How increased transparency can improve security while empowering individuals

Here's science journalist John Horgan's vision:

Several years ago, the U.S. intelligence services created Intellipedia, a Wikipedia-style website where spies from the FBI, CIA, NSA and other federal agencies can swap information, ideas, speculations related to national security and seek communal consensus. The program was intended to break down the communication barriers that hindered security agencies from preventing 9/11. Intellipedia is called “open-source spying,” but it isn’t open at all; only people with security clearances can access the site, which contains classified information.

The world needs—and will soon have—a truly open-source, unclassified, grass-roots Intellipedia, which will publish information on threats to humanity, whether criminal gangs or corporations, religious cults or governments. The site will post reports from any sources, including non-profits such as Human Rights Watch, international organizations such as the U.N., the media, governments, corporations, and credible individuals. Reports may include satellite and cell-phone images, data from radiation and chemical sensors, transcripts of conversations, records of purchases of potential weapons components, and any other relevant evidence.

Ubiquitous, omni-directional surveillance may remind some of George Orwell’s Oceania or Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, dystopias in which central authorities keep citizens under constant scrutiny. But the whole point of omni-directional surveillance is to eliminate traditional, Big Brother-ish agencies like the CIA and KGB, whose secrecy enables abuses of power. Surveillance will be omni-directional; the public will know everything about the police and other governmental authorities, and vice versa.

Privacy—and the right of civilians to bear arms–is a small price to pay for peace, especially since we’re headed toward radical transparency anyway.

Sounds good to me.

Do women earn less money than men for equal work?

Economics professor Nancy Folbre says they do, in this blog post that the New York Times' website published yesterday. At the top of her post, she claims:

Tuesday is the day on which women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the preceding week. On average, female workers have to put in more than six days of paid work to earn what men earn in five.

Among those who usually worked full time during the first quarter of 2009, women’s median weekly earnings were 79 percent those of men. That implies that the catch-up clock for them rings at about 10:38 a.m. on Tuesdays (assuming a standard five-day week and eight-hour day starting at 8 a.m.).

Some women earn less than men because they choose less lucrative occupations or take more time out from employment. But a 2003 Government Accountability Office study controlling statistically for these factors showed that women’s average pay between 1983 and 2000 flat-lined at about 80 percent of men’s over the entire period.

You'll notice that her link on the word "study" goes to this PDF of the 2003 U.S. government report. Well, if you actually click the link and read the report, you'll find that her summary is literally correct but misleading. The authors conceded that while they tried to control for confounding factors, they might have failed to adequately consider others:

[W]omen have fewer years of work experience, work fewer hours per year, are less likely to work a full-time schedule, and leave the labor force for longer periods of time than men. Other factors that account for earnings differences include industry, occupation, race, marital status, and job tenure....

Even after accounting for key factors that affect earnings, our model could not explain all of the difference in earnings between men and women. Due to inherent limitations in the survey data and in statistical analysis, we cannot determine whether this remaining difference is due to discrimination or other factors that may affect earnings. For example, some experts said that some women trade off career advancement or higher earnings for a job that offers flexibility to manage work and family responsibilities.

In conclusion, while we were able to account for much of the difference in earnings between men and women, we were not able to explain the remaining earnings difference. It is difficult to evaluate this remaining portion without a full understanding of what contributes to this difference. Specifically, an earnings difference that results from individuals’ decisions about how to manage work and family responsibilities may not necessarily indicate a problem unless these decisions are not freely made. On the other hand, an earnings difference may result from discrimination in the workplace or subtler discrimination about what types of career or job choices women can make. Nonetheless, it is difficult, and in some cases, may be impossible, to precisely measure and quantify individual decisions and possible discrimination. Because these factors are not readily measurable, interpreting any remaining earnings difference is problematic.

Now, maybe you think 80% is such a huge discrepancy that it couldn't plausibly be explained by unmeasured factors.

But that's an old report -- it only looked at data up to 2000. The GAO released a new report yesterday that looks at data from as recently as 2007 and suggests that we should be much more optimistic:

GAO used data from the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) Central Personnel Data File (CPDF)--a database that contains salary and employment data for the majority of employees in the executive branch. GAO used these data to analyze (1) "snapshots" of the workforce as a whole at three points in time (1988, 1998, and 2007) to show changes over a 20-year period, and (2) the group, or cohort, of employees who began their federal careers in 1988 to track their pay over a 20-year period and examine the effects of breaks in service and use of unpaid leave....

