The Obama effect

I would never use anecdotal evidence to argue a serious trend. But I do like to use my experiences as a pretext to make horrible generalizations. So let me do that...

The other day at B&N, I noticed a few black families in the children's section with their kids picking out books and reading. This was two days after the president's NAACP speech, which emphasized active parenting, among other things, to solve serious problems in the black community:

To parents -- to parents, we can't tell our kids to do well in school and then fail to support them when they get home. (Applause.) You can't just contract out parenting. For our kids to excel, we have to accept our responsibility to help them learn. That means putting away the Xbox -- (applause) -- putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. (Applause.) It means attending those parent-teacher conferences and reading to our children and helping them with their homework. (Applause.)

And by the way, it means we need to be there for our neighbor's sons and daughters. (Applause.) We need to go back to the time, back to the day when we parents saw somebody, saw some kid fooling around and -- it wasn't your child, but they'll whup you anyway. (Laughter and applause.) Or at least they'll tell your parents -- the parents will. You know. (Laughter.) That's the meaning of community. That's how we can reclaim the strength and the determination and the hopefulness that helped us come so far; helped us make a way out of no way.

It also means pushing our children to set their sights a little bit higher. They might think they've got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can't all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne. (Applause.) I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers -- (applause) -- doctors and teachers -- (applause) -- not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. (Applause.) I want them aspiring to be the President of the United States of America. (Applause.)

Perhaps it's just racist of me to assume that there aren't already a lot of black families going to B&N on a Sunday afternoon, but I've been in a lot of bookstores and it definitely made an impression on me as something I don't see often (anecdotal, I know). I guess I'm prone to overestimating the effect that Obama will have on black culture. The fact that so many children are born out-of-wedlock to black women is tied directly to perpetuating the cycle of poverty and crime.

While 28 percent of white women gave birth out of wedlock in 2007, nearly 72 percent of black women and more than 51 percent of Latinas did.

That is just unbelievable. Part of it may be that white women are more likely to be on birth control, part of it may be that white women are more likely to have the financial resources to get an abortion. Adding to this problem comes the higher religiosity of black women, which will guilt them into thinking they shouldn't have an abortion and instead drop out of college.

Some part of me just thinks that having a black president really has and really will continue to make a serious difference in the cultural attitude of black America. Maybe I'm overly naive.

I also wonder if there's any evidence of this in the serious drop in violent crime rates:

The District, New York and Los Angeles are on track for fewer killings this year than in any other year in at least four decades. Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities are also seeing notable reductions in homicides.

"Experts did not see this coming at all," said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist and professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Time will tell, I guess...

On contraception and religious right troglodytes

Sometimes I think it's easier just to look forward and try to put behind us the regressive and ridiculous policies of the past decade, and especially social conservatism spearheaded by religious right troglodytes. However, we have to raise awareness of the real harm done by programs run by people like this. For example, in many nations, people are so poor they scavenge garbage dumps but are not given access to birth control (and are threatened with excommunication) because of the shameful and absurd Catholic Church. In Africa, millions are dying from AIDS and hunger but Bush's programs (for all the legacy spin) cause more death because they place all emphasis on "abstinence" and do not provide the sort of comprehensive sex ed and contraception options that are effective.

Bush appointed a birth control opponent to head the agency in charge of family planning: the Dept. of Health and Human Services. The religious right doesn't just want to prevent abortion. They want to control your reproductive rights. Specifically, they want to end all forms of birth control and there's a clear (although perhaps subconscious) reason why: religion is hereditary. The one surefire way to increase the number of parishioners in the church is to breed them. The church could care the less what quality life your children have -- that's between you and Jesus -- but they want to make sure you have children who are in the pews.

If the religious right was actually interested in human welfare, they'd support comprehensive sex ed and realize that countries with no reproductive rights are those with the highest rates of abortion. But they don't live in the reality-based community.

*UPDATE: Add another study to document the failure of "abstinence pledges" to do anything but increase STDs and teen pregnancies*

17 yo unwed Bristol Palin is pregnant

Bristol Palin is five months pregnant. The McCain camp claims they knew...

