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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, February 21, 2004
Never Enough One of the many reasons why the homosexual marriage issue has me so irritated is that no matter what equality the law provides, it is never enough--and homosexuals insist not just on equal treatment by government, but equal treatment by private firms as well. This article about the marriage licenses being issued by San Francisco discusses the fact that because these licenses were issued in violation of state law, a lot of companies are unwilling to treat these newly married homosexual couples as being actually married: The couple asked State Farm for the marriage-discount rate on their car insurance, and the company mailed them an acknowledgment form showing both their names.In the mid-1970s, in California, homosexuals complained about police harrassment, and they wanted the sodomy laws repealed. I agreed at the time; I couldn't understand who all these Christians were who wanted the laws left in place. (I was young, naive, fairly liberal, and like most of my generation, I saw homosexuality as just a different lifestyle, not for me, but if others wanted that, sure!) The laws went away, and amazingly enough, within six years, the promiscuity of gay men meant that AIDS was burning a fire through the homosexual community, and soon, contaminating the blood supply. By 1979, homosexuals were insisting that private employers (admittedly, a public utility) could be sued for discrimination based on sexual orientation--and the California Supreme Court agreed. In the 1990s, the struggle was to extend this to nearly all private employers, and California's Legislature went along, banning all discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1992. (Note: sexual orientation was not defined by the law. You don't want to hire a member of NAMBLA at your day care center? Lawsuit, lawsuit!) Now homosexuals are insisting that they have a right to government recognition of marriage. But that's not good enough: "we're on the cusp of being treated again as second-class citizens." So private companies will have to be forced as well. Libertarians keep insisting that all of this is a libertarian policy. But inevitably, because the need for approval is so strong (as opposed to the libertarian ideal of laissez-faire), homosexuals aren't content with making the government treat them like everyone else. They need to force everyone to treat them that way. There is nothing libertarian about this, and libertarians should wake up, and admit that they have crawled into bed with a bunch that isn't interested in freedom, but control. We've already seen how homosexuals have destroyed the concept of free speech in Canada and Britain as part of their irrational need to suppress disapproval. I expect plenty of libertarians will start to make excuses for shutting up disapproving voices here, in the interests of "fairness." UPDATE: A reader points out that insurance companies give a discount to a married couple because their loss experience shows that married people are less expensive to insure, as reflected by actual losses. This is certainly true for heterosexual married couples. Will this necessarily be true for homosexual married couples? Maybe, maybe not. If I were an insurance company, I would not assume that a homosexual married couple is going to have the same loss record as a heterosexual married couple. More About the Albany Church Scandal This is over at FreeRepublic.com, so read with appropriate care, rather like you were reading the New York Times: Andrew Zalay, once of Albany and now working in California as an engineer, showed members of the media excerpts from his brother Tom's diary Wednesday that say shame and confusion from a relationship with Hubbard drove him to suicide in 1978 at the age of 25.Lifestyle? Gee, what do you think Tom Zalay was talking about? Toy Gun Control From the Salinas Californian: Five-year-old Martin Patiño threw his toy machine gun into a trashcan marked "armas no," Spanish for "no guns," and he promptly picked up a coloring book to replace it.Isn't it odd that middle class kids used to grow up playing with toy guns, and even BB guns, without becoming gang members? Hint: it isn't the toy guns that are the problem. There are some social and cultural problems involved, but it is easier to blame a toy. Amusing Self-Defense Account I was at first worried that the headline had something to do with the German cannibalism case, but no, that's just an expression: Butcher makes mincemeat of robbers The Economist About Outsourcing They have written an article arguing that the protectionist forces are making too big of an issue about outsourcing. I don't dispute that relative to the overall economy, the jobs going overseas are pretty small. (It is still little consolation if you are one of the people whose job has gone away, and is unlikely to be coming back, to know that someone else has a good job instead.) They also make some good points about how some Democrats are picking the starting year for counting job losses in a way that exaggerates the extent of the problem--picking 2001, before businesses started laying off workers. It is certainly true that some of the three million jobs lost is cyclical, not permanent. It is at least worth reading after listening to the doom and gloom sorts. A Fascinating Argument: Will Liberals Accept It About Concealed Carry Permits? Liberals are suddenly making libertarian arguments for gay marriage: Mathew Staver, a lawyer representing the Campaign for California Families, said he believes the court ultimately will find that Newsom acted illegally when he began allowing gay marriages last week.The same is true for carrying concealed firearms, or owning an "assault weapon." No one is hurt by being allowed to carry a gun, or have an AR-15. The same is true for allowing employers and employees to make what ever wage arrangements they want (say, paying less than minimum wage). The liberal argument for why the government has the right to regulate all these matters isn't the direct effect, but the indirect effect. Hey, if liberals decide that they are really libertarians, that's fine. We'll scrap the vast majority of the laws now on the books. But the fact is that liberals aren't libertarians. They still insist on the right of the government to regulate wages and gun ownership because of the indirect effects. Even on marriage, their libertarian-sounding arguments are just an excuse to do what they want to do. Ask them why San Francisco isn't issuing group marriage licenses for polygamists, or for five year olds, or, across species lines. After all, who is hurt by these things? Suddenly their libertarian-sounding arguments will all evaporate. Friday, February 20, 2004
