One of the anti-gay-marriage professors I linked to in the previous post is the University of Chicago’s Jean Bethke Elshtain. (Professor Elshtain is on the board of the Women’s Freedom Network, which is one of those anti-feminist think tanks with no actual accomplishments). According to her page on the Institute for American Values, when Ms. Elshtain taught at the University of Massachusetts “from 1973 to 1987, Elshtain drew fire for… allowing men in her Feminism classes.”

I find it extremely doubtful that this claim is true. When my housemate Charles attended UMASS (which was, admittedly, in the 1990s, a decade or so after Ms. Elshtain left), he took women’s studies courses and no one objected. As far as I know, Mary Daly - who was fired from Boston College for her refusal to teach co-ed classes - is the only women’s studies professor, ever, to take such a stand. (And even Daly taught men - she just put men in separate sessions.)

The story also seems unlikely since women-only classes at a co-ed public university would be illegal.

Still, maybe the story is truthful - I’m sure a lot of weird sparks in the pan happened over the years, especially in the early 1970s. Did any “Alas” readers attend UMASS from 1973-1987, or know someone who did?

David Blankenhorn at the Family Scholars Blog writes:

What I love is the bit about the “all but unanimous media and elite acceptance of SSM.” What world does Blankenhorn live in? Is he somehow unaware that his co-worker Maggie Gallagher - not to mention folks like William F. Buckley Jr, John Leo and Ann Coulter - have more than a little access to the media? Did he not know his associate Elizabeth Marquardt was published in the New York Times? Has he missed out on seeing gay-haters like Glenn Stanton and James Dobson interviewed respectfully on major television networks?

Is he unaware that FOX exists? (There is no gay-basher in the USA that Sean Hannity won’t interview with softball questions - Hannity recently gave a fawning interview to the head of the folks who want South Carolina to leave the United States over the gay marriage issue). Is he unaware that talk radio exists?

There is no credible standard by which same-sex marriage opponants could be said to be “all but unanimously” absent from the media.

Similarly, what “elites” is David refering to? Apparently, he doesn’t consider either President Bush or John Kerry (both of whom oppose gay marriage), or the vast majority of both the Senate and the House, to be “elites.”

He doesn’t consider himself to be an elite - since every non-elite American citizen is a think tank scholar Harvard graduate (gosh, nothing elite about that!).

He doesn’t consider the Bradley Foundation, with its $500 million dollars of assets, “elite”; nor the mulitmillionairre Coors family, nor the Olin Foundation, nor the Scaife Foundation - all of whom have given away loads of cash to support conservative think tanks, including David’s own think tank.

College professors who oppose SSM? Not elite.

To recap: Ivy-league-educated think tank scholars like Blankenhorn are not elites. The multimillionairres who support Blankenhorn’s and other right-wing think tanks are not elites. The most powerful leaders of both major political parties are not elites. Professors are not elites, not even Harvard professors like Mary Ann Glendon or Richard Parker. Even William F. Buckley Jr. is not an elite.

Is there any non-partisan definition of “elite” in which David’s claim even remotely makes sense?

Finally, in case David Blankenhorn hasn’t noticed, folks who support marriage equality have faced “fierce opposition,” too.

* * *

If there’s a legitimate case to be made against gay marriage, David and his associates have come as close to making it as anyone (and far closer than most SSM opponants). And they’ve done it without resorting to virulent homophobia, for which they should be given credit. Nonetheless, this sort of counterfactual self-pity-party about media access, “elites” and “fierce opposition” is advacacy at its weakest and most partisan.

It’s particular galling coming from David Blankenhorn, whose life - from his elite education to his elite think-tank gig - has given him an ability to participate in the gay marriage debate far beyond what most Americans could dream of. I’m sure he’s worked very hard for what he’s acheived. But given his privileged position, compared to the average US citizen, David should have the good grace not to whine about “elites.”

Playing the Motherhood Card. Via Sisyphus Shrugged, a powerful letter-to-the-editor about homophobia:

Atrios has the full text of the letter.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

It’s disgusting how much some people hate free speech. How much some people hate, period.

Full story.

• Everyone’s linking Eric Idle’s The FCC Song, and with good reason. Give it a listen. It might not be entirely work-safe, however.

