Eugene Volokh points to an AP story about a woman who, according to prosecutors, refused to have a c-section because she didn’t want to be left with a scar. Although neither Eugene or any of the other bloggers I’ve read have mentioned this, the woman says the story is not true.

The facts of this case are, for now, too muddled to draw any conclusions from. The prosecutors say that her objections to a c-section were purely cosmetic, but a nurse claims Ms Rowland said the doctors planned to cut her “from breast bone to pubic bone”; if Ms Rowland had been given that impression, then she’d have more than cosmetic reasons to fear the operation. Ms. Rowland’s lawyer says she suffers from mental illness, and Ms. Rowland herself says she never turned down a c-section at all.

Like a law professor quoted in the AP story, I’m concerned about the precedent this case could set.

Eugene Volokh’s discussion is very worth reading:

As far as Eugene’s analogies go, I think the bone marrow example is far more on-target than the prayer case; a parent asked to take their child to the doctor in addition to praying, is not being asked to go under the knife himself.

* * *

If the woman was mentally ill - and that seems like a reasonable possibility - then I have to wonder, did anyone at any of the three hospitals she visited attempt to offer her treatment for her illness? And is putting her on trial - rather than getting her treatment now - really the appropriate public policy response?

* * *

It’s interesting to compare this case to a case I blogged about in January: A hospital sought (and got) a court order to perform a c-section on an unwilling woman, in order to save the infant. Fortunately, the woman left that hospital before they could enforce the court order. She wound up giving birth in another hospital, and gave birth to a healthy baby.

Very interesting article about a girl born with a rare genetic defect that prevents her from feeling physical pain. Although I had realized in the abstract that feeling pain is necessary for self-protection, I hadn’t really considered the specifics. For instance, the girl’s self-explorations destroyed one eye and permanently damaged another before her parents realized that she had to be outfitted with goggles. (To bad the article is written in a gross faux-touching style.)

Donna at NoodleFood considers how this little girl’s case might apply to Peter Singer’s utilitarian philosophy, which is all about minimizing pain:

Read (as, AATS, they say) the whole thing.

The Feminist Majority Foundation sent me a fundraising email which claimed that “The fate of Roe still hangs by ONE VOTE on the Supreme Court.”

The FMF is lying. Currently, the Supreme Court is 3-6 in favor of Roe (or, to be technical, in favor of Casey) (The three anti-Roe votes are Rehnquist, Thomas, and Scalia). The “fate of Roe” hangs by two votes, not one.

As much as I admire the FMF, lying in a fundraising appeal is unethical and inexcusable.

* * *

So how “in danger” is Roe? Well, if Bush wins re-election, and if two of the current votes for Roe retire (O’Conner and Stevens are plausible possibilities), then it’s possible that Roe could be overturned. Bush could replace O’Conner and Stevens with pro-lifers.

Or could he? The Senate Democrats would probably filibuster an overtly pro-life Supreme Court nominee. But they might not have the numbers to sustain a filibuster; in 2004, more Senate Democrats than Republicans are up for re-election, making it likely that Senate Republicans will increase their majority.

At one time, I thought that Bush would probably not choose to seat justices who would overturn Roe, because such a ruling would probably benefit democrats in many elections (including the 2008 presidential election). However, the last few years of watching President Bush govern has convinced me that whatever else I dislike about Bush, he doesn’t lack for political courage. On issues from pre-emptive invasion to ridiculously huge tax cuts, Bush has been willing to take extreme steps; he might well do the same on abortion.

Overall, I can’t dismiss the possibility that a Bush re-election could lead to Roe v Wade being overturned.

Of course, even if Roe is overturned, that won’t mean that abortion will be illegal nationwide. It’ll be outlawed in some states, and many states that won’t outlaw it will pass laws making it much harder to obtain abortions (look for laws to be passed forbidding married women from getting an abortion without their husband’s permission, for example). Still, some states - mostly in the Northeast and Northwest, where women have higher status - will continue to have legal abortion.

So even if Roe is overturned, abortion won’t be outlawed entirely. It will be outlawed enough, however, to significantly worsen the lives and reduce the freedom of many American girls and women. That alone is reason enough to vote for John Kerry, in my book.

(If we’re really lucky, Kerry will be elected and get a chance to replace Rehnquist with a pro-choice justice. However, that’s pretty unlikely; Rehnquist wouldn’t voluntarily retire with a Democrat in the White House).

* * *

UPDATE: You know, I can’t beleive I forgot to post this bit of news, which was what has brought the issue to mind this week: It turns out that Roe v Wade was very nearly overturned in 1992., in the Casey decision.

As the late Justice Blackmun’s private papers, which were just released last week, show, Rehnquist had put together a five-member majority for overturning Roe and had actually written a draft of his majority opinion when Justice Kennedy switched sides.

Which makes me awfully glad that Bork, who almost certainly would have voted to overturn Roe, was turned down by the Senate. Kennedy, you’ll recall, was nominated after Bork’s rejection.

