Category: General

Same sex marriage, public opinion and religion

Rod Dreher, in one of his increasingly frequent loud sighs about  his side’s impending loss on same sex marriage, flags an interesting and revealing finding from the recent PRRI poll:

About 6-in-10 (59%) white mainline Protestants believe their fellow congregants are mostly opposed to same-sex marriage. However, among white mainline Protestants who attend church regularly, only 36% oppose allowing gay and lesbian people to legally marry while a majority (57%) actually favor this policy.

Roughly three-quarters (73%) of Catholics believe that most of their fellow congregants are opposed to same-sex marriage. However, Catholics who regularly attend church are in fact divided on the issue (50% favor, 45% oppose).

The framing of ‘secular vs religious’ is so pervasive that pro-SSM religious people fail to recognize they’re in the majority in their own church. It’s certainly true that they’re been an significant increase in Americans identifying as secular or irreligious in absolute terms, but they were starting from a very low baseline that the growth in their growth can only account for a trivial amount of the shift on public opinion regarding SSM. That group, however defined, is an important source of support for SSM, but in this country you can’t have social change without a significant fraction of Christendom on board, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. SSM is becoming popular because Christians are very quickly deciding they don’t have a problem with it after all. This is why when I hear people say that Christian teachings and doctrines on human sexuality and marriage  just can’t possibly accommodate SSM, I wonder what world they’re living in. Of course, some people, as part of a an attempt to dig in their heels, have convinced themselves of that, but that’s not particularly revealing; given the ease with which their fellow co-religionists have done it. In the end, Christianity has been the mainstream religion in American society by calibrating the amount of racism and sexism build into their teachings to remain close enough to the mainstream to retain its status. It’s clearly happening again with the tremendous change we’re seeing regarding acceptance of gays and lesbians.

In Dreher’s comments, someone quickly chimes in to worry that outsiders will use anti-discrimination law to sue churches that don’t perform same sex marriages. In addition to having no understanding of the relevant law, his risk assessment has a sort of Dale Gribble character to it.

Texas Executed An Innocent Man Update

“There are three forms of evidence against Cameron Todd Willingham — 1. Junk science. 2. Baseless conjecture. 3. Uh, uh, uh…get me another Tito’s and Ambien!”

The case of Cameron Todd Willingham now has a not-at-all surprising development:

In the 10 years since Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham after convicting him on charges of setting his house on fire and murdering his three young daughters, family members and death penalty opponents have argued that he was innocent. Now newly discovered evidence suggests that the prosecutor in the case may have concealed a deal with a jailhouse informant whose testimony was a key part of the execution decision.

The battle to clear Mr. Willingham’s name has symbolic value because it may offer evidence that an innocent man was executed, something opponents of the death penalty believe happens more than occasionally. By contrast, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote seven years ago that he was unaware of “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.”

[...]

What has changed is that investigators for the Innocence Project have discovered a curt handwritten note in Mr. Webb’s file in the district attorney’s office in Corsicana. The current district attorney, R. Lowell Thompson, made the files available to the Innocence Project lawyers, and in late November one of the lawyers, Bryce Benjet, received a box of photocopies.

As he worked through the stack of papers, he saw a note scrawled on the inside of the district attorney’s file folder stating that Mr. Webb’s charges were to be listed as robbery in the second degree, not the heavier first-degree robbery charge he had originally been convicted on, “based on coop in Willingham.”

In a sense, this new evidence is superfluous. Webb’s story — a jailhouse snitch asserting that someone who ended up getting executed because he wouldn’t cop a plea decided to spontaneously confess to a prisoner in another cell — doesn’t have a lot of room to get less credible. It underscores that the state of Texas always had nothing.

Admittedly, this isn’t an idea case to address Scalia’s claim, because this isn’t the kind of case (like a rock-solid albil) where we can know to an absolute certainty that Willingham is factually innocent. But there wasn’t even enough evidence for a responsible prosecutor to consider charging him, and as a condemnation of the death penalty that’s more than enough.

“Dont think of it as ‘stolen.’ Think of it as ‘Gone Galt.’”

The group of people who would see this nothing-to-see-here reassurance on Bitcoin convincing would surely constitute the most valuable set of contacts for con artists since the Glengarry leads.

Race to the bottom

Ichininosan has compiled a list of the law schools that have slashed their admissions standards most drastically over the past four years, as measured by average LSAT. I’m reproducing his work here, and adding 2004 data for comparison purposes (Note that good LSAT scores are far rarer than respectable UGPAs, because of grade inflation and variability in college quality, Note also that the “same” LSAT score in 2010 is actually a bit lower than the same score from 2004, because in 2007 LSAC allowed schools to start reporting only the highest scores of re-takers, as opposed to their average score).

The LSAT percentages are ordered 2004, 2010, and 2013.

