Soraya Chemaly has a powerful message to girls. It tells them, in essence, when girls are told by men (usually under the guise of religion) that they are shameful or sacred, but, in any event, must use or not use their bodies in a particular way; it’s because these men fear them.

Maybe it’s fear. Certainly I get a fearful, self-loathing vibe from St. Augustine underlying his hang ups about sex. But, if I had to give my gut reaction to why patriarchal cultures oppress women, I’d go for greed, not fear, as the primary emotion. Greed for domestic control, sexual control, getting more and doing less – imposing more burdens on women so there are less burdens on themselves. Hunting is more fun and more rewarding than hauling water. Taking what she wants out of the domestic equation makes life easier.

But, that’s just my gut reaction. I’m a privileged white male and so don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about such things. Aside from the “God told me so” explanation, what’s the reasoning -if not fear- behind imposing cultural distinctions between men and women beyond what they (particularly the women) might freely choose for themselves?

Are people worthless? It occurred to me that this is the underlying assumption in many ways when we regard public expenditures as sunk costs for which we don’t recognize getting anything of value in return. That’s the primary way in which cuts to those expenditures can be viewed as, essentially, a purely good thing. After all, if we killed everyone off, taxes and government would go away entirely. Nirvana!

I’m not sure how closely related the cause of the firing neuron is to the idea that came to mind, but here is the article that triggered my thought. It was a column about the economics of health care. Particularly this passage:

If we actually prevent diseases or conditions, would our bills go up in the end? People would live longer and develop lots of other chronic diseases that can be expensive to control or treat. And they would draw Social Security.

In the fiscal sense, health improvement can cost us money. But that totally ignores the value to society.

For example, H.I.V. prior to antiretroviral therapy was like a death sentence. With the introduction of those drugs, we took a killer and made it more like a chronic illness. There was a lot of hand-wringing about how do we pay for the drugs. But that completely ignores the value to society.

We think of health care as an expense, but we really should be thinking of health care as an investment. We want to invest where we have the greatest return. I would put prevention in that bucket.

In some fashion, which I have not entirely pinned down yet, I think this also ties into the world view where the biologically human life is of critical importance before birth and after brain death but where the biographical human life in between those points is a matter of relative indifference.

The Urbanophile has a post about New York City potentially privatizing its parking meter operation. He notes that Chicago’s meter privatization was a fail but that such projects are not necessarily doomed to failure; and offers some notions that are probably applicable generally.

First is, you have to appreciate how dynamic the system is. Contracts have to be able to evolve – practically, that probably means shorter term contracts, easier escape clauses, or an ability to amend duties.

Another is appropriate allocation of risk. Renn notes that one of the main benefits to a municipality of privatization is shifting risk but that all too often, privatization contracts do not leave the contractor with much in the way of appreciable risk. They need to make a profit, of course, but assumption of risk is one of the primary justifications for allowing someone profit (labor and innovation being the two other ones that come to mind.)

He suggests that it’s too bad former Indianapolis mayor and New York deputy mayor Steve Goldsmith is not working on the issue given his experience with privatization efforts in Indianapolis. I’d be interested to know how successful Goldsmith was in protecting Indianapolis from risk by shifting it on to private contractors.

All too often what you get with privatization is all of the monopoly of a municipality with none of the transparency and with more of the compensation getting shifted away from ground level workers and up the management chain.

Sheila Kennedy has a good post entitled “Looking Backward.” She reminisces about how, in 1980, she won the Republican primary in what had been the Eleventh District and how her loss in the general to Andy Jacobs was typically attributed to her being a bit too much of a Goldwater Republican. She says her governing philosophy hasn’t changed in the last 32 years, but now she’s routinely accused of being a leftist or a socialist.

Fred Clark at the Slacktivist also had a good post a few days back about the tribal markers of evangelicals that got me thinking. It occurs to me that conservative policy, whatever that means exactly, is perhaps incidental to the conservative movement except as it serves as a tribal marker for the movement.

