Month: March 2013

Can The South Be Trusted On Voting Rights Yet? Ctd

Alan I. Abramowitz thinks not. But racism isn’t the main reason why:

The nonwhite share of the electorate in the states covered by Section 5 is expected to increase over the next few decades. Given the racially polarized pattern of voting in these states, this trend is likely to pose a growing threat to the dominance of the Republican Party in many of them. As a result, the political incentives for Republican leaders to pursue changes in election laws, rules and regulations in order to suppress or dilute minority voting strength will almost certainly increase in the future, making continued federal review of proposed changes crucial in order to ensure fair elections. Far from being outdated, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act may be needed more than ever in the coming decades.

Earlier Dish on the subject here.

Blame The Things

Colin McSwiggen examines where we place blame in a technological society:

Do guns kill people or do people kill people? Is it television or bad parenting that’s destroying the American family? Were the Fukushima meltdowns a man-made disaster or are nuclear reactors inherently unsafe? These questions all spawn from the same worn-out false dichotomy about the political nature of technology: is the problem us or it? …

As a cognitive scientist, [Don] Norman [seen in the video above] researched technical screw-ups. He observed people “making errors – sometimes serious ones – with mechanical devices… computer operating systems… even airplanes and nuclear power plants.” What he found is that guilt interferes with improvement, that people will invariably “either try to hide the error or blame themselves for ‘stupidity’ or ‘clumsiness,’” and as a result no one calls for better designs that could have prevented the problems in the first place. Norman’s great contribution to design discourse has been to shift the blame to the things, and demand that they be fixed.

The Facts On Fracking, Ctd

A reader adds to this post:

Living in Colorado, we are impacted by fracking – not only on the Western Slope, but also in the counties north of Metro Denver. Missing from this discussion is the significance of water. Water is scarce in the West, and Colorado is situated in the High Plains Desert. Typical precipitation averages 15″ annually, and the West continues in a serious drought pattern.  There are already conflicts between agricultural needs, thirsty Front Range cities, stream flows necessary for fish and animals – plus water required by downstream states.

Fracking uses significant amounts of water, and it can’t be reused. The deep pockets of energy companies are outbidding farmers for extra water, drying up agricultural lands and putting more pressure on farm families to sell out. Increases in air pollution from well gas fumes escaping, and drilling that encroaches on housing developments also complicate the situation.

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew applauded Rand Paul’s righteous filibuster while we rounded up other reactions to the 13-hour dose of awesome, and recognized the decline of christianist influence thought in their inability to engage in secular debate. He dubbed Clinton’s DOMA announcement a “BFD” and stood in awe at the progress of gay rights during his lifetime,

In the political realm, Ponnuru looked forward to 2016 debates featuring Rand Paul, Chait found the paragon of truthiness, and we welcomed the blossoming of more conservative sanity. Readers shared their own stories from the lead-up to the Iraq War, Republicans sought “permission” to support marriage equality, and Evan Soltas declared the sequester overhyped. Overseas, the US weighed the odds in Syria, we eagerly awaited a peaceful outcome for the Kenyan election, and bookies pontificated about the next pontiff.

In miscellaneous coverage, a reader blurred the line between work and play for reporters, NPR considered all things about the Dish model, Hairpin offered Amazon alternatives, and freelancers measured payment against pageviews. Drum cast about for an explanation of the public’s climate ennui, soccer kept the lights on, stoners reclaimed 3-D printers for peaceful purposes, and a Yellow Lab chilled with some herbal help. Andrea Swensson passed on SXSW, Douthat ignored the Hathaway haters, and Peter Orszag challenged colleges to close to dropout gap.

Eslewhere, readers threw in their thoughts on san men, city-dwellers were sad (but there’s an app for that), and Harold Pollack calculated that substance abuse treatment for the mentally ill was definitely worth it. As Donnie Collins navigated the health insurance market, Gwynn Guilford solved China’s bachelor problem, and Lauren Drain proposed that sex might be straining WBC’s ties, We compiled rude awakenings in the MHB, our hair stood on end at the adorableness of the next generation of orangutan in the FOTD,  snow fell on Old Dominion in our VFYW.

– D.A.

Bill Clinton Turns On DOMA

That’s a BFD, it seems to me. The op-ed is here. Money quote:

When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that “enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination.” Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned.

He knew it then of course too. But it’s churlish to cavil. If we can forgive Ken Mehlman, we can surely forgive Bill Clinton. And welcome him to the civil rights cause of our time.

The Political Dead-End Of Christianism

Bluebanded_Gobies

[Re-posted from earlier today.]

