Month: June 2012

Way fewer than most Americans think.

A reader writes:

The answer to that question obviously depends on your situation, but for those who lived on their own and had to move home because of economic necessity, the answer is probably yes. It’s not that being at home is miserable per se. It’s that after all those years spent learning and growing up, it feels like you couldn’t make "being-an-adult" stick. 

And so I take issue with a passage from the Pew Study that Talbot quotes: "If there’s supposed to be a stigma attached to living with mom and dad through one’s late twenties or early thirties, today’s ‘boomerang generation’ didn’t get that memo." The hell we didn’t.

I’ve heard too many conversations in hushed tones about so-and-so’s moving home to believe that. The Pew Institute’s study can’t even persuasively support its own inference, because this isn’t just a question of behavior, but of attitude. Ask the 12% of adults aged 25 to 34 who are currently living at home whether or not they feel stigmatized. Or better yet, to capture the attitudes of those who may’ve been deterred from moving home by stigma, poll a general sample of 25 to 34 year olds and see what they say.  I think you’d find young adults much less okay with the "boomerang" phenomenon than Pew or Talbot would have you believe.

Another differs:

I am a 23-year-old recent college grad who went home for a year to live while looking for a job. I found work about a year ago and moved out of my parents' house. However, I had no qualms about returning home while looking for employment, and looking back on it I actually quite enjoyed the time under my parent's roof. After living in a typical "college house" for years, it was nice to live somewhere that was clean and spacious. Home cooked meals many nights, or eating out on the parent's tab was the usual. They charged me no rent, regularly offered to fill up my gas tank, and were genuinely glad to have me home while at the same time hoping I would find job prospects as soon as I could – for my benefit more than theirs.

But for many of my friends who also went home, they did not enjoy the experience. And here is the difference: they are oldest/older children in their family and returned to choatic, busy houses that still were full of rules and restrictions. I went home as a youngest child to empty-nesters nearing retirement and doing their own thing. They enjoyed having me around to do things with them. They enjoyed my perspective as a 20-year old entering a more unforgiving world. My mother and I would have long discussions on life, morals, religion, my generation, etc. As a man who came out to my mother in college, it was good to spend a year with her to ease her fears of me entering the real world and for her to experience a me living outside the bound of the closet, as the true me.

So going home for a year was probably the best thing for me. It gave me time to recharge, reflect, and gain perspective for the future. It brought me closer to my parents and we got to enjoy each other's company as adults, more free of the parent/child dynamic. And of course, it allowed me to save money which has made my transition into the working world much smoother.

Thomas Terry defends Mormonism against alleged bigotry:

At about 13 million members, Mormons are a pretty large cult. So what is so bad about this “cult?” … Utah is about 72 percent Mormon, so it's a pretty good representation of Mormonism. Among the 50 states, Utah has the lowest child poverty rate, the lowest teen pregnancy rate, the third-lowest abortion rate, the third-highest high school graduate rate at 94 percent, the highest scores on Advanced Placement exams, fewest births to unwed mothers (also the highest overall birthrate), lowest cancer rate, lowest smoking rate, lowest per capita rate of alcohol use, and, arguably, the most comprehensive and universal state health insurance system in the U.S.

Furthermore, Mormons as a group have the lowest rates of violence and depression among religious groups, are seven times less likely to commit suicide (if active church members), and have the lowest divorce rates of any social-religious group. Sixty-five percent of Utah residents have personal computers, the highest penetration rate in the country. Crime has decreased in the state of Utah by anywhere from 15-18 percent over the past 10 years.

The great and obvious achievement of Mormonism has been exactly the conduct of Mormons in every day life, in all spheres and all sectors. If you judge a faith by how its adherents behave and act, then the LDS church is very hard to beat. No child rapists, moreover, are protected in this church.

I've written my Sunday column on this question so won't elaborate further till it's published. But while I really don't think Mormonism is doctrinally stranger than older religions (my own church, for example, believes the Virgin Mary was physically whooshed up into the sky), I also don't think Romney's religion should be ruled entrely out of bounds for discussion. He is running in a party that explicitly states there is no solid separation of religion and politics. And the current president was pummeled mercilessly for the more radical teachings of his church in Chicago. And Obama was just a member of the congregation – not a former official in the church, like Romney, whose entire identity is bound up with a very particular religion.

Mormonism, in other words, should not be tackled differently than any other faith; but neither can it be completely exempted from examination in this election. When a future president puts on white robes and enters a secret Temple on a Sunday, it will be as big a cultural shift as having a black man in the Oval Office. I think Romney should pre-empt bigoted attacks with his own account of how his faith affects his life and politics. Just as candidate Obama did.