There are explanations for the embrace of the policies, but those aren’t the reasons. The reason is that Leaders I Trust told me these policies are Good and these policies are what distinguish Us from Them.

As Democrats drift to embrace more conservative policies (compare, for example, Birch Bayh v. Evan Bayh) in an effort to co-opt that vote, knowing there is no pressure on the Left; the conservative tribe keeps looking for more distinctive markers which are available only to the right. Rinse. Advocate transvaginal ultrasounds, girl scout antipathy, defaulting on the national debt, climate change denial, evolutionary denial. When Democratic policy drifts too close, move to greener pastures on the right. (The girl scout thing was probably unfair — Doug)

Just a thought.

President Obama made a statement today on marriage equality. Some have given him grief for previous statements that his views on marriage equality are evolving. I get it. For a politician to talk about “evolving” views on something suggests lightly held convictions of Romney-esque malleability.

But, because of my own evolution of thinking on this subject, I completely understand the President. Back in 2010 when discussing Indiana’s marriage discrimination amendment, I said this:

I’ve described my progression before, but for those just tuning in: Growing up, I thought of myself as anti-gay, because I didn’t know any gay people. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know I knew any gay people. Turns out a non-trivial number of guys I knew growing up and in college were gay. (Sorry if I said or did anything to offend, gentlemen). Once I met a guy I new to be gay, being “anti-gay” quickly seemed silly. He was, in most respects, just like anyone else I knew, and it seemed awfully small of me to dislike him simply because of who he loved. But, from there, I probably only got as far as indifferent to gay issues. I wasn’t against them, but they weren’t important to me either.

Now, I’ve progressed to being affirmatively in favor of allowing gay marriage. There just isn’t any rational basis for opposing it. If your God tells you to work against gays, I guess that’s between you and him. But the State’s supposed interest in promoting procreation is just hogwash. If that were anything but a pretext, you’d see prohibitions on marriage by post-menopausal women and sterile men. Working from the presumption that sexual orientation is a birthright and not a “lifestyle choice,” denying gay people such a fundamental right for no good reason seems gratuitously mean.

The President’s statement today made me feel a little better about what happened in North Carolina yesterday. The primary voters of North Carolina decided they wanted a constitutional ban on marriage equality. One of my good friends from elementary school is gay. (We had a bit of a falling out in 6th grade fighting over a girl, amusingly enough). He is in a committed relationship with his significant other in North Carolina. That the people of North Carolina would rebuke my friend because of who he loves made me angry on a personal level. That the President of the United States would take a political risk by publicly expressing his personal opinion that “same-sex couples should be able to get married” helps diminish that anger somewhat. The President said:

“I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient,” Mr. Obama told Ms. Roberts. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word marriage was something that invokes very powerful traditions and religious beliefs.”

But he added that “I’ve always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally.”

Politically, I don’t know how this plays. But it’s the right thing for him to do if that’s what he believes. I tend to think that the people who would withhold their votes from President Obama based on this position probably weren’t going to vote for him anyway. On the other hand, maybe I’m just letting my current views color how I perceive voting tendencies of people who hold my past views.

By the same token, this might have the potential to drive a bit of a wedge between libertarians and the younger conservatives on the one side and the older conservatives on the other side. A lot of the types of conservatives I talk to just don’t honestly seem to care about gay rights, pro or con. They aren’t marching in the streets demanding equality for gay people; but they seem to wish they could ignore the conservative wing that spends a lot of energy opposing gay rights. It creates a stumbling block when the younger conservatives want to talk about government staying out of peoples’ lives. If marriage equality becomes a prominent difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties; they might not be able to shrug off the issue as easily.

I recently saw a statistic that was fairly startling to me; that 40% of American women have had an abortion. I did a small amount of web-based research that suggested maybe the number is more like 30%.

This made me recall a conversation I had recently (with another guy) where we were musing about the strong reaction to the War on Women (or caterpillars, if you prefer) that was engendered when access to birth control was implicated. Whereas support for access to birth control is fairly strong, support for access to abortion is often very tepid even among those who support such access as an intellectual exercise. My friend said that abortion was just something that felt so alien.