Powerful Book Review in Atlantic Monthly It's by Caitlin Flanagan titled "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement." Her criticism of a number of recent books about working mothers--all written, according to Ms. Flanagan's review, from an almost reflexively feminist perspective--seem spot on to me from living in various parts of California, which is something of a cauldron of both highly paid professional women--and mothers struggling to bring in enough money to pay for luxuries like health care and dental exams. Flanagan is not impressed with the reasoning of these works. It's a long essay, well-written, and worth reading in full. I can't even begin to summarize here without going on for many pages, but I will give you a few interesting and important points. Flanagan argues that feminism engaged in an at least delusive, if not intentionally self-serving claim that back in the 1950s and 1960s, all women were oppressed in roughly equal ways, and that what all women had in common with respect to work and childrearing was pretty much the same regardless of economic status. As the title of her review suggests, Flanagan believes that without the mass importation of poorly paid, largely illegal immigrants (often exploited for that reason), the modern feminist ideal of the working professional mother would have been impossible. Flanagan's criticism of Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood: The Price of Motherhood proceeds from an undeniable and painful truth: that although keeping a house and raising children are as physically exhausting and emotionally demanding as almost any job you can think of, they are entirely unpaid endeavors?a fact that carries grave economic repercussions for women far beyond the loss of a weekly paycheck. This was made starkly evident to Crittenden?as it is made starkly evident to millions of women every year?when she took a look at her Social Security statement and noticed a startling row of zeros, the first of which corresponded exactly to the date she began her life's most challenging work: raising her son.As the historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese observed some years ago during a debate about feminism, it had done women like herself with good jobs an immense good; for a vast swarm of women, raising kids on their own, living in a trailer park, surviving on irregular child support payments and welfare, feminism had been a net disadvantage. Flanagan points out that this is not simply a question of some gaining and other losing, with no connection between the two. The privileged class of professional mothers needed a class of women poor enough to do the "[excrement expletive deleted] jobs" without impairing their careers. Yet as Flanagan points out, a previous generation of women had not regarded these as awful tasks, but simply part of being a mother. Even when these jobs were tedious, they were part of motherhood, for good and bad. Flanagan is not going to pretend that everything was wonderful about being a 1950s mother. She just wants some of the writers on the subject to admit that while something was gained, something was lost as well: What few will admit--because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities--is that when a mother works, something is lost. Children crave their mothers. They always have and they always will. And women fortunate enough to live in a society where they have access to that greatest of levelers, education, will always have the burning dream of doing something more exciting and important than tidying Lego blocks and running loads of laundry. If you want to make an upper-middle-class woman squeal in indignation, tell her she can't have something. If she works she can't have as deep and connected a relationship with her child as she would if she stayed home and raised him. She can't have the glamour and respect conferred on career women if she chooses instead to spend her days at "Mommy and Me" classes. She can't have both things. I have read numerous accounts of the anguish women have felt leaving small babies with caregivers so that they could go to work, and I don't discount those stories for a moment. That the separation of a woman from her child produces agony for both is one of the most enduring and impressive features of the human experience, and it probably accounts for why we've made it as far as we have. I've read just as many accounts of the despair that descends on some women when their world is abruptly narrowed to the tedium and exhaustion of the nursery; neither do I discount these stories: I've felt that self-same despair.One thing that my wife and I have noticed, over the years, is the dramatic decline in the quality of middle class kids. By this, we mean that what used to be considered middle class standards of education, behavior, and values are now relatively scarce. There is no great surprise to this. A generation ago, the woman who was the primary caretaker of middle class kids was their middle class mother. Today, more often than not, the primary caretaker of middle class kids is a daycare provider. There are exceptional daycare situations out there (and priced accordingly). Most kids