The gender pay gap--the difference between men's and women's average salaries--declined significantly in the federal workforce between 1988 and 2007. Specifically, the gap declined from 28 cents on the dollar in 1988 to 19 cents in 1998 and further to 11 cents in 2007. For the 3 years we examined, all but about 7 cents of the gap can be explained by differences in measurable factors such as the occupations of men and women and, to a lesser extent, other factors such as education levels and years of federal experience. The pay gap narrowed as men and women in the federal workforce increasingly shared similar characteristics in terms of the jobs they held, their educational attainment, and their levels of experience. For example, the professional, administrative, and clerical occupations--which accounted for 68 percent of all federal jobs in 2007--have become more integrated by gender since 1988. Some or all of the remaining 7 cent gap might be explained by factors for which we lacked data or are difficult to measure, such as work experience outside the federal government. Finally, it is important to note that this analysis neither confirms nor refutes the presence of discriminatory practices.

GAO's case study analysis of workers who entered the workforce in 1988 found that the pay gap between men and women in this group grew overall from 22 to 25 cents on the dollar between 1988 and 2007. As with the overall federal workforce, differences between men and women that can affect pay explained a significant portion of the pay gap over the 20-year period. In particular, differences in occupations explained from 11 to 19 cents of the gap over this period.

Prof. Folbre acknowledges this study and blandly recites a few of its findings, but she buries it under her sweeping, sensationalistic announcement that women need to work till "10:38 a.m." on Tuesday of a second week to catch up to what men make in one week.

She also asserts that "the pay gap is narrower among federal employees than in the work force as a whole." Her theory for why this is the case: "Job descriptions are more standardized in government employment, and salaries are a matter of public record."

But is that what's really going on? Is federal government hiring more enlightened than hiring in America as a whole?

Or is it simply easier to effectively control for variables when you're looking at a narrower slice of the whole job market?

A commenter on her post ("Milton Recht") gives some specific reasons to think so:

[T]he reason that non-government job studies show a greater gender wage difference that the government sector is that the statistics on private sector wages do not include the employer cost of benefits as part of the wage. All government jobs provide about equal benefits.

Studies are published that show women on average will choose a job with better benefits over higher salary and men on average choose jobs with higher salaries over better benefits. The same studies show that men on average will choose a job without health benefits for higher salaries and women on average will not.

When private sector benefits are adjusted to include employer cost of benefits, the private sector difference shrinks to about the same seven percent difference as government wages....

[T]here are probably valid non-observed, non-discriminatory variables for the pay gap. Otherwise, any employer would be foolish not to hire the cheaper labor if it were comparable in every other aspect except gender.

I realize he's referring to "studies" without mentioning or linking to them, so I'm skeptical of his specific claims. But his theory seems more plausible to me than Prof. Folbre's conclusions, even though she links to several empirical studies.

[UPDATE: Since I wrote that, Milton Recht dropped by in the comments of this post and added details: "A January 2009 Department of Labor study (link below) that studies of gender wage discrimination do not include total compensation." He quotes from the study:

Specifically, CONSAD’s model and much of the literature, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics Highlights of Women’s Earnings, focus on wages rather than total compensation. Research indicates that women may value non-wage benefits more than men do, and as a result prefer to take a greater portion of their compensation in the form of health insurance and other fringe benefits.]

More citations, links, and figures don't necessarily add up to a better analysis. For instance, Prof. Folbre's link to support her claim that women overall catch up on Tuesday at 10:38 a.m. doesn't seem to make any attempt to control for confounding factors. The report she links to simply says:

Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $649 per week, or 78.9 percent of the $823 median for men.

That's essentially meaningless if we don't know a lot more details about what kinds of jobs they had, what their credentials were, and how much they worked. (Perhaps the study secretly controlled for these factors, but if so, it's not apparent from the link.) Of course, Prof. Folbre emphasizes these findings over the GAO reports.

It's nice to link to multiple studies and invoke the principle of controlling for variables. But if you ultimately cherry-pick the gloomiest-sounding figures you can find, and -- whoops! -- by the way, forget about those pesky variables, context, and alternate explanations based on factors other than sexism ... then you've given up any pretense to empirical validity.