1. Suffolk 67. 4% 67.4% 40.3%
2. Valparaiso 54.9% 44.3% 22.9%
3. Illinois 90.1 % 93.2% 80.4%
4. Arizona Summit N/A 44.3% 22.9%
5. Elon N/A 67.4% 44.3%
6. Florida Coastal 48% 40.3% 22.9%
7. DePaul 70.9% 77.6% 59.7%
8. Vermont 60.1% 67.4% 48.1%
9. San Francisco 79% 77.6% 59.7%
10. Capital 55.8% 55.6% 36.3%
11. Catholic 73.4% 77.6% 59.7%
12. American 79% 85.9% 70.9%
13. Charlotte N/A 44.3% 26.1%
14. Thomas Jefferson 54.5% 48.1% 29.5%
15. Samford 66% 67.4% 48.1%)
16. John Marshall (IL) 57.8% 48.1% 29.5%

On the “I Am Outraged That Jan Brewer Would Veto This Meaningless Legislation” Argument

It seems that the latest strategy to defend Arizona’s recently deceased anti-civil rights bill is to assert that it’s really nothing, essentially a reiteration of rights that already exist.  Via Roy, Rich Lowry exemplifies this approach: “The legislation consisted of minor clarifications of the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has been on the books for 15 years and is modeled on the federal act that passed with big bipartisan majorities in the 1990s and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.”  If these are just “minor clarifications to already-existing federal rights, what’s the big deal either way?  Well:

If you’ll excuse a brief, boring break from the hysteria to dwell on the text of the doomed bill, it stipulated that the word “person” in the law applies to businesses and that the protections of the law apply whether or not the government is directly a party to a proceeding (e.g., a lawsuit brought on anti-discrimination grounds).

This is, as Ian Faith would say, considerably more than minor.  That the existing RFRA should be read as applying to businesses is, at best, extremely questionable. The claim was an unprecedented invention of the endless ad hoc legal war against the Affordable Care Act, and it was unprecedented because the idea that secular businesses can “exercise” religion is incoherent gibberish on its face.  And in the context of civil rights law, giving business rather than individuals a religious exemption to neutral laws is a big deal, particular if the Supreme Court ends up defining the ludicrously trivial burden of the contraception non-mandate as “substantial.”  An individual exemption would rarely create an exemption to civil rights statutes, but a business exemption is a whole different story.

Needless to say, Lowry then proceeds to “you’re the one that’s intolerant” routine — which has the inevitable problem of being just an argument against the concept of civil rights legislation. The history of “religious freedom” being used as a pretext to justofy discrimination is a long and inglorious one.

The end of the law school epidemic

The University of Tulsa’s law school has just announced that it is effectively cutting tuition by 54% for the incoming first year class, from $33,428 to $15,428. The cut is coming in the form of a “scholarship” which will be given to every admitted student from a 12-state region (but as a practical matter will have to be given to any admit from outside that region whom the school hopes to enroll). The “scholarship” is renewed annually if the student maintains good academic standing, which in recent years approximately 95% of Tulsa’s admits manage to do.

So in effect the law school is cutting sticker price by more than half for everyone who starts attending this fall (last year about a third of Tulsa’s students got comparable discounts, which makes one wonder what the other two-thirds of the current 1L and 2L classes will do about this development).

Note that this price cut is coming when we’re more than 70% through the current application cycle, which indicates that Tulsa is even more dire shape than the average school when it comes to its current applicant pool (nationally, applications were down 11.7% year over year as of last week, making this the fourth straight year of severe declines).

Naturally the school’s administration is characterizing this as a sudden outburst of public-spiritedness on the institution’s part:

“The ALES program directly responds to rising tuition, mounting student debt and a challenging job market for law school graduates,” said Janet Levit, TU law school dean.

She added that a recent American Bar Association report encouraged innovation by law schools to address the issues.

ALES, she said, is TU’s response to that call for action.

Currently, Levit said, there’s a growing need for more attorneys to serve rural communities, as well as to advocate for children and families, military veterans and small companies.

“TU Law graduates, with less debt, will be prepared and willing to represent underserved populations in our region,” she said.

It’s tiresome to keep repeating this but apparently my rock awaits me:

*The notion that Tulsa’s graduates will decide to take low-paying jobs to serve clients with little or no money is ludicrous on its face, since the existence of such a “choice” entails the option of taking a high-paying job — an option which practically no Tulsa graduate currently has (exactly one graduate in the class of 2012 got a job with a large (100+ lawyer) law firm).

*Even the most public-minded and altruistic lawyer can’t work for free. Under-served communities are under-served because their members don’t have the money to pay for lawyers. Cutting law student tuition doesn’t create jobs for lawyers.

*The amount of debt a law graduate carries has literally zero effect on the market for that graduate’s services. Lower debt leaves people who are unable to get a legal job better off in regard to their overall economic circumstances, but it does not make it more likely that these people will get to be lawyers.

Tulsa’s radical slashing of tuition follows on the heels of similar moves by several other law schools. And this is merely the publicly available information: many other schools are undoubtedly offering ever-more extreme discounts to potential students on a case by case basis. With first year enrollment this fall likely to total around 36,000 students (down from 52,500 in 2010) the combination of much smaller classes and lower per capita real tuition is going to prove unsustainable for some schools.

