Month: October 2005

I think it was Marvin who once said you gotta give ’em positive reinforcement on those rare occasions when they do something right. So, huzzah! and kudos to the Senate for voting 90-9 to approve a rider attached to a military spending bill banning torture.

Their measure would ban the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of any prisoner in the hands of the United States. It is a response to the abuse by U.S. personnel of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, which caused worldwide disgust.

McCain, who was a prisoner of war tortured by his captors during the Vietnam War, cited a letter written to him recently by Army Capt. Ian Fishback asking Congress to do justice to men and women in uniform. “Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for,” Fishback wrote the senator.

“We owe it to them,” McCain said on the Senate floor. “We threw out the rules that our soldiers had trained on and replaced them with a confusing and constantly changing array of standards… . We demanded intelligence without ever clearly telling our troops what was permitted and what was forbidden.”

Graham, a former judge advocate in the Air National Guard, said: “We take this moral high ground to make sure that if our people fall into enemy hands, we’ll have the moral force to say, ‘You have got to treat them right.’ If you don’t practice what you preach, nobody listens.”

The nine bad guys who voted nay were Allard, Bond, Coburn, Cochran, Cornyn, Inhofe, Roberts, Sessions, Stevens (boo! hiss!). I note proudly that my two senators (Specter and Santorum) voted yea.(Sen. John Corzine of New Jersey didn’t vote.)

Still, the administration has suggested that Pres. Bush may veto it on the grounds that it would “tie the President’s hands.” Um, yeah; that’s kinda the point! That’s what laws do. Plus the final bill still has to worked out in conference with the House, but still a step in the right direction.

First Things now has a blog. (via Mark Shea)

Though, I have to admit, one of the things I like about First Things is that it takes the longer view on things rather than getting caught up in the ephemera of the moment. Still, this’ll no doubt be worth reading.

Is the church for acceptance and pardon or transformation and costly discipleship? Justification or sanctification?

Well, both actually, says John Garvey:

While insisting that we must take the cross and transformation seriously, the church should also be a place where those who are weak, who are not ready for the whole of what is demanded, can feel welcomed and loved. In one way or another, we all fall into this category. The church is often seen as smug, doubt-free, and self-righteous, and Christians of all confessions are often guilty as charged. When one kind of sinning is seen as more important-more really sinful-than other kinds, we miss the point of the struggle, whether the sins involved are sexual, or have to do with greed or compassion or selfishness. We are called to empty ourselves, as Christ did, called to a radical humility, and morality is only part of this process.

Pro-life liberal Melinda Henneberger says social conservatives and pro-lifers have been played for suckers:

Among pro-lifers, I have long held the minority view that Bush never had the slightest intention of packing the Supreme Court with justices who would seek to overturn the 1973 decision legalizing abortion. Karl Rove would throw himself in front of a train before he let that happen.

So where did I get my inside intel on this?

There have been several not-so-subtle signals from Bush himself. When asked, during his first campaign, whether he thought the decision should be overturned, he said the country was not ready.

At a news conference in Iowa in 2000, he was asked whether he would counsel a friend or relative who had been raped to have an abortion. He answered, “It would be up to her.”

That same year, Ari Fleischer, his press secretary at the time, said this to clarify his views on the issue: “There are several actions he thinks we can take and we should take and he will seek to take that can help make abortion more rare in America.” Oh.

Then there are the statements from the women in his life. The president’s mother and former First Lady, Barbara Bush, said this on banning abortion on ABC’s This Week in 1999: “I don’t think it should be a national platform. There’s nothing a president can do about it, anyway.”

First Lady Laura Bush went even further. When asked on NBC’s Today show in 2001 whether she thought Roe should be overturned, she said, “No, I don’t think it should be overturned.” Could she have been any clearer?

All the president’s talk about a “culture of life” might even have been sincere up to a point, of course; doesn’t everybody think they’re for a culture of life?

And it certainly did the trick for him. Many people I know—most of them pro-life Catholics who oppose the war and much of the rest of Bush’s domestic agenda—felt obligated to vote for the president on this one issue.

So will social conservatives now admit they’ve been had? Probably not.

