I just got around to reading Justice Scalia's denial of the Sierra Club's recusal motion. It's typical, arrogant Scalia at his well-written best with none of the acid of his foaming dissents. Surprisingly, I find myself agreeing with him.
I'm no fan of Scalia. In fact, I have a huge distaste and distrust of him, but I do think he and the other justices are usually capable of setting aside their personal attachments to governtment officials when dealing with them in their official capacity. This is so even if Cheney gives him a ride to a hunting trip. As Scalia wrote,
If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court Justice can be bought so cheap, the Nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined.
And if his friendship with Cheney is such a problem, then it's not the hunting trip that triggers his requirement to recuse, it's the underlying friendship. But if that's the case, most justices would be prevented from sitting on most cases involving various government offices. DC is a snakepit of backslapping vipers. If you're in the pit, backslapping other vipers is the only game in town. If you don't socialize with the khakistocracy, you don't socialize at all.
Of course, as my gf says, these guys get to be on the Supreme Court. If we the people decide that one of the job requirements for being on the Supreme Court is that you lead a lonely life in DC, well, that's the way it goes. There's plenty of people who would take the job if the current gang think that's too much to ask.
Maybe the lesson from all this is not that Scalia should or shouldn't recuse himself. Maybe the lesson is that justices shouldn't be socializing with other high officials. Scalia shouldn't have invited Cheney in the first place.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Cops are the biggest flouters of the law around. Why is it that the broken windows theory of policing is never applied to the routine, daily, flagrant legal violations committed by cops?
More often then not, it's cops that run red lights and park illegally. Yet they never get tickets. And people see this and lose respect for police, as they should.
Thankfully, one minority community is fighitng back.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Bush is running on his war record, but with polls showing people aren't down with the war on Iraq anymore, perhaps the war president should be running from his war record.
The question I have is for the 41% of people who approve of Bush's handling of Iraq. What about this whole Iraq endeavor has gone right? Sure, the battle against the formal Iraqi army was a cakewalk. And sure we captured Hussein. But nobody thought those were our big challenges going into this. The big challenge was always to create an independent, self-sufficient democratic Iraq. That looks less and less likely as each day passes.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Drug War Rant notes that the 9th Circuit medical marijuana case is being appealed to the Supreme Court. For those of you keeping score at home, the 9th Circuit decided that the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce does not extend to prohibiting people from growing weed for their own consumption. If you're not buying or selling it, it's not commerce, and so the power to regulate commerce doesn't apply to it. It is this decision that Ashcroft is appealing.
Drug War Rant is looking forward to the battle, but I'm not so optimistic. The commerce clause power might have reached the limits of its expansion, but I agree with my co-blogger who thinks the rumors of the commerce clause's death are exaggerated. And while my co-blogger is optimistic about whether the Supreme Court will agree with the 9th Circuit, things do not look so rosy from where I sit.
The problem is that the Supreme Court has already decided a case very much like this one. That case was Wickard v. Filburn, and involved a farmer who grew wheat for his own use on his farm. Unfortunately for the farmer, he ran afoul of federal wheat production quotas and was fined for overproduction. He refused to pay, citing among other things, the federal government's lack of power to regulate wheat that had no place in interstate commerce.
He lost. The court decided that homegrown crops compete with the wheat market because if the farmer hadn't grown it himself, he would have had to buy the wheat. And the same argument will be applied to marijuana.
There are some good arguments that Wickard doesn't control the Raich case. The 9th Circuit relies on what I consider to be a rather bad one. The Court says that because the marijuana's "use is personal and the appellants do not seek to exchange it or to acquire marijuana from others in a market", the growing is noneconomic and thus Wickard just doesn't apply.
This sort of hand-waving doesn't get them very far. The question is not whether the growers seek weed in the market. The question is whether homegrown weed is a factor in the market for marijuana. And the answer is yes. If people can get high off their homegrown stash, they're going to buy less weed. It's arguments like these that make the 9th Circuit the most reversed circuit in the country.