aren't in those situations, nor are they being raised in their own home by a nanny from some Third World country. In our experience, they are being raised by women who are so poorly educated that daycare is the highest paying work that they can find. Let me be clear on this: there are women providing daycare because they love kids, and often they compensate for the low pay because they are raising their own kids at the same time. When my wife was working on her BA, our son went to daycare 1 1/2 hours a day, three days a week, with a woman we knew from church. She was educated, intelligent, and with thoroughly middle class in her values. But more typical of daycare providers, in our experience, was our neighbor, who had dropped out of high school, didn't vote because she didn't consider herself smart enough, and failed to adequately look after her charges. She eventually stopped doing it because her conscience bothered her. One child she watched from 7 to 7 everyday, starting at six weeks (when California stops paying disability insurance after a birth) while Mom drove a shiny new BMW to an important job in San Francisco. At the father's request, our neighbor kept it a secret when the baby first crawled, rolled over, and walked. By the time the baby was two, she called our neighbor "Mommy" and would hit her biological mother at the end of the day. The mother-child bond wasn't there. Lower class women are now raising middle class children. I hope that this isn't a suprise to you when I tell you that even in very middle class schools, there are big behavior problems. Unfortunately, it's not just in California; it's here in Boise as well, because much of the poison of "have children; let someone else raise them" has spread throughout the country. It may not be as bad here; my son tells me that in his middle school classes, about half the kids simply ignored the teacher, kept talking, and otherwise being disruptive. The teacher just talked louder, recognizing the unrealism of requiring kids to behave. This is a big improvement over middle school in Sonoma County, where my son tells me that some teachers did little teaching; the whole class was spent yelling at kids to sit down and be quiet. As much as I disagree with Mormon theology, at least Mormons some effort into promoting the idea of raising your own kids. That's probably why half the class at my son's middle school was prepared to sit down and listen. Promoting the idea that every mother should be working--and thus, every child is in daycare--will someday be looked back upon as one of the great mistakes of the last half of the twentieth century. At least some of the blame can be reduced back to that simple error of treating people as members of a class, rather than as individuals. Social expectations meant that every mother in the 1950s was supposed to be home raising kids, even though some were not suited to it. This was wrong, because it assumed that every member of the class of mothers had, or should have, the same goals and expectations. The correction to these social expectations (sometimes written into law, and sometimes not) were social expectations that every woman who wasn't stupid should be working, letting the stupid ones raise the kids. This was wrong for the same reason--the assumption that all members of the class mother should be employed. Question For Your California Law Students Are there any cases that you are aware of where the California Constitution's equal protection clause struck down any law based on sexual orientation? There's a 1978 case where gay law students sued Pacific Telephone for discrimination against homosexuals. I recall that the case was decided based on freedom of political expression under the Unruh Civil Rights Law. (The theory was that being openly homosexual was a political act, since there was no law prohibiting discrimination based on seuxal orientation at the time.) It would seem a bit strange for California's equal protection clause to have prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation--but not be used to strike down the state's laws banning homosexuality (not repealed until the 1970s). Ralph Nader Considering Run For Presidency Run, Ralph, run! As frustrated as I get with Bush's triangulation strategy, it will not cause me to support a third party candidate to run aganst Bush from the right. If you have to wonder why, look at Ralph Nader and the effect he had on the 2000 election. Al Gore wasn't far enough left for Ralph Nader, and Nader's forces, rather than recognize that they represent a fairly small minority viewpoint, decided to punish the Democratic Party for not catering to them: Nader, who turns 70 next week, has said he would base his decision, in part, on whether Democratic and Republican officials respond to his agenda, which includes the need for universal health insurance, a more progressive wage policy and making dramatic reforms to the criminal justice system.Conservatives are a good more common than "progressives," or whatever the term du jour is for Nader's form of leftism, but there still aren't enough of us to elect a president--but there are enough of us to guarantee a victory for someone like Kerry, if we sit on our hands. It is not a good situation. I understand those who get frustrated that conservatives have so little influence in America. But the alternative is to make ourselves into the equivalent of Ralph Nader. A Cure For Opiate Addiction? Here's one of those amazing stories that I am instinctively skeptical of, but it is at least interesting: However, when it comes to curing addiction, a reputable scientist believes ibogaine is nothing short of a miracle. "I didn't believe it when I first heard about ibogaine. I thought it was something that needed to be debunked," admits Dr. Deborah Mash, professor of Neurology and Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at University of Miami.The story is careful to emphasize that by itself, it won't do the whole job, and there are people who