It was about a week ago that we saw the ruling throwing out California's Prop 8; that decision has now been appealed, and we will see, at some point in the future, how the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handles the matter.
A couple of days later, I had a story up that walked through the ruling, describing the tactics used by the Prop 8 proponents, which, in the opinion of the Judge who looked at the evidence, were basically to try to scare Californians into thinking that gay people, once they're able to get gay married, will somehow now be free to evangelize your kids and make them gay, too.
In the course of answering comments on the several sites where the story is up, I noticed that there were those who felt the Bible should be guiding our thinking here...that if it did, we would be better off than where we are today, with all those immoral gay people running around free to do all those immoral gay things.
This led me to an obvious question: are those who have been using the Bible as a sort of "divining rod" to figure out who is immoral and who is not...actually any good at it?
The airwaves (and the print and blog waves, for that matter) are filled with the news that a Federal Judge in California has declared that State's Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional, which could clear the way for the resumption of same-sex weddings in the State.
Ordinarily, this would be the point where I would present to you a walkthrough of the ruling, and we'd have a fine conversation about the legal implications of what has happened.
I'm not doing that today, frankly, because the ground is already well-covered; instead, we're going to take a look at some of the tactics that were used to pass Prop 8, as they were presented in Judge Vaughan's opinion.
It's an ugly story-and even more than that, it's a reminder of why it's tough to advance civil rights through the political process, and what you have to deal with when you're trying to make such a thing happen.
The State conventions are over and both parties have published their platforms. The Texas GOP really provides a clear sense of Republican convictions and the differences in the platforms are stark. You may have heard about the Republican Party of Texas Platform, a document that virtually drips of fear, hatred and intolerance:
In addition to this, the Texas GOP seeks to end the state's lottery, which provides millions in funding to public education; restrict citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents are citizens; end federal sponsorship of pre-kindergarten schools; impose a jail sentence on any illegal immigrant in the state; shut down all day-labor centers; cut off all bilingual education after a student's fourth year in a U.S. public school; legalize corporal punishment in public schools; mandate that evolution and global warming be "taught as challengeable scientific theory"; and demand that Congress evict the United Nations from U.S. soil and end American membership in the global body.
I have repeatedly drummed on the problems in public education here in Texas. Well, just to keep you up to date there are three other pieces that have come across my desk in the last 24 hours in reference to education. Taken together with liberaltexans reporting and the context out of our past, they paint a pretty scary picture for our future.
First there was a report out of New York on the long term impact of excellent early education, especially excellent teachers!
Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not - which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.
There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child's health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: "We don't really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes."
Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.
[snip]
The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.
All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile - a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher - could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.
According to a new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Texas ranks 34th nationally in a state-by-state study on the well-being of America's children. There are also significant areas in which Texas is among the worst in the nation, and these ranks represent a failure in many of the public policies instituted over the last two decades.
Texas is among the very worst in preventing teenage pregnancies. The teen birth rate in Texas in 2007 was 64 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19, which is considerably higher than the national rate of 43 births per 1,000. Texas ranked 48th in the nation in teenage pregnancies, and only New Mexico and Mississippi ranked higher. This follows a nationwide trend of increased teenage pregnancies. According to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, after a decade of declining teenage pregnancies the nationally teen pregnancy rate rose 3% in 2006, which reflected an increase in teen birth of 4%. The report notes that the cause of the decline in teenage pregnancies in the 1990s was due to more and better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens. However, during the 2000s sex education programs aimed exclusively at promoting abstinence, and these programs have lead to increasing teen pregnancy rates especially in states such as Texas.
If you write off Rick Perry as a political prettyboy you do him a disservice and you fall into a trap that his critics seem to never quite overcome. Goodhair is a posturing, preening, parasite who has found the good life by using his political office to grow prosperous. He serves the usual set of Republican suspects - corporations, the affluent, fundamentalists, etc. All this is well known. What is not appreciated is his absolute mastery of hiding this servitude under the bushel basket of bureaucratic detail and obfuscation.
The short sloganized version of this tale has to be: "Rick Perry is too busy polishing his image to worry about innocent inmates facing the death penalty."
Perry's contributing culpability in everything from the TYC scandal to the torching of the govenor's mansion has never been the stuff of headlines, or at least, of enduring cycles of news coverage. Why? I answer because the decisions and inept governance that these sordid events highlight are spin by Perry as bureaucratic foul-ups which makes him the victim of everyone's favorite bete noir - The Big Bad Unelected Bureaucrat! Don't blame me Perry says, blame that little gray guy or gal over there in the cubicle.
So, when last year the Innocence Project raised the all too real specter that Mr. Death Penalty had refused to stay an execution even though there was credible expert testimony indicating that the convicted was NOT guilty Perry pulled a Perry, he used the arcana of the Texas bureaucratic process to stall the investigation. Rick Casey explains:
Dousing a troublesome arson probe Last fall, two days before one of the nation's top arson scientists was about to appear before the commission to explain his harsh criticism of evidence used to help convict Corsicana man Cameron Todd Willingham of deliberately setting the fire that killed his young children, Gov. Rick Perry abruptly named Bradley, district attorney of Williamson County, to replace the commission's founding chairman, Austin defense attorney Sam Bassett
Steve Benen over at the Washington Monthly Blog asks a very important question this morning, what do we do when an entire political party moves to Bizarro World?. I don't think there is an easy answer . I blogged last week about Who is Killing Our Democracy and argued that it was our elites, especially our politicans and the talking heads of the MSM.
But Steve's analysis brings home the fact that the political blame is not evenly divided. Republicans must bear the greater guilt. In discussing the multiple crisis we face, there is NO other reasonable conclusion. Therein lies the problem, the reasonable part. For to discuss our current situation reasonably, we must agree to be reasonable, to appeal to facts and not ideological presumptions. Sane people on all sides of the Liberal/Conservative/Moderate-Independent divide can do that. Not so Tea Baggers, Dittoheads, and rabid partisans of the left or right.
A recent article from the Boston Globe tells us How Facts Fail.
A friend of mine visited her doctor yesterday. She has had some recurrent pains in her arm and neck. She examined to the doctor that she was a teacher and that the tension from the job built up in her neck, what could he do for her? The doctor made the off-hand remark that he had heard that school funding was being cut and he couldn't understand why we were not able to pay for public education, surely something could be done. She proceeded to inform him that the first thing to do was to vote for White and not Perry. She then gave him the basics: politicans run on tax cuts, must deliver same. School costs go up just like everybody elses do, but the state funding does not. Dump the necessary increased costs on local home owners, who protest at the burden . Politicans promise to cut their taxes, rinse , repeat ad nauseum.
There are a few things worthy of remark in this simple exchange. First , my friend knowing how to explain the basics of the situation so very well. Sadly, even some of my political friends don't know how to do this. I get angry and me, Mr. Civil Conversation, just spews. All power to our unnamed allies who do this small group advocacy every day.
It was just yesterday that we decided to take a day off from politics and talk about music, both familiar and not so much; the conversation ran a bit long, and when we got halfway through we decided to get together tomorrow.
It was pretty fun, what with sewers and male models and Gorillaz and all, and when we had put down the pen it was just after taking in Sarah Vaughan's reworked dance version of the Peggy Lee classic, "Fever".
They say tomorrow never comes...but now it has...and we have eight more songs to talk about before we can finish our multigenerational "Summer Music Appreciation Playlist".
Today we'll incorporate jazz and dance, the invention of modern musical recording, arguably the greatest saxophone player ever, and a shout out to "our man in Paris".
If all that wasn't enough, we also discover what happens when you graft a certain Pepper onto Jamaica's musical tree.
You don't want to stop now, so jump on board and let's get this train rollin'.
It is a huge news day today, what with death and confirmation on everyone's mind...and I'm not going to do anything about it-well, not today, anyway.
Instead, I'm taking the day off to bring you something more compelling: a music appreciation class, with recordings old and new, and just right for your summer soundtrack.
And if that's not enough...by an amazing coincidence, we also get to talk about the (I never even know it existed) McRice burger, and, just for a summer bonus, we even have a smoking hot male model to grab your attention.
It's all about fun today, so let's get right to having some.
I just wanted to take a minute to say hello and to see how things have been for you lately, and to maybe bring you up to date on a bit of news from here.
Well, right off the bat, we hear you have a new Conservative Prime Minister and that his Party and Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems are in partnership, which I'm sure will be interesting; you probably heard that us Colonials are again having Tea Parties, which has also been very interesting.
I have a Godson who's getting married this September, so we're all talking about that, and I hear Graham Norton was even better than last year at hosting Eurovision, despite the fact that it's...frankly, it's Eurovision.
Oh, yeah...we also had a bit of an oil spill recently that you may have heard about-and hoo, boy; you should see how the Company that spilled the oil has been acting.
Those who are regular visitors to this space know that I post stories across the country, and to do that I have to follow stories from a number of states.
Because I post at Kentucky's Hillbilly Report, I've been paying particular attention to the Rand Paul campaign, and the news from the Bluegrass State (via "The Rush Limbaugh Show") is that Paul's planning to write his own balanced budget proposal for the Federal Government.
But there's a catch.
He doesn't plan on doing it until after the election.
Well, now, why in the world would a guy who's running for office based on his really good ideas want to hold back the best one?
That's not a bad question, and if we make the effort we can probably figure out the most likely answers.
We are again having to take a short bypass on our planned writing journey; this time to a place that's, according to their Facebook page, about 148 beer stores north of Toronto, Ontario (which, for the benefit of the less-geographically aware reader, is in Canada).
It's a crazy place, where duct tape is more truly the coin of the realm than loonies, but we're going to try to explain it all today...and in the effort we may even learn about a few things that really matter, like the unimportance of importance, and the kind of quality of life that comes from having a junk pile and a sense of adventure.
So grab the bug spray, Gentle Reader, because it's time to visit Possum Lodge.
In a recent interview of candidates for the State Board of Education in District 5, Ken Mercer responds to the question: What is your position on the teaching of evolution? "My biggest quote was, 'If our kids do not have the freedom to raise their hands in science class and ask honest questions, then we are no longer living in the United States of America.' You can call it strengths and weaknesses, but we won the right for kids to ask questions in class, and that was the battle. It wasn't religion. It was just a right to ask questions."
I don't know about you but I've never been in a classroom whether as a student or as a parent observing where children didn't have the right ask questions. Our teachers encourage questions as a way to participate in class and clarify understanding. Mr. Mercer's answer is an evasion because he never states his position on the scientific validity of evolution. What he and the other conservatives on the SBOE did was encourage our children to not just ask questions but to argue with their teachers about whether or not scientific principles are appropriate to the study of biology.
Texas has some of the lowest performing schools in the nation and Mr. Mercer's actions will keep it that way. That's all the reason I need to send him packing in November by voting for Dr. Rebecca Bell-Metereau.
So once again my writing schedule is going to be turned upside down by unforeseen events-but it's going to be worth it, as I have one of the funnier stories to tell you that I've brought to these pages for some time.
It's a tale of catering and rejection and redemption, all in one, along with a bit of the Harlem Renaissance thrown in for good measure, and the big circle that was created was officially closed last Saturday night.
So come along, Gentle Reader, and I'll tell you the story of how I was officially notified that I'm a member of the gay community-by email.
We don't have a lot of time for a big discussion today, but I wanted to take a second and talk about basic Federal Government economics as they apply to Rand Paul.
It is his stated vision to reduce the size of Government...and it is an undeniable reality that the vast majority of the Federal Budget is focused on only a few areas of spending.
Today, we'll quickly run through that economic reality, and we'll challenge Dr. Paul to tell us where he stands.
It was about a week ago that we last got together to talk about safety in coal mines, and we have some new developments in the story that deserve a bit more of your attention.
As we discussed last time, there are a huge number of hazards inherent in the operations of underground coal mines, and there are a series of "mitigators" that can be applied to reduce those hazards.
Ironically, the biggest hazard these miners face today might not be underground at all.
In today's story we'll consider the possibility that the most dangerous location in the mining industry might actually be at the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, where an enormous backlog in enforcement actions is keeping dangerous mines open that might otherwise be closed.
It's a "bad news, good news" story-but it really does have a potential happy ending, and with a bit of pressure, we can actually make life a whole lot better for miners, and their families, all across the country.
The radicals on the State Board of Education have shown that they don't value religious freedom. At their last meeting the members proposed and discussed various aspects of the proposed social studies curriculum which was developed by volunteer teachers and subject matter experts. Board member Mavis Knight offered the following amendment: "examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others." Knight pointed out that students should understand that the Founders believed religious freedom was so important that they insisted on separation of church and state.
Board member Cynthia Dunbar argued that the Founders didn't intend for separation of church and state in America and claimed instead that the Founders intended to promote religion. She called the amendment "not historically accurate."
Almost all constitutional scholars agree that separation of religion and state is clearly expressed in Article VI paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution which states: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Ken Mercer voted with the rest of the historical revisionists to defeat the amendment. If you value your right to practice your religion and teach your children that religion Rebecca Bell-Metereau must be elected to the State Board of Education.
