Lazy Saturday Reads
Posted: January 17, 2015 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: abortion, Free Range Kids, mansplaining, Masha the cat, Politifact, Rand Paul, same-sex marriage, Social Security disability, U.S. Supreme Court 36 Comments
NYC Newsstand on a rainy day.
Good Afternoon!!
First, I want to thank everyone who responded to our request for help with blog expenses. We are so fortunate to have such kind and loyal readers. You guys are the greatest!
The biggest story on my mind today is the Supreme Court’s decision to rule on the same-sex marriage issue. I have to admit, I’m very nervous about it. What if the Court rules that states can ban same-sex marriages and refuse to recognize such marriages from other states? Some background from SCOTUS blog:
Taking on a historic constitutional challenge with wide cultural impact, the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon agreed to hear four new cases on same-sex marriage. The Court said it would rule on the power of the states to ban same-sex marriages and to refuse to recognize such marriages performed in another state. A total of two-and-a-half hours was allocated for the hearings, likely in the April sitting. A final ruling is expected by early next summer, probably in late June.
The Court fashioned the specific questions it is prepared to answer, but they closely tracked the two core constitutional issues that have led to a lengthy string of lower-court rulings striking down state bans. As of now, same-sex marriages are allowed in thirty-six states, with bans remaining in the other fourteen but all are under court challenge.
Although the Court said explicitly that it was limiting review to the two basic issues, along the way the Justices may have to consider what constitutional tests they are going to apply to state bans, and what weight to give to policies that states will claim to justify one or the other of the bans….
The focus of the Court’s review will be a decision issued in early November by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. That decision, breaking ranks with most other courts, upheld bans on marriage or marriage-recognition in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee.
Friday’s order granted review of one petition from each of those states; the petitions phrase the two basic issues in somewhat different ways, which is why the Court rewrote them to make specifically clear what it intended to review.
The Kentucky case (Bourke v. Beshear) raises both of the issues that the Court will be deciding, the Michigan case (DeBoer v. Snyder) deals only with marriage, and the Ohio (Obergefell v. Hodges) and Tennessee cases (Tanco v. Haslam) deal only with the recognition question. If customary practice is followed, the first case listed in the order — the Ohio case Obergefell v. Hodges — will become the historic title for the final ruling.
The problem for the conservative justices will be that public opinion has shifted so rapidly on this issue–if they decide to limit the civil rights of LGBT Americans, there would probably be a serious backlash. From The Washington Post:
The country’s first same-sex marriage, the result of a Massachusetts court decision, took place less than 11 years ago. Now, more than 70 percent of Americans live in states where same-sex couples are allowed to marry, according to estimates.
The questions raised in the cases that the court will consider this spring were left open in 2013 when the justices last confronted the issue of same-sex marriage. A slim majority said at the time that a key portion of the federal Defense of Marriage Act — withholding recognition of same-sex marriages — was unconstitutional and in a separate case allowed same-sex marriages to resume in California.
Since then, courts across the nation — with the notable exception of the Cincinnati appeals court — have struck down a string of state prohibitions on same-sex marriage, many of them passed by voters in referendums. Many of those court decisions compared the prohibitions to the ones on interracial marriage that the Supreme Court struck down in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia.
When the Supreme Court declined to review a clutch of those decisions in October, same-sex marriage proliferated across the country.
Couples may now marry in 36 states and the District. Three in four same-sex couples live in a state where they are allowed to wed, according to estimates by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Chief Justice John Roberts will have to keep all that in mind if he cares about his place in history.
While we’re talking about the conservative trend on the Supreme Court, take a look at this sobering article at Think Progress: If You Want To Understand What’s Happened To The Supreme Court, You Need To Listen To Rand Paul.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is an odd place to seek counsel on the Constitution. As a Senate candidate in 2010, Paul told a Louisville editorial board that he opposed the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters, claiming that the right of “private ownership” should trump the right to be free from racist discrimination. Opposing a core protection for racial minorities, according to Paul, is “the hard part about believing in freedom.” He later suggested that civil rights laws targeting private businesses may exceed Congress’s power under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause — a view the Supreme Court unanimously rejected in 1964.
Yet the Heritage Foundation, one of the backbones of the conservative movement in Washington, DC, invited Paul to speak at length on the Constitution and the role of the judiciary earlier this week. If the audience was upset that voters sometimes elect leaders who disagree with the Heritage Foundation, they were no doubt enraptured by Paul’s vision for the courts. Senator Paul’s speech was a repudiation of democracy, and he called for the Supreme Court to assume a dominant role in setting American policy that it abandoned three generations ago. Under Paul’s vision, the minimum wage is forbidden and union busting is constitutionally protected. The New Deal is an illegitimate expansion of federal power, and more recent efforts to ensure that no one dies because they cannot afford health care are an abomination.