won't help--but imagine how the world could change if heroin and cocaine users could get free of their addictions. Even a 50% reduction in addicts would mean dramatic reductions in rates of burglary, robbery, and the associated murders, rapes, and aggravated assaults. Resources that are gobbled up by the criminal justice system would be available for schools. Of course, when morphine addiction was a big problem in the nineteenth century, someone came up with a non-addictive substitute: heroin. North Dakota Adds Idaho To List of Reciprocity States North Dakota has added Idaho to the list of states whose concealed weapon permits it recognizes. Lesbian Marriage in New Mexico At the end of a story about Mayor Newsom of San Francisco officiating at a gay wedding: In New Mexico, meanwhile, the Sandoval County clerk married a lesbian couple after announcing that the state had no legal grounds to refuse marriage licenses to gays. Other same-sex couples quickly began lining up to exchange vows.Hmmm. I haven't looked at the New Mexico statutes, so I don't know exactly how the clerk came to this conclusion. A majority of Americans do not approve of gay marriage. The only question is whether they care enough to do anything about it. Instapundit is of the opinion that the opposition to gay marriage is very soft. I've received email from a gay blogger in Kansas who wanted to bet me about the legal status of homosexual marriage in near-term future America. His bet was that it woudl be lawful. I decline to bet against him, because I think he is correct: within ten years, homosexual marriage will be the law (although not by legislation, but by judicial order). Within thirty years, I am pretty sure that churches that refuse to solemnize gay weddings will lose their tax-exempt status, again, not by legislation, but by judicial order. After all, what is the tax-exempt status of schools that discriminate based on race? I don't consider the two forms of discrimination at all equivalent, of course, but the analogy will be so powerful that the courts will impose it. I keep waiting for President Bush to show that he stands with conservatives on this, but I fear that he lacks the guts to side with the 60% of Americans who oppose gay marriage. In Case You Missed This Example of "Homophobiaphobia" (Yes, there are two "-phobia" suffixes there--this is the irrational fear of homophobia.) David Bernstein points to this example of outrageous behavior by a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill--and the department chair willing to step in and make the adult behave like an adult: PC at UNC: Student at UNC expresses religious objections to homosexual conduct and criticizes homosexuality as "disgusting" in class. Professor sends out an email to the entire class lambasting this student:Now, I don't know exactly what the circumstances were that provoked this "outburst." I can imagine circumstances where the student's statement was a legitimate expression of his opinion. I can also imagine circumstances where these remarks were tactless and inappropriate. The professor's response, of course, is just typical of the sort of fascist sentiment that dominates the academic community today, where some ideas are so horrifying, so repulsive, so dangerous, that a student dare not say it. "The idea that dare not speak its name.""what we experienced, as unforuntate (sic) as it is, is, however, a perfect example of privilege. that a white, heterosexual, christian male, one who vehemently denied his privilege last week insisting that he earned all he has, can feel entitled to make violent, heterosexist comments and not feel marked or threatened or vulnerable is what privilege makes possible."The professor adds that such "hate speech" creates a "hostile environment" and will not be tolerated in her class. Dreams Some people have erotic dreams; some have nightmares. My dream last night involved opening the Wall Street Journal, looking at the chart of Treasury rates--and seeing a Treasury yield curve inversion--where short-term Treasury yields are higher than long-term Treasury yields. (Click here to see Treasury yield curve online.) This doesn't happen often--once in the entire 15 years that I have been investing. When it does happen, you are supposed to buy the longest term Treasurys you can. Is this a premonition? I hope so! Publishers Tell Me There's No Market for My New Book Trade publishers keep insisting that there is no market for my new book (teaser here). So please explain to me why there is a large market for this: Harry Potter becomes "Warrior Cup" and his enemy Voldemort "Scaly Death" in a translation of the schoolboy wizard's adventures into Ancient Greek due for publication this summer.I have two university presses looking at my manuscript right now--but still, why is there a larger market for a book written in a dead language than there is for a serious history book written in English? "Roe" Asks Court of Appeals to Reopen Roe v. Wade (1973) Norma McCorvey, who was the "Jane Roe" of the most famous and divisive case of my lifetime (although I don't recall hearing about it when it happened), is now a pro-life activist, and has asked the courts to reopen the case, claiming, among other things, that she was taken advantage of by pro-choice attorneys. She now says that the factual basis of that suit--that she had been raped--was a lie. I have also seen an interview in which she says that she didn't even know exactly what an abortion was when she agreed to be the plaintiff. To hear her tell the tale now, she apparently thought "abortion" was rather like an "undo" in your favorite text editor, or to quote the Servpro disaster restoration service ads, "like it never even happened." The argument has advanced to the Court of Appeals: Norma McCorvey, who joined with anti-abortion activists nearly 10 years ago, is seeking to have the decision overturned, citing what she says is more than 30 years of evidence that abortions are psychologically harmful to women.A