Better arguments involve differentiating the wheat market (a legal market) from the weed market (an illegal market) to show that the federal power to shut down a market does not extend to shutting down home production that will never enter the market. Because the market itself is illegal, competition with (and other threats to) that market is irrelevant . That's a difficult argument to make, but it stands a chance of winning where the 9th Circuit's argument fails-- it manages to distinguish Wickard from Raich.
Regardless of what arguments are mustered, I predict Ashcroft wins this one. The Supreme Court isn't very sympathetic to patients who need medical marijuana and I don't think they'll see too much difference between the market-competing weed and the market-competing wheat.
Polis | 6 Writebacks | #
Rivka, at Respectful of Otters is talking 'bout her generation. She cites a recent Gallup poll to refute the charge that young women take abortion rights for granted.
She also casts the poll results as depicting "an American people who are groping for nuance." It seems that lots of women who don't identify as pro-choice still support Roe v. Wade, support legal abortions and indeed think we should liberalize restrictions on choice. She decries letting terms like "pro-choice", "feminist" and "liberal" be defined by their detractors. And asks what can be done about it.
The most important thing to be done is to take these terms back. Make sure your friends know you're a pro-choce feminist and make sure they understand what that means (and more importantly, what it doesn't mean).
Polis | 7 Writebacks | #
Reason Magazine, which stands outside the usual left-right political arena, has two articles on the Anybody But Bush crowd that seems to form most of Kerry's support: here and here.
Is anybody excited about Kerry? I mean, we're all going to vote for him and all, but what's the best thing you can say about him? He's not corrupt and he's not Bush. Aside form that, though, I can't think of a single Kerry position that yanks my crank.
Kerry is wrong on marriage (and tepid on other queer civil rights issues), has articulated no plan on Iraq, and has given us no clear reason for his campaign. He's definitely an improvement on Bush, but he's hardly inspiring me to go door to door for him.
Oh well, at least if he's not excitingly good, he's not excitingly bad.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
I attended the March for Women's Lives this weekend, along with somethwere between 850,000 and 1.15 mm others. It was worthwhile, but boring. Man, them women just wouldn't stop talking up there. And when they did stop, it got worse-- the music was straight out of some stereotypical folk-lesbian hits of the 70's dustbin album. Still, on the whole it was a good time and I'm glad I went.
I am always amazed that D.C. protests go so well compared to demonstrations in NYC. Maybe D.C. gets more practice with protests than NY. The city just gears up for these protests and handles them so smoothly and professionally, from police to transit to facilities. They let the people have their say with as little confrontation as possible. No arguing over permits or trying to shunt demonstrations outside the city center. It works, and they deserve a lot of credit for it.
The protestors were mostly middle-of-the-road people, mostly women (where were the men?) of all ages and races. Sure the kooks were there, but they were easily outnumbered. When protests scale up, the normal people always outnumber the weird lefty extremists that give protests a bad name.
There were counter-protestors in pockets of 1 to 10 people. They were usually separated from us by a barrier and a street-width of space, so confrontation was kept to a minimum. One guy, though, was standing alone on a low brick wall with a giant cardboard sign. It said: "End the war. In Iraq. On the poor. On women. In the Womb. Prolife is Progressive." I disagree, of course, but I thought he did a really good job of representing his point of view.
The march itself was fairly uneventful. Everything went as expected, and it was boring, which is good, because interesting often means dangerous at protests. The speakers came up and did their spiel while we shuffled by, too crowded to walk at a normal pace. Between the speakers they played terrible folksy music.
I never understand why rallies need speakers and celebrities and bad music. They should make the whole thing a giant party-- dance for choice, shake your butt for freedom! Sure, it's not a serious call to power, but I bet more people would show up and more people would leave feeling uplifted if they could get down with some bumping music at the rally. It should be an extravaganze of music and food and small group education sessions.
When we left the march, I asked my friends if they felt like they'd accomplished anything. We all agreed it was important to come and be counted, to make a statement about how many moderate people believe choice is important. But we all also felt like our individual presence was not going to make a difference. I think we went more because we couldn't not go than anything else.
