a debt ceiling showdown, out of specific opposition to Obama and general ignorance of how the debt ceiling works. But John Boehner knows full well that we can't just ignore the debt ceiling. If Obama successfully asserts the power to ignore the debt ceiling vote, then he'll allow the debt negotiations to proceed in a less fraught environment, and have defused a massive source of ongoing political instability. Cutting a deal to lift the debt ceiling may soothe the markets more in the short term, but it merely pushes the political risk further back.

One way to catch a fish:

The funniest part, is that Matthew, my youngest nephew, is curled up in the fetal position in the front of the boat the entire time, and you never see him!

(Hat tip: Nerdcore)

Adam Ozimek adds nuance to the debate over whether Americans would do the jobs illegal immigrants do:

Wages may only need to go up by 10% in order to find workers willing to replace illegal immigrants, but if the quality of work goes down -if the workers are slower, sloppier, etc.- then unit labor costs may double or more.

A reader writes:

I'm sure you'll hear a lot about this, so I'll keep my remarks short: Douthat's column is ridiculous because he imagines sex-selective abortion to be a problem of abortion whereas it's really a problem of discrimination. If we eliminated abortion tomorrow, you'd still get sex-selection under different techniques.

Another writes:

You think Ross's main point is unassailable? Then you didn't look at the comments in the posts you link to. There is no intellectual or moral difficulty for abortion-rights supporters who:

1. Are truly pro-Abortion RIGHTS and not simply pro-Abortion.
2. Believe unequivocally that infanticide is worse than abortion.
3. Accept the evidence that legally restricting abortion doesn't actually reduce the number of abortions, it just leads to more woman dying as a result of unsafe abortions.

The evidence suggests that the introduction of ultrasound and safe abortions has meant that sex-selective abortion has increased at roughly the same rate that sex-selective infanticide has decreased. I have no intellectual or moral difficulty in seeing that as a good thing.

Trying to ban abortions done for sex-selection would not have a significant impact on sex imbalance, because it would not significantly reduce sex-selection. A mild sanction would lead to more lying about the reasons for abortion. More severe sanctions would increase the number of adult women dying from abortion and push the level of infanticide back up. Either one would reinforce the cultural bias against women by refusing them legal agency in this most personal of choices. The only way to address the gender imbalance is to improve the status of women.

An Indian reader writes:

Let me address Mr. Douthat's sentence: "The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead." He might not be aware of this, but sex-selective abortion was a big scandal in India about 10-15 years ago. Since the government got involved, started campaigns, and enacted laws to restrict the practice, India has gone back to worrying about the rise in the traditional methods of female population control: female infanticide. The process by which live female children are either drowned or buried alive or poisoned or have their skulls bashed in or otherwise disposed off like so many unwanted puppies and kittens. Very common in America, I'm sure.

That is the India we live in. I don't know what conclusions Western liberals will arrive at, but for Indian feminists, it tends not to be a dilemma – sex-selective abortion is preferable to female infanticide – those babies being actually alive and all.

Another:

At some point we have to stop denying folks rights just because some people will take advantage of them and do something someone finds morally questionable. At some point we have to assume people are responsible enough to make decisions like this for the right reasons.

It’s a pretty terrible argument anyways. Abortion has been legal since Roe v. Wade and yet we don’t have reports of rampant sex selection abortions or evidence of anyone delivering that as a service. And you can’t even tell the sex of your child until 18-21 weeks and, according to this anti-abortion group.  Less than 4% of abortions in the US happen after this knowledge could be known.

Though according to this parenting site:

[Gender detection] is most commonly done between the 18th and 26th weeks of the pregnancy, but some newer ultrasound technology can determine the baby’s gender as early as 12 or 13 weeks.

One more reader:

I don't think the issue is very hard for pro-choice advocates.  One can advocate the right to choose and still be disgusted by the use to which some put that right.  I don't think it is very hard for those who hate KKK white suprmecist speech to be advocates of free speech.  I don't think it is very hard for those who hate drunk driving to be against prohibition.