Elliot Spitzer is a Big Fat Bully

Relative to the previous post: notice that the two groups of people Elliot Spitzer chose to bully during his term as Attorney General were businessmen and crisis pregnancy centers. The WSJ details his atrocities against businessmen:

He routinely used the extraordinary threat of indicting entire firms, a financial death sentence, to force the dismissal of executives, such as AIG's Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. He routinely leaked to the press emails obtained with subpoena power to build public animosity against companies and executives. In the case of Mr. Greenberg, he went on national television to accuse the AIG founder of "illegal" behavior. Within the confines of the law itself, though, he never indicted Mr. Greenberg. Nor did he apologize.
In perhaps the incident most suggestive of Mr. Spitzer's lack of self-restraint, the then-Attorney General personally threatened John Whitehead after the former Goldman Sachs chief published an article on this page defending Mr. Greenberg. "I will be coming after you," Mr. Spitzer said, according to Mr. Whitehead's account. "You will pay the price. This is only the beginning, and you will pay dearly for what you have done."

Jack Welch, the former head of GE, said he was told to tell Ken Langone -- embroiled in Mr. Spitzer's investigation of former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso -- that the AG would "put a spike through Langone's heart." New York Congresswoman Sue Kelly, who clashed with Mr. Spitzer in 2003, had her office put out a statement that "the attorney general acted like a thug."

These are not merely acts of routine political rough-and-tumble. They were threats -- some rhetorical, some acted upon -- by one man with virtually unchecked legal powers.

But, as you might expect, the WSJ limits its attention to Spitzer's attacks on the business community. His attacks on crisis pregnancy centers were equally outrageous abuses of power. According to Maggie Gallagher's 2002 account of his escapades:

New York's attorney general has subpoenaed every crisis pregnancy center in the state, regardless of whether that clinic has been the target of any specific complaints.

Gallagher also reported that Spitzer had promised at a NARAL luncheon:

But at a NARAL luncheon on Jan. 22, 1999, Elliot Spitzer made a political promise to crack down on so-called "false advertisements" in pregnancy services....Spitzer intoned his goal was "a suitable framework for public debate in New York. I want to be clear that I am not attempting to curtail anyone's right to free speech, but I do intend to stop those who would use violence and intimidation to achieve their political goals."

And Michelle Malkin reported around the same time:

This is a politically motivated witch hunt in an election year for Elliot Spitzer," Slattery said. According to online campaign finance data, Spitzer has received $2,900 from New York's NARAL political action committee over the past three years.

Elliot Spitzer's rode the two favorite Leftist hobby-horses, the anti-business hobby horse and the pro-abortion hobby horse, to public prominence and electoral victory. He evidently thought he could abuse his authority against those two groups, without fear of reprecussions. There are a lot of people enjoying his comeuppance.

On the Spanish Elections

The victory of Zapatero's Socialist party in Spain can not be interpretted as a full-fledged endorsement of his radical social policies. Writing in today's WSJ, Ramon Perez-Maura argues that Zapatero's victory has more to do with his siphoning off enough regionalist votes in different regions to cobble together a national victory.

Over the last four years, the ruling Socialist Party played two dangerous cards. It chose to hold negotiations with the Basque terrorist group ETA and it supported a new autonomy statute for Catalonia. ...Mr. Zapatero was able to scrape away enough votes in Catalonia and the Basque country to hold on to power.

At the same time, the international editor of the WSJ argues that

While his 3.6 percentage point victory over the conservative opposition Popular Party was convincing, Mr. Zapatero would be wrong to interpret Sunday's results as an unequivocal endorsement of his policies, or to minimize the challenges ahead. The next four years will arguably prove more difficult than his first tour in office.

A once booming economy is cooling. Spaniards are turning against immigrants. Mr. Zapatero's social and regional policies have polarized the country. Catalan separatism and Basque terrorism call into question the country's future as a unified state.

So, now that Zapatero has mortgaged the country by selling out regions of the country to separatists in order to secure his power, what will he do with his power? It is interesting to me that he has not "undone his predecessor's market reforms," as the WSJ mentions. He is leaving the market more or less alone. Instead, the focus of his attention has been the social issues, which as the WSJ puts it:

Alas, Mr. Zapatero gives no sign of wishing to temper his zeal on social policy. His aggressive efforts to push through gay marriage, fast-track divorce and adoption rights for homosexuals raised tensions with the Catholic Church -- whose views are shared by a bulk of the population.

I have argued elsewhere that undoing marriage has been as important Socialist objective as nationalizing property and centralizing the economy. Now that the Socialist economic agenda has been proven counter-productive and down-right destructive to the vast majority of citizens, the focus turns increasingly to the Socialist social agenda of destabilizing marriage. Gender is not a biological category, but a political category. The social relationship of marriage presents a special case of class conflict, which is as oppressive as the economic systems of private property and capitalism.
As Engels put it over a century ago:

Within the family, the husband is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat. ... The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry. This in turn demands that the characteristic of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished.

It is very revealing that the Socialist government of Spain is not trying to win on the old economic issues. I predict that their policies for the destabilization of marriage will prove every bit as destructive as their policies for destabilizing private property and capitalism.

Re: Family Medical Leave Act

I received this note from a friend who is a pediatrician:

What prompts me to write to you now is your feature on the Family Leave Act. I think it's a well intentioned and compassionate bill. It's unfortunate that there are those who work the system to their advantage and ruin it for the rest of us. In small businesses such as mine it presents a major logistical problem. It comes up several times a year when an employee, or more, goes on maternity leave. It's compounded when, once their leave is over and it’s time to return to work they want to go "part time." It’s understandable, I am sure, to the majority of your readers. When a new mother is faced with that irresistible bundle of happiness and the concomitant physiologic changes, most mothers will want to spend as much time as possible changing diapers cleaning, spit-up, nursing every three hours throughout the day...
Because of this and because of other business decisions which were driven by the needs for services in our service area by our patients, we now have 18 Pediatricians working a combination of full and part time. This has consequences for our business plan. Our financial structure includes certain benefits which are fixed: hospital and professional society dues, liability insurance, health insurance, etc. All these benefits add up in cost and these benefits go unused and are a financial liability to the corporation when there is no production (i.e. leave time). On the other hand we want to be family friendly so as to foster the culture of marriage and of life and because an employee that has less to worry about in these circumstances is a happier more productive employee, generally speaking.

This doctor's conclusion is that the restrictions of the FMLA make it harder, not easier, to make the accommodations that really matter to employees and that are cost-effective at the same time.

A Family-Friendly Small Business Nightmare

My friends at the Acton Institute published my article on the need to reform the Clinton-era Family Medical Leave Act. I have posted my full article on my site as well. The Act has been subject to abuses that cry out to be corrected:

The Act provides leave not only for maternity or the care of a new born, but also for care for a dependent with a serious illness. Unfortunately, the Department of Labor has issued conflicting opinions on what constitutes a serious illness. While the legislative history clearly indicates that the leave was not supposed to be used for minor sniffles, employees have obtained certification for minor conditions such as allergies, migraines, or back problems.
Compounding the problem, the FMLA allows for intermittent leave: that is, people can take leave in "separate blocks of time due to a single qualifying reason." According to the Small Business Administration, intermittent leave is the most challenging part of the FMLA for small businesses. The regulations require that leave increments have to be awarded in the "shortest period of time the employer's payroll system uses to account for absences or use for leave, provided it is one hour or less."
Some small manufacturing businesses track time in increments as short as six minutes. The Employment Policy Foundation found that 50 percent of leave-takers provide notice either the day the leave begins or the day after. The administrative and scheduling challenges this presents are a nightmare. And the program hurts overall employee morale, when other employees have to do the work of the absent employees.

The Acton Institute is interested in this because of my free market conclusions:
Small businesses want to retain skilled and dedicated employees without giving slackers an opening to abuse the company's good will. When problems arise, the firm and its employees can work out issues together. By contrast, when problems arise with federal legislation, there cannot be a carefully tailored, personalized response. The abuses and unforeseen consequences of the FMLA have to be dealt with by the federal government: litigation to determine the exact requirements of the law; further regulation to change the law; and a complex process of fact-finding in between.
Small competitive firms need not limit their scope to providing generic "family leave." Firms try to create a menu of ways to tailor policies to the specific needs employee needs. Firms would try various combinations of leave policies, job sharing, flex-time and telecommuting. Companies might try one approach for new mothers, something different for people with elderly parents, and something still different for people with minor chronic illnesses—assuming the law would allow you to "discriminate" in this way. But as things now stand, the government has preempted a lot of experimentation with programs that might possibly be better for the workers and cheaper for the companies.