If that statistic is accurate, maybe it’s something that’s alien to middle aged guys but not so alien to America’s women. I’m one of those people who support access to abortion as an intellectual exercise because I don’t regard a fetus in its early stages to be morally equivalent to a human even though it has the potential to become human. But, I don’t have the emotional response to restrictions on abortions that I do to restrictions on birth control because the former is nothing I’ve had to deal with directly and, so far as I recall, only one person I know has talked to me directly about her own experience.

It’s easy for me to say because I don’t have to deal with the backlash, but I think we could have a more honest discussion about abortion if the people having them were more open about the experience. The unknown horrors conjured up by your brain in ignorance are usually more terrifying than reality. I’ve told the story before about how I was something of a homophobe before getting to know some honest to god gay people. (Or, rather, people I knew were gay — I had known them, I just didn’t know that I knew them.) In much the same way, I expect that real atheists are less foreign to believers than whatever notions they have in their heads in the absence of real-world examples. And, I expect the people who actually have abortions present more sympathetic cases than the baby-murdering monsters currently occupying the void and informing public discourse.

You can still condemn abortion if you’d like, but such condemnation should be informed by the reality that 30-40% of the women you know may have participated in the exercise.

Nick Martin, writing for TPMMuckraker has an article entitled JT Ready Identified As Gunman In Arizona Massacre. The background is that yesterday, apparently, Ready killed himself and four other people: his girlfriend, her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and the daughter’s 18-month old baby. It appears that he took measures attempting to make it look like the killings were the work of Mexican drug runners.

The article gives quite a bit of detail about Ready’s anti-immigrant fervor and ties with white supremacist organizations. But what really caught my interest was the opening paragraph:

Longtime white supremacist and border vigilante JT Ready saw himself as part of a war that few others would fight. He amassed weapons. He donned a uniform. He formed his own brigade of volunteers to walk alongside him as he hunted what he described as “narco terrorists” flowing across the Arizona-Mexico border.

It seems to me that, with some people, there is a driving need to see one’s self as a heroic figure in the consequential drama of one’s life. And that need leads to a view of the world that doesn’t comport with reality which, in turn, leads to interactions with the world that aren’t healthy and which aren’t helpful to others.

In this category, I also see the fervent believer with a personal relationship to God that helps them withstand the persecution that is everywhere while they are engaged in a noble effort to stand against evil; perhaps through a desperate battle to save America by battling its destructive cultural decline.

I’m sure there are plenty of other examples, religious and non-religious; left-wing and right wing. We’re all protagonists in our own story. That’s inevitable. Noted philosophers Jethro Tull explained that we’re “looking for a sign that the Universal Mind has written us into the Passion Play.” But, the self-focus and need to be central figures in the larger story can lead to destructive behavior and detract from our ability enjoy and participate in the reality that is actually around us.

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, writing in the Washington Post, have an opinion piece looking at why D.C. is so dysfunctional and concluding, no, it’s not “both sides fault,” we can blame the Republicans on this one.

The response I’ve seen has been interesting if, maybe, predictable. I had one friend ask wearily, “since when did being conservative equal being the bad guy.” And, Doghouse suggests that this observation is at least thirty years too late. (“They called Truman a commie, for chrissakes”)

I’m too young and maybe not well enough educated to know whether the present political dynamic is different in kind from McCarthyite politics or is just pitching a different product. But, to my conservative friend, I can respond that this isn’t simply an indictment of conservatism – at least if that term means anything independently of “what the Republicans are doing at the moment.”

-Most recently: Allen West (R-Florida) – “78 to 81” Democrats are members of the Communist Party. No notable backlash within his party for this kind of stupidity.

-Moderate & center-right Republican lawmakers are a dying breed. Cites Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, and Chuck Hagel. (We can look more locally to what’s happening to Dick Lugar.)