• Kevin Drum outlines why it’s not possible for us to force Democracy on Iraq.
• Sara Butler describes sexist treatment of female interns in D.C.
  I was pretty painfully aware of how female interns were taken less seriously than the guys were. I was the only “girl intern” working on my floor, and all the scholars on my floor (this was at a conservative think tank) were men, while the secret- er, administrative assistants were women. The guys got invited over to one of the scholar’s house for poker night; I got teased about dating another intern. But hey, at least at a conservative think tank, they don’t take you seriously because they think you’re just going to get married, start having kids and drop out of the workforce anyway; on the Hill, they don’t take you seriously because they assume you’re only there because you find “power” a huge turn-on.
• The LA TImes describes how immigrant Chinese garment workers, their daughters, academics and government agents combined to bring better ergonomics to garment workers. Very cool - a successful example of worker (and daughter) driven change. Via Confined Space.
• Added two pro-choice blogs to the blogroll: Abortion Clinic Days and Now What? (Hat tip: Blog for Choice).
• Kip has good news for us Wonderfalls fans: there will be a DVD collection, not only of the 3 episodes FOX broadcasted but of the 10 episodes they didn’t.
• I really enjoyed the comics on Secret Identity Comics, especially the work-in-progress home. (Warning: serious comics, by and large, not ha-ha-funny comics.)
• Democrats looking for reasons to be optimistic about the upcoming Presidential vote-off should check out this Open Source Politics post about the state-by-state polls.
• One of my favorite Z Magazine writers, Tim Wise, now has a blog of his own. Huzzah! Tim is an especially valuable writer about race and racism.
• Oh, those horrible goths - who will protect us from them? Via Atrios.
• There’s been some discussion in the comments about the genocide in Sudan. I don’t know enough to blog intelligently about it, but I highly recommend that readers check out a new blog focused on Sudan, The Passion of the Present. Via Crooked Timber.
• Same-sex marriage opponants have a well-established habit of suggesting ridiculous links between marriage equality and some social problem - increased abortion, say, or single parenthood. But this may be the silliest one of all.
  UK Lord links gay marriage, obesity.

• An excellent Summer Wood essay on “Choice,” discussing how the word was politicized - and has been, in some cases, co-opted and depoliticized. (Via Vanessa at Feministing, who has some good comments on the essay). From Wood’s essay:
  Substituting “choice” for “rights” as both a legal framework and a common language indeed proved successful in attracting some libertarians and conservatives to vote for the “pro-choice” position in numerous state-level abortion contests during the ’80s. Because “choice” is, in essence, an empty word, people with vastly divergent political viewpoints can be united under its banner. In retrospect, this is both the word’s greatest strength and its ultimate weakness. As various constituencies brought their own political prerogatives and definitions of “choice” to the negotiating table, parents, physicians, husbands, boyfriends, and religious leaders all came to be included as rightful participants in decision-making process, significantly weakening the idea that women have a right to make this decision on their own.

  Solinger identifies the linguistic shift from abortion rights to “the individualistic, marketplace term ‘choice’” as deeply problematic, on both a philosophical and a practical level. The word’s primacy in the arena of reproductive rights has slowly made the phrase “It’s my choice” synonymous with “It’s a feminist thing to do” ? or, perhaps more precisely, “It is antifeminist to criticize my decision.” The result has been a rapid depoliticizing of the term and an often misguided application of feminist ideology to consumer imperatives, invoked not only for the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy, but also for the “right” to buy all manner of products marketed to women, from cigarettes to antidepressants to diet frozen pizzas.

• A surefire nominee for “best specialist blog” next year: The Well-Timed Period (it’s not about punctuation). Really wonderful converage of Plan B going on this week. Via Trish Wilson.
• Rivka at Respectful of Otters contemplates yet another post about how women just aren’t as interested in politics.
  It seems that Matthew is taking women’s lesser involvement in a particular kind of political activity - vigorous engagement in political argument - as evidence of lesser interest. Certainly there’s more to political participation than rhetoric, although you wouldn’t know it from reading a lot of blogs. I put more stock in women’s equal involvement in campaign activity, and our greater voting rates.
• The right-wingers want to take over South Carolina! I mean, even more so. All Facts And Opinions has the details.

Hooray! Ms. Musings is back!

(And with better blogging software this time, too!).

