From In re Wean (Tex. Ct. App. Aug. 31), which reversed a trial court finding that a father engaged in family violence against his children, and a protective order based on that finding. The opinion discussed many matters, and I can’t do full justice to it here. But I thought I’d quote a few passages:
1. Religious Beliefs:
Also at the hearings, there was evidence regarding Josh’s religious beliefs. According to Sarah, Josh believed that children were born sinful, wicked, and willful and needed their will to be broken in order for them to be obedient, and such message was preached at their church. Sarah testified that Josh believed spanking is mandated by the Bible and she needed to follow his directives regarding discipline because he was the head of the household. She alleged that Josh believed women were created for men, that their roles were unequal, and that women do not need education beyond high school because their “only role” is as wife and mother. According to Sarah, Josh pressured his boys to pray and read the Bible daily. Sarah alleged that Josh’s beliefs were evidenced by publications available from Vision Forum Ministries, the Christian company for which Josh was the chief financial officer. One of the many books available for purchase on the Vision Forum website, which was admitted into evidence, instructed parents to spank their children in the privacy of the home and stated that spanking a disobedient child is required by God and is an act of love. A handful of articles posted on the website were also admitted into evidence, which articles stated that the husband and father is head of the household and that man has headship over woman….
Regardless of whether Sarah’s description of Josh’s beliefs is accurate, … such beliefs would not constitute evidence of family violence. We recognize that concepts such as favoring male leadership or promoting corporal punishment could conceivably be manipulated to hide or justify family violence, support an unhealthy balance of control in a marital relationship, or repress a victim’s attempts to seek protection. However, there is no evidence in the record that the beliefs–by themselves–make the existence of family violence more likely. We cannot agree that the fact a parent believes that a person is born with a “sinful nature,” that spanking as a form of discipline is endorsed by the Bible, or that the husband is the “head” in a marital relationship is thereby evidencing to CPS or the judicial system that such parent engages, or is likely to engage, in violence or abuse against his or her children. We conclude that the trial court’s finding of family violence does not find support in the evidence regarding Josh’s or his employer’s religious beliefs.
2. Corporal Punishment: The court concluded that the father’s spanking of the children with a “wooden kitchen spoon” does not constitute abuse. “[T]he fact that a child is spanked, on its own, does not evidence family violence…. See In re A.S., 261 S.W.3d 76, 88 (Tex. App. 2008) (“[I]nfrequent spankings of a child that leave ‘marks’ or visible bruises 24 hours after the spanking do not constitute sufficient evidence to demonstrate that a parent has engaged in conduct that endangered a child’s physical or emotional well-being.”). A parent generally has discretion to use some amount of corporal punishment. Therefore, for corporal punishment to constitute family violence, there must be some evidence — such as severity of injury, type of instrument used, or mental or emotional state of the perpetrator — that would transcend a reasonable level of parental discretion regarding discipline.”
3. “High Sex Drive” and Supposedly Excessive Interest in One’s Wife’s Private Areas: The court expressed doubt about a Child Protective Services report that finds “that there was ‘risk’ of sexual abuse.” “[T]he stated basis for such risk was not the [Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner] exam results or the children’s interviews, but rather ‘the father’s high sex drive being unmet by his wife, his failure to participate in polygraph regarding these allegations, and his belief that his children and wife should submit to his will.’”
And the court also noted that “Sarah [the ex-wife] also found suspicious that during their marriage Josh was ‘very interested in my private areas,’” but concluded that neither this nor the other items the wife pointed constitutes “evidence to support Sarah’s suspicions or conjectures” that the ex-husband was sexually abusing their daughter.
In any case, if you’re interested in the case, read the whole opinion.
ruuffles says:
An appropriate case name as any.
September 2, 2010, 5:46 pmElemenope says:
Sounds like the Appeals court got it right.
On a more general note, though, it has always bothered me the disjunct between assault/battery and “corporal punishment”. How is hitting someone, especially someone under your plenary control, not assault? Is it simply a case of “that’s the way it’s always been”, codified into statute, or is there some deeper reasoning?
September 2, 2010, 5:53 pmAlessandra says:
Beating a child with a wooden spoon so that there are still visible bruises 24 hours later does not constitute cruel and excessive punishment? For cryin’ out loud.
September 2, 2010, 5:54 pmAJK says:
Pretty much.
Or, to put it more precisely, it reflects a legislative judgment that the use of physical force may be appropriate in disciplining children, but is inappropriate in other contexts.
September 2, 2010, 6:01 pmreshuffle1 says:
Spanking is an act of love;
Kids are born wicked and sinful;
Women don’t need education;
High sex drive and lust over female private parts.
I’m 1/4 guilty, brother.
September 2, 2010, 6:01 pmDave N. says:
I think it is more in the nature of a legal defense. A parent is allowed to use reasonable corporal punishment. At the point the corporal punishment becomes “unreasonable” then the child is being abused and crimes are being committed, including battery.
The best example I can think of a similar legal defense is boxing (although it applies to any contact sport): The participants have consented to being battered by each other. However, if a boxer reaches outside the ring, grabs a baseball bat, and beans his opponent with it, then the “consent” is no longer present.
September 2, 2010, 6:02 pmReader X says:
Judges grant protective orders and restraining orders like candy.
When a New Mexico woman demanded a restraining order against David Letterman claiming he was harassing her through the TV, a judge granted her the restraining order she sought (the judge was much beloved by women’s groups and domestic violence activists). He then defended the order despite national ridicule before finally dissolving it.
The wacky New Jersey Supreme Court held 7-to-0 that a protective order could be granted against a husband based on “threats” where the only “threat” was the husband response (to the wife’s saying she could take him to the cleaners and he could do nothing about it) that yes, he could (a statement that the New Jersey Supreme Court treated as a threat against the wife).
When members of a Maryland legislative committee voted down efforts to relax the requirements for restraining orders even further, the Washington Post demagogically trashed them repeatedly. (The Post’s national editorials are written by respected moderate liberals. Its local editorials are often written by shrill liberal editorial staffers). It continues to attack them in this week’s editorials making endorsements in legislative races.
September 2, 2010, 6:04 pmtheobromophile says:
Sex? Hard-core religion? Corporeal punishment? Prof. Volokh, are you trying to troll for comments?!?
The one part of this that bothered me (as in, the appeals court probably got the law and/or the policy wrong) was in regard to spankings that leave marks after a full day. I’m certainly for the right of parents to spank their children without interference by the State, but think there is a line that can be, and was, crossed.
The other stuff is weird, creepy, and stupid, but weird, creepy, and stupid are not illegal. Also, pardon me for saying this, but if you’re a woman and you marry a guy who thinks that marriage means that he is the head of the household and in charge of you, don’t complain at divorce that he wanted to be the head of the household and in charge of you. It’s a bit like marrying a man who wants to move across the country, then complaining that you moved away from your family after marriage. If submission to your husband isn’t your thing, then don’t marry the man. I can’t be the only one who has met bachelor versions of this father and thought to herself, “No wonder you’re 50 and unmarried; no sane woman would want you and your crap”.
September 2, 2010, 6:09 pmP. Caputo says:
Many of the same who would take away from this case that “Christianist” laymen and some sympathetic judges are hopeless retro/reprobates would laud this decision on grounds of multicultural sensitivity were it involving a Muslim family.
Goes without saying, probably not for orthodox Jews.
In the minds of too many, principles can be trumped by principals, or actors. And, yes, that often happens on both sides of the political divide.
September 2, 2010, 6:09 pmTony Sidaway says:
From the quoted reasoning:
“[T]he fact that a child is spanked, on its own, does not evidence family violence”
Spanking is objectively violence, and the best you can do from that point is to present a defense of the violence (maybe, for instance, one might argue that certain forms of violence by an adult towards a child in his or her care are permitted).
Or is “family violence” a distinct construct meaning something other than “violence by one family member on another?”
September 2, 2010, 6:09 pmAnthony says:
Hm. From the described situation, I think CPS is probably right to think there’s an above-average risk to the children, but maybe wrong to think that the evidence is adequate to justify official action (#2 is iffy; leaving marks 24 hours later takes a lot of force. The other certainly aren’t adequate cause).
September 2, 2010, 6:15 pmSteve P. says:
Yeah, seriously. I have enough education for the both of us, thank you very much.
September 2, 2010, 6:22 pmMike P Wagner says:
Just as a legal question, my perception is that the use of corporal punishment on one’s spouse was, at one time, fairly accepted by American society – or at least not judged to be a legal matter.
While there are still horror stories and sad situations today, I think that is no longer the case today.
Does anyone know when that changed, and by what mechanism?
Were there always laws against spousal battery, and the change was do to societal change that led to enforcement of exising laws?
Or was spousal battery not illegal, and societal changes ended up created new laws?
To be clear, I ams not seeking horror tales about abuse of restraining orders, I am really asking a factual question about the mechanism by which this change occurred.
Thanks,
Mike
September 2, 2010, 6:24 pmmoh456 says:
Reader X,
You mean MD wanted to reduce the burden of proof for protection orders even lower than clear and convincing evidence of abuse? So low as to allow a victim of domestic violence to get a cpo by simply proving abuse to a preponderance of the evidence? Good thing that tragedy was averted.
Oh and why was it that WaPo was so shrill about the issue? Oh yeah:
She didn’t get the order because she couldn’t meet the clear and convincing standard. But hey, better a thousand people die than one innocent man be forced to keep a certain distance from another person.
September 2, 2010, 6:29 pmAnderson says:
The one part of this that bothered me (as in, the appeals court probably got the law and/or the policy wrong) was in regard to spankings that leave marks after a full day. I’m certainly for the right of parents to spank their children without interference by the State, but think there is a line that can be, and was, crossed.
Agreed. Possibly, had the trial court left it at that, the ruling might’ve been affirmed. As it was, the trial court sounded kinda nuts.
A reminder that more issues not always = better.
September 2, 2010, 6:32 pmDilan Esper says:
Also, pardon me for saying this, but if you’re a woman and you marry a guy who thinks that marriage means that he is the head of the household and in charge of you, don’t complain at divorce that he wanted to be the head of the household and in charge of you.
If only life, and relationships, were as reductive as Theo thinks they are.
(To expound on this a little, and without even getting into feminist critiques of these sorts of views (which are quite easy to locate if you wish to find them), the idea of “submitting to your husband”, as preached by certain sects of evangelical Christianity, is subject to very different interpretations, and this point is always made in DEFENSE of the doctrine when feminists attack it. Many evangelicals claim that it is a sort of “spiritual” submission that has nothing to do with equal decisionmaking and equal sharing of the burdens of parenthood. So its entirely possible that a high school educated woman, raised as an evangelical Christian, might have always assumed this interpretation, met a guy whom she thought shared the same interpretation, and discovered (AFTER they were married, because quick marriage and no premarital sex or cohabitation is encouraged in such communities) that in fact he had a more literal interpretation of the doctrine. This is one reason why this doctrine is playing with fire.)
As for the merits of the case, let’s put it this way– I may dissent from some of the others in this thread, but I see no way to read these facts as indicating that this man is anything other than very dangerous both to his wife and his children. The only reason for any other reading is a sort of special pleading for religion. Indeed, if the exact same case came up with Islam switched in for Christianity, I suspect a lot of folks would come out in agreement with me.
September 2, 2010, 6:32 pmgaloob says:
As far as I know, the parental privilege to use reasonable force in disciplining their children was first cited in Regina v. Griffin, 11 Cox.Cr.Cas. 402, 403 (Assizes 1869).
September 2, 2010, 6:33 pmShelbyC says:
Perhaps that’s true, but I’m not sure how to justify such a belief other than an intuitive feeling that anybody who believes the things this guy believes ain’t firing on all cylinders and is likely to snap. And such beliefs should be put aside by a judge. Agree with you that the outcome would be different if the guy was muslim tho.
September 2, 2010, 6:44 pmJerry Mimsy says:
My parents used a wooden yardstick, not a wooden spoon, but 24 hours is not a long time, and “visible” is not a high hurdle to meet. I don’t recall documenting it, but I’d guess there was occasionally redness visible the next day.
I know I cause bumps on my own that last that long.
September 2, 2010, 6:45 pmPeter says:
Am I really the only one here that believes in spankings? I’m sorry but fear is the way the world runs and learning that earlier rather than later creates better people. It’s much harder to instill fear of the system (and fear of punishment) in a thirty year old (look at the prison system) than a six year old and at a much less draconian level.
September 2, 2010, 6:49 pmruuffles says:
The various comments seem to disagree on the degree of violence that is appropriate in spanking. Personally I think anything that leaves a mark or soreness or tenderness beyond 12 or 24 hours is probably too much.
Strange, I thought the libertarian strain of thought is that the world runs on incentives For a six year old, this might be taking away TV privileges, dessert, etc.
September 2, 2010, 6:54 pmElemenope says:
I’m sorry but fear is the way the world runs and learning that earlier rather than later creates better people. It’s much harder to instill fear of the system (and fear of punishment) in a thirty year old (look at the prison system) than a six year old and at a much less draconian level.
Because what we NEED is obedience at any cost, and it’s easier to hit kids than adults.
What?
September 2, 2010, 6:55 pmmahtso says:
I once heard a specialist from my state’s Child Protective Services testify that the buttocks bruises very easily. Because most bruises last more than 24 hours, having a mark 24 hours after a spanking (with a spoon or a bare hand) would not be uncommon.
Also, is it fair to characterize this matter as one of “conservative Christian beliefs” or would “extreme” be a better way?
September 2, 2010, 6:56 pmtheobromophile says:
Dilan,
Couples who cohabitate before marriage are more likely to get divorced than those who do not. Also, premarital sex, one would think, doesn’t help anyone ferret out a-holes; it just makes a woman more attached and clouds her judgement, no?
“Feminist” critiques are often cute ways of getting women to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. It’s her family’s fault, it’s the community’s fault, it’s everyone’s fault but the woman who met him, dated him, accepted his proposal, and walked down the aisle to say “I do” to him. Unless you believe that all women are helpless creatures, and merely want to substitute the government as their protectors rather than their families, you would understand that we’re adults who are as responsible or our own actions as men are.
You should also know that, when it comes to kicking total a-holes to the curb even when your family and friends just adore him and think you’re the best couple EVA, I’m not speaking out of my butt; I’m speaking from experience. Dilan, you don’t think much of me, but… if I could do that at age 18, why can’t other 18-year-old women do that?
As a final thought: what on earth do you know about Christian communities, aside from what your fear-mongering liberal friends tell you? I know a lot of fundamentalists and serious Catholics, and am here to tell you that they don’t behave like you think they do.
September 2, 2010, 7:04 pmPeter says:
@Elemenope:
“Because what we NEED is obedience at any cost”
Umm what world do you live in? This is what we have now .. either you obey voluntarily or you obey forcefully, what exactly do you think laws backed by the force of guys with guns is? The easier to hit kids comment is a red herring; the men with guns will hit you as easily, if not more so, than you hitting your kids and you have no re-address whereas your kids do.
@ruuffles:
Libertarianism only works (even in libertarian circles) when you have impartial guys with guns enforcing contract law. Usually any philosophy breaks down when somebody is willing to hit you in the face and able do so with impunity. Not sure if you’re a parent or not but kids adapt quite readily to minimization of what they like in order to not let you (parent) win, see how long your four or five year old will go without TV, toys, time-out, desert, whatnot .. willing to bet you will give up before him. Whereas a good solid beating once or twice will stay with them forever. Ask your parents (or anybody else from the generation where this was normal) how often they actually got beat in the mythical golden age of beating … folk act like it was a daily event whereas most folk I have asked can remember only maybe a half dozen times in their life that “put the fear of god (authority)” in them and most them in their 40′s look back on it as a good thing.
September 2, 2010, 7:11 pmNickM says:
The creepiest thing about this case IMO (and there are plenty) is that CPS claimed his refusal to participate in a polygraph test to be evidence of anything.
Nick
September 2, 2010, 7:11 pmtheobromophile says:
LMNOP: do you have children? If so, how do you discipline them? (Does your wife do that?)
September 2, 2010, 7:12 pmShelbyC says:
OH COME ON!!!
September 2, 2010, 7:14 pmElemenope says:
…if I could do that at age 18, why can’t other 18-year-old women do that?
Perhaps much like intellectual capacity, people also differ in emotional capacity/flexibility? Perhaps many people are simply not as capable as you? Should we base safety regulations on the most fit worker, or education requirements on the most ingenious student?
September 2, 2010, 7:14 pmJohn Jenkins says:
Did anyone actually READ the case?
For example, instead of pontificating about what family violence means, you could read the case and see how the Texas statutes define the term.
You might also note that the description of spankings that leave marks a day later in item 2 of the original post is a quote from another case stating the law in Texas and NOT describing what occurred in this case [and not identifying it as such is bad form from Prof. Volokh]. [EV: I thought the quotation marks in what was supposed to be a trimmed-down excerpt signaled that this was an item from somewhere else, likely another case. But perhaps the signal should have been stronger; taking your advice, I changed the quote to include the citation, which makes clear that the quote is from another case.]
From the facts in the case, the appeals court probably got this one right.
Some of the footnotes:
3. We note that it is apparent from viewing the interviews that the interviewer was seeking evidence that Josh was abusive, but not evidence that Sarah was abusive or that Josh was not abusive. There was no inquiry regarding Sarah’s methods of discipline or her changing M.E.W.’s diapers. When J.M.W. volunteered that “Mommy” spanks M.E.W. with her hand, the interviewer never followed up on his comment, but instead asked whether Josh spanks her too. J.W.’s statement in the interview that most of the time he does not want to go to Josh’s house was preceded by the interviewer’s statement that “Mommy doesn’t seem bad to me, but tell me some bad things that Daddy says.”
4. The investigator asserted both that M.E.W.’s “fussiness” when Sarah tried to remove her diaper indicated sexual abuse by Josh and that M.E.W.’s lack of “fussiness” during the SANE exam indicated sexual abuse by Josh. She also asserted that her conclusions were not inconsistent because they both involved sexual abuse by Josh. [highly tuned logic]
8. The CPS investigation report–issued after the hearings in the trial court–characterized the photographs merely as “superficial marks or bruises” and concluded that the allegations of physical abuse were “Ruled Out.” The report also concluded that there was “concern for risk of abuse in the future,” but based such concern not on the photographs but on the alleged “inflexibility and intolerance of minor behavioral infractions on the part of the children” by Josh.
September 2, 2010, 7:14 pmtheobromophile says:
LMNOP: you’re missing the back story. Dilan thinks that I’m a total incompetent nitwit, so, by your reasoning and his assessment of me, it would be like using the least fit, least emotionally healthy, etc. as your standard – which may or may not be a good idea, but certainly is not holding anyone to too high a standard.
September 2, 2010, 7:20 pmElemenope says:
LMNOP: do you have children?
Not yet, no.
If so, how do you discipline them?
When I do, the same way my parents did (which was effective both for my brother and myself): incentives and access to privileges. In my opinion, recourse to violence is lazy and ultimately counterproductive.
(Does your wife do that?)
In order for a regime of incentives and privilege management to work, both parents must implement it in tandem.
September 2, 2010, 7:21 pmLiam says:
Not untrue – on the flip side, though, there are also plenty of people who would agree with you on the facts as they are, but then whine and complain about cultural imperialism if the case involved a Muslim family. Neither set of opinions would likely be dealing with the substance of the facts, but would instead be acting on their own bigotry. That you can propose superficial alterations to the facts that would inflame certain prejudiced responses out those bigoted groups is wholly irrelevant to any substantive discussion of the situation.
Unless, of course, you would like to defend the proposition that people who would feel differently about this if it involved Muslims aren’t just bigots applying double-standards.
September 2, 2010, 7:23 pmwhit says:
because assault (or assault and battery in some states) = UNLAWFUL touching. my state specifically has an RCW that authorizes and helps define lawful physical discipline by parent/teacher/guardian
September 2, 2010, 7:24 pmElemenope says:
LMNOP: you’re missing the back story. Dilan thinks that I’m a total incompetent nitwit, so, by your reasoning and his assessment of me, it would be like using the least fit, least emotionally healthy, etc. as your standard — which may or may not be a good idea, but certainly is not holding anyone to too high a standard.
I must admit I’m fairly uninterested in historical personality conflicts.
Suffice to say that just because you were able to get out of a bad relationship (or, as you say, kick the a**hole to the curb), which to me demonstrates some effective degree self-possession and emotional maturity, it does not mean that many or even most people in a similar situation are as capable. It is thus inappropriate to extrapolate from your experience to a general rule.
September 2, 2010, 7:25 pmDilan Esper says:
Couples who cohabitate before marriage are more likely to get divorced than those who do not.
Even if this is correct (I have seen figures that go the other way), this, of course, is circular. It could be the result of couples who didn’t cohabitate making a dumb decision to stay together in a bad marriage as it could be the result of couples who did cohabitate making a bad decision to end a good marriage.
Also, premarital sex, one would think, doesn’t help anyone ferret out a-holes; it just makes a woman more attached and clouds her judgement, no?
