Obsidian Wings

Contrarian Double-Ex Hires Sociopath as Friendship Guru

By Lindsay Beyerstein

The self-proclaimed feminist website Double-X shrewdly hired noted sociopath Lucinda Rosenfeld to write its friendship advice column. This is precisely the kind of fresh, contrarian perspective we've come to expect from the Slate/Double-X brand.

Double-X racks up a lot of hits by hiring anti-feminists to diagnose the ills of contemporary feminism. Retaining a psychopath as a friendship guru is the logical next step.

Before taking the gig at Double-X, Rosenfeld produced a substantial body of anti-friend literature, including a novel about friends who despise each other (the official website even lets you stick pins in a flash voodoo doll!). She's also the author of How to Dump a Friend (2001) and Our Mutual Friend: how to steal friends and influence people (2004). Clearly, she's perfect for the job.

On Monday, Rosenfeld answered a later from a woman who woke up in the gutter after someone spiked her drink. She later learned that her friends ditched her after she went to the washroom and didn't come back. These same friends later refused to pick her up at the emergency room:

Later, when I called them from the street, sobbing in hysterics and asking for help, they told me to go back to the club and that they would have an ambulance pick me up there. When my mother—who lives 2,000 miles away (and hopped on a plane the next day to be with me)—later called these two friends of mine to beg them to join me while I was recovering, they refused. It wasn't until I told them that the hospital wouldn’t release me until I had someone to drive me home that they came to pick me up. They then angrily drove me to my car, and I drove home alone. By then, it was the next morning.

If the letter-writer were asking me, my utterly predictable, non-controversial response would be to tell her to get some new friends. Plodder that I am, I'd repeat the received feminist wisdom (/ethical person wisdom) that it's very, very wrong to shrug off the abrupt disappearance of a friend.

As for the ER, well, I warned you that I'm really boring. Basically, if you know me well enough to remember my number, drunk off your ass in the middle of the night, I'll come get you at the hospital. Heck, if my number is even in your phone, you can bet I won't just leave you at the county general. Then again, I was raised by hippies and steeped in annoyingly traditional values like loyalty and community. Snore.

Rosenfeld isn't afraid to turn the conventional wisdom on its head. Her advice: Harden the fuck up, loser. Don't expect anyone to rescue you from the ER unless you're related by blood or exchanging other bodily fluids on a regular basis. Please understand that if your rational, self-interested friends seem a little hostile, it's only because they sense it's your fault:

Wow, that’s a tough call. A spouse or even a boyfriend? Yes, it would be his or her duty to haul ass to said hospital at 4 a.m. But your single female friends who are already, presumably tucked in their beddy-bies? I have to admit that, if I got a call like yours (or your mother’s) in the middle of the night, I’d do what I could from home, but would be hard-pressed to jump in my car until morning. [...]

Here’s a little secret. BFFs are great when you’re upset about a boy/sick cat/whatnot. But there are limits to friendship—limits that don’t apply to our romantic partners or close family members. What I fault your friends for is not driving you all the way home the next morning, or at least following you there to make sure you got through the door on two feet. I also wish they’d been a less critical of what was, by your account, a freak incident. Why were they so unforgiving? I’d wager a guess that they think you’re lying about the mickey, tales of which are sometimes used as a cover for irresponsible behavior. (Only you know the truth.)

Being a sociopathic advice columnist is not without its challenges, however. Rosenfeld is perplexed that so many readers are sending her angry emails.

[HT: Jezebel, x-post at Majikthise]

Why Kidney Selling Bothers Me

by publius

I missed the latest round of the “should we sell our kidneys” debate.  To recap, various libertarian conservatives say yes, arguing that the donors’ health risks are small and that people really need kidneys.  The real challenge then, as John Schwenkler notes, is to justify the ban on kidney selling.

So I’ll try.  I’m not sure I can justify the actual ban – I lack the philosophical chops.  But I can get in the neighborhood, and maybe someone in the comments can punch it over the goal line.

The kidney debate interests me because it touches upon a much deeper and fundamental philosophical divide between modern progressives and conservatives (particularly libertarians).  The divide turns on one’s view of markets and, more precisely, freedom.  This divide, I think, is the original source of disagreement on several issues, particularly health coverage reform and labor law.

Modern libertarians subscribe to the old classic liberal worldview.  Under this view, there is a heavy emphasis on individual freedom.  Markets free from government intervention are good because they allow people to freely exchange goods, enter contracts, and generally do what they want – which has numerous benefits (efficient allocations, etc.).  The underlying assumption is that people can indeed act freely within this system.