In an earlier post, criticizing a men’s rights column by Glenn Sacks and Diana Thompson, I quoted the column’s statement that “On average, every day 17 [U.S. workers] die - 16 of them male.” In the comments to my post, Arbitrary Aardvark wrote:

The sixteen of seventeen stat was probably calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers (pdf link). I’m pretty sure there’s some way of getting Glenn’s numbers from that data (probably by using an average of multiple years).

As for including housewives, that’s an interesting idea. However, I have no idea how you’d do that - I don’t know that anyone’s put that data together.

But let’s try bullshitting it. (And I’m quite serious about that - the statistical speculation that fills this post is total bullshit, and I’m not going to pretend that these numbers would be defensible in any serious policy discussion. This is for entertainment purposes only, folks.)

In 2000 (most recent year I found - probably the numbers have dropped a bit since then, especially for male victims), 440 men and 1247 women were murdered by spouses, ex-spouses and boyfriends or girlfriends. About 70% of women who live with their husbands have jobs aside from being housewives; put another way, 30% of wives could be described as full-time housewives. If 30% of the 1247 women murdered by intimates in 2001 were housewives, then that’s 374 housewives murdered.

According to the official statistics, in 2000 there were 5,471 male and 449 female workplace deaths. If we included 374 murdered housewives when counting workplace deaths (and ignoring the question of househusbands dying on the job each year), then there were 5,471 male and 823 female workplace deaths in 2000. That changes the stat a little, but overall it’s clear that men are still the predominate victims.

Of course, that “374″ number is total nonsense - for instance, it may be that housewives are more or less likely to be murdered than other intimates, in which case the 30% number is wrong. And what about girlfriends? And what about housewives who are murdered on the job by someone other than a husband or boyfriend?

Also, I suspect that most housewives who die on the job aren’t murder victims. Murder deaths are relatively uncommon; what’s much more common is deaths due to car and truck accidents. How many housewives and stay at home mothers are killed each year in traffic accidents that occur while they’re “on the job” (driving to school or the grocery store, etc)?

I doubt the data even exists. In 2000, there were 6,495 fatal accidents a year involving female drivers (and 15,323 involving male drivers). If we assume that housewives are no more or less likely to die while driving than other women, then about 1,949 housewives died while driving a car in 2000. How many of those 1,949 were “on the job,” it’s impossible to say.

Still, what the heck. Let’s add those 1,949 women to the workplace death total (probably nearly all the driving done by housewives is related to their work, anyhow). Counting that along with our bullshit stat for housewives murdered each year, there were 5,471 male and 2,772 female workplace deaths in 2000. Male deaths still predominate, but the difference is less extreme.

However, I suspect that housewives are actually less likely to die while driving than most women. Why? Because the typical housewife is probably between the ages of 25 and 49, which are the least likely ages for a driver to get into a car crash (drivers below 20 and above 75 years old are the most likely to be in an accident). Plus, housewives are especially likely to be driving with children in the car, and my anecdotal observation is that parents with children in the car are especially cautious drivers.

But then again, even if we could count the number of full-time housewives who die in auto accidents on the job, that wouldn’t tell us everything. How many housewives die in household accidents, for instance? I don’t even know where to look.

What about parents who aren’t stay-at-homers but who nonetheless die while doing some home or child related work, or while driving to or from housework-or-child-related chores? If we’re including housewives when counting on-the-job deaths, shouldn’t we also count those who die in the course of their part-time job as a housewife (or househusband?)

Plus, what about the husbands and fathers who die each year trying to clean the gutters or driving Junior to school? (Men do less of the housework-related driving, but then again men are on average much worse drivers than women, so maybe they get into more housework-related car accidents despite driving less.)

* * *

Anyhow, it may make sense to consider “paid job deaths” and “housewife deaths” separately. The solution to paid job deaths is better funding of OSHA, going after unsafe employers, and above all unionizing. None of these solutions really apply to housewives and SAHPs (stay-at-home parents), and that’s a good reason not to conflate the two problems. Perhaps workers and housewives should be counted separately, in this instance.

What’s disturbing to me, is that housewives aren’t being counted at all. How many housewives, househusbands and SAHPs die accidentally each year should be something that someone keeps track of - but as far as I can tell, no one does.

March 12

1912: Juliette Gordon Low organizes the first troop, in Savannah, Georgia, of will be the Girl Scouts of America.

1925: Mary Belle Harris, prison reformer, is appointed superintendent of a Bureau of Prisons facility for women in Alderson, West Virginia.

Singin’ in the Rain is one of the few classic old musicals I adore. (I love musicals, but I prefer the modern stuff - I’m a sucker for anything Sondheim). I was watching it for the nth time the other day, when I noticed yet another example of how deeply weird this film is.