Georgia woman who sued in the similar case Doe v. Bolton (1973) now says that she didn't even want an abortion--she just wanted a divorce, and claims that the lawyers involved misled her about the papers that she was signing. I will tell you that while I think an original intent argument, based on what was lawful and unlawful in 1789, could have been written that came to the same results, Roe v. Wade (1973) isn't really an original intent argument. It is a privacy right argument based on Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), and has all the problems of Griswold. Labels: abortion Conservatives Threatening to Sit Out the Election You would think from the screeching of the left that Bush is some sort of ideological conservative. Yet the Religious Right is threatening to sit out the election out of frustration with Bush's apparent liberalism on abortion, education spending, spending in general, and his reluctance to get involved in the homosexual marriage struggle: "It's not just economic conservatives upset by runaway federal spending that he's having trouble with. I think his biggest problem will be social conservatives who are not motivated to work for the ticket and to ensure their fellow Christians get to the polling booth," said Robert H. Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute.So why is the left so vehement against Bush, when he has apparently sold out one of his core constitutencies? As an example, I just received a furious email from my sister about Bush's anti-choice policies, and the enormous damage that Bush's "abstinence-only" sex education policies have done to health education in the schools. The problem, however, is that while the Bush Administration is talking about increasing funding for such policies (and I think they are a mistake), federal funding for such programs was already $100 million a year when Bush took office. Bush hasn't actually made any change in this area. I wrote my sister back asking if perhaps she was upset about the Clinton abstinence-only sex education policies--because they were defintely in place when Bush came into office. Does anyone remember when the left was furious with Clinton for selling out to the Republicans on welfare reform? Yup. Bush is doing what Clinton did so well--triangulation. He is going just far enough to the left to make the middle happy. Who To Blame For Faulty Intelligence? As I have pointed out in the past, it would appear that even Hussein believed that he had WMDs--at least, he was paying people to build them for him. Now it appears that at least some faulty intelligence came from an organization that had its own reasons for wanting Hussein out of power, the Iraqi National Congress: U.S. officials said last week that one of the most celebrated pieces of false intelligence, the claim that Saddam had mobile biological-weapons laboratories, had come from a major in the Iraqi intelligence service made available by the INC.I can understand why the INC might have felt that lying to get Hussein removed was worth it, and Chalabi, one of the INC leaders, admitted as much in that same article: During an interview, Mr. Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled U.S. intelligence. The Glories of a Refractor Last night was the first really good night for observing in many months. It was cold, of course, but only about freezing. The sky was completely clear, although there was a lot of moisture impairing transparency. I was able to put the Televue Ranger and the Photon Instruments refractors side-by-side on the same objects, without the sound of chattering teeth distracting me. The Photon Instruments has a huge advantage in aperture--127mm vs. 70mm--but the Televue Ranger is about as good as it gets without being an apochromatic refractor. On Venus: both showed gruesome purple halos, with the Ranger perhaps having some slight advantage. Venus, of course, shows a gibbous image right now, and there is no detail--just blinding white clouds. On Saturn: the Photon Instruments showed at least one cloud band on the planet, as well as a clear and unmistakable Cassini Division in the rings. The Ranger showed no detail on the planet, and the Cassini Division was more implied than clearly visible. In both cases, image quality started to break down at high power. The Ranger image broke down at 120x; the Photon Instruments broke down at 229x. The limitation here, I think, was the seeing (mostly transparency). Star testing: I remain convinced that the Photon Instruments is undercorrected, about 1/3 wave. Oddly enough, I was unable to get diffraction rings out of the Ranger. I suspect that I need more magnification than I can get without using a Barlow. Orion Nebula (M42): The Photon Instruments gave a lovely image at 127x. I couldn't see any of the E, F, G, or H stars fo the Trapezium (nor should I), but A, B, C, and D were crisp and flicker-free. The lack of tube currents in a refractor, I am beginning to think, has a lot to do with the superior image quality that refractors have for their size. With only 127mm of aperture, the Photon Instruments is certainly no deep sky telescope, but within its limitations, it does a fine job. I pulled out the 8" reflector as well, to see how it compares on Saturn. Unfortunately, it seems to be out of collimation, and the batteries on my new laser collimator are dead. I don't know if the problem was having left it on, or being out in the cold aggravated battery death. Saturn was certainly not impressive because of the collimation problems. (This is also one of my objections to reflectors--the need to collimate them often.) One odd aspect, however, is how much whiter Saturn is in the reflector than it is in the Photon Instruments refractor, where it is a yellow color. I don't mean that Saturn is brighter in the reflector--it is actually a different color. Labels: telescopes How Many Gay Couples Are There? Bad Links Instapundit links to Nick Schulz's column about gay marriage. Nick Schulz quotes Virginia Postrel: But