...great judgment, McCain ;-)

In seriousness, I read the rumors that she (rather than her mom) had been pregnant with Trig with a lot of skepticism but a little bit of hope from a purely political perspective: I thought that such a scandal would be good for November. After talking to a friend of mine, I started to realize that the RR would just say, "It's better than an abortion." The same probably applies here.

The absurd policies of the Religious Right bear rotten fruit: 1 in 4 teenage girls who are sexually active have at least one STD. The rates of teen pregnancy are rising again after years of decline during the Clinton years with comprehensive sex ed. There's also a sad race gap: more than one half of black girls have one, compared to only 20% of whites and Latinos. The teenagers themselves aren't in the least surprised. See this or this piece of mine for more stats related to "abstinence only" education and abortions.

See this excellent item on the RR's policies of "marriage promotion" as well.

McCain at Saddleback and the "POW card"

Saddleback was a loser for Obama from the start. The framing of the questions and the crowd were obviously not in his favor, and he is a thoughtful conversationist while McCain literally recites bullet-point-type responses that are trite. ("The moment of conception" being one of the clearest.) Besides the fact that no one catches the logical contradiction in McCain on his support for IVF and stem cell research, while saying that these viable embryos have "human rights", it is a tired and arbitrary way to frame the debate. Why not say that sperm have human rights?

Then, the news that McCain was not in the "cone of silence" seemed to confirm a lot of suspicions that McCain was a little too quick with his responses, and that they were far more cogent than his usual fumbling, bumbling talking points. Which is not to say that they weren't just talking points, as even Jack Cafferty rips him for.

Besides his uncharacteristic quickness and coherence, there were two particular things that struck me about McCain's performance that seems to indicate he had the questions in advance:

1. He jumped ahead of Warren on the Supreme Court justices:
   

   MCCAIN: A union -- a union between man and woman, between one man and one woman. That's my definition of marriage.
   
   Could I -- are we going to get back to the importance of Supreme Court Justices or should I mention --
   
   WARREN: We will get to that.
   
   MCCAIN: OK. All right. OK.
   
   WARREN: You're jumping ahead...

2. He answered a question on education in exactly the format that Obama was given the question, although Warren had not yet given him the full question.

   [Warren with Obama]
   
   Q. OKAY LET’S GO TO EDUCATION. AMERICA RIGHT NOW 23 RANKS 19TH IN HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION. WE’RE FIRST IN INCARCERATIONS.
   
   A. NOT GOOD.
   
   Q. NOT GOOD. 80 PERCENT OF AMERICANS RECENT POLE SAID THEY BELIEVE IN MERIT PAY FOR TEACHERS.
   
   1. I’M NOT ASKING DO YOU THINK ALL TEACHERS SHOULD GET A RAISE.
   
   2. DO YOU THINK BETTER TEACHERS SHOULD BE PAID BETTER?
   
   3. THEY SHOULD BE MAKING MORE THAN POOR TEACHERS?
   
   [Warren to McCain]
   
   Q ABOUT 80 PERCENT OF AMERICA SAYS THEY SUPPORT MERIT PAY FOR THE BEST TEACHERS. NOW, I DON’T WANT TO HEAR YOUR STUMP SPEECH ON EDUCATION?
   
   A YES. YES. AND FIND BAD TEACHERS ANOTHER LINE OF WORK.
   
   Q YOU KNOW –
   
   A CAN I –
   
   Q YOU ARE ANSWERING SO QUICKLY.
   
   A CAN I –
   
   Q YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME OF POKER?

Even Warren notes how he seems to be reading his mind (poker). This is a little too convenient for me.

You can read the transcript here to confirm the accuracy of this.

The relevant section of the video for the education policy is between 2:00 and 2:56 --

Now, another thing I'd point to is this ridiculous response by the McCain campaign that for him to have cheated is unthinkable...because he was a POW:

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.

“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Now, apparently, it's not unthinkable for him to have been a POW, come home, cheated on his wife and left her, gotten involved in politics using his new wife's family money, gotten involved in a lobbyist-favor scandal (Keating 5)...

But it's unthinkable that he would've had a BlackBerry or iPhone and gotten the questions early. Riiiiiiight...they're using the POW card more frequently these days:

Last week, when the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a close Bush ally, publicly questioned McCain’s character, the McCain campaign responded by highlighting McCain’s background as a prisoner of war. When Dems attacked McCain’s healthcare plan in May, McCain responded by noting his background as a prisoner of war. Asked by a local reporter about the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks of Pittsburgh, McCain responded by talking about his background as a prisoner of war.

