Reason Magazine - Topics > Social Issues

'I may be straight, but I'm not narrow'

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:05:00 EDT

The live feed from today's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" hearing just ended. The curious can watch it here. (Warning, this thing went on forever: 2h35.)

The hearing went better than I expected, insofar as the Democratic witnesses, Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, retired Army Maj. Gen. Vance Coleman, and Marine Staff Serg. Eric Alva utterly outspoke Army Sgt. Maj. Brian Jones and Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, both of whom testitified (poorly, and in some places, damn near incoherently) on behalf of Republicans.

Donnelly managed, somehow, to answer every question from both the right and the left with, "Sexual urges would prevent unit cohesion." Jones, when asked whether or not he thought homosexuality was immoral, replied, "No, but if I'm 6'8" and I want to be a fighter pilot, I can't." Both think a gay-friendly military would bring on the end of the world.

As this hearing evidenced, the social conservative arguments for preserving DADT, letting the Department of Defense write its own policy, or banning gay service, range from paper-thin to non-existent. The only obstacle I see to passage of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act—the bill that would repeal DADT and implement a non-discrimination policy—is good ole' fashion homophobia.

Hopefully the 111th Congress makes repealing DADT a top priority, so that our military can get back to risking the lives of straights and gays in pointless wars.

John Cloud at Time.com wrote a great recap of the policy, and ended with this:

Do we want a military where Americans are not forced to lie about their most important emotional bonds?

I wrote about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" here.

Suited and Booted

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Typically, swimwear creates scandal in inverse proportion to the amount of fabric it's crafted from, but not so the Speedo LZR Racer. Like most of the high-tech bodysuits that have become popular among the world's fastest swimmers since the 2000 Olympics, the LZR is as modest as Mormon underwear—it leaves only one's ankles, arms, and shoulders exposed. And yet for the last several months, it's been attracting more attention than a fake Kazakh journalist in a neon green banana hammock.

With its ultrasonically bonded paneling, corset-like "core stabilizer," and fabric that sheds water like the Tour de France sheds dopers, the LZR Racer reduces drag significantly better than any other suit currently available. It's so form-fitting it takes Olympic medalist Natalie Coughlin 20 minutes to put hers on. Five-time Olympian Dara Torres requires two helpers to wedge herself into hers. Still, if the LZR isn't breaking any world records in locker rooms, the pool's a different story. Since the LZR's introduction four months ago, 44 world records have fallen to those who've managed to squeeze into one.

But what sort of message is such promiscuous record-breaking sending to our children? With the Olympics just around the corner, and the Tour already under way, this is high season for leather-lunged oratory about level playing fields, the spirit of sport, and the character-building that comes from joyless, obsessive, meticulously plotted training regimens that nonetheless do nothing to compromise the size of one's genitals.

A common theme of such rhetoric is that sport loses its metaphorical value and instructive authority as soon as things like magic Speedos—and even worse, magic anabolic agents—enter the picture. We value athletic competition in part, this reasoning goes, because it teaches us important life lessons about hard work, sacrifice, discipline, the passionate commitment to exceed one's limits. But when an athlete employs unsanctioned performance-enhancement techniques, somehow that all goes out the window and sport becomes an empty, meaningless, completely corrupt sham.

Or is it just that we're setting new world records for performance-enhancement hysteria? According to swimming's governing organization, FINA, the LZR Racer is legal because there's no evidence that it improves a swimmer's buoyancy—and yet its detractors characterize the suit as "drugs on a hanger." At this point, apparently, we're so wary of doping and its pernicious impact on sport that doping can occur even when no dope is actually involved!

And when dope is involved, it overshadows everything else. Versus, the cable channel that broadcasts the Tour de France in the U.S., has chosen to characterize this year's edition with the theme "Take Back the Tour." A promotional spot that airs repeatedly during the channel's commercial breaks features footage of Floyd Landis, Michael Rasmussen, and other pharmacologically suspect cyclists playing in reverse as singer Paul Weller warbles soulfully about clearing out his head, getting himself straight, making a brand new start. It's as if Versus believes the Tour must erase its entire recent history and go backwards into the future, toward some purer past, before EPO and testosterone digestifs, before autologous blood transfusions. Ah, yes, the good old days, when only cocaine, strychnine, and peppermint fueled the peleton, and the heroic alpine exploits of Gallic ectomorphs could still legitimately inspire us to push past our own boundaries and pain thresholds.

During the chatty intro segments that start each Tour broadcast, the Versus announcers have been taking special care to mention the new procedures and policies designed to keep riders clean. During the broadcast's up-close-and-personal profiles, past and present luminaries issue vague, halting platitudes about the positive new attitudes, positive new beginnings, the potential for change. Eventually, as one of the world's greatest sporting events is reduced to tedious a AA meeting, one can't but wonder: In all those prior Tours that we're supposed to wipe clean from our memories, were the drugs the only thing that mattered? What about rain, wind, flat tires, crashes, feuding teammates, efficient mechanics, drunken fans creating havoc in the roadways, routes that favored one type of rider over another, injuries, illnesses, perfectly executed race strategies?

If banned substances or other unsanctioned performance-enhancement techniques can single-handedly render a sport meaningless, that sport must not have much meaning to begin with. If a tremendous appetite for steroids is all that's required to achieve athletic excellence, Hulk Hogan wouldn't just be a D-list reality TV star—he'd be wearing the Tour's yellow jersey, closing in on Barry Bonds' home run record, and, provided he could shoehorn himself into Natalie Coughlin's LZR Racer, breaking the 100-meter backstroke record too.

Which is not to say that EPO, anabolics, and all the other substances athletes illicitly consume in an effort to beat those blessed with superior aerobic capacity or God's favor don't have an impact on outcomes and the culture of sport in general. Obviously they do. But they don't have nearly as much impact on sport's metaphorical value as anti-doping crusaders insist. Indeed, while Versus' cyclists-in-reverse commercial is supposed to signal a new beginning for the scandal-plagued Tour, it plays more like a highlight reel. Look at Floyd Landis as he hunches over his handlebars while barreling down a mountain at more than 50 mph and abnormally high testosterone/epitestosterone ratios are not what comes to mind. Instead, you see his courage and skill, his intense desire to win, his love of the sport. Dope-fueled or not, he looks like a hero and continues to inspire.

Meanwhile, consider the kinds of messages that arise from sport's current War on Doping. Be suspicious of achievement, wary of innovation. Embrace progress only if it's rare and gradual. According to the War on Doping mindset, the only way to ensure fair play is to monitor athletes more intrusively than we monitor paroled felons. Long hours in the pool, a knack for guessing curve ball when indeed a curve ball is coming, and all the other elements that lead to exceptional athletic performance mean nothing in the face of the awesome, incontrovertible, game-altering powers of dope. But are these really the messages we want to be teaching our children? And if the human spirit really is so impotent and inconsequential compared to a few hundred IUs of EPO or a magic Speedo, why are we even bothering to suit up at all?

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

Take My Kids Instead

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:45:00 EDT

Salon's Louis Bayard poses the question of the day: When a biblical literalist cites the book of Genesis in a protest against sodomy, is he or she in turn advocating parent-sponsored pedophilia?

Genesis 19...is also the source of all the trouble. Lot's house has been surrounded by the men of Sodom, "both old and young," crying: "Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them." Lot, rather alarmingly from modern perspectives, tries to appease the mob by offering his own daughters. The mob refuses. Whereupon Lot's male guests, angels in disguise, strike their would-be ravagers blind. Fire and brimstone follow; Sodom is no more.

Blasts from the past: Managing Editor Jesse Walker's response to the landmark civil liberties case, Lawrence v. Texas; Jacob Sullum on the anti-agists at the Yearning for Zion Ranch; and the legal team that forgot to include scriptural references in its defense.