(Painting: C.C.A. Christensen's painting of Joseph Smith receiving the Golden Plates from the Angel Moroni at the Hill Cumorah.)

Waldman warns against it:

One of the most dangerous temptations of the political reporter is over-interpretation of polls, the need to explain every apparent movement in this week's poll with reference to events that just happened.

The result is a whole lot of utterly unsubstantiated claims explaining things lots of reporters don't even understand or that may not actually have occurred at all. Only coverage of the stock market, where every news report confidently explains even the tiniest movement in share prices ("Apple shares fell one-tenth of a point today, with investors expressing concern after Billy Wilson of Saginaw, Michigan decided to buy a Droid to replace the iPhone he dropped in the toilet"), comes close.

Bernstein seconds him:

I have to say that it can be frustrating doing daily blogging that sometimes seems to consist of, again and again, saying that things don't matter at all. Or that they matter only a little bit. Or that they probably don't matter, but might if things break right. Or that they don't matter, although if they hint something about future actions then those future actions, if they happen, might matter, even if the present ones don't.

This is an impressive chart, it seems to me. It's an update on European countries' progress in meeting their Kyoto goals of reducing carbon emissions to below their levels in 1990. All the major economies have succeeded, with Britain and Germany leading the pack:

Germany and Britain have cut their carbon emissions by more than a fifth. Brad Plumer throws some cold water on the numbers:

A big chunk of those cuts is typically ascribed to two factors. Germany saw a huge one-time drop in emissions after reunification, since a bunch of inefficient power plants and factories in the East closed down. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, made a massive switch from coal to electric gas in the 1990s after its electricity industry was privatized. That made a big difference, since those two countries are Europe’s biggest emitters. But neither of those events are likely to repeat themselves.

Some of Europe's emissions have been outsourced to developing countries, which doesn't help the global situation. But some of this is real. The whole EU has cut carbon by 16 percent below 1990 levels under Kyoto. The US, which never ratified Kyoto, has seen a rise of around 15 percent. China's emissions have gone through the roof. A lot is fucked up in Europe, but they're way ahead of us on climate change. In a century from now, I wonder what people will recall as the real failures of our time.

Telluride, Colorado, 8 am

Kevin Williamson responds to the many critics of his "the GOP is the party of civil rights" essay. One of his stronger points:

[L]iberals look back at history, identify the social changes of which they approve, and define “conservatism” as opposition to those changes, since conservatism is, in this reading, opposition to social change. Thus the hilarious New York Times reference to those seeking to maintain Communism in post-Soviet Russia as “conservatives.” This doesn’t hold up to very much scrutiny: The abolitionist movement, for example, was populated largely by people who would be viewed with contempt by modern liberals, because they were crusading Christians who sought to write their own interpretation of morality into the law. (Or, in the case of John Brown, militant anti-government activists pursuing Second Amendment remedies.) One of the things I like most about Frederick Douglass is his economic analysis of slavery.

Bernstein counters:

Williamson attempts to reclaim civil rights Republicans by noting that they were in favor of integrating black Americans within the market economy, which (he appears to assume) only conservatives support. But of course that’s not true at all; virtually all Americans, and certainly all mainstream political movements, support a market economy. He says, “a lot of those so-called liberals from the northeast who supported civil rights look pretty good by today’s Republican standards: sober, free-enterprise, small-government guys.” The larger point? There’s simply no question that folks such as Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott, and Clifford Case could not be nominated in today’s Republican Party; that everyone at the time considered that wing of the party “liberal”, and that everyone at the time considered the Goldwater wing of the party “conservative,” and that it was the Goldwater wing which opposed civil rights. The bottom line: a Republican Party which actually treated people like Javits, Scott, and Case as “pretty good” would be a completely, totally different party from the one we actually have.

Pareene piles on. More Dish on the Williamson essay here.

Ask Tina Anything

[Re-posted with several questions added by readers since yesterday]

Tina Brown needs no introduction here. Peruse her Wiki page to review her long career in journalism. To submit a question for Tina, simply enter it into the field at the top of the Urtak poll (ignore the "YES or NO question" aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). We primed the poll with questions you can vote on right away – click "Yes" if you are interested in seeing her answer the question or "No" if you don't particularly care. We will air her responses soon.

