Author Archive | Dale Carpenter

in Adler country, at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law on the subject of traditionalist conservatism and gay marriage. The speech is being sponsored by the student chapters of the Federalist Society, the Conservative Law Students Association, and the Lambda Law Students Association. It will begin at noon and food will be served.

These tests are pretty arbitrary as to your precise position on the ideological spectrum. Do one’s views on gay marriage get weighted just the same in the outcome as whether one thinks parents should use spanking as a form of discipline? Weighted more? Less? How much so? But the tests do tend to capture roughly […]

In an important op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, retired army general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993 to 1997, John Shalikashvili, concludes that the anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is unnecessary and should be phased out. Shalikashvili’s stand is especially significant because he was among the most influential opponents […]

The state assembly opted to give gay couples civil unions, rather than marriage. Expect another round of litigation in the state courts arguing that the bill does not go far enough.

The new Conservative government in Canada has lost its promised attempt to repeal same-sex marriage. The vote was even more favorable to gay marriage than it was in 2005, with more Conservatives voting for it than last time. This appears to end the matter in Canada: Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he heard the message […]

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are boards comprised mostly of faculty at an educational institution that review and approve/disapprove research involving human subjects to ensure that the research meets minimum ethical guidelines demanded by the institution and/or by federal regulations when the research is federally funded. While the most obvious concerns involve medical experimentation, the jurisdiction […]

It’ll happen Monday starting at 10 a.m. Eastern. You can watch it here. The briefs, including the amicus briefs, are available here.

David Bernstein notes a response by Daniel Stein and Charlotta Stern to a recent article in Public Opinion Quarterly: “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors,” by John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick. I have not yet looked at the Stein/Stern response, but I have looked at the […]

Last week I posted several times on the charitable donation patterns of redistributionists, the subject of one chapter in the book Who Really Cares and a peripheral issue in a paper of mine, Testing Social Dominance: Is Support for Capitalism and Opposition to Income Redistribution Driven by Racism and Intolerance? This week I will describe […]

For Thanksgiving 2004, I posted an account of the Massachusetts Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving in 1621. Last Thanksgiving, the New York Times ran a bizarre op-ed by Professor James E. McWilliams of Texas State University at San Marcos on our anachronistic views of the food served at the first Thanksgiving. McWilliams in the 2005 New York […]

I have been working through Arthur Brooks’ new book, Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide; Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. Some parts I’ve read carefully, while some parts I’ve merely skimmed. On balance, I think it is a good book, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have some problems with the […]

Last fall and winter, I circulated a paper on the relationship of people’s views on income redistribution and capitalism to traditional racism and to intolerance for unpopular groups. I presented it to Gary Becker’s and Dick Posner’s Rational Choice Workshop at the University of Chicago and to the Law, Economics, and Organization Workshop at Yale. […]

The Missouri polls have now been closed for 5 hours. There are still no votes from Kansas City. Overall, nearly 2/3rds of the Missouri precincts are reporting. Democracy at work!

The votes are coming in very slowly now. One county in VA (Craig County) has no reported votes yet (11 precincts). But Webb leads in all other VA counties with 3 or more precincts still out. I don’t know enough about Virginia (I lived there only 2 years) to know whether this is just a […]

2:25am: With more precincts in, Webb now leads by 7,800 votes. My crude model now predicts an eventual 8,200 Webb lead, which if the last four hours is any indication, is a significant under-estimate. 1:52am: With 99.6% of the precincts in, the Webb lead is growing even faster than my crude model is predicting. Webb’s […]