Noli Irritare Leones

Grading Education.

Richard Rothstein’s new book Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right just got added to my short list of books about education that everyone should read. I presume that EPI has put it in the hands of everyone in Congress, but it might be worth, after reading it yourself, passing it on to a local school board member. Whereas a lot of criticism of NCLB amounts to little more than an unbalanced rant and I would say that most criticism is unconstructive, Grading Education offers a comprehensive, compelling, and constructive critique. It’s comprehensive in that it places NCLB within a (very interesting) discussion of the history of evaluation of schools, and constructive, not in the sense that it suggests a way to fix NCLB (that, the authors say, is impossible) but rather by offering a sensible alternative framework for “getting accountability right”….

Red Sex, Blue Sex: Why Do So Many Evangelical Teenagers Become Pregnant?

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

…

Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on measures of religiosity–such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.

Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how “embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn’t the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.

…

Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic orientation”–how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage–just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option….

The Neuroscience of Cons.

… They say that all cons rely on the mark’s greed to work. But this short essay implies that greed is only a secondary factor.

South Carolina Update: Priest’s statement on Obama voters repudiated.

California buys a bit of Brazil and Indonesia.

Nepal to recognize same-sex marriage.

On the state of sex in literature.

The Recession: A Pungent Analysis.

Via Philocrites, a Unitarian sermon on the “broken hallelujah.”

Furious agreement.

Question & Answer Guide On California‘s Parental Opt-Out Statutes: What classes, under California education law, you can or can’t opt your child out of, if your child is attending public schools.

I was filling Mom in on California proposition news, and when I told her about Proposition K’s defeat, she told me about this article in the Economist, which compares how different countries approach the regulation of prostitution.

Imagine that you are a young boy. (Blog may be blocked by nannyware at work, though not for anything in this entry.)

What’s the Difference Between Seasonal Flu, Pandemic Flu, and Avian (Bird) Flu? Via the Librarians’ Index to the Internet. Also, Medicare: Flu Information, and the HistoryMakers, an oral history site dedicated to preserving African-American history.

Paul Krugman on Fiscal FDR. Also, Franklin Delano Obama?

Michelle Obama Watch (that’s Michelle Obama Watch as in stories about Michelle Obama, not in the hostile takedown sense).

Where have all the English Americans gone? Nowhere….

David Axe looks at Somali pirates.

Drima the Sudanese Thinker on stoning and sharia.

Requiem for a Holy Place.

Veteran’s Day. And On Veterans Day.

This month’s advices and queries, for Pacific Yearly Meeting, are on peace.

Do I live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars?

How do I nourish peace within myself as I work for peace in the world?

Do I confront violence wherever it occurs, even when my personal relationships are involved?

Where there is distrust, injustice, or hatred, how am I an instrument of reconciliation and love?

What are we doing to remove the causes of war and destruction of the planet, and to bring about lasting peace?

Do we reach out to all parties in a conflict with courage and love?

(You can follow the link for the advices.)

Friends read and reflect on the queries in our meetings each month; at Orange County Friends Meeting, the practice is to read them during meeting for worship the first Sunday of the month, and reflect on them for a few minutes after close of worship.

That meant, this time, that our time for query reflection came right before the election, and it affected where my mind went; where at another time I might have thought of Iraq and Afghanistan and all of the places at war in the world, this time my mind was on shouted words at political rallies, and the fears on people’s minds. I thought of how peace may not always come in a form that obviously says peace at first sight, and I thought of Martin Luther King and of Colin Powell. Martin Luther King because, after all, though my living memory of him begins with the news of his death (my first political memory), and I’ve known him really only as martyr to nonviolence, weren’t there people who saw him as scary Communist when he was alive. I remembered a man once speaking of the fear with which his family heard the news of the coming March on Washington, and of the moment that his mind was changed. And Colin Powell because of what he’d said of the Muslim soldier - he’s no pacifist, but a general speaking of the death of a soldier, but confronting anti-Muslim prejudice with that story of the Muslim soldier is, after all, being an instrument reconciliation where there is hatred.

Also relevant to this month’s queries, Episcopalian blogger *Christopher has a post in which he talks about directing anger.

The atmosphere of the protest in stark contrast to the calm of the Benedictine community. I pondered as folks spoke and chanted rallying songs: Anger, Abba Isaiah of Scetis tells us, reminds us that something is wrong. Anger spurs us to justice, to doing right by one another. But anger is quite a powerful passion. Anger needs directing.

Yes, Christian tradition has a long history of oppressive behaviors. Christian tradition also has a long history of individuals and small groups willing to make reforms, willing to direct their anger at injustice toward reshaping our relationships together, willing to be communities of hospitality in the midst of storms. I am reminded that many of the movements to undo wrongs and bind wounds in the Western world are deeply rooted in Christian faith—Abolition, Women’s Rights, Civil Rights. I am reminded that Dorothy Day’s rule was founded in Benedict’s….

Today, I talked to the mother of the one regular preschool child in our First Day School; she’s started talking with S. about the queries each month. She said that, when she had the one on plain speech, she realized that S. is actually better on that one than we adults are.

I’m to teach the older kids next Sunday, and am thinking, since it connects to this month’s queries, of talking some about Africa - what some of the conflicts are there, some of the efforts toward peace, and what Quakers are doing.

Rod Dreher had said on his Crunchy Con blog that he would have a column today arguing that, if possible, social conservatives should trade civil recognition of same-sex marriage for protection of religious freedom. So, today I checked out the promised column.

In Why Prop 8 victory was Pyrrhic for conservatives, Rod argues that

This is the logical next phase in the development of modernity, whose 500-year project has been the gradual emancipation of the individual will. When gay marriage proponents argue that conservatives are on the wrong side of history, they’re right.

Moreover, the prejudice – both in the bad, bigoted sense, and the good, Burkean sense – that protected traditional marriage is evaporating. Conservatives will lose this war because they have lost the young. And they have lost the young because they have lost the culture.

and argues that it’s time to make a deal.

Well, California gays had marriage in all but name, but still successfully petitioned the state Supreme Court over the word “marriage.” Still, if religious liberty can be protected while statutorily granting same-sex marriage, that’s a deal prudent conservatives and fair-minded gay activists should take.

What I’m still not clear on is what religious liberty protections, specifically, he wants to bargain for - it’s not about sermons or religious marriages, but other stuff:

No, pastors won’t be jailed for anti-gay sermons. Nor are clergy likely to be forced to marry same-sex couples. But because marriage carries with it a vast array of legal rights and obligations, a live-and-let-live settlement is hard to imagine.

Back at his Crunchy Con blog, Rod is pessimistic about whether the solution he hopes for can come to pass.

I have no faith that this will happen. As a reader put it recently in one of the threads below, there really doesn’t seem to be any tenable middle ground — if by “tenable” you mean a middle ground that gays are willing to concede. I think a sufficient number of social conservatives could be convinced to yield on gay marriage if we could be assured that our religious institutions would be left alone. This could be accomplished, I think — lawyers, correct me if I’m wrong — if gay marriage were granted statutorily, instead of ordered by a court as part of civil rights jurisprudence. But as I indicate in the column, I don’t think gay activists want any part of that — they want full equality in every sense of the word….

