Category: Old Dish

BUSH’S EXTRA-LEGAL PRESIDENCY

More thoughts here from Marty Lederman. There’s no doubt in my mind that this administration has sought to establish an extra-legal executive as far as it possibly can. No wonder civil libertarians are worried. Two points worth noting: the president has defined the theater of war as including the territory of the United States and including citizens of the United States; he has also defined the war as without end. So his war powers, although moderate in effect compared to what, say, Lincoln and FDR got away with, are exponentially more far-reaching. Because this war is forever, as Jon Rauch explains in his latest National Journal column (not online yet). And countless future presidents will be given the right to ignore, flout or finesse domestic law if they so wish. I wonder how many Republicans will object when president Hillary is wiretapping their private conversations. They’d better speak up now, hadn’t they?

– posted by Andrew.

THE LAST ZYGOTE POST, I SWEAR

I’m afraid I’m still puzzled by where this line of argument is supposed to take us. Certainly not to the absurd conclusion that Andrew’s email correspondent draws, which that if we grant legal protection to zygotes or embryos, we would need “start refusing to sell alcohol to breeding-age women,” or “refuse to let them ski, ride horseback, or cycle,” because “all those activities can cause miscarriages.” (And if you disagree, you’re siding with the Taliban – which I suppose has replaced “that sounds suspiciously like something Hitler would say” as the clinching argument of choice.)

Right. And similarly, because we extend legal protection to born children, we don’t let their parents take them swimming or skiing, and we arrest parents who keep guns in the house, and also alcohol, and of course there’s secondhand smoke and all the other “activities that can cause accidental death” and that are therefore illegal. Except . . . they’re not illegal, because we make a rather obvious distinction between “activities that might accidentally harm or kill another human being in your care,” and “activities intended to directly cause the death of another human being.” So I still don’t see how the fact that zygotes and embryos die accidentally all the time bears on whether killing them is wrong – beyond the instinctive feeling that if something happens a lot without our thinking about it much, it can’t be bad.

As for why we don’t think about it that much – well, certainly Julian’s right, in a sense, that we respond differently to earthquake deaths than to accidental zygote deaths because earthquake victims have a lot of qualities that prompt pity and empathy and grief, and zygotes don’t. The zygote doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t have a personality or memories, he doesn’t have the kind of intimate bonds that are ruptured by the death of an adult human being. So the tragedy isn’t nearly as great as it would be if I were to die, or Julian, or Andrew. And similarly, not all murders are created equal, which is why I don’t think there’s any contradiction between saying that abortion is murder and should be illegal, and admitting that there are greater extenuating circumstances – because of the intimacy of pregnancy and the understandable terror associated with becoming pregnant unintentionally – and less suffering involved for the victim than in almost any other form of murder, and that the penalties for a woman who procures an abortion should therefore be minimal or nonexistent.

Yet acknowledging that all deaths aren’t the same, and that all murders aren’t equally wicked, doesn’t mean that all lives don’t deserve legal protection. If I shoot a mother of four, it’s a much greater tragedy than if I shoot a friendless bum, and you’d probably want to give me a much stiffer prison sentence. But it doesn’t mean the mom should have the right to life and the bum – or the fetus, the embryo, or the zygote – shouldn’t.

And of course, the other reason we don’t respond emotionally to zygote deaths is because we don’t know they’re happening. The “zygote intuition” argument would make a little bit more sense, in this regard, if people never felt grief over a miscarriage. Then you could argue – “look, our moral intuitions tell us not to grieve over human life before that life acquires a personality, or self-awareness, or a face.” But of course, people do feel grief over miscarriages, by and large – just as they feel guilt (again, by and large) over abortions. Which suggests, in turn, that we don’t grieve for zygotes not because we somehow intuit that they aren’t really people, but because – unlike embryos and fetuses – we aren’t aware of their deaths. You can’t grieve for something you don’t know exists.

And you can’t kill it, either. I know that the argument-from-zygotes is intended to show the alleged extremism of the pro-life position, not make an empirical claim about the nature of abortion in the U.S. – but even so, it’s worth pointing out that no abortion clinic is in the zygote-killing business. They’re in the embryo and fetus-killing business, because by the time anyone knows they’re pregnant, the zygote is all grown up. So if for some reason we decided to move to an entirely intuition-based abortion regime, our zygote intuitions wouldn’t really matter much anyway – only our embryo and fetus intuitions would.

– posted by Ross

PONNURU IN THE WEEDS

Alas, Ramesh cannot even spell “hydatidiform mole,” let alone explain why their existence renders my summary of the scientific literature incorrect. Thanks, Derb! Ponnuru describes the emails below as “idiotic,” without citing anything actually inaccurate about them. Here’s an account of hydatidiform molars:

A hydatidiform mole is a rare mass or growth that may form inside the uterus at the beginning of a pregnancy. A hydatidiform mole results from over-production of the tissue that is supposed to develop into the placenta. The placenta normally nourishes a fetus during pregnancy. Instead, these tissues develop into a mass. The mass is usually made up of placental material that grows uncontrolled. Often, there is no fetus at all.

I would infer that Ramesh argues that this phenomenon impedes the successful development of a zygote. Sure. My stats take into account all possible obstacles for the countless full-fledged human beings Ramesh believes are dying in vast numbers inside their mothers’ bodies. Here’s Wikipedia’s account of teratomas. They’re a form of tumor or benign cyst. Again, the relevance of this to the debate is mystifying. Maybe a reader could let me know how these two phenomena would affect my calculation of a ratio of roughly 8:1 natural abortions compared to procured ones. I’m jut trying to get as accurate a number as possible, however irritating it might be to pro-life absolutists.