A reader writes:

Let's not lose track of the context of the scandal in Milwaukee. Dolan was sent there after his predecessor, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, began to privately acknowledge that he was a homosexual, had not been celibate, and had made payments totaling nearly a half million dollars to one of his male lovers – hush payments. The silence money practice was at the very heart of the scandal engulfing the Milwaukee archepiscopate. So the new evidence that Dolan okayed payments to pedophile priests, presumptively to get them to depart quickly in line with canon law, is decisive – it showed Dolan's entire attitude towards the problem, which focused on using money to protect the church. 

For this man now to present himself to the nation as a moral leader commanding that voters do his bidding at the polls is a real farce. It shows that he and his brethren are motivated by a crazed desire to aggregate power and authority. For them, the doctrine of love, acts of compassion, concern for victims are all hollow.

It does not surprise me that his de facto endorsement of the GOP has not been met with enthusiasm from his flock. They believe the church should be about faith, not politics. The National Catholic Register does its best to spin this in defense of the Cardinal:

Suppose you are walking down the street and a homeless person approaches you and asks you for some money. You give him the money. Would that justify a headline saying that you have been paying the homeless?

Really? An employee who has raped children under the church's authority is the moral equivalent of a homeless person on the street? Here's the full context of the Cardinal's original denial:

"For anyone to assert that this money was a payoff or occurred in exchange for Becker agreeing to leave the priesthood is completely false, preposterous, and unjust. What this was, instead, was an act of charity, in-line with Catholic Social Teaching, that allowed a person to obtain health insurance coverage he simply could not afford on his own. If people want to criticize me for that charity, so be it."

My italics. Here's what the New York Times's Laurie Goodstein reported:

A spokesman for the archdiocese confirmed on Wednesday that payments of as much as $20,000 were made to “a handful” of accused priests “as a motivation” not to contest being defrocked.

My italics again. There's a reason the Cardinal is refusing to respond to the press on this. His specific denial has now been challenged by the spokesman for his former archdiocese, citing specific documents. It seems to me that unless the Cardinal has new facts to offer, and until he explains why his statement was not untrue, then he appears to be a liar.

(Photo: Michael Nagle/Getty)

A reader adds a new wrinkle to this phenomenon:

The big news in the past couple weeks is the two powerhouses of the comics industry, Marvel and DC, trying to outdo each other in jumping on the President's "evolution" coattails on marriage. After Marvel announced that Northstar, the first openly gay superhero (and Canadian!) would propose to his longtime boyfriend in Astonishing X-Men #50, followed by mainstream comics' first same-sex marriage in #51, DC announced that they would be reintroducing an as-yet unidentified "iconic" character to the New 52 continuity as a gay man. Naturally, these positive developments prompted outrage from the American Family Association's most likely inaccurately named One Million Moms, claiming that these comics would confront children with "homosexual topics that are too complicated for them to understand."

Which leads us to the part where it gets cool.

I keep thinking back to your post on the Dharun Ravi sentence that ended with "being gay is not an 'alternative lifestyle,' whatever that is." Well, one fellow who seems to agree with you is Dan Slott, the writer of "Amazing Spider-Man". When asked about the Million Moms boycott call, Slott essentially said "bring it on, we'll sell more with you against us." He then followed up by pointing out that he'd already introduced a gay character in Spider-Man:

"Actually, we already have two openly gay characters in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: Peter's boss at Horizon Labs, Max Modell, and his partner, Hector. We just treat it like an everyday thing. Which it is. From my P.O.V. there was no real need for Max to "come out" or to make an issue out of his sexual orientation. In Spidey's world, Max is a Steve Jobs/Bill Gates level celebrity. So everyone already knows about it.
…

Yep. Max Modell was always gay. The 1st time I had to mention it was when @fredvanlente wanted to do a joke over in the SPIDER-ISLAND issue of HERC. Fred had a scene where Emma Frost was reading Max Modell's mind, and she could tell he was having impure thoughts about her. Basically, I had to send in a note saying that the scene shouldn't play out that way because Max was gay. The first time it's actually mentioned in the book is in ASM #678 when Peter comments on Max's watch (which was an important plot point) and Max thanks Pete and tells him it was a birthday gift from his partner, Hector."

This actually floored me. I've been reading Spider-Man for two decades. I know everything. Not only was Max outed four whole months ago, it was in my absolute favorite recent story – a time travel romp littered with Doctor Who references. And I didn't even notice.

So I think Slott handled it perfectly. A major supporting cast member is a gay man in a committed relationship. That's not something that needs a press release or a Very Special Issue. Everyone knows and they just go about their business. Good on Spidey.

P.S. Slott has also come under criticism recently from a conservative blogger who took issue with Spidey not killing North Korean soldiers and not waterboarding the Sandman. Not even joking.