One of the main critiques, however, of (classical) liberalism is that this underlying assumption is unrealistic, or even fraudulent.  It’s absurd, the argument goes, to treat people as being "free" within markets – to assume they are islands of self-contained free will exercising their rights equally.

The truth, critics argue, is that “free” markets obscure vast disparities in wealth, power, information, bargaining position, etc.  In this sense, the assumption of “freedom” is a helpful ideology, but not one that accurately describes the relative power of contracting parties.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say Wal-Mart decides to start offering people $5,000 per finger.  (Let’s assume scientists have found a chemical in finger bones that helps break unions).  Under the liberal view, everyone is “free” to take that offer or to decline it.  

But this “freedom” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  From an opportunity cost perspective, Wal-Mart’s offer exerts more force on someone with a salary of $25,000, than it does on someone who makes $100,000.  The former is essentially throwing away 20% of their yearly salary, while the latter is throwing away 5%.  Both individuals are “free” – but the lower income makes the offer harder to refuse for the $25K person.  It exerts more force on that person.  To say, then, that these two people are both “free” misses an important difference between them.

Of course, you can take this logic to some dangerous and absurd extremes.  You could, for instance, argue that Big Macs should be priced according to one’s income, or that various types of markets (e.g., house cleaning) should be prohibited.  But these are not things I want government to do.  I believe in markets, not necessarily because I completely buy the idea of “freedom,” but because I am skeptical that the government is competent to address these problems through central planning, extreme redistribution, etc.  The remedies are often worse than the problems.

But that said, there are areas where we need to draw the line on markets.  Just as liberalism’s goal was to carve out a realm of freedom from the state, it’s also important to carve out realms of freedom from coercive market logic.

Market failures are a different issue.  I’m sure a market for kidneys would work pretty well.  I’m just not sure I want market logic – which is necessarily coercive on some more than others – to intrude into the realm of body parts, or selling children.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure any of this is helpful.  I’ve basically said “there should be a line,” but I haven’t established whether kidney selling crosses that line.  Maybe someone else can.  But this hopefully at least explains where some liberals are coming from – not just on this issue, but on a whole host of political issues. 

The skepticism that everyone is free under classic liberalism is one of the foundational assumptions that leads me to root viscerally (often too viscerally) for progressive policies.  It also makes me relatively more inclined to favor regulation in certain contexts.

At the end of the day, I guess I feel similarly to Kevin Drum – it’s not so much kidneys that bother me.  It’s that I can easily imagine this logic spreading to things like eyes, or even children.  I can’t quite justify it, but the inherent coercion on poorer people seems like a bigger deal when we start trying to commodify body parts.  If only we had a real philosopher who blogged here….

O, What A Tangled Web We Weave

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"Senator John Ensign's wealthy parents gave almost $100,000 to his former lover and her family, ostensibly out of concern for their welfare and as part of a "pattern of generosity," his lawyer disclosed Thursday.

A statement by his lawyer, Paul Coggins, on behalf of the Mr. Ensign, a Republican from Nevada, said that in April 2008 the senator's parents each gave $12,000 apiece to Cindy Hampton, her husband, Doug, and two of their children in the form of a single check for $96,000.

"The payments were made as gifts, accepted as gifts and complied with tax rules governing gifts," the statement read. Under federal tax regulations, $12,000 is the most that a person can receive as a gift from any one person without having to declare or pay taxes on it."

I'm trying to imagine how the conversation between Sen. Ensign and his parents went. Senator Ensign is 51, old enough, I would have thought, to take care of his own problems. Is he in the habit of asking his parents for nearly a hundred thousand dollars? Why on earth didn't his parents do the sensible thing and tell him to deal with his problems himself? It's one thing to be prepared to bail your kids out when they are struck by meteorites, or get a serious illness, or something similarly unpredictable and costly. It's quite another to spend several times the US median income to get him out of a situation that he ought to have had the good sense never to get into. 

I'm not sure which is more extraordinary: that Sen. Ensign had so little self-respect that he was willing to ask his parents for help for this, or that his parents actually agreed. 

$96,000 is a lot of money. Interestingly, it is precisely the amount you can give as a gift without having to report it to the IRS, multiplied by eight: one gift of $12,000 from each parent to Ensign's lover, her husband, and two of their children. I wonder what the IRS will make of that? I certainly hope that neither of the parents has made use of their children's money, or done anything else to suggest that this was all one big gift split up to avoid paying gift tax, or (more likely) having to report the gift. It's bad enough asking your parents to cough up $96,000 to cover up your indiscretions; asking them to violate the tax code and risk prison is a whole lot worse.