Relgious diversity in marriage law.

John Witte is a wise and learned man, a professor of legal history at Emory University. His article on the religious law of marriage is one of the wisest commentaries on the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments on sharia.

Gender "Equity" Activists are going after science

Christina Hoff Sommers reports on the omnious movement to use Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to enforce quotas in unviersity math, science and engineering departments.

Virginia Valian, a psychologist at Hunter College, is one of the most cited author­ities in the crusade to achieve equity for women in the sciences. Her book Why So Slow? (MIT Press, 1998) is indispensable to the movement because it offers a solution to a vexing problem: women’s seemingly free but actually self-defeating choices. Not only do fewer women than men choose to enter the physical sciences, but even those who do often give child care and family a higher priority than their male colleagues. How, in the face of wom­en’s clear tendencies to choose other careers and more balanced lifestyles, can one reasonably attribute the scarcity of women in science and engineering to unconscious bias and sexist dis­crimination? Valian showed the way.

Her central claim is that our male-dominated society constructs and enforces “gender sche­mas.” gender schema is an accepted system of beliefs about the ways men and women differ—a system that determines what suits each gender. Writes Valian: “In white, Western middle-class society, the gender schema for men includes being capable of independent, autonomous action…[and being] assertive, instrumental, and task-oriented. Men act. The gender schema for women is different; it includes being nur­turant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others.”...
To achieve a gender-fair society, Valian advocates a concerted attack on conventional gender schemas. This includes altering the way we raise our children. Consider the custom of encouraging girls to play with dolls. Such early socialization, she says, creates an association between being female and being nurturing. concludes, “Egalitarian parents can bring up their children so that both boys and girls play with dolls and trucks.... From the standpoint of equality, nothing is more important.”

But what if our daughters are not especially interested in trucks, as almost any parent can attest (including me: when my son recently gave his daughter a toy train to play with, she placed it in a baby carriage and covered it with a blanket so it could get some sleep)? a problem, says Valian.

“We don’t accept biol­ogy as destiny…. We vaccinate, we inoculate, we medicate.... propose we adopt the same attitude toward biological sex differences.” In other words, the ubiquitous female propensity to nurture should be treated as a kind of disor­der or disease....

Naturally, the solution to these problems is a greater expansion of government intervention in university life:

Alice Hogan, former director of ADVANCE, explained in a 2005 interview that the MIT study had been a wake-up call for the NSF. In the past, she said, the NSF had funded programs to support the careers of individual women sci­entists, but the MIT report persuaded its staff that “systemic” change was imperative.

Since 2001, the NSF has given approximately $107 million to 28 institutions of higher learn­ing to develop transformation projects. Hunter College, the site of Valian’s $3.9 million program, is one of them. The University of Michigan has received $3.9 million; the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao, $3.1 million; the of Rhode Island, $3.5 million; and Cornell, $3.3 million. What are these schools doing with the money?

Some of the funds are being used for relatively innocuous, possibly even beneficial, projects such as mentoring programs and conferences. But there are worrisome programs as well.

Michigan is experimenting with “interactive” theater as a means of raising faculty conscious­ness about gender bias. At special workshops, physicists and engineers watch skits where overbearing men ride roughshod over hapless but obviously intellectually superior female col­leagues. The director/writer, Jeffrey Steiger of the University of Michigan theater program, explains that the project is inspired by Brazilian director Augusto Boal’s book Theatre of the Oppressed (1974). Boal writes, “I believe that all the truly revolutionary theatrical groups should transfer to the people the means of production in the theater.” To this end, the Michigan fac­ulty members don’t just watch the plays, but are encouraged to interact with the cast and even join them on stage. Some audience members will find the experience “threatening and over­whelming,” and Steiger aims to provide them a “safe” context for expressing themselves....

More than just silliness however, are the expansion of quotas:

More mainstream schools are using their ADVANCE funds more conventionally—to ini­tiate quota programs. At Cornell, as of 2006, 27 of 51 science and engineering departments had fewer than 20 percent women, and some had no women at all. It is using its NSF grant for a program called ACCEL (Advancing Cornell’s Commitment to Excellence and Leadership), dedicated to filling science faculty with “more than” 30 percent women in time for the university’s sesquicentennial in 2015.

Science guys, gentleman-nerds that they are, have no clue how to deal with the feminsit onslaught. The results could be ominous.

The power and glory of science and engineer­ing is that they are, adamantly, evidence-based. But the evidence of gender bias in math and science is flimsy at best, and the evidence that women are relatively disinclined to pursue these fields at the highest levels is serious. When the bastions of science pay obsequious attention to the flimsy and turn a blind eye to the serious, it is hard to maintain the view that the science enterprise is somehow immune to the enthu­siasms that have corrupted other, supposedly “softer” academic fields.

Few academic scientists know anything about the equity crusade. Most have no idea of its power, its scope, and the threats that they may soon be facing. The business commu­nity and citizens at large are completely in the dark. This is a quiet revolution. Its weapons are government reports that are rarely seen; amendments to federal bills that almost no one reads; small, unnoticed, but dramatically con­sequential changes in the regulations regarding government grants; and congressional hearings attended mostly by true believers.

American scientific excellence is a precious national resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation’s health and safety. Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics, once pointed out that MIT alone—its faculty, alumni, and staff—started more than 5,000 companies in the past 50 years. Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results? So far, no one in Congress has even thought to ask.

Planned Parenthood Racism

The Family Research Council links to a video and transcript of an actor posing as a prospective donor to Planned Parenthood.

Lila Rose, a pro-life student and reporter at UCLA, launched an undercover investigation aimed at exposing the racism of the nation's largest abortion merchant. With the help of an actor, she contacted Planned Parenthood clinics in seven states, inquiring if they would be willing to accept a donation earmarked for the abortion of black babies. The results were jaw-dropping.
Rose was appalled to discover that every last clinic agreed. Not one employee objected or questioned the request, even when the actor insisted that the purpose was to "lower the number of black people" in America. When the caller phoned an Ohio branch, he was told that Planned Parenthood "will accept the money for whatever reason." ...

Actor: ...I really faced trouble with affirmative action, and I don't want my kids to be disadvantaged against black kids.
Planned Parenthood: Yes, absolutely.
Actor: And we don't, you know, we just think the less black kids out there the better.
Planned Parenthood: (Laughs) Understandable, understandable... This is the first time I've had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I'm excited and want to make sure I don't leave anything out.

The FRC article goes on to mention the unsavory past of Planned Parenthood founder and liberal icon Margaret Sanger, a past which is typically whitewashed.
The best book on Margaret Sanger, in my opinion, is called Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacyby Angela Franks. This book shows beyond any shadow of a doubt that eugenics was part of Sanger's ideology from the very beginning. Implied in Mrs. Franks book is her own vision of feminism as something that supports motherhood, not sterility. Well worth reading.

Artificial Reproductive Technology

Ryan Anderson has an important post on Artificial Reproductive Technology over on the First Things blog. What are the public arguments we can offer on the subject, not of embryo destruction, or cloning, or freezing of embryos? Summarizing Benedict XVI's address to the Congregation of the Faith,, Anderson says:

Benedict argued that non-conjugal reproduction such as in vitro fertilization had created “new problems”—the freezing of human embryos, for instance, and the selective abortion of medically implanted embryos, together with pre-implantation diagnosis, embryonic stem-cell research, and attempts at human cloning.

He argued that these “clearly show that with extra-corporeal artificial fertilization, the barrier that served to protect human dignity has been violated. When human beings in the weakest and most defenseless stage of their lives are selected, abandoned, killed, or used as mere ‘biological material,’ how can it be denied that they are no longer being treated as ‘someone’ but rather as ‘something,’ hence, calling into question the very concept of human dignity?”

Worth noticing is that his public argument is about the consequences of assisted reproductive technologies, how they result in embryo killing, freezing, and other abuses. The argument never touches on any objection to IVF per se—how the creation of new human beings in this way is itself wrong.

The new problem we face, according to Ryan Anderson is:

What we need is to build robust, publicly accessible arguments about procreation and the moral norms that govern it. We need to develop deeper discussions about the meaning and nature of parenthood, gender, and biology. And to the arguments we already have about the killing of embryos, we need to add arguments about the conditions under which we may bring those embryos into existence in the first place.

Read the whole post here.