So, what concession is being asked for? I Google the lawyer that Rod has recommended.

Georgetown’s Chai Feldblum, a gay rights activist and legal scholar, points to irreconcilable differences between gay rights and religious freedom.

Though Prof. Feldblum believes justice is on the gay rights side, at least she admits how high the stakes are for the faithful.

Google turns up an article by Chai R. Feldblum titled Moral Conflict and Liberty: Gay Rights and Religion, which I think must be Rod’s source. It starts with two parallel examples. In the first, two gay men, recently married in Massachusetts,

Imagine that you and your same-sex male partner got married last year in Massachusetts and are now planning a delayed honeymoon in Tennessee. You search the Web and find a lovely guesthouse in your price range. Nothing about the guesthouse’s description on the Web site makes you think you will not be welcome there. You make reservations through the Web site.

The two of you arrive at the guesthouse, sporting your wedding rings and calling each other “honey.” The owner of the guesthouse asks if you are gay. You answer that you are and explain that this is your delayed honeymoon. The owner is very gracious and courteous, but explains that you cannot stay in his guesthouse unless you agree to sleep in separate rooms and also agree not to engage in any sexual activity during your stay….

… Your identity as a gay person has not disappeared simply because you have been precluded from having sex with your partner during the weekend. But, presumably, you have experienced some dignitary harm. And, indeed, your identity as a gay person would have little real meaning if you were consistently precluded from having sex with your same-sex partner. This identity—this “identity liberty,” as I hope to explain below—is necessarily curtailed by the absence of a law prohibiting public accommodations from discriminating against gay people.

Now imagine that you and your opposite-sex wife have decided to open a Christian bed & breakfast. You view your guesthouse as a haven for God-fearing, evangelical Christians. You do not advertise generally on the Web, only on Christian sites. You make it very clear in all your advertisements that you run a Christian business and that you will not rent rooms to cohabiting, homosexual couples (married or not) or to cohabiting, heterosexual couples who are not married. One day you are sued because your state has a law prohibiting discrimination based on marital status and sexual orientation….

… But you feel that your beliefs and identity as a religious person simply cannot be disaggregated from your conduct. Your religious belief—your
“belief liberty” interest, as I term it below—is necessarily curtailed by the existence of a law that prohibits you from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or marital status.

Feldblum holds that, in general, the liberty interest of the GLBT person here should trump.

Ensuring that LGBT people can live honestly and safely in all aspects of their social lives requires that society set a baseline of non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. If individual business owners, service providers and employers could easily exempt themselves from such laws by making credible claims that their belief liberty is burdened by the law, LGBT people would remain constantly vulnerable to surprise discrimination. If I am denied a job, an apartment, a room at a hotel, a table at a restaurant or a procedure by a doctor because I am a lesbian, that is a deep, intense and tangible hurt.

(Here I notice a parallel to the “conscience laws” for pharmacists. Allowing broad exemptions for pharmacists - with perhaps even laws preventing pharmacies from firing them - for things like birth control prescriptions and Plan B can put women in the position where they can’t reliably fill birth control prescriptions - your regular pharmacist could be replaced by a new hire with an objection to filling that prescription, or may have a change of heart - or get Plan B in the case of a sudden birth control failure or even a rape. There might be ways to allow some compromise - for example, if one pharmacy in a town with multiple pharmacies has a clearly posted policy of not providing birth control, a woman’s liberty isn’t particularly infringed when she needs to go to the neighboring pharmacy. But at a certain point - no, sorry, conscience precludes our refilling your birth control pills, and no, we won’t refer you elsewhere and transfer the prescription - the conflict really is zero sum.)

However, Feldblum does explore, at the end of her article,

limited situations in which a legislature should choose to protect the belief liberty of individuals or institutions over the interest in protecting the safety and dignity of LGBT people.

One involves “enterprises that are engaged in by belief communities (almost always religious belief communities) that are specifically designed to inculcate values in the next generation,” provided that

the enterprise must present itself clearly and explicitly as designed to inculcate a set of beliefs; the beliefs of the enterprise must be clearly set forth as being inconsistent with a belief that homosexuality is morally neutral and the enterprise must seek to enroll only individuals who wish to be inculcated with such beliefs.

Another, about which Feldblum is more tentative, involves leadership positions in religiously affiliated social service organizations.

I’d be inclined to say that an exemption should also be allowed for organizations that are geared to helping people form intimate family relationships, are up front about what values they’re screening for, and aren’t (in the case of adoption) seeking state support. (Certainly, there’s one legally protected category - marital status - that you don’t want to apply here - silly lawsuits like the guy who tried to sue eHarmony for not letting him onto the dating service while still married should be right out. And, after all, if you’re a same-sex couple looking for, say, marriage counselling, would you really want to make a Christian counselling service that disapproves of your relationship altogether take you as a customer?)

(And, obviously, churches themselves don’t get state supervision of their choices of clergy, conduct of religious rites, or whatever.)

I’m wondering, though, if Rod is talking about some broader level of religious exemption, here. What sort of religious liberty protection does he see as important, here, that he thinks the GLBT side would be unwilling to grant?

Victory in Kentucky Klan trial.

Johan Maurer writes about Biblical realism

As the U.S. president-elect Barack Obama prepares himself and his leadership team for the tasks ahead, I find my optimism tempered by these sober words from Chris Hedges’ elegant rant against fundamentalisms*, both religious and atheist, entitled I Don’t Believe in Atheists:

“The prospects for the human race are bleak. The worse things get in human societies, the more powerful the yearning for illusion and false hope. …”

As Christians, we do have incredibly good news, but it is not the “Good News (TM)” the rest of the world sourly thinks we are peddling. (Why do they think that? Because the heretical celebrities who claim to exemplify Christian certainty indeed peddle it.)

…

Secondly, God has not just granted us, through the Holy Spirit, a share in the divine Love that flows throughout creation. (I envision it as a universal subatomic weak force, never coercing a particular outcome in any case but always drawing us toward ultimate reconciliation.) God has also arranged for us to have (at least!) two awesome resources for discernment: the Bible and each other. The Bible’s utter realism about sin (as Hedges points out more than once) inoculates us against destructive certainty. Biblical faithfulness and Christian arrogance are completely incompatible!! And our capacity for relationship, for dialogue, with people inside and outside our communities of faith, means we can draw on a planetary web of observers, thinkers, doers, to study and act. The scientist and the steward need each other; the activist and the contemplative need each other; and who would be better able to point out the mystic’s blind spots than the sympathetic cynic?

As much as I resist looking toward larger-than-life heroes to catalyze the global social resources we need to face the future, I do have high hopes for Barack Obama. I hope that he can help us commit ourselves, not to false certainties, utopian fantasies, or a fatal dependence on hero-figures, but to overcoming what Obama himself called our “empathy deficit.” …

Scattered thoughts:

Andrew Sullivan sometimes talks of a “conservatism of doubt.” I’m not sure he always exemplifies it - he has, after all, the temperament of a blogger - but he may be right that, if conservatism has something positive to offer the world, doubt is one of the more positive things it has to offer. Conversely, conservatism becomes scary when it lacks doubt, when it follows a utopian impulse of its own (whether it’s the utopian impulse to believe we can readily remake other countries with our armies, or more internal utopian impulses).