I don’t even know what this means. It isn’t like vaginas come with spikes attached with grasp onto the penis and won’t let it go. Women, just like men, can have sex with someone and then move on with their life or decide to take up with someone else. And while sexual DESIRE can certainly cloud judgment, there’s nothing about the act itself that clouds people’s judgment. Indeed, having sex with someone allows a person to make a more accurate judgment– you don’t have to worry about marrying the person only to find out that he or she is a cold fish in the sack.
“Feminist” critiques are often cute ways of getting women to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.
Wow, theo. Just wow. Somehow, when I hear about a woman whose husband is ordering her around, telling her not to go to college, forcing her to terrorize her children with domestic violence, raping her (not explicit, but certainly implicit in the court’s recitation of the statement of facts), etc., the first thought that comes to my mind is not about her “taking responsibility for her own actions”.
In any event, this is a nice demonstration of how you actually feel about feminism– despite sometimes calling yourself a “feminist”, you are a conservative woman, not a feminist, and you bash on feminists with respect to fundamental issues you disagree with them on.
It’s her family’s fault, it’s the community’s fault, it’s everyone’s fault but the woman who met him, dated him, accepted his proposal, and walked down the aisle to say “I do” to him.
It is simply a fact, theo, that pushing people to get married as young virgins, instead of allowing them to have all the premarital and nonmarital sex they want and get married when they feel they are ready to commit, is going to result in marriages that are dictated by raging hormones and where the partners haven’t gotten to know each other as well as they would otherwise. That’s a bad system if you care about women not getting abused, which I do. A guy like this simply couldn’t operate in an environment full of urban, college educated women, because such women don’t have to marry the first guy they want to have sex with. He can only operate in the world created and under the rules enforced by conservative evangelical Christianity.
You should also know that, when it comes to kicking total a-holes to the curb even when your family and friends just adore him and think you’re the best couple EVA, I’m not speaking out of my butt; I’m speaking from experience. Dilan, you don’t think much of me, but… if I could do that at age 18, why can’t other 18-year-old women do that?
One of the fundamental differences between conservative women and feminists, as I have explained to you many times, is conservative women essentialize their experiences. “I was able to bear and raise a child from an unplanned pregnancy– other women can as well!” “I was able to do my housework, take care of my children, and publish a book– I don’t see why other women need daycare!”
Your experiences, theo, are just that– yours. It’s great if you kicked a jerk out at 18. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the world can do that. To pick an extreme, but nonetheless instructive, example, I don’t think even you would claim that because you were able to do this, that means that some 14 year old pregnant Pakistani girl in a rural village who is trapped in an arranged marriage to a 55 year old who rapes her every night is going to be able to do it.
Now, of course, American women are better off than that, but suffice to say, close-knit conservative evangelical communities (and not to bag on just them– I could say the same thing about immigrant Muslim communities as well) put tremendous pressure on women to submit to the men in their lives, marry the first guy who takes interest, and stay married, and often make it very difficult, both in terms of legal remedies and social pressures, to escape. If someone is able to push through even those barriers and get out, more power to her, but that doesn’t prove that everyone who is still stuck in the rut is to blame for their situations.
As a final thought: what on earth do you know about Christian communities, aside from what your fear-mongering liberal friends tell you? I know a lot of fundamentalists and serious Catholics, and am here to tell you that they don’t behave like you think they do.
Theo, there have been many serious studies, by feminists and others, of the experiences of women in contemporary conservative Christian communities. In addition, we have quite a few histories which delve into the times when much of polite society, even in the cities, followed these mores, when, for instance, unmarried girls who became pregnant were either forced into shotgun weddings or wisked away from their communities. We also have the quite powerful evidence that in the 1960′s, when the sexual revolution took hold in urban America, this all basically stopped outside of the Bible Belt.
Saying “I know Christian conservatives and they aren’t like that!” really isn’t an answer to this point.
September 2, 2010, 7:26 pmDilan Esper says:
Not untrue — on the flip side, though, there are also plenty of people who would agree with you on the facts as they are, but then whine and complain about cultural imperialism if the case involved a Muslim family.
That is true too, though I suspect that most liberal feminists and those sympathetic to feminism would take the consistent position that I would take.
September 2, 2010, 7:27 pmtherut says:
My parents used the old switch from the switch tree outside. We had to go pick our own switch. I was like being on death roll as a child to have to do that. The picking of the switch was worse than the switching that took place. I thought I was very smart and climbed up to the top of the large side an sat there and laughed at my Mom. I did not laugh when she came back with a switch long enough to reach me from the ground. Now my grandmother was worse. She would hold us tight in her lap. Unable to move till we settled down. It worked. You learned the sooner you stopped fussing the sooner you could move again.
September 2, 2010, 7:32 pmtherut says:
My parents used the old switch from the switch tree outside. We had to go pick our own switch. I was like being on death roll as a child to have to do that. The picking of the switch was worse than the switching that took place. I thought I was very smart and climbed up to the top of the large slide an sat there and laughed at my Mom. I did not laugh when she came back with a switch long enough to reach me from the ground. Now my grandmother was worse. She would hold us tight in her lap. Unable to move till we settled down. It worked. You learned the sooner you stopped fussing the sooner you could move again.
September 2, 2010, 7:33 pmElemenope says:
because assault (or assault and battery in some states) = UNLAWFUL touching. my state specifically has an RCW that authorizes and helps define lawful physical discipline by parent/teacher/guardian
Yeah, I know that the exception exists, and is usually justified by statute. What I was asking for was the *reasoning* behind the exception.
—————
Umm what world do you live in?
This one.
This is what we have now .. either you obey voluntarily or you obey forcefully, what exactly do you think laws backed by the force of guys with guns is?
This is, at least in an abstract sense, true. But it does not mean that therefore we should normalize the expectation of violence, and teach implicitly that the most direct route to compliance *should be* violence.
The easier to hit kids comment is a red herring…
No it wasn’t. It was implicit in your comment. Either we whack kids around to teach them to fear the man, when they are more impressionable and easy to control, else we have to teach it by locking them in a cell. You said it was easier to do the first; I was just phrasing what you said in a less charitable way.
…[T]he men with guns will hit you as easily, if not more so, than you hitting your kids and you have no re-address whereas your kids do.
Again, this is the path to normalizing brutality, and is thus manifestly wrong. A person can easily come to understand the violence inherent in the system (“help, help I’m being repressed”) without beating them as children. I’ve been arrested, been pushed around by cops, been a defendant in a courtroom, and I went into those things knowing full well the aspects of violence without having them beaten into me.
September 2, 2010, 7:33 pmDilan Esper says:
By the way, I don’t think Theo is an “incompetent nitwit”. I just think she is a conservative anti-feminist with extremely ideosyncratic views (dictated by her apparent conservative Christian religious faith) that should not and cannot be applied to other women who neither share her religious beliefs nor share her circumstances.
In other words, the Theos of the world wouldn’t be a problem if they just said “I’m a celibate pro-life Christian, and I think you should be too”. But they become a problem when they say “I’m a celibate pro-life Christian, and I think laws should be enacted that make life more difficult for sexually active pro-choice nonbelievers”. Specifically, the laws theo dislikes make life much easier for women who don’t share her values. And unlike her, I think life should be made easier for women who don’t share her values.
September 2, 2010, 7:36 pmChris Travers says:
Well, we don’t use spankings at our house but nearly all punishment is corporal. Timeouts are used for warnings (and not mandatory to follow for the kid). Corporal punishment is used for the actual thing. The child usually has the right to self-inflict the given punishment in our house too (that also teaches physical discipline). Most of what we use are things like cold showers (more or less freezing temp in the winter), and the like. Not usually extremely painful but quite uncomfortable nonetheless.
We prefer corporal punishment for a number of reasons. 1) It gets the kid’s attention faster than any other method, and 2) properly managed it triggers senses of physical aversion.
We don’t spank because that usually triggers fighting reflexes. There is a big difference between the sense of being hit by someone and the sense of being put in a physically uncomfortable state by someone. And actual use of punishment becomes fairly rare as the kid stops needing to test it all the time. Most of the time a stern look where appropriate is enough.
Seems to work.
September 2, 2010, 7:41 pmChris Travers says:
We do that too in our house.
September 2, 2010, 7:44 pmpmorem says:
A good friend of mine uses the same discipline method with his son. It’s turning out remarkably well.
Nobody tell him that there’s a betting pool on when his son is first incarcerated.
Humans are not competent to recognize such, and need to be protected from themselves. It is wrong for me to have an interest in Liberty 5-3000.
September 2, 2010, 7:46 pmShelbyC says:
Ironically, the case at hand seems to be a case of the law making things difficult for folks who don’t share some local officials’ values.
September 2, 2010, 7:46 pmDilan Esper says:
Shelby:
I don’t see it that way, but then, that’s because I think that children have independent interests from their parents that the state sometimes has the obligation to protect. (Also, it’s worth noting that this isn’t even the standard case of the PARENTS’ (plural) values being trumped by the state– this is a matter of allowing one parent’s values to trump the other one’s.)
Interestingly, many conservatives do feel this way about the 9 months the fetus is in the womb but suddenly do not feel this way after the child is born. Wonder why that is….
September 2, 2010, 7:49 pmMatthew Carberry says:
She didn’t get the order because she couldn’t meet the clear and convincing standard. But hey, better a thousand people die than one innocent man be forced to keep a certain distance from another person. – moh456
If all that was involved was some sort of distance mandate from that person or their private property with reasonable exceptions that might make sense. As it stands the consequences of a protective order are out of proportion to the requirements of getting one.
September 2, 2010, 7:50 pmReader X says:
moh456 is incorrect about Maryland law and court rulings regarding restraining orders (which are useless to true victims of domestic violence, since a violent abuser will not be deterred by a piece of paper like a restraining order from a court; restraining orders are usually used not to prevent violence, but to gain leverage in acrimonious divorce cases and custody disputes, by stigmatizing and kicking out of the house a non-violent husband falsely accused of domestic violence for tactical reasons by the soon-to-be-ex-wife).
They are almost invariably granted even in Maryland which has a higher standard of proof for restraining orders than is used in most states (the Post’s own reporting showed some Maryland judges granted 99 percent of all requests, and virtually none less than 90 percent). Thus, mo456 is simply wrong to claim that the higher standard is based on the belief that it is better that a “thousand people die than one innocent man be forced to keep a certain distance from another person.” Indeed, existing law in most states seem to be based on the idea that it is better that 10 men be falsely branded as domestic abusers than that one guilty man avoid a restraining order.
The proposed change in the standard of proof in the Amy Castillo case would not have affected her case at all, because the judge simply did not believe her, and would not have ruled for her favor even under a lower preponderence of the evidence standard (the standard that theoretically applies in most states, although in practices, judges require even less, granting restraining orders at the drop of a hat to avoid being seen as “insensitive” to domestic violence).
September 2, 2010, 7:50 pmTed says:
You don’t need to make excuses, you poor thing…
No! I know a lot of “fundamentalists and serious Catholics,” and I am here to tell you that they behave much worse.
Indeed. Forever. I wonder what lasting effect it has? Oh, it…makes…them [PDF]…into…criminals. Cool.
Why do people rely on their own notions of what harms children when their is plenty of evidence out there to the contrary. Especially when that evidence is pretty common sense. Yeah, the kid will do what you tell him to do if you hit him, but its also more likely that he will use that method of persuasion in all aspects of his life, making him more anti-social, more likely to be physically abusive, and more likely to be incarcerated for a violent crime. But hey, he picked his toys up, right?
September 2, 2010, 7:54 pmShelbyC says:
Well, I started seeing it alot more that way after reading portions of the case: “[The SANE Nurse] stated that although there was an ongoing investigation and CPS had not yet made any findings or conclusions, she was “confident” that M.E.W. was being “groomed” for sexual behavior…”
come on.
September 2, 2010, 7:56 pmTed says:
Not yet…
September 2, 2010, 7:58 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
So what incentives and access to privileges works on a three-year-old who is hell-bent on running away from you in the parking lot every chance she gets? Or do you pray to God her hand never slips out of yours until she’s 10 years old?
I preferred spanking to time-out for two reasons: it punishes the child, not the whole family (can’t go to the store and leave your kid alone in her room, etc.,) and it gets the whole thing over with real quick. I wanted my daughter to think of her naughtiness as a temporary aberration, and not sit in time-out and spend time thinking about how bad she was, which, with her tender conscience, she would have done. So it was “This is because you [whatever], *whap*, and this is because you then [whatever], *whap*. Now we’re through with this and we don’t have to deal with it anymore.” It actually was pretty effective.
September 2, 2010, 7:58 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Ted, do you not know any normal people who were spanked as kids? I too had to pick out my switch on occasion. (Never did that to my kid.) I am not an ax murderer.
September 2, 2010, 8:00 pmAlex S. says:
It would be a cool test if things were set up for a story like this so that 1/3rd of visiting IPs got this version, 1/3rd got a version where the religious beliefs are put in terms of Islam, and 1/3rd in terms of Judaism and then later do a compare and contrast later on the nature and tone of the comments.
As for the case, based solely on the snippets here, I agree that it would be very bad form if a man’s sexual desires not being met by his wife were taken as a sign of likely sexual abuse against his children.
I tend to disagree that spankings that result in lasting bruises or marks aren’t unacceptable. I am completely fine with how my mother used spanking on us children and each, rather rare, time she did it is hurt like hell. But nothing ever produced marks beyond a few hours and she spanked us with a hairbrush.
September 2, 2010, 8:01 pmChris Travers says:
Yeah, reading the case I was struck that it basically looked like a rancorous divorce proceeding. I find it interesting that Sarah published a book on why children should be obedient to their parents through the same church that she argues is responsible for Josh’s “abuse.” Writing a book isn’t something one reasonably does under duress. It’s a lot of work usually over several years.
I conclude that it’s just a bunch of trumped up charges through a divorce with hard feelings.
September 2, 2010, 8:03 pmChris Travers says:
Actually that is the one thing we use spanking for at our house—- running into streets, or away from us in parking lots or the like.
September 2, 2010, 8:06 pmTed says:
I do. Do you any that were beaten and went to jail for beating others? I know some of those also. Your point?
September 2, 2010, 8:10 pmChris Travers says:
Probably…. Depending on circumstances. I wouldn’t necessarily say “categorically” too much (and I know you didn’t). I could see cases where more severe corporal punishment than normal might be needed.
Note that the thing here is that the Texas law basically says that infrequent spankings that leave marks 24 hours later are not evidence of physical abuse. If it happens once every few months, that is different than if it is happening every week.
September 2, 2010, 8:11 pmTed says:
Are there any ivy league-educated child developmental psychologists that professionally sign onto the idea that corporal punishment is an appropriate form of discipline? I honestly, don’t know, but if not…why not?
September 2, 2010, 8:15 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
My point, Ted?
“Yeah, the kid will do what you tell him to do if you hit him, but its also more likely that he will use that method of persuasion in all aspects of his life, making him more anti-social, more likely to be physically abusive, and more likely to be incarcerated for a violent crime.”
I don’t know anybody who has been jailed for anything. Virtually everyone I know was spanked as a kid. (I don’t know anyone who equates spanking with beating.) Evidently you run with a violent group. You need not extrapolate your experiences to everyone else.
September 2, 2010, 8:17 pmElemenope says:
So what incentives and access to privileges works on a three-year-old who is hell-bent on running away from you in the parking lot every chance she gets?
Does this happen with a lot of three-year-olds? My parents never had this problem with my (younger) brother, and according to their report at least, never with me either. We were not exactly the most well-behaved saints of kids, but we were taught early on that cars and roads were very dangerous for small children because they are hard to see. I remember my parents even demonstrating the point by having me look over the dashboard and showing that there were many things near the car I couldn’t see. Isn’t that all it takes? I find when people, including children, understand the reason behind an order, it is much *much* easier to get them to follow it.
September 2, 2010, 8:20 pmwhit says:
family violence implies UNLAWful violence
if a husband and wife were both MMA fighters and they sparred together, that would be “violence” but it wouldn’t be family violence. ditto if they played rugby together. it’s an implied understanding.
September 2, 2010, 8:24 pmMike P Wagner says:
I hate to go so far off topic, but when I married my wife, she was dead set against spanking, and I did not agree. But I agreed to follow her lead on this.
After raising two kids with her, I have to tell you that she was right, and I was wrong.
We had far fewer discipline issues in our house than the house I grew up in (where “belting” occurred), and both kids seem – to this father’s eyes :-) to be about some of the best people you are likely to meet. Straight A students, leaders in their peer groups (marching band, etc.), and kind and compassionate.
And not one lick of corporal punishment, ever. When they were younger, it was “time out”. By the time they were in high school, they more or less just did what we said – with one or two grounding for one of them.
I am inclined to think that my wife was right – most of what you teach by spanking is that big people get to hit little people whenever they want to. Daddy spanks me when I am bad, but he sure doesn’t spank other men when they are bad. Why not? They are as big as he is.
I know that a sample size of two is ridiculously small, but seeing the way my kids turned out, I am very grateful that I listened to the wise woman I married.
Mike
September 2, 2010, 8:25 pmElemenope says:
There is a helluva lot of “the plural of anecdote is data” running around this thread when it comes to corporal punishment. I am not up on the most recent studies, but to my recollection there is a *weak* but *statistically significant* correlation between moderate corporal punishment and criminal outcomes.
But to me that’s almost besides the point. My problem with corporal punishment is that it inculcates and reinforces an ideology of submission to authority and reflexive fear of the powerful. This translates down the line into adults who worship at the altar of the cult of the police and endorse all manner of official cruelty (both at the individual level and in terms of national and international policy).
September 2, 2010, 8:26 pmmoh456 says:
Reader X,
Can you point to this study (the original source, please) showing 90+% of protective orders are granted in MD? Does that number include ex parte temporary orders?
Yes, a piece of paper isn’t a 100% failsafe and won’t deter every abuser. A piece of paper at the legislative building prohibiting murder won’t deter everyone from murder. But CPOs have the force of law, and will and do deter many. I have worked with dozens of women who have needed and been made safer from protective orders. It’s flat out ignorant to say that they’re all used for leverage in divorce cases– practically none are.
As for Castillo, do you have some sort of quote from the judge to support your claim? You realize that it’s not inconsistent to say that the judge both doubted her credibility, and that a lower preponderance standard would have made a difference?
September 2, 2010, 8:32 pmJoe says:
It isn’t like vaginas come with spikes attached with grasp onto the penis and won’t let it go.
well, not usually.
September 2, 2010, 8:34 pmwhit says:
right. it’s a matter of both the severity/frequency of the discipline and the reason for it.
our statute says certain things are always unreasonable (shaking a child under a certain age, etc.)
i had a case where a 14 yr old girl called to report her mom for “child abuse”. it was not in dispute that the young “lady” called her mom a “cunt” at which point mom reared back and slapped her square across the cheek, resulting in a red mark.
she wanted to press charges for CHILD ABUSE!!!
she did not get her way
i advised her to not call her mom the “C” word.
September 2, 2010, 8:38 pmChris Travers says:
You ware way overstating what’s in those sources.
Furthermore what works well for one kid doesn’t work well for others. As a parent one does well to have a wide range of tools available and be willing to adapt them to the kid.
I am probably the only one here that is OK with lightly corporally punishing a 6-9 month old, though.
September 2, 2010, 8:42 pmChris Travers says:
I guess my concern is that very often these end up being cases where you have a rancorous divorce and one parent is trying to get at the other parent, to deny custody, etc. in order to hurt the other parent. I would suggest that opening up the restraining order system to such widespread abuse would lead to more problems than less. Accusations shouldn’t be enough to deny a parent time with his/her kids, or to deny the kids time with their parents.
September 2, 2010, 8:44 pmKamal says:
Wow.. I guess I lucked out. I didn’t think this sort of physical barbarism was tolerated by society anymore. But I guess the “freedom” to hit someone depends on if they are young and in your care?
September 2, 2010, 8:45 pmChris Travers says:
One of the sources you cited above looked at a great deal of debate within the community (the meta-study one). So I would assume that would be reasonable evidence of an affirmative answer.
September 2, 2010, 8:47 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
It happened with mine at about 2.5 years of age until I stung the backs of her legs with my hand one day, when she had the poor judgment to pull away from me and run behind a row of parked cars, while wearing a dress and no tights. She walked with me calmly after that.
I figure a parent’s primary job is to raise her kid to adulthood, alive.
Every child is not you. You knew that, of course.
September 2, 2010, 8:52 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
If by “barbarism” you mean “spanking”, did you honestly not realize that people still spank their kids? For real?
September 2, 2010, 8:53 pmKamal says:
Reminds me of when I see kids yelling in the super market, and the parents yelling back at them. I always wonder if it dawns on the parents that maybe kids pick up on their behavior. That’s why I think hitting a person, regardless of age or kinship, is bad – even as an instructive tool. I’m not saying it’s evil; i’m saying I don’t think it’s the most affective method, and may arguably teach the children that physical violence is a socially accepted way to deal with relatively small problems.
September 2, 2010, 8:53 pmGimlet says:
Sorry, Dilan, but in your snark at the end you’re either doing apples-to-oranges or you don’t have a point. I assume this is about abortion, and not about spanking a fetus? I’m unaware of any conservatives who would both argue against abortion and that the state should not stop a parent from killing a child after its birth. However, if you’re looking for logical consistency, I do think Peter Singer would argue both for abortion and that infanticide should be allowed.
