Scapegoating With Extra Scapegoating

The conservative magazine, Sam Schulman at The Weekly Standard condemns gay marriage, by condemning almost everybody else in the process. Among those scapegoated are:

* Mixed faith married people.
* Mixed nationality married people.
* Married people who have sex for purposes other than child bearing.
* People who have sex before marriage.
* People who have sex without someone other than their spouse during marriage.
* People who don't marry at the beginning of adulthood.
* People whose families would like, rather than loathe, each other in the absence of a marriage.
* Unmarried people who have sex who are a same sex couple.
* Married people who have sex who are a same sex couple.
* Same sex couples who built relationships with extended family.
* Unmarried women who don't feel they need marriage to protect them "from rape, degradation, and concubinage."
* State supreme court justices with degrees from middling law schools.
* Gays who "hold jobs--even as teachers and members of the clergy; . . .become elected officials, secret agents, and adoptive parents; and . . . live together in public, long-term relationships[.]"

We are also advised, by our thrice married male author, that marriage means the horrible suffering involved in surrendering "the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires" in favor of a wife, because "the granite underpinnings of marriage" are necessary for "domestic ecstasy." We are told that "without social disapproval of unmarried sex--what kind of madman would seek marriage?"

And what is unimportant about marriage? Well, "living forever with one's soulmate, loyalty, fidelity, warmth, a happy home, shopping, and parenting [or] arranging a happy home in which two hearts may beat as one--in fact marriage is actually pretty indifferent to that particular aim. Nor has marriage historically concerned itself with compelling the particular male and female who have created a child to live together and care for that child."

Who is this idiot and why does he get published? (Not surprisingly, he also hates atheists for questionable reasons and thinks that the Democratic party is the anti-Semitic party.)

Prop 8 Upheld, Existing Marriages Saved

The California Supreme Court upheld a ban on same-sex marriage today, ratifying a decision made by voters last year at a time when several state governments have moved in an opposite direction. The decision, however, preserves the 18,000 marriages performed between the court’s decision last May that same-sex marriage was lawful and the passage by voters in November of Proposition 8, which banned it.

From here.

Civil unions, which provide the legal trappings of marriage in all but name, will continue to be available prospectively in California.

The decision was not unexpected. The challenges had relied upon a distinction California's constitution makes between different procedures for amending the state constitution, which the California Supreme Court found inapplicable, and a variation of the Colorado Amendment 2 argument which argued that state constitutional amendments aimed at taking away fundamental rights should be treated differently, which the California Supreme Court rejected on the grounds that the distinctions were symbolic rather than substantive. Because the California Supreme Court holds that Prop 8 is not retroactive, there will still be 18,000 gay married couples in California, despite the proposition.

Less Red Tape Means More Research

The more layers of budget approval a project needs, the more likely it is that a project won't happen at all. The report vindicates the concept of fiscal autonomy for colleges and universities. Colorado's highly autonomous research universities are among the most productive in the nation and the world.

Pew On Evidence Based Sentencing

The Pew Center on the States has a new report (via Think Outside the Cage) on evidence based sentencing, and in particular on preventing recidivism for the majority of people sentenced to felonies who are on probation rather than serving prison sentences.

The trouble is that while the report repeatedly urges state legislatures to adopt evidence based sentencing programs and says that they work (well duh, otherwise they wouldn't be evidence based), it is remarkably thin on what these proven programs actually involve. Indeed, the opening paragraph of the report seems to be a persausive argument for more incarceration:

Sixty to 80 percent of state felony defendants are placed on probation, fined or jailed in their local communities. Although the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, there are nearly three times more offenders on probation than in state prisons. Recidivism rates among these felony defendants are at unprecedented levels. Almost 60 percent have been previously convicted and more than 40 percent of those on probation fail to complete probation successfully. The high recidivism rate among felons on probation pushes up state crime rates and is one of the principal contributors to our extraordinarily high incarceration rates. High recidivism rates also contribute to the rapidly escalating cost of state corrections, the second fastest growing expenditure item in state budgets over the past 20 years.

Most voters would be shocked by this fact and assume that probation is much harder to come by for felons than it actually is in practice.

Perhaps the 2007 paper in the Indiana Law Journal, which this seven page brief purports to summarize, is more informative.

I don't doubt that there are programs that have been proven to prevent recidivism. But, Pew should be telling us what they are and showing us the research in summary form, not simply telling us that they are good, mostly sight unseen.