Short News and Commentary
The Real Science Scandal
The Kansas Board of Education’s recent decision on science education—which, contrary to reports, didn’t outlaw the teaching of evolution but simply left the decision to local school districts—has activists vowing to protect Darwin at any cost.
The Kansas City Star accused the Board of “reveling in their ignorance.” The New York Times weighed in with the kind of condescension for which it is justly famous. Presidents of Kansas’s six state universities have accused the Board of setting back education in Kansas a century. The governor of Kansas, a nominal Republican, has threatened to change the way the Board of Education is chosen.
These defenders of “science” have established a precedent they would do well to heed in future. They could start by examining the Food Quality Protection Act and its implementation by the Environmental Protection Agency. U.S. agriculture is now well on the way to losing safe, effective chemicals because of a process that has more to do with superstition than science. If crop-protection chemicals are lost, fruits and vegetables will no longer be available to many consumers, and science is clear that consuming fruit and vegetables defends us against cancer.
Biotech (an alternative to chemical use) is under even fiercer attack. Gerber has recently refused to accept genetically modified crops for its baby foods—not because of any scientific evidence but in response to interest-group pressure. Europe refuses to import soybeans and corn grown from genetically engineered seed. And so a technology that could benefit billions of men and women is in danger of being discarded, because of consumers’ lack of scientific knowledge and governments’ scientific cynicism. Maybe some of the defenders of evolution could take up their rhetorical cudgels on behalf of agricultural gene splicing.
Meanwhile, trial lawyers are pocketing millions from the makers of breast implants, even though the scientific evidence points toward the safety of silicon implants. Here again it would be nice to see a few of those zealous defenders of the scientific method battling against superstition.
A Volvo with Kansas plates passed me on the highway recently. Its bumper proclaimed, “Animal Research—Scientific Fraud.” Whether to use animals in medical research is a moral question, albeit fairly easy to answer for most of us. But there is no denying human health, and science in general, has benefited enormously from animal research, and we should challenge anyone who says otherwise. Yet animal rights are politically correct, while skepticism toward the theory of evolution is not.
The Kansas Board of Education, deadlocked over how to treat evolution in the face of contrary information both scientific and moral, passed the buck to local school districts—an action more in keeping with healthy politics than right-wing ascendancy. Most school districts in Kansas will teach evolution as they always have, and voters will have the opportunity to replace any local school boards whose actions don’t meet with their approval. Letting the voters most directly affected by local schools make their own curriculum decisions is well within the American tradition. Kansas students will no doubt survive. But the triumph of fear over fact that so often occurs when science and public policy intersect is a serious problem indeed.
—Farmer Blake Hurst is a TAE contributing writer.
Socialist Magic
The Socialist-led government in France recently passed a law forbidding workers from laboring more than 35 hours per week. Companies may not reduce workers’ pay under the new rules; so employees will magically get the same money for less work.
The motivation for this wave of a governmental wand is the 11.4 percent unemployment rate in France—a problem which was itself created by a steady piling up of labor regulations, state-mandated benefits, and overblown taxation. The miracle promised by the French Socialists, in other words, is that they are going to eliminate an unemployment crisis caused by too many government regulations by creating...another regulation!
To sweeten the package for French companies, the Socialists are dishing out big subsidies to employers. To pay for them, taxes are being raised. And squads of government labor inspectors are descending on workplaces to make sure no one is spending too much time on the job. Recently, the top executive of a company that makes radar equipment was fined for encouraging managers to put in overtime.
—Economist Ralph Reiland is a TAE contributing writer.
Mass Illness
Remember Hillary-care? Well, Alan Sager, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, thinks he’s pinpointed its problem: “Clinton’s plan relied on price competition and a free market.” With the chances for nationalized health care now having dimmed, Sager is leading a charge for government-run health care on a state-wide basis instead, in Massachusetts.
Sager’s plan requires the government to allocate medical resources. “The key thing,” he explains, “is to collect all streams of money in one reservoir and then make everyone eligible.” Sager claims that he is not trying to rid the state of HMOs and private insurance, but just that the government will decide how much health care providers can charge for a particular service, and the money to pay for it will come from public funds rather than from individual pockets. He’s not sure who will be in charge of the reservoir fund, but that hasn’t stopped his plan from drawing the support of Massachusetts liberals.
The campaign for so-called “single-payer” health care statewide has been gaining steam for five years, aided by studies from Sager maintaining that the single-payer system will avoid the difficulties that have plagued other countries with nationalized health care. “People who tell you there will be rationing of health care are tricksters,” he insists. His plan does require an initial tax hike, however.