September 2, 2010, 8:53 pmKamal says:
I didn’t realize it was legal.
September 2, 2010, 8:54 pmguest101 says:
If excessive interest in my wife’s private areas is evidence of sexual abuse, I’m in pretty big trouble.
September 2, 2010, 8:55 pmmoh456 says:
This is the stereotype, but it’s pretty far removed from the reality. The organization I worked for would deny CPO representation if there wasn’t a credible claim of abuse or the claims were potentially being used as an abuse of process, and very very few were denied for those reasons. There was prescreening, but I doubt screeners would make much of a difference if vast numbers of women were cynically exploiting the system.
Many abused women are reluctant to follow through to the point of actually showing up for court, which can be extremely painful psychologically. Some who would be willing were encouraged not to pursue formal actions for their own safety. Unless there was extrinsic evidence, we would sometimes encourage victims not to risk the process. A victim who has to relive the abuse in court and then loses is worse off than before, and the abuser feels invincible. Even still, in my jxd, I’d guess far less than 90% of final CPOs are granted. I can’t imagine MD has a higher rate with a more stringent standard. (Although practically every 7 day temporary order is granted, so maybe that’s skewing the “statistics” such as they are).
Also, even when legitimate prior CPOs are brought up in a subsequent divorce, they’re not always that “effective,” at least in my jxd. The DR judges often ignore claims of abuse at that stage, presumably thinking (as you do) that it’s all a bunch of BS to get back at the husband.
September 2, 2010, 8:58 pmDay Break says:
“Should we base safety regulations on the most fit worker, or education requirements on the most ingenious student?”
Trick Question:
Safety agencies should base safety regulations on general principles and objectives. This recognizes that no companies or working conditionbs are the same. The regs should be based on maintaining and proving demonstrated crew safety competency not the “most fit worker.”
Broadly speaking education standards should be based on standards define what is to be learned at certain points in time, what performances will be accepted as evidence that the learning has occurred for all students. Students, teachers and administrators should be expected to work toward and achieve these standards. Likewise accommodations and modifications could be individually identified and implemented to help certain students reach the achievement goals. Obviously, accelerated students may achieve well beyond the academic standards and move into higher grade levels or into advanced coursework.
P.S. A good standard in my book are no multiple valedictorians (unless you happen to have two students with the same perfect GPA, both in hard sciences or math, then an exception might be made).
September 2, 2010, 9:00 pmDebrah says:
“Sarah [the ex-wife] also found suspicious that during their marriage Josh was ‘very interested in my private areas,’”…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is so ridiculous beyond mention.
September 2, 2010, 9:02 pmmoh456 says:
Also, re: Chris Travers, unfortunately “accusations” are sometimes the only evidence available– due to the intimate nature of the relationship– and credibility becomes crucial. I’d guess that many who resist this have no problem with rapists being convicted (at a much higher burden of proof, btw) on the basis of “accusations”. And the consequences of that are much more severe than CPOs.
September 2, 2010, 9:02 pmElemenope says:
I figure a parent’s primary job is to raise her kid to adulthood, alive.
I agree. And clearly, a spanking is infinitely preferable to death by vehicle; I certainly would not argue otherwise. If your child seems only to respond at that stage of development to negative reinforcement, I suppose you have no choice. It is just simply so far outside my experience with my own childhood as well as my brother’s and my friends’ that it struck me as odd for children who ought, if they are allowed to be walking/running around to be cognizant of the dangers inherent in that activity and act appropriately to those dangers.
Every child is not you. You knew that, of course.
I do know that. It may be that sometimes whacking a kid is the only way to protect them from an emergent danger they do not understand. I’ve just personally never experienced a situation in which it would be prudent or necessary to do so.
September 2, 2010, 9:04 pmChris Travers says:
All corporal punishment?
Here’s the thing. In our household corporal punishment takes two forms. One is for kids who are under about 18 months old and is also very communicative, while the other is for older kids.
Under 18 months old the way we go about things is “tapping” the child’s hand (usually) or less commonly (if it’s more urgent) cheek. This is done repetitively until the child stops doing what the child shouldn’t be doing. Initially the response is that of attention-getting. The child will stop and look up to try to figure out what is going on. Then the child may try to go back and persist. Then the tapping resumes. After about 5-10 repetitions, it becomes moderately uncomfortable but not painful. After about 20 repetitions it becomes mildly painful. If on the cheek, it starts off mildly painful.
The goal is to give the child a chance to get feedback about behavior, what’s off limits, etc. in what is first and foremost a communicative framework, but one that leads to discomfort if efforts persist. Neither of my kids have feared that.
The second form is for kids about 18 months old and older. If they step out of line, they are given ONE warning. If they persist, they are given a punishment (for example, cold shower) and a choice: do it yourself or have a parent do it to you. The punishments are never directly painful, but are generally very uncomfortable. The goal is to trigger senses of alarm and discomfort but not a sense of violence per se.
We don’t use timeouts. I will sometimes put my son in his room to calm down and advise him to stay there until he is ready to come out but whether he does so or not is his choice and he gets to deal with the consequences of any further actions after he comes out. Usually he will stay there longer than he would have if it was punishment, and he will be calmer afterwards. We do use access to privileges sometimes, but again the child is involved in the process. As another commenter mentioned, the act of getting the switch was probably more psychologically punishing than the actual beating, and so we make more of this sort of thing.
If my son didn’t know he did something bad (once he drew on my laptop screen with a pen), it’s enough for him to see I’m unhappy and simply say “don’t do it again.”
September 2, 2010, 9:05 pmGuest14 says:
I never see or talk to my parents any more, and I think it’s in no small part due to corporal punishment. I never saw them as anything but terrorizers, forces that had to appeased in order to avoid pain. I certainly never loved them. How could I?
Sometimes they reach out to me, but I ignore them. I have no particular need to be hit, at this stage in my life, so I don’t need parents.
September 2, 2010, 9:07 pmChris Travers says:
Let’s not start down that argument again.
However, what you are proposing is that mere accusations are used to deny a parent-child bond if they are merely a little more credible than not. That strikes me as very, very dangerous and not comparable to the very problematic issue of conviction of rape on the basis of accusation.
September 2, 2010, 9:07 pmDilan Esper says:
I’m unaware of any conservatives who would both argue against abortion and that the state should not stop a parent from killing a child after its birth.
Unless you think that the only thing that a parent can do to a child that is wrong is to kill him or her, that really doesn’t answer the point.
I do think Peter Singer would argue both for abortion and that infanticide should be allowed.
Any pro-lifer who brings up Peter Singer is an ass. Seriously. There’s one guy out there, his focus is animal rights (not infanticide) anyway, he has nothing to do with the pro-choice movement, and most pro-choicers tend to argue that life develops on a continuum (the exact opposite of Singer’s argument) and that the important aspect of the fetus’ status is that it is inside a woman (a dinstinction that Singer doesn’t find relevant).
The only reason pro-lifers bring up Peter Singer is that they have wet dreams that pro-choicers believe in what he espouses. He’s a great big straw man that they like to knock down, because it is a lot more fun to “argue” with him than to actually argue with the actual pro-choice position, i.e., that this is an issue of women’s rights.
September 2, 2010, 9:09 pmElemenope says:
Day Break:
You totally missed the context of those questions, or at the very least you are ignoring them. They were not meant as trick questions or really even questions at all, but merely as rhetorically expositive of the general point that regulations are not built well when they normalize the exceptional.
September 2, 2010, 9:10 pmMatthew Carberry says:
Convictions for rape and the sentencing consequences thereof occur after a trial by a jury on the facts in a court of law with the accused given the ability to mount a defense.
That’s a huge difference from stripping away fundamental rights in a non-representative forum before a judge making a decision in part fearful for the consequences to their career should they not impose the order and something go wrong.
Like many restrictions, it is unlikely the protective order deters the spouses that are truly dangerous and need restricting.
September 2, 2010, 9:11 pmChris Travers says:
I’ve had divorce lawyers tell me otherwise.
What about abused men?
September 2, 2010, 9:12 pmElemenope says:
Chris Travers:
If you’ve figured out a way to structure a corporal punishment regime that avoids the pitfalls of normalizing violence, more power to you. I wouldn’t say that *all* corporal punishment *necessarily* fits under the rubric of normalizing violence, but then again there is a fine line between discomfort and harm (which you seem to have sussed out pretty well, but not everybody does).
Another problem with such a regime is the possibility of the necessity of escalation as a response to diminishing returns of effectiveness. You may have gotten lucky in that your children respond rationally to correction, but not every child reacts in that manner. Some small but significant percentage of people are counter-suggestible at a deep level, and are likely to react to any punishment schema by doubling down. Many people used to direct methods of punishment will respond by making the punishment more severe, escalating without noticing past the point of discomfort into outright harm. Definitely some folks are able with effort to avoid that pitfall, but I believe it to be an inherent weakness of the system.
September 2, 2010, 9:16 pmChris Travers says:
For real?
September 2, 2010, 9:17 pmChris Travers says:
The secret is to watch your kids and see what they respond to. Punishment is first and foremost about communication.
The second secret is that “the sheath is for swords.” Authority is something that if you have to assert, you don’t have it.
September 2, 2010, 9:22 pmmoh456 says:
RE: Matthew and Chris Travers
The point of the rape comparison is that accusations are often enough to convict someone under circumstances with much more severe consequences and a much higher burden of proof than a CPO hearing. Sometimes all you have is testimony, from both sides. If it’s good enough to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt and send them to prison for life, it should be enough to grant a CPO.
“Like many restrictions, it is unlikely the protective order deters the spouses that are truly dangerous and need restricting. ”
1. This is at odds with my anecdotal experience regarding abusers.
2. Some criminals will not be deterred. That doesn’t make laws or judicial orders unnecessary.
“I’ve had divorce lawyers tell me otherwise.”
Well, everyone has their own experience. I’m not saying it’s uniformly considered irrelevant either, just that many DR judges are about the most skeptical people on earth when it comes to claims by one spouse against another, whether abuse or otherwise.
“What about abused men?”
Very few men are actually victims of domestic violence, although there are some. This is backed up by pretty large empirical studies, which I admittedly don’t have on hand. Of those who are, it’s often homosexual men being abused by their male partners. When women are the abusers, likewise, it’s often in lesbian relationships. I’m not sure why that is, but my guess is physical differences in strength.
September 2, 2010, 9:24 pmtheobromophile says:
Dilan,
The laws that you like end human life – and make life easier on a lot of lousy men. If we were talking about laws that just affected women, you might have a point; however, the laws end human life. That they incidentally place a small burden (in the days of birth control) on women is as irrelevant as if they were to incidentally burden men, 10-year-olds, or brunettes. On one hand, you have human life; on the other, a lifestyle choice. That life wins doesn’t mean that I’m an anti-feminist, unless you define “feminist” as “pro-murder” or “anti-life”.
Besides, Dil, I thought we figured out long ago that you are not the Supreme Arbiter of All Things Feminist. Now, if you want to say that no pro-lifer is a feminist, and alienate half of women from the movement, go right ahead, but your desire to have a stronger litmus test for being a feminist – and one that goes against every definition of the word – than for Christianity is humourous, to say the least.
Oh, hey, totally random question: what sect of Christianity do I belong to? (You know that theobromine is chocolate, right?) I would just like to know more about my religion, and it would be nice if the Supreme Arbiter of Everything the Universe would let me know which religion I am (thanks for the pointer with “Christianity”, but I’m still a little lost)…..
September 2, 2010, 9:25 pm/sarcasm
Laura(southernxyl) says:
“The secret is to watch your kids and see what they respond to.”
Yes.
FWIW, I’ve seen parents trying not to spank their kids, but yelling and screaming and saying harsh, abusive things. A brisk whack on the butt instead may actually be far less damaging.
September 2, 2010, 9:28 pmElemenope says:
The secret is to watch your kids and see what they respond to. Punishment is first and foremost about communication.
Agreed.
The second secret is that “the sheath is for swords.” Authority is something that if you have to assert, you don’t have it.
Agreed as well. Though I am given to doubt that most people who practice corporal punishment are possessed of your wisdom. At all. Actually, just make that people in general, though I tend to think its absence is more dangerous when something like violence is on the table.
————-
FWIW, I’ve seen parents trying not to spank their kids, but yelling and screaming and saying harsh, abusive things. A brisk whack on the butt instead may actually be far less damaging.
This is true; the only thing IMO worse than resorting to violence is being completely ineffectual at establishing authority. Kids who know they can get away with anything are impossible to regulate under any method after a while.
September 2, 2010, 9:29 pmChris Travers says:
1) That’s not what the studies show. The studies do show different forms of intimate violence based on gender, but women are more likely than men to engage in both minor and severe forms of physical violence. Women are more likely to threaten or (use!) knives and guns, while men are more likely to “beat up” the partner.
2) When I was in college I went through about six months of hell where my girlfriend I was living with at the time was threatening me with knives several times a week. When she hit me with a coffee cup from behind is the only time I have EVER in my adult life struck anyone full-force with my hands and quite frankly I was afraid for my life.
Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. The idea that men are the primary aggressors in DV is a pernicious myth which causes untold harm.
September 2, 2010, 9:31 pmKen Arromdee says:
Excuse me? Is there something that could possibly make a parent give up under these circumstances other than the parent’s desire to voluntarily do so? Perhaps the four or five year old is going to forcibly wrest the TV remote control from your hands and sit in front of the TV with you powerless to stop it?
September 2, 2010, 9:43 pmRandy says:
“there are also plenty of people who would agree with you on the facts as they are, but then whine and complain about cultural imperialism if the case involved a Muslim family”
Oh for Pete’s sake. I know of no one, and I have plenty of liberal friends, who would never say such a thing.
I’m really getting tired of these meme that keeps popping up in the most contrived circumstances, such as here, whereby accusations are made that liberals will allow muslims to do whatever they like, but not everyone else. It’s wrong, stupid, and inflamatory.
Which, I guess, is your point.
September 2, 2010, 9:46 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
FWIW again, I knew a woman whose child had a dreadful case of ADHD and was not necessarily a pleasant person, independently of that. His grades were D’s and F’s, partly because of his ADHD (which was medicated) and partly because he really didn’t give a damn. Spanking did not work with this kid, and neither did taking away privileges – he didn’t care – or taking things out of his room. He’d had just about an entire entertainment center in his room, and they took out everything but the bed and the dresser but it made NO difference to his behavior.
IMO they were trying to control the uncontrollable. If that had been my kid, I’d have told the school people they were on their own and tried to just have a positive relationship with him. Screw the grades. There’s got to be a niche for people like that, and you don’t have to make their life hell because they won’t go in the niche you picked out for them.
September 2, 2010, 9:51 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Chris, I’m willing to believe your statistic, I guess, but why is it that over and over I read about a woman being killed by her husband or partner or ex who can’t let go – shot or strangled or stabbed – and apart from Mary Winkler I’m having a lot of trouble remembering it going the other way?
September 2, 2010, 9:54 pmmoh456 says:
Chris,
The studies are a pretty controversial topic. I didn’t say it never happened, just that it wasnt all that common– especially at the level where there are injuries serious enough to warrant hospital/police involvement. Most of the claims I did see brought by men against women in DV court were done as a pre-emptive strike by savvy abusers. I do remember a handful of men who we would have represented but who eventually declined to pursue the case formally. As with your experience, those cases involved threats with weapons. In any case, the one hard statistic we do have, spousal DV murder, is about 3-1 committed by men.
September 2, 2010, 9:58 pmScott Eudaley says:
I tend to doubt the validity of the results of such studies because of a deeply flawed methodology. Almost always, it is based on self-reporting by criminals versus non-criminals. Most (non-criminal) people look back on their childhoods with some fondness, even if it wasn’t very good (in any number of ways). The natural response is to downplay the bad (in this case, corporal punishment). On the other hand, criminals are notorious for harboring resentments all out of proportion to any offense. Indeed, there are some studies which seem to indicate that excessive harboring of resentments and slights is the defining characteristic which separates the violent criminal from everyone else. The problems with any study based on self-reporting should be obvious.
Nonsense. If that were the case, I’d be a goose-stepping Nazi (yes, I know, another anecdote!). My parents, and especially my father, were very aggressive about enforcing their edicts via corporal punishment. And I was an extremely rebellious child. Although it never got to the point of abuse, it continued long past the point of effectiveness. It only ended when I got big enough (age 14) when I could fight back. One punch and it ended forever. Since my politics tend toward the libertarian (to use a convenient, yet inadequate, short-hand), your thesis definitely doesn’t describe me.
As a broader point, historically corporal punishment was once ubiquitous. During that time, Americans were isolationist in international affairs and domestically the crime rate was dramatically lower. Any relationship between corporal punishment and crime is certainly not borne out by the historical data.
One of the best descriptions of when corporal punishment should be used was given by the Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff. He argued that corporal punishment was only appropriate for the very young child, before its rational faculty was developed to the point where it could be reasoned with. Even then, it should only be used to enforce restrictions involving danger, such as crossing the street. Once a child has reached a certain level of rational development, all punishments must ultimately be directed at the mind, not the body. I tend to agree with him.
September 2, 2010, 10:03 pmDay Break says:
My apologies about the “trick question” comment, I really was venting a bit about the nonsense “multiple valedictorians” phenomenon which IMO actually from a sociological perspective normalizes exceptional achievement at the expense of differentiation based on merit.
Also, I 100% got your point that from a sociological perspective that the standards for regs should not be based on the exceptionally low or exceptionally high because the States goal is order and generalization for a variety of reasons.
Totally off Topic Question: Applied to education policy should regs/ standards be set iteratively higher or stricter?, so as to shift behaviors and improve outcomes.
September 2, 2010, 10:06 pmMe says:
Women don’t kill their spouses as often as men do because it would be financially stupid, not because they aren’t capable of violence.
A woman who divorces her husband can get alimony, often for life. See Bristow v. Bristow (Va. 1981) (short-term marriage led to lifelong alimony); Calvin v. Calvin (Va. App.) (wife got alimony despite being adulterous, “vindictive and cruel”); Settle v. Settle (wife got alimony even though husband’s income was similar, and he was paying huge fraction of his income in child support).
A man who divorces his wife won’t get alimony (in practice), even if the wife is much richer. See Asgari v. Asgari (Va. App. 2002) (wife made five times what husband made, and husband had partial disability).
To a wife, an ex-husband is usually worth more dead than alive.
That’s not true for a husband. For him, an ex-wife is usually much cheaper dead than alive.
Back before family law became financially tilter in favor of wives, wives were almost as likely to kill their husbands as husbands were to kill wives. A few of them saw it as the only way out of unhappy marriages, since divorce was not financially viable.
September 2, 2010, 10:07 pmmoh456 says:
Haha. Yeah the men who kill their wives are true financial wizards.
September 2, 2010, 10:10 pmRoger the Shrubber says:
Oh, well referenced.
September 2, 2010, 10:13 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Is this a statistic you can back up? Or is it just your ideology?
September 2, 2010, 10:13 pmElemenope says:
Nonsense. If that were the case, I’d be a goose-stepping Nazi (yes, I know, another anecdote!).
You ripped the words right out of my throat. ;-) Anecdotes aside, some people are going to be “libertarian” no matter what, just as some people are going to have a predilection towards cruelty no matter what. But for everyone else who does respond to environmental pressures, I somehow doubt that use of violence on them has a salutary and/or neutral effect on the tendency to internalize violence as a normalized way of achieving objectives.
As a broader point, historically corporal punishment was once ubiquitous. During that time, Americans were isolationist in international affairs and domestically the crime rate was dramatically lower. Any relationship between corporal punishment and crime is certainly not borne out by the historical data.
An interesting point, though I’d hasten to point out that reporting of and even definitions of crime were quite a bit different then too. Also, American isolationism is often exaggerated during those periods, usually outright ignoring military interventions pursuant to the Monroe Doctrine and neglecting trade policy. I imagine the historical data set as such could be massaged to either concur or deny either of our broader points.
———————
My apologies about the “trick question” comment, I really was venting a bit about the nonsense “multiple valedictorians” phenomenon which IMO actually from a sociological perspective normalizes exceptional achievement at the expense of differentiation based on merit.
No problem, and FWIW I totally get where you’re coming from with this. As to your question, I will admit not knowing nearly enough about developmental psychology to hazard an informed guess about the effects of ratcheting standards.
September 2, 2010, 10:22 pmPasserby says:
It is true that the ratio of wife-killings to husband-killings has changed somewhat over time, as “Me” notes.
But so many things have changed in society during that period that it’s simply conjecture to posit Me’s peculiar theory for why.
Killings of husbands are a bit less common than killings of wives, although both are a real problem. And when wives kill husbands, it is often not in self-defense, but for the same bad reasons — control, jealousy, greed (e.g., life insurance), etc. — that lead husbands to kill wives.
Contrary to what “Me” suggests, it is doubtful that most people know about the economics of divorce, much less take them into account in killing their spouses.