I’m not talking about the totally surreal “Gotta Dance” sequence, which is the most striking example of weirdness (a film set in the fifties set within a film set in the 1700s in a film which is itself set in the 1920s). Nor am I pointing out that the famous “Singin’ in the Rain” dance sequence actually takes place in a downpour made of milk (showed up on the cameras better than water would have). No, I’m talking about an interesting way the script plays with the standard conventions of musicals.

In musicals, songs come in one of two types: First is the “hey, kids, let’s put on a show” song, in which the character performs a song. The second type is the “expression of what’s in my heart” song, in which the actor sings, but the character herself isn’t actually supposed to be literally singing.

In Singin’ in the Rain, for example, the title song isn’t something the main character (played by Gene Kelly) performs on stage; it’s a spontaneous expression of his heart, performed on a rainy street as he walks home.

Or is it?

Think of the ending: good-hearted-but-unknown actress Kathy Selden (played by a very cute Debbie Reynalds) is forced to sing hidden behind a curtain, so that evil-but-famous Lina Lamont (played by a wonderfully nasty Jean Hagen) can lip-synch to Kathy’s singing and thus pretend to have a wonderful singing voice. “What are you going to sing?” the bandleader asks. “What song?” Lina hisses to Kathy (hidden behind the curtain). “Singin’in the Rain,” Kathy whispers back. “Singin’in the Rain,” Lina tells the bandleader.

So the band starts playing “Singin’in the Rain” - clearly, they all know it - and Kathy sings it while Lina (who clearly knows the words and tune) lip-synchs. And I’m left going: Whaaaa?

Just a few scenes ago, this song was presented as if it were a spontaneous display of what’s in Don Lockwood’s (Gene Kelly’s) heart. Now, it’s suddenly an old standard - everyone knows it, Lila, Kathy, the bandleader, the entire band.

Just a nice bit of genre-play in an already wonderfully weird movie.

(Actually, this particular kind of genre play takes place twice in the movie; in the bit I describe above, and also during the “Good Morning” sequence).

There was some interesting debate about the process by which same-sex marriage was legalized here in Portland, Oregon. Jack Bog objected to the process, leading to an interesting debate in his comments (including some comments by local politico Randy Leonard and (towards the end of the thread) some comments by me). The One True b!X took the opposite view. (Links via Long Story, Short Pier).

The issue is, should the County Commissioners have held a public meeting or two on the issue before announcing their decision? I’m not sure.

The Multnomah County Commissioners were legally within their rights to decide the rules for issuing marriage licenses without holding a public meeting. The controversy is whether they should, as a matter of principle, have held a public meeting or two anyhow.

I’m sympathetic to the “open government” philosophy, but I’m even more sympathetic to the need for equal rights for same-sex couples. If the county commissioners had used the open process some folks have called for, there’s a chance that gay-rights opponents could have gotten a pre-emptive injunction blocking same-sex licenses being issued. As The Oregonian commented after a judge turned down an after-the-fact injunction, “Monday’s ruling showed again that it’s harder to stop something that’s already happening than to prevent something that hasn’t happened yet.”

If anti-gay forces had gotten a pre-emptive injunction against gay marriage, then the fight for equal rights in Oregon would have proceeded as it did in Massachusetts: it wouldn’t have happened unless the state’s highest court made it happen. That would have been a needless gift to the anti-gay forces, who would have turned the issue into one of hysterically shouting about “judicial tyranny!” and “activist judges!”

As it is, this decision was made by local elected officials, driven by pressure from a pro-gay lobbying group and by lesbian and gay couples eager to marry. (The Oregonian published a nice description of the process by which the decision happened, secret meetings and all).

As a matter of strategy, the fight for gay rights is far better off when the initial decision to issue same-sex marriage licenses comes from a local official (as in Portland and in San Francisco), rather than from a high-court judge. The anti-gays are happiest when they can oppose gay rights by screaming “judicial fiat!”; let’s deny them that pleasure as much as we can.

Perhaps more importantly, getting gay marriage made legal at once (even if it might not stay legal forever), and the resulting news footage of happy newlyweds, has put a human face on the issue that only heartless people will not be moved by. While some opponents of gay marriage are driven by their boundless hatred and venom, in the end I really think that most people, when they come to see gay marriage as a human issue rather than an abstract issue, will come down on the side of fairness, equality and freedom. Putting a human face on this issue is the best possible strategy for gay rights - and it’s not only good strategy, it’s the truth.

Has same-sex marriage lost a supporter or two due to the county commissioners’ approach? Maybe. But I think the potential gains far outweigh the losses, in this case.

Lots of folks have been taking this Libertarian Purity Test. I’m oddly proud to say that I scored a six out of a possible 160 - which is to say, I’m less than one-fourteenth the libertarian Will Baude is, and less than a third as libertarian as Matthew Ygelsias.

I would have scored a bit higher if there had been more questions designed to appeal to left-wing libertarian impulse. Not a word was asked about reproductive rights, for instance, nor much about gay rights. The questions towards the end of the test, designed to weed out all but the really hard-core libertarians, are frightening to contemplate (do you want a privatized judiciary?).