More on AIDS in Africa

This article in Zenit interviews Matthew Hanley, long-time technical expert on AIDS/HIV for the Catholic Relief Service. He is also author of a new book on AIDS in Africa, Avoiding Risk, Affirming Life: Science, Love, and AIDS. His conclusions have significant overlap with those of Helen Epstein, whose book I reviewed earlier. She argued that a reduction in the number of sexual partners, not an increase in the use of condoms, accounts for the most significant drops in new HIV infection rates. According to Matthew Hanley:

Actual changes in patterns of sexual behavior have led to the most significant reductions in HIV prevalence. Take the well-known case of Uganda, where the prevalence rate dropped from 15% in 1991 to a little over 5% in 2001. Behavior change was so thorough in Uganda that by the mid-1990s, 95% of adults in that country said they had only one partner or none at all. But it is not only Uganda.

The most important factor in recent HIV declines observed in several other countries, such as Kenya, Zimbabwe and Haiti has been an increase in fidelity or "partner reduction." This should not be altogether surprising, considering that in a large swath of southern Africa, where over half of new infections globally come from, the AIDS epidemic is being driven by the dynamics of multiple and often concurrent sexual partnerships.

In other words, changing behavior is more important than reducing the risk associated with a given set of behavior.
Hanley also talks about the uniquely Catholic aspects to his work. Not only is the Church trying to prevent disease, she is also trying to promote a healthy way of life, that integrates love and sexual activity within the context of married life.

We try to articulate what the Church actually proposes, abstinence and fidelity, in a positive manner. I have found in my trips to Africa that there is a real thirst for something different, something hopeful. We all know that people yearn for more than the satisfaction of their appetites. In other words, they yearn for love, for respect and for meaning in life. In his first encyclical, "Deus Caritas Est," Benedict XVI reminded us of long-standing Christian tradition, namely that human beings are a "union of body and soul," that love is characterized by exclusivity, or fidelity, and that love contains a quality of permanence over time.

When we conducted training recently with five dioceses in Ethiopia, one of the participants, a wife and a mother, spoke for the group by saying how much she appreciated the emphasis on fidelity and related human values such as respect and communication. She was puzzled as to why such basic themes are not more routinely promoted in the context of HIV prevention, adding: "Why hasn't anyone explained it like this before?"

So we try to address the whole human person, their deeper aspirations, and in proposing love, affirm basic Christian sexual ethics. It is on this level that the Church then encounters the wider culture, which as Pope John Paul II suggested in "Familiaris Consortio," often holds "fundamentally irreconcilable views of the human person and of human sexuality," leading many to aggressively reject these first principles.

Money quote from Matthew Hanley:

Perhaps one of the most helpful means that I have seen of expressing the moral significance of the issues involved comes from the Kenyan bishops. In their pastoral letter on AIDS, they hit upon the crux of the matter: The Church proposes the same sexual morality even "when and where AIDS poses no danger." The central issue with respect to the Church's consistent teaching on sexual matters is thus not the risk of HIV, but the lack of chastity, and "this is not easy for 'the world' to grasp.

What a concept.
I look forward to seeing his book.

Lesbian law suit abolishes the private sector

I may exaggerate, but not by much. In New Mexico, a photographer is being sued by a lesbian couple, angered that she refused to photograph their commitment ceremony. She refused to film their ceremony because of her religious beliefs. But so what? A business ought to be able to refuse to do business with anyone, for any reason or no reason. It is not as if the photographer took their money and failed to do what she promised to do. She is now facing a complaint in front of the New Mexico Human Rights Commission.
This case is breathtaking for its pettiness. There is no constitutional right to hire each and every photographer who hangs out a shingle. Wedding photography is not a basic need or fundamental right. What exactly harm did this couple experience? They felt bad. They were possibly inconvenienced. They had to hire another photographer. Trauma.
The state has no business regulating the private sector to this extent. If the lesbian couple could not get their contracts enforced, they would have a case. But that case would be against the state itself. Businesses should have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, especially a business like photography, which is not a life or death issue for anyone.
The lesbians' tacit demand behind this case is the demand for unlimited approbation from the entire populace. They are not entitled to that.
In The Meaning of Marriage Seana Sugrue argues that same sex marriage is not a spontaneously emerging institution, as man woman marriage is. Same sex marriage can ONLY be a creation of the state, whereas man woman marriage is a pre-political institution that has emerged in virtually every time and place in human history. Therefore, the state will have to support and "coddle" same sex marriage in order to assure its survival. The state will arrogate to itself the right to regulate and control everything associated with parenting and marriage. Including wedding photographers.

Juno surprisingly pro-life.

Hollywood seems to care more for the unborn than one would think. Here's the link to my article about the movie Juno: http://www.tothesource.org/1_22_2008/1_22_2008.htm

Mothers Alone

is the title Policy Review gives to Amy Wax's outstanding review of two rather bad books: Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v. Wade, and
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family.

In Ann Fessler’s book, women born at mid-century reminisce about becoming pregnant out of wedlock and relinquishing their children for adoption in the decades before the sexual revolution and the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Rosanna Hertz’s, the daughters of that generation recount their experiences as women who have decided to become mothers outside of marriage. Fessler’s stories tell of coming of age amidst the seismic shift in sexual mores that yielded the world as we know it. Hertz provides a window into the lives some women live in that world.

The two books in question can't get past their post-modern and feminist categories of thought to observe the data right in front of their noses. The birth mothers who placed their children for adoption do not really see abortion, that is, their child's non-existence, as the solution. The children of the single mothers by choice are "staunchly unreconstructed," in that they want to know their fathers.
The larger problem, which neither author takes seriously, is the question of how to manage sexuality and child-bearing in a world without marriage. Here is Amy Wax.

Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in their complaints is the expectation — indeed the demand — that they should have been “helped” to keep their babies. This book’s central flaw, its core evasion, is its failure to come to grips with that expectation. All eyes are averted from its true implications. How can the demand for “help” mean anything other than its being incumbent on others — family, friends, society, the government — to provide these girls with the funds needed to raise a child alone, without marriage, men or fathers. These women’s complaints lead inexorably to an entitlement depressingly familiar in its contours and consequences: a welfare state in which the public pledges unconditional financial support for mothers barely out of girlhood. It leads, in short, to the wholesale bankrolling of children having children. The sins of this path require no rehearsal. Suffice it to say that we have been there and done that. We know where it leads: men without roots, domestic chaos, deprived children, social pathology — and wholesale political rebellion against the unseemly spectacle of welfare as we know it.

Like Hertz and her single-mothers, Fessler and her birth mothers simply fail to confront their own wishes writ large. The broader question of how to run the railroad does not trouble them. They are not concerned with the norms we all should live by. Rather, to borrow Michael Oakeshott’s phrase, these women are taken up with their own “felt needs.” Every hurt (self-inflicted or not) must be addressed and every hardship (defensible or not) assuaged. In this calculus, the dislocations of individual lives are all that matter. Hertz’s and Fessler’s moms are here to tell their stories, not devise wise rules for social life. The conundrums of social policy get pushed off into the background in favor of an endless recital of grievances against the order. Cut loose from a coherent moral framework, they give little thought to the world their desires would entail.

While this review is harsh toward the Life-style Left, Wax ends with an implied critique of the Right, which is not providing realistic answers. Read it all.

The Islamic Threat to Free Speech

Today's WSJ has an article by Fleming Rose, an editor of Jyllands-Posten, the publication that printed the infamous Mohammed Cartoons. Speaking of the plot to kill the cartoonist, Rose states:

Sadly, the plot to kill Mr. Westergaard is not an isolated story, but part of a broader trend that risks undermining free speech in Europe and around the world. Consider the following recent events: In Oslo a gallery has censored three small watercolor paintings, showing the head of the prophet Muhammad on a dog's body, by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been under police protection since the fall of 2007. In Holland the municipal museum in The Hague recently refused to show photos by the Iranian-born artist Sooreh Hera of gay men wearing the masks of the prophet Muhammad and his son Ali; Ms. Hera has received several death threats and is in hiding. In Belarus an editor has been sentenced to three years in a forced labor camp after republishing some of Jyllands-Posten's Muhammad cartoons. In Egypt bloggers are in jail after having "insulted Islam." In Afghanistan the 23-year-old Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh has been sentenced to death because he distributed "blasphemous" material about the mistreatment of women in Islam. And in India the Bengal writer Taslima Nasreen is in a safe house after having been threatened by people who don't like her books.

Every one of the above cases speaks to the same problem: a global battle for the right to free speech. The cases are different, and you can't compare the legal systems in Egypt and Norway, but the justifications for censorship and self-censorship are similar in different parts of the world: Religious feelings and taboos need to be treated with a kind of sensibility and respect that other feelings and ideas cannot command.

