(if I were the) King of the Forest

If a state chooses to live up to the more modern understanding of its obligation to fairness and equality under the law by creating a gender-neutral form of civil union, that is certainly just and arguably wise. If a same-sex couple, having been properly joined by such a state-sanctioned civil union, chooses to call themselves “married” some may contradict them but no one can or should stop them. If a church chooses to sanctify their union and call it “marriage” in the eyes of God, that is their right. If members of their community choose to honor the union with the same designation, then the communal sense of marriage will begin to evolve. If enough people in enough communities defer to the new usage then the traditional concept of marriage will begin to lose its name and, our ability to conceptualize it thereby undermined, will slowly fade from our cultural memory, just as gayness did decades ago. And we will be culturally poorer for that even as we are culturally more inclusive.

But that is a transformation that should be decided individual by individual in a cultural dialog over years or generations, in which some are free to preserve the old concepts and others to embrace the new until the weight of cultural consensus removes the last holdouts – or never does. It is not a transformation that should be enforced by political power.

If we want to make drugs affordable in the third world, we must find a way to rein in the health care advocates who would use that as a moral platform to transform the American and European markets. Protected from such a threat, the drug companies would, I’m guessing, cooperate. But as long as Americans agitate to be treated – at least for purposes of pricing – the same as their peers in the marginal markets, the drug companies will do all they can to protect their domestic profits – which ultimately protects the R&D pipeline that benefits both the first and third worlds.

I agree that the school system has probably failed them, but not by refusing to grant them a diploma; rather it has failed them by insisting that they are through with high-school merely because they have served their time and despite the fact that they can’t read and write English well enough to pass the MCAS exam. Justice would demand not an immediate – and meaningless – diploma but the opportunity for another year of intensive English instruction to overcome their deficiencies, followed by a well-earned and meaningful diploma which signified that they had, in fact, successfully completed the entirety of the high-school curriculum.

In an age when charity was the primary means for providing a social safety net and cultural enrichment charity was a matter of moral obligation. We would like to think that is still the case, but according to the CBO such endeavors now consume somewhere between 55% and 75% of the federal budget, and anyone in the top quintile of income distribution is already providing at least 15%-20% of their income as taxes to various governments in direct support of that. Perhaps direct giving to charity is only 2% of income, but if you add the 15% or more of indirect contribution to the same causes via the channel of government I’d say we’re doing pretty well.

Notwithstanding their characterization by opponents of the war in Iraq, arguments in favor of war were never as simplistic or one-dimensional as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, imminent or otherwise, and never presumed any direct link between Iraq and the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Sometimes, it just seems the world has gone mad. At times like those, I write things like this, and hope it makes things better. So far it hasn’t.

I was in the process of preparing this for submission to Newsweek for their ‘My Turn’ section when the attack on the World Trade Center made the topic page one news everywhere. Submitting it suddenly seemed pointless….

Another week, another killing spree, or so it seems.

This comes back to the fundamental questions that are rarely addressed in any straightforward way: Who should we accept as immigrants? Who should we reject? What commitments, to civil behavior and to our national best interest, ought we require of those we accept? And what commitments, to civil behavior, to our national best interest, and to duty to our society and respect for our culture, ought we demand of those who would claim citizenship in our nation?

The partisan wrangling over whether or not to allow the census bureau to supplement the traditional head-count method (’actual enumeration’) with statistically-derived estimates for the expected under-count in the 2000 census was enlightening only in the way it illustrated our leaders’ ability to miss the point.

The general state of race-relations in America has recently been highlighted nationally by President Clinton’s “Dialogue on Race”, and in California by ballot propositions like 187 (limiting government benefits to illegal immigrants) and 209 (eliminating state-sponsored affirmative-action). The desire for an unemotional and realistic conversation on race — where we stand, where we are headed, and where we want to be — is noble and desirable. It seems, however, that our initial attempts have been thwarted as much by the terms of the conversation as by the subject itself: just as the underlying context, assumptions, and forms of historical discrimination were largely defined by its beneficiaries (to whom ‘race-relations’ were a closed issue), the underlying context, assumptions, and forms of the fight against discrimination — and, more generally, of our discussions about race — have been largely defined by those to whom ‘race-relations’ have historically meant ‘race-based oppression’ — to whom ‘race-relations’ were very much an open issue and a dominant factor of their lives. While this is understandable, and perhaps even just, it almost ensures that racial difference is viewed and debated as a chasm to be crossed — or into which to fall — rather than as a boundary to be transcended.

If “old civil rights hands” had ever, in the past, exhibited any willingness at all to “look toward possible non-partisan efforts seeking legislative or administrative remedies for such problems as may remain in affirmative action programs” Prop. 209 would never have existed.