The Dish

You’re not letting this one go, are you? A reader writes:

In 2008 Barack Obama ran as a candidate opposed to gay marriage. I don’t think there’s any doubt that he chose to do this in the teeth of his personal beliefs and the knowledge that it would be hurtful to the gay community. He chose to do so because he believed to do otherwise would lose him votes and possibly the election. The president has changed his official stance on the issue, and his policies and rhetoric today certainly reflect that change. But I don’t think he’s issued any sort of public apology for his 2008 stance.

Now, Clinton’s past sins in this area dwarf Obama’s, but Clinton was also operating in a political climate much more hostile to gay rights. Are you convinced that, under similar circumstances, Obama would not have behaved the same? I’m not.

Well, that’s an impossible hypothetical, but if forced to give an answer, I’d say I am. Yes, they’re both pragmatists; but there is a limit and a method to Obama’s pragmatism, and a patience in achieving his ends. There is, in contrast, no limit I have been able to find to the Clintons’ pragmatism or careerism. They were also amateurs, who didn’t think through how to achieve their ends, announced aims without beginning to prep for how to get there, and ended up being completely outflanked by the rabid right. Another reader:

From AFP: “Ending the US travel ban had been an uphill struggle for rights groups, who saw former president Bill Clinton’s attempts to repeal the restrictions shot down by conservatives.” So you saying that Clinton “signed the HIV travel ban” by supporting (along with Barney Frank) a generous NIH funding bill with historically high HIV/AIDS funding, which (despite Clinton’s/Frank’s lobbying) re-authorized the ban, would be like saying “Obama signed the green-card ban on gay immigrants” by signing a non-inclusive immigration reform bill (which he’s indicated he’d do if there were no other way to pass immigration reform).

There’s a huge difference between not including gay couples in immigration reform because a Supreme Court ruling would soon likely make it it moot; and signing into law a brutal piece of stigmatization and persecution for countless people with HIV. Jesse Helms said he regretted it. Clinton has never owned up to his role in signing it. Above, in an interview two years ago, he is still blaming others. You will not find a single instance of him blaming himself for bungling these issues in 1993 and then running from them ever since. Again: a simple sorry would suffice. It remains beyond him. Another reader:

Sorry Andrew, but your criticism of Bill Clinton’s record on gay rights jumped the shark when you listed “don’t ask, don’t tell” as one of the ways in which he “did so much damage to gay lives.”

While DADT was seriously flawed insofar as it required that gays in military remain closeted, it prohibited – for the first time – discrimination and harassment against closeted homosexual and bisexual service members and applicants.  This distinction seems ludicrous now, but it was a huge step forward at the time.  Clinton, moreover, actually wanted to sign an executive order that would have allowed gays to serve openly, but he was forced to fall back on DADT as a compromise position after being met with staunch opposition from prominent congressional Republicans and Democrats who threatened to write the exclusion of gays into law.

In fact, other than DOMA, Clinton’s record on gay rights is extremely impressive for the 1990s.  He was the first president to appoint openly gay men and women, he issued executive orders lifting the ban on security clearances for LGBT federal employees and outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation in the federal civilian workforce, and he also pushed for both hate crimes laws and for the private sector Employment Non-Discrimination Act.  All this at a time when supporting gay rights was pretty unpopular.

None of this, of course, excuses Clinton from later selling out gays for his own political gain, but you overplayed your hand.

He sold us out at the very beginning. He had no plan to implement the end of the gay ban; it was just another promise to fundraisers he never thought through. Then he dropped it almost immediately and left all those who had come out in the lurch. Then under Clinton as commander-in-chief, the rate of discharges on grounds of homosexuality doubled compared with this predecessor. He did nothing to stop this, even as George Stephanopoulos reassured me and others that gay servicemembers were going to be safer under the new law. They were, in fact, sitting ducks – and Clinton learned one lesson: take the money from the gays but fire more of them than any private employer. Note above that he even blames Colin Powell before taking responsibility himself. But Clinton never took responsibility for anything but his successes. Another reader:

The issue about Clinton and DOMA taps into a bigger question I have about how to view the millions of conversions on this issue over the last two decades, and the millions more who have not yet changed their minds. Are they all recovering bigots?

I did not support same-sex marriage when DOMA passed. Few Americans did; in 1988, only 11 percent supported gay marriage or had much idea what it would actually mean. I opposed DOMA, but mainly because it singled out gays and lesbians – not because I had a substantial disagreement with the policy of allowing only heterosexual marriage. Though I believe now that it was an awful law, DOMA seemed a logical step for those who sincerely opposed same-sex marriage.

There was an interesting moment on this week’s “Meet the Press” (a rarity, I know), when Ralph Reed and Jim DeMint accused Rachel Maddow of labeling Bill Clinton and all those who once supported DOMA as bigots. Maddow pointed out that Reed and DeMint were the only ones using the word “bigot”, but they had a point. As our society’s views continue their tectonic shift on this issue, how do you accommodate people whose deeply held beliefs are changing?

Was I a bigot in 1996? Or did I not yet recognize the discriminatory effects of my beliefs? I don’t really have an answer to that yet – and I would suggest that the answer is just as fuzzy for Clinton and other politicians who supported gay rights in principle but also supported DOMA.