I suppose that, if anyone has to have the outsized hopes placed on him that Obama does, it’s well that he has, like Obama, a temperament drawn to a certain measure of nuance and caution. Though, on the other hand, our financial crisis may not leave as much room as usual for cautious choices. Anyway, I am, like Maurer, hopeful, while taking his point about realism.

Related to what Johan said about the contrast between Biblical faithfulness and Christian arrogance, I’m now reading Rowan Williams’ book Where God Happens, about the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and this passage caught my attention:

Living Christianly with the neighbor, living in suhc a way that the neighbor is “won” - converted, brought into saving relationship with Jesus Christ - involves my “death.” I must die to myself, a self understood as the solid possessor of virtues and gifts, entitled to pronounce on the neighbor’s spiritual condition. My own awareness of my failure and weakness is indispensable to my communicating the gospel to my neighbor.

Ebony, getting the first photo shoot for our new President elect, manages a cover which makes him look incredibly cool. I’ve never been much for shaded glasses - I like nice eyes - but these, along with the black suit, do have a certain James Bond style going for them. So it’s no surprise that the comment strays into talk about the hotness of Barack Obama.

During the campaign, there was always a corner of my mind that worried at such talk - was the fact that many women find him hot really going to be more of a political benefit to Obama than a political drawback? Now that he’s safely elected, I suppose I can relax about that - either it was more plus than minus, or else it was a moot point in the face of his other advantages.

I’m still not sure whether the “hot” factor was more of a boon or a bane for Sarah Palin. Did it boost her with men who’d never have voted for her otherwise, or did it make it just that much easier for her to unravel when she bombed out in the interviews with Katie Couric? After all, “hot” and “competent” are often contradictory images, for a woman. Not that “competent to be President” is anywhere near my take away impression of Palin regardless of her looks.

Either way, I think the whole hotness thing, even with people you don’t know, like distant politicians or actors, is never just about looks; it’s about total package and who appeals to you in other ways (even if you don’t really know them). Certainly, Clinton (who had plenty of people vouching for his hotness in his time) never got his appeal on pure looks. So, I suspect that people who find Palin hot aren’t just people who like her style of looks, but people whose hearts beat faster for “lipstick on a pit bull” versions of femininity, and similarly for the others. Even good looking actors, like George Clooney, get part of their sex appeal from whether the roles they’re playing are the kinds of guys you want to bed. (What it says about my tastes that I find Obama hotter, as politicians go, than I ever found Bill Clinton, I don’t know - but it probably has some connection to what sort of guy I like in real life, and doesn’t have all that much connection to how I evaluated their positions on the issues when deciding to vote for them.) People say sometimes that they just care about other people’s bodies - and bodies certainly matter - but I wonder whether bodies are ever really everything, even with strangers - aren’t you also looking for something in the way the person carries himself or herself, at least some personality you imagine onto the object of your desires, however unreal it may sometimes be?

Sooner or later, reading a thread like that, someone will say something that reminds me of Andre. This time it’s Stacy, with “Barack is only ‘hot’ he carries himself like a cool, confident, badass. People, and especially women, really respond to that.” That’s actually a bit of how I saw Andre, when I was drawn to him in college, and it’s a little weird seeing the same appeal reflected here. After all, Andre and Obama are, well, I can think of various ways they’re alike, some of them superficial. Both black, both about the same age, both about the same height, both good looking and with appealing voices, both bright guys who went to good schools, both wrote poetry in college, both I suppose left of center in politics, both willing to reach professionally for goals where success wasn’t exactly certain, and both good at what they do. Also both apparently devoted husbands and fathers now. But still, very different people. Andre’s very present father isn’t Obama’s absent one, Andre’s Chicago childhood isn’t all that much like Obama’s Hawaii and Indonesia one, and Obama has this calm disposition that makes him to politics what Bjorn Borg was to tennis when I was in high school, while Andre always struck me as more intense and passionate than calm. In personality, in background, in interests, they’re really different in lots of ways. So, if how I found him attractive resembles how these other people are describing Obama’s appeal, when they’re in other ways so different, what does that say?

Hugo had a recent post about where ex-lovers and ex-wives go. With three ex-wives, three ex-live-ins, and about eight or nine exes he’d say he was “seriously” in love with, Hugo has a fair number of exes to think about, and he describes them as people who, though no longer in his life, are

participants in the cloud of witnesses, both living and dead, to whom I am in a very real sense accountable in this life.

There’s a sense, I suppose, in which Joel is actually the only man with whom I was “seriously” in love. I mean, he’s the only one I ever married. The only one with whom I shared a rental or mortgage agreement and a checking account. The only one with whom I talked about having children. But of course there were a few others. My attitude toward exes is in some ways similar to Hugo’s, and in some ways not. Hugo thinks it’s best not to be friends with exes.

I’m not close today with my ex-wives or ex-lovers. I’ve made amends where I can and where appropriate, and in some cases (not all) I have received — and given — forgiveness. But I honor that transitioning from intense intimacy to uncomplicated platonic friendship is easier said than done. In a strange way, it has always seemed to me that staying “buddies” with an ex (when children are not involved) does a kind of violence to the reality of the relationship that was, particularly when that relationship was extraordinarily passionate. Speaking only for myself, everyone who has loved me and whom I have loved in return has left a mark (in some cases, literally) on my skin. And sometimes, “staying friends” requires a conscious effort to ignore that mark, something I am not always willing to do.

I am not now friends with any of my exes, but I’d phrase that choice differently. For one thing, well, some of it is chance (one of those exes - the one that lasted the longest - is dead). My feeling is, sometimes friendships with exes work, and sometimes they don’t, but the boundary I’d set is - open book with your actual spouse, and care for that person’s feelings. I lost one friend, I suspect to the jealousy of his then fiance, and, though whatever I may have done to arouse that jealousy wasn’t intentional, I’ve always felt he made the right choice. If there was anything sexual or romantic in the past, for me, your husband or wife now has the right to draw a line. Doesn’t mean you have to - we’re still in touch with one of Joel’s exes (and it’s mostly me keeping up the email contact). Just - there may be some levels of spousal jealousy where you’d take a stand and say no, you need to be less controlling, but jealousy of an actual ex, for me, would be something I’d respect.

On where exes go, if they’re not in your life now, well part of my feeling is, anyone I was ever in love with, that’s bound to be someone I admired in some way. (That goes, of course, for Joel, too. I do still admire much about Joel, bipolar disorder and all.) And with whom I shared some interests. If they’re not still in my life, the things we shared still are, and the things I admired are still things I can try to build into my own life.