The West needs to get a grip and defend its most cherished rights: the right to free speech, as well as the right of free exercise of religion. We have managed that very well these 200+ years of American history. We can't let it go, out of a combination of misguided sensitivity toward Islam and wanton fear of the Jihadists.

British Polygamists to get Welfare Benefits

In a secret move only recently discovered,

a panel of four government departments, after a review that began in November 2006, has decided that all the wives of a Muslim man may collect state benefits, provided that the marriages took place in a country where multiple spouses are legal.

Opposition has been furious:

Chris Grayling, Works and Pensions spokesman for the opposition Conservative Party, described the government's decision as "completely unjustifiable."

"You are not allowed to have multiple marriages" in Britain, he said, "so to have a situation where the benefits system is treating people in different ways is totally unacceptable."

"This," Mr. Grayling said, "sets a precedent that will lead to more demands for the culture of other countries to be reflected in [British] law and the benefits system."

Corin Taylor, research director for the rights organization Taxpayers' Alliance, was equally blunt.

"Polygamy is not something which British law allows, and therefore British taxpayers should not have to pay extra for extra benefits for second or third wives," he said. "If other countries sanction polygamy, that is fine, but the British taxpayer should not have to fund it."

This can only increase the pressure for the UK to relax the prohibition on polygamy and group marriage.

The Life-Style Left has been claiming that every lifestyle should be equally supported by the government: monogamous marriage should not be "priveleged" by the state. The Left seems to believe that legalizing polygamy, or polyamory as they prefer to call it, will result in a Marin County Hippie Love Fest with all the Birkenstocked commune members sharing household and childcare tasks and getting along nicely. But once multiple marriages are sanctioned by the state, there will be no stopping Muslim-style polygamy, which, will not be, shall we say, a Hippie Love Fest. Polygamy as practiced in the Muslim world is a not a pro-woman institution. And because Muslim-style polygamy will certainly produce more children than the typical Leftist group marriage, it will not take long for Sharia-style polygamy to crowd out feminist-style polygamy.

The Left should really start thinking this through.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Clarence Thomas bio and the high cost of growing up

Some commenters have noted how long and hard it is for people, male and female alike to get financially established. I have long thought that student loans are a serious barrier to marriage and to fertility.
I am now reading Clarence Thomas's autobiography, and plan to review it. I was knocked out by this revelation: when he went on the Supreme Court, he still had student loans from Yale Law School.
Outrageous. These Ivy League schools have endowments larger than the GDP of third world countries. Yet they can't support a student like Thomas. The older generation, which used to be called The Establishment, is sucking the life out of the young.

Child Man in the Promised Land

Kay Hymowitz has an insightful, though disturbing account of the enduring adolesence of the American male. I have noticed this myself, and have given it some thought. Guys playing video games and hanging out with buddies well into their thirties. Hymowitz walks right up to the explanation, but stops short:

For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it is marriage and children that turn boys into men. Now that the SYM can put off family into the hazily distant future, he can—and will—try to stay a child-man. Yesterday’s paterfamilias or Levittown dad may have sought to escape the duties of manhood through fantasies of adventures at sea, pinups, or sublimated war on the football field, but there was considerable social pressure for him to be a mensch. Not only is no one asking that today’s twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father—that is, grow up—but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything that he needs to settle down in pig’s heaven indefinitely.

Rod Dreher in the Dallas Morning News makes a similar set of observations:

As social critic Philip Rieff foresaw at the dawn of this revolution, the loosening of traditional constraints would make man free, but it would be a liberty fraught with anxiety, even psychological paralysis.

... the process of becoming a man requires a juvenile male to subordinate his own desires to an objective code of conduct – which is to say, some sort of higher authority. In this sense, the self could only be understood and realized in relation to one's community and its values.

The culture warriors of the previous generation were not wrong to question conformity, but they went too far. They have deprived their sons of authoritative tradition, both in word and example, and with it the ability to transcend the adolescent state. Much in our dominant culture conspires to keep young men in a permanent state of adolescence: conscious only of their desires and the impulse to fulfill them. This dependency is tailor-made for a consumerist economy built on creating and exploiting wants. Making the world safe for big business, no doubt, wasn't what the '60s generation had in mind, but it's a little late for do-overs.

And what exactly makes this continual postponing of adulthood possible? The elephant in the room; the naked emperor. Contraception. Think about it.

Fixing Family Leave

The WSJ takes on a policy that is supposedly "family friendly" and beyond criticism, Family Leave.

The law allows employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year to take care of themselves or relatives with a "serious medical condition." They can also take off for maternity, adoption or newborn care. That seems simple enough, but the courts continue to strike down regulations that the Clinton Administration issued to implement the act, and the result has been legal and economic confusion.

A 2005 study by the Employment Policy Foundation found the law's cost to businesses in 2004 was a not-so-cheap $21 billion. This included $5 billion in lost productivity, $6 billion to continue health benefits for employees on leave, and $10 billion in replacement labor costs -- including wages to employees who had to work additional shifts or overtime to fill in for the missing.
With these costs in mind, Secretary Elaine Chao's Labor Department last month issued rules to clear up ambiguities in the law that were being exploited. Take something called "unscheduled intermittent leave." Under current rules, an employee with a medical condition can simply fail to show up for two days before claiming leave. And since leave can be taken a few minutes at a time, employees can show up late, leave early, or disappear for an hour without notice. This is an invitation for misuse, especially at time-sensitive businesses (say, emergency first response or assembly lines) and many employers have lost control of their workforce. Under the proposed changes, employees would generally have to call in to request leave before taking it, which seems fair.

Labor's proposals would also clear up loose requirements for certifying what qualifies as a "serious" medical condition. Under current rules, workers can get an open-ended doctor's certificate for a condition -- asthma, migraines, whatever -- that allows them leave at any point. Under the new rules, companies can require employees to renew that certificate every year....
Many Democrats on Capitol Hill want to expand the law even further, imposing it on businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and making companies provide paid days off. But that would only expand the costs, and make employers even more reluctant to hire in the first place -- as in Europe. Meantime, the new rules will help ensure that family leave is taken by employees who really need it, not by slackers gaming the system.

These are just the cost associated with the federal requirements. If I'm not mistaken, CA has an even more generous policy.
In addition to these costs, you have to wonder how many employers are silently reluctant to hire women of child-bearing age, for fear of triggering these requirements.
Family leave is an example of a policy inspired by the desire to equalize the playing field between men and women, the ultimate goal of Leftist-inspired feminism. Once the concept is on the table, the regulation expands to include all kinds of Nice Things that Workers Will Love, but which will be expensive for business.
I maintain that it would be better for all to allow companies and workers to negotiate their own forms of flexible benefits, including flexible leave policies, rather than having the federal government impose a One Size Fits All policy.

It Takes a Family to Raise a Village

This week's newsletter is an excerpt from the lecture I gave last week at the University of California, Los Angeles. What I have provided for you here is the section of my talk titled, "Alternatives to the Marxist- inspired vision of the family." Enjoy!If you aren't receiving my free newsletter, you can sign up here.

I am not opposed to feminism, whatever that is. I am opposed to Marxism. The Marxist categories of class struggle and oppression did not work well in the market. They work even less well in the bedroom.

I think women are hungry for a new way of understanding these great demographic changes and their own role in society. So let me take a stab at it.

I believe income equality between men and women should not be the ultimate goal for personal and public policy. Equal incomes require identical behavior. But men and women behave significantly differently in the labor force, at home and over the course of their lives. The attempt to create income equality has led to massive amounts of government regulation and litigation in the labor market. At the personal level, women have forced their work lives into the mold created for male career paths. Traditional male career trajectories demand the most intense investment early in life, which happens to be the time that women's bodies are most suited for pregnancy.

By now, the participation of women in the market at every time in their adult lives has become entrenched in society. Our higher education system, our labor market, even our housing markets, are built around the premise that high-achieving, highly-educated workers will postpone marriage and child-bearing. But by the time women have accomplished enough in their careers to feel financially prepared for motherhood, their peak fertility is behind them.

For many women in the first generation of high powered careers, fertility difficulties came as a rude awakening. Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett conducted a survey of high-achieving women, hoping to assess the factors responsible for their success. She noticed that none of these women had children. And she discovered that none of them had chosen to be childless. These women are extremely disappointed.

Women's fertility is impaired with age, in that women are less likely to conceive a child. Men's fertility may be compromised with age as well. There is now suggestive new evidence that a child's probability of genetic defects increases with the father's age. The theory is that the DNA replicates less precisely as men age. This produces minor genetic defects that are not fatal to the infant. But these non-fatal defects are implicated in disorders such as schizophrenia, autism and cancer. Men 40 and older are nearly six times more likely to have offspring with autism than men under age 30.

