by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Aug 20, 2015
By now, almost everyone who isn’t a Democratic United States Senator has seen at least one of the five macabre videotapes released by the Center for Medical Progress, a pro-life investigative group. The videos are ubiquitous in social media, so I won’t provide links to them here.
In a recent post, AJC columnist Jay Bookman has provided a nice example of the arguments offered by those who continue to defend Planned Parenthood in the face of these—to say the least—embarrassing revelations. Here are his five points, together with my responses.
1. Nothing in the tapes provides evidence of illegal, let alone criminal, behavior. Planned Parenthood is allowed by law to recover its costs in collecting, preserving and transporting that tissue, and there is no evidence it violated that law. Tellingly, and despite the melodramatic complaints of conservatives, the videos have so far resulted in no criminal investigation or prosecution by state or federal authorities. Yelling and the beating of chests doesn’t alter that basic fact. Fabricated outrage doesn’t change that. Simply put, in legal terms there is no “there” there.
Not so fast, Mr. Bookman. The Planned Parenthood representatives are indeed cagey and circumspect and there is, to be sure, no straightforward smoking gun, but like all bureaucrats, they seem to know that there are expenses and then there are expenses. It may take a lot of trouble to untangle what’s a genuine “cost” and what amounts to a profit over and above costs. That the Department of Justice or a federal prosecutor hasn’t yet commenced an investigation doesn’t mean that the DOJ or a D.A. won’t, though given the track record of this Administration with respect to abortion, I’m not holding my breath. A real federal investigation may have to await a new Administration, or a Congressional investigation that forces the current Attorney General’s hand. So there is nothing at all “telling” about the lack of federal action so far. And if I’m not mistaken, at least twelve states have commenced investigations.
2. The law making such research legal was passed in 1993, and among those voting in favor of that bill was one Mitch McConnell, the same man who now claims that videos documenting what he voted to make legal “absolutely shock the conscience.” Other current GOP senators who backed that ’93 law were Richard Shelby, John McCain, Dan Coats, Chuck Grassley, Thad Cochran and Orrin Hatch, many of whom are now backing a shutdown.
Even if the research is authorized by law, it’s one thing to consider that research in the abstract, another altogether to confront graphically what it means and requires (the dissection of a recognizably human body). Perhaps the law needs to be changed. And even if we decide not to change the law that permits the research, there’s no reason why we have to fund either it or the organization that provides the human organs on which the researchers work.
3. Those receiving the fetal tissue are not ghouls of some sort, and the tissue is not being put to inappropriate or disrespectful use. To the contrary, the tissue is crucial to research into treatments to extend and improve human life, research that would be impossible to conduct without that material. As the New York Times reports, “the National Institutes of Health spent $76 million on research using fetal tissue in 2014 with grants to more than 50 universities, including Columbia, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Yale and the University of California in Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco.”
While we aren’t necessarily talking about Dr. Josef Mengele here, why must we assume a congruence between the demands of science and “democratic” morality? A careful reading of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis—the great work on science and politics written by the greatest and most perspicuous thinker on that subject—makes it clear enough for anyone who has eyes to see that there’s a pretty significant disconnect between science and ordinary morality. Curiosity and the ambition to master nature can take one pretty far from what’s decent and respectful. The more powerful science is, the greater mastery of nature it promises us, the more attention we must pay to it and the less we should avert our eyes from its practices. There may be benefits—which, by the way, are at the moment for the most part simply speculative—that aren’t worth the cost.
4. All tissue used in that research is donated by clinic patients, who receive no compensation for doing so. Their sole motive is to help fellow human beings. If we ban the use of such material in research, we accomplish absolutely nothing except to halt that potentially life-saving research. So which is the true “pro-life” position?
As C.S. Lewis argues in The Abolition of Man, there’s a moral cost in treating human beings as meat, or of denying the humanity of a being that is recognizably human. In so doing, we run the palpable risk of dehumanizing ourselves, of numbing our moral sense. Indeed, Lewis’s work ought to be absolutely required reading for anyone who wishes to comment intelligently on these issues.
5. None of the $500 million in federal funding going to Planned Parenthood is used to finance abortions. It is used instead to give low-income women access to contraceptives, maternity care, breast-cancer and ovarian-cancer screenings, and vaccinations against sexually transmitted diseases. If we strip Planned Parenthood of funding for such programs as punishment for the “crime” of following the law and providing tissue for medical research, no other organization has the infrastructure, personnel and training to provide those health-care services. In effect, those women and their children would be the innocent victims of a successful effort to defund Planned Parenthood.
While there may not be a single national organization capable of picking up the slack of PPFA’s arguably overstated non-abortion business, the federal funding that it receives can be put to precisely the same use by a myriad of community health centers and nonprofits in the health, not the abortion, business all over the country. Indeed, the proposed Senate bill preserves every penny of women’s health funding, mandating simply that it go to health clinics, not abortion clinics.