the libertarian writer Virginia Postrel touched on another dynamic at work, one that captures why a lot of self-described conservatives haven't lost a lot of sleep over the gay marriage debate. On her personal website she recently linked to an Associated Press article that pointed out the following:THere's a problem, however. When you go to Postrel's website, you find:"Massachusetts has one of the highest concentrations of gay households in the country at 1.3 percent of the total number of coupled households, according to the 2000 census. In California, 1.4 percent of the coupled households are occupied by same-sex partners. Vermont and New York also registered at 1.3 percent, while in Washington, D.C., the rate is 5.1 percent."Postrel went on to say that this "helps explain why DC conservatives, including the president, tend to squirm when their base demands condemnation of gay marriage and gays in general: If you work in Washington, you inevitably have gay friends, many of whom are de facto married." The Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that only full marriage rights for single-sex couples, not Vermont-style civil unions, satisfy the state constitution's demand for legal equality. With a Massachusetts senator the Democratic frontrunner, and Bush desperate to avoid the issue, this could get nasty.The problem is that the AP news story contains no such statistics. Furthermore, I am skeptical that these statistics are even close to possible. For example, this news story reports on 2000 census data on homosexual couples: To date, the Census Bureau has reported that there are 479,107 same-sex couples sharing a household. This number will rise when data from all 50 states is released. The missing states are New Jersey, Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, Mississippi and Arkansas.San Francisco is, if not the most gay-friendly city in America, certainly in the top five. It has one of the highest concentrations of gay people in the U.S.--and even there, only 2.7% of the population are gay couples. Contrary to Postrel's claim that 1.4 percent of Californian households are gay couples, the actual number--92,138 same-sex couples in California, multiplying by two to get the number of people, and dividing by California's population--comes to about 0.55% of the population. I am very skeptical of the rest of the statistics that Postrel is quoting. I suspect that someone is looking at same-sex households, and assuming that these are all gay couples. They may well be roommates. UPDATE: Volokh says that Postrel's data is correct, because the 1.4 percent is of all couples, not of the general population. (Yup, my mistake.) Postrel's link definitely doesn't point to an article containing the data. Here's the census data that Postrel should have cited. This would suggest, however, that one of the arguments for gay marriage--the supposed stability that legal marriage would provide--isn't much of an argument. Homosexuals are about 3% or so of the population--and about 1.4% of couples. Unsurprisingly, half of these same-sex couples are female, even though homosexual men outnumber lesbians by perhaps three times. Thursday, February 19, 2004
The Onion Has a Marvelous Satirical Piece It's about the multimillionaire gigolo's campaign to protect ordinary Americans from that rich guy George Bush: ANCASTER, PA?Democratic frontrunner Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) began a seven-day, eight-state whistle-stop tour Monday, addressing a group of Frigidaire factory workers from the all-teak deck of his 60-foot luxury motor cruiser. Equal Protection Claims in San Francisco I certainly don't claim to have any detailed knowledge of the California Constitution's equal protection clause, but at first glance, it appears that even in the much more serious situation of someone being sent to prison, California's courts seem pretty willing to defer to the Legislature in deciding whether a distinction between two classes is legitimate or not. This is from People v. Jones, 101 Cal. App. 4th 220 (2002): The Mills court noted that although section 290 requires registration by persons convicted of some sex offenses but not by persons convicted of other sex offenses, it is up to the Legislature "to determine the different degrees of gravity, of danger, to society from various types of sex offenses." (People v. Mills, supra, 81 Cal. App. 4th at p. 180.) The court explained that the Legislature's decision not to make certain sex offenses subject to registration "may be based upon the legislative determination a particular type of offender does not recidivate or recidivates less; some offenses, although touching upon sexual acts, are not so directly concerned or related to the type of conduct which is repetitive, recidivist, in nature." (Id. at p. 181.)Obviously, this is a very different situation from the question of marriage (and mostly, I am posting this to start a conversation)--but I would think if anything, the courts would be less willing to defer to the Legislature on a criminal charge, where someone is going to go to prison--a far more serious consequence than an inability to get married. Of course, the real issue is whether the courts will decide that the statute adopted by the voters had a rational basis. As that same decision explained: We conclude that defendant failed to show that the Legislature had no rational basis for requiring persons convicted of violating section 288a, subdivision (b)(1) (oral copulation with a person under the age of 18) to register as sex offenders under section 290. Therefore, the statute does not offend equal protection as applied to defendant, and the trial court did not abuse its discretion in declining to dismiss defendant's current conviction.It seems that to win on an equal protection claim, the defendant was required to establish that the Legislature's classification had no rational basis. To some people, of course, any distinction based on the sex of the participants is prime facie