Feministing’s Hannah quotes Catherine MacKinnon:

When reading what Catherine MacKinnon and some other academic feminists (especially Alison Jaggar) (or maybe not Alison Jaggar - see update below) say about liberal feminism, keep in mind that they’re using what is (in my opinion) an inaccurate definition of liberal feminism.

To me - and to most active feminsts outside the university I’ve discussed this wtih - liberal feminism is represented by mainstream, politically liberal feminists, who concentrate more on women’s economic equality and less on attacking pornography. Liberal feminism is, frankly, the popular face of feminism: Ms Magazine, The Feminist Majority Foundation, NOW, Bella Azbug, Naomi Wolf, Molly Ivans, Nancy Folbre, Katha Pollitt, and folks like that.

Contrary to MacKinnon’s claim, none of these folks ignores the need for social equality as well as formal equality. Alison Jaggar, writing along similar lines, has suggested that liberal feminists believe that all women need is equality under the law; I doubt there’s a single liberal feminist writer today who’d endorse that nonsense.

The more I read MacKinnon and Jaggar, the clearer it becomes that they’re using “liberal” in the old sense of the word, which we nowadays call “libertarian.” MacKinnon and Jaggar thus share a very inaccurate view of modern feminism.

First of all, they talk as if there is a significant theory of feminism combining libertarianism (aka “classical liberalism”) and feminism. But in fact, the libertarian feminists are a tiny minority of feminists[*], and their organizations are dismissed by most feminists as anti-feminists in feminist clothing. So MacKinnon and Jaggar’s conflating “liberal feminism” with libertarianism credits right-wing feminists with far more influence and support within feminism than they actually possess.

Secondly, MacKinnon and Jaggar basically ignore or misrepresent the views of actual liberal feminists - who are, I suspect, the large majority of feminists in the USA today, although they’re probably a minority within academic feminism.

Compounding the problem, MacKinnon and Jaggar are two of the most widely read authors in undergraduate women’s studies programs. Jaggar, in particular, has written some very popular textbooks which give a wildly inaccurate view of liberal feminism. As a result, women’s studies programs teach their students a view of liberal feminism that has no relevance in the real world, and is more than a little insulting to the majority of non-academic feminists.

[*] I have no idea what Ifeminist’s membership is, but I’m sure it pales compared to NOW’s. Ditto for the IWF. Concerned Women for America has a membership comparable to NOW’s, but they don’t claim to be feminists.

UPDATE: Never post from memory rather than from research. I remembered being very affronted by the description of liberal feminism in a Jaggar-edited textbook, and a bit of online searching found a feminist philosphy professor who seemed to confirm my memory. Another feminist on the net had gotten a similar impression of Jaggar’s view of liberal feminism.

However, after reading my post, my co-blogger Bean suggested to me that my description of Jaggar’s view of liberal feminism was incorrect. Kasala, who is one of Jaggar’s students, suggests in the comments that I’m mistaken. I must admit, they may be correct - Kasala actually knows Jaggar, and Bean’s memory for feminist theory is usually better than mine.

I’ll do more research (i.e., read Jaggar herself, rather than looking at secondhand sources) and return to this issue, either to stand by or to apologize for my criticism of Jaggar.

UPDATE: I can’t support my criticism of Jagger, from what I’ve read. So I withdraw my criticism of Jagger, and apologize to her for my error.

Over at The American Prospect, a centrist democrat and a liberal (Will Marshall and Robert Kuttner) are proposing economic strategy for the Democrats, under the slogan “If these two can agree on a progressive strategy, so can you!”

I actually agree with a lot that they say - or where I disagree, it’s only because I think they don’t go far enough. (Then again, I’m to the left of both of them). But part 1 of their plan - entitled “Return fiscal sanity to Washington” - seems to me to cast the problem of an unbalanced budget in ways that make little sense.

Interest rates? Whatever you think of Bush’s economic policies, you can’t plausibly claim that the problem with them is that interest rates have been too high. (In fact, interest rates have been considerably lower under Bush than under Clinton.)

There’s then a bit about repealing “the Bush tax giveaways to families earning more than $200,000 a year,” which I fully agree with.

Next comes a discussion of “pork.”

What’s so bad about this? Pork projects improve the infrastructure of a community and create jobs.

Citizens Against Government Waste (an anti-tax group) says that pork projects in this highway bill will cost $11 billion over the next six years, or about $1.8 billion a year. (For comparison’s sake, the non-pork portion of the highway bill is about $264 billion, or $44 billion a year).

