I said earlier this week that One Good Thing has the best storytelling of any blog, and clearly I’m not the only one who thinks so. Check out this article in the Chicago Tribune, heaping much-deserved praise on One Good Thing (as well as on the writer and her sex shop).
Mozil Tov, Flea!
The Human Rights Campaign has released a good pamphlet (pdf link) outlining the basic case for marriage equality, and answering some common objections to same-sex marriage. Here’s a sample:
Not by a long shot. When a gay or lesbian person gets seriously ill, there is no legal document that can make their partner eligible to take leave from work under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act to provide care — because that law applies only to married couples.
When gay or lesbian people grow old and in need of nursing home care, there is no legal document that can give them the right to Medicaid coverage without potentially causing their partner to be forced from their home — because the federal Medicaid law only permits married spouses to keep their home without becoming ineligible for benefits.
And when a gay or lesbian person dies, there is no legal document that can extend Social Security survivor benefits or the right to inherit a retirement plan without severe tax burdens that stem from being “unmarried” in the eyes of the law.
These are only a few examples of the critical protections that are granted through more than 1,100 federal laws that protect only married couples. In the absence of the right to marry, same-sex couples can only put in place a handful of the most basic arrangements, such as naming each other in a will or a power of attorney. And even these documents remain vulnerable to challenges in court by disgruntled family members.
That’s just one of many subjects the pamphlet covers - it’s worth a read.
One flaw, as Gabriel Rosenberg argues, is the pamphlet’s claim of 3,136,921 same-sex couples in the US today - a number that’s simply unsupportable. From Gabriel’s post:
As Ganriel says, the Census figure is probably an undercount, but not that huge an undercount.
Gabriel also points out that (again, according to the US Census), one in five male couples and one in three female couples are raising children - and 50% of those are raising two or more childrne. On the whole, “These numbers imply at least 330,000 children being denied the protections marriage could bring their families.”
UPDATE: I just received an email from Tom Sullivan of the HRC regarding that inflated figure: “I have posted a corrected version on the website and we are looking into ways to correct the print copies (labels perhaps). All future print runs will have the correct statistics.” Cool. :-)
I’m not too concerned that The Unborn Victims of Violence Act has passed.
Most of the pro-life arguments for this bill are nonsense; it would have been perfectly easy to pass a bill that punished criminals for harming fetuses without taking a stand on the abortion issue one way or the other. (Senator Feinstein offered an amendment to do just that, which was shot down 51-49). Instead, the Republicans chose to make fetal protection - something that both parties support - needlessly controversial by sticking in unnecessary pro-life language.
Nonetheless, there’s no need to panic. This is a pro-life victory, but it’s not one that matters much. And pro-choicers are probably better off having this faux-issue taken off the table.
Of course, not all feminists agree. Kate Michaelman of NARAL says “this is preparing for the day the Supreme Court has a majority that will overrule Roe v. Wade.” Similarly, Tena at Eschaton writes that “it takes another huge bite out of the right to choose, and is a set-up for the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade.”
Really, though, this bill doesn’t directly effect anyone’s right to choose. And if the Supreme Court does get a pro-life majority (something I discussed in this post), I’m sure they will use this law to help justify overturning Roe. But if this law hadn’t been passed, that same hypothetical pro-life Court would still overturn Roe - they’d just find some other justification.
Roe will live or die based on who is on the Supreme Court, not based on this bill.
March 26
1930: (Birthday) Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to be appointed an associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, born in El Paso, Texas. O’Connor was an Arizona lawyer and judge and served in the state Senate from 1969 until 1974, becoming majority leader - the first woman to hold such a position. She was elected an Arizona Superior Court judge 1974, and appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals 1979. President Ronald Reagan, under great pressure from women’s groups as well as his own party, appointed O’Connor and she was sworn in 09-25-81. Expected to be a strict Republican right-winger and seen as the deciding anti-choice vote, she amazed everyone by being the deciding vote to uphold a woman’s right to choose and confirm that an embryo or fetus is not a child.
1985: the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a lower court decision that an Oklahoma law allowing a teacher’s firing for speaking on gay rights is unconstitutional.