September 2, 2010, 10:25 pmConservative Evangelical says:
It’s a travesty that accusations alone could ever be enough for legal action…so why seek to expand rather than curtail such an unjust phenomenon?
September 2, 2010, 10:26 pmRoger the Shrubber says:
This is the fact that haunts my every waking moment.
September 2, 2010, 10:27 pmMe says:
I actually meant to write the opposite: that an ex-husband is worth more aliv than dead, if he can be forced to pay lots of alimony:
September 2, 2010, 10:30 pmNI says:
I’m no expert, but intuitively it seems wrong that spanking breeds violence just because in an earlier era spanking was more common AND there was less violent crime.
That aside, regardless of which side is wrong on the merits, it seems to me that this is an example of something in which parents should be able to exercise their best judgment without interference from the state. Some parents will conclude that corporal punishment is the way to go; others will disagree. It’s called living in a free society.
September 2, 2010, 10:33 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
CE, then what do you do about cases like this one? Where there were complaints made over and over, and nothing happened? Do you think there has to be blood and guts before the law gets involved?
September 2, 2010, 10:35 pmDebrah says:
This phenomenon is one that even today most people are reluctant to discuss.
Almost as if it doesn’t exist.
I think it’s very important to view the relationship between a man and a woman in fluid terms.
Since the woman bears responsibility of childbirth it can be argued that her role within a marriage will always be the more difficult one……(unless she’s one of this “baby machines” who feels most alive when she’s popping them out nonstop!).
And even today I think a marriage remains more stable when the guy is stronger than the woman in the financial department.
One key to sexual/romantic bliss is for the woman to allow the man to think he’s in charge whether or not he is.
Of course, it helps if his career makes this idea a reality.
IMO, some women have such a strong masochistic streak that they seem rather tethered to the very abuse they so decry.
It’s as if it becomes their identity.
And though it may seem humorous to discuss, there are also a number of relationships in which the men are the ones physically and psychologically abused.
Especially if the wife has the controls of the purse strings.
Love is a hurting thing.
September 2, 2010, 10:40 pmElemenope says:
Some parents will conclude that corporal punishment is the way to go; others will disagree. It’s called living in a free society.
I’m already mentally beating the crap out of myself for what I’m about to say, but…
“what about the children?”
And I don’t mean this in a facile sense, as though we should all rush out and embrace communitarian social control, but I can’t seem but to think that the rhetoric of “private matter, free society” falls awfully flat when what is being discussed is whether or not to use violence against people who themselves have no choice or control in the matter.
September 2, 2010, 10:45 pmNI says:
I’m not the type to kill anyone, though I once had a wife whose spending (mostly on crap — does anyone really need to drop a thousand dollars in a single afternoon at the Disney store?) was driving us into bankruptcy; as much as I wanted a divorce, I realized a divorce really would have ruined me financially. Had I killed her (and gotten away with it) my finances would have dramatically improved; had she killed me (and gotten away with it) her finances would have sunk.
We are no longer married; she left me for someone who makes more money than I do. I helped her pack and waved goodbye to her as she left.
And I will admit that I sometimes wonder, if she hadn’t left me, if sometime in the next forty or fifty years I might have snapped and resorted to violence. It’s hard to know that no matter how hard you work, she’ll spend it faster than I can make it and every weekly paycheck is just another week further in debt.
September 2, 2010, 10:48 pmConservative Evangelical says:
Laura, I’m not saying that unproven/unprovable crimes are not just as tragic as proven ones, only that that cannot be a reason to to dispense with the need for proof in our system. Further, in the case you cite there was apparently not even an “investigation” upon complaint…I would say that accusations are indeed enough to warrant investigation, as long as no defamatory or punitive measures are taken against a potentially innocent party until there is hard evidence.
September 2, 2010, 10:48 pmNI says:
Children have no choice or control over most things. They don’t get to decide what to eat or wear or whether to go to school or what time to go to bed or whether to watch X-rated movies or whether to drink alcohol. Childhood is a time when parents impose choices on children so they will be able to function as adults when they do get to make their own choices. Children are not miniature adults.
And sometimes the only argument a child will listen to is force. Did you ever try reasoning with a toddler?
September 2, 2010, 10:53 pmElemenope says:
Children are not miniature adults.
No kidding. Nonetheless, they are people, and so the rhetoric continues to ring hollow. Rhetoric along the lines of “what choice do we have?” is at least not self-evidently ridiculous the way that “freedom (slap!) & privacy (whack!)” seems to me to be.
And for what it’s worth, toddlers are small enough where you should never have to whack or spank them; you can literally pick them up and move them where you want. It becomes more reasonable when you get into the 3-5 year range.
September 2, 2010, 11:18 pmNI says:
Have you ever actually raised a toddler? Yes, you pick them up and move them where you want them to be, and as soon as you put them down they run right back to where they were. You can do that all afternoon if you like; toddlers are notoriously stubborn. Or you can give them a quick smack on the fanny, they’ll cry for 30 seconds, and that will be the end of it.
September 2, 2010, 11:30 pmDilan Esper says:
The laws that you like end human life
They do no such thing. They end the lives of tiny little things that can’t think or feel and which live within women. Further, though, the laws you like destroy the lives of those women to save those little unthinking unfeeling nonpersons.
and make life easier on a lot of lousy men
Actually, making abortion ILLEGAL empowers lousy men, because it allows them to force women into bad situations, and use their reproductive systems to keep them from going out the door.
Abortion rights are all about empowering WOMEN. How could taking a woman’s right and choice away possibly benefit her?
On one hand, you have human life; on the other, a lifestyle choice.
This is what I mean when I say you want to make it harder on women who don’t live like you do.
It isn’t a “lifestyle choice” to have sex. It’s a biological need and fundamental desire. And it isn’t a “lifestyle choice” to want to have sex without having your life destroyed with a pregnancy. It’s a fundamental right.
You think things that are tremendously important to other women aren’t important to you. That’s fine. So don’t have an abortion. But don’t essentialize your experience. Unlike Whitney Houston, you are not every woman. You are one woman who lives a very different life than the rest of the female population.
That life wins doesn’t mean that I’m an anti-feminist, unless you define “feminist” as “pro-murder” or “anti-life”. Besides, Dil, I thought we figured out long ago that you are not the Supreme Arbiter of All Things Feminist.
Theo, pro-choicers are NOT pro-murder, because abortion is not murder. And they are not anti-life, because they care about the lives of WOMEN, not unthinking unfeeling things in the uterus.
But more importantly, YOU WERE TRASHING FEMINISTS UPTHREAD. SERIOUSLY. IT’S THERE. Generally, actual feminists don’t trash feminists. It isn’t that I’m the arbiter of feminism. It’s simply definitional. If I said there is no evidence there is a God, there is only anecdotal evidence Jesus even existed, he could have even been a composite, we don’t know what he preached because all of his supposed teachings were written years later and selected by Roman Catholic politicians 300 years after his life, and there’s no reason at all to think he was the son of God or was resurrected, and people who believe those things are wrong and harmful to society, but damn it, I’m a Christian, you’d have the right to call me out on it and say “no, you’re not”. That’s basically your relationship to feminism.
Oh, hey, totally random question: what sect of Christianity do I belong to? (You know that theobromine is chocolate, right?) I would just like to know more about my religion, and it would be nice if the Supreme Arbiter of Everything the Universe would let me know which religion I am
Why would I care? You’ve self-identified as a Christian and espoused beliefs held by the religious right. That’s really all that’s important to the debates here.
But what denomination? That’s no different than asking if someone believes in square UFO’s or round ones, or has good LSD trips or bad ones, or is usually defrauded by Ponzi schemes or Nigerian investment e-mails. What particular delusion you labor under is your problem.
September 2, 2010, 11:30 pmAnon Y. Mous says:
(Singer references edited out of quote)
The pro-abortion crowd’s demand that there be no restrictions on partial birth abortion puts the lie to that statement. If the issue for them was truly limited to the fetus being inside the woman’s body, there would be no reason to stop the delivery to drill a hole in the infants head and suck its brains out. They insist on not only the right of complete autonomy of the woman’s body, but also the right to a dead baby.
September 2, 2010, 11:32 pmElemenope says:
Yes, you pick them up and move them where you want them to be, and as soon as you put them down they run right back to where they were. You can do that all afternoon if you like; toddlers are notoriously stubborn. Or you can give them a quick smack on the fanny, they’ll cry for 30 seconds, and that will be the end of it.
If they’re pre-verbal that it is doubtful they will learn anything from being spanked except the emotive equivalent of “mom’s/dad’s ANGRY!!!”. And if they’re as stubborn as you claim, it is unlikely that a quick spank would prevail on them to stop long term.
So, no, I don’t buy it as a more effective solution, in general.
September 2, 2010, 11:41 pmDay Break says:
@Dilan Esper & theobromophile:
“Indeed, having sex with someone allows a person to make a more accurate judgment– you don’t have to worry about marrying the person only to find out that he or she is a cold fish in the sack.”
–I take you mean an accurate judgment about sex and not about anything more important like say character, commitment and love.
–As far as taking responsibility most feminist by which I mean 99.9% would support the right for a women to have a one night stand get pregnant and then have an abortion, but would get all fired up if man wanted nothing to do with the baby if she decided to keep the child. Yeah that’s feminist responsibility and the usual double standard.
“Despite sometimes calling yourself a “feminist”, you are a conservative woman”
–Why is that relevant? Also, does being conservative mean she does not believe in truth, justice and equality. If not, why mention it?
“some 14 year old pregnant Pakistani girl in a rural village”
–Why do you advocate for a combined abortion policy that equally applies to women in advanced and developing countries. Comparing a woman in say NYC to a girl in Afghanistan is a fallacious comparison, clearly the contexts are different. And of course you did mention the poor girl in some southern state, but as it stands elective abortions account for greater than give or take 98%* of abortions in America—these mean abortions for lifestyle reasons not rape or incest. So why do you apply the worst case scenario, which is rape/incest as your basis for policy when the data from organizations such as the Guttmacher Institute show that women get abortions because simply did not want the baby for reasons of convenience. And of course you will say the baby will present economic hardship—but that raises the question why screw if you can’t afford the outcome? Because then it becomes obvious that abortion is being used as an insurance policy and not for reasons literally saving the mothers life in a medical emergency.
Is using abortion as an insurance policy or a back up plan when better options are available taking responsibility to you? If so, you are saying its ok to kill babies cause the mother can’t handle herself and things get put of control and she should responsibly kill her baby. Does that sound logical and just to you?
Please note, although it takes two to get pregnant I still put the onus to take more responsibility than the man because they take the brunt of an abortion—meaning if it goes wrong they are on the hook for the complications i.e death life time sterility, infections etc..
*Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives
September 2, 2010, 11:49 pmThe Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI)
Volume 37, Number 3, September 2005, p.113.
Chris Travers says:
Laura: Here’s a good study to start with.
It is true that women are more likely to be injured. However, at least where I live, I have heard of more husbands being killed (shot/stabbed) by wives than vice versa. I don’t know if that’s true everywhere. One thing you have to understand is that partner violence is typically asymmetric. There’s a significant difference in danger between a man being threatened or even assaulted with a knife by his girlfriend or wife and a woman being beat up by her boyfriend or husband. Due to simple differences in upper body strength, the injury profiles are going to be quite a bit different. Additionally a man (with additional strength) who is threatened has some additional options open, such as disabling firing mechanisms of guns, removing knives from the area, and just plan wrestling a weapon out of the grip of the other.
However, that doesn’t mean that men aren’t victims of DV. Study after study has shown at least gender parity in victimhood. And it’s damaging. Living under constant threat of violence (possibly fatal violence) is not something that one simply shrugs off and goes on. Indeed before my wife and I got married, we talked about my experience and I basically told her that there were a few things she really needed to avoid doing (like being physically violent with me when I couldn’t see her, such as from behind).
Of course. The fact is that every man I’ve known that’s been a DV victim has done everything in his power to keep it from going to court, and for very good reason. Police and courts are likely to be far more sceptical of those who claim to be male victims, and there’s often enough ambiguity in the situation that the man risks being arrested, thrown in jail, and being the one legally restrained. At least when I was going through this (1996-7), and given that my abuser was given to self-inflicted wounds, there was no way I was getting the police or courts involved. I knew that the system was stacked against me and that the only person that could guarantee my safety was me.
A significant percentage of my male friends have been through similar things. Not one of them would have at the time considered taking it to court.
September 2, 2010, 11:55 pmAlessandra says:
(excerpt from a larger post in the adoption thread — it was a reply to a comment by Travers– I don’t know if he saw my reply)
As an example of differences between homo-, bi-, and heterosexuals, there is an interesting new study out on intimate partner violence– did you see this one, Travers?
===================
http://www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/pubs/files/IPV_PB_031810.pdf
Nearly 1 in 6 adults in California, about 3.7 million persons, report experiencing physical intimate partner violence (IPV) as adults.
Based on the CHIS 2007 IPV module, women (21.1%) are twice as likely to be victims of physical violence as men (11%), and eight times (8%) as likely to report being the victim of sexual violence compared to men (1%).
Bisexual (40.6%), gay, lesbian or homosexual adults (27.9%) are almost twice as likely to experience IPV as heterosexual adults (16.7%).
CHIS 2007 completed interviews with 51,048 adults. For the adult survey, an adult was randomly selected from every household. For this policy brief, we analyzed data from 37,330 adults ages 18–65 years.
=============
I thought it was interesting to see that the rates for male victims was half as much as for women, that’s a lot of violence against men. (unfortunately I did not see any related data on the sex of the aggressor).
And check out the significantly greater rates of IPV for homo– and bisexuals! It’s too bad they didn’t add these two categories together, so that we could have a comparison between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals. Huge difference right there.
And that’s not examining sexual harassment problems.
I have been observing serious differences in rates of sexual harassment (meaning unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior or disruptive sexual behavior) between social conservative and liberals settings. In liberal settings the rates of harassment are much greater than in social conservative settings, partly because, non-heterosexuals frequently sexually harass others. So, in a liberal setting, aside from heterosexual men, you also have the compounding harassment from homo- and bisexual women towards other women, not to mention an increased level of harassment towards men from homo- or bisexual men, even if women are overall more targeted than men.
Maybe when hell freezes over we will have a large amount of studies showing this.
September 3, 2010, 12:04 amDilan Esper says:
The pro-abortion crowd’s demand that there be no restrictions on partial birth abortion puts the lie to that statement.
What “crowd” are you talking about? SOME pro-choicers believe in full abortion rights to birth. Lots of them do not. (A much more common position is full abortion rights in the first trimester, which is essentially what Roe v. Wade mandated.) And many do not support partial birth abortions either– the issue with that was always health exceptions. I realize many pro-lifers believe (without any evidence whatsoever) that health exceptions are a stalking horse for abortion on demand, but opposing partial birth abortion but believing there should be a health exception is a far, far distance away from Peter Singer.
September 3, 2010, 12:05 amChris Travers says:
Thank you for your thoughts. It will take me some time to think about them and know how to respond, but I think it’s worth stating I appreciate them.
September 3, 2010, 12:07 amChris Travers says:
That’s my experience. I use corporal punishment at that age, but it’s done differently with an emphasis on communication and mild discomfort.
September 3, 2010, 12:09 amDay Break says:
@Dilan Esper
“The only reason…
pro-lifersanybody “argue{s}” with {Pete Singer} is thatthis is an issue of women’s rightsSinger is 100% insane.Fixed that for you.
I mean really people off all spectrums standing and speaking out up for babies not to be killed or some one to philosophize about the idea and you call it a ‘woman’s rights’ issue. So everyman that stands up for his baby is a “woman’s rights” advocate? The sheer audacity.
September 3, 2010, 12:11 amAlessandra says:
On abortion. Although I haven’t read much about profiles of women who have sought abortions, many of those I’ve read indicate there were serious irresponsible sexuality attitudes as cause factors for the end result of an unwanted pregnancy. One of the most poignant ones I’ve read concerned a woman who was hurting from loneliness and feeling the deprivation of not having a loving relationship in her life, and could not find a man who was interested in a serious relationship, being surrounded by men with a promiscuous, liberal attitude to sexuality and relationships. So the woman went to have sex with these guys because it was the only she could have. On top of it, she didn’t use contraception, so she got pregnant, and then didn’t want the baby. The harm that having people with such attitudes is incredible. Liberals simply do not address issues like this.
Secondly, see the study I’ve just posted on intimate violence. You normalize homosexuality and the rates for intimate violence are colossal. Maybe there is something wrong with what you are telling people as well concerning sexuality and personal relationships.
September 3, 2010, 12:14 amDilan Esper says:
As far as taking responsibility most feminist by which I mean 99.9% would support the right for a women to have a one night stand get pregnant and then have an abortion, but would get all fired up if man wanted nothing to do with the baby if she decided to keep the child. Yeah that’s feminist responsibility and the usual double standard.
This isn’t a double standard. The fetus is in the woman’s body. Not the man’s. Therefore she gets to decide. Not him.
But if the fetus were in the man’s body, he’d get to decide. It really is that simple.
Why is that relevant? Also, does being conservative mean she does not believe in truth, justice and equality. If not, why mention it?
Because it is very bad for feminism that we have a lot of conservative women who, rather than simply admitting they are conservatives, claim they are the “real” feminists and that the actual feminist movement are a bunch of leftist imposters, or that feminism doesn’t endorse a political program for empowering women but rather simply is a label that can be claimed by anyone.
There’s a feminist political agenda, it includes a lot of things that Theo disagrees with (because she is a conservative Christian), in her more honest moments (like upthread), she admits she disagrees with it and criticizies feminism, and yet she insists that she is a feminist. This sort of dishonesty is quite bad.
Comparing a woman in say NYC to a girl in Afghanistan is a fallacious comparison, clearly the contexts are different.
Um, I think I said that. I just noted it was an example that showed that it isn’t real reasoning for Theo to say “well, I was able to leave an abusive guy when I was 18, therefore other women can do it too”.
Is using abortion as an insurance policy or a back up plan when better options are available taking responsibility to you? If so, you are saying its ok to kill babies cause the mother can’t handle herself and things get put of control and she should responsibly kill her baby. Does that sound logical and just to you?
No, I am saying that it should be legal (whether or not it is “OK”) to kill unthinking, unfeeling fetuses and embryos INSIDE a woman’s uterus who, if allowed to develop into “babies” (which they are NOT right now), could ruin a thinking, feeling woman’s life. And the reason is GENDER EQUALITY IS ONE OF THE MOST CENTRAL AND IMPORTANT HUMAN VALUES, much more important than untrue religious beliefs about souls, much more important than the interests of embryos who don’t even know they are alive or if you are killing them, and much more important than the opinions of Theo or you as to how much of a burden unplanned pregnancies really cause to women.
In other words, on the one hand, you have one of the central values of human civilization, and on the other hand, you have totally unimportant interests.
September 3, 2010, 12:15 amAlessandra says:
Right. Because doing violence to others has nothing to do with a person’s dysfunctional psychology.
September 3, 2010, 12:18 amDilan Esper says:
I mean really people off all spectrums standing and speaking out up for babies not to be killed
For the last time, you can say “babies babies babies babies babies”, and it doesn’t make it a baby.
Have you ever heard of the fallacy of assuming your conclusion? This is it.
It’s a fricking fetus or an embryo, and the reason we have those terms is precisely because something in the womb and at an earlier stage of human development is not the same as a baby.
It’s no more a baby than a baby is an adult.
September 3, 2010, 12:18 amTony Sidaway says:
As a practical matter unless you’re going to outlaw physical violence against children (my personal preference, based on personal experience in parenting) it’s handy to have an easily recognisable limit. In England and Wales, I believe, parents are permitted to hit a child but may not leave a mark. In Scotland they may not use any implement.
Adults are big, scary and move fast. Actually allowing them to hit children probably isn’t at all a good idea, since the kids are supposed to grow up and respect the law that forbids them to assault another person except in self defence.
September 3, 2010, 12:26 amChris Travers says:
On further review, it looks like my study was from New Zeeland (which is culturally similar) and your study is from California. However John Archer reviewing many of these studies in 2002 finds no statistically significant pattern across the board.
But even if it’s only half country-wide (which I doubt), pretending that the problem doesn’t exist causes immense harm because it encourages everyone to think that violence is something that men do to women and never the other way around, and it makes it very difficult to get real help when there’s a major problem.
September 3, 2010, 12:29 amAlessandra says:
Compared to what, beating a child on the head or the stomach?
Overall, if it leaves marks like this, I believe it’s utterly wrong. However, for assessing harm to the child, the other most important element is the entire emotional and psychological environment the child is living in. A child is much more traumatized by spanking if they are beaten by an emotionally cruel parent, who may also repeatedly verbally attack, terrorize, reject, and demean the child.
This is why I find it frustrating to read people who say “my parents whipped me but it was OK, so what’s the big problem? My parents loved me and that didn’t do anything bad to me, just put me in line.” That completely ignores the parents who beat children as one more element of an entire experience of emotional (and/or sexual) abuse.
And then there is the problem of the legal definition of abuse. A parent can do harm to a child and still not be categorized as abusive by the standards of the law.