On the other hand, if the $96,000 was all one big gift, then I don't have to feel so bad for the one Hampton child who mysteriously got no gift at all. (There are three. I believe the oldest is 19.) If the gifts were genuine, it might be hard to explain to that third child why his or her siblings just got $24,000 from Mommy's lover's parents while s/he got nothing at all, not to mention why Mommy's lover's parents suddenly started feeling so generous.

All these fascinating family conversations to imagine. So much easier to do things the straightforward way: don't have affairs, and if you do, deal with them yourself, by legal means. 

Fighting Words

by hilzoy

I am trying to figure out what would possess Erick Erickson to write something like this:

"You only thought leftists got excited when American soldiers got killed. As I’ve written before, leftists celebrate each and every death of each and every American solider because they view the loss of life as a vindication of their belief that they are right."

"Some" leftists, perhaps: there are a lot of people on the left, as there are on the right, and thus I imagine you could find members of either group who do any number of loathsome things. But Erick Erickson didn't write "some leftists." He wrote that "leftists celebrate each and every death of each and every American solider" [sic]. All of us. 

Even those of us who are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, or who have family or friends there. Even those of us whose family or friends have died. We all got excited. We celebrated. Each and every time a soldier died.

Duels have been fought for less.

I'm not interested in 'explanations' like: he's on the right, so of course he says idiotic things. Treating his opponents as one big undifferentiated cartoonish mass is part of what makes what Erick wrote so objectionable, and I have no interest in following his example. Nor is hyperbole a good explanation: it's not true that everyone on the left is happy when soldiers die, but that we don't go so far as to celebrate.

I think we can rule out the possibility that he believes this in good faith: that he asked himself, before writing this, "Is this really true?", thought about (for instance) the 44% of military voters who voted for Obama, liberals presently serving in combat, or the liberals on VetVoice, asked himself whether they actually celebrate when one of their own is killed in combat, and answered: "Yes."

He might be a pure hack, like those expert witnesses that the tobacco companies used to trot out to testify that nicotine is not addictive. But I suspect he's not.

The alternative is that he believes this in bad faith. Maybe, for him, writing blog posts has become a game: you score points when you can, and whether or not the things you write are actually true has ceased to be a concern. Or maybe hatred has got the better of him, like the person C. S. Lewis describes here:

"Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred." (Mere Christianity)

If you give in to "the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible", it's easy to see how you could end up thinking things about them that it is implausible to think about any group of human beings: for instance, that when a nineteen year old who enlisted because he wanted to serve his country gets blown up by an IED, your enemies think that that's cause for celebration. Your opponents become cartoons in your mind, and the normal duty to be charitable and generous, or even realistic, in your views about other people seem not to apply to them. You stop thinking of them as fellow human beings, and start thinking of them as enemies.

I suspect that this is the state of mind in which people laughed along with Rush Limbaugh when he said that Chelsea Clinton was "the family dog." No one who laughed at that could have been thinking of Chelsea Clinton as an actual adolescent girl whose looks were being ridiculed by the biggest talk radio host in the country. Had they done so, Limbaugh's sheer cruelty would have been obvious, and the only people who would have laughed are the kind of people who would laugh if they saw a dog being set on fire. 

But Chelsea Clinton wasn't a human being; she was an opponent. And Limbaugh was scoring points. And the thought that an actual girl, and one who had never asked to be in politics, was being made fun of on national radio probably never crossed their minds, any more than the thought of actual human beings who are liberals and who are, or care about, soldiers, crossed Erick's.

No one -- not liberals, not conservatives -- should forget that their opponents are human beings. And no one can afford to start down the road Lewis describes, in which you allow yourself to be disappointed when your opponents aren't as bad as you first thought, or want them to be as bad as possible. And no one should get so wrapped up in political fights that in focussing on the mote in someone else's eye, they lose sight of the beam in their own.

Outing Publius

by hilzoy

Publius and others have said most of what needs saying on the topic of outing bloggers. However, I did want to address this little gem from Ed Whelan:

"Law professor John Blevins (aka publius) and others seem to assume that I owed some sort of obligation to Blevins not to expose his pseudonymous blogging.  I find this assumption baffling.  A blogger may choose to blog under a pseudonym for any of various self-serving reasons, from the compelling (e.g., genuine concerns about personal safety) to the respectable to the base.  But setting aside the extraordinary circumstances in which the reason to use a pseudonym would be compelling, I don’t see why anyone else has any obligation to respect the blogger’s self-serving decision.  And I certainly don’t see why someone who has been smeared by the blogger and frequently had his positions and arguments misrepresented should be expected to do so.
 
