February 21, 2006
Should Gays Be Allowed to Adopt?
USA Today is covering the growing backlash against gay adoption:
Efforts to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children are emerging across the USA as a second front in the culture wars that began during the 2004 elections over same-sex marriage.As a staunch supporter of gay marriage--though an opponent of attempts by courts to impose the practice--gay adoption seems to me the most difficult question society faces with regards to gay rights.Steps to pass laws or secure November ballot initiatives are underway in at least 16 states, adoption, gay rights and conservative groups say. Some — such as Ohio, Georgia and Kentucky — approved constitutional amendments in 2004 banning gay marriage.
"Now that we've defined what marriage is, we need to take that further and say children deserve to be in that relationship," says Greg Quinlan of Ohio's Pro-Family Network, a conservative Christian group.
On most matters, marriage included, I find it morally impermissible for society to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, a trait I regard as intrinsic, not chosen.
Moreover my gay friends and acquaintances leave me quite convinced that the love gay couples feel for one another is no different than the love felt for one another by heterosexuals, and that the benefits they'd garner from marriage are as profound.
If you believe that committed, monogomous relationships are the best chance for a happy life and a good society, as many conservatives do, extending marriage rights to gays seems like a no-brainer.
Gay adoption is trickier because even those of us who normally demand that the law treat gays equally must weigh the welfare of another party: the child. When it comes to the system we set up for adoption, I care very little about fairness for adoptive parents because my priority is the welfare of the child.
So the question arises: is a child better off with heterosexual parents?
I don't know the answer. But my intuition is that all else being equal heterosexual parents are better for a child. People relate to men in ways largely influenced by their own father, and to women in ways largely influenced by their own mother. Since every child must relate to men and women in their lives, it makes sense to me that the lack of either sex as a primary caregiver is less than ideal.
That leads me to a conclusion I'm rather uncomfortable with: if forced to choose between a heterosexual couple and a gay couple I'd award adoption rights to the hetereosexual couple first, assuming that all else is equal.
That said, I find an outright ban on gay adoptive parents foolhardy. After all, all else is seldom equal. Sure, consider whether perspective parents will be able to provide a child with a role model of each sex. But there are many other factors that determine whether someone ought to be a good parent. An appropriate decision will weigh all these factors.
Moreover, it isn't as if we have so many willing adoptive parents that we ought to be turning good couples away simply because they're gay.
Julian Sanchez makes the same point in Reason Magazine:
...visit Florida and ask a child in foster care which makes him feel more threatened: the thought of being raised by homosexuals, or the prospect of an indefinite number of years spent passing through an indefinite number of homes.His whole essay is a quite convincing argument against bans on gay adoption.
Posted by Conor at 03:36 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
February 13, 2006
Great Moments in Public Education
The Chicago Sun Times reports:
A 12-year-old Aurora boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project this week has been charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug, Aurora police have confirmed.The school district's stance:The sixth-grade student at Waldo Middle School was also suspended for two weeks from school after showing the bag of powdered sugar to his friends.
The boy, who is not being identified because he is a juvenile, said he brought the bag to school to ask his science teacher if he could run an experiment using sugar.
Two other boys asked if the bag contained cocaine after he showed it to them in the bathroom Wednesday morning, the boy's mother said.
He joked that it was cocaine, before telling them, "just kidding," she said.
Aurora police arrested the boy after a custodian at the school reported the boy's comments.
The dangers of illegal drugs and controlled substances are clear. Look-alike drugs and substances can cause that same level of danger because staff and students are not equipped to differentiate between the two.Yes, that's right, the school officials assert that a bag of powdered sugar is as dangerous as a bag of cocaine. The mind reels.
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February 12, 2006
AIDS and Entry into America
Andrew Sullivan argues that HIV positive people shouldn't be kept out of the United States:
I'm delighted to see that the Homeland Security Department has temporarily waived the ban on any non-American with HIV from entering the United States for the Gay Games in Chicago this summer. It's still stunning to me, however, that the Bush administration, which has done so much to advance treatment for people with HIV and AIDS in the developing world, should still be perpetuating stigma by keeping the (largely unenforceable) ban on all HIV-positive visitors from legal entry into the U.S. Nothing stigmatizes a disease more than a country saying that no-one with HIV can enter its borders or become one of its citizens if he or she is HIV-positive. Being HIV-positive should not bar anyone from becoming an American citizen. But it does. You could remove the worry about people coming to the U.S. for free medical care by adjusting waiver requirements to ensure that immigrants have private health insurance before they get here. The stigma can be ended - if the administration finds a way.Anyone want to offer a counterargument?
Posted by Conor at 05:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 11, 2006
Are Boys Falling Behind at School?
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Despite extensive outreach programs and dire predictions about their futures, there is a minority group growing ever smaller on college campuses.It seems no matter what anyone says or does, the trend cannot be reversed. Fewer and fewer of them attend college.