No Reason to Rush

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In the old story, a preacher gives an inspiring sermon, which he concludes by asking his congregants to stand up if they want to go to heaven. Everyone rises except one nervous-looking fellow. "Brother," asks the incredulous pastor, "don't you want to ascend to paradise when you die?" Says the holdout: "When I die? Sure! I thought you were getting up a group to go right now."

That's pretty much how I feel about the California Supreme Court's decision granting the right of same-sex couples to marry. The destination is a good one. I just wish the court weren't in such a hurry to get there.

In recent years, the country has been moving at a steady pace to affirm a once-unthinkable concept—namely that as a matter of both individual rights and social good, gays should be free to make the same commitments as heterosexuals. According to a 2007 CBS News/New York Times poll, 60 percent of Americans now support allowing same-sex couples to enter into civil unions or marriage.

Radical changes don't happen overnight. But the speed of this one has been impressive. It's been only 22 years since the U.S. Supreme Court said states may criminalize homosexual conduct. It's been only 15 years since the Supreme Court of Hawaii shocked the country by ruling that gays might have a constitutional right to marry.

It's been only eight years since Vermont became the first state to admit same-sex couples to the rights and responsibilities of matrimony through civil unions. It's been only three years since California followed suit by letting gays enter into domestic partnerships.

But all of a sudden, the justices have discovered that their state constitution not only allows but requires that marriage include homosexual couples—even though in 2000, 61 percent of the state's voters rejected that option.

The majority is not always right, and in that instance, I thought the majority was wrong. But democracy doesn't say the people will always be right. It merely says they have the right to decide most matters of public policy. Here, by contrast, the California Supreme Court says the citizenry has no right to define marriage the way it has been defined by custom and law for eons.

At stake was not whether gay couples may acquire the rights and duties of marriage in a state-sanctioned framework. As the court acknowledged, they can already do so under the domestic partnership law. But it's not enough for them to get the substance of marriage. The court said they must also get the same terminology.

It reached this conclusion through a lot of philosophizing about "the right of same-sex couples to have their official family relationship accorded the same dignity, respect and stature as that accorded to other officially recognized family relationships." But the state constitution (like the federal one) does not traffic in mushy terms like "dignity" and "stature." When a court puts such heavy reliance on amorphous concepts, it telegraphs that it will not be tied down by the actual words of the state charter.

For further proof, consider that while the California constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of "sex, race, creed, color, or national or ethnic origin," it does not forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The justices somehow found something in the document that the authors thought they omitted.

Prudence and caution, which are virtues in the executive and the legislative branch, are no sin in the judiciary, either. What those attributes dictated here is that the court give civil unions a fair interval to show their merits or flaws in practice, rather than rushing in to pronounce them inadequate.

The justices would have been wise to mark time while the people of California continued on their path toward full equality for gays. Instead, the court has practically exhorted them to stop the journey. Opponents of gay rights have mounted a drive to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November, which stands a good chance of passing.

The exercise may end up not only overturning the Supreme Court's presumptuous decree but hardening public attitudes against the whole idea for years to come. In time, Californians would probably be inclined to embrace gay marriage. But if you insist they go there today, don't be surprised if they refuse.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

If You Don't Like Hank Williams

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:17:00 EDT

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a long, favorable review of the new Hank Williams (and family) exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. From Barry Mazor's article:

The lives of Hank and Audrey Williams; of their children, Hank Jr. and Lycretia; and of Hank's daughter Jett are all traced, as well as the growing careers of Hank Jr.'s performing progeny Hank III, the punk rocking honky-tonker, and Holly, the singer-songwriter. The exhibit features some 200 family artifacts, most never seen before in public, from Hank Sr.'s prized, inlaid Martin guitar and his violin, and the suitcase he had with him the night he died, to the family's early television set and bric-a-brac from their den. There are the spangled new Nudie suits provided Hank Jr. and then Hank III, in turn, when they were small boys, the white guitar Ms. Jett took to the stage as she began her own late-blooming career, and intimate family photos and home movies.

For my two cents, any celebration of America's honky tonk king is worth the trouble. And I can't help wondering what the folks at the Grand Ole Opry make of it. The Opry, of course, gave Hank the boot back in 1952, rescinding his membership as punishment for all the booze and pills he was downing. As Nick Tosches writes in Country: The Music and the Musicians, less than a month after scoring a crossover pop hit in the fall of 1952 with "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)," Hank was "in the worst shape of his life," shacking up at the boardinghouse run by his mother in Montgomery, Alabama. "He pined for his faithless wife, Miss Audrey, drank, took chloral hydrate, drank, fell down and cracked his skull, drank some more, and wrote ‘I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.'" A few months later he was gone, found dead in the backseat of a chauffeured Cadillac.

Today, Opry visitors are greeted at the door by a Hank impersonator. And why not? He's arguably the greatest singer and songwriter in all of country music. But then why hasn't the Opry reinstated his membership after all these years? Here's what Reinstate Hank has to say about it:

Despite being one of the most powerfully iconic figures in American music, Hank Williams has yet to be reinstated to the Opry. Now, your help is needed to honor and preserve his legacy. Join the campaign and add your signature to the petition to Reinstate Hank Williams to the Grand Ole Opry.

Petition here. Hillbilly hellraiser Hank III carrying on his granddad's legacy here. My look at country's tangled roots in blackface minstrelsy (including Hank's "Lovesick Blues") here.

Kevin Bacon, Thou Art Avenged: Dance the Night Away (Finally) at Arizona's San Tan Flat!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:58:00 EDT

When we last checked in at San Tan Flat, a family restaurant in Pinal County, Arizona, county officials had invoked an anachronistic ordinance to ban outddor dancing at the popular steak joint.

It was the subject of this Drew Carey Project video at reason.tv, dubbed Dance Ban: Footloose in Arizona:

Well, here's some great news, via The Arizona Republic:

Pinal County Superior Court Judge William O'Neil overturned a decision from the county Board of Supervisors that said the country-Western-themed restaurant was operating an illegal dance hall by allowing patrons to dance to live music on its back patio....
The saga of San Tan Flat drew national attention, prompting commentary from actor Drew Carey and conservative Washington Post columnist George Will. The case also received several comparisons to the 1984 Kevin Bacon film Footloose, in which a small town bans rock music and dancing.

More here.

At the time we released the video, one of the owners of San Tan Flat told the East Valley Tribune, "'This adds one more voice, and I think Drew Carey has a credible voice and he speaks with some degree of credibility to the public,' said Dale Bell, who owns San Tan Flat with his son, Spencer."

All of us at reason are glad to see this incredibly stupid injustice made right—and proud of our role in helping it happen.

New at Reason

Tue, 06 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Contributing Editor Greg Beato makes the case for drafting Barbie and waging culture war on Iran.

Read all about it here.

Free, Happy People, Holding Hands

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:12:00 EDT

Free people are happy people, sayeth Arthur C. Brooks.

For example:

Pundits and politicians on the left often tell us that a free economy makes for an unhappy population: the disruptions of capitalism make us insecure, and we would prefer the security of generous welfare programs and national health care. But for most people, it turns out, that isn’t true.
To begin with, those who favor less government intervention in our economic affairs are happier than those who favor more. When asked in 2004 whether it was the government’s responsibility to improve the living standards of Americans, 26 percent of those who agreed called themselves very happy, versus 37 percent who disagreed. When asked in 1996 whether it should be “the government’s responsibility to keep prices under control,” those who said it “definitely should be” were a quarter less likely to say that they were very happy than those who said it “definitely should not be.”

More interesting stuff from Brooks here.

Lies, Damn Lies, and STATS

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 13:17:00 EST

If you find yourself in need of a wee bit of debunkery, head over to STATS.org, a site that tears apart inaccurate "facts and figures" that are floating around threatening to become conventional wisdom against all logic and evidence. Some of their best stories of 2007:

Battles of the Bottles
Reacting to media reports in the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome banned plastic water bottles because they contained “toxic” phthalates. What the Mayor and the media missed was that plastic bottles are made with a different chemical that happens to have a similar sounding name -- polyethylene terephthalate, a harmless polyester.
Left at the Altar by Statistics

In June, Time Out New York sent a wave of panic through the city’s wannabe brides with a cover story claiming that there are 185,000 more single women than men in New York City. But the excess number of single women is due to the fact that men tend to die at younger ages than women do. In most younger age groups, there are significantly more men. For example there are 211,590 18 and 19-year old men in the NY Metro area compared to 201,282 women.