Blevins desired to be unaccountable -- irresponsible -- for the views he set forth in the blogosphere.  He wanted to present one face to his family, friends, and colleagues and another to the blogosphere.  That’s understandable but hardly deserving of respect.  If he wanted to avoid the risk of being associated publicly with his views, he shouldn’t have blogged.  It’s very strange that angry lefties are calling me childish (and much worse) when it’s Blevins who was trying to avoid responsibility for his blogging."

Minor point first: "unaccountable" does not mean "irresponsible". You act irresponsibly when you do things that a responsible person would not do, whether you do them in propria persona or pseudonymously. You act unaccountably when there is no way to call you to account. Pseudonymous blogging is not necessarily either of these things: a pseudonymous blogger can be completely responsible, and can be held to account since s/he can be criticized, ridiculed, etc. under her pseudonym.

More importantly: in thinking about this issue, it's important to separate three distinct questions:

(1) Should people blog under pseudonyms?

(2) If someone blogs under a pseudonym, should s/he expect not to be outed?

(3) If you find out the real name of a pseudonymous blogger, should you reveal it?

Personally, I think that the answers to these questions are: (1) if they want to; (2) not if s/he has decent circulation, and (3) not absent a compelling reason. But one can give all sorts of different answers to these questions. For instance, you can think that people ought not to blog under pseudonyms, and should expect to be outed if they do, but also think that you, personally, ought not to reveal a pseudonymous blogger's name if you learn it. (Compare: it would be dumb to leave your house unlocked, at least in a city, and a person who does so should not expect that she will not be robbed, but it does not follow that you should just up and burglarize that person's house absent a good reason. If you did, it would be morally obtuse to say: well, what did you expect?)

I think there is a presumption that people should be able to decide for themselves what facts about themselves to reveal; and that decent people should respect this, absent some compelling reason not to. Of course, there are compelling reasons: if it turned out that an anonymous blogger on a white supremacist site was in fact the person in charge of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, that would be worth knowing. But absent some such reason, I think that people's own decisions about what to reveal should be respected. 

Thus, if I saw Whelan coming out of a DVD rental store with pornography, or found out by chance that he was HIV positive, I would think it wrong to publish those facts unless there was some very compelling reason to do so. Likewise, I would not publish his address and then, when he protested, write that he obviously wanted to avoid responsibility.

This is especially true when you do not know why someone has decided to keep something private. Whelan seems to acknowledge that there are situations in which someone might have good reasons for writing under a pseudonym: 

"But setting aside the extraordinary circumstances in which the reason to use a pseudonym would be compelling, I don’t see why anyone else has any obligation to respect the blogger’s self-serving decision."

By outing someone, you are deciding, on that person's behalf, to incur whatever consequences outing that person might have. If you don't know whether or not the 'extraordinary circumstances' Whelan mentions obtain, you ought to err on the side of caution, absent a strong reason for outing the person in question. 

Whelan did not know that no such circumstances obtained. On the contrary: publius wrote him an email saying that he blogged under a pseudonym "for a variety of private, family, and professional reasons". Those could easily include reasons that, by any reasonable standard, would justify the use of a pseudonym. But Whelan did not write back asking for further clarification. He just arrogated to himself the right to decide whether or not publius' name would be public, without having any idea at all what the consequences might be, and, apparently, without caring.

What Whelan did added nothing to his or anyone else's arguments about the law. He had no reason to do this, other than pique. He outed publius as a law professor, but he also outed himself as a petulant bully. I hope he likes the publicity.

PS: For Ed Whelan: Don't bother trying to out me. It's already been done.

Operation Rescue

by hilzoy

Here's an article on the kinds of things other than assassination attempts, vandalism, and break-ins that Dr. Tiller and his staff have had to endure for years. It's about Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue (once Operation Rescue West; the group split), who moved to Wichita in order to shut George Tiller's clinic down:

"There's only one problem: Tiller is a hard man to find, let alone intimidate. After more than a decade as one of the anti-abortion movement's favorite targets, he keeps a low profile, drives an armored car and lives in a gated community in a house with a state-of-the-art security system. More pointedly, he has made it clear that he's not susceptible to scare tactics. In 1993, Tiller was shot in both arms by an anti-abortion protester. He returned to work the next day.

Newman is well aware of Tiller's resilience. That's why Operation Rescue is going after clinic workers like Sara Phares. The employees have no guards posted at their homes, no cameras monitoring their yards. If Newman can provoke enough of them to quit, his job will be done. He'll effectively shut Tiller down."