Opponents, meanwhile, have been mute, saying they are afraid to stir up any controversy in the legislature. The state’s private insurers, or doctors, or even patients might want to say something soon, though, because no one in the legislature is posing hard questions. When we asked whether the state’s Republicans had a strategy for opposing the plan, John Brockelman, the party’s executive director in Massachusetts, had nothing to say about single-payer health care itself, suggesting only that “there is no way an income tax hike like that will pass the legislature.”
But the legislative bill that would push the single-payer system onto all Bay Staters is now being promoted by many interest groups, including the powerful state unions and liberal “public interest” lobbies like the Senior Action Council and the state League of Women Voters chapter. Apparently convinced, 15 state senators and 49 state representatives have lent their support.
Republicans who imagine the issue of government-run health care has been laid to rest may be suffering from an unhealthy condition themselves: Over-confidence.
—Naomi Schaefer is assistant editor of Commentary.
A Dangerous religious-right kindergartner
A kindergartner named Antonio Peck, living in the Baldwinsville school district outside Syracuse, New York, was given a fashionable assignment a few months ago. He was told to create a poster about the environment.
Antonio, who is being raised in a religious family, told his mother that God was the only way to save the world. He wrote that thought at the top of his poster, and then added words like love, joy, and peace, as well as pictures, including one of Jesus praying. “It was creative and thoughtful…a child’s original idea,” his mother Joanne said.
But Antonio’s teacher, and school principal Robert Creme, told him the poster was unacceptable. They informed Mrs. Peck it promoted one religion over another and refused to display it at a schoolwide art presentation.
So Antonio tried again, adding images of children picking up garbage and recycling trash. But when the class posters went up at school, officials folded Antonio’s back to hide the figure of Jesus and the religious themes.
Concluding the school was hostile to their six-year-old’s religious speech rights, the Pecks called in Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based legal defense organization, and sued the school. The school refuses to back down. “The teacher and building principal…didn’t feel the work was appropriate,” states Baldwinsville Superintendent Ted Gilkey, adding “I think that’s true.”
What Is a Hate Crime?
On August 10, a deranged gunman opened fire at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, wounding several people. On September 15, a similarly deranged criminal murdered seven people at a Baptist church in Fort Worth.
Local newspapers throughout the country, and some of the television networks, gave the two events similar coverage. The New York Times, however, displayed media bias by giving far more prominent coverage to the Los Angeles shooting than to the Fort Worth incident, even though the latter was significantly more serious. As the reproductions below show, the L.A. story dominates the front page, appearing “above the fold” and including a large photograph. In contrast, the Fort Worth story received only a few column inches “below the fold” and no accompanying photo.
We cannot help asking: Does the New York Times really believe that Jews’ being injured is a bigger story than Christians’ being killed? Apparently so, and for the best of secular liberal reasons: The former was a “hate crime,” while the latter was not. Another bastion of elite opinion, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, tracks “hate crimes” against blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, Arab Americans, gays, lesbians, and women. But white Christians need not apply.
This myopia has real-world consequences, and they appeared in the Fort Worth case: Even though the Times itself reported that the shooter screamed a torrent of anti-Christian insults, the article stated that “investigators had not yet discerned his motives.” Imagine a similar case in which the criminal had shouted insults against blacks or homosexuals. A police chief who told the national media that he “could not discern a motive” in such a case would be fired on the spot.
We appear to be witnessing a remarkable resurgence in genteel prejudice, in which whole categories of persons are deemed beneath the concern of polite society. Ralph Ellison coined the term “invisible man” to describe blacks earlier in this century; Christians (particularly white Southerners) seem to be the invisible people of today.
—Adam Pruzan is with the Seattle-based Jewish organization Toward Tradition.
THEIR BODIES, OUR SELVES
DATELINE WASHINGTON, 2001—The Food and Drug Administration today announced the approval of the latest French abortion pill, RU2B9, for sale in the United States. The new pill represents a major step forward in abortion technology, permitting antiseptic, risk-free abortion for mothers of fetuses up to 12 trimesters postpartum—that is, until the unwanted pregnancy is 3 years old.
“For a long time women and their Significant Others who weren’t sure if children would fit into their busy lifestyles had to puzzle through this decision before the fact, in an unsettled state of mind,” says National Organization for Women spokesperson Jenna Side. “With RU2B9, today’s couples can sample the actual parenting experience before making their choice. It provides incomparable peace of mind.”