And all of this, of course, dovetails with the McCain campaign running multiple television ads talking about McCain’s background as a prisoner of war, literally including interrogation footage in the commercial.

This hard-sell wouldn’t be quite so odd if McCain didn’t go around saying that he’s reluctant to talk about his Vietnam experiences.

McCain became visibly angry when I asked him to explain how his Vietnam experience prepared him for the Presidency.

“Please,” he said, recoiling back in his seat in distaste at the very question…. McCain then collected himself and apologized for his initial reaction.

“I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences,” he said, noting that he has huge admiration for the “heroes” who served with him in the POW camp and said the experience taught him to love the U.S. because he missed it so much.

“I am always reluctant to talk about these things,” McCain said.

McCain’s service demands respect and the nation’s gratitude. But he’s clearly crossed the line into shameless exploitation.

Indeed. No one can prove that McCain cheated, unless someone from his campaign steps up and admits to feeding him the questions (fat chance, since Rove's protégé is now running the McCain campaign). But just watch the video, read the transcript, and compare McCain's response time to everything else he's done in the past two years, and see if you have some doubts too.

A few faith-related notes

More from Mother Jones on the McCain-Hagee-Parsley connections.

A priest-cosmologist won the Templeton Prize. Although it's "faith-based", at least they distance themselves from ID.

Finally, the absurd policies of the Religious Right bear more rotten fruit: 1 in 4 teenage girls who are sexually active have at least one STD. There's also a sad race gap: more than one half of black girls have one, compared to only 20% of whites and Latinos. The teenagers themselves aren't in the least surprised. See an older piece of mine for more stats related to "abstinence only" education and abortions.

UPDATE: See this excellent item on the RR's policies of "marriage promotion" as well.

Child preachers, abortion & the RR, oh my!

1. This video on child preachers just makes me sad. Check out Marjoe. I did.


2. The new documentary, "Lake of Fire," has stirred up some controversy. Anti-choicers would do well to read up on the facts, and a new WHO study shows that abortion rates are highest in countries where it is illegal, and lowest in countries which have comprehensive sex ed programs and abundant contraception choices. Contrary to all the spin and stupidity, although the US is much more religious than European countries, we have higher rates of teen pregnancy, STDs and abortions than them. Why? Because the religiosity of our country blinds people to the reality that curtailing these things is only accomplished through sex ed for teens and widely-available contraceptive choices. In other words, if they really care about "saving" fetuses, they should be pushing contraception. Instead, they push failed "abstinence-only" policies that lead to more teen pregnancies and STDs. These people don't care about other people, just about controlling them.


3. The RR still doesn't know quite what to do: back the serial-adulterer Giuliani with a liberal track-record on judicial appointments, Mormon "Magic Underwear" Romney -- someone they know only became "pro-life" 5 minutes ago (both he and Giuiliani fit into this category), or someone they know will not win? Dobson swears he'll choose the latter.
   

On Abortion and Ethics

I recently made a comment at the Raving Atheist concerning my view on the wrongness of state abrogation of liberty. The crux of the discussion was in relation to abortion, and whether or not our ethical views justify a legal restriction of individual freedom. Obviously they do when the freedoms or rights of other citizens are infringed. Animal rights and abortion rights are tricky, because animals and fetuses are not citizens, but can be considered legal property. Jim Brennan followed up with a question:

nsfl,
So, for the record, you also don't think the State has any grounds to abrogate my liberty to douse my 4 year old beagle in gasoline and light him up in my front yard to make S'mores?

As you might suspect, I strongly disagree, and laid out my reasoning why below. Before getting into that, it should be noted that I had a letter to the editor on abortion published in our campus newspaper a while back, and made some clarifications on it here.