Non-worksafe figleaf has a post about Men, Women, Monogamy and “Cheating.” He quotes people who see men as more prone to cheating than women, and, not surprisingly given figleaf’s whole perspective, thinks any such gap is much smaller than people say. The thing that strikes me, though, is the way the people quoted push their assertions of women’s less cheating hearts to a point where they seem scarcely to acknowledge that women care about sex at all.

A girl, on the other hand, is more likely to be satisfied with the attention and flirtation alone. She doesn’t NEED the physical confirmation to get an ego boost.

Look, to the extent that men and women do differ (and allowing figleaf’s point that we may overlap more than advertised), I think this guy is off about what the difference is. It’s not that women just want attention and don’t actually get horny; it’s that different stuff makes us horny.

And then we get this:

They would sleep with someone different every day–maybe even several times a day. I just don’t believe that would be appealing to most women over the long term. (I’m not talking about on occasion here, I mean different partners every day, for years. If you offered women the choice between that and a daily massage, they’d take the massage.)

I suggested to figleaf in comments that, you bet I’d take the massage, since massage implies some level of focus on my pleasure that sleeping with multiple different strange men every day really doesn’t. And we both agreed that the multiple partners a day may be a more appealing fantasy for men than the reality would be, and figleaf, who has gotten lots of free massages in the past from massage school friends, said some of the same is true of daily massages (which I can believe). But beyond that, the sense I get from men who talk like this (like the quote, not like figleaf) is that they don’t always get how much of women’s lesser enthusiasm for the fantasy of constant new partners (to the extent that we are less enthusiastic about that fantasy) is less about having less interest in sex than about being more conscious of the downsides and risks. Whether pregnancy or just plain really bad sex (and not just lackluster bad sex, but painful and unpleasant bad sex). It’s not that one doesn’t have a cheating heart sometimes, but that one is more conscious of the reasons not to follow it.

And I’m not sure “women can be counted on to be faithful because they just really don’t care as much as we do about sex” is a premise that gets men good relationships with women.

Now for the link that’s totally unrelated to sex. John Holbo at Crooked Timber comments

In other news: Will Wilkinson linked, a few weeks ago, to a TED lecture by the psychologist, Jonathan Haidt on ‘the moral mind: the real difference between liberals and conservatives’. Will didn’t agree with it much. But I quite liked it. It pretends to be doing way more paradigm-busting than a basically pat, introductory lecture could possibly manage, but that’s a pardonable rhetorical sin. It fit well with intro philosophy material I teach (not about liberalism/conservatism but about pretty much all the other stuff Haidt talks about). So I suggested to my students to watch and they liked it very much. Here’s my favorite bit (round about minute 10). He apparently did a survey in which he asked respondents whether, if they were buying a dog, they would want the one that was a member of a breed known for being ‘independent minded and relating to its owner as a friend and equal’; or would you prefer the one that is ‘extremely loyal to its home and family and doesn’t warm up quickly to strangers’? Turns out, liberals pick the first option more, conservatives the second.

I asked Joel which kind of dog he thinks Drake is. He said, “somewhere in between.” After discussion, we decided he fit more in the first category. I think Boston terriers in general are more of a liberal dog than a conservative dog, by this standard.

Chris Williams, all grown up. He’s on Facebook now, like practically everyone else who ever lived in Millwood, it seems.

The Millwood/Chappaqua contingent of Facebook is really active. There are fan groups for both towns, and not only multiple groups for people who used to go to Horace Greeley High School, there’s also a group for my middle school, Robert E. Bell, and one for my grade school, Roaring Brook. In these groups, people are busy reminiscing about the middle school teacher with the white streak in her hair and the class about the JFK assassination, about whom students spread the rumor that she was a witch, the red/yellow/green signs to govern when you could talk in the lunch room (yellow meant whisper only), and Elmer’s drug store and Rocky’s Deli. There, I can learn that one of my old school friends is now a Jew for Jesus, while another defines herself as a lapsed Zen Buddhist.

Millwood was a small town, a hamlet really - a town small enough to have an all volunteer fire department. My brownie troop met at that fire department building, which was not far from Elmer’s drug store. Buying comics and candy at Elmer’s was one of the main commercial activities available in town. Of course, there were also non-commercial things to do, like skating on the Mapes’ pond in the winter, or playing in the caves in the woods behind my house (which for some reason were known as the Indian caves). Just past the Millwood border, the goats of one of the families we were friends with would occasionally get loose on the grounds of the IBM Research Center where my father worked for decades.

Millwood was a small town (and the town where my mother lives now is even smaller), but for some reason my identity’s never been tied to small-townness. New York City, after all, loomed nearby, and my childhood memories interweave Elmer’s drug store with walking through Harlem on the way to Columbia University. Then again, a lot of people who do identify with small town actually live, as adults, in big cities - so do I not see myself as a small town girl because of the kind of small town Millwood actually was, the kind that’s right up next to a giant metropolis, or do I not see myself as a small town girl because I’m just not the kind of person who wants to define myself as small town?

At any rate, this is the kind of place I grew up: the kind of place that’s at one and the same time out in the middle of the woods, in a place where no one locks doors and all the neighbors are known to you, and a quick trip away from as much city culture as you could possibly want. Practically a Platonic ideal of suburbia.

I was thinking of doing Friday Random Ten again today, but the dog has already been awakened by the wind, so I shouldn’t delay his walk as long as that. So, instead I’ll give you a Youtube of one of my favorite Paul Simon songs, “American Tune.”

I’m recovering from a root canal I got yesterday (went in for just half a day of work afterwards), and the Santa Ana wind was fierce early this morning. We’d left the windows open, because Joel was hot last night, and when I got up I saw stuff blown down all over the living room, including a small artificial Christmas tree (which, yeah, should be in the garage since it’s not Christmas yet) that fell on the dog’s bed. The dog seemed OK, though.

Movies seen recently:

Blind Chance. This one’s by Krzysztof Kie?lowski, who also did the Blue/White/Red movie trilogy, and the Ten Commandments series, and the Double Life of Veronique, and some other that I haven’t seen yet. The premise of this one is that blind chance moves a man’s life in three different directions, and you get to see each of the very three different directions it could have gone. It was banned in Communist Poland, probably because the three directions all involved choices about how the protagonist interacts with the Communist Party and with a free university resistance movement (Communist Party member, resistance member, or family man trying to stay out of politics as best he can). They also involve other things - what woman he winds up loving, what work he winds up doing, what his fate is at the end of the story. And, though it certainly comes off as anti-Communist, it doesn’t do so in a movie-as-pure-political-piece way; the exploration of the interaction between chance and choice feels real.

Thoroughly Modern Millie: The weird thing about this one is - a G-rated movie musical which turns heavily on the white slave trade? With creepy Chinese villains kidnapping white women and shipping them off to be prostitutes? Through in a bit of “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City” style “modern” style and aspirations for the 1920s heroine, a handsome rich guy who puts on glasses like Clark Kent and pretends to be poor, and Carol Channing as an older woman who’s both full of life and rich. Looking at Wikipedia, I see that the Broadway musical version of this slightly diverged from the movie version, by giving the Chinese white slave traders more personality and an elderly mother to rescue, having one of them fall in love with the woman he kidnaps and rescue her, and including them in the pairing off at the end. All of this does not happen in the movie, where the Chinese are comic villains from beginning to end (save for one unrelated Chinese guy in a faithful servant role).