I’ve mentioned two pieces of what I regard as required background reading. Let me close with a third, Dr. Leon Kass’ classic, “The Wisdom of Repugnance”:
Revulsion is not an argument; and some of yesterday’s repugnances are today calmly accepted-though, one must add, not always for the better. In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or even just (just!) raping or murdering another human being? Would anybody’s failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we are suspicious of those who think that they can rationalize away our horror, say, by trying to explain the enormity of incest with arguments only about the genetic risks of inbreeding.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | May 8, 2015
A week ago today the city of Baltimore was set ablaze by its own citizens. The media storm following the protests and riots is the latest in a string of events that continue to orient our attention as a society to the lack of economic and social opportunity in America
David Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, wrote an excellent piece on “The Nature of Poverty” a week ago. Brooks draws attention to the importance of the social dynamics that undercut attempts to improve the conditions of urban poor through increased spending and policy solutions.
What Brooks notes in his article, and many others recognize, is that when dealing with poverty, one must deal with the causes of poverty and the psychological and developmental effects of poverty. One-size-fits-all programs fail to do justice to the ways in which individual circumstances vary. Some people have short-term needs – such as gas to get to work – while others need more structured and long-term oriented assistance – such as acquiring the skills necessary to compete in a very competitive job market. This requires panoply of social programs specifically targeted to lift people out of poverty for good.
A safety net in good working order is crucial to a healthy economy, but poor families don’t just need help – they need the right kind of help. Giving people money really does make them better off. Yes, it’s better to have more money to buy groceries and other basic necessities, but improving inequality through handouts has no consistent correlation with upward mobility.
Baltimore is the perfect example of the fact that getting more money from the government doesn’t really make you less poor, and a testament to the fact that poverty is enabled to linger through the impoverishment of our social relations.
Click here to read Brooks’ article.
Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Row Houses, Baltimore, Maryland.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Apr 28, 2015
A recent AJC front-page story detailed the results of an in-depth investigation of how Georgia’s colleges and universities handle allegations of sexual assault. Here’s the takeaway, as summarized in the article:
A three-month AJC investigation into the secretive world of campus tribunals found that Georgia’s largest universities are pursuing cases that prosecutors won’t touch, offering some accountability for a serious category of student misconduct. But the newspaper also found that campus justice comes with steep trade-offs.
Procedures vary widely and are often poorly understood by both the accused and the accuser. Students, and sometimes their parents, expect the strict rules of a court of law, but instead encounter a looser system where cross-examining witnesses is sharply curtailed and the burden of proof is far lower.
Several students…claim the proceedings in place are deeply flawed and violated their rights to due process. While they haven’t gone to jail, an expulsion, or even suspension, can have dire and long-lasting consequences.
Sexual misconduct on campus is a very real problem, but so is the way colleges and universities, not just in Georgia, but across the nation, are handling it.
A little background is in order here. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a letter indicating that the hostile environment standard heretofore applicable in sexual harassment cases would be extended to sexual misconduct on campus. Here’s the part of the long letter most relevant for our purposes:
In some cases, the conduct may constitute both sexual harassment under Title IX and criminal activity. Police investigations may be useful for fact-gathering; but because the standards for criminal investigations are different, police investigations or reports are not determinative of whether sexual harassment or violence violates Title IX. Conduct may constitute unlawful sexual harassment under Title IX even if the police do not have sufficient evidence of a criminal violation. In addition, a criminal investigation into allegations of sexual violence does not relieve the school of its duty under Title IX to resolve complaints promptly and equitably.
I’ve highlighted the words that lead colleges and universities into a legal thicket where they have to establish procedures for holding students accountable that don’t necessarily contain the sorts of safeguards for the rights of the accused with which we’re familiar from criminal law.
Many legal experts have found problems with the procedures established in response to this letter. For example, professors from two Ivy League law schools—Penn and Harvard—have raised questions about their university’s (undue) processes. Neither school is exactly a bastion of conservatism and the signatories include some stalwarts of the liberal legal establishment
The AJC article closes with the trade-off Georgia’s colleges and universities face:
Stephanos Bibas, a former federal prosecutor and professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, said schools are trapped between competing forces, each of which brings great risk.
“Currently there are dozens of accused, almost all men, suing colleges, and colleges feel like they are whipsawed either way, and there are billions of federal dollars — grants, scholarship dollars — on the line. I think they feel they will get sued whichever way they go,” Bibas said.