So what sort of projects are paid for by $1.8 billion a year? According to Citizens Against Government Waste:

Okay, a quarter million dollars seems like waaay too much to spend on a website (although what do I know?). But other than that, these all seem like defensible projects to me. They create real improvements that will improve lives for people or help local economies, and they do so while creating jobs. What’s wrong with that?

Also, let’s keep a sense of scale about all this. The US Federal government spends over $2 trillion dollars a year; $1.8 billion is less than one-tenth of 1% of that. Pork in the highway bill is not the cause of our unbalanced budget.

* * *

There is, to my mind, a good reason to bring the budget into balance: because the less debt the US owes, the less of our taxes goes to paying interest on the debt. Paying interest is bad for the US in the exact same way it’s bad for consumers: if you have to borrow money to buy stuff, you end up paying more for that stuff. That’s true whether the stuff bought is a Playstation 2 on my VISA or an extended war in Iraq paid for by future generations. Pay-as-you-go is a cheaper, more effective use of tax money.

That said, it’s not the end of the world if we do go into debt. Sometimes it’s a good idea; we went into debt to buy our house, but in the long run that will (hopefully) turn out to be a sensible use of debt. Similarly, in a time of high unemployment, pork projects that create jobs and add value to communities may be worth going slightly further into debt for.

(Link to Prospect article via Matthew Yglesias).

UPDATE: Edited to add the phrase “in the highway bill” to one sentence; the first version of the sentence didn’t make it clear I was talking about pork in this one bill, not in the entire annual budget. Sorry about that.

UPDATE 2: Overall, according to CAGW, the annual pork bill is $2.29 billion, or a little over 1% of total federal spending. That’s not chump change, but neither is it a major cause of the deficit. (For comparison’s sake, Bush’s tax plan will cost the federal budget an average of $147 billion a year, or about 64 times what we’re spending on pork).

I wish I had time to make a post of each of these links, but alas… So here they are. Sorry if this post seems a bit abrupt; it’s not because I think the topics under discussion aren’t important.

• Excellent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how badly news media covers class issues, and in particular, poor people.

• Daddy, Poppa and Me defends a webpage on “Nazi Anti-Jewish Speech vs. Religioius Right Anti-Gay Speech.” My favorite bit:
  But if the Nazis have become such a caricature of evil that nothing they did or said can ever be compared to anything anyone else does or says now or in the future, then the phrase

  “Never again!”

  becomes a useless and trite historical cliche having no force or power to stop hate before it becomes something violent. Do I believe that the FRC has the possibility to become a ‘regime’ that would slaughter my ‘kind’? No, I would be the last to make such a prediction.

  Do I believe the rhetoric of hate and demonization that the FRC uses has the possibility to increase violence and legislative attacks against my family? Yes, most defininitely.

• An article about “honour killings” in Istanbul, the practice of murdering girls and women for having sex, for being suspected of having sex, or even for being raped. The good news is, there is something of a backlash against the practice.
• In “Ideas which look sensible but aren’t,” Daniel Davies explains why it’s not a good idea to lend aid money only to countries with decent human rights records.
• Jon Stewart’s commencement address at William & Mary College.
• The Fifty Minute Hour has a sickening post about how rape-shield laws are not being enforced in one California case.

  UPDATEAnd Pinko Feminist Hellcat has another post on this case, aptly titled “Just when you think the OC rape defense couldn’t get any worse…”

• Death and Disease in Iraq. At least for now, war has made things even worse.
• Kuwaiti women react with caution to move on political rights.
• A useful Women’s Enews article describes and contrasts the Kerry and Bush health plans.
• In Pakistan, Those Who Cry Rape Face Jail.
  Up to 80 percent of the 2,000 women now in Pakistani jails are facing charges related to the Hudood Ordinances, according to Rizvi. Many of the cases involve women being charged with adultery after they have allegedly been raped. Another case involves a woman seeking a divorce who has then been accused of adultery. While few are ever tried and convicted, the stigma and the ordeal can color the rest of their lives.

  “These laws promote injustice and are un-Islamic, denying women the rights given to them in the Koran, and discriminating against the weakest sections of society; women and minorities,” Rizvi says. “It is a flawed legislation that can’t be fixed. Its drafting is flawed. Its motive is flawed.” [...]