Writing: I just finished two very short screenplays, horror, or actually, kind of Call of Cthulhu roleplaying plots as screenplays. They’re too short, actually - one would be half an hour and the other twenty minutes - so lesson one of the exercise is that when I do the plot in advance on index cards, the way you’re supposed to, I give myself way too little plot. (Of course, when I didn’t do the plot in advance, I wound up with something much longer, but where I was never quite sure how it was going to end.) I think they also didn’t come out too well; horror may not be my best genre.

Links:

Robert L. Nelson, Ellen C. Berrey and Laura Beth Nielsen, “Divergent Paths: Conflicting Conceptions of Employment Discrimination in Law and the Social Sciences”

Speculative newspaper

If you’re a software quality assurance engineer in Orange County, like me, I think it safe to say that you could give $1000 to proposition 8 and rest assured that it wouldn’t cause you any problems at work. If you’re a prominent musical theatre director in California, not so much. Mr. Eckern resigned from his posts after backlash from gay people over his donation. There’s been lots of blogosphere comment about Eckern’s donation and the reaction. Not surprisingly, Andrew Sullivan calls him the “dumbest man alive.” Equally unsurprisingly, social conservative blogger Rod Dreher complains about a lavender blacklist. What did surprise me was a remark toward the end of Dreher’s post.

I’m working on a column for Sunday in which I discuss why it’s in the interest of prudent social conservatives and prudent gay rights activists to come to some sort of settlement that would allow for gay marriage while establishing a zone of protection of religious liberty around religious institutions, for the sake of religious freedom….

I’ll keep an eye out for Dreher’s Sunday column, because I’m curious about just what he’s proposing.

On Veterans Day.

A lesbian and gay group in Utah attempts to leverage Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ vocal support for Proposition 8 into an argument to expand rights for gay and lesbian couples in Utah.

“But leaders of the rights group here, Equality Utah, said statements made by Mormon leaders in defense of their actions in California — that the church was not antigay and had no problem with legal protections for gay men and lesbians already on the books in California — were going to be taken as an endorsement to expand legal rights that gay and lesbian couples have never remotely had in Utah, where the church is based.”

As part of this legislative agenda, the group does not plan to overturn Utah’s so-called defense of marriage act in full, but will seek to strike out the portion of it that bans same-sex unions that are the equivalent of marriage. According to the Times story, they are also planning legislation that would “expand protections for same-sex couples in health care and hospitalization decisions, housing and employment and in inheritance issues in probate court.”

Small steps toward rural land reform in China.

What is a prostitute? (cross-culturally, in Egypt) Via Neuroanthropology.

Craigslist Agrees to Curb Sex Ads.

Zimbabwe is still not doing well. There’s a water crisis severe enough that water shortages forced Parliament to adjourn, and a cholera epidemic. Despite widespread starvation, the UN has been forced to cut back food aid, due to its own funding crisis. With cash shortages and many businesses refusing to take checks, people are waiting in long cash queues at banks.

Meanwhile, the SADC recently ruled that the Home Affairs ministry should be rotated between Zanu-PF and MDC, a ruling seen as a defeat for Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party, which argued that Mugabe has allocated the ministries to MDC’s disadvantage.

One take on the SADC ruling:

Politics analysts, activists and the media in the Southern African region have reacted with shock and outrage to the SADC ruling that says the MDC must co-share the Home Affairs Ministry with ZANU PF.

Isaac Dziya, a political analyst, said the SADC ruling was a travesty of justice for Zimbabweans and makes the region a laughing stock of the world. He said the notion that the MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai should be satisfied with ’sharing’ the Home Affairs Ministry, while Mugabe controls the security forces, is preposterous.

‘You just wonder to yourself if these heads of state have access to television, the internet or newspapers or they’ve missed the bloodshed, which has been ongoing for the last eight years under Robert Mugabe,’ Dziya said….

A media source more friendly to the Mugabe regime writes:

… The West, who have for years advised and funded the opposition, thought President Mugabe was in a weak position and his offer to enter into dialogue meant he was ready to negotiate himself and the revolution out of political existence.

That is why they felt they could demand anything and everything and Cde Mugabe would obsequiously deliver it to them on a silver platter.

Buoyed by the loud noises coming from little people in Gaborone, Tsvangirai started to swell with expectation and began assuming the posture of a very powerful figure.

The ill-advised posturing came to a head when a few weeks ago Tsvangirai refused to travel to Swaziland for meeting of the Sadc Organ Troika because he did not want to use an emergency travel document….

Having gotten the favorable ruling it wanted from the SADC, Mugabe says that a new Cabinet is imminent.

Cholera spreads among Congo refugees.

A cholera outbreak in a refugee camp has spread to eastern Congo’s provincial capital of Goma, as humanitarian groups called for more UN peacekeepers to protect civilians caught up in the fighting between government forces and rebel troops.

Human Rights Watch said the UN security council should bolster the 17,000-strong UN force in Congo - the world’s biggest UN peacekeeping mission - by 3,000 soldiers and police.

Chad: Survey Finds Alarming Child Malnutrition.

The United Nations has called for urgent action after a new survey found “alarming” levels of malnutrition among children under five in the western part of Chad, a country that is grappling with humanitarian crises on several fronts.

The survey released yesterday, conducted under the leadership of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Action Contre la Faim, found that one in five children in that age group suffer from global acute malnutrition.

South Africa: Makeba Dies Singing.

Sonia told THISDAY yesterday: “Finally, I had a big show where Miriam Makeba played. The dream to sing with her was about to come to pass. Pata pata was to be the last song and I was to sing with her. I held the mic at the back, waiting for the sign from the director to ask me to join her.

“She stopped singing suddenly, turned towards us with a divine face she walked towards me she looked tired, she couldn’t walk again….

Africa: Understanding China’s Strategy - Beyond ‘Non-Interference’ [opinion].

In the course of an article about whether religion makes people nicer, Slate makes a point about religion in Scandinavian countries that I found interesting.

The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don’t believe in God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice, have strong communal feelings, and tend to be well-behaved.

Steven Barnes blogs A note from Alice Walker to Obama.

Sr. Helen Prejean’s “Memo” to President-elect Obama.

After the Election: Benedictine Christianity as Othercultural.

Okay, the “Black people cost gay people the right to marry in CA ZOMG” meme needs to stop, NOW.

Same-sex Marriage: The Good News from the 2008 Election.

Bad models or bad modellers on the financial crisis.

Paul Krugman on New Deal economics (with charts).

… Now, you might say that the incomplete recovery shows that “pump-priming”, Keynesian fiscal policy doesn’t work. Except that the New Deal didn’t pursue Keynesian policies. Properly measured, that is, by using the cyclically adjusted deficit, fiscal policy was only modestly expansionary, at least compared with the depth of the slump….