-Ascendancy of Grover Norquist and his absolutist, no-tax regardless of the need pledge. 238 of 242 House Republicans are signatories as are 41 of 47 Senators.

-Ascendancy of Newt Gingrich and his campaign to convince the electorate that Congress was corrupt in an effort to remove the then-majority Democrats from office. This one got away from him after it was successful and the Republicans took office and he tried to dial it back so he could govern.

-Nearly every Obama initiative has met with “vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition.” Compare this with the Bush administration wherein Democrats weren’t exactly lovey dovey but where many Democrats were willing to work with the Republicans on No Child Left Behind, the Bush tax cuts, post-9/11 war and security state measures, and the Iraq War.

-The filibuster has become routine, applied to even widely supported bills and to Presidential nominations. The press has become complicit in this, often failing to call it a filibuster or to note that the tool was once used sparingly and as a last resort. Now the press frequently just implies that 60 votes is a standard requirement in the Senate; but that’s certainly not how the Founders envisioned things. The Republicans have used this far more frequently than Democrats ever did when they were in the minority or even than minority-Republicans have done historically.

-The party has become dismissive of even non-partisan analysis and evidence where it does not conform to the prevailing ideology.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

-They abandon policies that they, themselves, endorsed when Democrats adopt those policies. (e.g. “seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded”)

So, the problem isn’t “conservatism;” rather, it’s the ideological rigidity and reflexive partisanship that’s problematic. Democrats bring some of that themselves, but not nearly as much and not nearly as uniformly. The Democrats occasionally bring a knife to what is turning into a perpetual gun fight.

Vic Ryckaert, writing for the Indy Star, has an article about a kindergartner in Shelbyville who had a pattern of aggressive behavior, kicked the principal, and threatened to kill him. The school called the cops and had the kid arrested.

Attempts to contact the family for this story were not successful.

In journo-speak, that could mean a few things; but I’ll go ahead and assume that this could be part of the problem. The paper was able to talk to a therapist and an autism advocate who said an arrest might not be the best thing for the kid; instead they recommended having the kid treated with counseling or seen by doctors.

I question whether those are options legitimately available to the school. The police are free, and they’re on call. (Which is why, in the absence of mental health options, the poor and mentally ill frequently end up in jail.) I don’t know if an arrest is the right thing, but I also don’t know that it’s fair to expect the school to be an extension of the mental health system. Maybe keep the kid out of class, tell the parents to come and get him, and don’t let him back in school until he gets a note from his doctor that he’s not going to be a behavior problem diverting resources away from the rest of the school kids.

Sarah Janssen, writing for the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, has an interesting article> about Emily Herx, a former teacher at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic school who suffered from infertility. She and her husband, wanting a child, underwent in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures. The procedures were apparently covered by the Catholic school’s self-funded insurance plan. Management had some knowledge that she was doing this. But, about a year after the first round of IVF, when she was undergoing a second round, she was called into the office St. Vincent de Paul church leader Rev. John Kuzmich. Apparently someone had complained about her IVF treatments.

Kuzmich told her she was a grave, immoral sinner and that there would be a scandal in the school if anyone found out. When her contract was up, the diocese didn’t renew it. The non-renewal was because of her sinfulness and fear of scandal, not because of her teaching performance. (All of this, I believe, is from Ms. Herx’s complaint; the diocese might recall things differently). Her appeal to the Bishop did no good; he said, “IVF is an intrinsic evil, which means that no circumstances can justify itIVF is an intrinsic evil, which means that no circumstances can justify it.”

According to the complaint, male teachers are permitted to obtain vasectomies and use birth control with no adverse employment consequences. Apparently the ADA recognizes infertility as a disability, and Ms. Herx is alleging that she has suffered discriminatory and adverse employment actions because of this disability. She is further alleging that her employer is discriminating based on gender; given the disparate treatment of men versus women when it comes to sinful behavior with respect to the human reproductive system. (My phrasing, not hers.)

All I can say at this point, is good luck to the judge charged with untangling that one.