  Under the Hudood, punishment of a man for rape must be preceded by his own confession or the testimony of four males of upstanding character who witnessed the act of penetration. Women and non-Muslim witnesses are considered worthless.

• A good article by rape researcher Mary Koss discusses what existing research has shown us, and suggests directions for future research.

Subtitle: No Dutch Treat for US

Only a few years ago, many lamented the sky high American illegitimacy rate as a wretched example for the western hemisphere. Somehow, Americans had managed to combine capitalists values and a shockingly high illegitimacy rate. To be sure, many Americans married, but many American marriages also crumbled. Often, parents decided not to marry anyone at all.

Today, the family is reviving in the US. In the mid-1990’s, the sky high American illegitimacy rate seems to have ended its mad ascent after nearly tripling in the years between 1970 and 1993. Yet, since the campaign to legalize same sex marriage has built up steam, the rate of increase in non-marital births has slowed dramatically. This is no coincidence.

A careful look at the campaign for same sex marriage in the US shows that its principle themes are to promote responsible parenthood and long term commitment. Advocates of same sex marriage like Jonathan Rauch and court cases like Goodridge vs. Massachusetts stressed both themes. This important message seems to be getting out; American parents seem about to reverse the long term trend of forgoing marriage.

Examine the evidence. The figure below shows the relationship between out-of-wedlock births and the campaign for same sex marriage. Isolated discussions of same sex marriage began in the mid-80s and mounted slowly. Gays made local gains in 1989 when San Francisco and New York extended domestic partnership benefits to same sex couples. Naturally, local victories in only two cities had little effect on the nationwide illegitimacy rate. However, with these local victories, discussions began to gain steam. Nationwide conversation took off in 1993, when the Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii ruled that denying same sex marriage violated due process.

(Click on image to see larger version)

The impact of nationwide discussions was almost immediate. Obviously, unmarried women already pregnant at the time of the ruling still bore their illegitimate babies. But in 1995, we see the illegitimacy rate dropped for the first time in decades. In the following years, recognition of the importance of marriage for everyone spread to other states. In 1999, Vermont’s Supreme Court ruled that the benefits of marriage must be extended to same sex partners. Soon Vermont offered domestic partnership, and the State of California passed “The Declaration of Domestic Partners”.

The effect of all this discussion of same sex marriage, with its emphasis on responsible parenthood, and long term commitment, has been stunning and persistent! It has also surprised some conservative opponents of same sex marriage. Despite aggressive educational programs like “Just Say No” implemented during the Reagan administration, the non-marital birth rate had increased steadily at a rate of 0.8% per year for more than two decades. Yet, as gay rights advocates began to describe the numerous benefits of marriage for everyone, we see prospective parents began to value marriage once again. The rate of increase in non-marital births has dropped to only 0.2%, or one fourth its previous value. It was more than Nancy Reagan could have ever wished for!

There is hope yet. If we continue discussing same sex marriage, and enacting it more widely, Americans may once again remember that people raising kids had best be married.
Read the rest of this entry »

• Good article by Adam Haslett in The New Yorker. The article covers a lot of topics, but here’s my favorite bit:
  What effect will allowing men to marry men and women to marry women have on our peculiarly modern venture of marriage? Proponents typically say that it will have hardly any—that there is no shortage of marriage licenses, and all that will happen is that more citizens and their children will have the benefits of existing family law. The opposition argues that one of the organizing institutions of our society will be imperilled.

  History suggests that neither view is quite accurate. Despite comparisons to the repeal of miscegenation laws, no other expansion of the marriage franchise—to the sterile, to slaves, or to interracial couples—has required an alteration in the basic definition of the term: the union of a man and woman as husband and wife. To discount this as mere semantics misses what the definition points up: that marriage, through all its incarnations, has been a procedure that assigns people a new identity based on their gender. For centuries, it has been the ceremony that makes males into husbands and females into wives. Until very recently, this meant a lifetime commitment to both the security and the constriction of a well-defined social role. The symbolic danger that gay marriage poses to such an arrangement is obvious. It alters the public meaning of the word by further draining it of its power to reinforce traditional expectations of behavior. What does it mean to be a husband in a world where a man could have one of his own? This is up to each individual couple, one is tempted to say. Fair enough; but the words we use to describe our relationships are shared cultural property. There is no private language. In this sense, granting the word “marriage” to gay couples will eventually affect everyone.