As it is, though, I’m glad to see that I’m one of the very lowest scorers so far (Evangelcial Outpost is keeping a tally).

March 11

1903: (A First) Der Wald is performed at the Metropolitan Opera. Written by Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, it is the first opera written by a woman to be performed in the US.

1907: (A First) a number of rich and famous women of the day including Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Mrs. Walter Damrosch, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney opened their own women’s club The Colony with a clubhouse at 112 Madison Ave., New York City, the first time women had their own public gathering place.

1994: (A First) The first women priests ordained in the Church of England.

When most people read they hear the written words spoken in their minds. A disembodied vocal of authors, narrators, and characters fills their minds’ ear acting out plays and essays, novels and poems. Blogs are composed with words and so are no exception to the rule, so chances are that you’re hearing a voice right now.

Sometimes the voices that readers hear are the voices of actual people. Mothers speak with familiar tones in letters to their children, and stories traded between friends are still heard as though over the phone even if read alone in silence. Some actors, even, can take over a character so that no matter what voice readers may have heard before they cannot help but hear the actor’s now. How many Harry Potter fans will always hear Alan Rickman when they read Severus Snape? How long with Lawrence Olivier be Hamlet?

Usually, though, the voices people hear are new, unique, and private. Each reader hears his or her own version of a character’s voice that is created from the reader’s perception of the character’s gender, age, race, ethnicity, personality, history, and personal appearance and how these things interact to create a whole person. These perceptions on the part of the reader can be the difference between a sympathetic character and one the reader hopes gets side-swiped by a bus. Everyone bring prejudices to the table while reading; people will inflict their views of blacks and whites and hispanics or men and women or the rich and the poor on the characters.

It’s not just characters that people’s views effect, though. The reader’s views of people and their various types will also have an effect on the way that the reader views the author and the author’s intentions. A book or article written by a white woman will be viewed differently than a book or article written by a black man even if the content of the book or article doesn’t change significantly, or even at all. A book about growing old that is written by a teenager will probably be viewed as more artificial, more constructed, than one written by a sixty-year-old even if the words themselves remain the same. (Alternatively, the teenager might be praised as some sort of genius of insight while the sixty-year-old might be criticized for wasting people’s time with the minutiae of life as a senior citizen.)

In a sense, readers construct voices to read with for authors in the same way that they do with characters. If the reader believes that all senior citizens are crotchety and sarcastic then a book with a picture of a wrinkle-bedecked person on the dust jacket will be read in a voice that drips sarcasm and shrilly screams between the lines for you to cut your hair and get off the lawn. The author’s tone is constructed from the reader’s perception of what the author might or must be like.

Works published by anonymous authors are not immune to these forces of imagination and projection. Even though a reader may not have a byline or an authorial picture to attach the work to, the reader will still make certain assumptions about the author’s personality and history and will respond accordingly. In effect, though the author has no tone of voice but the one that the words themselves suggest, the reader will construct a tone and pitch based on what they think the author is like even without much evidence to back that claim up.

These factors can be observed with a good degree of regularity here in the blogosphere. An off-handed remark by Glenn Reynolds about liberals needing to be rounded up and shot is more likely to be viewed as a joke by his conservative readers, because of their perception of him as a fair-minded and well-balanced individual, and is more likely to be taken at face-value by liberals, because of their perception of him as some sort of fire-breathing extremist. A comment by Atrios along similar lines but concerning conservatives would have similar reactions but with reversed party lines. (And, yes, I’m horribly stereotyping, but you get the point.)

In her post in response to my first post about the Crucifixion, Jeanne d’Arc at Body and Soul wrote:

The only problem with this sentence is that I’m not a “she.” I didn’t correct it at the time because it’s my personal opinion that gender is mutable and ultimately irrelevant, but her comment made me think and remember. One of the first comments in response to my first-ever post at Alas (kinda), A Comment on Rape and “She Asked For It,” was from Cleis of Sappho’s Breathing who said:

I suppose that that’s what I get for naming myself PinkDreamPoppies. It makes me wonder, though: what voice do people hear when they read my posts? How much of a difference does it make to rAnDoMp0sTeR if he or she views me as a female instead of as a male? Have there been readers who agreed with me or disagreed with me or misread something I said based entirely on their perception of my sex?

Unfortunately, there are certain perceptions of what it’s okay for men and women to say, think, and do and for some people it is so unacceptable for people of the “wrong” gender to do the “wrong” thing that their view of a specific action can be altered depending on what gender they think is performing it. I wonder how many men liked George Elliot’s novels who would have hated them had they know she wasn’t a man?

This doesn’t apply solely to the written word. Colors of lipstick that are sexy when on a woman’s lips can be decidedly unsexy when on a man’s. A man or woman who was attractive enough to make out with can suddenly become disgusting when it’s discovered that the man or woman is not what they appear to be. Football can be a national pastime until women want to play, then it’s comedy. Men can’t dress or decorate unless they’re gay and thus “half woman, anyway.” Need I even mention the wage gap?