I was surprised in 1999-2000 when social conservatives so readily jumped on the Bush bandwagon. I mean, this was the scion of the Bush family we were talking about – standard-bearers of country-club Republicanism. In retrospect, it looks more than a little like the syndrome that afflicted Democrats last year – to settle immediately on whoever seemed most “electable” and not worry too much about what his actual positions were.

Fr. Jim Tucker on technology and ethics.

Camassia on gender and the church.

Kevin Carson on Posse Comitatus.

Also, Gutless Pacifist, R.I.P.? Plus Chris at Progressive Protestant is moving on and blog-friend Marvin is going on hiatus (though Ivy Bush co-blogger Jonathan will surely uphold the banner of quality blogging we’ve all come to expect there).

In comments below Joshie pointed out that the objectionable aspect of Bill Bennett’s comments was not necessarily that he was advocating a program of African-American genocide, something manifestly untrue (thought that didn’t stop some people from attributing that to him!), but his apparent assumption that African-Americans are, in some sense, more prone to crime than other racial or ethnic groups.

Now, this is one of those discussions where it’s best to tread carefully, but it might be helpful to distinguish different claims that might sail under that description. According to the Department of Justice, African-Americans are six times more likely than whites to be murdered and seven times more likely than whites to commit murder. If we use homicide as a proxy for crime in general, it seems we can say that, in some very generic statistical sense, Bennett’s assumption is true. And it can hardly be racist per se to point this out.

I take it that the question of racism arises only when one tries to explain this disparity. The racist view would presumably be that there is some inherent trait, genetic perhaps, that makes black people more prone to crime. Not only is such a view morally repugnant, but there’s not a trace of evidence to support it.

That leaves a complex of environmental, economic, political, cultural, and social factors as the explanation for the disparity in the crime rate. Given the history of treatment of African-Americans in our country it’s not hard to see how such factors could result in a higher crime rate. And none of that requires positing any kind of inherent trait as an explanation. (I note parenthetically that according to the DOJ an astonishing 65% of homicides committed by African-Americans are drug related, which suggests to me that the war on drugs continues to do more harm than good. Prohibition leads to a black market, and black markets tend to be surrounded by criminality and violence.)

Looking at the context of Bennett’s comments, it’s easy to see how the assumption behind his hypothetical scenario of aborting all black babies lends itself to the “inherent trait” interpretation (since pre-born children are, by definition, unaffected by social, economic, etc. influences), even if that’s not what he intended. And, as I mentioned, the arena of talk radio doesn’t exactly lend itself to dispassionate debate and the drawing of fine distinctions, so it was probably inevitable that his comments would be interpreted in an inflammatory way, and he should’ve anticipated that.

UPDATE: William Saletan makes a good point in canvassing the various defenses that have been offered of Bennett’s remarks:

5. The crime rate of the next black generation can be predicted from this one. Several of my favorite writers have taken this line. Here’s Andrew McCarthy in National Review: “The [black crime] rate being high, it is an unavoidable mathematical reality that if the number of blacks, or of any group whose rate outstripped the national rate, were reduced or eliminated from the national computation, the national rate would go down.” NR‘s Ramesh Ponnuru makes the same point: “Bennett’s claim about what would happen to crime rates if, somehow, all black babies were aborted, is nearly incontrovertibly true because it is sadly true that blacks are disproportionately involved in crime.” Matthew Yglesias of TPM Café agrees that abortions of black, male, poor, or southern fetuses would reduce the crime rate because “southern people, poor people, black people, and male people have a much greater propensity to commit crime.” And Nick Schulz of Tech Central Station writes, “[B]lacks commit a disproportionate share of violent crimes in the United States. … Given that fact, it’s not a monumentally difficult conceptual leap to surmise that if you aborted every black child in the country from here on out (a hideousness that no one is advocating), the crime rate would drop.”

Actually, it is a monumental leap. It’s a leap from people who have committed crimes to people who haven’t even been born. You can’t just call such an inference “mathematical” or assert a criminal “propensity” among blacks. You have to explain it. If three apples fall from a tree, the next apple will follow. But if three flipped coins come up heads, you can’t predict that the next coin will do the same. Are black babies more like apples or coins? What law of nature entitles Bennett to say he “know[s] that it’s true” that aborting them would lower the crime rate?