  The mistake is to consider the change in meaning particularly drastic. After all, undoing customary expectations for how a husband and wife behave toward each other has been one of the goals of the women’s movement since its inception. Rather than an abrupt departure, same-sex marriage is the culmination of a larger and ultimately more consequential change in the nature of marital relations between men and women.

  Which is one of the reasons that the opposition to it is so fierce. It has come to symbolize what is, historically speaking, radical about contemporary marriage: the decline of the patriarchal legal structure and the rise of the goal of self-fulfillment. Gay marriage is unsettling, to many, not because it departs from modern meanings of matrimony but because it embodies them.

• Gabriel Rosenberg discusses no fault-divorce. My favorite bit:
  Later in the forum (1:11:20) Wood was asked whether she would support an amendment for a uniform national policy on divorce. She said no, because divorce did not alter the definition of marriage. I disagree. Whether marriage is a lifetime commitment, or just a temporary arrangement seems to me to be a much bigger difference in the definition of marriage than viewing one’s spouse as a human being without reference to gender.
• The Washington Post compares same-sex-marriage-and-marriage-lite polls in red states and blue states. Majorities in both blue states and “purple” (i.e., swing) states favor either gay marriage or a marriage-lite alternative, although it’s just barely a majority in the purple states.
• The first (and likely the last) time I’ll ever be quoted by Andrew Sullivan. That same post (the one about abortion rates and lesbian & gay rights in Europe) was also linked to by pro-SSM conservative Steve Miller. This is a nice benefit of Marriage Debate, without which neither Miller nor Sullivan would be likely to come across anything I write. (Thanks Eve!)
• The Conjecturer fisks “Focus on the Family.”
• Gay Marriage? Been there, done that, Dutch say.
• Max Boot of the conservative Weekly Standard argues that The Right Can’t Win This Fight.

  Over on Marriage Debate, Joel Bruhn makes a similar argument, writing:

  Gays in this country mostly do NOT agree with us here, and being citizens, taxpayers, and voters, are fully entitled to lobby accordingly. And they’ve been far more effective in persuading the public on this issue than have the conservatives who oppose them.

  Others have correctly noted that it is mostly judges, and not voters, who have been giving gay-marriage advocates their latest victories, but I see that point as basically irrelevant here. Gay marriage has seen popular support rising steadily for many years now, and this trend isn’t going to reverse. We’re already past the point where a federal marriage amendment could find sufficient support to be passed, and momentum is on their side, so we’d better make a contingency plan.

  Eve disagrees, noting that “until quite recently (about a year or so ago) I hadn’t heard strong, cogent, secular arguments against same-sex marriage.” That’s true, but a year later, I for one still haven’t heard any strong, cogent, secular arguments against same-sex marriage. :-P

So the “www.amptoons.com” problem has finally been solved - at more expense than I would have preferred, but such is life. It may take a couple of days for the change to finish propogating throughout the web. Currently, it’s partly propogated, so results depend on which ISP you use - as of 10:20 am Thursday, “amptoons.com” points to the wrong place if your ISP is comcast.net, but the correct place if your ISP is sprint.com or speakeasy.com.

But in any case, starting sometime between today and a couple of days from now, depending on your ISP, the correct URL for “Alas, a Blog” is once again http://www.amptoons.com/blog . My goodness, am I happy to have that resolved.

Many thanks to Jenn Lee, for patiently hosting amptoons.com all this time.

Page four of Hereville is online. I’m pretty happy with how this one came out, drawing-wise.

Also, check out my friend Jemale’s comment.

The Independant reports that UN troops have been buying sex from teenage refugees in the Congo - some as young as 13. The girls, of course, have no real choice - they’re facing starvation, and they often have children of their own to feed as well. The soldiers taking advantage of their desparation are the scum of the earth.

The Independant has two articles up - one (quoted from above) brief, one longer and with more quotes from the abused girls. The horrifying thing is not just the actions of the UN troops, but how every aspect of the situation - from the misogynistic beliefs of her own culture, to the lack of sufficient aid from international helpers - has conspired to give these girls virtually no choice.

The article also discusses how no one seems willing to discipline the soldiers. And, of course, just stopping the soldiers - without doing anything about the reasons teenage girls are so desparate for food that they’ll trade sex for fruit - is no solution. More.