People needn’t wonder about any internet person’s gender, though, if they know where to look.

This raises other questions, though, about what whether or not those differences in the way that men and women write are created by social forces or are biological forces. However, that’s the subject of another post.

So how much changes for you?

March 10

1913: (Death) Harriet Tubman, (date of birth unknown, probably in 1820) died in Auburn, NY, where she had made her home after the close of the Civil War. Born in slavery, she became the Moses of her people, leading more than 300 hundred slaves out of the South through the underground railway to Canada and freedom.

I should have posted this sooner, but: Neko, whom many readers will recognize from her excellent comments on “Alas,” has started a blog of her own - Pinko Feminist Hellcat. Go check it out!

Elizabeth Marquardt responds to my post “Why Are Gay Interests So Easily Sacrificed?” In that post, I wrote:

Elizabeth responds:

A few points:

• Elizabeth doesn’t explain why, given that there are multiple possible approaches to trying to save heterosexual marriage, it wouldn’t be better to stop fighting gay marriage and concentrate instead on approaches that wouldn’t harm lesbian & gay people’s interests. I’m sorry Elizabeth didn’t address this, since it was the main point of the post she was responding to.

• In the context of my post, “sacrificing” same sex couples (and their children) means sacrificing their and their children’s best interests in order to provide straights with a marginal and dubious benefit. (I discuss this a bit more in this post). Elizabeth seems to deny that her policy sacrifices same-sex familiies’ interests; after all, she’s offering them civil unions.

  Elizabeth is implicitly claiming that marriage won’t provide anything significant to same-sex couples that civil unions won’t also provide. This claim reduces marriage to just a piece of paper, an empty word; it is only if the word “marriage” is meaningless that civil unions and marriage are interchangeable.

  If Elizabeth thinks marriage is more than a word, then she must admit that same-sex couples sacrifice quite a lot when they are denied marriage. If Elizabeth is saying that there’s no significant difference between civil unions and marriage, then she isn’t considering “marriage” to be anything significant. I don’t think she can have it both ways - not with any intellectual consistency.

• Frankly, I don’t think the “sacrifice” Elizabeth thinks straight people would be making exists at all. Nothing about same-sex marriage will prevent people from referring to “husbands” and “wives,” or from claiming that the ideal situation for kids is being raised by a biological mother and father. These ideas will still be subject to criticism, of course - but that’s true whether or not SSM is legally recognized. SSM will not be the end of free speech, as Elizabeth seems to believe it will be.

  As Stentor writes in the comments, “If she feels unable to advocate a position different than what’s enshrined in law, that’s her problem, not mine — after all, I’m more than willing to say that kids can be raised just fine in a same-sex household even though the law says otherwise.”

  I’d discuss this further, but Tom Sylvester has already criticized this aspect of Elizabeth’s argument (here and here), and Elizabeth seems to have conceded that she might be mistaken about this.

• Elizabeth points out that same-sex couples are a tiny minority. But there are probably even fewer Jews than there are same-sexers in the USA; no one would suggest that Jews are therefore less deserving of equal rights. If anything, the fact that lesbians and gays are a small minority makes it even more essential that their rights be protected.
• I hesitate to bring this up, as I don’t want to offend Elizabeth. But so far her “support” for civil unions has rarely (if ever) gone beyond bringing up civil unions to oppose SSM. Elizabeth does not, to my knowledge, publish pro-civil union arguments, or criticize attacks on civil unions from other marriage-movement folks, with any frequency. Until she does, her support for civil unions is less than persuasive.
• Finally, both Elizabeth and Tom lament the unfairness of people linking the anti-SSM position to bigotry. No doubt some accusations are unfair; there’s a gulf between outright gay-bashing and merely opposing SSM. However, the question isn’t as clear-cut as Elizabeth and Tom think it is.

  Discussing anti-Semitism, William F. Buckley once made a useful distinction between “hateful anti-Semites” and “country club anti-Semites.” A country-club anti-Semite may not hate Jews, and may even have close Jewish friends; but he’s nonetheless willing to live with and even advocate rules that discriminate against Jews (such as gentile-only country clubs). A country-club anti-Semite isn’t a Jew-hater, but he’s still an anti-Semite.

  Not all SSM opponents are driven by hatred of gays and lesbians (although some are). But all SSM opponents are “country club homophobes”; regardless of their personal liking for gays, they’re willing to support a policy that discriminates against gays. It’s not unreasonable to consider this a form of bigotry (although presumably Tom and Elizabeth would disagree).

  It’s understandable that Elizabeth finds being accused of bigotry uncomfortable. Nor do I believe that she has animus against lesbians and gays in her heart. Nonetheless, there’s a legitimate argument that supporting unequal laws for straights and gays is a bigoted position, and advocating this position is only acceptable in the context of a homophobic society. SSM supporters shouldn’t have to refrain from making this argument out of sensitivity to opponents’ feelings.