Net stimulus of around 3 percent of GDP — not much, when you’ve got a 42 percent output gap. FDR might have been more of a Keynesian if Keynesian economics had existed — The General Theory wasn’t published until 1936. Note in particular that in 1937-38 FDR was persuaded to do the “responsible” thing and cut back — and that’s what led to the bad year in 1938, which to the WSJ crowd defines the New Deal.

Implications for Obama: be inspired by FDR, but don’t imitate him slavishly. In particular, your economic policy should be bolder, not more cautious.

8 Stats for American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month.

Blogging–the New Pamphleteering?

John McGuiness on Veteran’s Day:

Is it me, or is Veterans Day observed in an incredibly passive-aggressive manner. The parade is scheduled for like 9:30 am on a Thursday in November, which predictably enough draws small crowds. Then there’s a series of letters to the editor about how sad it was that nobody showed up to the parade, and blogger refresh Google at 12:01 on Veteran’s’s Day so they can criticize them for not having a special logo to mark the day. It’s not about honoring the veterans, but making everyone feel bad for not appreciating them.

Pro-life blogger Hector loses hope of a political solution to the abortion problem in My last post on the life issues, for a while.

Sarah of the Bitten Apple on Why the Pro-Life side lost me.

RIP Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 - 10 November 2008).

Obama on Fire.

Sticks.

Sylvia on Rahm the Knife.

Study shows how spammers cash in.

Sarah of the Bitten Apple on the relevance of labels and why she considers herself a feminist.

Revolution as Fulfillment. Kieran Healy quotes Canadian historian Rob MacDougall “on a characteristic American tendency to see radical social change as the inevitable expression of values expressed and promises made at the country’s inception.”

Anti-Terror Law Mission Creep in the U.K.

Kenyan photo essay “Obamamania” on allafrica.com. And Friends for Peace in Kenya posts a nice editorial cartoon.

Southeast Asia celebrates Obama’s victory.

America Recycles Day November 15th.

Promising Dialogue (Update) on the historic Catholic-Muslim Forum at the Vatican.

John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter writes An open letter to President-elect Barack Obama on relations with the Vatican.

Russell Arben Fox on Left Conservatism in a Liberal America.

Stentor on Clever Bigotry.

‘No’ on Prop 8 — and ‘No’ on Race-Baiting. Related: LaToya’s Links on Prop 8 and the scapegoating of black people for its passage.

jana reflects on her Mormon heritage, Prop 8, and where do we go from here?*

Not Ophelia at Feminist Mormon Housewives on A. and Me: Coming Out (pt. 1).

You say it Yahweh …

“The elements are eternal”

A Cloud of Witnesses.

Ilán Stavans on eros, Hebrew, translation, and language.

I see that one of my Facebook friends from Greece has joined the new Facebook group WE want a Greek Obama…

Meanwhile, the Nation is reporting from Nairobi that

Ms Susan Rice, formerly the State Department’s top Africa official, is expected to be named soon to a senior foreign-policy post in the Obama administration.

Ms Rice, an African-American, served as a leading advisor to Senator Obama during the presidential campaign.

She wrote the preface to a report last year setting forth a new vision of US relations with the rest of the world, urging greater reliance on “soft power” - development aid and democracy-building initiatives - rather than military might. That document, known as The Phoenix Initiative, may help guide US global strategy over the next four years.

The New York Times says Rice is

Being considered for: A top foreign policy post, possibly deputy national security adviser or ambassador to the United Nations.

… She also brings early experience with Al Qaeda; Ms. Rice was the top diplomat for African issues during the 1998 terrorist bombings of embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Here’s where I pull together not all that closely related remarks about discussions happening on other blogs.

In Needed: straight talk on gay marriage, Rod Dreher raises the question about trade offs between sexual and religious liberty. As I’ve said, I think all the discussion of stuff like “oh no, our kids will get gay friendly lessons in the public schools” was a huge red herring in the Proposition 8 debate - you can have same-sex marriage and teach nothing at all about marriage in the schools, have same-sex marriage and allow parents to opt their children out of any classes covering sex education (as was the case in my own school system when I was young - the part about opting out, of course, not the part about same-sex marriage), or have no same-sex marriage and still have gay friendly tolerance curriculums in the schools. And, since I have several other same-sex marriage threads available, I’d ask that same-sex marriage not get discussed in this particular thread. But the question of trade offs between sexual and religious liberty can get interesting in other ways. Rod quotes Maggie Gallagher, who is quoting yet another person.

“It seemed to me the height of disingenuousness, absurdity, and indeed disrespect to tell someone it is okay to ‘be’ gay, but not necessarily okay to engage in gay sex. What do they think being gay means?” she writes in her Becket paper. “I have the same reaction to courts and legislatures that blithely assume a religious person can easily disengage her religious belief and self-identity from her religious practice and religious behavior. What do they think being religious means?”

To Feldblum the emerging conflicts between free exercise of religion and sexual liberty are real: “When we pass a law that says you may not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, we are burdening those who have an alternative moral assessment of gay men and lesbians.” Most of the time, the need to protect the dignity of gay people will justify burdening religious belief, she argues. But that does not make it right to pretend these burdens do not exist in the first place, or that the religious people the law is burdening don’t matter.

“You have to stop, think, and justify the burden each time,” says Feldblum. She pauses. “Respect doesn’t mean that the religious person should prevail in the right to discriminate–it just means demonstrating a respectful awareness of the religious position.”

Feldblum believes this sincerely and with passion, and clearly (as she reminds me) against the vast majority of opinion of her own community. And yet when push comes to shove, when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict, she admits, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.” …

I’m a little puzzled as to the conclusion, because to me it seems that there are obvious cases where each should win.

1. If sexual orientation’s a legally protected category, and I have an ordinary management job at a regular old company, I shouldn’t be able to claim religious liberty as a basis to discriminate in hiring.
2. If, on the other hand, I’m at a church, and we’re hiring a minister, religious liberty obviously trumps, and legally protected categories should be irrelevant.

Other cases could get more complicated. For instance, I think that there should not be any general parental right to opt kids out of public school classes, on religious grounds or any other (if you find the classes your kids would need to go to unacceptable, you can home school). But I think that one should, as a matter of policy, always allow parents to opt their kids out of classes dealing with sex education, lessons about marriage, or the like - whether it’s parents opting kids out of “abstinence” classes because they don’t approve of those classes’ take on sex roles, or parents opting their kids out of comprehensive sex education because they think the class gives tacit approval to teenagers having sex. To do otherwise seems, to me, too intrusive on family relationships. And, if you’re bothered by the kids that may be missing out on sex education if their parents opt them out, support Scarleteen - most teenagers do have Internet access either at home or at a friend’s house, after all.

Parents should not, on the other hand, be able to opt their children out of, say, classes on evolution, based on religious beliefs. If homosexuality is raised in the context, for example, of a general anti-bullying message, then I wouldn’t give parents a choice to opt out - any anti-bullying teaching that schools choose to give (whether it makes explicit reference to gay kids or not) should be given to all kids in the school.