So Amp posted some links a couple days ago and stole all my freakin’ links. Seriously, just as soon as I’ve gathered up enough links to feel like I’ve got a good-sized link post, Amp does one and posts everything I’d been saving for you Alas readers so I just abort the idea entirely. It sucks. Seriously man, get with my schedule…
Anyway, here are a few things I found interesting that Amp didn’t snatch up (yet). In no particular order:
Are assholes drawn to the District by some force of nature? Like a giant mother asshole calling her young?
I spend at least five minutes pretending I wrote that.
And I spent at least ten minutes pretending that I’d written that witty little bit. Seriously, flea has a great blog going on there. There’s a reason my significant other has read the site’s entire archives and I’ve started on them myself.
Two crazy liberals can’t be wrong!
Those who make a public pledge to abstain until marriage delay sex, have fewer sex partners and get married earlier, according to the data, gathered from adolescents ages 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later. But the two groups’ STD rates were statistically similar.
The problem, the study found, is that those virginity “pledgers” are much less likely to use condoms.
“It’s difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you’re not going to have sex,” said Peter Bearman, the chair of Columbia University’s Department of Sociology, who co-authored the study with Hannah Bruckner of Yale.
“The message is really simple: ‘Just say no’ may work in the short term but doesn’t work in the long term.”
I don’t know how much I’ll be able to read posts, write posts, read comments, or write comments for awhile. My DSL has gone screwy and so, until I can set up some kind of dial-up back-up connection and/or get the DSL working properly and consistently, I may not be around.
Ugh. Sometimes, I hate technology.
This short post by Michael of Res Ipsa is worth quoting in full:
One also wonders if the “read the research” crowd would have been making anti-miscegination arguments if they knew that some research shows that children of interracial marriages have poorer outcomes then kids from same-race marriages? Would the research on “one mom and one dad” have been nuanced to mean “one mom and one dad of the same race” since there was undoubtedly no research on interracial couples included in those studies, just as no data on same-sex parents is included in the “one mom and one dad” research?
Also check out Michael’s post critiquing Maggie Galligher’s latest. (You may need to scroll to the bottom of the page). Via Family Scholars Blog.
A good article by Lynn Paltrow describes many recent cases in which the law has been used to force c-sections on unwilling women. Here’s a sample:
Angela Carder was not as lucky. This case occurred in the early 1990s and garnered national attention. After the 25-weeks pregnant Carder became critically ill with cancer, she, her family and attending physicians agreed to focus on prolonging her young life for as long as possible. The hospital, however, sought a court order forcing her to have a C-section. Despite testimony that the surgery could kill her, the court concluded that the fetus had a right to life and ordered her to be cut open against her will. The surgery was performed: The fetus died within two hours and Angela died within two days with the C-section listed as a contributing factor. No one suggested arresting the doctor or hospital officials for murder.
Paltrow is the head of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, whose website I should probably explore.
March 25
1911: Fire breaks out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, killing 145 women workers; some leap to their death from factory windows because the doors are locked.
1934: (Birthday) Gloria Steinem, author, feminist activist, and editor and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, born in Toledo, Ohio.
I’ll never understand what mainstream liberals have against feminism.
Which brings us to “Raising Hell,” by Philip Longman, the cover story of this week’s Washington Monthly. Here’s a sample:
All of us benefit hugely from such parental investment. What could you buy with your Social Security check, or your I.R.A.s for that matter, if everyone else in your generation had simply forgotten to have children or had failed to invest in them? Yet parents do not receive any greater pensions than non-parents for the sacrifices they make to raise and educate the future workers upon whom we will all depend in old age.
We also live in an increasingly knowledge-based economy in which the formation of human capital becomes increasingly essential to all sectors. Yet again, we leave the cost of amassing this human capital primarily in the hands of individual parents and low-paid caregivers and educators, nearly all of whom could vastly increase their incomes simply by getting out of the “nurturing business.” […]
These two trends–the mounting costs of caring for a growing elderly population and the increasing importance of human capital to the economy–have fundamentally altered the economics of family life. To put it bluntly, childrearing is fast becoming a sucker’s game.