I propose that we embrace our fertility. Women would be better off if we accepted the reality that our fertility peaks during our twenties. Go to college for a liberal, but not necessarily a vocational, education. Get married. Have kids. Let our husbands support us. Maybe go back to school for an advanced degree. Go to work. Help support the kids' college. And, since women live longer than men, we could be working longer and let our husbands relax a bit.

The vision of women moving in and out of the workplace also involves an alternative vision of marriage and family. Marriage is a life-long institution for mutual cooperation and support, rather than the unenforceable non-contract it has become. I need not say that cooperation between spouses would be far better for children. Nor need I say that this is the exact opposite of the Marxist vision, which replaced marital stability with employment stability.

Gender differences are not necessarily sources of conflict, but rather opportunities for cooperation and complementarity. Our dignity as women does not depend on women being identical with men. Nor does our dignity depend upon our being completely independent of men. Women and men can view one another as collaborators, rather than as competitors. We women can place our education and our talent at the service of our families and the community, rather than at the service of employers and our egos. Rather than squeezing our child-bearing around the periphery of our careers, we can integrate the natural cycles of our bodies into the core of our lives.

This is the bargain women have made, under the influence of Marxism. Up until now, we have defined our goal as being equal participants in a labor market designed for people who don't give birth. Rather than change the labor market to accommodate the woman's body, we have insisted that women change their fertility in order to accommodate the labor market. I say we should take women's fertility as given and change the labor market to accommodate our bodies. We have defined our personal goal as being completely financially independent of men. I say we should find ways to strengthen our collaboration with our husbands.

I claim the right to participate in the labor market as women, not as men in skirts. I claim the right to get married and stay married, not the right to raise our children alone, and to spend larger and larger portions of our lives alone.

The family is essential to a free society. And women are essential to the family. The last generation of Marxist-inspired ideas about women and family have made family life unnecessarily difficult. It is time for a new approach. It is time to let the natural, organic family blossom.

Dying Alone

Elizabeth Marquardt's beautiful article shows the complicated ways divorce affects death.

Temple University's Adam Davey found that aging stepparents were only half as likely as biological parents to receive care from grown children. "Society does not yet have a clear set of expectations for stepchildren's responsibility," he observed.

You can say that again. All stepchildren and stepparents forge a relationship in their own way. Some become deeply attached, some are virtually strangers, many fall somewhere in between. Even when stepchildren and stepparents are close, the deep ambiguity of the relationship can make losing a stepparent to death or divorce a profoundly lonely experience for the child. A friend told me about a colleague who had recently nursed her beloved stepmother, a woman she had grown up with, during a long illness. Even as she mourned her stepmother's death, the woman was mystified and hurt by the lack of support she had received from many friends and co-workers, who'd wondered why she would go out of her way to provide long-term, hands-on care to someone who was "only" a stepmother.

Treating Kids like Commodities

The Calgary Herald's Naomi Lakritz says we'll be sorry for treating kids like commodities. She starts with the recent story of a pair of siblings who were adopted separately married each other without knowing they were biological siblings. She moves to the story of aboriginal Canandian children who were adopted by white American families:

Adoption has thankfully come a long way from the days when an adopted child's origins were hushed up and treated as shameful. That's because adoptees have stood up and demanded access to information to help them answer that most basic of human questions: Who am I?

Everyone is entitled to that kind of information; it is necessary for the development of a healthy sense of self and of roots, of culture and heritage, and of one's place in the world.

We treat children as a commodity at our own peril. That is why the Manitoba government's '60s initiative to sweep thousands of aboriginal children off reserves and into the arms of white adoptive parents was a disaster.

These kids were given away to American parents who thought it was really exotic to have a cute Cree baby in the family, but when the children grew up and understood what had been done to them, the repercussions for their emotional health were devastating. Forty years later, some have successfully reunited with their families; others still wander between two worlds, suffering from all the social ills inherent in such a crisis of the soul.

She moves on to the potential of similar marriages among the much more frequent cases of children who were conceived with the genetic material of anonymous donors. These children will not know their biological origins.

No thought is being given to what happens when these children who are born from a dizzying array of egg and sperm concoctions reach adulthood and ask themselves those perennial human questions. Unlike the aboriginal children of 40 years ago, these babies will have even more to grapple with. That's because, for all Dr. Laura's insistence that a child's parents are the people who raise him or her, the fact remains that sperm and egg donors and a variety of surrogates are creating vast networks of biological half-siblings who run the risk of potentially marrying each other....There seems to be an attitude that if technology can mix eggs and sperm in ever weirder ways, it should just be done with no consideration for the child being created or for the thinking, feeling adult he or she will become. We constantly talk about how precious children are. Funny -- we sure don't treat them that way.

I have to agree.

Why Gay Marriage Can't Work

This article about a custody dispute between a gay man and a lesbian couple illustrates the unavoidable differences between same sex couples and opposite sex couples. The basic facts of the case are that a gay man agreed to be a sperm donor for a lesbian couple. When the child was born, the birth mother's civil union partner tried to do a second party adoption and adopt the child. The father of the child balked: He did not want to relinquish all his parental rights.

The father had signed a standard document provided by the IVF facility:

In order to have the in vitro procedure performed at a Connecticut reproductive services facility, the parties had to execute a consent form provided by the facility. In that form, the donor agrees to "give up all rights and claims" to the child conceived from his donation. Neither Browne (the father) nor D’Alleva (the mother) had anything to do with drafting this form, and neither of them sought legal advice as part of the procedure.

However, the birth mother added his name to the birth certificate:

The forms were signed when the sperm was donated in June 2003, but the child was not born until May 2005. Browne was present at the birth, the parties signed the Acknowledgment of Paternity form, and Browne was listed as father on the birth certificate.

The verbal agreement between the man and the couple was described as:

"As a part of their agreement," wrote Judge Riley, "Ms. D’Alleva alleges that she and Ms. Bochain would adopt the child and Mr. Browne and Mr. Piecha ‘would have some type of role as co-guardians,’ that Mr. Browne and Mr. Piecha ‘would have a role as secondary or "fun parents" and that the defendant [D’Alleva] and Ms. Bochain would be the primary parents."

Here is where factual disputes arise. Browne filed an affidavit "which tracks many of the assertions made by the defendant but also differs in some critical respects. He does not assert," wrote Riley, "that the defendant and Ms. Bochain were to adopt the minor child and that his role would be that of a secondary or "fun" parent. He claims that he was told that he would be a legal guardian of the child and that he would have a permanent and significant role in the child’s life."

Unfortunately, found Riley, "All these factual claims by both parties were prior to the sperm donation and none were reduced to writing (other than letters) much less to the format of a legal agreement."

Here is the problem: when a man and a woman marry, any children born to the woman are legally presumed to be the children of her husband. There can be no such presumption of paternity for a same sex couple. At least half of the genetic material must come from outside the couple. Therefore, the individuals need to take specific legal steps to detach the parental rights from the donor and attach parental rights to the birth mother's partner. This case is instructive because those steps were missing and now the adults have to sort out the parental rights, after the child's birth.

Whether the lesbian couple had a civil union or did not have a civil union should have no bearing on whether the sperm donor has parental rights. The crucial question is whether he consented to surrender his rights or not. That has to be established, regardless of the legal relationship between the two women.

An opposite sex married couple does not have to go through these steps, and indeed, should not have to go through these steps. The point of marriage is to attach children to their fathers, so that each child has a legal connection with both of his biological parents.

There is no relationship the state can create that will give same sex couples the same automatic presumption of parentage. I have heard people try to slip this one by: same sex marriage can be the same as opposite sex marriage if we just change the "Presumption of paternity" to a "presumption of parentage." This case shows why that rhetorical equation does not work. It is not in anybody's interest for the adults to try a skip the steps involved in detaching parental rights from the father and reattaching them to the mother's partner.
That is why we need two distinct sets of legal institutions, one for same sex couples, one for opposite sex couples. Trying to shoe-horn same sex couples into an institution designed for opposite sex couples will not serve either group well in the end.
Cross-posted at marriage debate.

Dear Abby Misses the Boat

I read this column over my Raisin Bran last Monday morning, and I haven't been able to put it out of my mind since then. (It's the second letter on the page.)