“I’m a judicial activist,” Paul proudly proclaimed.
Nevertheless, Paul’s speech to the Heritage Foundation is worth watching in its entirety. It lays out a vision that is closer than the Court’s current precedents suggest, and that could easily become a reality if the Court’s older members are replaced by younger conservatives. Moreover, as I explain in my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, a Supreme Court committed to Paul’s economic agenda would hardly be unprecedented in American history. If anything, Paul is asking the Court to return to its self-appointed role as the vanguard against democracy.
While state legislators ate eggs and drank coffee in a Manchester diner, Paul suggested that half of the recipients of federal disability relief are “gaming the system” because they are able to work. He also told them the arguments against building the Keystone XL pipeline are “this sort of Luddite, flat-earth, that my goodness we shouldn’t have cars” mentality.
It was Paul’s comments about disability benefits that drew the most attention, largely because Democrats quickly pounced.
During a question-and-answer period, Paul was asked about government programs and welfare.
“You know, the thing is that all of these programs — there’s always somebody who is deserving. Everybody in this room knows somebody who is gaming the system,” said Paul.
“What I tell people is, if you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldn’t be getting a disability check,” Paul said. “You know, over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everybody over 40 has a back pain.”
Really? I’m over 60, and I might get a little bit stiff sometimes, but I certainly don’t have chronic back pain. Let’s see what the fact checkers have to say about Paul’s claim.
Politifact: Rand Paul says most people receive disability for back pain, anxiety.
You can read the whole article for the details and some caveats, but here’s the bottom line:
Paul said, “Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts.”
The numbers don’t add up. The two broader disability categories that include back pain (“diseases of the musculoskeletal system”) and anxiety disorders (“mental disorders – other”) don’t even equal close to 50 percent, let alone those two ailments by themselves.
Paul’s quip might make for a good soundbite, but it’s not rooted in reality. We rate the statement False.
As for people “gaming the system,” Politifact notes a report from the Government Accountability Office that estimated that
…in fiscal year 2011, the Social Security Administration made $1.29 billion in potential cash benefit overpayments to about 36,000 individuals who were working and making more than $1,100 a month (the limit to receive disability benefits).
The 36,000 people receiving improper payments, while a lot on paper, represent about 0.4 percent of all beneficiaries, the report said.
Talking Points Memo posted a video of three “christian” men “apologizing” to women for allowing them to have abortions. It’s the most patronizing bit of mansplaining I’ve seen I’ve seen in a very long time. From TPM:
“I conceded to an abortion,” Pastor Shane Idleman says. “That decision still haunts me today.”
Against a montage of giggling, joyful children and babies, the men discuss how much they regret the decision and take responsibility for letting down God, women and their unborn children.
“I should’ve manned up and I should’ve fought for you and — I didn’t,” John Blandford says. “I didn’t.”
Then come the apologies to all women who have had an abortion, women who have been “subjected to such a terrible thing,” women who “no one tried to rescue,” and women who have “tried to hide this from everyone.”
“I’m sorry for men not taking a greater stand in this area,” Idleman says.
“I’m sorry that, I’m sorry that this is available,” Daniel Phillips says.
But don’t worry all you sinful women “hid[ing] in shame and darkness,” you can always repent and ask god to forgive you. Watch the video yourself if you can stomach it.
Here’s an interesting story from Slate’s Hanna Rosin about the “free range parenting movement.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon, a 10-year old Maryland boy named Rafi and his 6-year old sister, Dvora, walked home by themselves from a playground about a mile away from their suburban house. They made it about halfway home when the police picked them up. You’ve heard these stories before, about what happens when kids in paranoid, hyperprotective America go to and from playgrounds alone. I bet you can guess the sequence of events preceding and after: Someone saw the kids walking without an adult and called the police. The police tracked down the kids and drove them home. The hitch this time is, when the police got there, they discovered that they were meddling with the wrong family.
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv explicitly ally themselves with the “free range” parenting movement, which believes that children have to take calculated risks in order to learn to be self-reliant. Their kids usually even carry a card that says: “I am not lost. I am a free-range kid,” although they didn’t happen to have it that day. They had carefully prepared their kids for that walk, letting them go first just around the block, then to a library a little farther away, and then the full mile. When the police came to the door, they did not present as hassled overworked parents who leave their children alone at a playground by necessity, or laissez-faire parents who let their children roam wherever, but as an ideological counterpoint to all that’s wrong with child-rearing in America today. If we are lucky, the Meitivs will end up on every morning talk show and help convince American parents that it’s perfectly OK to let children walk without an adult to the neighborhood playground.