I try to avoid the word “bigot” as much as possible for those reasons. I don’t think Clinton was a bigot just because he made a big show of returning to Arkansas in election year to personally preside over the execution of a mentally retarded African-American man, Ricky Ray Rector. I just think he was a disgusting opportunist, and if it ever was a choice between his career and minorities, his career always came first. It still does, and I wouldn’t be bothering with his Baldwin-like inability to own his own anti-gay record, if he weren’t obviously trying to win the White House back again, by-passing the 22nd Amendment via his wife.

Tate Watkins looks at why Haiti, which grew half of the world’s coffee during colonial times, has struggled in recent years:

Washed beans that sell for high prices abroad account for less than 2 percent of coffee grown in Haiti. Unwashed beans make up 90 percent of Haitian production, most of which is consumed by the domestic market or slips across the border to the neighboring Dominican Republic on donkeys, duty-free.

Poor farmers have sporadic cash flows, and most prefer to sell as quickly as possible, with little regard to price or who happens to be buying. The farmers’ cooperatives that sell washed beans for export lack financing and pay only a portion of the price up front; members have to wait until the end of the season to receive the remainder, or ristourne. Local and Dominican traders can often pay immediately upon purchase and are happy to buy low-grade coffee or even raw cherries. The majority of Haitian farmers wind up selling low-value coffee at correspondingly low prices.

How Haiti compares to Rwanda, whose coffee exports have boomed over the past few decades:

Haiti and Rwanda produce about the same volume of beans each year. But Rwanda has exported nearly 20 percent of its coffee in recent years as washed beans for gourmet markets, up from just 1 percent in 2002. Haiti sells 90 percent of it’s production as cheap, dry-processed beans that never leave the island of Hispaniola. The upshot is that in 2010, Rwanda made $55 million from coffee exports. Haiti made $1.5 million.

Update from a reader:

I’m glad to see the topic of Haitian coffee come up. it does seem like a real possibility to start pulling Haiti back up. I would like to give a quick plug for the Singing Rooster non-profit that has been providing loans and training to co-ops in Haiti. The coffee’s fantastic and the put the money back into Haiti.

When hypothetically on the cusp of death, physicians overwhelmingly decide against life-prolonging intervention, with the exception of pain medication. Lisa Wade talked to USC professor and doctor Ken Murray to figure out why:

First, few non-physicians actually understand how terrible undergoing these interventions can be. [Murray] discusses ventilation. When a patient is put on a breathing machine, he explains, their own breathing rhythm will clash with the forced rhythm of the machine, creating the feeling that they can’t breath. So they will uncontrollably fight the machine. The only way to keep someone on a ventilator is to paralyze them. Literally. They are fully conscious, but cannot move or communicate. This is the kind of torture, Murray suggests, that we wouldn’t impose on a terrorist. But that’s what it means to be put on a ventilator.

A second reason why physicians and non-physicians may offer such different answers has to do with the perceived effectiveness of these interventions.

Murray cites a study of medical dramas from the 1990s (E.R., Chicago Hope, etc.) that showed that 75% of the time, when CPR was initiated, it worked. It’d be reasonable for the TV watching public to think that CPR brought people back from death to healthy lives a majority of the time.

In fact, CPR doesn’t work 75% of the time. It works 8% of the time. That’s the percentage of people who are subjected to CPR and are revived and live at least one month. And those 8% don’t necessarily go back to healthy lives: 3% have good outcomes, 3% return but are in a near-vegetative state, and the other 2% are somewhere in between. With those kinds of odds, you can see why physicians, who don’t have to rely on medical dramas for their information, might say “no.”

Previous Dish on the subject and Ken Murray’s work on it here, here, here, and here. Update from a reader:

This chart has been popping up all over the internet without a key piece of context.  As can be seen in Figure 2 here, or at this Radiolab article, the original caption for it reads as follows:

Preferences of physician-participants for treatment given a scenario of irreversible brain injury without terminal illness (see text for details). Percentage of physicians shown on the vertical axis. For cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), surgery, and invasive diagnostic testing, no choice for a trial of treatment was given. Data from the Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, 1998.

Emphasis mine.  Irreversible brain injury changes the calculus somewhat.  It’s probably not true, as the chart without context suggests, that over 60% of doctors would refuse to take antibiotics to save their lives if they had a chance of regaining normal functioning.

Drawing on evolutionary psychology, Micah Mattix reviews Denis Dutton’s arguments in The Art Instinct:

The first feature of our inclination toward art is that we seem to have a universal love of landscape paintings — and not just any landscape, but landscapes similar to those our ancestors would have encountered on the African savanna. A central pillar of evidence for his argument is a 1993 study commissioned by Russian painters Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid that surveyed people from ten diverse countries and found a surprising number of consistent aesthetic preferences. Dutton writes:

People in almost all nations disliked abstract designs, especially jagged shapes created with a thick impasto in the commonly despised colors of gold, orange, yellow, and teal. This cross-cultural similarity of negative opinion was matched on the positive side by another remarkable uniformity of sentiment: almost without exception, the most-wanted painting was a landscape with water, people, and animals.

Dutton suggests that this seemingly universal preference for paintings depicting open spaces, trees, water, and animals is related to our ancestors’ search for food and safety. Such landscapes would have presented opportunities for cultivation; and the presence of water and climbable clusters of trees — which could have served as lodgings for game and provided safety from predators — would have been preferred by hunter-gatherers to either a dark forest or desolate plains. The emotional response to landscapes, the sense of peace, Dutton suggests, developed from the habitat choice of “people (and proto-people) in the Pleistocene.”

(Image: Petworth Park: Tillington Church in the Distance, J. M. W. Turner, c. 1830, via Wikimedia Commons)