More reason on statistics here and here.

Chicken Soup for Your Soul

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:24:00 EST

Normally the phrase Chicken Soup for the Soul brings to mind schlocky books full of horribly homespun wisdom. But now you can sell your soul, do some good, and go buy a bowl of chicken soup with the profits.

For reason readers who have some surplus soul around or don't believe they have one in the first place, a new charitable website:

Pierre Ayotte, noted in a press release to be a "friendly upcoming Internet opportunist"--i.e. not The Devil Himself, just to be clear--would like to rent your soul for 10 bucks a week.
It's a new twist on an old nonprofit business model. He's gambling that the soul-leasing business will earn enough to keep him afloat from the charities that pay weekly to advertise on his site, RentYourSoul.com.
Ayotte swears he's not working for Beelzebub. He'll pay you $10--via PayPal, check, or bank note--and also donate $10 to the charity of your choice, selected from the nonprofits posting to RentYourSoul....
Instead of skirting the fiery pit of eternal damnation, why not simply lease your soul for a good cause? It only takes a few minutes to post a photo of yourself, and if Ayotte displays it on the home page, you're soul-free for a week and 10 dollars richer afterward.

Markets in Everything, indeed.

If Capitalism Is the Disease, What Is the Cure?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:07:00 EDT

Last week, Jacob Sullum blogged a New York Times' op-ed by "contrarian sociologist" Mike Males. In his fun piece, Males noted vast increases in anti-social behavior among middle-aged people and concluded that, pace media hysteria about kids, "what experts label 'adolescent risk taking' is really baby boomer risk taking."

Now Michelle Shinghal notes the letters in response to Males, especially this gem:

I suspect that many of these badly behaving adults come from the lower and middle economic classes.
Given this era of unprecedented wealth for an exclusive few; the decline of real wages; astronomical higher-education costs; health care and housing woes; the obsolescence and theft of pensions; not to mention mergers, layoffs and outsourcing, it's no surprise that adults increasingly turn to alcohol, crime, drugs and risky sex to escape their woes.
Mr. Males has laid out the human costs of American capitalism. The remedy? Electing politicians whose ideas will create positive social and economic change for all, not for the few.
It's time we take care of the families on Main Street, not just Wall Street.

More here.

The Fauxcialist Revolution

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 15:18:00 EDT

Over at Jewcy, Michael Weiss compiles a list "of the worst poseur Marxists—faux-cialists, if you like—plus three world leaders who are actually literate in radical politics and willing to put their knowledge to good use." A funny piece—and one that allows me to post my favorite photo of George Galloway and Dead or Alive singer Pete Burns.

How many British MPs can you name who’ve spent Christmas disco dancing with Tariq Aziz and joked about male pattern baldness with Uday Hussein? With his promiscuous attraction to all types of murderous dictator, the Scottish politician George Galloway manages to be both a textbook reactionary and sui generis at the same time
...
It took a stint on the reality series Celebrity Big Brother in 2006 to alienate even some of his diehard loyalists. Before being ejected from the house by his co-residents, Galloway dressed in a leotard and imitated a cat drinking milk out of a saucer provided by a transvestite.

Horrifying video of Galloway's cat imitation here.

And Weiss on the ridiculous Tariq Ali:

Ali’s work is never done until he’s stuffed as many leftist platitudes and clichés as possible into a single sentence. In his New Left Review essay “Mid-Point in the Middle East?” he extolled Muqtada al-Sadr, Hassan Nasrallah, Ismail Haniyah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as glorious upstarts in the “unfolding drama” of the modern Middle East and writes: “A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the fabulous wealth of petroleum.” It’s like an Onion parody of the Socialist Workers’ Party meeting minutes, which might not be far cry from Ali’s rather matey intent: he loves to work in schlocky pop cultural references in his pamphleteering, titling, for instance, his pro-chavismo book Pirates of the Caribbean.

Whole article here.

reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie and former reasonoid Tim Cavanaugh recently guested at Jewcy's "Movable Snipe" feature.

Left and Right Meet on Scary Street

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:40:00 EDT

Michael Moynihan wrote here yesterday on the left/right anti-market convergence. I stumbled across a pretty hideous example of it, alas not online anywhere I could find: a "visual essay" by noted culture jammer Kalle Lasn in the March/April issue of the Canadian edition of Adbusters.

It's called "The Existential Divide," and the general tone is: we are all self-indulgent libertine scum who deserve to die. A specific quote or two:

Lately....freedom has taken a perverse, hyper-individualistic turn....
When a modest, pious man living in a poor village a world away looks at us, what does he see?...
We in the affluent west are now experiencing negative popuation growth....an unconscious collective suicide?....
In our eyes, the islamist suicide bomber has come to epitomize "the terrorist", a modern savage.....yet in fact, this "other" is a man whose life revolves around the mosque, daily prayer, restrained dress, moderate fasting, a tight-knit family and community. When pushed to the limit, a committed muslim may decide to sacrifice his own life...for what he sees as a greater social and spiritual good. Which one of us in the west will do this now?

Lasn, meet Buchanan and D'Souza, and Virginia Postrel , our former editor, is not surprised.

A reason review by Jacob Sullum of Lasn's book Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America.

Social Cons vs. National Review

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:53:00 EDT

A coalition of social conservatives thinks that the eggheads over at right-wing mothership National Review are shilling for Mitt Romney--and that it just ain't right:

Twenty-two conservative activist leaders will publicly release a letter this week challenging the conservative magazine National Review's "puff work" for presidential candidate Mitt Romney and implying that the magazine is quietly abandoning the social conservative grassroots and constitutionalism. The editors refuse even to acknowledge receipt of the letter, which cites information about which they've misled their readers, most strikingly:
Romney's stance and record after his "awakening" are not pro-life.
The Massachusetts Constitution says the people are bound only by laws ratified by the legislature; and only the legislature can suspend or alter laws. Blaming judges who admit they cannot create laws and have no authority over the legislature or governor, Romney unconstitutionally ordered officials to act as if judges legalized homosexual “marriage.”

However, I'd say it blunts the sense of their wrath at NR just a leeeetle bit that the very first thing the press release quotes to buttress the point that true-blue (true-red?) righties should deny Mitt three times and more is an article from NR's own website, the supposed Romney ass-kissers:

John Haskins of the Parents' Rights Coalition notes NR's glaring refusal to face the implications of a devastating article (May, 2004, National Review) by a leading legal scholar, illuminating why fawning, pro-establishment attorneys such as Jay Sekulow, radio lawyer Hugh Hewitt, and (an NR pro-Romney blogger) David French have facilitated Romney's unconstitutional actions:
"The deeper failure must go to the man who stood as governor, holding the levers of the executive. And if it is countdown for marriage...it is countdown also for Mitt Romney, whose political demise may be measured along the scale of moves he could have taken and the record of his receding, step by step... [I]t became clear that even conservative lawyers had come to incorporate, and accept, the premises that gave to the courts a position of supremacy in our constitutional schemes."
The Missing Governor (National Review Online May 17, 2004)
-- Hadley Arkes, Professor of Jurisprudence, Amherst College

I fully support all conservatives rising up in righteous indignation about the flaws of all the GOP front-runners. Keep it up!

Good Times, Bad Mood

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 06:14:00 EDT

Americans have many reasons for gloom. The war in Iraq has yet to turn around, we can't agree on a solution for illegal immigration, and Lindsay Lohan isn't cute anymore. We also have one reason to be happy: the economy. But right now, we're in the middle of a good funk, and we don't want to let any sunshine spoil it.