Perhaps if they had been black and lived in South Carolina, they would have been arrested like Debra Harrell, the single mother who let her daughter go to the playground while she was working at McDonald’s. As white suburban professionals, the Meitivs experienced a lower level of intrusion, but still one that would make any parent bristle. The police asked for the father’s ID, and when he refused, called six patrol cars as backup. Alexander went upstairs, and the police called out that if he came down with anything else in his hand “shots would be fired,” according to Alexander. (They said this in front of the children, Alexander says.) Soon after, a representative from Montgomery County Child Welfare Services came by and required that the couple sign a “safety plan” promising not to let the children go unsupervised until the following week, when another CPS worker would talk to them. At first, the dad refused, but then the workers told him they would take the kids away if he did not sign.
It’s a thought-provoking piece. Read more at the link.
Finally, a feel-good story, thanks to Ralph B., who posted it on Facebook.
From The Washington Post: Russia’s heroic cat Masha: She’s credited with saving an abandoned infant from winter’s deep freeze.
Masha the cat – as the stray is called by the residents of the building she calls home in Obninsk – found the infant in an entryway Saturday night and climbed into the box in which the baby had been left.
One of the building’s residents heard the cat and the baby’s cries. At first, Nadezhda Makhovikova just thought she was hearing Masha in some sort of distress. “When I went down, I saw it was a baby crying,” Makhovikova told REN TV earlier this week.
Reports said the baby had been left with a pacifier, bottle and diapers, and was dressed warmly, wearing a little hat, as residents described him – though he likely would have had difficulty staying warm enough to survive a whole night in the sub-freezing temperatures in the area.
Residents called an ambulance, which whisked the baby away to a local hospital – but not before Masha would try to accompany the baby on the way.
Here’s a video about Masha. It’s in Russian, but you can get the gist.
So . . . what else is happening? Please share your thoughts and links in the comment thread and enjoy the long weekend!
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Thanks for the link on the Meitiv family and their free range parenting style. I’d be furious if it were me, especially with the comment about “shots being fired,” said in front of the kids. And what does that teach the kids – to fear the cops more than any real or imaginary danger in their neighborhood.
I listened to another news broadcast about this story and the reporter stated that a child had to be 13 in order to supervise other younger children. I actually laughed at that and thought that my parents would have been in big trouble because I had been babysitting since I was 9 (oldest of 8 kids pretty much insured that I would learn responsibility early). Granted, 9 years old is young, but I think kids are smart and can learn responsibility and still enjoy being a kid.
Perhaps being from the boom generation gives me a different outlook – I would have hated having helicopter parents and not being able to wander in the woods or wade in the river by myself. Or having parents constantly phoning me on a cell phone to make sure I was alright.
That’s nuts. When I was 11, I started babysitting for money. I took care of multiple kids and infants with no problems at all. I had already helped with my younger siblings.
My stepfather owned a dairy farm in Missouri. When I was 10 I did a heck of a lot of things without supervision which included driving, driving tractors, feeding cattle, taking care of animals such as dogs, goats, horses, etc. We walked to the bus stop by ourselves to go to school (and this wasn’t close either), shoot this list could go on and on. The people in this country are really in a sad state since 2001. I don’t see any promise for better days ahead, either.
Like y’all I was babysitting for multiple children at 9-10. I was doing laundry at 9. Laundry wasn’t nearly as easy as it is today. It included something called a clothesline, starch and an iron. I was housekeeping and even doing light cooking by 9-10. So by the time I was 12-13, I was seen by my family as an adult, I was basically doing everything that most adult women were doing except having sex and I was seriously thinking about that too. 🙂
I do think that parents today are much more protective (and in many cases overly protective) than my parents were with me and I was with my children. From the time I was 6-7 I was free range roaming all over the neighborhood and sometimes beyond. Many times no one except my companions knew where I was. My children and grandchildren tell me that the world is more dangerous now and that they must keep track of their children 24-7, but I don’t believe that. The biggest difference in society today is that people who perpetrate crimes against women and children no longer get to fly under the radar as they did when I was growing up. In those days parents and most any adult could discipline children anyway they wished, short of murder. Men could abuse their wives with no fear of punishment and no shame. It wasn’t uncommon for 13 year old girls to date grown men and no one thought anything of it. Men who now would be considered sexual predators were excused for their behavior because some “loose woman” made them do it. REMEMBER THOSE DAYS??? I don’t think much has changed except that today we recognize things as unacceptable or criminal that in those days were ignored altogether or swept under the rug.