September 3, 2010, 12:30 amptt says:
I’m surprised at all the discussion about spanking three-, four-, and five-year-olds. The father in this case began spanking his kids when they were three or four months old.
September 3, 2010, 12:41 amDay Break says:
@ Dilan Esper
So an infant or a newborn child is not a baby? That’s strange because Singer also called a born child a baby.
“Killing a newborn BABY is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living…. I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support – which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection.”
– http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html
And its basic biology to know that a zygote, fetus, embryo are quantifiers of human development not qualifiers. So when women have an abortion they are destroying human life—that is a scientific fact. You fully support the destroying of human life for matters of lifestyle. Your basis is similar to Singers, only difference being you want to keep the destruction inside the womb.
You were saying?
September 3, 2010, 12:43 amArthur Kirkland says:
Smacking children hard enough to leave marks visible the next day is nuts. And, as usual, there is no nut like a religious nut.
I pity those children.
September 3, 2010, 12:50 amArthur Kirkland says:
How should the term of imprisonment for those involved in clipping fingernails compare to the suitable term for preventing implantation of a blastocyst? Or should the penalty be death?
September 3, 2010, 12:53 amChris Travers says:
I am pro-choice, and I know what I am going to say here is unpopular among the pro-choice crowd, but….
Language is defined by usage. We talk about women who are pregnant feeling the baby move. We talk about the fetus as a baby all the time. Absolutely it’s a baby. That might not be a comfortable thing to think about but if we are going to push for informed decision making, isn’t it better to recognize what people who are faced with the decision are actually likely to think about it?
I knew a woman once who suffered severe pregnancy complications and had to abort the pregnancy (it was medically necessary as her doctor said, then shortly after hearing that her cousin died during pregnancy of similar complications at the end of the second trimester). Faced with this decision she hid this from most of her friends, and referred to the fetus as a “parasite” because she couldn’t think of it as even a fetus.
Saying it is or is not a baby is meaningless semantics we use to try to score propaganda points or comfort ourselves. People think of being pregnant as carrying a baby, mourn when miscarriages happen, etc.
Let’s recognize it for what it is, a difficult choice in an imperfect world.
September 3, 2010, 12:53 amDay Break says:
Comedy. Finger nails and a baby really compare biologically, lol.
September 3, 2010, 1:02 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
So you think bribing kids to behave is a good technique. No, your kids won’t grow up spoiled.
September 3, 2010, 1:02 amShelbyC says:
Get a room, you two. Of course what y’all are arguing about is an unanswerable question.
September 3, 2010, 1:09 amAlessandra says:
Right, because people who hate social conservatives are so sane.
Nicole Chuminski was convicted in Suffolk Superior Court of setting the blaze that killed two young girls in South Boston in 2008, bringing closure to a sad event that shocked the city and rattled the closely knit neighborhood. The bodies of 14-year-old Acia and 3-year-old Sophia were found on the third floor, locked in an embrace.
Chuminski, now 27, said nothing as the jury announced they found her guilty of arson, two counts of second degree murder, and two counts of assault and battery for setting the April 6, 2008, fire that killed 14-year-old Acia Johnson and her 3-year-old sister, Sophia. Throughout the trial, Fredette argued that Chuminski was in a fit of rage after fighting with Anna Reisopolous, the girls’ mother and her lover of a few months, at a wedding reception the night before in Weymouth. An enraged Chuminski, allegedly threw a firebomb at the front door of the house. Prosecutors say an accelerant found on the door was also found on Chuminski’s clothes. Earlier in the trial, firefighters testified that the blaze had burned with an unusual intensity. Reisopolous is being held in a county jail on unrelated charges.
Because Chuminski was given consecutive and not concurrent sentences, if she is paroled after 15 years, her second sentence would start. That means she faces a minimum of 30 years in prison. Her defense attorney said Chuminski did not start the fire and he plans to appeal the decision.
September 3, 2010, 1:13 amDay Break says:
@Dilan Esper
I like how you did not address the one night stand issue—whistling pass the graveyard on that one. As far as the double standards I mean the men cannot dissolve their parental rights if he did not want the baby to be carried to term. Feminists and generally good people say that that is not right. Also, yes, the fetus is in the women body but it’s a separate entity biologically speaking.
“There’s a feminist political agenda, it includes a lot of things that Theo disagrees with (because she is a conservative Christian), in her more honest moments (like upthread), she admits she disagrees with it and criticizies feminism, and yet she insists that she is a feminist. This sort of dishonesty is quite bad.”
–Really?, if a transgender can say they are a “man” or “women” then why can’t she self identify as a feminist? is there a grand decider that bestows the mantle of feminism? Is there is a monolithic worldview of feminism like there is a monolithic worldview for democrats, republicans, tories, labour party or any part for that matter ? GTFOH.
“No, I am saying that it should be legal (whether or not it is “OK”) to kill unthinking, unfeeling fetuses and embryos INSIDE a woman’s uterus who, if allowed to develop into “babies” (which they are NOT right now), could ruin a thinking, feeling woman’s life”
–What does that have to do with killing a human life and we know its human life thanks to the law of biogenesis. And it’s not “Ok” meaning moral or ethical to kill a human for convenience.
–As far as the burden of pregnancy isn’t that a self inflicted “wound.” I think Theo is pretty spot on about feminisms not supporting responsibility for their sexual actions. And you are saying women are using abortion as an insurance policy for screwing up, that is not taking responsibility for your actions. In 98% of the abortions women had a choice not to have sex.
“And the reason is GENDER EQUALITY IS ONE OF THE MOST CENTRAL AND IMPORTANT HUMAN VALUES, much more important than untrue religious beliefs about souls, much more important than the interests of embryos who don’t even know they are alive or if you are killing them, and much more important than the opinions of Theo or you as to how much of a burden unplanned pregnancies really cause to women.”
–You claim to support Feminism then bash a women that bashes Feminism. Then you say your belief is more important than another which is a value statement and complete bullshit btw—that my value statement response for the record. If you really care about women why do you cover up the fact that you really don’t care about really giving them agency and you support idiot tramp women that get elective abortions for lifestyle reasons—when they could have kept their legs closed?
Again to you don’t care about responsibility for actions and womens’s rights, you hide behind hack philosophical arguments and lame political labels. Why not strive for justice and equality instead of hiding behind the label of feminism?
Plain and simple you want women to be able to s*ck and f*ck with impunity. That’s all that matters to you.
September 3, 2010, 1:14 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
No, Dilan. The reason we have those terms is that they’re technical scientific terms, the same way that a heart attack is called a myocardial infarction by medical professionals. The reason that non-medical professionals use the terms “fetus” or “embryo” is because they want to fool themselves because of their ideology regarding abortion.
That’s why, in ordinary conversation, when people aren’t thinking about abortion, they always use the term baby. Nobody says, “Hey, what sex is your embryo?” or “Can you feel the fetus kick?” or “I’m taking prenatal vitamins for my zygote.”
September 3, 2010, 1:18 amDay Break says:
Well said.
September 3, 2010, 1:18 amElemenope says:
So you think bribing kids to behave is a good technique. No, your kids won’t grow up spoiled.
What an odd conclusion to jump to.
————–
Saying it is or is not a baby is meaningless semantics we use to try to score propaganda points or comfort ourselves. People think of being pregnant as carrying a baby, mourn when miscarriages happen, etc.
Let’s recognize it for what it is, a difficult choice in an imperfect world.
While certainly people lose sight of this rhetorically, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a person who holds a pro-choice opinion and doesn’t actually recognize the above as fairly uncontroversial (if admittedly very uncomfortable).
September 3, 2010, 1:38 amScott Eudaley says:
According to Dr. Peikoff, it is precisely because the child has not yet reached the conceptual level of consciousness that corporal punishment can be required. At that stage, the perceptual level of consciousness dominates and one of the most fundamental perceptual relationships is the pain=bad, pleasure=good pairings. At that stage of a child’s development, the perceptual level is all you really have to work with. Have you ever tried to house-train a dog without using some form of corporal punishment? Quite literally, a pre-conceptual level child is in the exact same position as a dog.
Fortunately for humans, that is a highly delimited period of time. Unfortunately for dogs it is not. Dr. Peikoff noted that once a child can speak in complete sentences, no matter how limited, they’ve reached the conceptual level and corporal punishment is inappropriate. And precisely because we want to encourage and expect the child to develop further, that we should limit the use of pain as a perceptual level motivator to situations that involve danger to the child. In other cases, we’re willing to let the child struggle to develop, learn and make mistakes. When it comes to dangerous situations, we don’t want to take that chance so we enforce it at the level the child has already mastered–the perceptual.
I think we both agree that corporal punishment is used far too often and often for inappropriate reasons.
September 3, 2010, 1:38 amDilan Esper says:
So an infant or a newborn child is not a baby? That’s strange because Singer also called a born child a baby.
Again, no pro-choicer gives a crap what Peter Singer thinks. The only people who give a crap about him are people in the animal rights debate and dishonest pro-lifers who pretend that he is the philosophical father of pro-choice thought. And those dishonest pro-lifers are JERKS– because only a jerk argues against a strawman when he knows that his political opponents take a different position.
So just stop quoting Singer. Nobody on the pro-choice side cares. It just makes pro-lifers look like asses when they do it.
And its basic biology to know that a zygote, fetus, embryo are quantifiers of human development not qualifiers.
For your information, “basic biology” doesn’t tell you jack **** about whether a woman’s interests in gender equality outweigh the interests of a fetus. It just doesn’t. It is a misuse of science to claim that because something falls within a taxonomic category, that defeats someone’s rights.
Nor does “basic biology” use the category “baby” to describe a fetus or embryo or zygote anyway.
And finally– you can talk about “quantifiers” and “qualifiers” all you want– anyone who thinks that destroying a zygote is immoral is an idiot. Seriously. The thing’s a single cell. Functionally the same as an amoeba. It gets destroyed by natural causes most of the time, whether or not an abortion drug is involved. If that thing were really a human being, we should be conducting extreme medical interventions to make sure it implants or goes into an artificial womb. We don’t. You know why? Because we actually aren’t idiots who think that thing is the same thing as a human person. We only act like idiots when it comes to denying women their rights.
September 3, 2010, 1:52 amChris Travers says:
What I am going to say is going to be even more unpopular with the Pro-Choice crowd than what I said before, and I am sure I will be called a heathen barbarian by all sides. I want to graciously accept this title in advance.
In most traditional cultures unwanted children are simply left to die out in the elements. Anyone who has been a parent and watched for this will note that awareness is something that infants develop slowly. There’s no reason to think that such exposure is particularly painful to the infant even if we react with horror to such a practice today. In the absence of effective birth control, this is generally what constitutes family planning, and it’s something Christianity has tried to stamp out for over a thousand years but as the abortion debate shows, individual autonomy in family matters is very much a cultural right in this part of the world. Nearly a thousand years after Iceland banned infanticide, Roe v. Wade was decided.
Anthropologically and biologically I see very little difference between abortion and infanticide. However, most Western cultures had timeframes for when this could be done and when it could not be, and the limit would be when the child was brought into the family unit in some way. The idea seems to have been that an opportunity was natural to give, but that outside of those areas it was at least socially unacceptable.
The same holds true with abortion. People talk about pregnancy as if (whether we want to debate ontology of what a “baby” is or not) the fetus is a baby. People talk about it thus because people think about it thus. Abortion is thus very little different from infanticide either in function of psychology. If it wasn’t a valuable function, I doubt it would have been widespread in the ancient world or today.
Similarly in Japan, where abortion is commonplace (most women have 1-2 abortions in their lives), religious memorial services are held for aborted fetuses by Buddhist temples, and after women have abortions they often attend these.
I think that having a healthy approach to abortion requires some comfort with this, understanding that it is little different from infanticide in any objective way, but that this is the norm of human society throughout history (with the brief exception of Medieval and Modern Christianity). We should recognize that those who choose to have abortions often do go through a mourning process and provide resources for that. We should recognize that it is a difficult decision in an imperfect world.
I think that abortion should be legal and relatively easily available. However, I also think that we do better if we think about the social issues not from a legal perspective but from a human one. How do we tend to think of pregnancy generally? How does abortion play into that? What conflicts are thus faced by someone facing the decision? What help are many likely to need coming out of having done it?
I think the key to facing these problems is to realize that abortion is an experience of infanticide even though it is not legally in the same category and should not be. I think if we are up front about that, people can make a decision with eyes wide open, and the community can be prepared to offer what support is necessary both before and after. It would probably reduce the number of abortions too but the number shouldn’t be the issue. The question should be whether if we are going to support the right to make a choice we should support it as people face it against the background of our language, so that the choice can be made freely and honestly rather than tied to a specific political ideology.
The real difference is that we have merely pushed back the point where a decision can be made. Science makes the opportunities available earlier. So this should take precedence. I don’t see anything per se immoral about infanticide but as long as abortion is available it is a far superior option and infanticide should be deemed as morally at least obsolete.
September 3, 2010, 1:52 amDilan Esper says:
Language is defined by usage.
Actually, pro-lifers slip from science to usage and back to science. They want to define “human” strictly according to scientific taxonomy, but they want to define “baby” colloquially. That’s nice spin if you can get it, but it’s dishonest.
Indeed, if the God that pro-lifers mostly worship actually exists, they are in trouble, because women getting abortions aren’t murdering anything, but THEY certainly do bear false witness in the abortion debate, so light up the furnace…. :)
September 3, 2010, 1:56 amAlessandra says:
It’s not only that. What a lot of men want is to have women who are completely devoid of a sense of a respectful, committed relationship, and who will then engage in loveless sex.
Then these men don’t have to deal with all their demeaning attitudes towards women and all their problematic psychological attitudes in personal relationships and will still (rather easily) find someone who will provide them with their emotionally deformed “sexual release.”
I have been thinking about the issues raised by Travers and Anatid concerning loveless sex. Yes, it is true that not everyone who engages in loveless sex has the above profile. But, at the same time, many do. And liberals always lie about how many profound problems they have in personal relationships, and especially how much this is a disrespect to women. A discourse that states that loveless sex is great purposefully hides every single problem related to loveless sex and the millions of people that are harmed by living in a society where this is the norm.
My main objection is exactly with the degree of lying concerning the extent of harm involved. Even though it is true that some may navigate a relationship with success that rather early starts including loveless sex.
September 3, 2010, 1:58 amDilan Esper says:
I like how you did not address the one night stand issue—whistling pass the graveyard on that one.
I trust women to manage their own sex lives, and think they have the right to do so and it’s none of my business what they choose to do. So why would I care if women had one-night stands or didn’t have them. Just make sure that they don’t have to bear a life-ruining pregnancy if they don’t wish to, and you maximize their freedom and further the cause of gender equality.
September 3, 2010, 1:58 amDilan Esper says:
What does that have to do with killing a human life and we know its human life thanks to the law of biogenesis.
So when you kill a zygote that is about to divide into two identical twins, are you killing one life or two?
This is all a big misuse of science. Pro-lifers don’t give a crap about science, except to the extent that it gives them talking points they can use.
Science doesn’t compel opposition to abortion. And by the way– the feminist studies of culture and gender equality and what happens to women when they don’t have abortion rights are scientific too– and unlike pro-lifers, pro-choicers don’t have to lie about them and selectively quote them and pretend that they have moral implications they don’t have to make their arguments based on them.
September 3, 2010, 2:01 amDilan Esper says:
You claim to support Feminism then bash a women that bashes Feminism. Then you say your belief is more important than another which is a value statement and complete bullshit btw—
This needs to be underscored. You think the proposition that gender equality is one of the most important values is “complete bullshit”.
Thank you for being honest. Indeed, most pro-lifers agree with you, and most pro-choicers agree with me.
So let’s drop the crap about “life” and debate the real issue, which is whether we are going to have a society where women are equal to men– which requires abortion rights– or whether we are not.
September 3, 2010, 2:04 amDilan Esper says:
It’s not only that. What a lot of men want is to have women who are completely devoid of a sense of a respectful, committed relationship, and who will then engage in loveless sex.
For your information, casual sex existed and was common long before legal abortion, and legal abortion was an accomplishment of the women’s movement, not men. Indeed, they have plenty of casual sex in countries like Ireland and Poland and El Salvador and Chile where abortion is illegal. There’s no evidence that without abortion rights, horny men won’t be able to get laid. (Leaving aside free sex, there’s a reason prostitution is called “the world’s oldest profession”.)
This is pure projection on pro-lifers’ part, just like the Peter Singer crap. If you’d actually LISTEN to pro-choicers, you’d learn that what we are actually concerned about is that unwanted pregnancies destroy women’s lives, take them out of schools and the workplace, and leave them dependent on men who are often abusive. Sure, a WOMAN should be able to choose to have sex and offend your God without getting pregnant. That’s very important. But the reason it is very important is that pregnancy is a draconian punishment for having sex that you don’t approve of.
Many, many women who are no longer sexually active are nonetheless pro-choice. Do you think it’s because they want young men to have more opportunities to get laid?
This is just a big libel on pro-choicers, nothing more.
September 3, 2010, 2:11 amyankee says:
I actually do know people who do that, and refer to their own pregnancies that way. It always sounds a bit unnatural because it’s very much not the conventional way of talking about pregnancy.
September 3, 2010, 2:36 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
Babies are not “punishment,” and do not “destroy women’s lives.”
Men are slightly more pro-choice than women. Do you think it’s because women want to “destroy women’s lives”?
Your problem, Dilan, is that you simply cannot see any issue from a perspective different than your own.
September 3, 2010, 2:37 amyankee says:
Other feminists I know argue that pro-choicers aren’t really interested in fetal life and really just care about forced pregnancy as a way of punishing and shaming sluts. I used to think this was unfair, but you are doing a good job convincing me otherwise.
September 3, 2010, 2:42 amDilan Esper says:
David N.:
UNWANTED pregnancies ruin lives. Those of us who buy into the central importance of gender equality know this, and it’s why you can’t go around overvaluing the interests of zygotes.
September 3, 2010, 4:59 amAlessandra says:
You apparently missed the previous discussion concerning loveless sex. It had nothing to do with the possible consequence of an unwanted pregnancy, so you ended up arguing your own misunderstanding of what I said.
“There’s no evidence that without abortion rights, horny men won’t be able to get laid. (Leaving aside free sex, there’s a reason prostitution is called “the world’s oldest profession”.)”
That’s my point. What you call “horny men” is a collection of men who often display a complex set of demeaning and exploitative attitudes towards women, towards relationships and sex. It’s not a coincidence that it is in the poorest countries that your “horny men” sexually abuse an enormous numbers of children and women forced into prostitution systems. Because if people have a dehumanized view of others, and still firmly believe they must get their deformed sexual release, that will impact their sexuality in terms of desire and actual behavior.
“If you’d actually LISTEN to pro-choicers, you’d learn that what we are actually concerned about is that unwanted pregnancies destroy women’s lives, take them out of schools and the workplace, and leave them dependent on men who are often abusive.”
I believe that’s where the concern started and I agree with these concerns, and I would also add the concern of an unwanted child being mistreated by its mother after it is born.
However, I see your discourse as about two decades completely out of touch with reality of who is getting abortions now. Well-educated, middle class and up women simply have no excuse for behaving in completely irresponsible ways concerning contraception. And a good number of women who get abortions are in this category. And the state should never have to fund their lunacy, given that there is shortage of money to help children victims of violence, for example. Or if there is any public money involved, the state should stick these women with a fine. I was thinking this about reading the first comments here. It would be a nice idea if women in this profile were fined with a fine of 10% of their annual income if they sought an abortion from a situation that did include not violence. And I would tack another 10% income fine on the guy. Although this idea probably would not be feasible to implement, you can bet it would make these people more responsible quite quickly.
“Sure, a WOMAN should be able to choose to have sex and offend your God without getting pregnant.”
I think there are plenty of women who are having sex and are being offended and demeaned in the process, without getting pregnant. And there is also a number of women who do not have sex because they can’t find a partner who is not interested in exploiting them (for a certain period of time in their lives), so the loss concerns the full loss of a good relationship, not just sex.
And that is what I object with the discourse about loveless sex being a good norm form society.
September 3, 2010, 5:09 amTony Sidaway says:
Where on earth did all these mountains of anti-abortion crap come from? Couldn’t you chaps who care about such things please take it to email?
September 3, 2010, 6:10 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
FIFY. (The only “gender inequality” is that women get to unilaterally decide whether to impose 18 (or more, in some states) years of financial obligations on both parties.)
But unwanted pregnancies do not “ruin” lives. Children are not tumors; they’re not an affliction or an illness. They may cause people to change plans, but they do not “ruin” lives. Not whether you call them blastocysts or babies.
September 3, 2010, 6:22 amShelbyC says:
From a remarkably successuful thread-jack by a single individual, perhaps trying to divert attention from the fact that a religious dude is getting pretty badly shafted by his idealogical cohorts. Er, and it’s not just anti-abortion crap, if you’ve noticed. We’ve got crap on both sides.
September 3, 2010, 8:13 amReaderY says:
Lust for ones wife is evidence one is abusing ones daughter? Really?
The whole case is pretty close to claiming that people with the wrong political beliefs are thereby likely to abuse their children.
September 3, 2010, 8:18 amReaderY says:
I’ll skip the abortion debate until we get a thread on the subject.