Next time we do something like this, we have to bring our own party with us. Music, more food (we ate ourselves silly on cheeses, pasta salads, ceviche, grilled calamari sandwiches, hummus, nuts, fruit, and many other delicacies), more liquor (we ran out of bourbon halfway through the march), and more noise. Maybe we'll revive the Rockstars Against the War and funk some shit up.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
The Honolulu Police Department's Vice Division is, according to its website, concerned with just a few different types of gambling. Illegal casinos and bookmaking are of course listed, and anybody that knows anything about island life isn't surprised to see cockfighting on the list. But what, I wondered, is Caracruz?
The Honolulu PD says it's a game "played by two persons. Each person flips a coin and bets on whether the two coins will match heads or tails." They claim "there are large organized games where hundreds of dollars are wagered on each flip", which I find more than a little incredible.
Caracruz only has 3 outcomes: 2 heads, 2 tails or one of each. You wouldn't think such a simple game with would attract such expensive wagering, certainly not on any sort of widespread scale. An organized game requires a house that takes a rake or bets against you at deceptive odds. There's not much room to hide a rake or a tilt in two coins.
Indeed, Googling caracruz yields few hits, the first of which is the Honolulu PD website. One site lists it as a drinking game-- some tosser tosses two coins. If he gets two heads, he drinks. If he gets two tails, he chooses somebody else to drink. If he gets one of each, he passes the coins. If three mismatches come up in a row, everybody drinks.
The drinking game sounds much more plausible. I recently met a girl from Hawaii. She's hinted at a somewhat seedy past, so I'll have to seek her expert opinion on this matter. Perhaps she'll enlighten me over a game of Speed Quarters. Meanwhile, anybody else heard of Caracruz?
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Jim, over at Vice Squad (the newest addition to our blogroll), links to a story on Walmart's latest attempt to target the puritan market-- a DVD player that censors DVDs during playback to skip all the sex, violence and swearing.
Like Vice Squad, I think this technology is great. Vice Squad is a big proponent of voluntary, individualized censoring-- prudes can enjoy clean versions of mainstream movies without the mainstream being prevented from producing the dirty stuff most of America gets off on.
I like the technology for a different reason. The ability to recognize and delete naughty bits is also the ability to recognize and delete everything but the naughty bits. Imagine a DVD player or a TIVO that removes all the filler from porn. It could also skip to all the fight scenes in kung fu movies. It would even boil hockey games down to just the boxing. I want one.
In the "Keeping Them Honest" department, Wired has an article on websites that enable you to track political donations, lobbying and spending. They cover several great sites that allow you to do your civic duty while finding out which of your neighbors is a closet Republican:
- Fundrace - Lets you look up donors to presidential campaigns by zip code and city. Also has maps showing which areas of the country are giving to which party.
- Political Money Line - A huge database of political contributions, spending, PACs, lobbying, 527s and every other political fundraising vehicle.
- Open Secrets - Another database that has the latest 527 data.
The best thing about all this data is not just the ability to expose the quid pro quo in politics and donations. It's the ability to spy on your neighbors. My apartment buliding gave 10 times as much to Howard Dean as it did to John Kerry. We collectively gave zero dollars to Bush.
The building across the street is a little fancier than ours. Its tenants are haughty and they have doormen that blow whistles 24/7 to hail cabs. I hate those fucking whistles. Of course, that building donates Republican almost 2 to 1. And the Democratic donors mostly contributed to Kerry and Lieberman.
You can also see apartments where everybody in the family maxes out, hitting the cap on personal contributions. By breaking the donation into several pieces and putting each in the name of a different family member (kids, spouse, pets), individuals can circumvent the caps. It's legal, but ugly and it says a lot about a person.
These websites are great tools for political action or justifying petty animosity toward your neighbors. Next time that fat Republican down the hall is running for the elevator, you can actually feel good about yourself for letting the doors close in his face. I love technology.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Lots of people use "they" as a singular third-person pronoun. It's standard among everybody except incredibly stuffy grammarians. The slightly less stuffy grammar hawks use "he or she", and the people who care more about grammar than style employ the unpronouncable "s/he". These people believe "they" is for the plural and to use it for the singular is wrong.
But it's not. People have been using "they" to mean "she or he" since before the 16th century. So when the editor who equates esoteric grammar skills with self-worth blue pencils your pronouns, tell them you base your usage on no less an authority than William Shakespeare. And then tell them to get a life.
Factcheck.org is Snopes for pols. A thoroughly nonpartisan site, it examines the veracity of statements made by politicians and exposes the falsehoods.
Their latest article takes Bush to task for lying about Kerry's support for tax increases. The one before that knocks Kerry for making "the President seem to be rooting for the loss of US jobs using words he never used."
Why can't we vote for none of the above?
Polis | 5 Writebacks | #
I've never watched Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and I have a low opinion of such shucking and jiving, but I still enjoyed Right-Wing Eye, a Queer Eye parody about how the right wing would make over a young, liberal, unmarried, interracial couple. The movie is also an ad for the April 25 March for Women's Lives in DC.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Civil asset forfeiture is a way for the government to take money and property from people regardless of whether those people have violated the law. Law enforcement can seize your house, business, car, cash, land or any other property under a series of state and federal laws that allow them to take anything that might be involved in a crime. Basically, if they can arrest you, they can take your cash, your car, or anything else they want.
Once they seize it, it's there's. If you want it back, you have to show that the property hasn't been involved in a crime. Many people cannot afford this expense and difficulty, and very few people manage to get their property back.
Right now these laws are mainly used to go after minorities and suspected drug dealers. But that's changing. Most recently, Los Angeles has proposed seizing the car of anybody arrested for drunk driving, regardless of whether the charges stick or not. New York City has been doing this since 1999. They take away your car if you're accused of even the lowest level of misdemeanor DUI. They even brag about taking $60,000 cars. Imagine losing $60,000 for a misdemeanor when the charges are dropped or never proven.
After your property is seized, it's sold at auction and the government keeps the money. In many cases, the law enforcement agency that seized the property gets the money, either directly or indirectly. This creates an obvious conflict of interest and turns arrests into shakedowns.
The worst part of all this is that our courts think this is all perfectly fine. As far as I know, no court has struck a civil asset forfeiture law. The Supreme Court has upheld forfeiture more than once with almost no dissent
More reading: Drug War Rant has an excellent post about why civil asset forfeiture is bad. Roger Pilon, of the Cato Institute, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 1997. His testimony is worth reading because it goes into the details of how forfeiture is structured legally. The link above about New York City's program is pretty detailed from a pro-forfeiture point of view.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
One of the nifty things about Movable Type is that it comes with a search module all set up and ready to go. And the module, because it generates entries upon request, it can do neat Blosxom-ish things, like detect if you're logged in and, if you are, put a button to edit a post after each post. It's neat, and it's too bad that functionality isn't in the regular page view.
This plugin fixes that. It makes available a
This plugin will only work for blog's that use the same directory for data and MT. If your main index file is in the same directory as (or a subdirectory of) your mt.cgi file, you're good. Otherwise, the cookie detection doesn't work. There is a solution for this, but I haven't perfected it yet.
The big drawback to this code is it displays the edit link as long as you're logged in, regardless of whether you can edit the specific entry in question.
I fixed this problem in version 0.2.
INSTRUCTIONS:
- If you don't already have it, install the JavaScriptCookies plugin
- Install this plugin by dropping this file into your plugin directory. No config required. Woo.
- Add the javascript to your template by putting <MTJavaScriptGetCookie> in the <head> section.
- Add the <MTEntryEditLink> tag somewhere between your <MTEntries> and </MTEntries> tags.
Get the plugin here. Get other plugin/mod/flavour stuff here.