DEAR ABBY: My husband and I have been married four years. During that time we have had three children. Our youngest was born three months ago with various medical problems including heart defects, enlarged kidneys, hearing problems and Down syndrome.
To top it off, I have recently been diagnosed with cancer. I start radiation and chemo next month. I am stressed to say the least, and being intimate with my husband right now is at the bottom of my list of things I need to do.
My husband is having a problem understanding why I am not interested in sex. He takes it personally when I don't accept his advances. I love him very much, and I'm grateful for everything he does for me and the kids, but right now I have no interest in sex. How can I get through to him without hurting his feelings? And how do I stop the advances so I don't feel so guilty? -- STRESSED IN WISCONSIN

There are many possible ways to interpret this heartbreaking, truly difficult situation. The key question is: how do you interpret the husband's desire for sex? Let's look at how Abby handles it.

DEAR STRESSED: Excuse me? You've had three children in four years, you're caring for a newborn with physical and developmental disabilities and you're beginning treatment for a life-threatening illness. Frankly, I'm surprised you are still standing.

If necessary, drag your spouse to your OB/GYN, your pediatrician and your oncologist. Your husband may be the father of three, but he needs to learn the facts of life -- the first of which is that right now, you are physically and emotionally distracted and unable to perform as he would wish.

Abby interprets the husband as being sex-crazed, immature and selfish. An easy call right out of the feminist playbook. What if there is a different interpretation? There is absolutely nothing in this letter to suggest that he is abusive or inattentive in any way. Let's give the man the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume this is an example of the Gender Divide over the meaning of sex.

Men quite often view sex as a way to show their love and to feel loved. That is why they take it personally when their wives say no. They feel unloved, and they don't know how else to show their love.

Look at what the husband is going through: he has the sole financial responsibility for 5 people, including a seriously disabled child. He may lose his wife to cancer. He may be physically healthy, while his wife is sick. But they are both stressed.

One possible interpretation of the man's desire for sex is that it his way of showing love and feeling love. When I showed this column to my husband, his response was immediate, "He is probably scared to death that he is going to lose his wife. He is trying to cling to her, in fear and desperation."

A more constructive approach than the one Abby offered, in my opinion, would be for the wife to express her appreciation to him. Tell him directly, simply, "I really don't have the energy to be sexual with you." Then ask him: what would make you feel loved right now? It would also be a good thing if one or both of them just said simply: "I'm scared we're going to lose each other. I'm scared that our days of holding and touching each other are numbered." Often, that willingness to be vulnerable has a way of breaking down the barriers and allowing real intimacy to happen.

In these kinds of situations, both members of the couple are driven to their limits, physically, emotionally, probably financially too. She needs him. He needs her. The relationship is in deficit. You might call it a Love Deficit. They each need extra love, at exactly the moment the other person is most needy and unable to give. They need help from outside. They need to enlist friends and neighbors and relatives to help give them some extra time so they can take physical and emotional care of themselves and each other. They need to be finding ways to stay close to each other. Back rubs, foot massages, just holding each other.

If they have any spirituality at all, this would be a good time to pray. The infinite love of God is always there for us, supporting us. This is a time to draw on that love. (I talk about this in one of my books. I forget which one right now.)

I ask my readers to pray for this couple.

French claim European fertility prize

France now has the highest fertility rate in Europe.

With 1.98 children per woman, France's fertility rate is now ahead of Ireland on 1.90, according to the latest government figures, and well above the European Union average of 1.52.

Babies born to unmarried couples represented 50.5 of all French births in 2007, compared to 48.4 percent the previous year and merely 5.9 percent in 1965, according to the French national statistics institute INSEE.
Sociologist Irene Thery told Le Parisien newspaper this was the "logical outcome of a major revolution... Gradually, it's the child who has come to make the family, not the marriage."

France's leap back up the fertility table began in 1993, back when its fertility was only 1.66 children per woman, although it still falls just short of the 2.07 children per woman needed for generations to be replaced.

Pro-birth public policies, including universal public schooling from the age of three, and the relative affordability of childcare for infants are credited in part with the increase in fertility.

With a total of 816,500 babies born last year, France's fertility rate has dipped slightly since 2006, however, when it passed the symbolic mark of two children per woman.

Child-bearing has been separated from marriage, and the state has taken over responsibility for child support. One thing not mentioned is the relative fertility rates of European French and the African Muslim population of France. I once speculated on this difference in print. I was quickly slapped down by people who pointed out that the French don't keep statistics separated by race or national ancestry. In the US, for instance, we know that the fertility of Blacks and Hispanics is higher than non-Hispanic whites. We also know that college-educated white women have fertility rates around 1.7, well below the national average of 2.1.

It would be interesting to know the ethic composition of French fertility, but I guess it isn't knowable.

The average age of first-time mothers, rising year on year, stood at 29.8 years.

In this, the French are acting like college educated residents of Massachusetts, which had the highest age at first marriage and first child-birth, the last time I looked.

Aggression is a buzz

This study suggests that mice find aggression a rewarding experience, to which they return voluntarily.

“We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said. “This shows for the first time that aggression, on its own, is motivating, and that the well-known positive reinforcer dopamine plays a critical role.”

Kennedy is chair of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development’s special education department, which is consistently ranked as the top special education program in the nation. He is also director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research of Human Development’s Behavior Analysis Clinic.

The full study is not yet available on-line.

Is Same Sex Attraction a Fixed Trait?

This study of 79 women suggests a subtle answer. Money quote:

Women’s definitions of lesbianism appeared to permit more flexibility in behavior than their definitions of heterosexuality. For example, of the women who identified as lesbian in the last round of interviews, 15 percent reported having sexual contact with a man during the prior two years. In contrast, none of the women who settled on a heterosexual label at that point reported having sexual contact with a woman within the previous two years.

“This provides further support for the notion that female sexuality is relatively fluid and that the distinction between lesbian and bisexual women is not a rigid one."

Full text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office or at http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/dev4415.pdf I plan to take a look at the full study before commenting further.

Bucking the Class Fertility Divide

From the Washington Post:

Demographic data obtained by The Post indicate that in metro areas nationwide, including cities and suburbs, 13 percent of men and 31 percent of women ages 25 to 29 with four-year college degrees have had children, according to an analysis of 2000-06 social survey data from the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. By contrast, 49 percent of men and 62 percent of women in that age group with less education have had children, according to the analysis by University of Maryland sociologist Steve Martin.

New data from the National Center for Health Statistics also show that college-educated mothers are usually about 30 when they deliver their first child.

This class divide in fertility deserves much more attention that it has gotten. But it is a natural result of the sexual and social norms put into motion by the combination of feminism and contraception. Women who have the horsepower to make something of themselves professionally are under tremendous social pressure to delay child-bearing. Working class and poor women are not under that particular pressure, and tend to have their children younger.
This Washington Post article is about young professional couples who are bucking that trend by having their children in their twenties. The article features some (justifiable) complaining about the limited options of the "mommy track." I've written elsewhere and here that women deserve more flexible career options, especially if we are going to keep our fertility rate at replacement levels. But nestled in with the complaints is this gem:

Talk at home might revolve around the frequency of eating solids and replenishing baby clothes, but the couple said parenthood is giving them a new level of ambition that is sophisticated and rejuvenating. "When you arrange an environment and provide guidance and see that it actually happens, all the things you're working on, it's this feeling of joint accomplishment between me and Liz," Libresco said. "That's this bliss."

Unviersity of Virginia sociologist Steve Nock Marriage in Men's Livesand others make the point that fatherhood increases men's income because it helps make them serious and it increases their ambition. This young couple is experiencing exactly that.

I find the daring of these young parents a hopeful sign. I wish them all the best.

The real meaning of love

From an unlikely source: a Spanish priest talks about his book that connects the crisis in marriage with the crisis in religious vocations. The key to understanding this unlikely connection is that he believes the modern world misunderstands love. Here is the "money quote" as they say.

Father Manglano: Starting with Spinoza, philosophy has proposed a subjective love: Love will be a passion that awakens my happiness because of my relationship with a person with whom there is chemistry, as we tend to say.

Love will come as a sensation that I find in myself. Then, what I love when I say that I love is nothing distinct from myself. In that way, things, love lasts only as long as the sensation lasts. The moment the sensation disappears, or I wake up as a different person, that first love will have died, and on and on. Love understood in this way is necessarily ephemeral.

Nevertheless, other philosophies understand love as something objective: It is the free exercise of loving another person, of uniting myself to him or her.

The "you" is not an opportunity to feel like I'm in love, but rather the "you" is the motive for which I come out of myself to base myself on another vital center, which is the person of the beloved.

Love is "in relation to": I come out of myself and go toward the one who gives to me. Then yes, it is possible to accomplish an eternal love, that is, after all, what all of us would like.