They seem to be damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
I’ll leave to the legal experts to craft a fair policy to deal with sexual, but not quite criminal, misconduct on campus. I speak here as someone who has spent more than forty years on college campuses as a student and professor, and as the father of two children, one a college freshman and the other a high school junior. To my mind, there are two problems that the lawyers and student affairs professionals are trying to clean up. The first is the overwhelmingly pervasive presence of alcohol on campus. Everyone has access to it and all too many of them abuse it. Alcohol disinhibits young men and women who would otherwise shy away from the so-called hook-up culture. And it impairs their judgment when they find themselves at close quarters. While I’m dubious of the claim that one in five college women are victims of sexual assault, I have no doubt at all that almost all the cases that fall short of genuine criminality involve the inebriation of all the parties involved.
The second is the hook-up culture itself, based upon the understanding that sex is all about pleasure, not intimacy and procreation. Parents who try to inculcate in their children a traditional understanding of sexual morality are fighting against a strong cultural current, purveyed not just in television, movies, and music, but also in the law that has made marriage itself mostly about adult happiness and personal fulfillment.
But heaven help the educational leader that makes an argument like this. Late last year, Eckerd College President Donald Eastman III sent this message in an email to students:
“Virtue in the area of sexuality is its own reward, and has been held in high esteem in Western Culture for millennia because those who are virtuous are happier as well as healthier,” Eastman wrote to Eckerd’s 1,800 undergraduate students. “No one’s culture or character or understanding is improved by casual sex, and the physical and psychological risks to both genders are profound.”
Eastman, 69, suggested students drink less alcohol because “you know that these incidents are almost always preceded by consumption, often heavy consumption, of alcohol, often by everyone involved in them.”
While I can imagine that many parents were applauding him from the sidelines, the on-campus response was swift and mostly vitriolic.
Our problem is largely one of moral culture, that is to say, it’s an issue of character and character formation. Laws, formal rules, and procedures have a part to play in forming character, but they are blunt instruments, sadly unequal to the task of raising young men and women capable of forming and upholding the intimate bonds necessary for healthy families. When we make a mess of raising our children—as the evidence from campus life suggests we all too often have—we are driven back to these blunt instruments, whose limitations the AJC story makes all too clear.
As a professor, I feel bad for my students. As a parent, I fear for my children.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Apr 24, 2015
Today, poor children in America have a limited shot at moving up the economic ladder into the middle or upper class. A study in 2012 by the Pew Charitable Trust shows that “[t]hose born at the top and bottom of the income ladder are likely to stay there as adults.” Further, “More than 40 percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile of the family income ladder remain stuck there as adults, and 70 percent remain below the middle.”
In terms of economic mobility, America is losing its identity as the “land of opportunity.”
In January 2014, Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, economists from Harvard and Berkeley, released a study with interesting insights regarding this issue of upward mobility. Their study explores community characteristics that foster upward mobility for lower-income children. The study measures two outcomes: absolute mobility, or the way children progress up the income ladder into adulthood, and relative mobility, or the income disparity between children who grew up rich and poor in the same community as they reach adulthood.
The researchers in the study looked at households in “commuting zones,” or what are basically metropolitan areas, in order to compare the economic mobility of children in various communities. Interestingly, they found that kids who grow up in certain metropolitan areas are far more likely to climb into the top two-fifths of American household income distribution than kids from families with the same relative income from other metropolitan areas. This led them to look into what the specific community factors are that foster opportunity. Their research reveals some very telling patterns:
1. Family Structure
The single most important factor in communities that foster economic mobility is family structure. Chetty et al. found that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to achieve both absolute and relative mobility. As such, “[c]hildren of married parents…have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.”
What makes this finding particularly significant is that this is the first major study showing that rates of single parenthood at the community level are linked to children’s economic prospects over the course of their lives. Previous research has shown that children raised by two married parents are significantly more likely to climb the income ladder, but this is the first serious study to show that lower-income kids from both single and married-parent families are more likely to flourish if they are in a community with high shares of two-parent families.
2. Racial & Economic Segregation
Second, they found that children raised in communities that are racially and economically segregated – that is, communities that cluster lots of poor kids together – are less likely to achieve economic mobility. In fact, segregation and family structure are the only two community characteristics that had a consistent correlation with upward mobility in their study.
It is helpful to think of racial and economic segregation as isolation – that is marginalization from both the mainstream economy and the norms that allow middle-income people to flourish. These norms are often contagions that go unnoticed and unmentioned in middle-to-upper-class communities. What is missing for so many children stuck in cycles of poverty is social inclusion, which overlaps with the third factor.
3. Social Capital
Social Capital often goes unmentioned in conversations about economic mobility because it is so difficult to capture in social-scientific terms. Moreover, social capital highlights how complex and connected poverty is because it cannot be separated out from other community factors. The methodology of social scientists encourages that complex problems be broken down into distinct elements to make it easier to analyze and tweak through targeted programs. But to address the problem of social capital is to enter into the complexity of poverty and see how approaches that ignore social capital actually rob disadvantaged groups of the coherence of their experience.