[James] Taranto says we need to speak frankly about the current black crime rate because it subjects black men to stereotypes. Fair enough. But what do we accomplish by asserting the criminal propensities of today’s black babies? Such talk does nothing to lower the crime rate, and it subjects those babies to the same stereotypes as they grow up. Bennett understands the psychological effect of negative assumptions in the context of affirmative action: To suggest that “black young people couldn’t get into college unless we gave them points for their race is to be involved in the bigotry of low expectations,” he argued two years ago. But when the context is blaming blacks for crime rather than helping them get into college, the bigotry of low expectations escapes both his notice and his lips.

UPDATE II: Julian Sanchez does a good job expressing his unease with Bennett’s comments:

Now, it’s certainly uncontested that, currently, a disproportionate number of crimes really are committed by African Americans. But to assume that crime would drop dramatically as a result of the kind of mass-abortions he was imagining, it seems to me that you have to posit that this isn’t a highly contingent fact having to do with a whole range of potentially alterable sociological and economic circumstances, but a kind of timeless truth. That is, you have to suppose not just that 2005 America is such that blacks commit more crimes (which is true), but that they’re intrinsically more likely to commit crimes—that this will hold true 20 years from now or 30 or whenever. Now, you might think that’s likely to be true just because you’re pessimistic about the prospects for the relevant social and economic conditions changing. But there’s at least a whiff in Bennett’s comments of the idea that there’s some kind of genetic predisposition to criminality. Maybe Bennett doesn’t think that, but if not, he displayed severe tone-deafness in picking an example that seems to imply it.

Interesting article from Salon on “unschooling,” a radical laissez-faire variant of homeschooling. The author clearly thinks the approach has serious limitations, but finds it to be a refreshing experiment in “dropping out” of the tightly organized and highly competitive environment that a lot of insitutional schooling (public and private) has turned into.

There have been suggestions, from President Bush and others, to amend the Posse Comitatus act in order to make it easier to use the military to respond to natural disasters. The act dates to Reconstruction and essentially makes it illegal (except under certain conditions*) to deploy the military for use in domestic law enforcement. The reasons for such a law are clear and compelling, so it’s alarming, to say the least, to see the president suggesting any kind of substantial revision.

Alan Bock makes the case for posse comitatus here.

The Posse Comitatus law was passed in 1878, not only in response to some of the abuses committed by federal troops during the Reconstruction period in the South after the Civil War, but more specifically after many suspected that federal troops influenced the election of 1876, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was chosen by the Electoral College and federal troops ran some polling places in the South. Specifically, Hayes won the disputed electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida, states where President U.S. Grant had sent troops as a posse comitatus by federal marshals at the polls if deemed necessary.

I’ve read some about that election but don’t have a settled view as to whether it was really stolen or not. But the use of federal troops in an election, the most central event in any democracy, bothered even many in Congress who didn’t think it was stolen (or perhaps welcomed the theft). The Posse Comitatus Act was enacted in 1878. It reads as follows (as revised in 1956):

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than two years, or both.”

[…]

What the act does is to ensure that the military is not used for domestic law enforcement. This is an important safeguard for individual liberty and citizens’ rights. When military forces are used to enforce domestic laws on citizens, the danger of a military or military-dominated dictatorship is not necessarily inevitable. But it is a constant danger.

[…]

Prohibiting the military from engaging in civilian law enforcement not only protects us from the admittedly probably remote danger of a military dictatorship, it also protects the effectiveness and integrity of the military. If the military were asked on a regular basis to engage in civilian law enforcement (or even disaster relief) it would soften the warrior mentality and take resources and training time from the primary mission of being ready to fight an actual war. Weakening the Posse Comitatus Act, as has been suggested before by politicians of both parties, would almost certainly reduce the respect citizens have for the military, which has gradually increased since the act was passed, not coincidentally in my view.

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*One of the exceptions involves the use of the military in enforcing anti-drug laws. Notoriously, this allowed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to receive military training in preparation for the siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX on the grounds that there was drug activity going on inside the compound (charges which were never substantiated). For a pretty darn convincing “revisionist” account of the Waco debacle see the documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement.

No evidence of shots fired at rescue copters