I make an argument similar to this in the closing chapters of Love and Economics

New Pro-life blog from Canada

My friend Andrea Mrozek from the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada has just started a new prolife group blog featuring Canadian women. They are calling it, Pro-Woman, Prolife: Canada Without Abortion, by Choice. This promises to be a very useful resource for ideas and data for smart prolife women worldwide. I've added it to my blog-roll.

Comprehensive Abstinence Education

That's my latest article in The National Catholic Register.

The genius of the Singles for Christ program is that the young people are brought up within a social network of shared expectations. Most of the Singles for Christ were probably Kids for Christ or Youth for Christ. They probably have married parents who are Couples for Christ or widowed grandmothers who are Handmaidens for Christ. When they were teenagers, probably very few went home to empty houses, turned on a TV porn channel, and had unsupervised afternoons after school.

This abstinence program is more than a classroom experience. This is a full way of life that provides young people with an appealing future as part of a married couple.

The lessons are embedded in a community of supportive adults, who expect certain behavior and model that behavior. The adults prepare the young to participate in the adult life of the community, on the community’s terms.

Read it all here.

The Missing Headline: Unmarried Births Rise

My latest article on Mercator Net is here.

Horrors! The teen birth rate rises!

Thus spake the mainstream media when preliminary data from the Centres for Disease Control showed that the teen birth rate rose three per cent in 2006, the first rise since 1991. The mainstream media reacted true to form. They rounded up the usual suspects: abstinence education and those pesky Christian conservatives. If only the media had troubled to examine the whole report, though, they might have noticed a few things that didn’t fit their template of sex-education-good, abstinence-bad.
...
The unmarried mothers’ birth rate rose over twice as much as the teen birth rate. But the mainstream media did not find this worthy of comment. So, let’s ask ourselves why they choose to emphasize one figure, the increase in teen births, over an increase in unmarried childbearing.

Read it all here.

Comment on Teen Pregnancy

Dear Readers,
I received a comment on my post Sex Ed Failing to Stop Teen Pregnancy. I deleted one comment that was very similar to this one, but used more swearing. I would be very interested in my readers' response to this writer's comment. I will leave the comment up for a week. After that, I will take it down, since it is more vulgar than I think is appropriate.

Pro-Active Mom

A Pro-Active Mom in Iowa sold her son's car, and placed this ad in the newspaper:

The ad reads: "OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don't love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet."

Besides selling the car almost immediately, she has gotten lots of feedback from the ad, all of it positive.

"It's overwhelming the number of calls I've gotten from people saying 'Thank you, it's nice to see a responsible parent.' So far there are no calls from anyone saying, 'You're really strict. You're real overboard, lady.'"

Barriers to Fertility amd Our Obligations to the Young

Robert Samuelson is absolutely right in today's column. The next generation faces an increasing proportion of the Federal budget that goes to pay the expenses of retired workers. We can't go on like this. These costs amount to a massive barrier to fertility for the next generation:

Our children face a future of rising taxes, squeezed -- and perhaps falling -- public services, and aging -- perhaps deteriorating -- public infrastructure (roads, sewers, transit systems). Today's young workers and children are about to be engulfed by a massive income transfer from young to old that will perversely make it harder for them to afford their own children.

That is, we are signing up to look like Europe.

No major candidate of either party proposes to do much about this, even though the facts are well-known.

Spending for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- three programs that go overwhelmingly to older Americans -- already represents more than 40 percent of federal spending. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office projects these programs could equal about 70 percent of the present budget by 2030. Without implausibly large budget deficits, the only way to preserve most other government programs would be huge tax increases (about 40 percent from today's levels). Avoiding the tax increases would require draconian cuts in other programs (about 60 percent). Workers and young families, not retirees, would bear the brunt of either higher taxes or degraded public services.

I agree with Samuelson. We need to act now to make the necessary corrections. I am a Baby Boomer. I've been talking about this, and I must say, planning around these facts for my entire adult life. It's time to act.
cross-posted at the acton blog.

Teachers Having Sex with Students

The New York Post reports an increase in the number of teachers having sex with students.

Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon said yesterday that his probers received more complaints and substantiated more cases against school workers in 2007 than in any year since the office was created in 1992....

He attributed the rise in complaints, in part, to his office's getting "a fair amount of publicity over the last several years - so there's an awareness."
...The surge included an 18 percent jump since 2006 in the number of verified cases and a 10 percent climb in total complaints.

Of the cases substantiated in 2007, 95 were sexual in nature, including that of a 22-year-old Bronx school aide accused of having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

My concern is this statement:

In all, Condon last year called for 186 staff members to be put on the Department of Education's list of ineligible workers.

That's nice that they are not eligible to work for the Dept of Ed. But I want to know: how many are in jail? How many were turned over to the police for criminal investigation? If they didn't go to jail, where are they working now?
And will the NY Dept of Ed be held accountable if they go on to abuse other kids?
As a Catholic of the San Diego Diocese, which just settled for millions of dollars over the cover-up of abuse as much as abuse itself, I'm just a little sensitive over the prospect of public schools moving sexually abusive teachers outside of the area of their responsibility, but possibly into someone else's.

Alienation of Affection

Most people don't even know what "Alienation of Affection" means. It is a civil offense which says that if you woo somebody's spouse away, you have done them a wrong and you owe them.
An old statute of that sort was used in this case. A successful businessman impregnated one of his employees. When she divorced her husband, (who was a plumber) he sued the businessman and obtained $750,000 in damages.
The significance of this kind of case:
Marriage is a serious vow.
Violation of the marriage vow inflicts harms on the innocent spouse and
The state recognizes those harms and insists the perpetrator make restitution.
The threat of being held accountable presumably will provide an incentive for better marital behavior.

If you are considering divorce....

People contemplating divorce often do not have a realistic view of what is awaiting them. Sometimes, people in my audiences tell me, "if I had known how difficult divorce was going to be, I would have worked harder at my marriage." Here is a truly awful case which illustrates a number of the points I sometimes make about divorce.
1. Divorce does not end conflict. It just transfers the conflict into new arenas. (Actually, I have found this is a great laugh-line when talking to divorce lawyers or family court judges: "Divorce ends conflict." Hysterical, if ironic, laughter.)
In this particular case, Marc and Tonya Herschfus continued to argue for three years after their divorce over the religious upbringing and medical care of their son.
2. The conflict sometimes escalates, as the stakes are higher. In this case, Tonya accused her former husband of abusing their son.

The trial court cited the “numerous post-judgment divorce proceedings” and lawsuits filed by Marc Herschfus against Tonya Herschfus. Tonya Herschfus filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy and instigated Marc Herschfus’s arrest on a Friend of the Court (FOC)bench warrant. Jacob was the subject of four Child Protective Services referrals and investigations and was subjected to numerous medical examinations, psychological counseling, and an interview regarding potential sexual abuse.

No evidence of child abuse was ever found.
3. The family court ends up investigating the most personal and detailed aspects of people's lives. When parents can not cooperate, whether they are married or not, the court steps into the middle of their lives. In this particular case, religious practice was one of the issues in dispute:

As part of the divorce settlement, the parties signed a document outlining specific terms for raising Jacob in that religion (the “Upbringing Document”). ... The trial court found that the parties “have different views on how strictly to observe their religion,” such as in relation to driving on holy days. The trial court noted that Marc Herschfus hired a private investigator to follow Tonya Herschfus on holy days in 2006 and caught Tonya Herschfus driving with Jacob. The trial court found that Tonya Herschfus was clearly “attempting to hide the fact that she is driving from [Marc Herschfus]. The message to Jacob, of course, is that it is appropriate to deceive his father.” The trial court noted that the parties also disagreed about the use of kosher food. Tonya Herschfus believed that Marc Herschfus had brainwashed Jacob to read the food labels at her house. She also testified that Jacob refused to eat at her non-Jewish family’s home on Thanksgiving 2006. Tonya Herschfus testified that Jacob acted “troubled and withdrawn” even
after she promised that she would only give him kosher foods.
The trial court found that Jacob was in turmoil given the different religious observances of his parents. The rules at Marc Herschfus’s home and Jacob’s religious school were inflexible, while Tonya Herschfus was more lax, causing him “substantial stress.” Jacob sought “structure and guidance” but felt “conflict and divided loyalty.” Jacob’s school principal testified that Jacob is a “loner,” “hyper and easily angered,” and the other children tease him. At the age of five, Jacob already saw a therapist to deal with stress and anxiety.