[Edited to improve the wording here and there, and to add in Stentor’s comment, a few hours after the initial posting.]

Eugene Volkh critiques an NPR segment on “three strikes” laws, focusing on a man who got 25 years to life for stealing some videotapes. Eugene argues that by reporting it this way, NPR is biasing its report in a way that benefits the case against “three strikes” laws. In order to provide balance, NPR should have reported on the criminal’s entire lawbreaking record, not just the “third strike.”

That sounds correct - until Eugene fills in the details NPR left out: The man was “convicted, over a span of 13 years, of three felony residential burglaries, felony marijuana transportation, misdemeanor theft, and escape from federal prison.”

You know, I’ve heard about this case many times in the past, and I had always assumed that his first two strikes included genuinely violent felonies - assault, armed robbery, something. Contrary to Eugene’s view, the way NPR reported the story strongly benefits the pro-”three strikes” side of the argument, because it left open the possibility that this man had ever committed a violent crime which could justify a lifetime prison sentence.

In fact, judging from this example, the “three strikes” rule is even more unjust than I had previously imagined. 25 years for life for housebreaking, pot smoking and shoplifting? That’s ridiculous.

(To be fair, Eugene’s post acknowledges that some folks, given further information, “might well think that Andrade’s sentence is still unfair.” But he doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that NPR’s incomplete reporting may in effect favor the pro-”three strikes” side of the argument. Nonetheless, I agree with Eugene’s conclusion - reporters should sum up all three strikes, rather than just reporting the final strike.)

* * *

On the other hand, I’m reminded of a conversation about “three strikes” I had with a woman at a bus stop a few years ago. The woman, who was Black, was in favor of “three strikes,” because under three strikes rules white people and Black people are both subject to extreme, unjust sentencing. She thought this was fairer than the previous system, in which only minorities were subject to extreme sentencing.

Feminist philosopher Susan Moller Okin died last week, although the news has only been publicly released today. Her second book, Justice, Gender and the Family, hit me like a onrushing train the first time I read it, and still influences my thought today.

I don’t really have much to say, except that if you haven’t read Justice, Gender and the Family you should. Okin does a remarkable job of discussing complex issues in reasonable depth using entertaining, jargon-free prose; I’m sure most “Alas” readers would enjoy it immensely. Amazon has used copies starting at two bucks.

March 9

1892: Ida B. Wells Barnett, journalist and half owner of the Memphis Free Speech, denounces lynchings of three black men in Tennessee.

1906: Irene Miller, a member of the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (and later, the Women’s Freedom League) was arrested for knocking at the home of the British Prime Minister and demanding a reply to her request to see the prime minister about women’s vote. During the arrest, Flora Drummond dodged inside the Prime Minister’s house and was also arrested. Annie Kenney was arrested outside for simply speaking to the crowd that had gathered.

1907: The first forced sterilization law in the United States is passed in Indiana. By 1944, 30 states with sterilization laws had reported a total of more than 40,000 eugenical sterilizations with those sterilized reported as insane or feebleminded. While 1907 - 1964 are considered by many to be the height of forced sterilizations, the numbers of women, predominantly Native American women and other poor women of color, sterilized after that period are even more astonishing.

Sara at Diotima defends the Bush administration’s new rules encouraging single-sex education by pointing out how many folks, including feminists, have praised single-sex colleges.

Sara is right that single-sex colleges don’t seem to have hurt anyone. However, there’s a big difference between a single-sex school and a single-sex classroom. The country as a whole is so large that the existence of a handful of single-sex academies doesn’t noticeably affect the sex ratio in co-ed colleges. In a setting like a single school, however, a strong program of single-sex classrooms for girls could leave the school’s “co-ed” classrooms with a high ratio of boys to girls. This could be detrimental to both girl and boy students who might not learn as well in a boy-dominated environment as they would in a balanced co-ed environment. Plus, if this program draws the best students away from co-ed classrooms, that also could harm the prospects of the students in the regular classes.

Normally I’d say “too bad” - students who’d benefit from a single-sex program shouldn’t sacrifice their interests to improve prospects for others. However, virtually every well-designed study of single-sex education finds that single-sex ed offers no benefit to students once other factors (such as income and class size) are accounted for. So it seems that single-sex classrooms might well make things worse for some students without actually providing any academic benefit.

Hopefully any research on single-sex classrooms will study not only the results for the students in the program, but for the students in the rest of the school.

* * *

Another problem with the new legislation is that it has virtually no rules to prevent “separate but unequal” education. Under the Bush administration’s newly proposed rules, it’s possible we’ll see boys-only trips to mock congress in Washington, D.C. justified as “equal in the aggregate” because girls have the opportunity to take a co-ed civics class back at home. Or perhaps some particularly great programs - computer animation in the boys’ school, parenting courses in the girls’ school, whatever - will end up being offered only to one sex. In a California experiment with separate-but-equal schools, a class on “settling the Western frontier” was broken down like this: “the boys’ lessons were enriched by an activity on survival skills. Girls, on the other hand, learned to quilt and sew.” (Education Week, 05/30/2001)

To be fair, the Bush program doesn’t mandate such abuses; it just opens the door to them. Whether or not such abuses actually happen depends on how the new rules play out in school systems and in the courts.

But when there’s so little evidence that students benefit from single-sex education, why even open that door?

March 8

International Women’s Day

Artwork by Tina Coggins, TCDesign - Eye on Design

Today is International Women’s Day, first celebrated in the US in 1909 (following the declaration of the Socialist Party of America), and internationally in 1910. IWD is commemorated at the United Nations and is designated in many countries as a national holiday.

There is a long and inspirational history of International Women’s Day. To learn more about the history of this important day, check out The UN page on IWD, the United Nationals Cyber Schoolbus, and A History of International Women’s Day in words and images

1857: Women garment workers march in New York City to protest bad working conditions, low pay, and long days. The police attacked the protestors and dispersed them, but two years later, again in March, these women formed their first labour union to try and protect themselves and gain some basic rights in the workplace.

1908: Bread and Roses march in New York City.

1917: Bread and Peace strike staged in Russia:

It was in honor and recognition of these Russian women that International Women’s Day became officially recognized on March 8 (before that time, the day was celebrated on the last Sunday in February in the US, and on various days in March in Europe).

[I’ve decided to start a series of “Sunday reruns,” re-posting older posts that my newer readers may not be familiar with. This post was originally published August 9, 2002.]

An essential point that not everyone has yet absorbed: Sometimes there is no fair solution.

Case in point: This week in Newsday, Glenn Sacks and Dianna Thompson argue that life is unfair for fathers. Well, I agree; life is unfair for fathers. It’s not as unfair as Sacks and Thompson think it is - for instance when they claim “when a woman wants a child and a man does not, the woman can have the child anyway…” Of course, this isn’t strictly true - a man could insist on using birth control. Or get a vasectomy. Or even refuse to have sex with women. Sacks and Thompson are so eager to show that men are pure victims that they refuse to acknowledge any of the choices men do have.

What bothers Sacks and Thompson is that women have one choice men don’t - women can choose to have an abortion. This is unfair (although Sacks and Thompson don’t acknowledge the many ways in which this unfairness benefits men), but it’s an unfairness inherent in biology, not in law. So the question becomes, what can be done to remedy this unfairness? Well, according to Sacks and Thompson, the solution is giving unmarried men the right to walk away from all their parenting obligations. In other words, unmarried men shouldn’t pay child support unless they want to.

But their logic is shaky. According to Sacks and Thompson, “On average, every day 17 [U.S. workers] die - 16 of them male. Couldn’t men who work long hours or do hazardous jobs - and who suffer the concomitant physical ailments and injuries - argue that their bodies are on the line, too? Where is their choice?”

Well, unless they’re independently wealthy, they have no choice but to work. But although the news doesn’t seem to have reached Sacks and Thompson, nearly everyone in the US has to work. It’s not as if unmarried fathers are forced to work while childless or married men (or women for that matter) spend their days drinking brandy by the fire. Sacks and Thompson say that for unmarried fathers to need to work is a injustice, because it violates “my body, my choice” - but since when is it such a horrible violation of bodily integrity to have a job? And if it is a violation of bodily integrity for unmarried fathers, then why isn’t it a violation for all other workers, as well?

Sacks and Thompson are right that occupational injuries are too frequent - and too sex-biased - but workplace injuries aren’t caused by paying child support. It’s not as if 100% of mine shaft workers are unmarried men with children; nor is a mine worker magically safer on the job if he has no children. No feminist objects to protecting workers - but Sacks and Thompson seem to believe that workplace deaths are caused by inadequate father’s rights. The real problem is inadequate workplace safety - and the real solutions have nothing to do with eliminating child support payments for unmarried fathers.

Finally, although “16 deaths a day” sounds impressive, is this really a figure that tells us about the average working man’s life? Of the approximately 73 million American men who worked in 2000, 5,467 - which is to say, less than one-hundredth of one percent - died on the job. It’s tragic that they died, of course - but we can acknowledge that tragedy without pretending that men typically face such dangers in order to pay child support.

* * *

What all that really indicates, of course, is that Sacks and Thompson bend over backwards to perceive men as victims. So they say that men have absolutely no choice - ignoring that men aren’t being forced to have sex against their will. So when unmarried men get jobs, that’s a violation of “my body, my choice” equivalent to being forced to bear a child against one’s will - even though the rest of us have to get jobs too. So when one out of every 13,433 male workers dies, that becomes an example of typical male experience. Logical consistency takes a back seat as men-as-victims settles in behind the wheel.

But just because Sacks and Thompson are male-victimology junkies, that doesn’t show that they’re wrong about the larger issue - shouldn’t men get a choice equal to women’s? Contrary to Sacks and Thompson’s view of men as victims first and foremost, men have plenty of choices until pregnancy happens. But once a pregnancy has begun, Sacks and Thompson are right - in our legal system, for the first two trimesters of pregnancy, women have a choice and men don’t. And that, they say, is unfair.