Here's how he tries to get them to quit. Sarah Phares is an administrative assistant at the clinic:

"A week later, hundreds of Phares' neighbors received an anonymous postcard of a mangled fetus. This is abortion! read the big block letters. "Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these." The postcard implored them to call Phares, whose phone number and address were provided, and voice their opposition to her work at the clinic. Another card soon followed. It referred to Phares as "Miss I Help to Kill Little Babies" and suggested, in an erratic typeface that recalled a kidnapper's ransom note, that neighbors "beg her to quit, pretty please." The third postcard dispensed entirely with pleasantries: "Sara Phares is not to be trusted! Tell her to get a life!" (...)

Before long, protesters from Operation Rescue showed up at her house. They parked a tractor-trailer across the street, plastered with twenty-foot-long images of dismembered fetuses. From its speakers came the kind of sweet, tinkling music that lures children from their back yards in pursuit of Dreamsicles. One protester, a somber man in a tan windbreaker with a three-foot crucifix thrust before him, performed an exorcism on Phares' front lawn, sprinkling holy water on the grass to cast demons from the property. Phares, a small-boned woman with an irreverent sense of humor, joked about the exorcism. "Wish he'd held off on that holy water till after we'd put the fertilizer down," she said. But her husband wasn't amused. Since 1994, there have been five assassination attempts on abortion providers at their homes. A few days after the protest, Phares' husband got out his revolver, loaded it and taught Sara how to use it. (...)

After a brief prayer asking that Phares hear their message of "gentle rebuke," everyone caravans over to her neighborhood, five cars plastered with bumper stickers condemning abortion and extolling the Ten Commandments. Bringing up the rear is the Truth Truck. For maximum exposure, they stop on a busy street that funnels traffic toward the cul-de-sac where Phares lives. It's a treeless neighborhood, its fresh brick apartment complexes christened with optimistic names such as Cedar Lakes. The protesters display their signs for passing cars. "Phares' Choice," one proclaims, over a picture of tiny, bloody body parts. Another reads, "Sarah Phares, Abortion Profiteer," misspelling her name and giving her address. The image on Jeff Herzog's sign is particularly disturbing: a fetus being grabbed by forceps, its mouth open in a Munchian scream."

And:

"Newman and his small staff of zealous pro-lifers are buzzing with the news that the clinic's office manager has quit -- a result, they believe, of their name-and-shame campaign. The manager had been accosted by a neighbor in a grocery store who recognized her from an Operation Rescue flier that featured her photo. "You're that baby killer!" the neighbor screamed at her. Then Newman, through investigative methods he'd rather not reveal, discovered where the woman's husband works. "We think that's what clinched it," he says. "He probably realized we were going to picket his workplace. I imagine he's the major breadwinner in the family, and he didn't want to risk his job.""

If you read the whole story, you can find out how Newman threatened the Tillers' dry cleaner and a cab company that sometimes took patients to and from the clinic:

"Newman then tells him, in the most courteous tone imaginable, that he might see a few people outside the company holding signs. Just to let everybody know what he's participating in. "It's not personal," Newman says gently."

They also go through employees' trash, and offer rewards for incriminating information. They stop children on sidewalks and tell them their neighbors kill little babies. 

Scott Roeder, who seems to be the suspect in Tiller's murder, posted on Operation Rescue's website. Operation Rescue has denounced the murder. They write:

"We are shocked at this morning's disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller's family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ."

I just thought it would be useful to clarify exactly which "peaceful, legal means" they had used, and what Dr. Tiller and his staff had had to live with.

I am strongly pro-choice, but I think it is perfectly possible to be opposed to abortion on principled grounds, and I think that it would be an enormous mistake to conflate all people who are opposed to abortions with either Dr. Tiller's killer or the likes of Operation Rescue. That said, large elements of the anti-abortion movement have never done nearly enough to distance themselves from the violent and/or crazy parts of their movement. I hope they start to now.

Dr. George Tiller

by hilzoy

My thoughts are with the family of Dr. George Tiller, who was killed today. 

I'm not sure how many doctors still perform late-term abortions in this country -- one and two seem to be the most common estimates. This is, of course, due to the campaign of terrorism that has been waged against them. I cannot imagine the courage it takes to go on doing what you think is right in the face not only of consistent harassment and death threats, but of actual attempts on your life. 

Why go on doing it? Here's one reason:

"Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.

We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. I could describe in great detail the procedures and the pain and suffering that everyone is subjected to in these situations. However, that is not the point of the post. We can all imagine that this is not something that we would wish on anyone. The point is that the pain and suffering were only mitigated by the compassion and competence of Dr. George Tiller and his staff. We are all diminished today for a host of reasons but most of all because a man of great compassion and courage has been lost to the world."