irrational. But there are lots of distinctions in the marriage laws that would seem equally irrational: laws against incestuous marriages, and laws against polygamy. I can't see any reason why a law prohibiting same-sex marriage is intrinsically more irrational than laws against brother-sister, mother-son, father-daughter, or one guy, four women marriages. And what's with this discrimination against animal marriage? What makes it irrational to define marriage to an animal as wrong? I know that some people will get really steamed, and say that animals aren't humans. Yeah--and your point is? What makes human relationships preferable to animal ones, without getting into that pesky notion of absolute morality? UPDATE: At least part of the issue is whether marriage is a fundamental right. If so, strict scrutiny applies; if not, rational basis is enough, and the courts must defer to the judgment of the Legislature. The problem is, as another decision, People v. Alvarez, 88 Cal. App. 4th 1110 (2001), points out: In discussing the Olivas case, the court in People v. Bell n20 noted that "We find a lack of clarity and consistency in the cases dealing with the equal protection analysis of penal statutes. Olivas did not deal with a statute creating a crime but was concerned rather with a law which results in greater punishment for separate defendants convicted of the same crime in the same court based solely on the ages of the defendants. Still, Olivas states that liberty is a fundamental interest and requires that the strict scrutiny test be applied to equal protection claims when liberty is affected. Courts since Olivas have applied that concept narrowly . . . ."This case upheld an enhanced penalty for use of a firearm in a crime, relative to another deadly weapon. What makes using a gun rather than a dagger worse? The argument is essentially this: The Martinez court rejected the defendant's contention, stating that other enhancement provisions, such as section 12022 (committing a felony with a firearm or deadly weapon) and section 12022.7 (infliction of great bodily harm), "may not be compared to section 12022.53, because they enhance the sentence for 'any felony,' whereas section 12022.53 is limited to designated felonies of a very serious type. . . . More significantly, the Legislature determined in enacting section 12022.53 that the use of firearms in commission of the designated felonies is such a danger that, 'substantially longer prison sentences must be imposed . . . in order to protect our citizens and to deter violent crime.' The ease with which a victim of one of the enumerated felonies could be killed or injured if a firearm is involved clearly supports a legislative distinction treating firearm offenses more harshly than the same crimes committed by other means, in order to deter the use of firearms and save lives."I don't know about you, but this sounds like doubletalk to me. Yes, a firearm is deadlier than a knife, when used in a crime, but they aren't all that different in lethality. It looks to me like the courts use "strict scrutiny" to strike down laws when convenient. As the decision admits, liberty is a fundamental right, and Alvarez's liberty was definitely at risk here. I can't see that there is anything rational about firearms enhancement relative to use of another deadly weapon. You could just as easily make the argument that promoting homosexuality by giving it equal status justifies treating it more harshly than heterosexuality. It would make about as much sense. Labels: child sexual abuse Should Chutzpah Be a Capital Crime? I outraged by the chutzpah of this guy's notion of an appropriate punishment for what he did. First, the crime: Alan Walter Jr., one of eight friends accused of abducting, raping and drowning 13-year-old Maryann Measles in October 1997, pleaded guilty Thursday to six counts, including felony murder.Horrifying crime, right? But this is shocking: He initially told police he thought he deserved about 300 hours of community service for his crime, but later revised that to two months in prison.I am stunned by the savagery of the crime, and I am even more stunned that this monster would make either of these proposals with any expectation of being taken seriously. This sounds to me like someone who should never see the outside of a jail cell. He is so completely out of touch with civilized standards that he thought punishments this light might be a basis for negotiation. Do You Remember Reagan's First Term? When Reagan came to office in 1981, we were in a terrible economic situation. For all the whining about unemployment and a bad ecnomy we are hearing today, you would think this is an unprecedented situation. America was a much more unpleasant place to look for a job in the late 1970s than it is today. Even though the economic malaise was largely the result of previous administrations (both Democrat and Republican), the left called the economic hard times of 1981-83 "the Reagan recession." Yet, by 1984, the economy was recovering--and Walter Mondale, a Big Government liberal, went down to smashing defeat. The situation is quite similar. The good times (built partly on dotcom and telecom startup delusions) came to an end in April of 2000, with the stock market beginning to fall. Bush took office when things were definitely not going well. We now know that there was some mild recovery--or at least, the bloodletting was starting to cool--when 9/11 happened--and the economy collapsed. For the last few months, partly because of the tax cut, but partly (perhaps mostly) because the liquidation of unproductive assets is part of how recessions cure themselves, the economy is well into recovery. Today's news is that the leading indicators composite index is up, and new unemployment claims for the week ending February 14 are down: "the largest decline since the beginning of November...." There is enough time between now and November for this rising economy to put a lot of people back to work--and yet not enough time for the inevitable demand-pull increase in interest rates. I think Bush is going to win re-election, although it will be nip and tuck--the billionaires are pulling out all the stops to get their boy Kerry into the White House. UPDATE: Here's a table from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing unemployment rates from 1975 (when I entered the workforce) to today:
John Kerry, Enemy of Special Interests Shockingly enough, the Los Angeles Times (free registration required) is running this story: Sen. John F. Kerry sent 28 letters in behalf of a San Diego defense contractor who pleaded guilty last week to illegally funneling campaign contributions to the Massachusetts senator and four other congressmen.Now, there's no evidence that Kerry knew the contributions were illegal--but this is exactly the sort of special interest politics that Kerry claims to oppose. Amusing Description of Howard Dean's Campaign From one of the comments over at Lucianne.com: Dean was the perfect dot-com candidate, all hype with tons of start up money but no substance. This combination led to his top-fuel dragster like acceleration to oblivion. Viacom CEO Capable Of Learning; the Virtues of Rolled Up Newspapers Against the Snout From the New York Post: BESIEGED Viacom president Mel Karmazin read the riot act to execs of all 180 Infinity radio stations yesterday - including Howard Stern's in New York - telling them they'll be fired if they violate the company's new "zero tolerance" policy on obscenity.Yes, you can call me narrow-minded, prudish, whatever you like. I have caught Howard Stern's late night TV show a few times, and I was really impressed. I guess it doesn't surprise me that Stern has an audience for stuff like this--I just didn't think there were enough drunken, out of control teenaged boys to keep a show like that on the air. (Let me emphasize: I am sure that there are many drunken, out of control teenaged boys with far too much taste to watch a show like Stern's.) I expect that some of you are also going to tell me, "If you don't like it, change the channel." I will take you seriously when your henchmen at the ACLU stop trying to remove the Ten Commandments from public parks because it is offensive: Plaintiff Sue Mercier is a resident of La Crosse, Wisconsin and a member of plaintiff Freedom from Religion Foundation. When visiting her lawyer’s office, which is near the monument site, plaintiff Mercier must sometimes alter her route to avoid seeing the monument. She shops at the People’s Food Coop and the farmers’ market less often than she would if the monument were not in Cameron Park. When she has viewed the monument, it has “disturbed” her emotionally. Yale Law School On those occasions when I think about going to law school, I read articles like this one, and cringe: Federalist Society Vice-President Nick Muzin LAW '05 said he did not consider himself to be particularly conservative before coming to the Law School; he said he even worked for the Gore/Lieberman Presidential Campaign in 2000. But he said he feels far to the right of the politics of many Law School students.And this is the right wing at Yale Law School? Compared to most of America, Muzin is firmly in the liberal camp. "My larger concern is I feel that the law school is really marginalizing itself -- they're fighting for causes that were already lost 30 years ago," Muzin said. "I think they're really doing a disservice to their students, producing students who will not be leaders in mainstream America."I really wish that this was true. In one sense, Muzin is right: these causes were already lost 30 years ago among the people. But what the majority wants isn't really particularly relevant in the post-Lawrence world, where judges get to rewrite history to suit their preferences about what the law should be. If enough judges want it--and Yale Law School graduates are going to be disproportionately represented among federal judges--that's all that really matters. Thanks to David Bernstein for the link; he remarks that he was apparently ostracized for a controversial statement he made in Contracts class at Yale. As a former fellow student related it to Bernstein: "I don't remember Contracts class being that controversial; we didn't discuss any of the truly hot button issues for the left--such as race, abortion, gay rights--in Contracts--and, in any event, my (libertarian) views on such issues wouldn't have been so objectionable to them, anyway. So what did I say in Contracts class that led to my ostracism?" He said, and I swear he seemed at least 80% serious, "well, you kept saying that contracts should be enforced!"This is really scary. Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Illegal Immigration & Temporary Worker Programs I received this article from a group called the Center for Immigration Studies. I don't know anything about them, but it is pretty obvious that they think Bush's proposal for a temporary worker program, like the Bracero programs of the past, would be bad for low wage American workers. You can read a short history of these programs here. Obviously, you have to regard anything from an advocacy group with a certain amount of care, but I don't see anything obviously absurd in it, and much that fits with my knowledge of the effects of large scale immigration in other periods of American history: The heart of the problem is that guestworker programs seek to reconcile two sharply conflicting goals: the need to protect citizen workers from the competition of foreign workers who are willing to work for wages and in conditions that few citizens would tolerate versus the wishes of some employers who rely on labor intensive production and service techniques to secure a plentiful supply of low cost workers. In addition, there are always unforeseen side effects that harm the wider society.Another article from that same group, written by a former federal prosecutor, points out the combin | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
