Year: 2013

Stephanie Mencimer claims that the church “has all but dropped the rope in the public policy tug of war over marriage equality”:

The LGBT community’s best evidence of change within the church is that last year, in the only four states ever to pass marriage-equality laws, the church “did not provide one dime or one volunteer,” [Jim] Dabakis, [the head of the Utah Democratic Party and cofounder of the Utah Pride Center in Salt Lake] says. He adds that in Maryland, when one local Mormon leader tried to organize to oppose a pro-marriage equality initiative, the church shut her down.

(Hat tip: Glazer)

Rod pushes back against the assumption that there has been no racial progress in Dixie:

Yesterday he discussed how people should put down roots wherever they live. Before that, he explained why we should follow the example of his late sister, the subject of his new book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life:

[The book] follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie’s death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie’s funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations – Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting.

Ask Anything archive here.

Wilkinson asks why we don’t investigate alternatives to gun control:

Perhaps the best way to prevent mass shootings is censorship. For example, it could be made illegal to publish any information at all about mass shooters. No names. No pictures. No probing stories about their fraught home lives. Nothing. Maybe it wouldn’t work, and mass killers would nevertheless go on to achieve through their evil work the glory of infamy. Then again, maybe it would work. Shouldn’t we be willing to at least consider a small abridgement of the first amendment, if doing so would save even one child from a horrific death?

The fact is, most of us would rather lose an abstract kid or two than resort to this sort of censorship. We don’t like to admit that, so we tend to deny that it would work. But nobody actually knows it wouldn’t work.

Adam Gopnik is open to the censorship of violence:

The reason we don’t want our kids—or our teen-agers, or ourselves for that matter—lost in violent imagery, whatever the beauty of the pixelated townscape, is not because of something that they will cause but because of what they are right now. It’s not what they might do it’s who they are in the act of becoming. Fictive or not, violent images increase the sum total of violence in the world. If we believe that we, as Edmund Burke said, should hate violence and love liberty, then we can’t hate violence and still make it part of our idea of pleasure.

There is a third way, of course: for those involved in entertainment and journalism to self-censor, to understand that less is more, and to focus more on the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators of it. But in a free country, that only works if it marks a cultural shift from below, not paternalism from above. Not watching gratuitous, numbing violence is something we need no law to enforce. We can start today.

Jonathan Cohn’s new TNR cover-story tackles America’s daycare system:

A 2007 survey by the National Institute of Child Health Development deemed the majority of operations to be “fair” or “poor”—only 10 percent provided high-quality care. Experts recommend a ratio of one caregiver for every three infants between six and 18 months, but just one-third of children are in settings that meet that standard. Depending on the state, some providers may need only minimal or no training in safety, health, or child development. And because child care is so poorly paid, it doesn’t attract the highly skilled. In 2011, the median annual salary for a child care worker was $19,430, less than a parking lot attendant or a janitor. Marcy Whitebook, the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California–Berkeley, told me, “We’ve got decades of research, and it suggests most child care and early childhood education in this country is mediocre at best.”

At the same time, day care is a bruising financial burden for many families—more expensive than rent in 22 states. In the priciest, Massachusetts, it costs an average family $15,000 a year to place an infant full-time in a licensed center. In California, the cost is equivalent to 40 percent of the median income for a single mother.

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Some background on Brill:

He is the founder of CourtTV and American Lawyer magazine. His most recent venture is Journalism Online, which he sold to RR Donnelley in 2011 for a reported $45 million and now has more than 400 publications using its Press+ service to charge for digital content. He also founded Verified Identity Pass, Inc., a New York-based company that operated the Clear airport security fast-pass, a pre-cursor to the current Federal Trusted Traveler program.  In addition to writing a column for Newsweek, he has written magazine articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Harpers and Time.

His most recent success is that 36-page Time cover-story, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us”, which the Dish covered here and here. Money quote from Brill:

When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?

What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million- or million-dollar tab? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car? And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?

Brill’s piece is what journalism should now be doing – the long, deep-dive, debate-shifting essay that addresses our reality in an accessible, clear but compelling way.  To submit a question for Steve, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. Thanks for participating.