Here's another:

"A routine ultrasound on October 26--meant to be a time of great joy (my best friend came with us to the appointment--revealed terrible news: one of the twins had died, probably about a week before. We went from the ultrasound appointment to my obstetrician's office and were met with even more grim news. My weight had spiked up about 18 pounds, my blood pressure was soaring, and I had protein in my urine.

It turned out that I was in full-blown preeclampsia. I was admitted to the hospital immediately.

After that, everything happened very quickly. I was put on medication (magnesium sulfate) in an attempt to treat the preeclampsia and save the remaining twin until he reached outside-the-womb viability--a mere two weeks away (I was just over 22 weeks pregnant). But I got much worse overnight; my blood pressure couldn't be controlled, I had a massive headache and was vomiting uncontrollably. My kidneys shut down. I was moments away from seizures, coma, and death when the doctors came and told us the bad news: my remaining twin could not be saved. My pregnancy had to be terminated or both the baby and I would die.

You might, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, be able to imagine what it felt like to be my husband--to imagine being terrified of losing your children and your wife in one fell swoop. Ms. Clinton, you might be able to imagine lying in the hospital, so sick you barely feel any of what is happening, only knowing that the long-fought-for children you so desperately wanted are now both going to be dead.

Here's the part of the story where choice comes in. I could, of course, have gone through induced labor and delivered my tiny twins. But my blood pressure was hovering around 165/120 (often going higher), even with treatment. Can you imagine what labor would have done to my body with blood pressure that high? My doctor recommended, and I agreed, that I undergo the much less stressful intact dilation and extraction procedure (...)

As I lay on the gurney, waiting for my procedure to start, I felt a gulf of grief and emptiness the like of which I have never known. I felt abandoned by God. I lay there, crying, alone, surrounded by doctors and nurses. You can't imagine the sadness.

I was lucky. Are you surprised that I would say that? I was lucky because the partial-birth abortion ban was not yet in effect in October of 2004. If it had been, I would have been forced to undergo labor and delivery, no matter the risks to my health, and I might right now be either dead or so brain damaged I would be unable to type this."

And this:

"I also know a woman who had two "partial-birth abortions," or D&Xs (dilation and extraction) as they are more accurately called. My friend Tiffany is a carrier of a terrible genetic abnormality. In addition to other defects, her babies developed with no faces, with no way to eat or breathe. They were doomed. The only way to extract them without hurting her chances of ever having another baby was through a D&X."

And this essay that I will never forget, about a woman whose child died in her womb, and who couldn't find anyone to do a dilation and evacuation, the safest procedure for someone in her condition, because it was too controversial:

"I could feel my baby's dead body inside of mine. This baby had thrilled me with kicks and flutters, those first soft tickles of life bringing a smile to my face and my hand to my rounding belly. Now this baby floated, limp and heavy, from one side to the other, as I rolled in my bed.

And within a day, I started to bleed. My body, with or without a doctor's help, was starting to expel the fetus. Technically, I was threatening a spontaneous abortion, the least safe of the available options.

I did what any pregnant patient would do. I called my doctor. And she advised me to wait. (...)

On my fourth morning, with the bleeding and cramping increasing, I couldn’t wait any more. I called my doctor and was told that since I wasn’t hemorrhaging, I should not come in. Her partner, on call, pedantically explained that women can safely lose a lot of blood, even during a routine period.

I began calling labor and delivery units at the top five medical centers in my area. I told them I had been 19 weeks along. The baby is dead. I'm bleeding, I said. I'm scheduled for a D&E in a few days. If I come in right now, what could you do for me, I asked.

Don’t come in, they told me again and again. "Go to your emergency room if you are hemorrhaging to avoid bleeding to death. No one here can do a D&E today, and unless you're really in active labor you’re safer to wait.""

Why didn't her own Ob/Gyn do the procedure? 

"I can't do these myself," said my doctor. "I trained at a Catholic hospital."

George Tiller endured decades of terrorism to help women like these, women in unspeakably awful situations whom very few people were willing to help, given the price domestic terrorists had decided that anyone who helped them would have to pay. Now he has given his life. 

Barbarians At The Gate, Barbarians In Your Heart

by hilzoy

A couple of weeks ago, Rod Dreher wrote an article about what he calls our "astonishing, and astonishingly rapid, cultural collapse" in the face of "a barbaric mainstream culture that has grown hostile to our fundamental values":

"Conservatives have worked so hard over the past few decades to fight for civilized standards against a short checklist of modern barbarisms -- abortion, gay marriage, political correctness, and so forth. What we failed to consider was that we had become barbarians ourselves."