Some things may be generally a protected category, but there should be cases where the protected category wouldn’t apply. For instance, married vs. single would be a protected category for employment, but dating services certainly shouldn’t be obliged to take married people on an equal basis. In fact, I think, in the interest of freedom and pluralism in personal relationships, that matchmakers of any type should have lots of freedom to openly set standards that exclude people, and solicit customers who welcome that exclusion. If some service wants to set itself up, say, to only match Asian-American men and Native American women who are both over the age of 40 and Jehovah’s Witnesses, it should be free to do so. And if you don’t like the fact that eHarmony doesn’t match same-sex couples, go over to Match.com (or one of many other matchmaking sites).

Nor should adoption agencies be obliged to take unmarried people on an equal basis - even where state law allows unmarried people to adopt. In fact, private adoption agencies (that don’t accept government funding or place children for government agencies) might reasonably be allowed to place restrictions that wouldn’t be acceptable in regular contracts, or in county adoptions or adoptions by groups that received government subsidies (I’d be OK, for example, with a private adoption agency that only worked within a particular faith community, though religion’s normally a protected category).

There may be some cases where it’s reasonable to allow a group to practice a form of discrimination that’s morally repugnant, but at a cost. For instance, I think that the resolution of the Bob Jones University case, where they were able to continue to forbid interracial dating on campus for years, but had to lose their tax exempt status for that, was reasonable. (So was the opprobrium they got from the rest of the country for enforcing that rule.)

Next unrelated topic - Proposition K. belledame222, assembling links for the 11th Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy before the election, has several pro-Prop K links. Prop K would have decriminalized prostitution in San Francisco, and it lost. I didn’t bother looking at or commenting on the proposition before the election, because I’m not in San Francisco. But I’m going to state again the general principles that guide my thinking about laws on prostitution.

First, the law isn’t meant to perfectly reflect morality; many things may be wrong that shouldn’t be made illegal.

Second, though I think that we have a certain right to privacy that covers sexual liberty, I don’t think we should have as strong a right to sexual liberty as to, say, free speech. A big part of the reason for this is that there are degrees of coerciveness in sex, such that, besides the obvious cases of outright physical violence, there are some things that could be experienced as coercive by most women, that could get argued to be “consensual” sex that no one should interfere with (and you can, in fact, find people willing to make such arguments about everything from sexual harrassment to sex with people who are falling down drunk). It’s easier for people to make those dubious “freedom” arguments if one makes sexual liberty out to be a right absolutely as strong as freedom of speech, than if one makes it out to be one that’s implied in privacy rights, but a bit more qualified than something like freedom of speech.

Third, I’m not libertarian about economic arrangements; I think that governments may appropriately set conditions on what you can buy and sell and under what circumstances, in the interest of protecting people from exploitation.

Fourth, the most important interest the government has in prostitution is protecting prostitutes who are subject to trafficking, abuse, etc. That interest is more important than either the morality arguments or the sexual liberty arguments that can be made.

Based on those principles, I believe that, whatever else we do, the prostitutes themselves should be decriminalized. Whether that should be done by going with something like the Swedish system, or whether it should be done by some other form of legalization or decriminalization in combination with cracking down on trafficking and the like, is something that can be argued pragmatically, based on what proves to work. The exact best answer might vary from one jurisdiction to another. But making prostitutes subject to arrest has easily more downside than upside. When there is a victim in prostitution, when there’s someone acting under duress, that someone is the prostitute, and those prostitutes who are in that position should be free to seek whatever help they may need, from police and others.

Final unrelated topic, “casual sex.” There was a thread at Hugo Schwyzer’s blog that digressed into a discussion of the meaning of this phrase. Here are my thoughts. Among the range of attitudes toward sexual morality in this country, you can find “it’s fine as long as it’s consensual and condoms are used as needed,” “it’s fine as long as you’re in love,” and “it’s fine as long as you’re married.” Oversimplifying a lot here, because there’s a lot more of a range in detail than that, but in this case, I want to discuss the “it’s fine as long as you’re in love” position.

For a lot of people - well, me anyway - this is the most intuitively appealing position at a gut level (a gut level that, of course, sets aside for the moment the question of whether it’s the most defensible Christian standard). Waiting all the way till marriage feels hard, sex when you’re not at all in love feels like using and being used, but sex with love, at a gut level, just feels right. But there’s a flaw in this position, one way in which, even though it appeals to my heart, my head finds it more problematic than the positions I’ve put on either side of it - it has less to do with behavior and responsibilities and treatment of others than with emotions and feelings. You can be really, really in love, and still get an STD. You can be really, really in love, and still wind up with AIDS. You can be really, really in love, and still find out, when your birth control fails (or when your decision to forgo the birth control just this one time, with someone you really love, proves rash) that you really don’t have a relationship that will hold together in the face of expecting a child.

And one of the problems with criticizing “casual sex” is that it’s easy to take that in fuzzy ways that don’t have much to do with really thinking about what responsible sexual behavior involves - “casual sex” is sex if you’re not really, really in love, or sex if you haven’t had the requisite number of dates first, or sex with a number of partners that’s, well, fuzzy, but certainly more partners than I’ve had. So, if you’re going to criticize “casual sex,” be sure to be clear about what sex you don’t consider casual; otherwise people will just fill in their own varied ideas, and pat themselves on the back for not having “casual sex” by their own standards.

Actually setting forth a rationale for what kinds of sexual behavior you consider wise is a different thing. Two of the bloggers I read often are non-worksafe figleaf and Steven Barnes. Both of them talk a lot about sex (figleaf with more explicitness than the much more work safe Steven Barnes). Both of them clearly see sex as a vital and positive part of life. Neither of them seems to have a sexual ethic tied particularly strongly to a particular religious tradition, and neither goes with the old rule that you should need to be married to have sex. And both are pro-choice, as well as, of course, pro-birth control.

But beyond that, the guidelines they set seem to be very different. figleaf, who likes to call himself a “prudish libertine” or a “libertine prude,” has lots of ideas about what ways of approaching sex are desirable, but none of them require any level or intimacy or relationship between the partners (assuming both enthusiastically consent). Steve has said that it’s wisest not to have sex with anyone from whom you wouldn’t take a 2am phone call a year later, and that it’s not good to have sex under any circumstances where you wouldn’t be around long enough to know if a pregnancy resulted. Now, the thing about this advice is, whether you think it’s the right place to draw the line or not, it’s a clear place to draw the line, and not an arbitrary one. I think this kind of advice is rationally defensible in secular terms (and the 2am phone call example rather appeals to me), but simply letting people read whatever they want into “casual sex,” not such a good idea.