First, let me say that although I think this is a very complicated ethical issue in concerning late-term abortions...but not terribly complicated in legal terms. Let me outline the premises of interest [I highlighted the key terms to consider]:

P1) fetuses are conscious creatures/animals
P2) abortions cause a high degree (possibly described as "cruel and unusual") of pain and suffering to the fetus
P3) abortions are unnecessary (and/or are "trumped" by some "higher necessity/right"), and are not justifiable as a "lesser evil" in terms of causing pain to a fetus to avoid risking the life of a mother
P4) torture is the unnecessary inflicting of pain and suffering to a conscious creature, and abortions constitute torture
P5) the state has the right to outlaw torture, abrogating the liberty of an individual to torture other animals
C1) the state has the right to outlaw abortions, from P4 and P5

I think that the state has the right to ensure that we don't torture our property, when our property is a conscious creature [this is implicit in the usage of the term "torture"]. This seems to be the basis of civil law regarding animal rights. You asked me to clarify this point, so I am attempting to do so, in saying that I do not disagree with P5. I will explain how C1 does not follow because P1-P3 are far from proven, and thus P4 is where the "buck stops".

P1) You asked about setting a beagle ablaze. An obvious and demonstrable difference between dogs and fetuses involves their state of self-awareness. Dogs qualify as conscious creatures. In setting a snail ablaze, although it writhes and we project onto it our own mind and the awareness of the agony, the writhing of the snail is the involuntary response of its biochemical signals. There is no conscious brain to be aware of pain or suffering. You obviously chose a beagle for this reason--they have a conscious, self-aware [however limited] ability to experience pain and suffering.

Does P1 hold for (even a late-term) fetus? Although the nervous system development is capable of pain response at 28 weeks, this does not imply consciousness. There are some strong arguments that self-awareness doesn't begin until some time after birth (during the first year of infancy). Medical science cannot demonstrate consciousness, just as the writhing of the snail does not indicate a conscious mind, but it does demonstrate the presence of a complex central nervous system (CCNS). The assertion that consciousness can exist without a CCNS is entirely without merit, and is akin to my asserting that a teapot orbits a planet in a galaxy at the edge of the universe: completely unfalsifiable. Therefore, we will consider only those fetuses with a CCNS as capable of consciousness, which occurs only fairly late in the third trimester (for the sake of argument, let's say past month 6).

Therefore, we can prune this discussion down to considering the only possible fetuses with a potential self-awareness as those in the late term, and abortions of those fetuses. In lieu of scientific or philosophical support of your premise (that they are conscious), let us just consider this premise unsupported.

P2) We must establish the degree of pain and suffering involved in an abortive procedure, versus what we consider "normative" or "allowable" thresholds. Does the "pain and suffering" of an abortion compare to, say, a light pinching of an infant? It is obvious that the degree of pain and suffering experienced is important. We do not prosecute mothers who pinch their baby's bottoms, or give them a little spank on the butt, as though it is child abuse, until it passes a certain threshold of pain and suffering. Let us then consider only the procedures which may cause the most pain and suffering: D&E skull decompression procedures (aka "partial birth abortions"). Is a D&E procedure "torture"? Torture involves an extended period of pain and suffering, relative to "normal" pain. Is the D&E "protracted/extended", as it occurs in seconds? Obviously not.

This procedure has been refined and designed to quickly and mercifully terminate the life of the fetus. It is not a protracted and excruciating procedure for the fetus. The brain tissue is removed within milliseconds after the puncture, which means little or no pain is felt. I don't know if you're aware of this, but you don't have nerves inside your brain. IOW, you can't "feel" pain inside your brain. The skull puncture is the only arguable infliction of pain, and considering that loss of the entire brain immediately follows, the ability to perceive and endure this pain is much abbreviated. It is important here to note that football should be outlawed (and a whole lot of other things, too) if we want to prevent all degrees of pain and suffering from being inflicted. Yes, shades of gray appear in determining the degree, but this is an inescapable part of life--in setting thresholds and limits which sometimes elude facile demarcation. The same could be said of child neglect. Do we charge a parent with neglect as soon as its child's stomach growls [ie it hasn't been fed for long enough to develop hunger]? We all recognize the need to arbitrate degrees of "badness" and "goodness".

Not only is P2 unsupported, it is contradicted by known medical science--the D&E procedure described cannot be said to cause extended or intense pain due to its design as a terminative procedure.