I very much agree with Mr. Longman here. Of course, it’s all pretty familiar; there’s next-to-nothing here that isn’t cribbed from feminist books like Nancy Folbre’s The Invisible Heart and Who Pays for the Kids, and Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood. (Longman even quotes Folbre directly at one point, without mentioning that she’s a prominent feminist). If you look in the academic literature, the feminist writings similar to what Longman writes here go back many years. Still, it’s good that this idea - that raising children should be understood as a public good - is spreading.
Of course, after spending most of an essay discussing feminist ideas as if he made them up out of thin air, Longman names the villains who have prevented pro-caregiver reforms from taking place: conservatives and feminists.
Since then, Friedan’s argument that over-mothering was causing male homosexuality to spread “like murky smog over the American landscape” has lost resonance on the Left. But her general critique, that motherhood should not be a woman’s highest calling or priority, has not lost its following. And so the preoccupations of modern feminism, and of the Left in general for the last generation, have been with issues of personal liberation, birth control, abortion, and access to the market economy.
Friedan’s homophobia was appalling - but it was also thirty years ago, and has long been repudiated by feminists. To suggest that Betty Friedan’s decades-ago homophobia shows that current-day feminists don’t support caregivers is bizarre and incoherent.
Longman’s basic policy prescription is a cut in payroll taxes for working parents; is there a single policy-oriented feminist or feminist economist who opposes such a program? Are feminist legislators like Nina Lowrey (who proposes Social Security credits for caregivers) the hold-up? How about organizations like MOTHERS (founded by feminists Naomi Wolf and Ann Crittenden) - are they opposing such policies?
Get real. As far as I can tell, virtually all the people who have been working for economic support and security for caregivers (not just parents, but other caregivers, such as people caring for elderly relatives) are feminists.
Do feminists say “motherhood should not be a woman’s highest calling or priority?” Perhaps some do, somewhere (although Longman doesn’t provide any evidence to support this stereotype). That’s certainly not what some feminists Longman has read - such as Nancy Folbre - say about motherhood. What the feminists I know say is that motherhood shouldn’t be women’s only socially acceptable calling - being a mother is fine, but so is not being a mother - and that fathers should take a fair share of the caregiving load, too.
It’s true that over the last generation, feminists have worked for reproductive rights, equal access to decent-paying jobs, and (horrors!) personal liberation; surely The Washington Monthly isn’t saying that feminists should have ignored these issues?
What Longman doesn’t acknowledge is that feminists have also been working on helping working parents, through lobbying for child care, for family leave, and through advocating the sorts of policies Longman is talking about - as well as policies he isn’t talking about, such as Social Security credit for caregivers.
To claim that feminists are blocking such legislation is a bizarre, anti-feminist lie - made even more bizarre by the fact that most of the ideas this article recycles were developed by feminists. While I support much of the analysis in this article, I find it disappointing that the Washington Monthly thinks feminists are as much to blame as Republicans for opposing pro-caregiver policies - when feminists have actually been far more supportive of such policies than anyone else in the Democratic coaltion.
* * *
UPDATE: There is part of Longman’s policy that I don’t think I support. He suggests that parents whose children don’t graduate from high school should be penalized by getting less social security than other parents.
There’s an economic logic there, in that parents of children who graduate high school have, in a sense, “created more value” and should be rewarded for it. But the possible injustices of this policy are bothersome. My cousin died accidentally at age sixteen; the idea of penalizing her parents financially for that tragedy is repulsive. How about parents of mentally disabled children who cannot be fairly expected to graduate? For that matter, given how strongly dropping out is related to poverty and race, there’s something disturbing about economically punishing families of drop-outs - don’t they have enough economic problems?
There’s also a bizarre sort of discrimination against parenting in Longman’s proposal. Parents should get Social Security credit for parenting because what they do is work - and socially important work. But other workers don’t get Social Security depending on whether or not society likes the outcome of their labor. We don’t, for instance, deny folks who have been working at Enron their Social Security for that time - even though, on the whole, Enron has been a net drain on society and on the economy.
Justice issues aside, there are practical problems. What do we do with families that have two children, only one of whom graduates? How will the Social Security Administration keep track of whose children have graduated? The federal goverment doesn’t currently keep a list of who has and hasn’t graduated - and Longman claims his plan won’t require a vast new bureaucracy - so I don’t know where the SSA is going to get that information.