When it comes to the economy, the national mood is a combination of dissatisfaction and fear. A recent Gallup poll found that 66 percent of Americans think national economic conditions are "only fair" or "poor." And we remember the old proverb: It's always darkest just before it goes totally black. Fully 70 percent think the economy is getting worse, compared with 23 percent who discern signs of improvement.

In the midst of a recession, a depression or the Irish potato famine, our morose outlook would make sense. But at the moment, it seems to have no basis in reality.

Unemployment stands at 4.5 percent, down from the peak rate of 6.3 percent four years ago. The stock market is near record levels. Economic growth, which slowed in the first quarter, has since rebounded. Inflation is running below 3 percent. But to paraphrase the old country song, we've enjoyed as much of this as we can stand.

It's true that not all the economic news is golden. Some people are out of work or drowning in debt. Gas prices are painfully high. People who expected their home values to keep climbing, no matter what, are learning the definition of the term "bubble." Health care and college costs, however, seem permanently immune to the law of gravity.

But even in the best of times, some trends fall below average. Taken as a whole, the economy is plenty healthy. So why do we insist on seeing it as sickly?

One reason is that we've gotten so accustomed to prosperity that we take it for granted. From 1971 through 1997, the unemployment rate never once fell to the level we now enjoy. In the 1970s, annual inflation was frequently in double-digits. Recessions used to come along every four or five years, but since 1991, we've had only one downturn, a mild one back in 2001.

Another reason for the pessimism is that we mistake the few bad indicators for a broad trend. When gas prices soar, it's tempting to conclude that we're on the verge of economic turmoil so awful that we will soon be eating tree bark to stay alive. Never mind that other prices are reasonably stable, and that the national economy has absorbed higher fuel costs without too much strain.

In one sector where prices have been dropping, of course, the trend is taken as cause for panic: home sales. But what is bad for home sellers is good for home buyers. Most of us are both, which makes the whole phenomenon pretty much a wash.

A major cause of the misperception, though, is President Bush's sagging popularity. It's clear that many people let their discontent with the president color their view of everything. If he is failing to win the war in Iraq or curb illegal immigration, we assume he must also be coming up short on the economy.

The polls suggest that some people won't acknowledge anything good here lest it suggest competence on the part of a president they can't stand. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 43 percent of Republicans say the economy is fair or poor, but 79 percent of Democrats take that view. "People are giving partisan responses," says public opinion expert Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

This is an error on two counts. The first is that even if George W. Bush were completely incompetent on matters related to our money, which he is not, presidents don't have that much power over the fortunes of the economy. The second is that it's entirely possible for a president to handle one area of policy badly and another one well -- just as a baseball player can be a star at the plate and a klutz in the field.

For a variety of reasons, we just can't be happy with our current prosperity. When things eventually change, trust me: We may not miss Bush, but we will really miss the good times.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Discuss this article online.

Child Abuse? Blame Porn

jsamuel@reason.com (Juliet Samuel) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:15:00 EDT

Australia's Aborigines are being sent to the naughty corner:

Australia's prime minister announced plans Thursday to ban pornography and alcohol for Aborigines in northern areas and tighten control over their welfare benefits to fight child sex abuse among them.
Some Aboriginal leaders rejected the plan as paternalistic and said the measures were discriminatory and would violate the civil rights of the country's original inhabitants. But others applauded the initiative and recommended extending the welfare restrictions to Aborigines in other parts of the country.

Who knew that ending child abuse was as simple as banning porn and booze for indigenous populations? The decision comes in response to a report tying high rates of child abuse with alcohol abuse in the same populations. That report finds that alcohol abuse was a "key factor in the collapse of aboriginal culture." Some Aborigines can think of another key factor:

The plan angered some Aboriginal leaders, who said it was the kind of government behavior that has disenfranchised Aborigines and created the problems in the first place. They also complained they had not been consulted; the government had not previously indicated it was considering such action.

The ban on pornography means that all publicly funded computers will be audited periodically. And all this requires more police, so Howard wants officers shipped over from Australia’s other states.

"I'm absolutely disgusted by this patronizing government control," said Mitch, a member of a government board helping Aborigines who were taken from their parents under past assimilation laws who uses one name. "And tying drinking with welfare payments is just disgusting."

Liberation Finally Arrives in the UK

jsamuel@reason.com (Juliet Samuel) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:45:00 EDT

The UK Department of Communities and Local Government is looking to take on discriminatory golf clubs, among other injustices, in a new Single Equality Act, as proposed in a consultation document released yesterday. The ultimate aim is to simplify some of the UK's 40-odd years of discrimination laws, but the current proposal seems a little off the mark: among its priorities are such (it claims) "common-sense" measures as abolishing inequalities in golf clubs and legally guaranteeing a woman's right to breastfeed in all (public and private) child-friendly venues.

Such legislation is apparently necessary because, as The Guardian reports,

Rosie Dodds of the National Childbirth Trust said: "13% of women in England and 16% in Wales have been asked to stop or made to feel uncomfortable when breastfeeding in a public place."

Private, single-sex organizations would, however, be excluded from the law:

Private clubs and associations - we do not favour preventing people setting up clubs which have membership targeted at one sex or group.

But we believe that people being treated as second class citizens when a club is open to all is not acceptable. For example, there are still golf clubs which restrict the times their female members can have access to club facilities or play during the day or bar them from being part of the running of the club.

This all-or-nothing measure would, of course, directly discourage membership reform among the most traditional private organizations. After all, why grant excluded groups partial membership at all when they would be legally obliged to demand full rights and privileges?

Sterling logic from the British government.

Have We Raised A Generation Of Narcissists?

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 21 May 2007 06:35:00 EDT

Growing older has many drawbacks and one unalloyed pleasure: passing judgment on the younger generation. Lately, people have been scrutinizing the members of Generation Y and finding them deficient.

What's wrong with the kids? A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reported that because they have been told since infancy that they were special, they believe it and expect to keep hearing it. "Bosses, professors and mates are feeling the need to lavish praise on young adults, particularly twentysomethings, or else see them wither under an unfamiliar compliment deficit," it said.

To critics, this generation is an army of self-absorbed narcissists with a swollen sense of entitlement. In my house, I have tried to prevent this outcome by reminding my kids, "The world does not revolve around you. It revolves around me." But apparently some parents didn't dispense that wisdom.

Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, reports that college students increasingly agree with statements indicating oversized egos, such as "I am an important person." Marian Salzman, a senior vice president at the advertising agency JWT, told The Christian Science Monitor, "Gen-Y is the most difficult workforce I've ever encountered," because they "are so self-indulgent."

But before Gen Y-ers start to feel bad about themselves, they should know that worse things were said about their parents. Back in the 1960s and '70s, it was universal wisdom that the kids of that era suffered from too much coddling. Vice President Spiro Agnew blamed student unrest and other problems on "spoiled brats who never had a good spanking." Best-selling author Norman Vincent Peale, author of "The Power of Positive Thinking," complained about youngsters whose parents felt a duty to "satisfy their every desire."

It's a hoot to hear modern kids described as self-indulgent by the generation that created its own culture out of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Talk about a sense of entitlement: When the baby boomers came along, they (we) got the voting age lowered for their benefit. They also demanded that the drinking age be lowered, and it was -- only to be raised once they were safely into adulthood. Narcissism? Not for nothing were boomers dubbed the "Me Generation."

Most of the grousing is just what every new crop of kids hears from its elders, who forget that when they were young, they were equally infuriating. People who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II are known as the "Greatest Generation," but their parents didn't call them that when they were going through puberty. "Bye Bye Birdie," the musical that asked the question, "What's the matter with kids these days?" debuted during the Eisenhower administration.

The young people we accuse of being hopelessly self-satisfied are the same ones who have been told they had to score high on the SAT, get straight A's and cure cancer just to get into a decent college. Far from being hothouse flowers who wilt under pressure, they've coped with high expectations and intense competition.