The minority group? Men.
This trend has been getting a lot of press attention lately. The New Republic tackled it here:
Nearly every chart told the same story. Boys are over 50 percent more likely than girls to repeat grades in elementary school, one-third more likely to drop out of high school, and twice as likely to be identified with a learning disability. The response? Near-total silence.
Newsweek dedicated a cover story to the topic:
They're kinetic, maddening and failing at school. Now educators are trying new ways to help them succeed.
The Atlantic Monthly gets credit for being first, tackling the topic way back in 2000:
This we think we know: American schools favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is the very opposite. By virtually every measure, girls are thriving in school; it is boys who are the second sex.
But Slate says they're all full of hot air.
I understand The Missing Link is lucky enough to have a couple high school classes among its readers. Do these stories ring true to you? Or are adult journalists so out of touch with what's going on at today's high schools that they've got the story all wrong? Your comments are welcome.
Posted by Conor at 02:23 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
February 09, 2006
Sue Happy America
The soft drink lawsuits are coming.
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Why We Should Clap for the Invisible Hand
Clive Crook offers a rousing defense of capitalism in the Atlantic Monthly:
Capitalism is prey to excesses, self-evidently, and it creates, or leaves unattended, a host of problems that decent societies must address by other means. Even so, the prevailing culture of suspicion and disappointment is at odds with the facts. Mainly, what is missing is awe. Premodern scholars (Karl Marx is an exception) could scarcely have imagined the material advance that capitalism has delivered. Certainly Adam Smith never dreamed that his “invisible hand� would arrange things so well.If you're lucky enough to subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly like me, read the whole thing.In the late 1980s, as Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on his perestroika program of economic reform, Soviet officials were sent abroad to see how things were done in the West. One visited London’s main vegetable market. He asked how the market was organized, and how prices were set. He was told that the individual traders bought whatever quantities they wished, and set their own prices, and that these fluctuated throughout the day as the balance of supply and demand changed. At this, the Soviet visitor laughed. He said he understood that this was the official line—but, please, how did the market really set prices?
That, in fact, was the reaction of an intelligent man. It is fantastically improbable that markets work, at scale, as well as they do. It is astonishing that in an economy of America’s size—to say nothing of the world economy as a whole—a limitless variety of goods and services is continuously offered at prices people are willing to pay, without persistent gluts or shortages, entirely without central direction. That the system also calls forth an endless flow of innovation and improvement is a miracle. The man from Moscow was right to be incredulous.
And it gets better, because this infinitely complicated, decentralized system has an obvious affinity with personal liberty, in a way that a centrally directed system never could.
Posted by Conor at 11:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Contemporary Music, Already Formulaic, Seeks Better Formula
Interesting new research:
The mystery of what makes a hit has perplexed song writers and marketers as long as there has been popular music.So if you want to write a hit song... just write a hit song!And in the end, the next hit song may be -- like love -- unpredictable.
But a new study has come up with an intriguing clue: People will select a song if they think others like it.
Actually, this whole subject has been anticipated in my still-in-progress novel, which hypothesizes that record company executives should be careful what they wish for:
Early music industry studies analyzed the neurological pleasure that accompanies various chord progressions and lyrical accompaniments, with competing labels in a musical space race to plant corporate flags on The Technically Perfect Song’s virgin landscape…Patent lawyers may want to save this post for future litigation.…Until a 1990s pop idol turned MCA executive realized you can only sell the perfect song once. And so hypothesized (correctly, it turns out) a less risky, more profitable path to music industry success: create software that costlessly composes catchy songs.
The MCA patented process has resulted in fail safe best-sellers in the 12 to 22-year-old demographic, with singles inexorably turning gold then platinum, outselling even the very best selling traditionally composed songs (which, paradoxically, consumers claim to like more).
Posted by Conor at 02:53 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
February 07, 2006
Movies and Liberalism
Apropos this post a commenter writes:
In considering a film’s viewpoint, one has to regard what was occurring during that particular era of which it was a product. Were gender roles changing? Was homosexuality becoming more tolerated? Changes in issues such as these contribute to a film’s ability to be more controversial.I think this is partly right: societal changes are reflected in films, and society has become more liberal in many ways since, say, the 1950s.
The film industry is constantly changing. Traditional values are questioned and in regards to the issue of censorship, what was typically considered forbidden to show in theaters is now being deemed acceptable. Gender roles are shifting as women in film are becoming more outspoken.
But liberal ideas aren't the only ones that challenge the status quo. Consider The Incredibles, a film in which trial lawyers and societal prejudice against excellence forces superheroes into retirement. "Everyone is special," the superhero mother tells her superhero son, who must hide his talents to spare the feelings of other kids. "That's just another way of saying no one is," he replied. (I'm quoting from memory, but that's about right.)
A cult of equality and self-esteem are elements of liberalism that have been established as societal norms. The Incredibles was a thoughtful challenge to those pieties.