Notice that these kinds of issues are usually none of the government's business. We don't ordinarily invite agents of the state to examine these kinds of issues within our families. Because parental cooperation has broken down, the state gets drawn into these intimate matters, which ought properly be none of the government's businss. The court went to great lengths to emphasize that each parent could practice any relgion they wanted, but that they were compelled to comply with their agreement. (I originally found this case in a blog that does religious freedom issues.)
4. There is some evidence that custodial fathers are more apt to foster healthy relationships with mothers than the reverse. (See Warren Farrell's book,Father and Child Reunion on this point.) This case illustrates this.

The trial court noted that Dr. Okla opined that Marc Herschfus was “more likely to foster a positive relationship” than Tonya Herschfus. ... The trial court further noted that Dr. Okla testified that Tonya Herschfus had an “inappropriate affect” when discussing the sexual abuse allegations, was suspicious of Marc
Herschfus, prevented Jacob from having a comfortable relationship with Marc Herschfus, may have coached Jacob to make allegations against Marc Herschfus, and made inappropriate remarks in front of the child. To the contrary, Dr. Okla found Marc Herschfus to be appropriately concerned and less angry than Tonya Herschfus, although he was worried, frustrated, and anxious.

5. Not only did this mother make false accusations of child abuse, she also accused her husband of domestic violence, a charge which was never substantiated.

During the current custody hearing, Tonya Herschfus claimed that she sees a therapist because of domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of Marc Herschfus. She testified that Marc Herschfus is angry and intimidating, and that she is afraid of him. Tonya Herschfus secured a personal protection order against Marc Herschfus during the initial divorce proceedings; however, the trial court noted that
domestic violence was not “a significant issue” at that time. Marc Herschfus denies that he ever abused Tonya Herschfus and claims that Tonya Herschfus assaulted him during one of Jacob’s doctor appointments.The upshot of this case: In the absence of parental cooperation with each other, the court modified the custody agreement to give primary custody to the father, rather than shared custody. As far as I can tell, the court levied no penalty against the mother for her false allegations of child abuse and domestic violence.

Huge Rally Held for Marriage in Madrid

"Tens of thousands" rallied in Madrid in favor of traditional marriage.

Tens of thousands of Spaniards filled downtown Madrid Sunday in a rally called to defend family values in a country where the Socialist government has angered the Roman Catholic church by legalizing gay marriage and making it easier for couples to divorce.
The crowd roared when Pope Benedict XVI appeared on giant television screens in a live hookup from St. Peter's Square and praised them for holding the event.

My speech at the Acton Institute this past week actually dealt with the fact that Socialists around the world have made dismantling the family a central part of their agenda. Engels argued way back in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that monogamy is the original class struggle, with the man as the bougeois and the woman as the proletariat. After my speech, someone in the audience pointed out that the Spanish Socialist party had pretty much left the economy alone. There isn't much political payoff in blowing up the economy. But the Socialists have made changes in marriage among their first and highest priorities. Hence this opposition rally by the proponents of marriage as one man, one woman, for life.
A video of my talk is available at the Acton site.

Sex Ed Failing to halt teen pregnancy

That is the headline in the UK Telegraph. I can't help but think that the US media would have had a slightly different "slant" on this story.

For example, here is the lead of the UK story:

Every year, almost 50,000 girls under 18 fall pregnant, leading critics to claim that government-led efforts to encourage safer sex are backfiring. The number who conceive is at its highest level since a multi-million-pound teenage pregnancy crackdown almost a decade ago.

As a result, Britain tops the league table of teenage mothers in western Europe, despite also having a record number of school-age abortions.

This comes despite the Government investing more than £150 million in an attempt to stem the tide of conceptions - and pledging to cut teenage pregnancy rates by half by the end of this decade.

I can't imagine reading this analysis in a mainstream US paper:

Amid a rising teenage population, the conception rate has dropped by only 11 per cent since 1998, in stark contrast to the 50 per cent target. At the same time, the overall number of teenage pregnancies has gone up to more than 47,000 a year.

In the 1970s, rates were similar across western Europe, but while other states have had marked success in bringing down the numbers of pregnancies, Britain now has the highest teenage birth rate: six times that of Holland, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France.

Government policies aimed at dealing with the problem have allowed girls to obtain standard contraceptive and morning-after pills at school, without the consent of their parents, while new proposals will allow them to go directly to pharmacists.

In the US, the media typically blame similar statistics on those dreaded abstinence educators.
Here are some of the experts quoted in the UK story:

Last night, critics said that Labour's policies had backfired and made girls feel increasingly under pressure to become sexually active at a younger age. Others expressed fears that national targets were powerless in the face of a popular culture in which youth was increasingly sexualised.

Norman Wells, of the Family Education Trust charity, said that the Government had allowed the "systematic removal of every restraint that used to act as a disincentive to under-age sex". There was no evidence that easy availability of contraception reduced teenage pregnancy rates, instead it added to pressure on young girls by normalising under-age sex, he said.

Mr Wells also attacked the Government's commitment to confidentiality policies about contraception which "kept parents in the dark about their children's sexual activity".

"The problems associated with teenage pregnancy will never be solved so long as the Government persists with its reliance on yet more contraception and sex education," he said. "What we need is a radical change away from a culture which has reduced sex to a casual recreational activity."

Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said that the Government's failure was rooted in an attempt to find "state-led solutions" to problems that needed to be tackled by families and communities. "Our research has shown that progress is only being made in the areas where people are relatively well-off, whereas in deprived areas the situation is often getting worse.

"What we actually need is for family-led organisations, and local communities and the voluntary sector to work together on these problems."

Anne Atkins, a social commentator, said the emphasis on sex education and contraception was giving young people the message that sex at a young age was inevitable. "The message may be intended to be 'when you have sex, use a condom', but what young people hear is the 'when you have sex' part," she said.

I wish we got this kind of coverage in the US.

States Create Sperm Donors

The new social institution of the anonymous sperm donor is completely the creation of the government. This case from the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania proves that beyond any shadow of a doubt. In this case, a woman asked a friend to donate sperm to her, on the understanding that he would not be a father to the child: he wouldn't ask for visitation or other parental rights, and she woudl not ask for child support. By the time the child was 5 years old, the mother changed her mind and asked for child support. The PA Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling, and decided that the man did not owe child support. The court ruled that the couple's verbal contract was binding.
This case is interesting because the court's argument makes it very clear that couples could not and would not contract for donor sperm unless they were assured that the state would create a separation between the members of the couple.

Assuming that we do not wish to disturb the lives of the many extant parties to anonymous, institutional sperm donation, we can only rule in Mother’s favor if we are able to draw a legally sustainable distinction between the negotiated, clinical arrangement that closely mimics the trappings of anonymous sperm donation that the trial court found to have existed in this case and institutional sperm donation, itself.

...however, we can discern no principled basis for such a distinction. Moreover, even if, arguendo, such a distinction were tenable, it would mean that a woman who wishes to have a baby but is unable to conceive through intercourse could not seek sperm from a man she knows and admires, while assuring him that he will never be subject to a support order and being herself assured that he will never be able to seek custody of the child. Accordingly, to protect herself and the sperm donor, that would-be mother would have no choice but to resort to anonymous donation or abandon her desire to be a biological mother, notwithstanding her considered personal preference to conceive using the sperm of someone familiar, whose background, traits, and medical history are not shrouded in mystery. To much the same end, where a would-be donor cannot trust that he is safe from a future support action, he will be considerably less likely to provide his sperm to a friend or acquaintance who asks, significantly limiting a would-be mother’s reproductive prerogatives. There is simply no basis in law or policy to impose such an unpleasant choice, and to do so would be to legislate in precisely the way Mother notes this Court has no business doing.

Moreover, we cannot agree with the lower courts that the agreement here at issue is contrary to the sort of manifest, widespread public policy that generally animates the courts’ determination that a contract is unenforceable. The absence of a legislative mandate coupled to the constantly evolving science of reproductive technology and the other considerations highlighted above illustrate the very opposite of unanimity with regard to the legal relationships arising from sperm donation, whether anonymous or otherwise.

Given that the state already permits anonymous sperm donation, I think this case is properly decided. Contrary to the Court's statement, I can think of several good policy reasons why the "would-be mother's reproductive prerogatives" should be curtailed.

Children have a natural right to have a relationship with their fathers. The state has no business separating mothers and fathers from each other, and children from their fathers. We should not assume that every woman has a right to have a baby, just because she wants one. And if a woman wants to "seek the sperm of a man she knows and admires," public policy ought to be to encourage her to marry him, not cook up alternative contracts with him that allow them to deconstruct the parental relationship.

I think we should begin having a debate on exactly these questions.
Cross-posted at the Marriage Debate blog.