Finally, I wonder if increasing Social Security payments for parents of high school graduates actually would increase graduation rates. Is the reason some kids don’t graduate really that their parents lack financial motive? That doesn’t make much sense - parents would be awfully short-sighted not to see possible benefits in their children prospering. And if they really are that short-sighted, will reducing their future Social Secuirty payments actually change their behavior?
One thing I found intriguing was a reference to a 1954 lawsuit involving Sam Spade: “Hammett was not claiming copyright in Sam Spade—on the contrary, he wanted to reuse his own character but to be able to do so he had to overcome Warner Brothers’ claim to own the copyright.”
Long Story, Short Pier has an excellent take on the 300th issue of Cerebus - not on the issue itself, which Kip has not read, but on the occasion.
What’s Cerebus, you ask, and why is issue 300 an occasion? It’s a monthly comic book, written by Dave Sim and drawn by Sim and his collaborator Gerhard, which has been coming out more or less once a month since the late 1970s. But Sim has said for decades that the storyline would end with issue 300. So, just as a matter of dogged persistance, Cerebus is an impressive achievement. It was also one of the best-written, best drawn comics ever - until Sim seemed to go quite mad with misogyny. Oh, well, at least the cartooning is still good.
The impact that Cerebus has had on me as a cartoonist is immeasurable. I’m probably not going to comment on Cerebus critically, though, until I have time to purchase and read the whole thing - I’m currently several reprint volumes behind. (The entire thing is something like 17 or 18 volumes).
From The Economist (March 6-12), via Crescat Sententia:
Somalia is not without attractions. The sun shines, the beaches are sandy and you can dine on lobster on the roof of the Sharmo Hotel, which commands a splendid view of the capital, Mogadishu. It is not safe, however. The Sharmo advises guests to hire at least ten armed guards to escort them from the airport.
Since civil war broke out in 1990, Somalia has been divided into some two dozen warring fiefs. But Mr Jimale is undaunted. “Tourists can still go and see the former beautiful sights,” he says. “The only problem is they’re all totally destroyed.” Your correspondent admired what was left of the cathedral. Graffiti outside warned “Beware of landmines”.
Mr Jimale wants donors to help re-build Somalia’s national parks, though they mainly lie in areas the government does not control. “Most of the animals have disappeared too,” he concedes, “Because we have eaten them.”
Brave tourists can find unusual bargains in Mogadishu. In the market, a hand grenade sells for $10, a Howitzer for $20,000. For those who remain unconvinced, Mr Jimale is reassuring. “I’m sure tourists would leave Somalia alive and I’m hopeful they wouldn’t be kidnapped,” he says. “At least, we would try to make sure they were not kidnapped, although it can happen.”
March 24
1972: U.S Congress passes the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972.
1985: the National Association of Attorney Generals (of the various states) called for the U.S. Justice department to investigate abortion clinic bombings and terrorism as violations of the Federal Civil Rights laws. The Republican administration ignored the request.
They’re hoping that the modification will let them pick up enough votes to pass the bill out of the Senate. I’m hoping they’re wrong.
Worldwide Pablo points out that this is a defeat for the conservative Christians who oppose equal rights; they will submit a brief to the court, but they don’t get to be a party in the lawsuit.
The only people criticized here are Bush and Rove - and the critiques of them (Bush is dumb, Rove calculating) are ongoing stock critiques, not a critique of them that’s particular to the SSM debate. The cartoon’s point - which is that the definition of marriage has changed with the times, and so appeals to tradition should be viewed skeptically - is a reasonable one (although Tom may not agree with it), and focuses on attacking an argument, not on attacking SSM opponents personally. If SSM opponents actually do find this beyond the pale, then they need to grow thicker skins.
And while you’re at his blog, you should also read Gabriel’s response to David Blankenhorn’s dismissal of Rauch’s Atlantic article.
“I look at these gay marriages and I say ‘how is that impacting in any way against the marriage I have with my wife?’ I don’t think it does,” Shays said. “I don’t think people need to fear this type of union.”