September 3, 2010, 8:19 amShelbyC says:
Er, I believe we even have two examples here.
September 3, 2010, 9:05 amElemenope says:
Have you ever tried to house-train a dog without using some form of corporal punishment?
Yeah, see, this one I actually do have some experience with, both with puppies and kittens, and I *know* from that experience it is not necessary to use punitive methods to train them.
September 3, 2010, 9:11 amRick says:
Your blanket statement with no supporting facts is offensive to people like me, who think all religion is barbaric and would take the same view of this case regardless of the specific religion that made the guy crazy in the first place.
I agree with the decision for the most part, although, like other commenters here, I do wonder about “how much is too much” when it comes to corporal punishment.
September 3, 2010, 9:32 amShelbyC says:
Well, his point was to respond to the meme raised earlier that some folks who are defending this guy would not defend him if he were muslim. And unfortunately, neither meme is wrong, stupid, or inflamatory.
September 3, 2010, 9:35 amAlessandra says:
No one here knows what the woman meant by this phrase. It’s taken out of context, and it was mentioned connected to a possible molestation of the little girl.
While it’s easy to jump to a conclusion that it’s the wife who got freaked out about the husband’s “normal” sex drive, without more information, you can’t know if that’s all it was. It’s clear this husband doesn’t have very good attitudes about women, marriage equality or raising children, there is nothing that would be surprising if he had a warped, obsessive, or perverted sexual psychology. And this is how the wife expressed it, given that we don’t know what else she said when interviewed. It’s just a snippet.
September 3, 2010, 9:50 amKen Arromdee says:
Is that like not being a true Christian? Or a true Scotsman?
September 3, 2010, 10:28 amWallace says:
FTW.
September 3, 2010, 10:42 amChris Travers says:
Straw man.
The simple fact is that pro-choice and pro-life come down on how to balance life and liberty. That’s all. This is an irreconcilable difference here because it comes down to a judgement of values. Let’s acknowledge this to start with and while I don’t think the differences can be fully reconciled, I do believe that there is enough area of common ground that can be had on the social, rather than the legal level, that it’s worth pursuing.
It’s also interesting to look at statistics and note that Catholics in this country are more likely to have abortions than Protestants (particularly more liberal ones). I personally suspect that pro-choice individuals may generally be less likely to have abortions than those who start with a simplistic answer to the whole question simply because they’ve been empowered to think about the question before being faced with it.
Furthermore, what we really see is not a pure pro-choice vs pro-life camp here. I have never met someone so pro-choice that he or she thinks that there is a Constitutional right to have an abortion on the eve of normal childbirth merely because of the inconvenience of having a child, and I have only met one individual who thought that abortions should be banned (or even Constitutionally could be banned) even where necessary to save the mother’s life. So this isn’t a question as to whether abortion should be legal, but rather a fairly narrow question of when it should be legal, and what burdens on the choice are appropriate. These differences are not ones we can reconcile, but they address a remarkably narrow question and it’s worth everybody stepping back and noting the narrow scope of it.
September 3, 2010, 10:48 amChris Travers says:
The point of punishment is communication and discipline.
The best way to discipline a cat is to bare your teeth and hiss while moving towards the cat. It tells the cat in no uncertain terms that the behavior is unacceptable. And while it is not corporal punishment per se, it is a communication of a physical threat to the animal. Because this is how cats talk to eachother in this manner, it’s also the best way to communicate with the cat.
Dogs are much more social animals, but dogs typically corporally punish eachother on the face. This is why hitting the dog with a rolled up newspaper on the nose, while not painful, works well. It’s also something to be aware of with dogs and young children because if the dog things he/she is empowered to punish the child, the method the dog will use is nipping or even biting at the face. Dog packs are quite hierarchical and this presents something that has to be addressed in interaction with humans particularly when there are young kids around.
September 3, 2010, 10:57 amChris Travers says:
BTW, I agree with this. Mostly just calling Dilan on his BS :-).
I don’t identify myself as a libertarian. However, we tried this with our oldest, and it didn’t work well with him. If he felt the punishment was worth it (at the age of 4) he’d quite cheerfully break whatever rules he wanted to and then cheerfully cooperate with the punishment. Sometimes he’d try to negotiate the punishment before breaking the rules…..
September 3, 2010, 11:05 amDay Break says:
I will support unfettered abortion rights just as soon as you support men being able to sever parental rights for babies they don’t want. Fair is fair.
September 3, 2010, 12:07 pmmistermandias says:
“natural response is to downplay the bad (in this case, corporal punishment). On the other hand, criminals are notorious for harboring resentments all out of proportion to any offense. Indeed, there are some studies which seem to indicate that excessive harboring of resentments and slights is the defining characteristic which separates the violent criminal from everyone else. The problems with any study based on self-reporting should be obvious”
I believe that criminality has a partly congenital basis–to the extent that it does, you would expect that kids who are born with tendencies that make them more prone to criminal behavior (short temper, violence, unwillingness to follow rules, focus on short-term gratification) are more likely to have behavior problems and therefore more likely to get spanked.
Also, the one study of this kind that I examined in detail didn’t even control for socioeconomic background or marital status. People from poor, broken homes more likely to commit crimes. News at 11.
September 3, 2010, 12:08 pmChris Travers says:
I support both, FWIW.
September 3, 2010, 12:23 pmADF Alliance Alert » TX Court: Conservative Christian Religious Beliefs, Use of Moderate Corporal Punishment, & High Sex Drive Do Not Show Family Violence says:
[...] At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh provides excerpts from the ruling in In re Wean (Tex. Ct. App. Aug. 31). [...]
September 3, 2010, 12:24 pmNathan Wagner says:
Do you have boys or girls? I suspect that spanking is less effective on girls than
boys. Unfortunately I don’t have any actual data to back this up.
I would additionally point out that your sample size is too small to draw any
conclusions and that your example doesn’t necessarily generalize. The problem
with people is that they are all different. Incentives that work with
one don’t necessarily work with another, or even the same person at different
times.
By way of anecdote, my father spanked me when I was a young child for various
infractions, and it certainly served as a deterrent. On the other hand
he spanked me once when I was 13, and I pretty much laughed at him.
I suspect that you had a reasonable house and reasonable kids. But your methods
simply would have failed with me. I spent most of my time in my room anyway,
so “grounding” would have been basically irrelevant, and since you’d have
to send me to school, if I wanted to do something, I’d have just done so
and ignored the grounding. What are you going to do, ground me some more?
I guess my point is that discipline needs to be geared to the individual.
Incentives are fine, but if the kids only real incentive is “don’t get spanked”
then you’re going to have to spank him. Naturally, if the kid doesn’t really
care if they get spanked, but really wants to go out and play, then perhaps
a grounding will work.
An advantage of spanking is that it’s relatively immediate and over and done.
For kids, I think a lot of alternative punishments are too abstract and too
far removed from a time horizon that the kid can comprehend. If you lock
up a 20 year old for a two weeks for something, that might be effective, but
if you ground a six year old for two weeks, that two weeks is an eternity,
and I don’t think most six year olds are really capable of really associating
the punishment with the behavior at that remove. And similarly for others,
I’m not sure the typical four year old is really capable of properly responding
to a threat of no dessert for dinner at two in the afternoon.
(Some of the above is not really in response to the quoted post, just general
September 3, 2010, 12:32 pmobservations on the comments).
Ted says:
And conservatives always lie about how many profound problems they don’t have in personal relationships, and especially how much they disrespect women. I don’t recall you asking to borrow my 5ft blinders, could I have them back please?
I counted, and you are now the person who claims to be misunderstood the most often of any regular commenter here. Perhaps you should at least consider whether your writing skills are partially to blame, and be more generous to those who had difficulty deciphering your meaning. My guess is that you won’t.
September 3, 2010, 12:51 pmDay Break says:
Questions: Why isn’t infanticide immoral in your opinion? How should said baby be killed? starvation, lethal injection, drowned, incinerated, fed to wild animals, dropped from cliff. I am really trying to understand which method is the most “humane.” Also, if elective abortions were outlawed would you support infanticide as an alternative?
I take it your school of moral thought is utilitarian.
September 3, 2010, 1:10 pmrb1971 says:
Strawman. I am pro-choice (btw, it’s pro-abortion-*rights*, not pro-abortion, unless you’re aware of a proposal for roving squads of abortion doctors forcing abortions on unwilling women), as are the vast majority of people that I know, and most of them are ok with laws prohibiting so-called partial-birth abortions except in cases of rape, incest or significant medical danger to the mother. This group includes at least one person that’s been an active member of NARAL since college.
September 3, 2010, 1:21 pmDay Break says:
September 3, 2010, 1:28 pmChris Travers says:
If you look back at what I wrote, I said I see nothing immoral per se about infanticide. I don’t condemn the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, or others for this practice. As I said, you will see me as a heathen barbarian, and I will see that designation as an honorable one.
The basic issue is: death is a part of life. It is an inherent part of life, an inexorable reality. As such, there are worse things than to die. Our ancestors, who sacrificed animals at communal feasts, who saw many of their children die to illnesses that are currently seen as preventable, etc. understood this better than today. Looking at an historical baseline, it’s not that they were desensitized to death, it’s that we are hypersensitized to it.
Traditional cultures in general have figured out these issues. Arab travellers to Hedeby in Viking-Age Denmark wrote about the practice of throwing unwanted children into the sea. In Iceland, the preferred method was exposure but this was only acceptable until the child was 8 days old– on the 9th night, the child became a full member of the family and was given a name. In republican Rome, not only was infanticide legal but was required by law in the case of deformed infants.
Not sure I’d agree with that. I actually see myself as a neo-structuralist (in the sense of structural anthropology, etc) with some utilitarian (i.e. functionalist) and post-structuralist influences. Beyond everything else, I am a Heathen who worships the Aesir and the Vanir and seeks to find meaning in life by recreating the old ways today.
September 3, 2010, 1:54 pmAlessandra says:
What a stupid answer. If you don’t have any precise way to express in which way you think I am “lying about problems I don’t have” and how this “disrespects women,” this is just another meaningless comment. And which does not address any of the points criticizing liberals, btw.
September 3, 2010, 1:58 pmAlessandra says:
If you are too lazy to read previous threads, the problems lies with you. Given that it’s only certain individuals who have serious problems correctly understanding what I write, that’s something that also indicates a particular cognitive issue with them.
And their misunderstanding comes most often from their own prejudices and stereotyping, so it’s definitely something that they should work on. In this case, given that Dylan did not read the initial discussion, I’m not sure if he would have correctly understood what I said if he had chosen to.
September 3, 2010, 2:07 pmAlessandra says:
That’s because Chris has some serious moral blindspots (or black holes), which he likes to justify by saying to himself that if someone somewhere did it, it makes it good. I’m surprised he hasn’t argued for slavery yet. ;-)
September 3, 2010, 2:13 pmElemenope says:
…liberals always lie[...]conservatives always lie…
Ugh. Universal quantifiers flying every which way, and nary a one that is true. How’s this: partisans always discount testimony and data that harm their positions.
In other news, dog bites man.
September 3, 2010, 2:14 pmDay Break says:
I really don’t even know what to say. Your reasoning is unique and interesting to me to say the least. I get the sense you are serious, if so more power to you.
September 3, 2010, 2:15 pmElemenope says:
Beyond everything else, I am a Heathen who worships the Aesir and the Vanir and seeks to find meaning in life by recreating the old ways today.
A True Conservative! ;)
September 3, 2010, 2:16 pmDilan Esper says:
Is that like not being a true Christian? Or a true Scotsman?
No, because neither of those things are ideologies or political movements.
September 3, 2010, 2:17 pmlosantiville says:
Vision Forum has the best catalog. It’s a great place to get costumes and weapons (mostly toy) for boys.
Actually, a wooden spoon’s not bad. Doesn’t do much damage. The bruises visible after 24 hours is there because some bruising will be caused by the mildest punishment.
Note BTW that when religion, corporal punishment, bourgeois values, and suppression of violent foreigners were at their peak, crime was low and you didn’t need security guards and you could board planes by just walking on w/o being searched.
September 3, 2010, 2:18 pmDay Break says:
So does the European Christian Political Movement (ECPM) count?
September 3, 2010, 2:25 pmhttp://www.ecpm.info
Chris Travers says:
If by slavery you mean what happened with the African slave trade, I have always argued against that. If you mean extending that argument to all forms of involuntary servitude, I have always argued against such an extension.
One major problem you have is that it’s historically unusual for slaves to be treated as entities who were not legally allowed to own their own effects, and where there was absolutely no personal autonomy. In Rome slaves could (and often did) enter into voluntary organizations without their master’s permission, and most such organizations had rules in their charters regarding how to provide proper benefits to slaves if the master objected. For example, if the master wouldn’t give the body up for burial, many organizations would perform the burial with an effigy instead. Similarly among the Norse and among the Romans, there were social and political systems in place to encourage freeing of slaves as one’s freed slaves were important sources of political power in both places.
What you have to remember is that in most of these places, having extended family ties was important to ensuring one’s legal rights were protected. If someone was captured in a foreign war and brought home as a POW, that individual had no way of enforcing any legal rights. In Greece, in Rome, and among the Norse, the primary impact of their systems of slavery were actually to provide these individuals a framework of rights they wouldn’t otherwise have. Freed slaves were then brought into the extended family of the former master and this provided additional political power because these former slaves were then obligated to defend their former masters’ political interests.
So I would be opposed to a categorical statement against all forms of slavery too. However, there were two things that were (somewhat unusually) missing in the experience of this in our country:
September 3, 2010, 2:27 pm1) Some level of autonomy for the slaves, and
2) A system of encouraging freeing slaves.
Chris Travers says:
I can live with that.
September 3, 2010, 2:49 pmDilan Esper says:
So does the European Christian Political Movement (ECPM) count?
If it has accepted positions, identifiable leaders, and a background of theories that support it, then yes, it would be something like feminism.
September 3, 2010, 4:30 pmDay Break says:
Sorry to beat a dead horse, but its like I said: “Plain and simple you want women to be able to s*ck and f*ck with impunity. That’s all that matters to you.”
September 3, 2010, 4:32 pmDay Break says:
Christianity fits that defintion and is an ideology, so why reject it?
September 3, 2010, 4:44 pmDay Break says:
“Feminist studies of culture and gender equality and what happens to women when they don’t have abortion rights are scientific too” is now scienftic, lol, its as you said a political ideology which is full of hack “academics” running around with the latest theory on how a man is keepin’ them down and how they can s*ck and f*ck, kill their babies and still move up int the world all in one afternoon. Its funny instead of looking for truth and justice Feminist just looks for someone to blame and someone to f*ck.
September 3, 2010, 5:03 pmElemenope says:
Is there a sudden groundswell against women s*cking and f*cking with impunity? How perverse.
September 3, 2010, 5:09 pmChris Travers says:
This is the reason never to be a follower in a political movement.
September 3, 2010, 5:13 pmChris Travers says:
Science doesn’t compel support or opposition to anything. It’s a tool for exploring mechanisms. It doesn’t tell us what we do with those mechanisms. It’s a vehicle, not a driver.
There’s no scientific basis (narrowly construed) for any possible stance relating to abortion or infanticide, and any stance that was derived from anthropology would be tremendously distasteful to modern standards. Both sides in the present debate, however, want to appropriate scientific mythology for their own goals. That’s fine and all, but let’s stick to where the real disagreements are.
“Personhood” is an inexact cultural construct, not an exact and scientific one. There is no bright line that exists in human development between conception and old age. The only lines we draw are cultural ones.
September 3, 2010, 5:18 pmAlessandra says:
Typical liberal idiocy. As I wrote before, a distortion as the above purposefully disregards and denies the damaging contextual aspects of so many sexual interactions, specially concerning the emotional sphere, but also in reference to physical consequences, such as STDs and unwanted pregnancies, and posits all of these concerns as some unjust repression of (benign) sex for women.
September 3, 2010, 5:38 pmDay Break says:
Alessandra, while I agree 100% with your sentiments, I am going to say he was being sarcastic or pointing out the sexual irony of my statement.
September 3, 2010, 5:44 pmDay Break says:
But it is a reason to lead a political movement.
September 3, 2010, 5:45 pmElemenope says:
Typical liberal idiocy. As I wrote before, a distortion as the above purposefully disregards and denies the damaging contextual aspects of so many sexual interactions, specially concerning the emotional sphere, but also in reference to physical consequences, such as STDs and unwanted pregnancies, and posits all of these concerns as some unjust repression of (benign) sex for women.
1. It was a joke
2. I am not a liberal
That is all.
September 3, 2010, 6:00 pmAlessandra says:
Given that Elem has stated a number of times stupid things concerning sexuality with a serious intent, it’s impossible to know…
September 3, 2010, 6:17 pmAlessandra says:
Whether you want to label yourself a “liberal” or not is besides the point. You do hold several liberal positions concerning sexuality and personal relationships. Apparently you have some major hangup in recognizing the fact.
September 3, 2010, 6:21 pmDay Break says:
Elemenope is a witty person, so I try and read his statments, which are often hilarious with a sceptical eye.
September 3, 2010, 6:23 pmElemenope says:
Given that Elem has stated a number of times stupid things concerning sexuality with a serious intent…
In other words, I refuse to countenance your description of homosexuality as a disease or a psychological “problem”. In this area, I thank the powers-that-be that you think I’m stupid.
And Day Break, thankfully, has a sense of humor. You should look into that.
September 3, 2010, 6:25 pmKazinski says:
3/4
I occasionally use corporal punishment on my youngest, but I don’t like it. In fact usually before I spank him I have to drink for a few hours to work myself up to it.
I was a kid when I was younger, and I am wicked and sinful, so it must have come from being a kid.
I’m not sure if women need an education or not, but the ones that are educated are better earners when you hire them out. And it really doesn’t hurt either, women will still think they know more than you and tell you so often, even if you don’t educate them.
If I wasn’t interested in women’s private parts I never would have gotten married in the first place, and then had wicked and sinful children.
September 3, 2010, 6:26 pmElemenope says:
Whether you want to label yourself a “liberal” or not is besides the point. You do hold several liberal positions concerning sexuality and personal relationships. Apparently you have some major hangup in recognizing the fact.
As was talked about (at length) on an earlier thread, liberalism and conservatism are not best understood as a certain constellation of held positions; most people who self-identify as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ will take individual stances on issues from all over the spectrum. Personally I view it as a dispositional orientation, liberalism being generally goal-oriented and conservatism being generally system-oriented; liberals being dangerously unconcerned with unintended consequences and conservatives being, perhaps, over-concerned with the same.
It turns out that modern social conservatives have, by-and-large backed themselves into an idiotic corner regarding sexuality. So, yes, the positions I take in that narrow area tend to conform with stereotypically liberal positions; though they are not arrived at by goal-oriented reasoning, so are they properly ‘liberal’?
September 3, 2010, 6:30 pmAlessandra says:
Given that I have not said that homosexuality is a disease, that is nothing but your typically liberal misleading stereotype. Imagine if engaging in such stereotyping would qualify you as having a series of stupid attitudes…
September 3, 2010, 6:46 pmDay Break says:
Sorry I just could not help myself.
September 3, 2010, 6:46 pmElemenope says:
Given that I have not said that homosexuality is a disease, that is nothing but your typically liberal misleading stereotype.
You wouldn’t characterize a psychological problem as a disease? OK, keep digging there, skippy.
September 3, 2010, 6:58 pmAlessandra says:
Many positions can certainly be categorized as being liberal or conservative, and these are very useful labels for describing top-level political categories. A person, however, is not a position. People can apply any label they want to themselves, but when we are talking about a position belonging to either liberal or conservative category, it’s not the label applied to the person that defines the position.
I think that it turns out that liberals are clearly shoving society into an idiotic, harmful ghetto regarding sexuality and personal relationships.
As far as the resulting position, of course. As far as how you arrived there, it would depend. For example, unless you make it clear that you ignore why normalizing homosexuality is problematic because you fundamentally differ from typical liberal discourse, I will assume that you’re following the same liberal justifications for your arguments.
September 3, 2010, 6:59 pmElemenope says:
Sorry I just could not help myself.
LOL
September 3, 2010, 6:59 pmElemenope says:
I will assume that you’re following the same liberal justifications for your arguments.
Then you will succeed only in arguing with a person who only exists in your head.
September 3, 2010, 7:07 pmAlessandra says:
Given that the last thread where this came up, Leo asked if I thought homosexuality could be equated to “peanut allergy,” that is, a strictly physical disorder or disease, this is what I was referring to.
My view of homosexuality is that it encompasses the psychological realm, so it cannot be a physical disease.
In that respect, yes, it is disordered from a sexual-psychological perspective and could potentially be called a (psychological) disease.
However, given that the word disease is synonymous to illness, and a psychological dysfunction is not necessarily a mental illness, you create a false equation. The general definitions of both terms (dysfunction and illness) entail very different concepts.
Because of this, saying that I think homosexuality is a disease is misleading and incorrect on various levels, and should be avoided.
September 3, 2010, 7:19 pmAlessandra says:
Unless you state why your justifications are different, I’m arguing with a who person is outside my head, but who is simply hiding.
September 3, 2010, 7:22 pmohwilleke says:
Procedurally, there are a couple aspects of the case that are notable.
1. The DA’s office, and not simply the individual spouse, brought the original restraining order request.
2. Some of the facts important to the mandamus ruling were based on facts favorable to the father in a Child Protective Services hearing available only after the hearing at which the trial court made its ruling was held.
3. The parties are getting divorced and the same trial judge that issued the restraining order will be entering child custody orders later on. It will be interesting to see what those child custody orders look like. Generally speaking, there is a not more judicial discretion available in entering child custody orders than there is in entering restraining orders, and it is clear that the father has made a poor impression with the trial judge as a parent, even though the restraining order was vacated by the court of appeals.
September 3, 2010, 7:25 pmTed says:
We know what you think, and we remain unpersuaded.
September 3, 2010, 7:30 pmElemenope says:
My view of homosexuality is that it encompasses the psychological realm, so it cannot be a physical disease.
You imply a distinction where none exists.
Minds are what brains do. When they malfunction, it is every bit as much a physical disease as the failure or aberrant function of any other organ. Just because we don’t understand the mechanisms as well as, say, kidney disease, doesn’t mean that we should mythologize them as somehow non-physical or assume that they are different.
September 3, 2010, 7:55 pmElemenope says:
Unless you state why your justifications are different…
I find your demand for justification for the rights of others revealing.
September 3, 2010, 7:57 pmreshuffle1 says:
Kazinski-
Too funny.
September 3, 2010, 8:02 pmDay Break says:
–Ignoring the homo issue, I am not sure that a psychological dysfunction can withstand an analogy to that of biological dysfunction and as you said “we don’t understand the mechanisms as well” so rushing to analogize would seem at the very least premature and could be flat out wrong.
September 3, 2010, 8:18 pmAlessandra says:
No, it is because psychological functions deal with emotions, thoughts, moods, ideologies, attitudes, cognitive abilities, psychological mechanisms of the conscious and the unconscious, etc. This cannot be said of a kidney disease.
Surely, the brain is involved in producing a lot of the psychological realm, but to equate a psychological dysfunction to a physical one, simply because the former involves the brain is plainly ridiculous.
September 3, 2010, 8:30 pmAlessandra says:
And this from someone who hasn’t even read the many threads where I participated here, and whom I bet could not correctly summarize what I think.
You think you know what I think is a much more accurate statement. In any case, I am not here to “persuade” anyone, but to debate what I think is misinformed or misguided concerning the issues posted on the blog.
September 3, 2010, 8:34 pmleo marvin says:
So? They refused to listen.
September 3, 2010, 8:35 pmDilan Esper says:
Christianity fits that defintion and is an ideology
No, it actually doesn’t and isn’t. There are hierarchical religions such as Scientology where it is easy enough to determine who is an adherent. But anyone can label themselves a Christian and many major denominations not only disagree on first principles but actually work against each other and attempt to poach members and prosletyze.
The feminist movement isn’t like that at all.
September 3, 2010, 8:47 pmDilan Esper says:
Dilan Esper: Plain and simple you want women to be able to s*ck and f*ck with impunity. That’s all that matters to you.
Just to be clear, I didn’t say this at all. I refuted it upthread.
September 3, 2010, 8:49 pmElemenope says:
Surely, the brain is involved in producing a lot of the psychological realm, but to equate a psychological dysfunction to a physical one, simply because the former involves the brain is plainly ridiculous.
Praytell, point to the evidence, any evidence–heck, I’ll accept even a coherent philosophical argument in lieu of empiricism–of a part of the mind that is not generated by physical parts, please. Descartes will be your happy and willing slave in the afterlife if you do.
(Every time you mention qualia, my friend has to give me five cents. Every time you mention a soul, I get a buck. Be generous, would you?)
September 3, 2010, 8:56 pmElemenope says:
…as you said “we don’t understand the mechanisms as well” so rushing to analogize would seem at the very least premature and could be flat out wrong.
It would be a shock indeed if one sort of meaty bits worked metaphysically in a different fashion than all the other closely related (in form and structure) meaty bits. So the prudent assumption is that they are similar unless shown by evidence to be different.
September 3, 2010, 9:00 pmAlessandra says:
Do you go to your general practitioner to “cure” the statement that “2+2=5 is correct?”
September 3, 2010, 9:10 pmChris Travers says:
Are you saying feminism is like Scientology?
September 3, 2010, 9:41 pmAlessandra says:
Depending on the feminist, yes. ;-)
September 3, 2010, 9:44 pmElemenope says:
Do you go to your general practitioner to “cure” the statement that “2+2=5 is correct?”
You’re actually forwarding this as an argument that the mind is non-physical? As I’ve already said, our *understanding* of the brain is not fine-grained enough to be able to medically change individual targeted thoughts or memories (though, truth be told we are getting closer than is comfortable to this goal). Knowledge that the brain is a physical system does not automatically grant knowledge to manipulate that system at will. We know that Earth’s atmosphere is an entirely physical system; does that give us the capacity to predict the weather with perfect accuracy, or change it to our whims?
But the actual error in your question is in eliding distinctions between types of brain processes. A brain may come to find “2+2=5″ true for two different reasons; either a memory error (learned the wrong fact or failed to recall it correctly) or a processing error (a defect in how the brain processes the addition operation). We know from actual empirical research that memory is entirely a physical process (data stored in proteins in certain locations throughout the brain, and accessed by dedicated physical structures in the brain), as is processing (with certain physical injuries to brain areas causing corresponding “mind” damage to specific capacities). We also know, like a personal computer, it is usually easier to manipulate internal pieces of individual content through the data channels already provided for input (in a human case, the senses) than to attempt to do it directly bit by bit, which makes your question fatuous at best.
There is nothing to be observed in any of those processes that would cause a person to assume a non-physical component.
A creative first try, though. Try to be less flippant next time.
September 3, 2010, 9:45 pmAlessandra says:
Socially conservative feminists are the best though. Like me. ;-)
September 3, 2010, 9:46 pmDilan Esper says:
This is sophistry. I am saying that Christianity is not like Scientology, and Christianity is also not like feminism.
September 3, 2010, 9:50 pmEdward says:
So basically what you are saying is because some other man did something horrible, every man should have to pay for it, just because a woman makes an unsubstantiated claim? We are not talking about one person being mildly inconvenienced here. If such requirements were relaxed, then women could abuse their ex and their children by refusing parental rights with no requirement other than her word.
September 3, 2010, 9:51 pmIn this country we have something called due process. Are you suggesting that men no longer deserve due process because one man killed his children? Mothers are far more likely to kill their children than fathers, so if that is your contention, the direction of the law is backwards.
Dilan Esper says:
A “socially conservative feminist” is someone who may hold private moral views about various issues, but does not believe that the law should enact those views, e.g., “pro-choice but anti-abortion”.
You could also argue that socially progressive women who disagree over the abortion issue, i.e., women who believe in gender equality, equal access to contraception, the sexual revolution, the rights of lesbian women, the fight against workplace sexual harassment, etc., but who simply cannot abide by abortion because they think it is a form of homicide are feminists.
But women who are socially conservative and want the government to enact their moral beliefs are not feminists, because the feminist movement and feminist theory says that these things should be left to women to decide and that one group of women should not be able to enact their beliefs into law to the detriment of other women who do not share them.
September 3, 2010, 9:54 pmAlessandra says:
Nice try completely avoiding answering my question. The only thing that was flippant was your attitude in not answering it. If everything in the brain is physical, according to you, any problems in the brain are a) a disease, and b) would then need to be corrected by a medical doctor–so implies your ridiculous claim. And that’s where you start digging yourself in about denying the differences in the realm of the psychological and the physical, and about equating a psychological dysfunction to a mental illness which you also equate to a physical disease.
September 3, 2010, 9:54 pmAlessandra says:
I don’t know if anyone had ever used this label before, but as it applies to me, you’re completely wrong with the definition about the law not enacting my views.
Women who are in favor of funding abortion for completely irresponsible, negligent women are not progressive. They are doing damage to society. Women who normalize homosexuality are too ignorant about sexuality to discuss what laws we should have.
Just like one group of feminists has no right to enact their beliefs into law to the detriment of other women who do not share them. So what else is new in the history of democracy?
September 3, 2010, 10:00 pmDay Break says:
So let’s see:
Feminists’ beliefs in social equality do not automatically exempt them from strife. To say that feminist organizations, feminists or actually women don’t disagree is ignoring that fact that we all have individual differences in personality, beliefs, abilities, or ambitions and ignores the real fact that some women oppress other women. Therefore, the principle of “sisterhood” is a myth from the 1960s.
Likewise, there are many different kinds of feminism with ALL disagreeing about a host of issues including what sexism consists of, and what exactly ought to be done about it; they disagree about what it means to be a woman or a man and what social and political implications gender has or should have. You would make a huge mistake assuming just because Radical feminists are dominant in liberal leaning academic universities that feminism is a monolithic block of beliefs.
Notable disagreements include:
1.) Disagreement between and within third-wave sex-positive feminists internally and externally with other other Second Wave feminists generally over the issue of pornography, BDSM, sexual violence and transsexual “women.”
2.) Disagreement between Pro-life feminists/ Gender feminists and Radical feminists over the issue of abortion.
3. Black women feminists and white women feminists. Historically black have experienced white women as white supremacists.
Seriously, do you know any women that do not fight and bicker with one another if so, point me in their direction.
September 3, 2010, 10:10 pmAlessandra says:
Hey now, that’s sexist! ;-) Men do it just the same (and they gossip more ;-)
p.s. Day Break- you are a guy, right? (I hate when people put these non-gender recognizable names)
September 3, 2010, 10:15 pmElemenope says:
Nice try completely avoiding answering my question.
I answered it; I’m sorry if my answer was too subtle. Try this:
“Going to a doctor to fix “2+2=5″ is the equivalent to going to a meteorologist to fix the hurricane about to hit your city.”
Doctors and neurologists are creeping up to understanding those processes enough to manipulate them, but for now they have to be content with the meteorologist’s level of understanding those systems; decently thorough large-scale understanding (that is moderately predictive), but incapable of fine-structure manipulation.
If everything in the brain is physical, according to you, any problems in the brain are a) a disease, and b) would then need to be corrected by a medical doctor–so implies your ridiculous claim.
Wrong, and wrong. As I already indicated, the senses provide an ample set of channels to manipulate the physical matter of the brain in a beneficial way. Since through heuristics humans have figured out how to manipulate the memory contents and/or process construction through the use of those channels, that will continue to be the dominant method for changing a brain’s contents; this has no bearing whatsoever about claims regarding the physicality of the mind. That the physicality of the brain has a direct and irreducible correspondence with the mind is demonstrable: scoop out someone’s Broca’s area and they will be incapable of forming sentences, scoop out their Werneke’s area and they will be unable to assign meaning to words. Manipulate the electrical action-potential (using magnetic or direct electrical stimulation) across the prefrontal lobes and you can manipulate a person’s facility with vocabulary in a quantifiable, measurable way.
September 3, 2010, 10:23 pmDay Break says:
Alessandra: Hey now, that’s sexist! ;-) Men do it just the same (and they gossip more ;-)
p.s. Day Break– you are a guy, right? (I hate when people put these non-gender recognizable names)
100% Biological Male.
September 3, 2010, 10:26 pmElemenope says:
FWIW, I do concur with you that “socially conservative feminist” is neither a contradiction in terms nor a position restricted from functioning in the policy sphere.
September 3, 2010, 10:32 pmChris Travers says:
Well, I composed a reasoned objection but decided to see to draw from your response first.
The problem with statements like “no true feminist” is that there is a great deal of disagreement within the feminist community about key issues, such as whether pornography is a problem, whether such is degrading to women, whether it is a problem is women choose to stay home, foregoing a career, in order to care for children, and the like. Saying “no true feminist” in that context papers over those disagreements and pretends they don’t exist.
I don’t think it’s a valid way to characterize any position on anything. Just because you can’t imagine someone who could believe X and Y at the same time and justify those against eachother doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Otherwise, feminism would be like Scientology.
September 3, 2010, 10:37 pmAlessandra says:
But right there you are saying that the two are not the same. Given that they are not the same, the term irreducible is meaningless here.
Right and right. Reread how you denied that a psychological problem is different than a physical disease, and maybe you will get a clue.
Which game are you going to play next–denying that doctors treat physical diseases?
September 3, 2010, 10:43 pmtheobromophile says:
Alessandra beat me to it, but um, Dilan? One functional definition of a “law” is something enacted by one group that uses legal force to stop another group from doing something they want to do.
Yours is a strange definition of feminism – screwing and anarchy, apparently.
September 4, 2010, 12:16 amtheobromophile says:
First, medicine is not science in the true sense, but one of my friends who is in the field openly laughs at abortion advocates and their rationalisations – he talks about looking at what is in the womb using our amazing technology and what it means for the pro-life movement.
Second, Dilan, you’re not a scientist, so stop pretending to know anything about it, let alone use it as a bludgeon against actual scientists, m’kay?
September 4, 2010, 12:26 amElemenope says:
But right there you are saying that the two are not the same. Given that they are not the same, the term irreducible is meaningless here.
It’s called “not presupposing your conclusions”. If this is an alien concept to you, I have severely overestimated your capacity to discuss.
Right and right. Reread how you denied that a psychological problem is different than a physical disease, and maybe you will get a clue. Which game are you going to play next–denying that doctors treat physical diseases?
I cannot converse with a person who willfully distorts what is said to fit their your own conclusions, elides distinctions when convenient and invents them when opportune. Have fun with yourself.
—————-
…medicine is not science in the true sense…
This is poorly understood by people on both sides of the argument, and needs to be said.
September 4, 2010, 1:01 amArthur Kirkland says:
I gather that believing a blastocyst is a “baby” because some people interpret a book of superstitions in that direction, however, strikes you as a serious position.
Of course, many Americans believe — for the same reason — that the Flinstones is a documentary.
September 4, 2010, 1:16 amArthur Kirkland says:
Yes, gals. You got it all wrong. Dropping out of school and raising your rapist’s child in poverty might look like something that ruins your life, but the proper way to view this “change in plans” is as a blessing direct from the God of the Bible. See? You’re lucky to be part of God’s plan!
Now get off the food stamps and other government assistance. That’s not part of God’s plan.
September 4, 2010, 1:26 amArthur Kirkland says:
When religion was more influential, we had the Inquisition, slavery, suppression of women, lynchings, suppression of science, segregation and other church-approved joys, too. Child abuse, too, but that wasn’t church-approved so much as -conducted, -facilitated and -concealed.
The effect of religion on society is, at best (and being charitable), a wash.
September 4, 2010, 1:35 amAlessandra says:
Apparently you like to kid yourself that simply because you assert something without proof, it makes it so.
If only you had a little mirror at home…
=============
Elem: In other words, I refuse to countenance your description of homosexuality as a disease
Alessandra: Given that I have not said that homosexuality is a disease,
Elem: You wouldn’t characterize a psychological problem as a disease? OK, keep digging there, skippy.
Alessandra: My view of homosexuality is that it encompasses the psychological realm, so it cannot be a physical disease.
Elem: You imply a distinction where none exists.
LOL
September 4, 2010, 3:50 amChris Travers says:
But what about a fetus at 8 weeks gestation? People believe that is a “baby” because we refer to it in common English as one.
the problem with your argument strikes me that it would suggest that the natural bright line regarding abortion type issues is the pre-implantation/post-implantation line. That strikes as too early for social reasons. If the line is “it’s understood as a baby” vs “it’s not understood as a baby” then we have a problem: there is no bright line between implantation and old age that can be used to clearly differentiate where this process happens. Let’s recognize that people see the fetus as a baby (on both sides of the debate) and hence recognize it for what it is: a difficult choice in an imperfect world.
The point though is that personhood is a cultural concept, not a scientific one. This argument has been going on for over a thousand years. In 1000 AD, the republic of Iceland was in a crisis. The pagans and Christians claimed they couldn’t get along together. After days of negotiating in the legislative body, a compromise was reached that would last all of three years: Iceland would officially convert, but animal sacrifice would be allowed as would exposing infants to death prior to naming. In 1003 AD, the legislative assembly banned both these things, though it’s not clear that there was much enforcement.
The argument over abortion today is the same thing. The argument is not where human life begins, but where we as a culture should extend the protections of personhood. Many on the anti-abortion-rights side believe that personhood should extend to the pre-baby at the moment of conception. Others of us believe that there should be, for basic liberty reasons, a period where these protections do not apply. A fetus at 8 weeks may be referred to as a baby in Contemporary Standard American English, but few people refer to it as a “person.”
Murder is not taking a human life. It is taking a person’s life. Abortion is not murder because the life taken is not that of a person.
September 4, 2010, 10:55 amJoe says:
The argument over abortion today is the same thing. The argument is not where human life begins, but where we as a culture should extend the protections of personhood.
The debate is not really so cut and dried. I have seen much debate that defines “human life” to mean more than some mere biological concept. As Justice Tom Clark once noted:
To say that life is present at conception is to give recognition to the potential, rather than the actual. The unfertilized egg has life, and if fertilized, it takes on human proportions. But the law deals in reality, not obscurity — the known, rather than the unknown. When sperm meets egg, life may eventually form, but quite often it does not. The law does not deal in speculation. The phenomenon of [p218] life takes time to develop, and, until it is actually present, it cannot be destroyed. Its interruption prior to formation would hardly be homicide, and as we have seen, society does not regard it as such. The rites of Baptism are not performed and death certificates are not required when a miscarriage occurs. No prosecutor has ever returned a murder indictment charging the taking of the life of a fetus. [n7] This would not be the case if the fetus constituted human life.
[qtd. by Justice Douglas in Doe v. Bolton & by various lower court judges at the time]
Murder is not taking a human life. It is taking a person’s life. Abortion is not murder because the life taken is not that of a person.
This is a conclusion that might be sound but I don’t think it is patently obvious. “Person” does appear to be used here to give the entity in question a certain worth, not mere legal definition, but is it really necessary to admit a “person” exists to consider something murder? And, abortion is not murder even if “a person” exists, at least necessarily. Someone can reasonably think a seven month fetus is a “person,” for instance, and abortion still might be acceptable for said “person” does not have the right to have the woman involve sacrifice her life or health to keep it “alive.”
September 4, 2010, 11:28 amAlessandra says:
In a study released by the Guttmacher Institute in 2005, women were asked to provide reasons why they chose to have an abortion (multiple responses were permissible). Of those who gave at least one reason:
* 89% gave at least two
* 72% gave at least three
Nearly three-quarters said they could not afford to have a baby.
Of those women who gave two or more answers, the most common response — inability to afford a baby — was most frequently followed by one of three other reasons:
* pregnancy/birth/baby would interfere with school or employment
* reluctant to be a single mother or experiencing relationship problems
* done with childbearing or already have other children/dependents
Below is a breakdown of women’s responses that specified reasons that led to their abortion decision (percentage total will not add up to 100% as multiple answers were permissible):
* 74% felt “having a baby would dramatically change my life” (which includes interrupting education, interfering with job and career, and/or concern over other children or dependents)
* 73% felt they “can’t afford a baby now” (due to various reasons such as being unmarried, being a student, inability to afford childcare or basic needs of life, etc.)
* 48% “don’t want to be a single mother or [were] having relationship problem[s]”
* 38% “have completed [their] childbearing”
* 32% were “not ready for a(nother) child”
* 25% “don’t want people to know I had sex or got pregnant”
* 22% “don’t feel mature enough to raise a(nother) child”
* 14% felt their “husband or partner wants me to have an abortion”
* 13% said there were “possible problems affecting the health of the fetus”
* 12% said there were “physical problems with my health”
* 6% felt their “parents want me to have an abortion”
* 1% said they were “a victim of rape”
* <0.5% "became pregnant as a result of incest"
Source:
September 4, 2010, 11:55 amFiner, Lawrence B. and Lori F. Frohwirth, Lindsay A. Dauphinee, Susheela Singh and Ann F. Moore. "Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitiative Perspectives."Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Guttmacher.org, September 2005.
White, Angela. " Cost of Giving Birth at the Hospital or at Home." Blisstree.com, 21 September 2008.
"Why It Matters: Teen Pregnancy and Education." The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, retrieved 19 May 2009.
==================
So if they couldn’t afford a baby (I find that phrasing so awful), why did they have sex without using contraception?
Chris Travers says:
But these are not static concepts and the test that Justice Clark uses there is that of personhood (i.e., membership in society), not life. In other words, we don’t issue death certificates when a miscarriage occurs, dead fetuses from miscarriages aren’t baptised, and kicking a pregnant woman thus causing a miscarriage is not homicide.
However, Justice Clark’s tests are subject to change because it is a question of personhood and membership in society rather than a question of biology. If death certificates were issued, if religions did treat it as a death (which some do, btw, including some forms of Buddhism in Japan), then the analysis might be different. Indeed at least one prosecutor has indicted an individual for causing premature birth of a baby who died. So has another. And then there’s the Scott Peterson case. So AFAICS that’s very much a state-by-state issue today, even though it might not have been in Justice Clark’s day.
September 4, 2010, 1:12 pmChris Travers says:
One might argue that one is never really required to sacrifice one’s life for another anyway. The question at seven months old would likely involve a question of whether life-saving methods must be applied after delivery. In fact even at six months, more than half of those born could be saved with appropriate medical intervention. Whether or not this is a good idea is another question.
Health is a more interesting question. Part of the problem here is that there is at least arguably a difference between sacrificing a little bit of sanity due to lack of sleep for three months, and serious, permanent physical health problems.
I guess what I am arguing for is closer to the Casey standard than Roe’s. I think that there is a liberty interest in opting out of parenthood. I think that this should apply to either parent and that men, as well as women, should have the right to say “I don’t want the responsibility of parenthood right now.” I think that any law which unduly infringes on this liberty interest should be seen as Unconstitutional. I am not saying that this is the case right now (it is for abortion, but men don’t have a similar opt-out, and equal protection doctrine doesn’t strictly-speaking apply). I would also suggest that there is a point, which can be defined to some extent by the legislative body (provided that it is not an undue burden) after which personhood extends to the fetus. For example, I wouldn’t have a problem with the legislature requiring that abortions must be done within 30 days of discovering that one was pregnant but that if this was discovered after the pregnancy was, say, at 7 months or later, the state only had to allow legal options for abandonment at the hospital or fire station instead.
However, in later-term abortions, I would argue that doctrines such as necessity and parallels to self-defence come into play and that there is an inherent right not to sacrifice one’s life or long-term for another.
September 4, 2010, 1:28 pmAnon says:
When my daughter was an infant, she frequently had bruises on her arms or back from simply picking her up. My wife frequently has bruises after sex (even of the most mundane variety and if you tell her I classified it that way I’ll deny it); so the part about marks lasting more that 24 hrs is not a good yard stick.
If this remark seems OT to the current abortion theme, it is.
September 4, 2010, 2:28 pmReaderY says:
When one considers that a century ago people were convinced that science had proved that women and blacks were inferior, anthropology consisted of objectification of savages, and eugenicists were convinced the only way to progress was to keep the inferiors from breeding, it’s remarkable that are still people sufficiently uneducated as to have retained the sort of blind, irrational faith that “science” produces reliable moral judgments that people used to have before the Holocaust and the 60s wisened folks up.
Science deals with facts, not values. Depending on ones values, its facts can be spun any way one wants. “Science” based moral claims are not falsifiable. They’re not science at all, they’re pseudoscience.
Marketing ones value judgments by trying to emotionally connect them with “science” by sheer associational display is no different from what goes on in marketing any other product. If one buys into the value judgment being sold, one no more gets any actual science than one gets the busty blonde shown in the advertisement if one buys the car or the brand of beer.
Charlatans have been using rhetoric to project their value judgements as somehow being the impartial conclusions of science, and their claims have been discredited, for too long. It’s time to stop taking such rhetoric so seriously.
September 5, 2010, 3:21 amJoe says:
In answer to Chris. [Part 1]
But these are not static concepts and the test that Justice Clark uses there is that of personhood (i.e., membership in society), not life. In other words, we don’t issue death certificates when a miscarriage occurs, dead fetuses from miscarriages aren’t baptised, and kicking a pregnant woman thus causing a miscarriage is not homicide.
Right, they aren’t static concepts. I’m not saying otherwise. Whatever “test” he uses, he still says “human life,” and I have seen it used in that respect by people online. “Human life” to some people signifies some sort of worth, worth that might not reach the worth of personnhood. A few in fact somewhat use it interchangeably. We protect “life,” liberty and property, so if abortion is allowed, in some sense, “life” is not involved at all. “Life,” that is, means to some people “human life” of a certain stage of development.
This is why I’m wary about assuming any particular word is some obvious dividing line (“i.e.”) because each word in this discussion has such an individualized flavor to them. We can try to agree but even then we should be aware that there are other views.
However, Justice Clark’s tests are subject to change because it is a question of personhood and membership in society rather than a question of biology.
Defining when life begins even biologically is subject to change, since the dividing line is not self-evident, it is a matter of choosing a definition. For instance, fertilization? Implantation? But, yes, “human life” is not always used in a biological sense. “Human” can have a wider meaning. “Humane,” for instance.
If death certificates were issued, if religions did treat it as a death (which some do, btw, including some forms of Buddhism in Japan), then the analysis might be different. Indeed at least one prosecutor has indicted an individual for causing premature birth of a baby who died. So has another. And then there’s the Scott Peterson case. So AFAICS that’s very much a state-by-state issue today, even though it might not have been in Justice Clark’s day.
Some of his examples are open to question; the excerpt is used to show how “human life” is used by some people.
September 5, 2010, 11:44 amJoe says:
[Chris, part 2]
One might argue that one is never really required to sacrifice one’s life for another anyway. The question at seven months old would likely involve a question of whether life-saving methods must be applied after delivery. In fact even at six months, more than half of those born could be saved with appropriate medical intervention. Whether or not this is a good idea is another question.
Okay. Still, I’m saying that even if a “person” is involved, for argument sake, abortion might be allowed. A person can arguably be involved at two months and abortion allowed, out of some autonomy concern or whatever. The personhood of the embryo or fetus is not the end of the question.
Health is a more interesting question. Part of the problem here is that there is at least arguably a difference between sacrificing a little bit of sanity due to lack of sleep for three months, and serious, permanent physical health problems.
A late abortion is something of a risky procedure and safe medical practice (and medical norms is the test used in this context — see, e.g., Carhart) would not justify an abortion in such a case for generally trivial reasons. “Health” in this context would be a serious threat to health, not “lack of sleep” (unless that means TOTAL loss of sleep!) or some other trivial thing.
For example, I wouldn’t have a problem with the legislature requiring that abortions must be done within 30 days of discovering that one was pregnant
I find this a silly idea — so, if you find out, as you very well might now or at least not too far from now, that you are pregnant in the first month, even a first trimester abortion can be banned. I don’t know how you can prove how someone “discovers” they are pregnant anyways. Seems like a way to encourage people not to go to the doctor early on. Likewise, waiting periods, money issues and any number of matters can delay the final procedure here.
However, in later-term abortions, I would argue that doctrines such as necessity and parallels to self-defense come into play and that there is an inherent right not to sacrifice one’s life or long-term for another
Yes, that is my point — “personhood” of the fetus would not be the ultimate test.
September 5, 2010, 12:04 pmChris Travers says:
Ok. Just so we are clear.
I am trying to speak in categories, and words refer to categories. One major issue however, is that words are defined by usage and categories are often unclear. I think this is what you are getting at, in which case we probably agree on more than we disagree.
The difficulty I think is what Nietzsche referred to as the tyranny of words, namely that natural categories map to words only imprecisely and it is a good idea to keep that in mind (I don’t agree with Nietzsche on most things but in that area he is precisely correct), so we shouldn’t read too much into them.
So I guess I am trying to get at an anthropological pattern rather than a specific word as it is used today. What I am trying to say is that most cultures (medieval Christianity being an exception) have defined a point where a child is subject to the protections of society, and this is usually some time after birth. In our society we draw the same line but at some point before birth. Some states (and the federal government) still attempt to draw that line as early as conception for purposes other than abortion but it is not clear to me that these work.
This is also relevant to the question of corporal punishment because a different line is drawn regarding the right to be free from it in our society. This is every bit the same sort of line-drawing that abortion is, and it is scientifically arbitrary, but culturally cohesive.
September 5, 2010, 2:36 pmChris Travers says:
Shamelessly reordered….
Indeed, that’s one of its strengths.
I think the issue is that everyone has a mythological system that they use to make sense of life. The myth of social progress being a direct analog to technological progress is a major one in our society, and it’s held by both secular and religious folk. Some, like me, make a conscious attempt to break out of it, substituting traditional mythologies as well, but at the same time, breaking out of it entirely is not possible (or even necessarily desirable). The best that can happen is that we can see the myth for what it is: a non-scientific statement which values science as an end in itself, and tries unsuccessfully to tie social progress to that model. Seeing it for what it is, perhaps we can use scientific methods to see if certain things work as advertised (IMO corporal punishment studies are inadequately controlled, and might show correlation, but I see no reason to suppose from them that they support causation).
Completely agree.
September 5, 2010, 2:56 pmArthur Kirkland says:
What would be a good yardstick regarding evidence that an adult who beats a child has “crossed the line?”
September 5, 2010, 2:57 pmChris Travers says:
As a somewhat amateur anthropology fan one interesting thing to watch on this thread is how the same groups which believe that corporal punishment is an act of violence against a helpless person are the same groups which are likely to say abortion is not, and vice versa.
Everyone is going to say “But those are DIFFERENT! They aren’t comparable at all!” But the same sort of line drawing goes on on both sides. Sometimes it is worth noting that this and realizing we are all more alike than different.
September 5, 2010, 3:01 pmChris Travers says:
I think you have to look at both frequency and severity in objective terms. People who bruise easily shouldn’t be more protected by the laws than those who don’t.
September 5, 2010, 3:03 pmElemenope says:
Everyone is going to say “But those are DIFFERENT! They aren’t comparable at all!” But the same sort of line drawing goes on on both sides. Sometimes it is worth noting that this and realizing we are all more alike than different.
An interesting point. In many ways, the line-drawing exercise is similar, in that the arbitrary nature of the judgment of the concepts at issue is on full display. I would say, though, that they are distinguishable in that one is an argument over whether violence (in the classic sense) is being done, and the other is primarily an argument over whether the recipient of the violence is properly a person. I’d say the second definitional argument (“what is a person?”) has a more far-reaching impact beyond the immediate issue of abortion, than the other does regarding what violence is.
September 5, 2010, 6:17 pmDilan Esper says:
The problem with statements like “no true feminist” is that there is a great deal of disagreement within the feminist community about key issues, such as whether pornography is a problem, whether such is degrading to women, whether it is a problem is women choose to stay home, foregoing a career, in order to care for children, and the like.
I don’t think there’s much disagreement about the second point. But definitely there is disagreement about porn.
That said, the issues that conservative women like Alessandra and Theo raise are issues that there is little disagreement on within either academic or movement feminism. The only reason there is any confusion about this is that some conservative women who trash feminists all the time have nonetheless labeled themselves “feminist”.
September 5, 2010, 9:35 pmDilan Esper says:
First, medicine is not science in the true sense, but one of my friends who is in the field openly laughs at abortion advocates and their rationalisations — he talks about looking at what is in the womb using our amazing technology and what it means for the pro-life movement.
Theo, science compels neither a pro-choice nor a pro-life position. Science does provide TALKING POINTS for both sides, but the problem with pro-lifers is they are a bunch of liars when they pretend that science actually compels their position rather than providing talking points.
Here’s what I mean. DNA is a talking point for pro-lifers that was revealed by science. On the other hand, the process of identical twinning was a talking point for pro-choicers that was revealed by science.
Neither of these things prove that a zygote is or isn’t a person with a right to life. They just don’t. But pro-choicers, as far as I know, don’t pretend that twinning does prove that; pro-lifers, in contrast, pretend that DNA proves their case when it doesn’t.
September 5, 2010, 9:40 pmtheobromophile says:
Dilan: I know pro-choicers and atheists who think that twinning is a trump card, and pro-lifers who think that DNA does not make a prima facie case, but is a rebuttal argument to the “It’s her body” issue.
Second: the feminist thing kills you both ways, Dilan, and you just don’t get that. If feminism is really as anti-life as you say it is, then “feminists” are not speaking on behalf of most women, for their own good; they are explicitly fighting the wishes of the half of women out there, like Alessandra and me, who are pro-life. That’s not feminism; that’s leftism.
If pro-life women were a tiny minority, like less than 5% of women, I could understand where you are coming from, but we’re basically as pro-life as men are, which means that a majority (or very close to it) of us oppose abortion.
The other side of that which really screws your “feminism = boffing indiscriminately and killing your babies” ideology is that so-called feminists don’t even bother to figure out where we are coming from. Now, I know where they are coming from in their pro-abortion rhetoric, and that’s why I have zero desire to outlaw contraception: if a woman uses it and never gets pregnant in the first place, she’s happier, we’re happier, everyone wins. But the lefties don’t want to figure out where we are coming from and just stick their fingers in their ears when we say that abortion is a barbaric, backwards procedure that hurts women and children. You, Dilan, are a prime example of this – “Women want abortion so they can get on with their sex lives”.
September 6, 2010, 3:36 amChris Travers says:
Would it be accurate to say that “No true Christian believes the Arian heresy?”
September 6, 2010, 12:49 pmChris Travers says:
When you talk about pro-life vs pro-choice, are you talking about questions of policy or personal morality? Just trying to keep clear here.
One could argue that the desire to see abortions as safe, legal, and rare is a pro-life perspective.
September 6, 2010, 12:58 pmAlessandra says:
Exactly. I think the third criteria is currently perhaps the most important to be considered and fought for. And that’s what policy needs to target, especially concerning affluent, well-educated women.
September 6, 2010, 1:51 pmChris Travers says:
The key thing is that this provides a great deal of opportunity to use common ground between those who are pro-choice and those who are pro-life to make this happen. It means conducting research into things that drive the decision and working hard on policies which, while they don’t criminalize abortion, meet the needs of those making that choice today.
September 6, 2010, 2:47 pmElemenope says:
Would it be accurate to say that “No true Christian believes the Arian heresy?”
If it did, wouldn’t that have made Constantine not a True Christian?
September 6, 2010, 3:55 pmChris Travers says:
Constantine I or Constantine II?
September 6, 2010, 4:09 pmElemenope says:
Constantine I or Constantine II?
Constantine I. At the very least, he brought Arius out of exile, booted Athanasius, and IIRC was baptized by an Arian bishop.
Now that you mention it, wasn’t Constantine II also an Arian? [Edit] Whoops, I was thinking of Constantius II.
September 6, 2010, 4:33 pmDilan Esper says:
When you talk about pro-life vs pro-choice, are you talking about questions of policy or personal morality? Just trying to keep clear here. One could argue that the desire to see abortions as safe, legal, and rare is a pro-life perspective
Yeah. The polls that pro-lifers point to are sloppily worded– Roe polls very well, which suggests that people want it legal even if they don’t like it very much.
The other thing to note, of course, is that something can be (1) supported by many women and (2) bad for women. You’ll find many supporters of female genital mutilation among women living in societies where it is common– that hardly makes that the feminist position.
And lastly, you will actually find very few movement FEMINISTS, i.e., people who work on feminist causes, who are pro-life. (Bear in mind groups like feminists for life do not count, because they actually just exist to give conservatives cover to oppose abortion and don’t do any work on feminist causes.) The feminist movement– and feminist theory– sees this as a pretty important litmus test issue for women’s rights, because unplanned pregnancies ruin women’s lives and since no contraceptive is perfectly effective, the only way to avoid ever needing an abortion is to give up something that feminists believe you shouldn’t have to give up.
September 6, 2010, 7:12 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Actually, it suggests that people don’t know what Roe actually says, so they can read whatever they want into it.
People who actually study polling know that you don’t ask questions which assume people have specific knowledge.
September 6, 2010, 7:17 pmDilan Esper says:
The other side of that which really screws your “feminism = boffing indiscriminately and killing your babies” ideology is that so-called feminists don’t even bother to figure out where we are coming from.
The fact that you even characterize something that feminists think is so important in this trivializing fashion shows exactly where you are coming from, Theo.
And when I talk about feminism, this is really what I mean. Most opposition to abortion comes from people who share your values, Theo, i.e., people who believe that having full control of your sex life is akin to “boffing indiscriminately and killing your babies”. That’s fine– it’s a belief you share with many other conservatives including conservative women. But it is NOT a FEMINIST belief. Seriously, leaving aside the feminist movement, feminist scholarship dating all the way back to Simone de Beauvior has worked to try and destigmatize female sexuality. This is really a fundamental project of the movement. You can think that it is wrong, and that is not only your First Amendment right but you have many thoughtful people on your side. But this– along with issues of women’s roles in society– is really sort of the razor’s edge of the feminism/anti-feminism divide. Feminists believe that women get to separate sexuality and reproduction so that they can define their own sexual morality; anti-feminists believe that is selfish, over-indulgent, and immoral.
September 6, 2010, 7:20 pmDilan Esper says:
Actually, it suggests that people don’t know what Roe actually says, so they can read whatever they want into it. People who actually study polling know that you don’t ask questions which assume people have specific knowledge.
David, the problem with that argument is that political professionals, unlike pro-life activists, all think it is stupid. This is why pro-life national candidates ALWAYS downplay their beliefs, pro-life Supreme Court nominees ALWAYS say they believe in the right to privacy, Republican presidents NEVER attend the Roe v. Wade protest rally, etc. Every political consultant tells pro-life national candidates that if you come out for banning abortion, you are dead.
And since those guys KNOW how to read polls, that suggests that in fact the pro-life cause is an electoral dud outside very conservative precincts.
September 6, 2010, 7:25 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Perhaps, but the starting assumption should be that this isn’t the case. It’s awfully, er, paternalistic of “feminists” to think they know best for all women.
Of course, the corollary to your initial point is that something can be (1) supported by “movement feminists,” (2) not supported by feminists or women, and (3) bad for women. For instance, it could certainly be the case that there are no “feminist causes” because feminism has already achieved its goals, and “movement feminism” is just a group of radicals who have hijacked the term “feminism” for their own non-feminist agenda.
September 6, 2010, 7:50 pmDilan Esper says:
David:
I very much agree with you that “supported by feminists” does not automatically equal “good for women”. But if that were true in this instance, it would simply establish that feminists are wrong about abortion, not that pro-lifers are feminists.
September 6, 2010, 8:26 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
I think you have it backwards. Of course national candidates “downplay” their beliefs; the country is split on abortion and national candidates want to appeal to the broadest possible constituency. That’s true on both sides. Liberals, after all, hide behind the euphemisms “pro-choice,” without actually stating what choice they’re in favor of, or “right to privacy. Clinton felt the need to say that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare” — but it’s not clear why a politician should care whether they’re “rare” if there’s no moral component to abortion.
September 6, 2010, 8:57 pmElemenope says:
Clinton felt the need to say that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare” — but it’s not clear why a politician should care whether they’re “rare” if there’s no moral component to abortion.
Very few people believe there is no moral component to abortion. Rather, most people who argue for the legality of the practice merely think that those concerns do not outweigh other moral and/or social concerns that are produced by making the practice illegal.
September 6, 2010, 9:59 pmDilan Esper says:
Liberals, after all, hide behind the euphemisms “pro-choice,” without actually stating what choice they’re in favor of, or “right to privacy. Clinton felt the need to say that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare” — but it’s not clear why a politician should care whether they’re “rare” if there’s no moral component to abortion.
None of that is the same thing, because everyone knows that all those things add up to support for abortion rights. Indeed, if you ask them flat out whether abortion should be legal, every pro-choice national candidate says “yes”.
If you asked George W. Bush about whether abortion should be illegal, in contrast, he babbled something about changing hearts and minds and never answered the question.
I can tell you that I have a fair bit of knowledge about the thinking of political consultants, and if you ask any of the honest ones (INCLUDING pro-life ones), they will tell you that being in favor of making abortion illegal is a liability in a national election while supporting keeping it legal is not one.
September 6, 2010, 10:56 pmChris Travers says:
My point in asking this is that there seems to be a substantial number of people who believe that abortion is morally wrong but that the legality should be preserved because it can be a lesser evil. Are you saying this isn’t pro-life? Or are you saying it’s not feminist?
This is why I asked Theobromophile what exactly her position on the policy question was. Certainly the safe, legal, and rare formulation is one that even Alessandra (!) admits is pro-life, but I am sure you would admit is also pro-choice.
Why is this significant? Because it gives the folks who are both pro-choice (in terms of policy) and pro-life (in terms of moral view) common ground to work with both sides to reduce the number of abortions in this country but without criminalizing it.
September 7, 2010, 4:12 pmDilan Esper says:
My point in asking this is that there seems to be a substantial number of people who believe that abortion is morally wrong but that the legality should be preserved because it can be a lesser evil. Are you saying this isn’t pro-life? Or are you saying it’s not feminist?
Well, I don’t think movement pro-lifers consider it pro-life (they certainly don’t endorse politicians who espouse it), and I defer to them on what constitutes a pro-life position. I just wish they would defer to feminists as to what constitutes a feminist.
But I won’t deny that there are people who take the hedge that they are “pro-choice but anti-abortion” and some of them may call themselves “pro-life”. I just don’t think that’s really the operative definition of the term in political circles.
September 7, 2010, 9:48 pmAlessandra says:
hmmm A bit of a problem there. I did not say that the “safe, legal, and rare” formulation is pro-life. I claim no authority at defining exactly what these two terms entail (pro-life/pro-choice).
I said that for women who are educated and not poor, who have not been a victim of violence, there is generally no excuse for getting an unwanted pregnancy.
It’s like throwing fuel on a towel and then lighting a fire close by, so there is some chance that the towel will catch on fire. In the event that the towel catches on fire and the house does burn down, you ask the government to give you another house. And you call that a fundamental woman’s right.
What crap.
September 8, 2010, 8:06 am