UPDATE: Comments over here.

Blogs vs. "continuous eloquence"

Blaise Pascal said:

Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant.

(Quoted by Ambivablog.)

My initial reaction to this quote was: this is a huge problem with blogging. You can't do consistently eloquent posts while making a large audience want to keep reading on a regular basis.

But then I thought: no, it really explains the problem with books, and blogs are the perfect antidote. Even the best blogs are rarely if ever "continuously eloquent," but that's a good thing.

Blogs put more of a burden on readers to make their own judgments about what's worth reading and where the real truth is. Books and blogs both consist of the same basic substance: human thought expressed in language (with maybe a picture here and there). But only a book seems to beg its audience to revere it as a grand accomplishment. Blogs are criticized as incomplete and lacking in credibility, and it's fine to point out those flaws, but only if we also recognize them as virtues.

People who have a knack for "continuous eloquence" have a dangerous power, because they can lull you into beliefs that have little basis but the eloquence itself.

Rap, gender, race, and degradation

"OM," writing on the excellent website Butterflies and Wheels, says:

I wrote to the women's studies list yesterday to ask for thoughts on sexist epithets....

Here's one of the replies she got:

"Recently, I was standing at the bus stop with a young man who was singing along to rap music. Suddenly, he yelled "Bitch!" and I almost ran for cover.

But he was just singing along to the music.

Can anyone wonder why young women are treated so badly when the music kids listen to describes them as bitches, evil, and mean?"

This degradation -- of women and society -- reminds me of an anecdote recounted by John McWhorter in this column from 2003:

Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.

What struck me most was how fully the boys’ music - hard-edged rap, preaching bone-deep dislike of authority - provided them with a continuing soundtrack to their antisocial behavior. So completely was rap ingrained in their consciousness that every so often, one or another of them would break into cocky, expletive-laden rap lyrics, accompanied by the angular, bellicose gestures typical of rap performance. A couple of his buddies would then join him. Rap was a running decoration in their conversation.

Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn’t be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.

PREVIOUSLY: "My problem with rap."

Who cares about blasphemy? Who'd want immortality?

I don't read novels anymore now that I'm not required to for school. So I'm grateful when people who do read them excerpt some of the good parts. Example:

She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy, for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence.

That's from Michal Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, quoted by LemmusLemmus on his blog, The Church of Rationality. He gives the obvious solution:

[A]nti-blasphemy rules were not made by and for gods, but by and for believers.

Once you decide that it's OK to rationally scrutinize religion, the flaws become so obvious that, whether or not you're a believer, it feels a little embarrassing.

Another one:

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

That's from Susan Ertz's Anger in the Sky, excerpted in the Yale Book of Quotations, via AskMetafilter.

Here's what I don't understand about how Heaven fits in with Christianity: I thought Christians justify the existence of evil in the world by saying you need free will to allow for goodness, and free will leads to evil human behavior. If Heaven is free of evil, doesn't that also mean people in Heaven aren't free, and doesn't that mean Heaven isn't very good?

Overheard in Albany, NY: sotto voce by the espresso machine

Cafe worker 1: Did he say if he wants room for cream in his Americano?

Cafe worker 2: I'd leave a little room — he looks like he takes cream.

"This LP is basically not very good."

This review of Chris Cornell's new album, Scream, is actually more useful than the average review by a professional music critic. (Via ChordStrike.)

In that spirit, I wrote a review of St. Vincent's yet-to-be-released album Actor (which I was anticipating last Music Friday). Here it is, in full, originally appearing as a status update on Facebook:

John Althouse Cohen thinks the new St. Vincent album is pretty good but not as good as Marry Me. Better-produced, though.

You might read reviews of the album in Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, where the critics are trying to (1) satisfy people's word-count expectations and (2) show off their (a) facility with metaphor, (b) aptitude for lyrical analysis, and (c) knowledge of musical influences (probably mentioning Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell), but my Facebook status update tells you everything you need to know.

If you're a fan of St. Vincent based on Marry Me, it's worth getting Actor, but expect a bit of "sophomore slump." If you don't have either of her albums, get Marry Me first, and only get Actor if you really like Marry Me. Any ink spilled, or bandwidth hogged, dissecting this album in any further detail will be superfluous.