I submit that it stands as the exception to the rule, too. Generally speaking Hollywood movies aggressively challenge the status quo when it advances liberal notions, but hardly ever challenges the status quo if it means challenging liberal orthodoxies.
Posted by Conor at 05:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Middle Class, the Poor and Marriage
In City Journal Kay Hymowitz argues that the wealth gap in America is largely due to the different decisions the rich and the poor make about marriage:
Why would women working for a pittance at the supermarket cash registers decide to have children without getting married, while women writing briefs at Debevoise & Plimpton, who could easily afford to go it alone, insist on finding husbands before they start families? For a long time, social scientists assumed, reasonably enough, that economic self-sufficiency would lead more women to opt for single motherhood. And to listen to the drone of complaint about men around water coolers, in Internet chat rooms, on the Oxygen Network, and in Maureen Dowdworld, there would seem to be plenty of potential recruits for Murphy Browndom. Certainly when they talk to pollsters, women say that they don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a baby without a husband. Yet the women who are forgoing husbands are precisely the ones who can least afford to do so.Go here to read her theory.The conventional answer to the puzzle is this: in an economy marked by manufacturing decline, especially in cities, too many of the potential husbands for low-income women are either flipping burgers, unemployed, or in jail—in other words, poor marriage material. But three facts raise doubts about this theory.
One, it’s not just unemployed men or McDonald’s cooks who have become marriage-avoidant; working-class men with decent jobs are also shying from the altar. Two, cohabitation among low-income couples has been increasing; about 40 percent of all out-of-wedlock babies today are born to cohabiting parents. Why would there be a dearth of marriageable men, when there appear to be plenty of cohabitable fathers? And three, marriage improves the economic situation of low-income women, even if their husbands are only deliverymen or janitors. In a large and highly regarded study, the Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman concluded that married, low-income, low-educated women enjoyed significantly higher living standards than comparable single mothers. Joe Sixpack may not be Mr. Darcy, but financially, at any rate, he’s a lot better than no husband at all.
Still, whatever the arguments against it, the no-marriageable-men theory is entrenched in policy circles and in the academy and is unlikely to go anywhere soon, so let’s try another approach to the Marriage Gap conundrum. Instead of asking why poor and near-poor women have stopped marrying before having children, let’s think instead about why educated women continue to do so—even though, in order to be accepted in polite company or to put food on the table, they don’t need to.
Posted by Conor at 02:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 06, 2006
The Great Zucchini Revisited
If you read The Peekaboo Paradox, an article I recommended a few days ago, this online chat with the reporter may interest you. It includes material edited out of the original story.
(If you didn't read it... you should.)
The reporter also reveals his favorite expense account item ever: $100 to receive a massage he needed to write this story.
Posted by Conor at 03:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Future of Entertainment
Did you miss Kobe's 81 point game?
Thanks to Google's new video service you can buy it for $3.95.
Welcome to the future of entertainment.
Posted by Conor at 02:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Why Is the Typical Hollywood Movie Liberal?
If you think that Hollywood movies are typically liberal, as many Americans do, you probably attribute it to the mostly liberal producers, directors and actors who make the movies.
Matthew Yglesias challenges that conventional wisdom, arguing that Hollywood movies are left- of-center because their target audience is left of center:
Teenagers go to a lot of movies. They need reasons to get out of the house away from the prying eyes of their parents, and can't legally participate in a lot of nightlife activities. As a result, there's a relatively low bar you need to cross to convince a teen to go to your movie. Parents with kids at home are the reverse -- it's expensive for them to hire a sitter for the kids, and since they don't get that many opportunities to spend an evening out the opportunity cost of going to the movies is high. So you need to cross a pretty high bar to get them to go out to the movies. Last, insofar as you live in a densely-populate area, it's much more convenient to go to the movies.If Yglesias is right the shift in the movie industry from theater revenue to DVD and at-home-on-demand revenue should trigger a rightward shift in on-screen politics.As a result, the audience that studios are trying to appeal to is younger, more childless, and more urban than the American population as a whole.
These also happen to be the demographic characteristics of American liberalism. So it's not that surprising that rationally self-interested movie studios would be much more inclined to push projects designed to appeal to liberals than projects designed to appeal to conservatives.
Network television is run by a very similar group of people as those who make movies, but it has very different demographic characteristics. As a consequence of this, and notwithstanding The West Wing, you see a huge number of shows on network television propounding a very right wing depiction of the criminal justice system.
Of course, there are those who argue that Hollywood is quite conservative.
Posted by Conor at 01:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 31, 2006
The Great Zucchini
The Washington Post has published the best article I've read in a long time... about a man who calls himself The Great Zucchini.
This unmarried, 35-year-old community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek. Not bad for a complete idiot.Read the whole thing--you won't be sorry.
Posted by Conor at 11:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack