Avdat

Valerie's world

Jonathan condemns polygamy, and argues that any openness to blessing "non-exploitative polygamous relationships" is just another example of the Enlightenment run amok.

I didn't see Larry King's interview with "Valerie," but it sounds like she's arguing that marriage is a civil contract like any contract, and that the state has no rational basis for limiting that contract to just two parties.  If that's the argument, then I don't think that's liberalism per se, but libertarianism, which argues that the government's sole role in regulating contracts is to ensure that they're entered into freely and that all terms are observed by all parties.

Fortunately we don't live in a libertarian society.  So there's all manner of regulation of contracts.  Take anti-trust law, for instance.  A lot of these laws ask whether the common good is helped or harmed by a certain merger or acquisition, and if not, said deal is not permitted to go ahead.

So even if we concede that Valerie's in a fine relationship, it's pretty easy to make the argument that polygamy mostly looks like what's practiced in places like Warren Jeffs' west Texas compound, which is reason enough to ban it. 

Plus, marriage streamlines everything.  With marriage, you know exactly who can pick up the kids from school, who can pull the plug at the hospital, and who inherits the house.  But legalized polygamy would seem to reintroduce a lot of uncertainty into settled territory.

But the point is that government regulation of contracts shows us that liberalism is not entirely amoral.  One need not appeal to revelation to condemn polygamy, nor insist that the state's only recourse in banning polygamy is to adopt a religious (albeit nonsectarian) rationale.

Your right to vote

Patrick Appel is blogging for Andrew Sullivan while the latter takes a mental health break from the medium.  Appel has a minor thread going this week on how the suspension of voting rights of convicted felons blunts efforts to enact sensible prison reforms.  Start here, then go here, then here.

I'm happy to report that North Carolina has a rather liberal standard on this issue.  This is an almost verbatim quote from a state-issued pamphlet on the subject:

If you are convicted of a felony in North Carolina, you temporarily lose your citizenship rights, including the right to vote. However, after completing all the terms of your sentence (including parole, probation and restitution), you do not have to do anything to have your citizenship rights restored. They’re automatically restored (N.C. Gen. Stat. 13-1). All you need to do is re-register to vote, or register for the first time, if you weren’t registered to vote prior to your conviction. In order to streamline the process of registering, ask your releasing officer for your Certificate of Restoration of Forfeited Rights of Citizenship (N.C. Gen. Stat. 13-2).

For more information, contact the State Board of Elections (919) 733-7173. On the web: www.sboe.state.nc.us

We're trying to spread the word between now and Friday, April 11, the deadline to register to vote in the May 6 primary.

We are ruled by jerks

Local reaction to Governor Spitzer's resignation:

In (Spitzer's) wide-ranging probe of the mutual fund industry, Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. and merger partner FleetBoston Financial Corp. in 2004 agreed to a $675 million settlement. The bank declined comment Tuesday. Many at the bank, though, were saying "what comes around, goes around" when the news of the prostitution case surfaced, one source said.

No.  No.  No.  No.  No.

Whatever social wrath and legal penalties Eliot Spitzer must bear is payment for his purchasing sex, not for the legitimate exercise of his oversight authority.  The board room snickering is truly galling--the soundtrack of our decadent Second Gilded Age.

Laugh it up, bankers.  That's Margin calling on line one.

Gimme that pitchfork

The pitchforks were out at last night's County Commission meeting.  My fair city, Salisbury, North Carolina, wants to annex neighborhoods along Highway 150 west of town.  But residents of said neighborhoods don't want to be Salisburians, no way, no how, nuh-uhh:

Rod Whedbee, a resident of Salisbury and chairman of the Rowan Property Rights Alliance, said the city's attempt to take in more property to get more revenue is "a sign of poor fiscal stewardship." He also equated annexation without a vote of the people to fascism and quoted writings of Mussolini that say government is important, not individuals.

"In Rowan County, have we become fascists, believing in the all-powerful government, or do we believe and act upon the notion of a democracy that values its citizens?" Whedbee asked.

The County Commission has even retained an attorney to help our neighbors fight this lovely little proposal.

I'm not surprised there's opposition.  Their taxes are going to roughly double.  They will get much better police and fire protection as a result, however.  I see that as a good trade-off, although I can certainly imagine others seeing it differently. 

At the same time, any property owner in the proposed area shouldn't be surprised that the city is making this move.  Densely developed areas next to a municipal boundary are ripe for the picking.  That's the way it is.

What I can't see is the legitimacy of throwing around terms like "fascist."  "Fascism" is David Treme rounding up a couple of hundred thugs, some to move the city limits signs, others in brown shirts with baseball bats and a few pitchforks of their own going door-to-door collecting the new tax revenue our City Manager is keen to get his hands on. 

North Carolina does have very liberal involuntary annexation laws, but they're, you know, laws, written by the State Legislature and signed by the Governor acting on behalf of We The People who elected them.  As far as I know, the city is working within the law to pursue its plans.  The people, of course, are free to lobby their legislators to change the laws, which they're doing, but please, let's tone down the rhetoric.

P.S.  John Barber is right to wonder whether the County ought to foot the bill for private citizens' civil court battle.  The Commission is acting like the City of Salisbury is the enemy.  Well, all of us in Salisbury are Rowan County citizens as well.  Maybe the County Commission should buy me a lawyer to appeal my property tax re-evaluation.

P.P.S.  For many years, NC's liberal annexation laws exempted the city of Fayetteville, because the law's author was from Fayetteville's much smaller neighbor, Hope Mills.  If you want to know why Fayetteville's such a crappy city, it's not the military base.  It's going 30 years without the power to annex.  Inside Owen Drive/MacPherson Church Rd., Fayetteville's a charming Southern town.  Outside that perimeter, it's a hellhole.  That's what you get when you cripple a municipality's power to annex.  You get nice towns surrounded by a mish-mash of tract homes, strip malls, car lots, septic tanks underground and no sidewalks above ground.  Maybe the County Commission's new economic development pitch could be, Rowan:  The Next Fayetteville!

Ouch, my hand!

Talk of the Nation devoted half-an-hour to the Archbishop of Canterbury's controversial comments that some form of Shari-ah Law ought to be an option for British Muslims.  It seems perfectly reasonable to me.  Civil courts already encourage some form of mediation or binding arbitration for a variety of cases.  If both parties voluntarily subject their divorce or custody case to faith-based mediation, what's the problem?  Especially if either party has the right to appeal to the civil courts?

One guest was a Jewish scholar who informed us that this already happens with Orthodox Jewish divorces in the U.S.  You get divorced in the eyes of God and the Jewish religion, and then the civil court often rubber stamps the religious court's settlement.

The idea that Rowan Williams would be advocating chopping off the hands of thieves or stoning adulterers is ludicrous.  So why the hubbub?  That might be worth an extra half-hour, how the media demonizes religion.  Or a third half-hour on the boogeman of religion in the public square.

More remembrances

It's not just MLK's birthday that's on the body politic's mind this week.  It's also the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.  Scott Lemieux has a three part series on why Roe was rightly decided.  In short:

1. the majority opinion in Roe was not an invention, but had both feet planted in venerable constitutional tradition;
2. the laws that Roe overturned were blatantly discriminatory, and the Roe decision thus compliments earlier Warren court decisions ending segregated schools, poll taxes, literacy tests and the like, and
3. contrary to conservative critiques of Roe, the majority opinion wasn't out in front of public opinion; it was state legislatures who were behind the curve on abortion policy.

Part two, which addresses point number two above, was most illuminating:

As I mentioned, abortion is without question a harder case than Griswold or Lawrence. I believe that women have a right to reproductive freedom, and unlike Byron White, I do not believe that abortion involves merely the "convenience" of a woman. But that isn't the end of the analysis. The reason for this is obvious: the potential argument that the fetus is human life that the state can protect, which goes beyond the consensual behavior of Griswold (or the severe invasion of Skinner.) Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if the argument that the fetus is a human life that must be protected is accepted, Roe is clearly wrong. If a state passed a law, based on a consensus view that the fetus was life and had to be protected, and was willing to enforce these laws equitably, as I judge I would uphold such a law as constitutional however much I disagreed with the underlying moral view.

But, of course, we can stop right there. The abortion laws struck down by Roe are not plausibly based on the premise that the fetus is a human life, and these laws were not enforced equitably. Let's take these two points separately:

1)Blackmun's opinion did a terrible job of both connecting its voluminous historical evidence to its legal arguments, and of tracing the extensive legal tradition that supported Roe. He did bring up one more important point, however: there is little evidence that state abortion laws, most of which dated from the late 19th century, were primarily concerned with fetal life. Both concern about the danger of the procedure (now, of course, obsolete) and patriarchal conceptions of female sexuality were more important. And, of course, this was true of even more recently revised abortion laws, and of current proposals for new abortion laws. As I have written before, abortion laws tend to be a legal, moral, and ethical shambles that are inexplicable unless their primary objective is regulating the sexual behavior of (some) women. Laws designed to protect fetal life have no reason to exclude women from punishment, or contain rape, incest or health-of-the-mother exceptions, or to permit women to obtain abortions across state lines. As the nature of these laws indicate; there is nothing remotely resembling a consensus that a fetus is a human life, and only a tiny minority of the minority that nominally accepts this position acts is a way that is consistent with this belief. For this reason, American abortion laws are directly comparable to Griswold and Lawrence: they are primarily attempts to regulate consensual sexual behavior. Perhaps these laws would pass constitutional muster if fairly applied. But this brings us to point number 2:

2)Abortion laws in the United States have never been applied equitably, or anything remotely approaching this. As I have written before, the definitive account can be seen in Chapter 2 of Mark Graber's Rethinking Abortion. When I say that abortion laws aren't equitably applied, I don't mean this in the sense that any law in any context short of utopia is unfairly applied. Rather, I mean that affluent white women had virtually universal de facto access to safe abortions performed by competent doctors in hospitals. Such grey market abortions could have been easily stopped--you don't have to march a respectable ob-gyn out of work in handcuffs many times to dissuade him, and these abortions left a paper trail. The laws weren't enforced because there was no social will to enforce them. Just as the effect of contraception laws was to prevent to distribution of free contraception to the poor, the effect of abortion laws was to deny abortion to poor women and women of color. It doesn't exactly require a radical reading of the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to see this legal framework as intolerable. When one considers how abortion laws are actually applied, the case for their constitutionality is extremely weak. In addition, this selective enforcement makes clear that protecting fetal life was not particularly important to legislatures (unless fetuses only become intrinsically valuable when they are carried by poor women or women of color.)

So my question is, Has the pro-life movement really moved beyond where state legislatures were in the 19th century when they wrote anti-abortion laws?  If it's not about punishing poor women, black women, Latino women, and Native American women for fornicating, but about the life of the unborn child, then serious pro-life legislation in a post-Roe would, it seems, have to prosecute both the pregnant woman as well as the doctor in all cases of abortion except when the mother's life is in danger.

I haven't heard many mainstream pro-life people calling for that.

Add to that the fact that the ire of the pro-life movement may be misplaced.  A whole lot of abortions are performed on women in their 20s and up, many of whom are married or are in stable, long term relationships:

Georgette Forney, who had an abortion when she was 16 and is now an anti-abortion campaigner leading Anglicans for Life, says she often sees economic pressures triggering abortions, even in middle-class families.

"In one situation, the husband was adamant that they were on track to pay for their two sons' college education and a third child would throw off his whole calculation," Forney recounted. "So that baby was aborted, and that woman was devastated. It was a five-year process to recover."

Forney said she also encountered a single mother who was worried she might lose custody of her daughter in light of a suit by the biological father. The woman then became pregnant, Forney said, and had an abortion in violation of her own beliefs because she feared having a second child would jeopardize prospects for keeping her daughter.

"We've begun to depend on abortions," Forney said. "We feel we have to choose between our unborn child and our born children."

Martha Girard, on the other hand, says she's appalled by the notion that women should lose the right to choose.

A hospital ultrasound technician from Pleasant Prairie, Wis., and a mother of three, Girard had an abortion two years ago, at 44, when she mistakenly thought she was too old to get pregnant. Having been through three difficult pregnancies previously and coping with a mentally disabled eldest son, she felt abortion was the prudent choice.

"I knew that this pregnancy would end up badly -- I could feel it -- and we've already got enough problems with the mentally ill son," Girard said.

The Journal of Family Issues published a report this month asserting that women often choose abortion because of their wish to be good parents.

That means women who have no children want the conditions to be right when they do, and women who already are mothers want to care for their existing children, said the lead author, Rachel Jones, a researcher with the Guttmacher Institute.

Now let me be clear.  Even if abortion should be legal, and I think it should, that does not mean that it is not a dubious moral act.  Many legal things are morally questionable, even reprehensible:  certain "no-fault" divorces, topless bars, preventive war, etc. 

Borrowing from Karl Barth's treatment of suicide, I would say that we need to meet the problem of abortion with the gospel and not the law.  Not "Thou shalt suffer this child to live," but "Thou mayest live with this child.  And we'll help you."

In the above citation the problems that led to abortion were flat out coercion by a husband, an unpredictable and potentially hostile legal system, and the financial and emotional burdens of caring for existing children.  I do believe that God can "make a way out of no way," and I think God uses ordinary people helping people to do that.  That means people helping empower women, giving them access to safe, reliable birth control, universal health care, and the whole "village" (pardon me) pitching in to raise the children.

There's too much law in the pro-life movement.  When one gets beyond the rhetoric of life and looks at specific legislative proposals, it still seems like it about "By God, you've made your bed, and you're going to lie in it."  I'm not on board with that.  And I think that pro-life people and soft pro-choice people really need to grapple with that, as well as with the legal and social points that Lemieux makes in his summary of Roe.

UPDATE:  In case you or I were thinking I was in Lemieux's hip pocket on this, read him mock me here (to the extent that he mocks this William Saletan article, which I pretty much agree with).