It seems ridiculous to call for more foreign aid - especially remembering the similar scandal that took place a couple of years ago - but what else can be done? The clear way to help these girls is to provide them and their children with access to enough food and security so that they don’t need to trade sex for food. Which means more foreign aid. Which may mean more exploitative foreign aid workers. Aaargh.

What these girls really need is a situation where they have power of their own, rather than being dependant on the power of men around them - fathers, brothers, local soldiers, UN soldiers, or aid workers. But I can’t imagine any way to bring that about, in the short term.

There is an interesting, and still ongoing, debate over if registered partnerships and gay marriages have killed off heterosexual marriage in Scandinavia.

The anti-marriage-equality case was best presented by Stanley Kurtz (who also opposes marriage-lite measures like civil unions), in a Weekly Standard article.

Both Galios and Andrew Sullivan responded to this article, and then Kurtz responded to Sullivan, and then there were the counter-responses; since I’m lazy, rather than recreating the links, I’ll just point you to this Galios post.

Darren Spedale also wrote a good response to Kurtz.

That was a little while ago; in what might be termed “round two” of the debate, economist M.V. Lee Badgett wrote a response to Kurtz. Then, Galios discussed Badgett’s article, expanding on some points that were relatively buried in Badgett’s piece. Kurtz responded to Badgett yesterday.

As if all that wasn’t enough to read, Kurtz has a new article in the current Weekly Standard, which Galios has commented on (and Justin Katz has in turn commented on Galios’ comment).

I’m sure there’s more on the way.

• The other day, I was trying to convince my housemates that we should look to France rather than Canada for a model of socialized medicine, because by the standards of most of the first world, Canada’s health care system isn’t that good. (Although it’s still much better than ours).

  By a happy coincidence, Kevin Drum links to an Economist article (available only to subscribers, alas) nutshelling the French system’s results. Here’s the bit Kevin quotes:

  Its hospitals gleam. Waiting-lists are non-existent. Doctors still make home visits. Life expectancy is two years longer than average for the western world.

  ….For the patient, the French health system is still a joy. Same-day appointments can be made easily; if one doctor’s advice displeases, you can consult another, a habit known as nomadisme medical. Individual hospital rooms are the norm. Specialists can be consulted without referral. And while the patient pays up front, almost all the money is reimbursed, either through the public insurance system or a top-up private policy.

  For family doctors too, liberty prevails. They are self-employed, can set up a practice where they like, prescribe what they like, and are paid per consultation. As the health ministry’s own diagnosis put it recently: “The French system offers more freedom than any other in the world.”

• Lots of good at Julian’s Lounge lately. First, he takes down Jenny Morse’s argument against same-sex marriage (see also Lucia’s post on Morse earlier this week).
• Next, Julian takes on a silly essay by a philosophy professor [joke which some found offensive deleted], which argues that liberals have generally had easy lives in which everything was handed to them on a silver platter, unlike hard-working conservatives who have learned to value labor and so aren’t so willing to give other people’s tax money away. (Apparently the good professor is unfamiliar with the respective biographies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush).

  It’s funny reading the Professor’s condescending responses on his blog, both of which assume that Julian is liberal. Actually, Julian is a libertarian; my guess is, Julian was wincing at seeing his own policy preference argued for in such a hamhanded manner.

• Lastly, Julian mentions that he - like me - did parlimentary debate in college. I bet a lot of political bloggers have a parli background; they’re both natural activities for folks with an irrational belief that other people are eager to hear our political opinions.
• An interesting article in Reason about the “tax honesty” movement - you know, those folks who swear up and down that no one is legally required to pay federal income taxes. (Via Julian’s Lounge, yet again).
  Not merely Protestant, the tax honesty people are strangely reminiscent of fandom – of the comic book, fantasy, science fiction, role-playing-game variety. They have the same obsession with continuity and coherence within a created fantasy world of words. It’s just that, in this case, that world of words isn’t a multivolume fantasy epic or a long-running TV series — it’s U.S. law. When these people try to reconcile the definition of income in this subsection of Title 26 of the U.S. Code with the definition in a 1918 Supreme Court case, it’s like hearing an argument over the inconsistencies between a supervillain’s origin as first presented in a 1965 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and the explanation given in a 1981 edition of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider- Man.