Well, I agree. It is unfair. But their solution would actually make things worse, not better.

Any genuine discussion of “fairness” has to consider what’s best for all the parties involved - but Sacks and Thompson never consider anyone’s rights but the father’s. What about the other parties?

For instance, they propose giving fathers a right to cut and run - but they don’t propose giving mothers the same right. So let’s say I have a one-night stand and learn, eight months later, that the woman is pregnant with our child. Under Sacks and Thompson’s proposal, I - as the man - would have the right to sign away all my obligations to the child. But what if I want to keep the child, which the mother wants to give it up for adoption? Well, under the laws of most states, I’d automatically get custody - and the mother would be obligated to pay me child support (although Sacks and Thompson seemingly think only men ever pay child support, the truth is noncustodial parents of both sexes pay). So men get to cut and run, but women don’t. How is that fair?

My guess is that Sacks and Thompson would concede this point, and be willing to modify their proposal to give women and men equal rights to flee their obligations. But there’s still an important party whose rights haven’t been considered: what’s fair to the child?

There is an undeniable harm to noncustodial parents of forcing them to pay child support - they have to give up money that they’d otherwise spend as they want. But there’s also an undeniable harm of saying parents have no legal obligation to support their children. Child poverty is already a bigger problem in the US than in other wealthy nations; releasing noncustodial parents from the obligation to support their kids would make this worse.

Any honest appraisal of “choice for men” has to weigh both these elements. Which is the worse harm - the harm to noncustodial parents of having to pay child support, or the harm to children if child poverty is increased? “None of the above” isn’t on the menu; as a society, we have to choose one harm or the other to live with.

The moderate loss of financial freedom to noncustodial parents is obviously the lesser harm, and thus the harm we should choose. That is unfair; but increased child poverty is even more unfair. We can only choose which unfairness is easier for our society to live with.

Children have an unambiguous right to the material support of two parents. Under Sacks and Thompson’s theory, parents have the ability to sign away their children’s rights before the child is ever born - but that’s not the way the law works. Once the child is to be born, it has rights, regardless of what it’s parents signed before it was born. A parent can’t sign away a future child’s right to support, for the same reason that a parent can’t sign a contract selling his future child’s liver. The future child’s rights aren’t the parent’s to sign away.

There is no chance that “choice for men” will ever become law. It’s “fairer” only in the most facile analysis - an analysis that has eyes only for the rights of the father, ignoring mother and child entirely.

Is our current system unfair to noncustodial fathers? Yes, of course it is. It’s also unfair to custodial mothers that they have to do virtually all of the work and pay most of the expenses (child support payments typically cover less than half the child’s costs). And it’s terribly unfair that some children grow up without two parents who love each other and want to be together. Life is unfair.

But Sacks and Thompson’s solution doesn’t relieve unfairness, it just transfers it. Rather than all three parties sharing the burden equally, the father is relieved of all unfairness while the costs to mother and child are increased. How is that fair?

The whole article is worth reading, but the highlights are as follows:

First, Mayor West of New Paltz, NY makes clear the biggest difference between himself and Former Chief Justice Roy Moore. Namely, a respect for the rule of law.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country…

I’m curious to see how this case turns out not just in light of same-sex marriage but also with regard to the right of municipal authorities to violate laws on the basis that they view them as being unconstitutional. The same-sex marriage issue is, as I understand it, somewhat tricky because there isn’t any clear precedent on the federal level concerning same-sex marriages so the issue isn’t quite the same as a mayor banning abortion meaning that the situation as a whole is somewhat without precedent … But I’m also not a lawyer, so anyone who knows better feel free to leave a comment.

Disappointing news from Wisconsin and Kansas:

And (semi-)good news from Idaho.

Finally, a separate AP report puts things in perspective by noting that, even after legalizing same-sex marriages, life in the Netherlands goes on as usual.

From the same article, a glimpse of America’s future after it has, inevitably I believe, allowed same-sex marriages:

I find it amazing that Mr. van Mourik honestly believes that the falling same-sex marriage rates are a sign that legalizing same-sex marriage is entirely unnecessary. If the number continues to fall relative to the population over the course of the next five or six years, he might have a point, but unless that happens he’s failing to recognize a basic fact of life: when something has been prohibited for whatever reason, there’s always an uptick in its use shortly after it’s finally allowed. Think of how much water you drink when you’re thirsty or the opening weekend returns for a hot new movie or the spike in alcohol consumption following the end of prohibition.

The same-sex couples who were waiting to be married did so as soon as it was legal, and now that that store of couples has married itself out the rates are falling back to what I suspect will establish themselves as normal levels. A similar phenomenon will happen in America’s future; we’re not going to see 1,500 same-sex marriages in Multnomah County every week, but that doesn’t mean that same-sex couples don’t want to be married or won’t be getting married.