Aside from such obvious psychological benefits, the great medical advantage of the procedure—known in pro-choice circles as “retroactive elimination of the coital by-product”—is that “the pill is administered to the by-product itself, instead of the mother,” says Side. This allows modern parents to go about life without worrying about spotting or other inconvenient side effects common with the previous pill, RU486.
Side herself commented that she first began investigating alternative means of abortion after she “ruined an expensive outfit following a surgical abortion with one of the previous procedures,” then found she couldn’t have sex “for days afterward.” An anonymous participant in one of the early French studies reported being delighted with the results: “The procedure was done at 9 a.m., and I was at work within the hour! I can’t wait till they have a similar procedure for older kids. I’ve got a couple of teenage girls who are driving me crazy!”
French doctors who supervised the study of RU2B9 insist there is no pain for the coital by-product to which it is administered, just as in the case of partial-birth abortions, they reassured an earlier generation of women there was no pain for the fetus whose head was crushed as it lay in the birth canal.
“The by-product will just wither away on its own,” said Dr. Y. Dewey Care, head of the renowned French Institute for Utter Detachment from Normal Human Feelings. The pill kit comes complete with an insulated Carcuspak™ for disposal of the unwanted pregnancy.
Asked whether “elimination of the coital by-product” was perhaps too gracious a phrase for what, in an earlier time, might have been called murder, Side became visibly agitated. “This is an attitude men historically have adopted to hold women down!” she snapped. “For a long time women have embraced the mantra, ‘our bodies, our selves.’ The new pill is just a logical extension of that. Now it’s ‘their bodies, our selves.’”
—Steve Salerno teaches journalism at Indiana University.
A Tale of Two States
When Congress enacted welfare reform legislation that President Clinton finally signed in 1996, it abolished the federal welfare entitlement to cash benefits. Recognizing the incredibly destructive consequences that this entitlement program had wrought, Congress directed each of the 50 states to design its own program to replace welfare with workfare.
Demographically, few states resemble each other more closely than Minnesota and Wisconsin. Each has a population of roughly 5 million, each is dominated by a single metropolitan area, and each has a long-standing progressive political tradition. But in their welfare reforms, no two states have taken paths more divergent.
Before the late 1980s, Minnesota and Wisconsin had similar welfare programs. In 1986, however, Wisconsin’s welfare caseload peaked at over 100,000 families. That year, Tommy Thompson was elected governor on a platform that focused on welfare reform.
By the early 1990s, Wisconsin had secured waivers from the federal government that allowed the state to impose work requirements in selected counties as a condition of receiving welfare benefits. By 1996, these reforms were applied to all counties. (Disabled adults remain covered under a separate program without a work requirement.)
Wisconsin enforces its work requirements by denying benefits to able-bodied adults who refuse to work, cutting benefits to the extent that recipients fail to show up for their jobs, and providing community service jobs as a last resort. Under Governor Thompson’s reforms, the number of Wisconsin families receiving welfare has dropped from its high of more than 100,000 to only 10,185 by the end of 1998, a 90 percent decline.
Minnesota’s version of welfare reform, the “Minnesota Family Investment Program” (MFIP), was implemented on January 1, 1998, and provides a clear contrast, beginning with its premises. MFIP “encourages” work, but does not require it. Many recipients, including those with children under one and those who are “experiencing a crisis,” are exempt from any expectation of work. Other recipients are required merely to prepare a work search or work readiness plan.
The most severe sanction if a recipient refuses to work or fails to comply with program requirements is a 30 percent reduction in benefits. Since Minnesota’s cash welfare benefits exceed comparable benefits in Illinois and Indiana by 41 percent and 85 percent respectively, a 30 percent reduction is not exactly draconian.
According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, only 38 percent of the state’s welfare recipients are working. This figure is astonishingly low at a time when there is essentially no involuntary unemployment in Minnesota and many jobs go begging at every level of skill and experience.
Not surprisingly, Minnesota’s approach has produced results very different from Wisconsin’s. Minnesota’s caseload peaked in 1992 at 66,212. By the end of 1998 it had fallen 30 percent—just one third the decline experienced by Wisconsin.
By supporting able-bodied recipients who do not work, Minnesota’s welfare system needlessly perpetuates dependence. It also raises a fundamental issue of fairness. Abraham Lincoln frequently argued that the basic precept of tyranny is, “You work and I eat.” He condemned slavery as a manifestation of this precept.
Minnesota refuses to abandon this precept. By contrast, Wisconsin has experienced a new birth of freedom, bo for taxpayers and for newly self-reliant workers.
—Minnesota attorneys John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson
are adjunct fellows of the Claremont Institute.