OK, by now you’ve all probably heard of the leaks of tensions between McCain and Palin camps. (Did Palin rush out and spend way more outfitting her whole family than the campaign meant to authorize? Or was she innocent and shocked when she saw the price tags of clothes that had been bought for her?) Color me a little skeptical when you get to the point of leakers claiming that Palin didn’t know Africa wasn’t a country; while it’s true that she showed herself remarkably ignorant for a VP candidate in the Couric interviews, well, let me put it this way. Not knowing the name of the prime minister of Canada when those comedians called her pretending to be Sarkozy? That’s an impressive lapse for the governor of Alaska, who’s using her state’s bordering on Russia and Canada as a basis for claiming foreign policy expertise. But not so remarkable a lapse for an American in general - sorry, Elliot, but south of the border here we see your country as so low drama that we often lose track of who’s governing it at the moment. Not knowing Africa’s a continent, on the other hand? I’ve met precisely one person in my entire life who appeared to be that weak on geography. It sounds to me as if something got misconstrued somewhere.

What’s interesting to me in the article, though, is how different the negative campaigning angle gets described when relating what’s supposed to be Michelle Obama’s perspective from how it comes out from what’s supposed to be the perspective of McCain’s top aides.

The Obama campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October, at the same time that many crowds at Palin rallies became more frenzied. Michelle Obama was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. “Why would they try to make people hate us?” Michelle asked a top campaign aide.

…

McCain also was reluctant to use Obama’s incendiary pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as a campaign issue. The Republican had set firm boundaries: no Jeremiah Wright; no attacking Michelle Obama; no attacking Obama for not serving in the military. McCain balked at an ad using images of children that suggested that Obama might not protect them from terrorism. Schmidt vetoed ads suggesting that Obama was soft on crime (no Willie Hortons). And before word even got to McCain, Schmidt and Salter scuttled a “celebrity” ad of Obama dancing with talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres (the sight of a black man dancing with a lesbian was deemed too provocative)….

And McCain staffers appear to be trying to disassociate themselves from the Ayers line of attack and suggest that Palin started freelancing while the campaign was still making up its mind on whether to use it.

FWIW, here’s Obama dancing with Ellen DeGeneres. Though the Obama/McCain dance off is funnier.

Meanwhile, conservative looking for a more highminded discussion than the campaign leaks and finger pointing may want to check out the Slate discussion among Tucker Carlson, Ross Douthat, Douglas W. Kmiec, Jim Manzi, Kathleen Parker, and Christine Todd Whitman on whither conservatism and what the Republican party should do now.

A tough road ahead.

Hope regained.

In the desert, maybe you can remember your name! Silver linings for conservatives.

The President Elect - Barack Hussein Obama.

They Should Have Seen Obama Win.

The News Today, Oh Boy.

What I Have Learned in These Eight Years.

Stentor offers a less enthusiastic Election reaction than other leftie bloggers.

Obamic Inspirations from Kenyan blog Odegle Nyang. And Kenya Imagine reports on the Obamamania there.

AllAfrica blogger reports on Kenya: The Day After in Obamaland.

Today is a Kenyan public holiday in honor of President-elect Barack Obama. Kisumu city is quiet, save for the barrage of Obama songs playing from speakers, and the loud snippets of Obama-related conversation overheard everywhere.

Most shops have closed to observe the holiday, but American flags and Obama paraphernalia are among the items available for sale downtown….

Too much explanation.

How to vote (OK, I didn’t link this advice till after you voted, but you can keep it in mind for next time.)

Early morning after: ballot initiatives and progressive House candidates. Good round up of ballot initiatives around the country. Or you can check out this Wall Street Journal summary. Pro-life ballot initiatives seem to have fared badly, anti-same-sex marriage ones fared well, an anti-affirmative action measure in Colorado may still be too close to call, Massachusetts will get decriminalized pot and Michigan medical marijuana, and Washington state approved a right-to-die measure based on Oregon’s Death With Dignity act.

The Countermobilization Myth: Prop 8 Edition.

And, one non-election link: belledame222 has posted the 11th Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy.

Thus Maggie Gallagher, adding a surprisingly subdued note to her celebration of the victories of anti-same-sex marriage initiatives in California, Florida, and Arizona. I’m amused to see an Economist blogger’s surprise that Maggie would invoke fallenness: “That’s a melodramatic way of looking at it. A fallen world?” Well, yeah, and if you have a sense of where Maggie’s coming from, it’s actually a pretty expected way of looking at it.

California backers of same sex marriage are in fact still holding out hope that this victory for Maggie may be very temporary indeed. The No on Proposition 8 site finally has its press release up, and it’s not conceding yet.

Roughly 400,000 votes separate yes from no on Prop 8 – out of 10 million votes tallied.

Based on turnout estimates reported yesterday, we expect that there are more than 3 million and possibly as many as 4 million absentee and provisional ballots yet to be counted.

Given that fundamental rights are at stake, we must wait to hear from the Secretary of State tomorrow how many votes are yet to be counted as well as where they are from.

It is clearly a very close election and we monitored the results all evening and this morning.

As of this point, the election is too close to call.

Because Prop 8 involves the sensitive matter of individual rights, we believe it is important to wait until we receive further information about the outcome.

UPDATE: The holding out hope for a reversal from absentee ballots has ended. The No on Prop 8 site now has a final statement up that begins

Tuesday’s vote was deeply disappointing to all who believe in equal treatment under the law.

All Americans are harmed when any of us are discriminated against or have our fundamental rights taken away.

Make no mistake, this fight is not over.

We remain committed to ensuring full equality under the law, just as the thousands of same-sex couples who joyously married in California are committed to each other.

Meanwhile, three lawsuits have already been filed challenging Proposition 8. This is actually fairly common for California initiatives - first you have the initiative battle, and then you watch the news afterwards to see whether any of them get challenged in court. Most of them won’t be challenged, and challenges often fail, but sometimes either all or part of an initiative gets overruled.

The state high court has twice before struck down ballot measures as illegal constitutional revisions, but those initiatives involved “a broader scope of changes,” said former California Supreme Court Justice Joseph Grodin, who publicly opposed Proposition 8 and was part of an earlier legal challenge to it. The court has suggested that a revision may be distinguished from an amendment by the breadth and the nature of the change, Grodin said….

The first action was filed by the ACLU, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Lambda Legal. Santa Clara County and the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles also sued, and Los Angeles lawyer Gloria Allred filed a third suit on behalf of a married lesbian couple.

All the lawsuits cited the constitutional revision argument, and two of them asked the court to block Proposition 8 from taking effect while the legal cases were pending….

More experts are quoted with differing opinions as to the likelihood that such a challenge could prevail in this case. Since I’m not a lawyer and don’t play one on the net, I’m not going to venture an opinion. I’ll only say this: you can’t assume the court will overrule the proposition because it previously approved same-sex marriages - it also previously nullified the marriages that Gavin Newsome performed. At the same time, there’s precedent for propositions being struck down as illegal constitutional revisions, so it’s not out of the question that that could happen this time.

Another legal question has also been raised.

In addition to going to court, gay rights advocates sought to assure about 18,000 same-sex couples that their marriages will remain valid.

The groups cited comments by Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, who has said the initiative was not retroactive. If the marriages are challenged in court, that case too would go to the California Supreme Court. Experts differ on whether the law would protect the marriages….

To me it seems most logical to expect the law not to be retroactive (and someone I know who voted Yes on 8 had the same reaction), in which case we wind up in the odd situation of having 18,000 same-sex couples who are married, and the rest who