Here is why social capital is so important: You could have two people with exactly the same income who actually live very different lives based on the different social networks they have. For some, achieving upward mobility is a perfectly compatible, even expected, progression within their networks and lifelong relationships. Being a part of their family and maintaining strong relationships with loved ones basically means moving up the economic and social ladder. When hard times hit, they have the support structure they need to get back on their feet. For others, achieving upward mobility means separating themselves from family and loved ones, which may cause them to lack the connections and support they need to withstand an economic crisis.
The breakdown of the social bonds in American communities actually hurts the poor the most. Many people talk about inequality, but this study shows that the problem is not inequality but a lack of economic and social inclusion. Social capital is intertwined with family structure since adults in two-parent families have a much easier time devoting themselves to the kinds of activities that build social capital in a neighborhood. Social capital is also closely correlated to access to quality schools, which leads to the fourth community factor that fosters upward mobility.
4. Access to Quality Schools
Though it is certainly not a new finding, Chetty and his colleagues found that poor kids are far more likely to succeed if they have access to high quality education. Though the study does not mention the need for school choice, it is clearly a necessity by the fact that too many schools are providing a poor education to children who have no other options available to them.
GCO believes that the best and most effective way to provide access to high quality education for children from low-income households is through a variety of school choice initiatives, particularly Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and Tuition Tax Credit Programs. Throwing more money at failing schools that lack competition and the ability to innovate is not the solution.
Conclusion
The study by Chetty et al. has a lot of other interesting findings worthy of consideration, but the four community characteristics that have been mentioned – two-parent families, racial and economic integration, social capital, and access to quality schools – are the ones with the strongest and most consistent correlation with upward mobility. These factors help to set those cloistered and marginalized from mainstream norms on a pathway to opportunity.
At GCO, we are committed to addressing limited social mobility in Georgia. We seek to identify barriers to opportunity and promote legislative, policy, and community solutions that allow people to achieve middle class by middle age. Our hope is that Georgia and America at large will once again become a “land of opportunity” for all people.
by Kimberly Sawatka | Dec 3, 2014
For many, December is a much awaited time of the year. While the holidays can issue in a frenzy of shopping and preparations, extended time away from school and work provide the prefect opportunity to relax and catch up with loved ones. Beyond the presents that may be given or the lights that may decorate our homes, fellowship with family, friends, and neighbors is what renews us during the holidays.
For me, the holidays have always been a time of celebration shared between the generations of my family. As a child I looked forward to going to my great-grandmother’s house. Preparing for the yearly family gathering, I would watch her whip up marvelous holiday delights. I would listen to her stories about Christmas when she was a girl. Once aunts, uncles, and cousins arrived, I loved the hum of the house filled with conversation and holiday cheer. It is the traditions shared with me in my youth that I still look forward to as an adult.
Keeping in mind what makes the season bright for you and finding fun ways to share time with others will surely make this the most meaningful and memorable holiday yet.
5 Activities to Try This Holiday Season
- Family book club: This year, select a book for the whole family to read over the holiday. Meeting weekly to discuss the plot, character development, and personal feelings about the story will not only help bring everyone together, but also help the kids (and adults!) keep their reading and critical thinking skills sharp over the break. Time spent discussing readings with family is also a special way to learn new things about each other.
- Holiday letter-writing: Nothing brightens a person’s spirits like receiving a hand written letter. Share season’s greetings by sending warm holiday messages to your neighbors, friends, or family members. Additionally, have the kids handwrite a letter to Santa Claus, send thank you cards for gifts received, or keep a holiday journal. These are all great ways to practice writing skills over the break.
- Christmas Caroling: Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a caroler in years! However, nothing makes me happier than to join-in (albeit off key) songs like Silent Night and the Twelve Days of Christmas. Revive the holiday tradition this year by starting a caroling circle of your own.
- Community service: Because the holidays are not only about what we receive, but what we give back, experiences such as working at a local food bank or collecting donations for less fortunate families provide the opportunity to build a stronger sense of community. Embrace the spirit of the holidays through volunteer work.
- Start a new tradition: Traditions provide a sense of closeness with your family and inclusion in a wider community, both contributing to developing a positive self-identity. This year I am happily starting a new holiday tradition with my siblings. Since Christmas is now one of the rare occasions we are all home together, we decided to make each other ornaments for our Christmas trees. Find a new family activity that will allow you to learn from and about those close to you.
This holiday season don’t just catch up on your Netflix list. Whether getting out to ice skate, reading in front of the fire, or helping a neighbor out, make this a meaningful time by celebrating what matter the most: love shared and good will exhibited.
Page 8 of 8« First«...45678