Update: Anybody know if it is possible to read a cookie set for a different directory than the one you are in? How might this be done in perl or javascript? Anybody that can help me with that gets my eternal love and affection. Thanks.
Update: I believe the answer to my question is "no".
I wrote a Movable Type plugin that creates convenient tags you can use to drop javascript cookie functions into your template headers. Put <MTJavaScriptCookies> in the <head>...</head> section of a template to give you the whole menu of cookie functions: setCookie, getCookie, deleteCookie, and fixDate. Alternatively, you can go a la carte and use just what you need with the tags <MTJavaScriptSetCookie>, <MTJavaScriptGetCookie>, <MTJavaScriptDeleteCookie>, <MTJavaScriptFixDateCookie>.
To install, just drop it into your plugin directory, then put the tags in your head as needed. Finally, use the setCookie, getCookie, deleteCookie, fixDate functions in your javascript.
Please note that while I packaged the javascript in a plugin, I did not write the javascript. I ganked it from Web Reference.
Get the plugin here. Get other plugin/mod/flavour stuff here.
Elena is a biker. She has a website that doesn't sell anything. She also has a 1000cc Kawasaki Ninja that makes 147 horses. She rides her black Ninja to red line in 6th gear on perfect roads. The roads are perfect because they are deserted, and they are deserted because they are in the Chernobyl dead zone.
Elena's biggest fear isn't radiation. It's hitting a boar at triple-digit speeds, running out of gas or getting a flat tire. There are no phones in Chernobyl, no passers-by to flag for help. If her bike breaks down, she has two options: fix it herself or glow in the dark. She carries a tire patch kit, watches her fuel gauge and avoids chickens crossing the road.
That's not to say radiation isn't a concern. She carries a geiger counter and knows to stay in the center of the asphalt, which doesn't retain as much radiation from Chernobyl's meltdown (wood, though "absorbs radiation like a sponge"). Stepping off the road without a radiation detector is like "walking through a minefield wearing snowshoes".
She brings her own food and water. Anything grown in the zone would likely kill her. She is like an astronaut.
A trip to Chernobyl is a journey back to 1986, when everybody dropped everything or just dropped dead. The fire trucks that responded to the radioactive fire are still there, the firemen having died upon arriving at the scene. Washing hung to dry remains hung. Parade decorations sit forgotten, waiting for a celebration that will never come. People left their clothes, documents, money, photos and everything else. They even left their families. They just fled.
It wasn't just homes that were abandoned. Fleets of airplanes sit, grounded. Barges float loose on the river, and yards of trucks rust as the weeds try to claim them into the ground.
Although the zone is deadly to people, flora and fauna have flourished. Without humans competing for resources, other, more radiation-resistant forms of life have dominated. Chickens can take 2.5 times the radiation that people can. Cockroaches can withstand 100 times more than us. These hearty beasts do pretty well. Horses run wild, boar have moved into homes, and trees have burst foundations from beneath, rising indoors on spindly trunks. Of course, there are stories about horrible mutant creatures, but Elena says zoologists deny them.
Elena has taken pictures of the abandoned buildings, schools, a motorcycle store, a fair grounds and many other places that used to be the center of social life. She accompanies these pictures with sober commentary, and you really feel the tension between the awful destruction and the beautiful freedom of a land overrun by nature, a place that since 1986 has avoided the trampling foot of human progress.
Chernobyl will be deadly for the next 600 years, give or take 300. Elena thinks it will be 300, but she also admits she is an optimist.
Go see her photoessay, Ghost Town.
Via Amateur Hour.
Mark Kleiman has some comments on his recent report, entitled Illicit Drugs and the Terrorist Threat, to the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. The report and his comments are worth reading, as are Drug War Rant's thoughts.
Kleiman's report discusses five connections between the illegal drug trade and terror(Cash, Chaos, Corruption, Cover, and Competition for enforcement resources), both in America and abroad, and he comments on his blog that "if terrorism were the only thing we cared about, we probably ought to legalize cocaine." The reason we shouldn't legalize cocaine, though, is because we're also worried about legalization leading to more, heavier users and the long-term damage that attends drug use.