This year, Harvard accepted only 9 percent of undergraduate applicants, the lowest figure in its history, down from 18 percent in 1983. The same trend is evident at other selective schools.

You would think the epidemic of narcissism would translate into selfish, destructive conduct. But on most counts, today's youngsters comport themselves more responsibly than Mom and Dad did at their age.

In 1977, 29 percent of high-school seniors smoked cigarettes daily. By 2006, only 12 percent did. The number of high-school seniors who regularly use illicit drugs declined by 43 percent during that period, while the number who regularly consume alcohol dropped by more than a third.

Over the last quarter-century, the juvenile arrest rate has fallen as well. Teenage girls are far less likely today than before to get pregnant or to have abortions.

Maybe all that self-esteem has led modern youngsters to the conclusion that their lives and bodies are far too valuable to risk on reckless behavior. Maybe when they hold a high opinion of themselves, it's because they've earned it through diligence and self-restraint.

From all objective indicators, this generation is doing just fine. And if all they need to keep doing it is a steady supply of praise, I say give it to them.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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Laws Against Advertising Intent to Discriminate: Who Do They Help?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 15 May 2007 17:26:00 EDT

Eugene Volokh wonders about housing discrimination laws, and laws that restrict stating preferences in housing ads:

Both under California law and under federal law, it's illegal to tell prospective roomates about one's roommate preference, even when it's legal to actually discriminate based on that preference.....
.....the advertising ban substantially burdens the freedom of intimate association. Though the law doesn't ban the exercise of the right to choose one's roomate as such, it does ban a very important tool through which one can exercise this right, which is advertising. If the lesbian pagan wants to find another lesbian pagan, she'll have a hard time doing that if she has to waste time sorting through dozens of applicants who don't qualify. What's more, she presumably can't even ask them about their sexual orientation or religion, since that itself might be seem as expressing a "discriminatory statement.".....
It's also not clear that the law is doing the discriminated-against roommates any great favor. If people won't rent to me because they're looking for a black or Hispanic or Asian cotenant, I'd rather know that up front, in the ad itself, rather than spending my time doing something that, unbeknownst to me, is entirely futile (and in fact quite lawfully futile, so long as the tenant says nothing to me about her real criteria and her reasons for rejecting me).

Ghetto Capitalists

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:11:00 EDT

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 448 pages, $27.95

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Superdome became a font of myths about the depravity of the urban poor. News reports, widely circulated but never corroborated, described an epidemic of murders, rapes, and other assaults among the thousands stuck waiting in the world’s largest fixed-dome structure. On a widely-quoted episode of the Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson assailed the moral character of the refugees. “In three days,” he said, “they turned the dome into a ghetto.”

The implicit definition of ghetto reflected a popular conception of the least privileged Americans. Polls consistently show that Americans think the poor are more likely to be African American and unemployed than is actually the case, and the dome fed those misconceptions with a fetid 259,000 square feet of photographed paralysis. Katrina, commentators insisted, was a “wake-up call,” but those stock images of the Superdome reinforced a vision of the ghetto as a sloth-filled dead zone. It was a warehouse, not a community; it was packed with black Americans waiting to be saved.

A new book challenges that stereotype of the idle poor and their supposed quiescence before the market economy. In Off the Books, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh posits that if a transaction occurs in the ghetto and no one writes it down, it still counts as trade. His sprawling study of Chicago’s seedy South Side unearths a lively world of exchange in a supposed economic graveyard.

Now a sociologist at Columbia University, Venkatesh spent over a decade immersed in a 10-block neighborhood he calls Maquis Park (a pseudonym) before producing Off the Books. At once an outsider and a welcome participant in the ghetto economy, he found that he was suddenly part of “a vast, often invisible web” of economic exchange. That web supports the residents of Maquis Park and adds a strange sort of order to their existence, tempering chaos and adding predictability to the lives of Chicago’s poor. For the most part, the people he meets seem eager to trade. It’s just that much of what they’re trading isn’t going to meet with the approval of a law-and-order Republican or a bleeding-heart Great Society Democrat.

Take Oceana, a mother of six whose last six months of employment are a picture of elbow-greased, bootstrapping entrepreneurialism. “I picked up garbage for a guy who worked in the city and who was fucking some lady in the van and needed some time off one day,” she tells Venkatesh. “I bought some kids some beer. I always have someone who can’t leave work but who needs a bag [of pot or cocaine]. The lady at the library lets me put the books on the shelves. That minister likes me to walk on his back, or sometimes do a little more, but I’m not talking about that. Unless you paying.” Also on Oceana’s résumé: washing cars, painting houses, and minding a local store while a hooker gives the proprietor a blow job. She summarizes, “I do just about anything and everything, baby.”

Within the fluid economy of Maquis Park, Oceana’s flexibility is extreme but not aberrant. Her neighbors are unlicensed hairstylists, ad hoc caterers, tailors, psychics, and accountants, and typically ply more than one trade at a time. They sell clothes, pirated movies, and used kitchen supplies they call “ghettoware.” Others are gypsy cab drivers, janitors, and mechanics. Some make a quick buck taking over abandoned buildings and offering the space for shelter; others make money with promises to keep police patrols away from the same space.

Taxable income isn’t reported, and the requisite licenses are not obtained. For those reasons, among others, residents are often unwilling to turn to law enforcement when crime hits. Listing the challenges of running an off-the-books car repair service, resident James Arleander first cites the people purportedly protecting him: “First, you are doing something illegal, which means police must be involved. You have to deal with them, and you can either hide [from them] or pay [them].” (Arleander does not specify whether he is hiding or paying.)

Maquis Park’s fortune seekers negotiate between the wider city and their largely isolated neighborhood, spanning the legal and underground economies. A store may be formal in that it has the requisite permits, but it will still conduct most of its activity far from city regulators’ prying eyes. Seventy percent of the neighborhood’s shops employ one or more people off the books, paying in cash, food, liquor, or any number of store products. In a ghetto where police presence is always inadequate, business owners can stave off break-ins by renting out their space after hours to street entrepreneurs: prostitutes, gamblers, hair stylists. When owners need a bit of capital, it’s not banks to which they turn but friends and loan sharks with cash on hand.

The economy Venkatesh describes is frenetic and buoyant, but it is also deeply insular, a raucous party behind closed doors. Ghetto enterprises must rely on community ties for everything from their labor force to their security to their cash flow. Their economic survival thus depends largely on friendships and community relations, less so on contracts and impartial adjudication. As Samuel Wilson, who runs a day care center, puts it, “It’s a small group of us that are really helping each other.…It’s what you do in the inner city, and you can’t lose that. Who’s going to trust you next?”

If the neighborhood’s “vast, invisible web” holds the poor together, it also ensnares them. Local entrepreneurs simply can’t imagine expanding beyond the immediate community. That storied sphere “where everyone knows your name” isn’t simply a special place; it’s all there is. “For the local black merchants,” Venkatesh explains, “other business climates are really just other examples of informal and highly personalized economic relations—like those in Maquis Park —to which they are not privy.”

As Venkatesh stares into this closed economy, he comes to realize that residents cannot see out. To them, the larger business climate is an amalgam of mysterious institutions and backroom dealing. Residents “believe their white counterparts have clandestine connections.” Says a neighborhood businessperson: “I’ve noticed business all over the city and it’s all about hand-shaking, promises, lots of things going on behind closed doors.” The larger world is just a bigger, whiter ghetto, where people are riding on their reputations and sharing wealth among friends. The discrimination may be real, but the idea that a wider economy connects billions of strangers seems utterly alien to the women and men trying to make it on the street.

This lack of perspective isn’t enough to explain the isolation of Maquis Park, and Venkatesh fails to put forward a cogent theory of why the ghetto is an economic island. The fact that the formal economy remains impenetrable to enthusiastic entrepreneurs suggests that something is seriously wrong in Chicago; the city has played a role in walling off the formal economy. Legitimate enterprises adhere to regulations that their ghetto counterparts have no chance of heeding. Businesses in Maquis Park are wont to pay below minimum wage; they are not overseen by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; they frequently lack licenses. Permits, whatever their virtues, make little sense in so mutable a business climate. A shop owner might be selling car parts one day, cutting hair the next. City regulations simply bear no relation to the realities of Maquis Park markets, and every layer of red tape widens the space between marginalized and mainstream entrepreneurs.

There is, of course, another way to make a buck in Maquis Park, one that does connect the neighborhood to the larger city—and its suburbs too. Drugs were the life spring of the community’s economy in the 1960s and ’70s, and the Black Kings, a notorious Chicago gang, financed itself through the illicit trade. But as heroin and crack became less lucrative in the ’90s, the gang’s business interests diversified and matured. Slackening demand for narcotics forced the Kings to find alternate sources of income, from pimping to extortion. If the gang’s cash flow has waned since the crack heyday of the ’80s, its entanglement with the local economy runs deeper than ever. “Back then, there were gangs; today it’s a business,” Venkatesh hears residents comment, with a whiff of nostalgia.

“As Chicago’s working poor entered the year 2000,” Venkatesh explains, “the gang’s advances were making very blurry the lines that divided shady traders from one another.” It becomes even more difficult to separate funds made off the books from those made on them. Local businesses launder their money, and local ministers accept their donations. Gang money feeds the dealers, hairstylists, and hookers alike.

Maquis Park residents, cut off from police protection at least partly because many of them are outlaws themselves, are also vulnerable to the Black Kings’ growing demands. In 2000 the gang’s leader, short on cash due to lagging drug sales, began exacting payment from local businesses in exchange for a bit of security. The payments were not voluntary, and stores were charged monthly fees ranging from $50 to several hundred dollars. In effect, they were being taxed by a shadow government.

Venkatesh does not note the obvious parallels between government coercion and organized crime, and he never probes residents’ feelings toward the police force that has left them to parry the Black Kings on their own. That’s a shame, because the enforcement of drug laws is largely responsible for the neighborhood’s fragile ecosystem. Prohibition pushes up the price of narcotics, feeding the community while leaving most of the attendant economic activity without police protection and vulnerable to plunder. Prohibition also helps fund the Black Kings’ reign, a lawless and often cruel alternative to the city of Chicago.

Venkatesh is also needlessly moralistic in his discussion of prostitution, his disapproval seeping through the veneer of academic objectivity. (He describes the neighborhood’s hookers as “selling their bodies,” a dated and condescending euphemism for sex work.) He can be repetitive and rambling, pumping out page after page on subjects of limited interest, such as the long, dry business histories of community leaders. But if Off the Books sometimes seems like an inelegant information dump, it’s also a gallimaufry of fascinating tidbits about the odd economics of the ghetto.

The book, then, is a reflection of the cityscape Venkatesh limns: chaotic and inconstant, but not without hidden value. Its strongest contribution is his redefinition of the urban landscape. Maquis Park emerges not as a holding pen for the idle poor but as a hub of spirited exchange. It has never made much sense, after all, to characterize the ghetto as both a seat of sloth and a hotbed of vice. Narcotics and guns don’t sell themselves. The wider world may not approve of sex work, but it’s still work.

At the very least, Off the Books should call into question a world in which fixing cars for cash is a criminal enterprise, one where the will to work clashes so constantly with the limits of the law. If Venkatesh’s picture of the ghetto is accurate, the task is not to change the people within its borders, as conservatives would have it, or to ply them with subsidies, as their liberal counterparts would. Ending the isolation of Maquis Park means allowing its bustling informal economy to join the wider network of formal exchange. While that task is freighted with the historic legacy of discrimination, a city truly interested in encouraging ghetto capitalists would erase the lines between the licensed and unlicensed, the permit-carrying barbers and the outlaw beauticians.

There are no licenses, of course, for Maquis Park’s hookers and drug dealers. But if we don’t want poor Americans to conduct transactions off the books, we might reconsider what kind of activity we allow on the books. The ghetto, writes Venkatesh, is “a product of perpetual negotiations, of collusion and compromise, of the constant struggle to survive—to find a purpose for your life, to fulfill your desires, to feed your family.” It’s not a dome full of people waiting to be saved, he might add, but a force to be unleashed.

Kerry Howley is an associate editor of Reason.

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Disney Legalizes Same-Sex Unions

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 11:44:00 EDT

Gay couples are now free to buy a Fairy Tale Wedding package at Disneyland, Disney World, or Disney's cruise ships, with "a ceremony setting befitting the dreams of a princess." The Disney properties have long allowed same-sex couples to tie the knot on the premises, but this is the first time those unions are being given official sanction. The Magic Kingdom has thus proved itself more progressive than the motherland, or as progressive as you can be while throwing around the word "fairy."

The reactions have ranged from the anti-gay activist Sonja Dalton's remark that this would be "a fantasy wedding indeed" to the gossip site TMZ.com's depressed discovery that homosexuals can be tacky too. (It's called camp, darlings.) But the most interesting fact here is just why Disney would change its policy. It wasn't because regulators ordered it to do so. If anything, the government has been increasingly unfriendly to gay unions, with multiple states passing laws refusing to recognize same-sex marriages. Nor was it pressure from activists, though The Advocate reports that "the change follows criticism from LGBT news outlets." (From the other side of the issue, the Southern Baptist Convention boycotted the Disney empire from 1997 to 2005 because of its "promotion of homosexuality.") It was the fact that two potential customers asked to purchase the service, and the company decided it had more to gain from saying yes than saying no.

This is why I don't buy what has been called the Hayekian argument against gay marriage, after F.A. Hayek, the economist and philosopher who celebrated social orders that emerge from below rather than being imposed from above. Jonathan Rauch—who doesn't buy the argument either—summed it up in a 2004 article for Reason. The position, he wrote, "warns of unintended and perhaps grave social consequences if, thinking we're smarter than our customs, we decide to rearrange the core elements of marriage. The current rules for marriage may not be the best ones, and they may even be unfair. But they are all we have, and you cannot re-engineer the formula without causing unforeseen results, possibly including the implosion of the institution itself."

My objection: Marriage isn't being re-engineered. It is evolving in an impeccably Hayekian fashion, as folkways appear on the ground and are gradually ratified by imitation, then market acknowledgement, and then, only lastly, by the law. For eons, same-sex couples have quietly lived as though they were married. As social mores changed and gays came out of the closet, so did those longtime-companion relationships. Before long, lovers were holding their own marriage ceremonies, which were not recognized by the government or (at first) by any established church but did carry weight with family, friends, and neighbors. Couples started to draw up marriage-like contracts, in an effort to establish rights privately that they couldn't acquire publicly. Businesses had to decide whether to extend benefits to gay spouses; with time, more and more did.

All this happened without legislators or judges taking the lead. It happened because a certain number of gay people wanted to live as married, then slowly established institutions that allowed them to do so. Legalizing gay unions—I don't really care if the government calls them "marriages," because what's important is what everyday people call them—doesn't rearrange a core social institution. It recognizes a rearrangement that is already taking place.

The smartest conservative critics of gay marriage understand this. The traditionalist writer Bryce Christensen once published an essay titled "Why Homosexuals Want What Marriage Has Now Become," which said plainly that "homosexual weddings constitute the predictable (not natural, but entirely predictable) culmination of cultural changes that have radically de-natured marriage. Once defined by religious doctrine, moral tradition, and home-centered commitments to child rearing and gender complementarity in productive labor, marriage has become a deracinated and highly individualistic and egalitarian institution." The roots of the change, he wrote, went back to the rise of the industrial economy, when "most men left behind the traditional household economy which had reinforced wedlock for millennia, leaving their wives to work alone in a functionally diminished home."

For Christensen, gay marriage is another step in the wrong direction. But you could as easily argue that even if you find all those changes objectionable, they amount to one less reason to deny gays the same rights as heterosexual couples, one less reason to expect same-sex unions to undermine society. Nor are those changes entirely irreversible—it is possible to imagine a household economy reemerging in a post-industrial context, though there would be substantial differences between it and its pre-industrial counterparts. For one thing, it might be a gay couple now manning (or womaning) the home-based enterprise, with some adopted kids on the premises.

Meanwhile, the world we live in now is increasingly willing to embrace homosexual unions, even if many Americans—and most states—haven't gotten there yet. For an extra fee, couples buying the Fairy Tale Wedding can hire Mickey and Minnie Mouse to attend as guests, sitting in the audience in formal wear. If Mickey is cool with gay marriage, the rest of the country can't be that far behind.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.

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Poor Little Rich Man

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:06:00 EDT

Maybe it's true that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. But the poor are also getting a lot more time to enjoy "our friends, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows." While people in the top 10 percent have about the same amount of leisure time now as their counterparts did in 1965, the bottom 10 percent have gained about 14 hours a week in free time.

Over at Slate, Steven E. Landsburg offers some musings on these surprising facts:

First, man does not live by bread alone. Our happiness depends partly on our incomes, but also on the time we spend with our friends, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. So, it's a good exercise in perspective to remember that by and large, the big winners in the income derby have been the small winners in the leisure derby, and vice versa.
Second, a certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing—usually through some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the trends of the past 40 years—say, by rounding up all those folks with extra time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself what—if anything—is the fundamental difference.

Read the original study here.

In Search of the Average American

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:35:00 EST

Last week, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a “Portrait of Generation Next,” a wide-ranging collection of survey data from Americans aged 18-25. The report collapsed a generation into a few crisp adjectives. Generation Nexters, it turns out, are tolerant, tech-savvy, idealistic, and liberal-leaning. And alongside all of their catalogued assumptions, one goes unsaid: None of them will find it strange that they and 42 million peers have been distilled into a press release.

As Sarah Igo points out in her new book The Averaged American (Harvard University Press), people haven’t always been so welcoming of large-scale attempts to lump them together. Surveyors, argues Igo, popularized the concept of a mass public as they defined its boundaries. As they framed a snapshot of the nation’s collective psyche, early pollsters were giving often-resistant Americans a new—and often distorted—way of thinking about themselves. In her engaging history of the surveyors and the surveyed, Igo, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that surveys and polls have helped generate the very idea of the archetypical American.

Reason: What does it mean to be part of a mass public?

Sarah Igo: The way people have talked about that in the past was very wrapped up with being a consumer. That people were listening to the same radio shows of watching the same television programs, buying the same kinds of products, and to me that was always kind of unsatisfying. I didn’t think products necessarily made one feel part of anything larger. What I discovered was that statistical information, bastardized and popularized, was a deeper way for people to understand that they belonged to something larger than a family or a particular community. It gave people a way to look at the nation in a very new way. I think that kind of statistical information, where people could find themselves in the numbers, or sometimes not find themselves, was a very powerful technology for understanding this whole, or this mass.

The word mass has an interesting history, but it's often been portrayed very negatively. I think there is something more interesting going on in people's recognition of themselves, or sometimes misrecognition of themselves, in the numbers that surveyors provided.

Reason: How did surveys become a way to define the average rather than the marginal?

Igo: Surveys go centuries back, but in the modern period, in the 19^th century, they were really used as a tool of social control, of policing almost—of poor people, marginal people, black migrants, immigrants—by social reformers. And it's really not until the 20^th century that you get surveys attempting to query "normal, ordinary" Americans—white, middle class folks. I think there is an expected conflation in the 20s 30s 40s 50s of that character—the normal American—with white middle class subjects. And then there is a movement in the 60s and 70s, both in survey research itself and in the wider social cultural political world, to pay greater attention to people who had been neglected in earlier surveys. It happens in medical studies, in epidemiology, women's health activists for example, where women who had not been medical subjects suddenly asked why there hadn’t been any attention paid to breast cancer.

Reason: The gay rights movement has used survey numbers to gain legitimacy. Is a surveyed America a more tolerant America?

Igo: I think that may be true now. I don’t think that was true in the earlier surveys. The earlier surveys, bound by their own time and place and presuppositions, did elevate a certain kind of profile as typical, or average, or mainstream, often not deliberately. I don’t think these surveyors set out with that goal in mind, but their image of who the average American was was tempered by race and class and even geological region. I think that's why Middletown took off the way it did; it played into but also advanced the idea that the real Americans were native whites. There is always a bit of slippage that allows for preconceptions or stereotypes or certain kinds of simplifications to enter into these pictures of who we are. That said, I do think more careful kinds of statistical analyses that take into account minority positions have made for a more tolerant and certainly more diverse picture of "who we are."

Reason: What do you make of claims that America is losing its common culture?

Igo: There is this nostalgia for some kind of homogenous-and I think idealized and impossible-commonality in a nation this diverse. That's always been a kind of national fantasy. And that fantasy was strongest in the period where surveys really took hold at the national level.

People now look back, sometimes using survey data, to the 1950s and say we were a country that was much more unified, much more harmonious. I suspect that's not true. But that's the image that these surveys projected. The earlier surveys, bound by their own time and place and presuppositions, elevated a certain kind of profile as typical, or average, or mainstream.

People have talked about cosmopolitanism as a solution—a pluralistic way of thinking and being. I think that may be a more promising ideal than the notion that there was some archtypical American culture that we can get back to.

Reason: Aren't these anxieties as old as the country itself?

Igo: If you look back at the 19th century, very few people assumed Americans were automatically the same kind of people. There were attempts to Americanize, but there was much more recognition than there is now that there was a vast array of different kinds of people, cultures, traditions, that existed. We somehow think now that there was something shared that has been lost. I've become convinced that that's not true.

Reason: How have not-so-average Americans used survey data?

Igo: One of the most interesting actual uses of statistical data has been the gay rights movement using [Alfred] Kinsey's figures to proclaim that they are 10 percent of the population. There is a Boston radio station that calls itself 1 in 10 and is designed for the gay and lesbian community there. That suggests to me that a group believes higher numbers lead to a kind of legitimacy in the public sphere, but also something problematic. If you've put your energies into establishing that number as something significant politically, you run into trouble if you discover that number is not actually representative. And that figure has been attacked again and again both by statisticians and from people on the right.

Reason: What does the self-help industry owe to survey techniques?

Igo: The self-help industry plays to some of the same desires that Americans have: to confess, to answer questions, to know themselves better, and to know how they fit into a statistical distribution. The quizzes in women's magazines that you can fill out, check a bunch of boxes, to find out what kind of person you are—I think that owes quite a debt to survey techniques. The idea that a set of questions tells you more about yourself than you already knew is part of a 20^th century modern movement toward a certain kind of self-consciousness.

Tea Leaves 2007

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 04:58:00 EST

What does not exist and never has existed, yet is our most precious possession, because it is all we have left? -- Joseph Cornish.

The future, of course. For the past couple of years I have tried my hand at predicting the political, social, economic, and scientific events of the upcoming year. So how did I do last year?

CORRECT PREDICTIONS

My proudest predictive success made last January 2nd was: "A rising tide of voter disgust with corruption will toss the Republicans out of the U.S. House of Representatives in November elections and a new blessed era of gridlocked government will begin." I failed to realize that voter disgust would also turn the Republicans out of the Senate. Still my bet that the House would turn over garnered me two expensive dinners. With regard to politics, I was also right that President George Bush would continue to renege on his old promises to reform social security, overhaul federal taxes, and lower the Federal budget deficit. I also correctly and happily foresaw that Congress would not pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Embarrassingly for a science correspondent, my forecasts for scientific firsts were not so good (see below). I did correctly foresee that the space shuttle would not be launched in May (in fact it took off in July). In addition, no cloned human babies were born. And the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine did issue $14 million in "training" grants (albeit from private donations). I'll claim this one even though the spigot will really get turned on in 2007. And as bravely predicted, no asteroid hit the earth in 2006.

On the environment, I was right that no further commitments to reduce greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol will be reached at the 12th United Nations' climate change conference in Nairobi.

In international news, I was correctly foresaw that Saddam Hussein would be convicted of crimes against humanity. And that Russia's tendency toward authoritarianism would grow. It's harder to evaluate my claim that China would move toward more liberalization in 2006; there were certainly no really strong signs that that is happening.

As predicted, crime was up a bit in 2006, while the number of prisoners in American jails rose by 1.9 percent. A record number are on probation and parole. The Drug War continues to fail in nearly every sense.

PREMATURE AND JUST PLAIN WRONG PREDICTIONS

I could say, "Why dwell on past mistakes. Let's just move on." But what fun is that?

In politics, I predicted that outrage over illegal wire-tapping and other violations of our civil liberties would prompt Congress to roll back some of the most egregious provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT. I was wrong. I also prognosticated that revulsion over the Korean stem cell fraud in 2005 would prevent Congress from passing legislation that would ease President Bush's restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research. Happily in this case I was wrong too. Both the House and Senate passed such legislation which provoked President Bush's only veto to date. I was also mistaken about Congress refusing to sanction the building of a wall across the U.S./Mexico border. In fact, our solons have authorized the building of 700 miles of such a wall.

Science: I predicted that a lab would have successfully derived stem cells from cloned human embryos and that the FDA would approve the first use of embryonic stem cells to repair crushed spinal cords. Neither happened, though researchers in Oregon did inject fetal neural cells into the brain of boy who is suffering from Batten disease.

Environment: Contrary to my hopeful prognostication, the number of hungry people in the world increased by 4 million in 2006.

On economics, I was right that peak oil fears would subside, but I was wrong about how low oil prices would go. I predicted $50 per barrel, and prices got to within $5 of that. I can't forbear pointing out that some allegedly very savvy people were predicting $262 per barrel in 2006. Ha!

It is with considerable dismay that I report that I was wrong when I said that the number of American troops in Iraq would drop below 100,000 by the end of 2006. Now it looks like the Bush administration will be sending even more.

So swishing the tea leaves around in the cup, what do they tell me will happen in 2007?

POLITICS

Ok, the first one is not for 2007, but for 2008. I predict that Barack Hussein Obama will be the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. This will become clearer throughout 2007. Why? The Jack Kennedy phenomenon. He is attractive. And he has no record, which means that voters can project whatever hopes and dreams they have onto him.

Stem cell legislation will pass again. This time it may be attached to a bill that President Bush wants (say some Defense appropriation) so he may actually hold his nose and sign it.

The Democratic Congress will expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program to cover poor adults, bringing the proportion of health care financed by government perilously close to 50 percent. Bush will sign it. We fall further down the slippery slope to universal (that is socialized) health insurance.

A higher federal minimum wage will pass even though it applies to only about 2.5 percent of workers.

SCIENCE

OK, this year the FDA will approve the use of stem cells derived from human embryos to treat crushed spinal cords.

Researchers will create a stem cell line from cloned human embryos for the first time.

I think I will stick with my prediction that a cloned human baby will be born before 2010, although time is running out and the science is not progressing as fast as I had thought. For example, there are still no primates cloned from adult cells yet (somatic cell nuclear transfer).

No one will become ill as a result of eating foods made from ingredients derived currently available biotech crops or cloned animals.

ECONOMICS

The price of a barrel of oil will fall below $50.

As a result, ethanol mania will cool.

One euro will cost $1.50. (It's $1.31 now.)

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will receive the first application for building a new nuclear power plant since 1973.

ENVIRONMENT

There will be no new commitments for limiting greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol made a the next U.N. climate change conference in December 2007.

Criteria air pollutants will continue their decline in the United States.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Saddam Hussein will be executed for his crimes. Apparently quite soon. In any case, he will go to Hell, if it exists.

There will be no successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Civil war will break out between Hamas and Fatah.

World population growth rate will continue to slow.

World deforestation will continue to slow. U.S. forest area will continue to expand.

CRIME

After years of falling, the average violent crime rate in the U.S. will remain essentially flat, rising or falling by no more than 2.5 percent.

The U.S. rape rate will continue to fall from its height in 1992.

And oh yeah, the Drug War will continue uselessly and destructively on.

It seems unlikely that our prison population can grow by much more, so I predict that the increase next year will be under 1 percent.

On an endnote of modesty I quote management guru Peter Drucker: "Forecasting is not a respectable human activity and not worthwhile beyond the shortest of periods." Hey, I'm just trying to look one year forward here. I hope that any of my less than happy predictions are false, and that we all have a much happier New Year.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

No More Coulters!

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 05:41:00 EST

Boston Globe

Diversity in higher education was a major topic of discussion at a recent conference in Cambridge. The focus, however, was not on the familiar concept of diversity as a desirable mix of races, genders, and ethnic groups. Rather, participants deplored the lack of intellectual and political diversity on college campuses.

The National Organization of Scholars, which held the conference Nov. 17-19, emerged in the late 1980s in response to "political correctness" in the academy. The group is widely perceived as conservative, much to the consternation of some members who are liberal Democrats but are put off by the prevailing orthodoxy in the universities. One star speaker at the event was Boston-based lawyer Harvey Silverglate, a liberal champion of civil liberties, who noted that many statements that would be considered normal, if debatable, expressions of opinion anywhere else are regarded as discriminatory on college campuses.

Numerous studies confirm that most college faculty lean left, especially in the more prestigious institutions. At a time when political discourse in American society in general has shifted noticeably to the right, some people wonder why an academy that tilts left is a problem: The universities, they argue, are islands in a sea of conservatism. But no academic institution can thrive on uniformity; liberalism itself can turn illiberal when isolated from different ideas. What's more, the marginalization of right-of-center ideas in the academy may have a lot to do modern conservatism's transformation into a caricature of itself.

That marginalization is evident. Some academic programs, particularly in such areas as women's studies, education, and social work, explicitly push for left-leaning social change. On one panel, Brooklyn College historian Robert Johnson offered a striking example of intellectual uniformity. He noted that, according to its website, the University of Michigan history department has 26 full-time professors teaching American history. Eleven of them focus on race and ethnicity in America, while another nine specialize in women's history. There are no military or diplomatic historians.

To what extent this imbalance penalizes alternative viewpoints is hard to establish. In a recent survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni at 50 top colleges and universities, nearly half of students said the presentation of contemporary political issues and controversies in classes, campus panels, and lecture series was too one-sided, and nearly a third felt they had to agree with a professor's political views in order to get good grades. On many campuses, there is a general sense that you have to be a liberal to fit in. In a post-conference interview, Johnson said that the problem was not so much retaliation against students with dissenting opinions as "one-sided instruction to students that don't have the educational or intellectual background to detect the bias and challenge a professor's viewpoint."

Some conservatives advocate legislative interference as a solution. Activist David Horowitz has been pushing for an "Academic Bill of Rights" that would not only protect dissenting students from classroom retaliation but also guarantee the inclusion of balanced viewpoints in the curriculum. This effort has gone nowhere.

In his talk at the conference, Johnson took a dim view of such efforts. Given conservative support for including "intelligent design" in the biology curriculum, he noted, a mandate of "balance" in teaching could be used to smuggle creationism into science classrooms at public universities. Yet he also outlined legislative remedies that could work: Fund programs that would expose students to ideas currently neglected or marginalized in the academy; conduct oversight hearings on the lack of intellectual diversity on campuses; abolish speech codes that often result in suppressing politically incorrect opinions on race, gender, and sexuality within college courses.

When stifled on campuses, right-of-center ideas don't just go away. These days, they are expressed -- in pungent manner -- on talk radio, and in overtly political journalism and publishing. Such outlets have increased in prominence, and universities have lost influence over American politics. When intellectual life is seen as a bastion of the left, conservatism devolves from intellectual giants like the late Milton Friedman to intellectual thugs like Ann Coulter -- with dangerous consequences for the political climate.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.