My friends and I talk about how on weekends, we’d get on our bikes and be gone for the day.
Nobody thought anything about it.
Play was our job.
I don’t think that conservative justices see public opinion supporting gay marriage as a problem. I think they really see it as a minor inconvenience, while the real problem in their opinion is that gays can legally marry.
John Roberts may care. He is very aware of his legacy.
So does Antonin Scalia. It’s just a question what they want that legacy to be.
What’s your evidence that Scalia cares about his legacy?
Scalia is aiming for Saint
Yeah, he’s a real Mother Teresa!!! 🙂
What legacy? The most incompetent, ideological and corrupt Chief Justice ever?
I think Kennedy will be the swing vote as he was in DOMA. I believe Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas will vote against Marriage equality because that’s what they do.
Here’s a quote from Scalia that might give you some indication of how much Scalia loathes LGBT community. “Rejecting the Lawrence majority’s conclusion that private sexuality between consenting adults receives “substantial protection” under the Constitution, Scalia responded “[s]tates continue to prosecute all sorts of crimes by adults ‘in matters pertaining to sex’: prostitution, adult incest, adultery, obscenity, and child pornography”. That might give you some indication of how he personally view L/G relationships.
Here’s an irony that I find an interesting footnote concerning the Lawrence case: “In the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Kennedy wrote that the Constitution protects “adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.” The opinion said it was not deciding the question of same-sex marriage, but Mr. Scalia begged to differ. If states may not use laws to express moral disapproval of homosexual conduct, he wrote in dissent, “what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising the liberty protected by the Constitution?”
And for your reading pleasure
Thirteen Offensive Things Justice Scalia’s Compared To Homosexuality
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/03/25/1766941/thirteen-offensive-things-justice-scalias-compared-to-homosexuality/
Thanks for posting the story on Masha. What a sweet cat! She looks similar to one of mine I lost last year, who looked part Norwegian Forest Cat. If I ever cried she would come running up to me, meow and nuzzle as if to say “there, there, I’m here for you.”
Journalists takes atirical advantage of the change in Congress:
http://seattletimes.com/text/2025481063.html
I walked home from grade school when I was in lower elementary. It was a midsized town in Iowa and had to walk past a hospital and small commercial zone and then through several other neighborhoods to get up the hill to home. It wasn’t just a few blocks away either. I don’t understand this at all.
I walked to and from elementary school. I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, so it was a small town. Usually I walked with other kids that lived in my neighborhood.
We walked with a group of us. By the last six blocks I was the last one to trudge up the hill.
My sib and I walked to and from the bus stop without an adult. It was nearly a mile. After my sib finished high school, I walked it by myself for several years. I still like walking.
How did the Holcomb story affect you, BB.
That must have rocked Kansas.
Sorry, that was meant to be a question, of course.
What is the Holcomb story?
The Clutter family. I’m just a few years younger and I remember that as so frightening.
Oh, right. That was in 1959. We lived in Indiana by then. We were in Lawrence while my Dad was working on his Ph.D., at KU, and we left when I was 8 years old and moved to Athens Ohio, where my Dad taught at OU for two years. Then we ended up in Muncie, IN. I don’t think I heard about the murders until later on when I read In Cold Blood.
Another one.
Gunman opens fire at Florida mall, killing one, injuring another, before killing himself, police say
Shots ring out in food court, police evacuate shopping center. People run in terror as bullets fly
How is Ralph has anyone heard from him lately?
See him around Facebook on an odd late night.
I miss reading his comments.
I do too. I don’t know why he stopped coming by here.
Me too. Maybe something came up IRL.
Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-in-poverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
It wasn’t exactly a bright and warm day in Boise, but at least the wind wasn’t blowing on us, as we were surrounded by the crowd of supports for Add the Work, No More, No Less. The legislature is finally going to take up the case, after nine years of exhaustive outreach to get the words “sexual identity and sexual orientation” added to the Idaho Human Rights Law. These people have campaigned, and campaigned, and has involved so many people, including churches, planned parenthood, health services, and AAUW. And you know that Madelyn Taylor still has her case before the courts, and she said it hopefully go before the courts in 30 days.
It was her spouse that was refused burial at the Idaho Veterans Cemetery, until October, when the 9th circuit struck down the ban. I was honored to be invited to her services.
Like BB said, it would be one of greatest tragedies for our Country, if the Supreme Court denies same sex marriages. I am going to get busy sending out letters, and making calls. Will leave it up to those individuals to tell their stories during the open hearing on 26 Jan. Positive, all around my husband, and myself we felt positive, and a sense of unity!
Opps Add the Words, not work!
Thanks for posting this, Fannie.