Too Quick on the Trigger, too loose with the facts
In recent years U.S. military forces have been selectively used to intervene in hot spots around the globe. But with no rational, consistent standards to govern where we involve ourselves, each adventure becomes an exercise in presidential caprice. As the National Journal noted amidst the Kosovo war, “the Clinton administration is involved in many [conflicts], but in almost inverse proportion to the death toll. Only a few hundred people were killed in Haiti before America intervened with 20,000 troops, [yet] in the Sudan, where nearly 2 million have died and 2 million more lives are threatened, the U.S. role is almost non-existent.”
With U.S. military involvement being ordered so arbitrarily (and often without any clear connection to America’s own security interests), a second, even more disturbing, pattern has evolved: the manipulation of U.S. public opinion through the use of inflated death claims, maudlin media coverage, and bombastic rhetoric from our political leaders.
In Kosovo, for instance, we were direly warned a massive campaign of “genocide” was underway, eliminating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. On April 19, as the U.S. was bombing, the State Department reported 100,000 Kosovar Albanians were feared killed by Serbs. “It is chilling to think where the 100,000 men are,” intoned spokesman James Rubin. A month later, Secretary of Defense Cohen repeated the claim: “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing. They may have been murdered,” he fretted.
It turns out our government had no factual basis for telling us such things. American observers have quietly admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the number of civilians killed in Kosovo may total “no more than 2,500”.
America’s recent, still lingering involvements in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, several African nations, East Timor, and other locales have been exceedingly expensive in American treasure and lives and in foreign good will. They have brought deaths and injury to servicemen, seriously depleted our weapon stocks, strained military units enough to seriously reduce re-enlistments, and left our defense readiness in tatters.
Those are serious costs. If these missions are also encouraging our own government, and others, to lie to and manipulate the American public (often through the feckless media), then the price is simply too high.
The public is not stupid and will eventually catch on. One day the boy will cry “wolf!” and there will be no response. Let’s hope there isn’t a bona fide beast crawling out of the woods when that happens.
colorful communism
The North Korean news agency has a daily news page on the Web (www.kcna.co.jp). I go whenever I need a laugh, for every visit proves that Communist lunacies live on.
Any trifle involving the supreme leader gets fawning treatment. “General Secretary Kim Jong Il received a gift of a flower basket from the Minister of Foreign Relations of Mongolia and his entourage. The gift was handed to Vice Premier…” and so on. Obviously the revolutionary love of the Mongolian people for Kim Jong Il knows no bounds.
Another recent item noted, “General Secretary Kim Jong Il appreciated a performance given by the art propaganda squad of KPA combined unit no. 488. Accompanying him to see the performance were Director of the KPA General Political Department Jo Myong Rok, Generals Hyon Chol Hae and Pak Jae Gyong, and other KPA general officers. Put on the stage were colorful numbers such as a poem and chorus ‘We will become today’s seventh regiment,’ a female vocal quartet ‘We will hold our general in high esteem,’ and a poem and chorus ‘we will defend the headquarters of revolution with our lives.’ General Kim Jong Il highly estimated the militant, appealing, and colorful performance reflecting matters of great importance.…”
Nearly every day’s posting is packed with enduring left-wing primitivism of this sort. Bet you didn’t know “posters encouraging the working people in the forced march of socialism have been produced by fine art production centres of Korea. The Mansudae Art Studio made in a short time nearly 30 posters, including ‘Forward, everybody, in the forced march for final victory,’ ‘Let us produce more electricity by building minor power stations,’ and ‘Let us put fish breeding on a scientific basis to produce more fish.’”
These are not spoofs: 24 million North Koreans live under this insanity. And millions of other souls in countries ranging from Cuba to the People’s Republic of China must cope with similar forms of vestigial Communist gibberish.
And you thought the home shopping channel was obnoxious.
—Eli Lehrer is a TAE contributing writer.
DO exactly AS I SAY (NOT AS I DO)
This summer, regular TAE contributor Michael Barone analyzed Hillary Clinton’s political record and declared her a classic elitist centralizer (U.S. News July 12, 1999). Some excerpts:
In her years on campus, 1965-74, crime and welfare rolls tripled and the nation lost its first war. The nation’s leaders seemed to lose their legitimacy, and the high-test-score, self-admiring elite students at places like Wellesley and Yale Law felt entitled to step immediately into their places even as the students insouciantly disobeyed laws (against marijuana, for the draft) they found inconvenient. At Wellesley and at Yale Law, Hillary Rodham found her role: as an elite decision maker, operating through large institutions, trying to impose policies unlikely to win support on their own, and in the process disregarding rules and laws that bind everyone else.
At different points in her career, she had a chance to put her ideas into practice. In 1978 Jimmy Carter appointed her chairman of the federal government’s Legal Services Corporation (LSC). The lawyers running the LSC disdained their assigned task of providing poor people with free lawyers in routine cases and set out to make public policy through class-action lawsuits—an attempt to avoid the democratic process. When Rodham was chairman, Legal Services affiliates brought lawsuits to force New York’s Transit Authority to hire heroin users and to require racial quotas in school suspensions in Newburgh, New York. The LSC broke its own rules by organizing campaigns against a state referendum and against Ronald Reagan.
There is an obvious resemblance between this heavily lawyered regime and the one she sought to impose through her health care plan a dozen years later, or the centralized day care she plugged in her book, It Takes a Village. There is a resemblance as well to her penchant for cutting corners and disobeying rules in the White House. It was while her husband was the Democratic nominee for attorney general of Arkansas, with no opposition, that Rodham allowed a leading Arkansas businessman and his broker to guide her to, if not allocate to her, $100,000 of commodity trading profits. In 1980, when her husband was under attack for raising license-plate fees, it turned out Rodham had not bothered to pay hers in 1977 and ’78. It is a straight line from here to the illegally secret health care task force meetings and the Rose Law Firm billing records, out of sight for months and then found in the White House family quarters. The pattern is clear: rule making for others, rule breaking for herself.
Another approach comes from Yale Law contemporary Richard Epstein. He argues that a complex society works best not through centralization and complex rules but through decentralization and simple rules. Recent progress has followed from his approach, not hers. Crime and welfare rolls are now falling on as steep a curve as they were rising in 1965-74, not because of complex centralized legislation but because local politicians, like New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, came up with innovative programs based on simple rules. Does a decentralized nation need a centralizing leader, one eager to issue complex rules for others but unwilling to obey simple rules herself?
LAST WORDS ON ELEPHANT DUNG
Radical art historian Camille Paglia recently blasted the notion that only philistines would object to the Brooklyn Museum’s controversial “Sensation” show. “I’m just as sick of ‘Catholic bashing’ as [Mayor] Giuliani,” she wrote in Salon. “I resent the double standard that protects Jewish and African-American symbols and icons but allows Catholicism to be routinely trashed by supercilious liberals and ranting gay activists.… That a Jewish collector and a Jewish museum director had no compunction about selecting a parodic image of the Madonna...shows either stupidity or malice. The Brooklyn show has fomented hatred in this country.”
Liberal columnist Mike Barnicle was even more specific. “Imagine for a moment if a guy named Kelly sat down at an easel, produced a painting of a black man being dragged behind a pickup truck driven by a laughing rabbi with a smiling Billy Graham standing on the bumper, urinating on the victim’s battered corpse and decided to call it art. Would we all run to the museum, insisting that it be displayed, toasting Kelly while reading sympathetic puff pieces about him in the New York Times? …Of course not. Why, the howling would wake up Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Of course, the main question is whether public money should be used to support such exhibitions. The Brooklyn Museum has recently received not only the $7 million city subsidy that Giuliani wants to end, but also hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
TAE contributor James Glassman noted a couple years ago that government subsidies don’t just bring politicization of art, they bring mediocrity. He notes that during the New Deal, huge sums of federal money were dished out to artists, musicians, actors, writers, photographers, and dancers. Yet almost no memorable art resulted. What we got, Glassman reports after reviewing a collection at the National Archive, was “works that are dreary, unimaginative, condescending, and politicized—not much different from the worst of the ‘socialist realism’ in the old Soviet Union. Government money stifles creativity and produces ‘art’ that’s hokey and hortatory. Also, subsidized art reflects the political views of the government officials who fund it. In the New Deal, this meant collectivism and greater authority for the state. In the 1990s, there’s an emphasis on alternative sexual styles.”
Today’s government agencies have little to show for their billions in subsidies since 1965, Glassman notes. “In fact, just the opposite.” The influence of public subsidies—which extends well beyond the dollars spent, since they provide an imprimatur for nervous corporate and foundation givers—may actually “explain the artistic drought we’ve suffered for the past 30 years.”
But won’t art wither without governmental aid? Hardly. Americans privately give $10 billion every year to the arts, culture, and humanities. They donate. They purchase artworks and tickets. The NEA, meanwhile, has an annual budget around $100 million. For that we get bad art and inflammatory politicization that the whole nation would be better off without.