– posted by Andrew.

ANOINTING ALITO

Yep, this is where judicial hearings are headed. Hey, this is all about God, isn’t it?

ABRAMOFFZZZZ: The Cornerites are bored by the Abramoff scandal. They were bored by the torture scandal. They were bored by the illegal wire-tapping scandal. But not all conservatives are quite as sleepy.

BROKEBACK BREAK-OUT? The Kaus-Rich argument about the box office viability of “Brokeback Mountain” has some more data to crunch. Before Christmas, Brokeback averaged a take of $58,000 per theater, compared to King Kong’s $20,000. Yes, it was restricted to very few theaters in blue states. But from the latest Variety report:

“Brokeback” gained an amazing 61% in its fourth frame despite adding only 52 theatres. Focus’ Ang Lee-helmed gay cowboy love story lassoed up $4.8 million at 269 playdates, giving it a three-day per-screen average of $13,407.
Pic expanded to just a few additional mid-sized cities and made boffo grosses in all of them, including $37,000 in Nashville, $44,000 in Columbus, and $32,000 in Milwaukee. Lowest grossing theatres are in the suburbs, where “Brokeback” is averaging mid-single digits, similar to moderately performing wide pics like “Geisha” and “Rumor Has It.”

Today, the movie moves into the redder of red states, but the New York Daily New’s critic, Jack Matthews, doesn’t think that will make a big difference. Money quote:

A studio spokesperson says the producers are encouraged by the advance buzz from red state critics. “Brokeback” has won the Best Picture award from critics groups in Florida, Dallas/Fort Worth, Las Vegas and in the state of Utah (the last presumably using a secret ballot).
According to exit polls, “Brokeback’s” audience started as women in their 30s and now is about evenly split along gender lines. Straight men may be leaving shoe-leather skidmarks on the way into the theaters, but they’re going. Like “Curb Your Enthusiasm’s” Larry David, who voiced his tongue-in-cheek objections to “Brokeback” in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, I felt that “cowboys would have to lasso me, drag me into the theater and tie me to the seat” to make me watch a pair of range riders steam up in a pup tent. But I’ve now seen the movie three times (twice with my wife, if you have to know) and it is one of the most devastating Hollywood love stories of all time.

We’ll see how this progresses – but the idea that a movie with bareback gay sex in it would have been this successful even five years ago seems unlikely to me. That bareback sex would be a way of revealing deeper love is even more astonishing.

THE LIBERACE POPE: Say what you will about his theology, but his couture is fabulous!

– posted by Andrew.

ZYGOTIC EPISODES

A reader clarifies something:

Ramesh should know a zygote is a fertiziled egg (an embryo is a fertilized egg that has divided some arbitrary number of times). Sometimes the womb is to blame, but there are lots of zygotes that are defective so they never get far into the embryo stage (let alone the fetus implanted in the uterus stage). It is not the womb or mother’s internal architecture that is defective–its the fertilized egg itself that has some sort of chromosome damage or other abormality that prevents it from going forward (could even be the father had some bad seed). When my wife and I first started trying to have children it did not happen instantly after we stopped using birth control–she felt “something” for the first couple of months of attempts that didn’t pan out into a positive pregnancy result. It may have been in her head, but then again it may have been a zygote that didn’t make it.

The reason I single out zygotes is simply because that’s what the theocons have done. Robert George insists that human life begins at the moment a new splicing of 46 chromosomes occurs at the moment of fertilization. The reason these zygotes don’t make it may be chance, environment, competition or their own genetic errors. I think the latter is what Ramesh is referring to. Some zygotes die because they’re objectively disordered, if you’ll pardon the expression. But they’re still complete human beings, according to the Pope. Just like the disabled, dying, and even gays. And they die by the millions in America ever year. According to the Pope, their deaths are no less morally significant than those of the miners who recently perished in the Sago mine. As another reader points out, the political implications of this are mindboggling:

You are on the right track with the zygote discussion. The question for lawmakers about abortion is not whether it’s a good or bad thing: it’s always bad. The question is whether it’s a bad thing government should regulate and if so, how? The reason the zygote question is important is because it’s very difficult for government to ban ordinary physical processes, and miscarriage (known in medical books as “spontaneous abortion,” by the way) is a completely natural process. We do well to remember that banning something doesn’t stop people from doing it, it just allows the government to punish those who do. In this case, if it’s not possible to determine easily whether something was natural or induced, how can the state legitimately apply punishments?
If zygotes or blastulae or embryoes become 14th Amendment persons, entitled to all the protections thereof, how do we go about ensuring their protection against say, negligent acts by the mother? Could we start refusing to sell alcohol to breeding-age women? Refuse to let them ski, ride horseback, or cycle? All those activities can cause miscarriages, and 14th Amendment persons have the right to be protected from other 14th Amendment persons’ harm, intentional or otherwise. If one objected to the Taliban, one cannot coutenance the kinds of restrictions necessary to protect zygotes from their mothers, who are quite often unaware of their existence.

This helps explain the disconnect between the rhetoric and logic of the pro-life movement and what they actually do about it.

– posted by Andrew.