"Food rules" for Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan -- author of the excellent In Defense of Food, which I'm in the middle of reading -- asked for people's "food rules."

New York Times readers gave over 2,500 of them in the comments of this blog post.

Do you think it's someone's job to read all of these? I just made it through the first page of comments, and here are a few I liked:

My main food rule is “cook your own food from scratch.” This was as much a food rule growing up in my family as it was a budget rule. Same for “eat your vegetables.” I threw out “clean your plate,” though.

— Heather

If I can pronounce all of the ingredients and can create a mental picture of the ingedients in a food, then I eat it. If I cannot, then I do not eat it.

— Jessica Neece

Our rule is simple: fresh food, varied meals, portion control. It’s a variant of Julia Child’s reaction to food fetishism, a French truth: pretty much anything is ok as long as it is real food and as long as we eat all kinds of foods routinely.

— hazbin

When the children were little, it was 7 vegetables at each dinner (garlic and herbs counted, for example, and two kinds of mushrooms = two vegetables). Now that we’re only grownups at home, we rely on local organic grocers and farmers’ markets for seasonal products and a little color on the dinner plate, but are no longer doctrinal about the 7-veg rule.

— Demington

Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

— DS

If man didn’t eat it 10,000 years ago you shouldn’t eat it now.

— Greg

If you love to eat but hate to cook, marry someone who enjoys cooking. It will provide a lifetime of happier, healthier eating. (And cleaning up the kitchen burns calories.)

— Jessica Rodocker

If you haven’t been to the farm where it’s from and seen how they treat their animals you shouldn’t been eating it.

— John Deserio

(Shallots photo by Don LaVange.)

"We Have Ways of Making You Bolster Our Erroneous Preconceptions"

That's Matthew Yglesias's heading, perfectly capturing the case against torture based on foreign-policy realism (aside from the obvious moral argument against it).

Environmentalism

It's "bad for the environment."

Judges as "workers"

Another insight from the introduction of Richard Posner's How Judges Think:

[J]udges are not moral or intellectual giants (alas), prophets, oracles, mouthpieces, or calculating machines. They are all-too-human workers, responding as other workers do to the conditions of the labor market in which they work. ...

Because behavior is motivated by desire, we must consider what judges want. I think they want the same basic goods that other people want, such as income, power, reputation, respect, self-respect, and leisure. ...

[L]egal uncertainty ... creates the open area in which the orthodox (the legalist) methods of analysis yield unsatisfactory and sometimes no conclusions, thereby allowing or even dictating that emotion, personality, policy intuitions, ideology, politics, background, and experience will determine a judge's decision.

It's ironic, then, that many conservatives will claim that conservatism is based on an understanding that human beings are imperfect, and human nature can't be changed. These same conservatives will find it outrageous that judges' decision are influenced by factors outside the narrowest definition of "the law."

Speaking of judges' fallibility, Posner makes a blatant factual error on pg. 22:

Presidents differ in their ideological intensity, and taking account of that difference can improve the accuracy of the attitudinal model. Seven of the nine current Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Republican Presidents, but it is more illuminating to note that four conservative Justices were appointed by conservative Republicans (Scalia and Kennedy by Reagan, and Roberts and Alito by the second Bush), two liberal Justices by a Democratic President (Ginsburg and Breyer, appointed by Clinton), and one liberal and two conservative Justices appointed by moderate Republicans (Stevens by Ford, Souter and Thomas by the first Bush).

Did you find it?

I count two liberals and one conservative appointed by Ford and Bush Sr.

What's that stuff up there?

"Burned poster remains" (cropped), by Stewart Butterfield, who thoughtfully made his photos "some rights reserved." (You don't set your Flickr photos to the creativity-thwarting "all rights reserved," do you?)

It's from his "Roman Textures" set. Any of these would also make a great background image for your computer's desktop. (If you want to do so, click on a photos thumbnail, click the "all sizes" button above the photo, click "original" size, download the photo to your computer, and go into your control panels to set the desktop photo using the downloaded file.)

How do you like the new banner? Would you prefer one of the other Roman textures instead?

By the way, thanks to three AskMetafilter users for helping me edit my template to make the linked text the right color to stand out from the background. One of them was so nice as to send me a follow-up email to give me a completely unsolicited tip about how to spice up all the links on this blog. OK, so it's not as awe-inspiring as using AskMetafilter to find where your grandfather lived in Vienna before fleeing the Nazis, but it reaffirmed my confidence in the internet as a machine that fosters people helping other people.

So, do you see what I did to the links?

The Obama administration is "bewitched by language."

The New Republic's John Judis says:

The Obama administration continues to have trouble filling positions because of the ironclad rules it has installed to keep lobbyists from holding positions where they have authority over issues on which they once lobbied. According to the New York Times, the latest casualty is Tom Malinowski, the advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. Malinowski is barred from holding a human rights post in the administration because he lobbied for human rights.

In defending these stances, administration officials insist they are not going to make “value judgments” or that if they allow one lobbyist in the door, they’ll have to let them all in. But appointing officials is precisely a matter of making value judgments, and in this case, the administration’s judgments are being hampered by a self-imposed orthodoxy based on the uncritical use of the term “lobbyist.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would say they are being “bewitched by language.”

Click the link for a brief history of lobbying in America, and how the Obama administration is failing to learn the lessons of that history.

PREVIOUSLY: "How Obama's lofty campaign promises are crippling his own administration."

Should boys be taught different manners from girls?

Perri Klass, M.D., says in the New York Times:

Not long ago, in the clinic, a fellow pediatrician and mother asked whether we were still teaching our sons old-fashioned elevator etiquette: stand back and let the ladies off first.

We all protested that we don’t particularly like it when men pull that elevator stunt — hospital elevators tend to be packed, and the best thing to do if you’re near the door is get out promptly — but we had to admit we thought our adolescent sons should know the drill.... 

As a pediatrician with two sons and a daughter, I acknowledge the need to emphasize manners and respect as boys maneuver into adolescence and adulthood, and to help them understand the implications and obligations of their increasing size and strength. And I acknowledge that for their own protection, boys need to understand that there are people — male and female — who will see them as potential predators, and judge them automatically at fault in any ambiguous situation.

But I am enough of an old-fashioned feminist to want to teach daughters the same fundamental lessons I teach sons: err on the side of respect and good manners; understand that confusion, doubt and ambiguity abound, especially when you are young; never take advantage of someone else’s uncertainty; and, just as important, remember that adolescence should be a time of fun, affection, growth and discovery.

It’s too bad that one side of teaching our children about sex and relationships means reminding them that there are bad people in the world; stay away from them, stay safe, speak up if someone hurts you or pushes you. But everyone needs that information, and that promise of adult support. We have to get that message across without defining some of our children as obvious perpetrators and others as obvious victims, because that insults everyone.

I've never understood that elevator thing. If there are men and women getting onto an elevator, and the men "let" the "ladies" go in "first," then what happens if it's a big group of people all going to the same floor? The men will be right in front, meaning they're the first who should exit. I've actually seen this happen in a packed elevator, with the result being that a man (not me) was standing directly in front of the door when the elevator opened and we were all supposed to get out. He just stood there, immobile -- he couldn't simply get off the elevator like a normal person, because that would violate the "ladies first" rule. There was enough space that the rest of us could go around him, but the entrance was narrow enough that we had to awkwardly squeeze by. His behavior didn't help anyone; it just caused some slight discomfort. That's what happens when you prioritize traditional gender roles over common sense.

The same thing can happen with people trying to get in the elevator -- a commenter on AskMetafilter says:

[T]he only thing time a display of chivalry is annoying me is when there's the big cluster of people trying to get on the elevator, and I'm standing behind a guy, and I want VERY much to get on -- but he can't see me, and he's standing like a stone because he's letting the cute girl he CAN see in FRONT of him on first, and meanwhile I'm standing behind him seething because he's in my way and I just want to get on the freakin' elevator, GOD almighty....

Aside from elevators, the general rule of "ladies first" isn't even consistent with traditional gender roles. Whoever goes first is physically protecting the person who goes second. If you go first, you're the one who's testing out the conditions: whether there's an unexpected drop, a slippery floor, people recklessly charging through, etc. So if you subscribe to the traditional view that it's men's job to courageously protect women at every turn, you should favor a "ladies last" rule. Right?

Do tobacco taxes unfairly burden poor smokers?

Over 20 states were considering raising taxes on tobacco as of this New York Times article from last month. On April 1, the federal tobacco tax was increased by 61 cents to pay for health insurance for needy children (SCHIP).

But some people complain that raising taxes on smokers burdens the poor, because smoking is more prevalent among the poor than among the general population. (For instance, the argument is made in this video clip, and this blog post argues that it burdens blacks as well as the poor.)

First of all, it doesn't burden "the poor," since most poor people don't smoke. At most, it burdens poor smokers. (29% of Americans living below the poverty line smoke, according to the American Heart Association.)

But that's not accurate either. It burdens them only to the extent they keep smoking.

Is it hypocritical for liberals to support policies that burden that group of people to that extent? Not only don't I think it's not hypocritical; I think it could actually redeem liberals for how welfare and welfare-like programs have harmed the poor.

When you give someone money, you increase the likelihood that the person will buy harmful stuff (cigarettes being one of countless examples). That's true of everyone -- not just poor people, not just smokers.

And since money is fungible, this is true even if you give earmarked benefits like food stamps. If you give someone $X money on the condition that it be spent on such-and-such goods that they would have bought anyway, they'll spend that money on those goods, but they now have $X more to spend on whatever they want. (I'm no economist, but that's my rough calculation -- please correct me if I'm wrong.)

All of this might make me sound like a right-winger who's opposed to welfare on the ground that the poor will just do bad stuff with it. I'm not. But I think that even if you support welfare, you should be aware of its costs. Raising tobacco taxes mitigates one such cost by deterring poor people (along with everyone else) from buying cigarettes.

RELATED: Last year, my mom blogged this new law:

Congress cracks down on flavored cigarettes to show it cares about children ... and has to cut a swath around menthol to show it cares about black people.

Or... wait... is it supposed to show it cares about black people by helping them like smoking less? It's so hard to be a caring congressperson these days!

(Photo of cigarette packs in Italy by Aneta Leavitt.)

Why Republicans should support same-sex marriage, according to McCain's 2008 campaign manager, Steve Schmidt

Steve Schmidt gave a ground-breaking speech to the Log Cabin Republicans today. Here's the gist of the speech:

The institution of marriage is the foundation of society and alterations to its definitions shouldn't be lightly undertaken. It has always been defined as the legal union of a man and a woman, and it's understandable that many Americans are apprehensive about making a definitional change to so profoundly an important institution. But it is a tradition, not a creed, or, at least, not a national creed. It is not how we define ourselves as Americans. And while we shouldn't carelessly dismiss the importance of enduring traditions, we should understand that traditions do change over time in every society. And as long as those changes do not conflict with the tenets of our national creed then they can, and inevitably will, be modified by a society that has come to view them as inequitable.

Our national creed is a declaration of natural rights, not a compact for the preservation of social customs, as important as many of those customs are. It was precisely and elegantly defined 233 years ago as adherence to certain self-evident truths. All are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Americans' fidelity to that creed ended the tradition of slavery because it was understood that slavery denied to the slave the universal rights America was founded in blood to protect. Women were constitutionally disenfranchised. But in time that injustice was rectified because the nation realized such discrimination violated our national creed.

The argument of the pro-life community acquires its moral force because it holds that the life of the unborn is not distinct in its dignity from the life of the born, and, thus, possesses a God-given right to be protected. The same protection cannot be argued to extend to the institutional definition of marriage as exclusively the union of persons of the opposite sex.

[I]t cannot be argued that marriage between people of the same sex is un-American or threatens the rights of others. On the contrary, it seems to me that denying two consenting adults of the same sex the right to form a lawful union that is protected and respected by the state denies them two of the most basic natural rights affirmed in the preamble of our Declaration of Independence - liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ...

I'm confident American public opinion will continue to move on the question toward majority support, and sooner or later the Republican Party will catch up to it. ...

Whether you are for or against same sex marriages, every Republican ought to value the right of people to make such personal decisions for themselves. As former Vice President Cheney observed, freedom means freedom for everybody. And I think Republicans should always be on the side of freedom and equal rights.

I, and I believe most people, believe you are born with your sexuality. It is not a choice. It should offend us as Republicans and Americans when gays are denigrated as degenerates or un-American or undeserving of the government's protection of their rights. And the Republican Party should give voice to genuine outrage when anyone belittles the humanity of another person. It is offensive in the extreme to the values of this nation, and we should be in the forefront of rejecting such truly un-American prejudice. ...

We should publicly affirm that gays are entitled to the same respect and protections we accord heterosexuals to be secure from discrimination in their employment and the places they choose to live; to enter into contractual relationships with another person that grant them the same benefits and privileges allowed married couples, such as tax advantages accorded married couples or the responsibilities to make end of life decisions for one another. ...

I think the institution would be strengthened by the inclusion of more couples who are genuinely committed to each other. But even if you believe marriage would be changed for the worse by same sex unions, I'm not sure it's a compelling argument for their exclusion. We don't forbid divorce, a more proven and prevalent threat to the health of our society.

As I said, I respect the opinions of Americans who oppose marriage for gay couples on religious grounds. I may disagree, but if you sincerely believe God's revealed truth objects to it then it is perfectly honorable to oppose it. But those are not the grounds on which a political party should take or argue a position. If you put public policy issues to a religious test you risk becoming a religious party, and in a free country, a political party cannot remain viable in the long term if it is seen as sectarian.

There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same sex marriage. I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one's liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage. In a marriage, two people are completely responsible to and for each other. If you are not willing to accept and faithfully discharge those responsibilities, you shouldn't enter the state of matrimony, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if you're straight or gay. It is a responsibility like no other, which can and should make marriage an association between two human beings more fulfilling than any other.

Marriage can be a profoundly gratifying state that strengthens the virtue of individuals and societies, and increases the measure and quality of the happiness we enjoy. It seems to me a terrible inequity that any person should be denied that responsibility, and the emotional enrichment it can provide. And I cannot in good conscience exclude anyone who is prepared for such a commitment from the prospect of such happiness.

In closing, I'll return to our national creed, what Lincoln called the inestimable jewel of American history, and offer my respect for and urge my fellow Republicans to respect every human being's rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness as much as they cherish their own.

Customs change. Societies change. People change. But that creed must never change.

I agree with all of that, including the observation that being in favor of same-sex marriage is a conservative position. I hope Republicans take Schmidt seriously.

A car chase is coming to my town, Albany, NY!

Cool!

Reality check on taxes

NYT's Economix has the perfect retort to this week's tax protests:

"Where were the Medicare tea parties?"

RELATED: "The Top Ten Reasons I'm Thrilled to Pay High Taxes," by The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn (not to be confused with me).

NOTE: I've crossed out the link to The New Republic because it no longer works. It was destroyed in TNR's redesign. Although some of their links were reformatted, this piece can't be found even through Google. What a waste!

St. Vincent and Regina Spektor, part 2

I haven't been this excited about two upcoming albums in at least a couple years.

There's St. Vincent's second album, to be released May 5, and Regina Spektor's fifth album, sometime in June.

[UPDATE: You can hear the St. Vincent album streaming online, free at NPR's site, for two weeks starting on April 21.]

I blogged about both of them in my inaugural Music Friday post.

Here's "Actor out of Work," a song St. Vincent has pre-released from her upcoming album, Actor (via her website):



I'm glad to hear her trademark sound intact: lovely compositions reminiscent of Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson, incongruously overlaid with grinding dissonance.

HuffPo's devious technique of giving readers what they want

Jack Schafer has a roughly 1,700-word article in Slate about the mainstream media's grievances against the Huffington Post.

Here's the key point, which appears on page 2 of the article:

I personally don't like the way the Huff Post "showcases" the work of other journalists, but I don't get heated about it, either....

Instead of getting wigged out at the Huffington Post, offended sites would be smarter to glean a lesson from experience. Top journalists aren't going to like hearing this, but not everybody has time to lounge about with the 2,000-word masterpiece that you and your editor handcrafted. They want to get to the salient point, and they want to get there now. As heretical as it may sound, the Huffington Post is adding value by skinning alive that beautiful baby seal you just birthed and serving its fresh, beating heart to readers in a hurry.

Instead of feeling diminished by the Huff Post's excerpts, more publications might want to pre-empt the site by serving distilled versions of their own articles.

Again, it took 1,700 words to make that point.