Last week, as regular readers know, I went to the University of Idaho to debate whether civil marriage equality was good or bad for society as a whole. My interlocutor was and is a fundamentalist, a believer in Biblical morality, and a very hospitable and gracious host. I had dinner with his extended family – an impressive, funny, intelligent crew. His son-in-law friend, who shepherded me around, was super-smart, is obviously fully engaged in the modern world, educated and eager to chat. He also believes that the earth was created in six days six thousand years’ ago, that civil marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples only, and that abortion should be illegal.

I just want to say I wish I met more Christianists like this more often. My hosts sincerely believe that there can be no solid separation between church and state and no basis for social order or “truth” other than Biblical morality as strained through the New Testament. And so purely pragmatic political arguments can quickly become problematic for them. Peter Leithart, who attended the debate, wrote it up on First Things and admirably homed in on the core divide:

Sullivan demanded that Wilson defend his position with secular, civil arguments, not theocratic ones, and in this demand Sullivan has the support of liberal polity. Sullivan’s is a rigid standard for public discourse that leaves biblically-grounded Christians with little to say … That leaves Christians with the option of making theologically rich, biblically founded arguments against gay marriage. But do we have the vocabulary ready to hand? And even if we do, does the vocabulary we have make any sense to the public at large?

Wilson closed the debate with a lovely sketch of the marital shape of redemptive history, from the garden to the rescue of the Bride by the divine Husband to the revelation of a bride from heaven. In order for that to carry any weight, though, people have to be convinced that social institutions should participate in and reflect some sort of cosmic order. Who believes that these days? Wilson tells a cute story, many will say, but what does it have to do with public policy?

If that’s a hard case to make, it’s even harder to make the case that homosexuals are in any way a threat to our civilization.

Rod Dreher notes:

This is the answer to the question about “cosmic” versus “moral.” Leithart is pointing out that the metaphysical ground has radically shifted under our feet. The traditional Christian moral arguments depend on a metaphysical understanding that is no longer widely shared, not even by Christians.

This is why Christianism cannot win a majority – and is fast becoming a smaller minority. If your agrument is that God says so – and your fellow citizens don’t believe in that same God – how can you even engage in secular debate? New analysis (pdf) of polling and the last election results on the gay marriage question, for example, reveal that only one major religious group now opposes marriage equality across the board: white evangelical Christians, who are pretty close to synonymous with the Tea Party. Even every other Christian population supports it! From white non-evangelical Christians to Catholics, clear majorities favor the reform.

To give one comparison: white Catholics back civil marriage equality by 53 – 43 percent. Hispanic Catholics back it by 54 – 35. But white evangelicals oppose it by a massive margin: 73 percent oppose it, 23 percent support it. The GOP’s problem is that this is their base; it cannot compromise because God’s word is inviolable; and yet it is also losing the argument badly. You either stick with this base and lose – or you fight them and lose. Which is why so many in the GOP are now just not talking about the issue.

In Idaho, the crowd was largely white and evangelical. They voted overwhelmingly against marriage equality at the start and after a debate in which my opponent conceded that his argument was ultimately rooted totally in Biblical truth and not secular consequences, and who declared the state of heterosexual marriage as in crisis. In other words, that night mirrored the last twenty years. The longer this debate has gone on, the more the opposition has Thomas_Aquinas_by_Fra_Bartolommeowithdrawn to claims of simple Biblical authority. That is not an appeal to the center of the American polity. It’s a withdrawal from it.

The theo-conservative response to this was an attempt to revive “natural law” arguments against gay marriage, derived from updating Aquinas. But deriving an “ought” from an “is” in nature has been deeply problematic since Hume. And if you were going to do that anyway, I think you’d have to concede that we now know empirically that same-sex attraction among humans and most other species is ubiquitous, and may even have some kind of evolutionary advantage. Aquinas didn’t know, for example, that humans were conceived by a woman’s egg as well as a man’s sperm. He couldn’t possibly have known what Darwin and his followers have unfolded: a vast, constantly shuffling of DNA, designed to generate diversity in order to survive the challenges of subsistence through time and environment. He couldn’t have known that the animal kingdom is full of homosexuality; or that gender can change in fishes (see the blue-banded gobies above); or that grasses have many genders; or that countless human beings are born with indeterminate gender or trans-gender.

My view is that if you take Aquinas’s core position in 2013 – and try to deduce what is right from nature itself – you’d probably have to conclude that homosexuality is itself a natural deviation from the norm, and that such deviations are not “mistakes” but, if they survive the test of scores of millennia, are actually integral to nature. Aquinas saw through a glass darkly; now we see gene to gene.

So we end up in David Bentley Hart’s words here:

If we all lived in a Platonic or Aristotelian or Christian intellectual world, in which everyone presumed some necessary moral analogy between the teleology of nature and the proper objects of the will, it would be fairly easy to connect these facts to moral prescriptions in ways that our society would find persuasive. We do not live in such a world, however.