And this is where Drug War Rant steps into the debate. Pete Guither notes that we don't really know how big the cocaine population would grow, or how much it would suffer from legalization. Politics has prevented any honest study of the problem, both here and abroad. So we don't know the downside to legalization.
But we do know the downside to prohibition. In addition to the terror funding, we have innocents killed by overzealous cops, death by impure drugs, death from lack of honest drug information and risk assessment, erosion of civil liberties, corruption, organized crime, wholesale incarceration of young minority men (and the accompanying social disruption), loss of government credibility, not to mention the financial (and opportunity) cost of paying for this mess.
Even accepting that incremental steps toward legalizing the use of certain drugs will result in health and social costs when more people use more heavily, it is difficult to believe those costs add up to more than the costs listed above.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Today, I signed up with the Small World Project, a study that tests the power of extended social networks. They give you a picture, a name, and a bunch of personal data about a target person. You take that info, think of people you know who might be closer to the target than you are, and pass the buck to them. They do the same. Repeat until you have actually found the target. The idea is to test whether the target is found and how many hops it takes to do so.
My target is a retired nurse with former ties to a hospital my sister works at. I'm going to call my sister, get her email address, and send it to her. The target worked at that hospital for one year in the late 1970's, so it's not much, but it's something. We'll see if it works.
My other leads are other nurses, especially people that have been nurses for a long time, and maybe English folk, since the target spent 10 years in Norwich and Manchester.
Of course, finding people by asking around is so 10 years ago. I googled my target and found a guy who write about her on his web page. All the available details match (age, town of residence, name, occupation), so I have no doubts it's her. I'm not supposed to just email this guy (that's cheating), but I'm tempted to at least use the information to decide which of my friends to next send her info.
Update: The project reports that, on average, 6 hops would be needed to reach the targe, but that only 3 percent of targets are actually reached. The path exists, but it is difficult to find.
The list of innocent people who have had their doors kicked in and been terrorized by the NYPD grows, but nobody with any authority is willing to do anything about the problem. In each case, police obtained a no-knock search warrant based on lies and/or they executed the warrant on the wrong address (i.e. they kicked in the wrong door, and threw innocent people on the floor). All this to "protect" people from drugs.
In addition to 57-year-old Alerberta Spruill, who was killed by a flash grenade tossed into her Harlem apartment by NYPD thugs, we can add Martin and Leona Goldberg, two Brooklyn octagenarians. Martin suffered bruises to his face, and Leona was hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat after her brutal treatment. As Drug War Rant notes, the police have tried to patch things up with the Goldbergs by sending them a fruit basket.
Amazing how this stuff never happens in midtown Manhattan. It does, though, happen in cities other than New York. From the New York Times:
In Boston, a 75-year-old retired minister died of a heart attack in 1994 after the police raided his home and handcuffed him, working on a bad tip from an informer. Another bad tip led drug agents to raid a house in San Diego in 1992. Its owner, a businessman, thought he was being robbed and fired a shot at the raid team. They returned fire, seriously wounding him. He sued and won a $2.75 million settlement.
There are usually two justifications offered for allowing police to kick in your front door instead of ringing your bell: First, if police don't crash through the door quickly, suspects will have time to destroy evidence. Second, if police announce their presence, suspects will have enough warning to respond with violence.
I am skeptical that much evidence can be destroyed in the couple minutes it might take to get a door answered. Even in the case of drugs, if we're talking about such small quantities that you could flush it down the toilet in just a minute, then the suspect in question isn't a big enough criminal to be kicking in doors.
The concern for officer safety is a real one, but you can't trade off the safety of innocent people for the safety of officers. Besides, it's a false choice. The real choice is not between killing innocent people versus putting officers at risk. The choice is between a practice that is a danger to officers, innocents and suspects versus finding a different way to obtain evidence and arrest criminals.
