Sexy Amendments to the Constitution

We have all heard the ultimately impotent advocacy for an amendment to the Constitution that would restrict marriage to heterosexual monogamy. We have also all heard the formulaic justification: protect the family, protect marriage. The main problem here is that if I am really interested in protecting the family and traditional marriage, if I toast my Pop Tart every morning in the warm glow of my righteous cause, then a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage is not where I'm going to start.

You won't hear Mitt Romney or Sean Hannity say it (though you might keep an eye on Newt Gingrich), but what this country really needs to protect families is an Amendment that criminalizes premarital sex. Out of wedlock births are the problem. That is what's destroying the family. The Brookings Institution reports:

In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites. Every year about one million more children are born into fatherless families.

As of 1990, more than one in four children are born out of wedlock. Meanwhile, The National Gay and Lesbian Task force estimates that only 3-8% of the population are homosexuals, a number significantly higher than equally partisan Christian groups' estimates and higher even than Kinsey's statistic of 4% exclusively homosexual males. Even if we accept that high number thought, children born out of wedlock are a significantly higher percentage of children than homosexuals are of the general population. Even if suddenly same sex marriage were legal and immediately the entire homosexual population of America were to marry at the same rate the heterosexual population does, roughly half, the 12.5 million newly married homosexuals would still not match the roughly 20 million children under eighteen who were born out of wedlock. If we want to promote healthy families centered on heterosexual parents, the first step is to criminalize sex outside of marriage with an amendment to the Constitution.

Even if, oh were that it so, we could get that magical clause tacked on to the Constitution, gay marriage wouldn't be my next stop. After criminalizing pre-marital sex, the next greatest threat to traditional marriage is divorce. The oft quoted statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce, probably more scientifically stated as 40-50% of marriage will be disrupted by permanent separation or divorce, ought to be enough to prove that conclusively. In addition to destroying half of all traditional, heterosexual marriages, divorce leaves an estimated 1.1 million new children in broken homes every year. That is only slightly lower than the 1.2 million children born out of wedlock every year. The family is suffering.

If we follow our statistical path from the tentatively titled "No Milk Until You Buy the Cow Amendment," allowing same sex marriage would only see about a 2-4% increase in marriages, or roughly 100,000. Meanwhile, the legality of divorce allows for the destruction every year of well over one million marriages. The disparity is clear. Divorce poses roughly ten times the danger to marriage and the family that same sex marriage does. It must be criminalized, and it must be done at the Constitutional level.

It is a tragedy, really, that the "consistent conservatives" in this country have had so much trouble appropriately identifying and combating the real threats to traditional marriage. Perhaps if we made it an issues of America's standing in the world. Maybe if we point out that socialist Sweden has managed a significantly lower divorce rate than America. Or that in the sensuous Mediterranean climes of Spain, the out of wedlock birthrate is about 75% of what it is in the States. Canada is beating us in every category, which ought to be enough to infuriate every conservative. For single-parent households as a percentage of total households with children, America ranks below Canada, Japan, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. We're dead last.

So let's get with it, defenders of traditional marriage. If you genuinely care about the state of marriage in this country, then it is time to stand up and make the hard decisions necessary to protect it. That, or maybe it is time to be honest with yourself and the public about what motivates your politics. Honesty in politics: God help us if we ever get it.

The Wisdom of Ann Stoler

In the epilogue of Ann Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (a book which is absolutely not on my recommended reading list for anyone except specialists in colonial studies...which I am decidedly not) there is an intriguing reflect on the function of classification in politics. Stoler is speaking directly about colonial systems of power, and specifically about the Dutch Indies, but her observations have a broader application, one that has been touched on here with reference to Vernard Eller and Roger Hines.