Shays is, by the way, being challenged in the upcoming election by Diane Farrell (D) of Westport (my high school hometown). Farrell, who as a judge can legally solemnize marriages, has asked Connecticut?s attorney general for permission to solemnize gay marriages.
Along similar lines, check out Barney Frank’s comment on the modifications to the anti-marriage amendment:
The U.S. Supreme Court was loath to tamper with that tradition of the man as lord and master of the household as late as 1911, when it rejected the idea that a wife could sue an abusive husband. The justices called the very thought “revolutionary,” “radical and far reaching.”
Unfortunately, I can’t remember which “Alas” reader emailed me that link - but thank you, whomever you are!
The first response is an evasion. Laws often state general rules but provide exceptions where appropriate and just. Gay marriage, like non-procreative straight marriage, is an appropriate and just exception to the procreationists? rule that marriage exists for procreation.
The second response is equally unavailing. If we were serious about the procreationist project, we could require prospective married couples to sign an affidavit stating they are able to procreate and intend to procreate. If in, say, ten years they had not procreated we could presume they are either unable or unwilling to do so and could dissolve the marriage as unworthy of the unique institution.
That would be neither impractical nor require an invasive fertility test. That no one has proposed it, or anything like it, suggests we do not take the narrow procreationist vision of marriage very seriously. Marriage is not essentially about procreation because procreation is not essential to any marriage.
Further, this second response suggests that the general rule of procreation must bend to the overriding needs and interests of couples unable or unwilling to live by it. If that exception exists for non-procreative straight couples, why not for non-procreative gay couples? If there is an answer to this question, it cannot be found in the procreationist argument.
So the procreationist rule, refined in light of actual lived experience, is this: Nobody is required to procreate in order to marry, except gay couples. It?s a rule made to reach a predetermined conclusion, not for good reasons.
March 23
1977: Lucy Wilson Benson is appointed Under Secretary of State for Security Assitance, Science, and Technology. Benson was president of the League of Women Voters of the United States from 1968-1974, and was the first woman to give a commencement speech at the University of Maryland (in 1972).
This Jonathan Rauch article in The Atlantic seems, to me, to put its finger on what’s wrong with the non-religious objections to same-sex marriage.
…Notice how the terms of the discussion have shifted. Now the anticipated problem is not sudden, catastrophic social harm but subtle, slow damage. Well, there might be subtle and slow social benefits, too. But more important, there would be one large and immediate benefit: the benefit for gay people of being able to get married. If we are going to exclude a segment of the population from arguably the most important of all civic institutions, we need to be certain that the group’s participation would cause severe disruptions. If we are going to put the burden on gay people to prove that same-sex marriage would never cause even any minor difficulty, then we are assuming that any cost to heterosexuals, however small, outweighs every benefit to homosexuals, however large. That gay people’s welfare counts should, of course, be obvious and inarguable; but to some it is not.
That is the central immorality of the anti-same-sex-marriage position: they’d rather smash gay families with a log than risk straight families getting a splinter. I’m not sure if it’s homophobia or just incredible selfishness, but in either case it’s pretty distasteful.
This Salon article by Ann Hulbert, about flaws in studies of children raised in same-sex households (studies which univerally failed to find any harm to those children), has gotten a fair number of links from anti-same-sex-marriage blogs, and no wonder.
But although Judith Stacey has indeed criticized many studies (in her much-talked about journal article), to describe her as “shooting down findings” is going a bit far. In fact, Stacey has strongly defended the studies Slate says she “shot down”:
The studies we discussed have been published in rigorously peer-reviewed and highly selective journals, whose standards represent expert consensus on generally accepted social scientific standards for research on child development. […]
I also agree with the article’s conclusion, which suggests that this isn’t a question that’ll be decided by the social science, ultimately.
(See also this post, linking to con- and pro- articles about the social science studies).
I was going to write a couple long posts today, but am too depressed. So how’s the weather? It was a way-too-hot seventy-degrees here in the Springs today; I’m not sure if I’ve ever been happier to see the sun go down. It may rain some these next few weeks, but I think it’s safe to say that we’ve seen the last of the snow around here. That’s disappointing.
March 22
1893: (A First) Senda Berenson Abbott organizes the first collegiate women’s basketball game at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, with freshmen playing against sophmores.
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