P3) Now, let's say I grant yet another premise to you for the sake of argument and say, "okay, it's conscious, AND the pain is intense...cruel and unusual, etc.": it still doesn't compare to your analogy, because torture implies that we inflict a pain which is otherwise unnecessary. The necessity of abortion would have to be another premise of yours, one which denies that the mother's right to life [should her life be endangered] is somehow less than the fetus'. Conversely, there is no compelling reason for you to set your dog on fire. If you can't feed your dog, for instance, or take proper care of it, it isn't a risk of your life or an unnecessary burden to require that you take it to an animal shelter, where it can be adopted, or humanely put down if necessary. If your dog has killed someone, then you or the state have the right and the obligation to prevent that from recurring by ending the dog's life. However, you are again faced with the necessity of torture versus allowing the state, or your own shotgun, to do this job without torture.

Conversely, bearing children is an inherently dangerous, arguably-life-threatening, and painful burden upon a woman. If we deny her the right to determine whether or not she must go through this, we are denying her, potentially, the right to avoid intense pain and/or possibly death. In this sense, we often forget in the abortion arguments that intense pain is a given--it is a question of who will feel it [see P2]. Perhaps one could argue that the protracted and quite coherent suffering of childbirth does not compare to the relatively fast and less aware suffering of an aborted fetus. It seems, though, unnecessary here--P3 is falsified.

You thus have no need to torture an animal, ever. The same question of necessity does not hold in most of these situations with D&E procedures. Late-term abortions are nearly always the result of medical complications that endanger the life of both mother and child [hydrocephalus, etc]. This is certainly a compelling reason and interest: to preserve the mother's own health and safety. Abortions "of convenience" in the late term have already been outlawed via the "partial birth abortion ban". Thus, in the only case where there is no demonstrable necessity for an arguably painful procedure upon an arguably conscious creature, your question about the state's abrogation of liberty has already been answered: the state has found it necessary to do so [whether you want to argue that they were right or wrong in so doing].

I find this troubling, considering that the late term abortions "of convenience" could still be arguably necessary from the perspective of the mother--it is much less likely that she will die, or suffer intense pain, via D&E, than via childbirth. We are denying her the right to choose this option.

Conclusion: It cannot be objectively demonstrated that P1-P3 are true, they can be shown to lack merit, and P3 is flatly falsified. .: P4 is false, and .: C1 does not follow.

Legally, individuals must retain the ability to make decisions that affect their own body, health and safety, without state abrogation of that choice. The slippery slope cannot even be allowed to begin here, because this is the state-enforced loss of rights over one's own body.

Personally, I consider late-term abortions which result from simple negligence and ignorance on the part of the mother unethical. Those women who have no necessity, financial, medical, or otherwise, to abort, and choose to wait until the third trimester (or late second) must be either stupid or reckless with their own bodies. Why in the hell couldn't she abort sooner? Why in the hell did she wait until the procedure became risky to her (D&E are fairly safe, but obviously carry more risk than early term abortions) and there is now an argument that she now is inflicting serious and otherwise unnecessary pain upon a conscious creature (granting your premise 1 and 2)? Thus, in my view, an argument can be advanced that she is acting unethically.

However, even in granting your premise 1 and 2 (which is quite generous), we still find that an abrogation of her rights here means that we tell her what she can and can not decide about her own body. The same is not true for a pet. There is no compelling legal interest on your part to kill animals. There is certainly no compelling interest on your part to torture them. The compelling interest in terms of law here are "where do the rights of the individual begin and end? does the individual have complete control over their own body?"

Thus, the question, "does the individual have complete control over their property [excepting their own body]" is a "no" already. Persons can have lawful control of property without entailing torture. That's already been decided, and you can read animal rights laws for the reasoning behind it. I am not sure if we can say that our children are our legal "property", but if we allow harm to come to our infant via neglect, we are held legally culpable for that as well. In this sense, negligence and reckless abandonment are further definitional constraints of what we can and cannot do, and can and cannot allow to be done to, our own property, if our children are legally considered our property.

In the case of animal rights, the question is only one of property--what we can do with what we own: can we torture our possessions? In the case of abortion, the question involves not only the liberty to torture or harm our property, but also whether or not individuals maintain absolute sovereignty over their own bodies. The Supreme Court decided, "yes." In my opinion, they decided correctly.
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Technorati tags: Philosophy, Ethics, Abortion