  The tax honesty movement’s vision of the world is fantastical in another way. It is not merely obsessed with continuity; it is magical in a traditional sense. It’s devoted to the belief that the secret forces of the universe can be bound by verbal formulas if delivered with the proper ritual. There are numerous formulae in the tax honesty spellbook, with rival mages defending them. Which spell is best: The summoning of the Sovereign Citizen? The incantation of the Constitutional Definition of Income? The banishing spell of No Proper Delegation?

  The tax honesty folks similarly believe that their foe the IRS must also be bound by these grimoires of magic…

• If you can’t stand Powerpoint (and who can?), you’ll enjoy this little collection of links from Brett Peters. Via Jim Henley.
• The South Dakota Senate race is actually a heck of a lot more interesting than I would have imagined. Julia tells the story.
• Controlled studies show that it results in 54% fewer juvenile arrests and 69% fewer juvenile convictions and probation violations. And for every dollar it costs, four dollars are saved in future costs. Why aren’t tough-on-crime conservatives all over it?

  Probably because it doesn’t involve more cops or more juvenile detention centers or harsher punishments or religious indoctrination. Instead, it’s all about nurses.

  Go to Respectful of Otters for the full story.

• And while you’re there, you must read Rivka’s excellent post on consent and nonconsent.
• Speaking of excellent posts about consent, welcome Wistful Musings and Howling Rage, a new blog by frequent Alas comments-poster JRC. JRC’s comments here are always top-notch, and I feel sure his blog will be as well.

In a curious side-note to this year’s political and artistic riggamarole, the jury at the Cannes Film Festival has awarded the Palme d’Or to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. I’m curious to see what sort of comment and criticism this receives.

(Story via Ain’t It Cool News.)

The Sideshow links to this interview with reporter Greg Palast. Palast’s work is published mainly in the British press, since the American press doesn’t like to report on the ways the US is still failing Democracy 101.

I haven’t posted anything about Abu Ghraib, largely because I have nothing to say. I am appalled, but not surprised, by recent revelations, apart from being surprised that the American press is reporting them.

Nor am I very enthusiastic for this from a partisan point of view. I don’t find what has happened in Abu Ghraib to be more evil than the Iraqi sanctions. That the US tortures Iraqis isn’t even something new. Awful as the torture of prisoners is, it’s not worse torture than what a parent goes through watching their child slowly die of typhoid fever or cholera - let alone what the child goes through. Although the torture of sanctions was less direct, it was not less deliberate.

The truth is, in terms of our foreign policy, the US is evil. We’ve always been evil (although that’s not all we’ve been), and the only reason this is getting any attention in the States is because it’s an excuse for CNN and the newspapers to focus on lurid photos. (Thank God for lurid photos, I say). Body & Soul is disucssing the conflict between blaming the monsters at the top of the chain in command, versus blaming the soldiers who actually implimented the tortures. She correctly concludes, I think, that both deserve some share of blame. To that, I’d add, blame American voters, because we have been more than willing to let the top monsters and the soldiers off the hook.

Anyhow, I was meaning to introduce this amazing post at Body and Soul. Unlike me, Jeanne has things to say about Abu Ghraib which are worth reading. Here’s a quote that deserves to be repeated a thousand times:

…but that’s only a tiny part of what Jeanne has to say. Please go read it.

So I was at my job, helping to set out the tables for tonight’s event, which was a benefit concert and dessert buffet for a scholarship fund. The fund helps law students who have agreed to work as lawyers towards equality for lesbians and gays.

Anyhow, one of the organizers asked me for a table and then told “Tom,” a middle-aged man who was busily laying out desserts, to help me. I’m fine, I told him, but he went with me anyway and helped me lug out a table. Later on, I needed help putting a table upright and rudely called out “Tom, grab the other end of this,” which Tom did cheerfully.

Later on, I noticed that one of the event organizers was wearing a “Tom Potter for Mayor” button. I said something nice about the button, and she said, “oh, haven’t you met Tom?” You can guess how the rest went. And that’s how I met Portland’s Next Mayor (or at least, the guy currently favored to win the election).

For what it’s worth, I like that Potter does a little volunteer work for a gay rights organization, and that he doesn’t think gruntwork is beneath him. I was going to vote for Tom Potter anyway (his opponent has tried to win by outspending ten to one, a tactic that I - and a lot of Portland - find insulting), but I’m a bit more enthusiastic about it now than I was yesterday.