In no other area do we allow police to use investigation and arrest methods that consistently kill innocent people. In every other instance, society has decided that it's better to let criminals go than to put innocents at risk by pursuing them so violently. Some jurisdictions have even curtailed police pursuit in areas that are far less violent and terrorising than no-knock raids, such as high speed chases.
We know with certainty that no-knock raids have killed innocent people and will continue to do so unless stopped. So why will nobody in government stop the raids?
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
The Guardian put together 4000 balanced and insightful words on the treatment of homosexuality as a disorder. The article covers the main players for and against this idea, the studies and professionals behind the idea, and some people who have undergone treatment (with varying degrees of success).
For years, "curing" homosexuality was a laughable idea, but then it was legitimized (to some) by the very psychiatrist who had led the battle to stop treating homosexuality as a disorder in the 1970's. This guy, Dr. Robert Spitzer, conducted a new study and concluded that it is possible for therapy to help some people change their sexual orientation from gay to straight.
Of course, the study is deeply flawed. It consisted of telephone interviews with several hundred self-described ex-gays. These men and women were extremely religious folks, many of whom were steered to the study by organizations that sell the therapy being tested. Indeed, many of the people studied were in the business of promoting or providing sexual reorientation therapy. As the article notes, "These are people who get paid to say that therapy works." What's more, at least some of the people who claimed to be ex-gay have been outed quite famously as being ex-ex-gay.
The study's flaws aside, its conclusions are rather timid. Although newspapers reported Spitzer's findings as "Gays can change if they try really really hard", in truth Spitzer is careful not to go that far. He says that he wanted to test the proposition that orientation never changes. So he found some cases where it changed. Still, he says,
I think change is probably extremely rare, otherwise it would not have taken so long to find the participants. And, yes, the change I found was seldom from one extreme to the other. But nevertheless, there was change.
In other words, Spitzer's claim is that somewhere, somebody changed, so it's not accurate to say orientation never changes. Spitzer still does not claim that reorientation therapy is a viable option for most people, draws no conclusions about the cost of failure, or anything else. That some people claim to be ex-gay is not enough to prove that gays should try to be ex-gay.
Even the therapists promoting the treatment admit its limitations. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, the leading pyschologist pusing the treatment, defines success not as reorienting patients on opposite-sex partners but instead on eliminating same-sex desires and acts. Nicolosi says
[S]exual reorientation, half of it is to get rid of same-sex attraction. The other half is hopefully opposite-sex attraction. Most clients just can't imagine being attracted to women. A lot of them say, I just want to stop being attracted to guys. And, hey, that is a workable treatment.
In the end, Nicolosi treats homosexuality as an addiction to gay sex. He refers to indulging homosexual desires as "acting out". The pay-off for a man to tame his wild desires is
instead of living a gay lifestyle, he has a wife that he loves emotionally and sexually, and he has three kids, and his friends are married men.
But even this guy living the straight fantasy
may still get a little same-sex titillation from time to time, sure, and he'd better be realistic about that. I mean, he's setting himself up for a fall if he really believes he won't.
And so I wonder what kind of cure Nicolosi is really peddling here. What kind of straight man experiences "same-sex titillation"? What kind of straight man isn't attracted to women? These people aren't really cured. They're just abstaining because "acting out" can cost them their families and send them to hell. That might or might not be a good reason for abstaining, but those people are not cured. They're still gay in the sense of being attracted to same-sex partners.
As for the legal implications of Spitzer's study, it's complicated. If you accept the premise of the anti-gay crusaders that homosexuality is a complex of behaviors, then you already think homosexuality isn't an innate characteristic, and Spitzer doesn't really add much. If you accept the premise of the gay advocates that homosexuality is all about your sexual desires, then Spitzer's study showing some people can, with great effort and fear of hell, deny those desires, doesn't undermine the belief that the desires are innate. I'm calling this one a wash.
Update: There is, of course, a blog devoted to following ex-gay issues, Ex-Gay Watch. It is from a firmly gay-positive viewpoint with no ranting and lots of good points about the ex-gay sales pitch. Thanks to Denny for tipping us to the link.