[T]axonomies demand more than specification and detail. As Jim Scott too notes, "seeing like a state" may encourage just the opposite--that its agents master not sociological fine print but broad simplified sociological generalizations. Taxonomic states may encourage state agents to pay less attention to detail than to sorting codes. Psychologists convincingly argue that taxonomies reduce cognitive expense. Colonial administrators seemed to treat them as technologies that reduced political expense as well. In the Indies, social categories that were "easy to think" pared down what colonial recruits and residents thought they needed to master. Sociological shorthands lessened how much of certain kinds of information one needed to operate and how much one needed to know.

In other words, the appropriation of difference for the purpose of classifying social groups is an exercise in political laziness. It "gloms," to steal Eller's language, large and diverse bodies into manageable subheadings so that the government can do just that, manage them. White, black, Hispanic. Gay, straight. 99%, job creators. Eller would say none of that categories correspond to any reality and, in fact, function to distort it. Stoler would seem to agree, as she recounts the way the concept of race was constructed in colonial contexts (where, interestingly, European could be so broad as to include the Japanese and Arabs).

While for Eller the problem is an ethical one, the inability to construct a classless and therefore just society as God desires, Stoler's account has a more detached air. She passes no judgment--being a historian and not, like Eller, a theologian--but only presents the grim, unnerving picture of the way the state has evolved to take the path of least resistance between reality as it is and reality as the state would construct it. More unnerving still for me was the realization that our democratic system distinguishes itself from the Dutch system of Stoler's work in that rather than a hegemonic few deciding the sociological categories and directing the state on those grounds, Americans participate in the grouping of themselves into arbitrary categories and allow themselves to be berated, pressured, and educated into conforming to those categories. Every time Americans vote, march, speak, protest, or perform any civic act in the framework of a sociological taxonomy and conforming to the expectations of that taxonomy they remove a conceptual roadblock to the power of the state to mold reality.

Circumcision: Benefits Outweight Risks

As a general rule, when debates about circumcision arise, I tend to fall with those who believe that a parent should have the right to make that decision for the child in its infancy. The notion of a child's right to choose is absurd to me, a point I tried to hammer when the courts in Germany made this an international issue. Additionally the frequent argument that having a foreskin results in a better sex life is precisely the kind of qualitative judgment that science is unable to make. The statement that a penis with a foreskin is more sensate is a scientific claim. That a more sensate penis is better or results in more fulfilling sex is not.

What remains, in terms of arguments against circumcision, is the notion that it is an entirely cosmetic procedure or that, if it has some medical value, that such a value is minimal and outweighed by the risks. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a policy statement which the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists endorsed saying that just the opposite is true:

The nation's most influential pediatricians group says the health benefits of circumcision in newborn boys outweigh any risks and insurance companies should pay for it...

"It's not a verdict from on high," said policy co-author Dr. Andrew Freedman. "There's not a one-size-fits-all-answer." But from a medical standpoint, circumcision's benefits in reducing risk of disease outweigh its small risks, said Freedman, a pediatric urologist in Los Angeles.

Recent research bolstering evidence that circumcision reduces chances of infection with HIV and other sexually spread diseases, urinary tract infections and penis cancer influenced the academy to update their 13-year-old policy.

Their old stance said potential medical benefits were not sufficient to warrant recommending routinely circumcising newborn boys. The new one says, "The benefits of newborn male circumcision justify access to this procedure for those families who choose it." The academy also says pain relief stronger than a sugar-coated pacifier is essential, usually an injection to numb the area.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Convention has estimated circumcision costs range from about $200 to $600 nationwide...Meantime, a recent study projected that declining U.S. circumcision rates could add more than $4 billion in health care costs in coming years because of increased illness and infections.

As the quote states, this is nowhere near an endorsement of universal male circumcision. It does, however, better articulate a well-reasoned position on the subject. Informed parents can make informed decisions without being labeled, socially or legally, as child mutilators. Maybe that means that the US medical community is "out of step" with other developed nations, as Ronald Goldman suggests, but if Germany is an example of such a nation, I'm glad we're not in step with them.

Cow News

Several weeks ago, I had intended to share a story about an Oregon farmer who invested more than $100,000 in waterbeds for his dairy cows. The trend apparently started in the Midwest and is starting to catch on. The principle is simple, according to farmer Ben Van Loon: "Happier cows, happier milk."

A recent story about a rancher feeding his cattle chocolate brought it to mind again. This time the principles motivating the farmer are more explicitly commercial and the disclaimer "not fit for human consumption" puts a damper on the illusion, but it is nevertheless amusing to think about a world where cows are pampered with waterbeds and chocolates.

Pay Teachers Less

The American education system is broken. There are few if any who would argue otherwise. The problems are by no means simple, and the possible solutions are numerous. The administrative overhead of schools is one of the most obvious and easily resolved issues. Superintendents, principals, assistant principals, computer technicians, evaluators, social workers, security guards, secretaries, and countless other occupations which are not directly involved in the education of children, as well as the facilities needed to house this massive bureaucracy, eat up a disproportionate amount of taxpayer dollars. Consolidate the administrations, cut those positions, and slash those salaries. Bureaucrats should not be making four and five times the teachers in the trenches.

Numerous other problems do not lend themselves so easily to correction. The massive effort to centralize and standardize education has removed control from the people who should be served by, and therefore should control, the education process. Curriculum has become a political battleground, with the Right wanting schools to teach intelligent design and nationalistic propaganda and the Left wanting them to teach homosexual history and sexual liberation. The focus on variety—in learning styles, teaching methods, and more—has made education more about entertainment than learning. Teachers unions protect inept teachers, and the tenure system makes it impossible for new, highly qualified teachers to find good jobs.

Even more basic still, and therefore more difficult to change, is a set of cultural assumptions at all levels of society that hamstrings the education process. Parents aren’t interested in engaging with their children’s education. Students have no motivation to apply themselves. Decades of universal, compulsory education through secondary school has made graduation more a right than an accomplishment. The confusion of equal opportunity with equal ability creates an educational environment where teachers must teach to the least capable student, leaving those best able and most interested in learning to fend for themselves. Everyone thinks the system has malfunctioned, and everyone knows whose fault it is: not mine.

My vision for a functional education system would scrap the present manifestation of public education entirely, but if we’re discussing what to do with what we have, I have an unusual suggestion: pay teachers less. That, of course, flies in the face of conventional wisdom (which is a sanitized way of saying “campaign rhetoric”) and some unconventional experiments. There is a mindset which says that the problem with American schools is that education does not pay enough to attract the best and brightest that universities have to offer. If teachers were paid in a way comparable to other certified professionals, then maybe the kind of people we attract to be nurses, doctors, engineers, and lawyers would want to be teachers instead. My wife is a teacher, and so I understand acutely the attractiveness of raising teacher salaries and even the unfairness of their salaries relative to their workloads.

Baiting university students with the promise of more money, however, misunderstands the basic problem. American colleges are not under-producing qualified teachers. In fact, there are so many new teachers being sent out into the workforce, they can’t all find jobs. The ones that can find jobs, often find them as substitutes, teaching assistants, interim teachers, or as unprepared, ill-equipped new teachers in dangerous inner city schools. It is hard to imagine many people who actually spend time around teachers and hear about their problems directly (and constantly) honestly believe that the problem is that they simply lack the skill or financial motivation to do their jobs right.

Here’s the real problem. If my wife is a third grade teacher—and she isn’t, but bear with me—everyday she is faced with the same enigma. In her class she has little Bobby who is reading at a sixth grade level but still hasn’t mastered his multiplication tables. She also has little Sarah who is functionally illiterate but already has a rudimentary grasp of fourth grade math concepts. Little Mitchell is right on track with his learning if only my wife can convince him to sit in his seat and do his work. Little Rene is always too sleepy to pay attention, while little Marcus still doesn’t have a working grasp of conversational English. In addition to these five, she has twenty to twenty-five more students, equally diverse. Now, it doesn’t matter if you are Stephen Hawking and Steve Jobs and Mister Rogers all rolled up into one. There is no way anyone, no matter how qualified and no matter how well-paid, is going to come up with a multi-subject day of learning that is going to meet most or all of the needs of that class. Teaching devolves into learning-themed crowd management. In seven years, my wife is teaching tenth grade: Bobby is in remedial math, Sarah is cheating her way through high school English, Mitchell is on ADHD medication that has retarded his learning, Rene is pregnant, and Marcus is the father. The problem is compounded.

At $35,000 a year, my wife certainly isn’t getting paid enough to deal with that, even if it is only for nine months out of the year. It is hard to imagine, however, that one teacher making $60,000 is going to be able to solve the problem any better. On the other hand, two teachers making $30,000 each and managing two separate classes of only ten students each might just make a dent. Sure, there is still going to be diversity that needs to be overcome. Students will still present unique problems that will distract from an ideal educational environment. Some potential teachers might even be diverted from entering the field because of the reduced pay (though other ways to incentivize, such as broader loan forgiveness, could easily compensate for that). In the end, however, the net result will be a shift from the current reality of crowd management closer to an ideal experience of educational mentorship.

Of course, you could never actually pay teachers less. The unions wouldn’t allow it (and frankly, with the cost of getting a degree reaching meteoric heights, teachers couldn’t afford it). But it was never realistic to raise teacher salaries either, as that would inevitably cut into the lucrative business of multiplying administrative positions and bloating educational bureaucracies. Still, isn’t it nice to imagine a world where teachers could afford to train themselves to become educators and then actually be allowed to educate children? It distracts from the unsettling reality of one twenty-four year old woman in inner-city Atlanta trying desperately to get thirty nine-year-olds to meet state and national proficiency benchmarks on standardized tests so that she can continue to make payments on her six figure student loan debt. It’s almost as if prayer in schools isn’t really the issue after all.

The Church in Nigeria "Strikes" Back

We have been following very closely the religious strife in Nigeria. (N.B., this is real religious strife, not "Obama is making me give condoms to nuns" or "My coach made me eat a pre-game meal in a church.") Initially, there were reports of retaliatory violence on the part of Christians in response to frequent, lethal assaults by Boko Haram. Thank God, the Christian Association of Nigeria has issued the following statement:

We will not encourage our people to carry arms against anybody whatsoever the situation may be. For those that are behind Boko Haram, you come to us with AK47, bombs, charms and other dangerous weapons, but we come to you in the name of God.

I want to assure Christians in Nigeria that Christ has always been with his people. He will never give victory to those persecuting Christians and the Church. Whoever is trying to exterminate Christians and Christianity from Nigeria is neither pleasing God nor his people.

Cow News

Is anyone else flabbergasted by the fact that we can put an R/C Tonka truck on Mars and develop a birth control pill for men but have yet to master the quick and humane execution of our meat? According to the Associated Press:

Federal regulators shut down a Central California slaughterhouse Monday after receiving undercover video showing dairy cows — some unable to walk — being repeatedly shocked and shot before being slaughtered...

Four minutes of excerpts the animal welfare group provided to The Associated Press showed cows being prepared for slaughter. One worker appears to be suffocating a cow by standing on its muzzle after a gun that injects a bolt into the animal's head had failed to render it unconscious. In another clip, a cow is still conscious and flailing as a conveyor lifts it by one leg for transport to an area where the animals' throats are slit for blood draining.

"The horror caught on camera is sickening," said Erica Meier, executive director of Compassion Over Killing, based in Washington, D.C. "It's alarming that this is not only a USDA-inspected facility but a supplier to the USDA."

...The videos show workers pulling downed cows by their tails and kicking them in an apparent attempt to get them to stand and walk to slaughter. Others shoot downed cows in the head over and over as the cows thrash on the ground. In one instance, the video shows workers trying to get cattle to back out of a chute while repeatedly spraying them with water and shocking them.

It's a good thing the USDA is around to inspect these places. Otherwise, imagine what they would be doing.