What Dreher means is that conservatives have "accepted rootlessness", worshipped capitalism uncritically, and so forth. I agree on those points, more or less (and with exceptions), but of course I think that many of the conservatives Dreher is talking about are becoming barbaric in other ways as well. I thought about this as I read this article in the NYT, about one manifestation of what Dreher calls barbarism: two women who were fixed up while one was out of town, and who fell in love over email:

"Ms. Diaz said she was at first "a little sheepish about telling people" of their love before first sight. But a little more than a year later, on May 8, the couple were legally married by Jeanne Laughlin, a Connecticut justice of the peace, in a conference room at the Stamford Government Center.

They exchanged yellow pipe-cleaner rings, saving their engraved gold bands for their public ceremony the next day, when Mr. Rogers -- who had introduced them -- led them through their vows in the three-story atrium of 632 on Hudson, an event space in a 19th-century New York town house.

"All my life I searched for you, but never thought I'd find you,” Ms. Adamick said. "All my life I dreamed of you, but never dreamed you were real."

Mr. Rogers said, "You may both kiss the bride," and their 96 friends and family cheered as the couple smiled exuberantly.

"My cheeks physically hurt since I’ve known her," Ms. Diaz said, her radiance undiminished.

But she was troubled. "Part of my identity is being a cynical New Yorker and hard-bitten lawyer," she said. "By being so happy, am I going to lose my edge?""

Read the whole thing: it's so sweet that I began to wonder whether it might cause tooth decay. Then ask yourself: what sort of person would not only forswear gay marriage for him- or herself, but actively work to deny this kind of happiness to those who do not share his or her religious views? Why would anyone think that this story is a threat to Western civilization? If two women in their forties want to get married, what sort of person would think that allowing them to do so brings the barbarians one step closer to the walls?

Dreher wonders: "How do you argue persuasively for a politics based on traditional virtue in a therapeutic postmodern capitalist culture where individual autonomy -- especially in matters sexual and economic -- is widely considered the highest good?" I don't think this is all that hard. You just try to make the best case you can for honor and decency, and to work out the difference between valuing individual autonomy -- the kind that allows Dreher to choose a set of religious beliefs that he thinks are deeply out of fashion -- and thinking that anything goes.

It helps, though, to take seriously the possibility that one has become a barbarian oneself, and that, as Dreher notes, one way to do this is to define others as barbarians in order to remove oneself from scrutiny. This is a standing danger for anyone who cares about morality, and the only defense against it that I'm aware of is to question your own motives, and never to forget that the place where you can most effectively combat barbarism is in your own heart and your own life.

If I were Dreher, I would ask myself: of all the things in the world to be concerned about, why on earth would this couple's happiness be anywhere near the top of the list? Even if you were concerned above all with sexual morality, why not argue against people who don't treat sex or human relationships with the respect they deserve, rather than inveighing against two women who want to cleave to one another, forsaking all others, until death do them part?

Christ commanded his followers to love one another. There are plenty of things that Christians disapprove of in which love plays no part: anger, pride, envy, cruelty, vanity. The worst a Christian should say about these two women is that while, by loving one another and taking their love fully seriously, they get one very important thing very, very right, by falling in love with the wrong person, they have gotten another thing somewhat wrong. Of course, if these women are not Christian, or take a different view of the handful of passages in the Bible that concern homosexuality, they might not agree, which makes Dreher's desire to impose his religious views on them all the more peculiar. (He would surely not accept my right to impose secularism on him, supposing I had any desire to do so.) 

But even in Christian terms, why not concentrate on any one of the innumerable things in which there is much less good to be found, if any, rather than trying to force his views on people who are genuinely in love, want only to be able to marry, and do not accept any of the religious views on which Rod bases his view that gay marriage is wrong? 

Repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

by hilzoy

Lt. Daniel Choi, who recently came out as gay, wrote a letter to Barack Obama, citing the values of honesty and integrity that he learned at West Point, and asking: "Please do not wait to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Please do not fire me." But he also makes some very good points about the effect of DADT on the Army itself:

"I have personally served for a decade under Don't Ask, Don't Tell: an immoral law and policy that forces American soldiers to deceive and lie about their sexual orientation. Worse, it forces others to tolerate deception and lying. These values are completely opposed to anything I learned at West Point. Deception and lies poison a unit and cripple a fighting force.

As an infantry officer, an Iraq combat veteran and a West Point graduate with a degree in Arabic, I refuse to lie to my commanders. I refuse to lie to my peers. I refuse to lie to my subordinates. I demand honesty and courage from my soldiers. They should demand the same from me. (...)