But we still live in a democracy. Which means that this worldview cannot survive in our culture and polity without some massive Third Great Awakening that shows no sign of emergence in the developed world. The natural law Deus Ex Machina, in other words, either leads to believing that homosexual orientation is natural or collapses in the civil sphere because of previous concessions and loopholes: no fault divorce, contraception, women’s greater freedom and power, the acceptance of infertile couples and post-menopausal couples as civilly married. The only argument they have left is the nebulous idea that this will all somehow lead to polygamy. But there are very good civil and secular arguments against polygamy – the subjugation of women, the social consequences of large numbers of young men without women to marry, etc – that cannot apply to allowing gays to marry. Almost all the utilitarian, pragmatic arguments against marriage equality evaporate upon inspection. And it remains a truth that the attempt by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI to revive this tradition and win back the West to neo-Thomist doctrine has been a total failure.

They cannot even persuade their own flock, let alone the rest of society. We are left in the world Alasdair Macintyre brilliantly laid out many years ago. If the democratic conversation has to continue without universally shared concepts of the divine order, it must do so with pragmatic, secular and civil arguments. They may be rooted in faith, but they cannot appeal to mere divine authority to persuade.

Which is why the Christianists are losing – and so suddenly. My hope is that this failure will help many of them either to seek their own salvation and leave others be (a long evangelical tradition in America before liberal over-reach in the 1970s) or to re-learn how to engage in civil, secular argument. But that won’t be easy. And it may simply be far too late.

(Photo: blue-banded gobies from Wiki; painting of Thomas Aquinas by Fra Bartolommeo, also via Wiki.)

A Debate Desperately Needed On The Right

Ponnuru hopes Rand will run for president in 2016:

It’s not that I agree with his distinctive brand of libertarian conservatism — some of what’s distinctive about it I dislike — but it would be useful for his ideas to get a thorough debate, and for Republicans to figure out just where they stand nowadays on foreign policy and national security. We don’t have a great sense of how many Republican voters would fall into each camp if a primary campaign focused on it. For now, though, Republicans are moving in Paul’s direction — and the carping by John McCain and Lindsey Graham about that fact will not slow the tide.

Should Every Book Link To Amazon? Ctd

A reader writes:

The Hairpin did a follow up to the Amazon Affiliate debate where they announced that they would continue putting in Amazon links, but that they would now offer readers a choice. So, whenever a book is mentioned, it is followed by two links, an affiliate link to Amazon and an affiliate link to IndieBound (a coalition of independent booksellers). An example of how they do it can be seen in this post.

An overview of the Dish’s toe-dipping into affiliate revenue here.

Should Trans Surgery Be Covered? Ctd

The story of Donnie Collins, the Emerson student whose frat brothers helped him raise money for his “top surgery”, has become a lesson in the difficulties of navigating the health insurance landscape. Dana Liebelson provides the latest:

[On] Wednesday, a spokesperson for the university told Mother Jones that, in fact, Collins’ surgery was covered by his student health insurance all along, and the rejection was a mistake by the insurance company. “Emerson College is pleased to have confirmation that its policy with Aetna will cover Donnie Collins’ surgery,” Carole McFall, a spokesperson for Emerson, told Mother Jones. “After the rejection of his initial request, the college contacted Aetna for clarification—knowing that transgender benefits have been part of its insurance policy with Aetna since 2006. The conversations that followed led to the discovery that the policy language had inadvertently not been updated by Aetna on their internal documents. This inaccuracy led to the rejection of coverage.”

The excess money raised by the fraternity’s campaign will instead be donated to the Jim Collins Foundation, which “provide[s] financial assistance to transgender people for gender-confirming surgeries.” Donnie explains the rest above. Reader comments on the issue of coverage for trans surgery here.

Treating Criminal Tendencies

Harold Pollack wants to reduce violence committed by the mentally ill:

Millions of Americans suffer from some form of severe mental illness, or SMI. It’s important to remember that the vast majority of these men and women have never committed a violent crime and never will commit one. (Indeed, the mentally ill are often victims of violent crime, a social problem that has not received sufficient attention.) The most careful studies in several wealthy democracies suggest that the severely mentally ill account for perhaps 5 percent of violent crimes. Despite these rather low numbers, violence perpetrated by a subset of disturbed individuals is a genuine public safety concern.

He notes that “the combination of [severe mental illness] and substance abuse disorders, appears to be an especially strong risk factor for violent offending, with alcohol use playing a particularly prominent role”:

Because the social costs of crime are so high, even highly imperfect services—which is to say, most of the services offered to this population—tend to wildly pass any reasonable cost-benefit test. Anirban Basu, David Paltiel, and I published an economic analysis of substance abuse treatment services that included (but were not restricted to) individuals with co-occurring disorders. We found that the economic benefits of reducing the incidence of armed robbery alone—which was only committed by a small subgroup of treatment patients—were sufficient to offset the entire cost of the intervention.