. . . a commenter points out:

Regardless of the motive this is a move in the right direction. Law schools need to end racially exploitative reverse robin hood scholarships and charge the same tuition to everyone.

I would add that reverse Robin Hood scholarship policies have a severe class bias, since the lower a student’s SES, the less likely the student will benefit from such policies. (Because lower SES students will, all other things being equal, have weaker entrance numbers than students who buy big discounts off sticker price with their LSAT/GPA scores, and because lower SES means less of the sort of cultural capital that allows high SES students to figure out how to game the system).

Total number of 1L students enrolled at Tulsa:

2008: 139

2009: 140

2010: 166

2011: 108

2012: 110

2013: 83

Total number of ABA-accredited law schools by year:

1972: 149

1982: 172

1992:176

2002: 186

2012: 201

The end of the obesity epidemic

I have a piece in TNR on the new JAMA study finding no statistical change in obesity rates over the past decade in either adults or children. (The finding that got the most headlines was a 40% drop in “childhood obesity” among 2-5 year olds, but for reasons I explain in the article this finding is probably not very meaningful in and of itself).

On a related note, here is a review of Michael Gard’s important book The End of the Obesity Epidemic (A version of this review appears in Critical Public Health): Read more…

The Leftward Drift of the Democratic Party

I didn’t expect to agree with the bottom line, but having seen several smart people recommend the new Harper’s piece by the genuinely brilliant Adolph Reed Jr….I was expecting it to be better.  It certainly has more interesting insights than similar arguments advanced by the Matt Stollers of the world, but I think what he says that’s true isn’t actually controversial and what is controversial isn’t true. A few points:

• The core of the argument is the assumption of a “Democratic Party whose center has moved steadily rightward since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.” I find the idea that the Democratic Party has moved right since 1980 frankly bizarre.  A party whose leadership consisted of O’Neill, Byrd and Carter is more progressive than Pelosi/Reid/Obama?  On what planet?  The former Democratic Party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for 4 years — where’s their progressive achievement comparable to  the ACA or the repeal of DADT?  Right on economics since the (all too anomalous) LBJ era I’ll buy, but I find the nostalgia for the only Democratic president of the last century to govern to the right of (a not very progressive) Congress baffling.

• Nor do a buy the idea that the left has been “subdued” by the Democratic Party.  Reed asserts that short-term thinking has prevented the left from pursuing goals like single payer.  My question — how many people on the American left, not just radicals but left-liberals, don’t support single-payer (or a similar European health care model?)  His argument seems premised on the idea that it’s impossible to walk and chew gum at the same time, that nobody could see the ACA as a significant achievement and be aware that it remains greatly inferior to the alternatives in other liberal democracies and so should be a beginning, not an end, of reform.  I don’t think this makes sense in theory and I don’t think it’s true in practice.

• In addition to minimizing the large and increasing gaps between the Democratic and Republican parties — we’ve been through this enough — Reed says that “[m]ost telling, though, is the reinvention of the Clinton Administration as a halcyon time of progressive success.”  He does not cite anyone who has believes this, I would assume because for all intents and purposes they don’t exist.  (Personally, the only people I’ve seen do this are bloggers attacking Obama from the left, which is baffling on many levels.)  I’m not the one who thinks that the Democratic Party is to the right of where it was in 1996, even though I certainly don’t believe that there was nothing to differentiate Al Gore and George W. Bush.

• Calling Obama a “neoliberal Democrat” suggests that the term has ceased to have much meaning beyond “a politician I don’t like.”  Obama is certainly not a person of the Left, a point Reed establishes in great detail (although, again, it’s not clear to me what non-Republican ever believed that he was.)  But the ARRA or the ACA simply aren’t Reagan/Thatcher or even Clinton private-centered neoliberalism — name me some neoliberals who were big fans of expanding the single-payer program for the poor.  (Yes, the optimal stimulus would have been even larger, but leaving aside the fact that Obama wasn’t the primary reason it was too small compare it to most other liberal democracies, where it was a huge outlier on the left.)  Since the contours of the term have become so elastic I guess I can’t say it’s wrong to call Obama a “neoliberal” — but doing so essentially renders the term useless.  “Moderate liberal” seems more accurate.  Is that the stuff of dreams?  Indeed not.  Is that superpar for a president of the United States? Most certainly.

• In terms of his conclusion, I certainly agree that ailing in the rebuilding of labor is an urgent task.   But I disagree with the rest of the fatalism.  The left has more influence on the Democratic Party that it has at any point since 1968, with the defeat of Larry Summers and the removal of Chained CPI from the budget the latest wins.  (And not that the golden age of labor influence that Reed cites was a period in which a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats controlled Congress for more than two decades, not only thwarting progressive reform efforts but passing Taft-Hartley with veto-proof majorities.  Progressive change has never been easy.)  The goal should be to keep moving in this direction, not to walk away in despair.

Clarence Thomas’s Silence — An Interesting Trivia Question, Nothing More

As soon as Jeff Toobin’s argument about Clarence Thomas people on various social media anticipated my response, and I can’t disappoint.