The Department of the Army sent a letter discharging me on April 23rd. I will not lie to you; the letter is a slap in the face. It is a slap in the face to me. It is a slap in the face to my soldiers, peers and leaders who have demonstrated that an infantry unit can be professional enough to accept diversity, to accept capable leaders, to accept skilled soldiers.

My subordinates know I'm gay. They don't care. They are professional.

Further, they are respectable infantrymen who work as a team. Many told me that they respect me even more because I trusted them enough to let them know the truth. Trust is the foundation of unit cohesion. (...)

Do not fire me because my soldiers are more than a unit or a fighting force -- we are a family and we support each other. We should not learn that honesty and courage leads to punishment and insult. Their professionalism should not be rewarded with losing their leader. I understand if you must fire me, but please do not discredit and insult my soldiers for their professionalism."

It has always seemed obvious to me that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is immoral and discriminatory. But I've never understood why it isn't clear that it's also an insult to the professionalism of the military. The very idea that our soldiers should not be quite capable of subordinating their personal beliefs to the needs of their unit is as insulting. The idea that if some of them can't, we should fire the people they object to rather than the ones who cannot be counted on to put their jobs first, is just bizarre.

That said, I am wary of asking Obama to simply set aside a law, however misguided. I didn't like it when Bush did that, and I don't like it now. The idea of suspending it while the administration "studies" it seems like a disingenuous way to get around the law. The Palm Center (pdf) has (what might be) a better idea:

"The President has the authority to issue an executive order halting the operation of "don't ask, don't tell." Under 10 U.S.C. § 12305 ("Authority of the President to Suspend Certain Laws Relating to Promotion, Retirement, and Separation"), Congress grants the President authority to suspend the separation of military members during any period of national emergency in which members of a reserve component are serving involuntarily on active duty."

I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether this would work, but if it could, Obama should use it. (Unlike the idea of studying DADT, this would not be a dodge: we do need, for instance, Arabic linguists like Lt. Choi.)

Whether or not Obama can legally suspend DADT, though, Congress plainly can. HR 1283, which would repeal DADT, is still in committee. Nancy Pelosi should move it as quickly as possible. While Congress dawdles, people's careers are being ended. And that's not right.

Conflict Of Interest

by hilzoy

There is just no way that this ought to have been allowed:

"The Federal Reserve Bank of New York shaped Washington's response to the financial crisis late last year, which buoyed Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street firms. Goldman received speedy approval to become a bank holding company in September and a $10 billion capital injection soon after.

During that time, the New York Fed's chairman, Stephen Friedman, sat on Goldman's board and had a large holding in Goldman stock, which because of Goldman's new status as a bank holding company was a violation of Federal Reserve policy.

The New York Fed asked for a waiver, which, after about 2½ months, the Fed granted. While it was weighing the request, Mr. Friedman bought 37,300 more Goldman shares in December. They've since risen $1.7 million in value. (...)

Mr. Friedman, who once ran Goldman, says none of these events involved any conflicts. He says his job as chairman of the New York Fed isn't a policy-making one, that he didn't consider his purchases of more Goldman shares to conflict with Fed policy, and bought shares because they were very cheap."

Whatever Mr. Friedman might think, having a director of the New York Fed serving on the board of Goldman Sachs, and owning 98,600 shares of Goldman Sachs, became an obvious conflict of interest once Goldman became a bank holding company. The New York Fed regulates banks and bank holding companies headquartered in New York, New Jersey, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, and enforces laws governing them, in addition to doing various other things that can affect their share prices. Goldman Sachs is a bank holding company headquartered in New York. I'm not sure how a conflict of interest could be more obvious than that.

In saying this, I do not mean to impugn Mr. Friedman's motives. I don't know Mr. Friedman. For all I know, he is a pillar of rectitude and a prince among men. That doesn't matter. For one thing, owning stock in a company you regulate can influence you without your awareness. In fact, it's hard to see how owning so much stock that a mere $1 change in the stock price means that your net worth goes up by nearly $100,000 could fail to affect your thinking, however hard you tried. 

Moreover, even if you do manage to completely wall your decisions off from any such influence, conscious or unconscious, no one other than God can be certain of that. And if there's reason for people to wonder whether your decisions are influenced by your stock holdings, those decisions will be suspect. 

The legitimacy of the Fed's decisions is very important. The Fed and its subordinate banks are unaccountable bodies with enormous powers. It matters both that their decisions be, and that they be believed to be, made without undue influence by politicians, bankers, or anyone else. It will not survive otherwise. The fact that it has not seemed to be independent either of politicians or of Wall Street recently is a very big problem. It needs to be dealt with directly. But the least we can expect is that its directors not make things worse by having large and obvious conflicts of interest.