Update: And for balance, there's Exodus, a blog with a section on "former homosexuals". Exodus seems to link articles with little or no comment, but it's stance is pretty clear when you see what it links.
Just when you thought Massachusetts was going to end marriage discrimination, bigotry manages to sneak back in to the process. While the state seems set to open city hall to Massachusetts couples, many out-of-staters will be out of luck.
Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly has opined that Massachusetts law prevents the state from granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples living in states where laws ban gay marriage [read another summary here]. Reilly says Massachusetts should give a list of banned states to clerks so they know who to turn away.
It is unclear how forceful the ban needs to be before it triggers the Massachusetts statute. Reilly says the 38 states that define marriage as a heterosexual union qualify. Mary Bonauto, a lawyer for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, disagrees. She says only states whose laws declare same-sex marriages void would qualify.
Either way, the people with the fewest options are the ones who won't have their options widened in Massachusetts.
Although Reilly presents this as him just enforcing the laws on the books, it is a case of selective enforcement. The state does not maintain a list of states and their ages of consent so they can turn away young couples. It doesn't maintain a list of how different states define incest so they can turn away related couples. In all these instances, you have couples whose marriages are fine by Massachusetts law but might not be fine back home. In only one of these cases does Massachusetts feel the need to be so vigilant as to enforce its 1913 ban.
Via Jill Matrix, who writes a wonderful blog that I somehow forgot to visit for over a year. I've put her back on the blogroll to make sure that doesn't happen again.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Last year, Pedro Martinez threw almost all the right pitches. The one wrong pitch was the one that mattered, the one that got Grady Little fired. Through it all, he was a primadonna crybaby, refusing to talk to reporters, throwing at people's heads when he felt threatened, and rarely deigning to pitch deep into games.
This year, he's still a punk ass bitch. The big difference is that he's lost a little on his fastball, which means batters should maybe start wearing catcher's masks.
At any rate, he lost the Sox's opener, and I can only hope that's what the season will look like for him. Early struggle, followed by tantrums and another notch in the L column.
My picks: Yankees over Cubs in 6. Sox will take the wildcard, but lose to the Angels in 3.
Three Slate articles worth reading. One on Bush's lies and the other two on the failures of the drug war.
- All the President's Suckers - William Saletan details what happens when you call Bush on doing the opposite of what he promises. The article has great examples and ties together a basket of Bush mendacity and character attacks.
- What's With All the Dutch Ecstasy? - Brendan Koerner explains why it's hard to produce ecstasy here and why the Dutch have stepped into the market to keep the ravers rolling.
- Who's Got the Acid? - Ryan Grim tries to explain the decline in American acid use in the last few years.
The first two articles are right on. The last one isn't quite convincing. Even if law enforcement did bust the guys responsible for 95 percent of the acid supply in America, that was in 2000. Surely by now somebody else could have figured out a way to make the stuff, or, as with ecstasy, we could have started importing it from outside the US. And if the acid market were really having logisitical problems with distribution because the Dead and Phish stopped touring, surely 3 years is long enough for somebody to step in with the management experience to fix it. It's not called "organized crime" for nothing.
If people aren't buying acid, it's not because they can't get it. Rather, people can't get acid because they're not buying it. For some reason, there's not enough demand right now to sustain a large market in acid at the offered price. And that's why acid isn't showing up in society's indicators.
Grim does manage to get one thing right, though:
The history of drug prohibition indicates that the government can upset supply and demand at the margins. It can drive one drug into scarcity only to see users substitute it with another. But it never eliminates the market for drugs altogether.
The acid-eaters haven't dried up and blown away. They're just eating Dutch X instead of American tabs.
Speaking from my own experience, the reason most people I know do less acid is that high quality acid is scarce. Cheap, dirty acid is plentiful. Liquid hasn't been seen in a couple years. It's tough to find, and when you find it, it's expensive. As Grim says, former heads now resort to substituting shrooms or ecstasy or more niche drugs.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #