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This afternoon—between Specter defections, Clinton-Obama joint appearances and a rare Tony Bennett sighting, one of the strangest I’ve spent on Capitol Hill—it’s worth looking miles from the Beltway, to Austin, Texas, where Vice President Joe Biden toured the National Domestic Violence Hotline Center. Joined by Austin Mayor Will Wynn, Biden surveyed the complex that hosts the hotline and other programs designed to help women, especially those suffering from emotional and physical abuse, help themselves. From the press pool report:
[Biden] was guided to the crinkled paper on the wall with the 2-millioncalls’ notation. With a marker, he wrote above that notation: “Keep thefaith! You are changing womens’ lives one woman at a time” beforeputting his signature below his message. Folks in the room broke intoapplause. VPOTUS then hugged Cindy Loper, a staff member whose cubicleis near the crinkled-paper wall.
VPOTUS briefly held staff member Anna Truchard’s hand—saying “we’vealready met; we’re old buddies”-- before continuing his walk-through... Atthe south end of the room, he hovered over staff members taking callsin Spanish.
VPOTUS then crossed the hall into a room where about 20 people wereclustered in anticipation of a group photograph. The people includingMarta Pelaez, described to me later as president and ceo of one of thelargest women’s shelters in San Antonio, spoke quietly to him beforeVPOTUS said over the past 15 years, he’s often been approached by womengiving thanks for the act leading to the center. “It is a big deal,” hesaid.
“We need someone to advocate for us and you are that person,” Pelaez said.
“Wellbaby, I ain’t going away,” he said, adding that he’s lined up two womento fill administration positions focus on preventing domestic violence.
What a guy! It’s easy to joke, as Sarah Palin did, about the vice president being dispatched to various funerals and second-tier conferences, but today Biden provided needed exposure for this increasingly critical resource and also provided an important reminder as to why these caricatures don't apply to him.
Biden’s authorship of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994 was a remarkable piece of legislative doggedness, as chronicled by Fred Strebeigh in the New Republic last summer. The bill’s passage also depended in large part on the work of a group of female lawyers that Biden trusted and heeded at key moments in the fight to keep its provisions legal (a tale that Strebeigh also relates in his new book, Equal). Biden takes the thought of abuse so seriously, apparently, that people think he's been affected himself.
VPOTUS said everybody thinks he has a family member who was the victimof violence. “Thank god they weren’t,” he said. “I was raised by areally gentle decent man who thought the single greatest, the cardinalsin for real of all cardinal sins was the abuse of power. The ultimateabuse of power was for a man to raise his hand to a woman, or for awoman or man to raise their hand to a child. That’s the ultimate,that’s the serious abuse of power that can exist.”
With that kind of empathetic statement, I’d say that the vice president could stand to be known for more than verbal diddles and a prizefighter’s honor—his support of women’s rights makes far more of an impression.
ALSO: Via the White House, some background and additional resources:
Since the hotline center’s founding in 1996—spurred by congressionalapproval of the VPOTUS-sponsored Violence Against Women Act in 1994—thehotline has fielded more than 2 million calls. Its number is800-799-7233 (SAFE).
The Love is Respect hotline, focused on teen-agers, has handledmore than 25,000 calls and online chats since it started as ahotline-center project in November 2007. The hotline is called theNational Teen Dating Abuse Hotline; it’s 866-331-9474. Both hotlinesare open around the clock 365 days a year. The teen online chatsite—www.loveisrespect.org--is live from 4 p.m. to midnight Sundaythrough Friday, year-round.
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Emily you’re wondering why you're loathe to throw a ticker tape parade for Arlen Specter? E.J. is right. One does want to credit him for the good stuff as well as the bad, and he’s been willing to push back over the years. But I keep getting stuck by that lofty speech he gave in 2006—opposing the Military Commissions Act—which included a provision that stripped courts of their power to review the constitutionality of enemy detentions.
Remember when he stood up and announced, "I'm not going to support a bill that's blatantly unconstitutional...that suspends a right that goes back to [the Magna Carta in] 1215." And added, "I'd be willing, in the interest of party loyalty, to turn the clock back 500 years, but 800 years goes too far."
And then he voted for it?
Good times.
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Dear XX Factor readers: We want to introduce you to a new interview feature we'll be running on Double X, the our forthcoming web magazine expanding out from XX Factor. "Ask, Tell" will be a regular interview with writers, actors, filmmakers, and more. Our first interview is with Tilda Swinton, whose new film Julia is the story of an alcoholic who, in desperation, kidnaps a boy to extort money.
For each interview, we'd like to include questions from you, our dear readers. So, if you have a question for Tilda Swinton, send it to me at morourkexx@gmail.com by 1 p.m. tomorrow.
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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just rejected President Obama’s claim of a wildly-overbroad “state secrets” privilege in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, a suit filed by five victims of the “extraordinary rendition” program against the Boeing subsidiary that flew planes for the rendition program. The district court had dismissed the suit after the Bush administration claimed that everything about the program was a “state secret.” Then-CIA-director Michael Hayden told the court that “[d]isclosure of the information covered by this privilege assertion reasonably could be expected to cause serious—and in some instances, exceptionally grave—damage to the national security of the United States and, therefore, the information should be excluded from any use in this case.” The Obama Administration surprised us in February by continuing to assert the same privilege at the court of appeals.
But today the panel that heard that appeal said “no.” Remanding the case back to the lower court, all three judges agreed that the all-or-nothing “state secrets” doctrine advanced by the Bush and Obama administrations “has no logical limit—it would apply equally to suits by U.S. citizens, not just foreign nationals; and to secret conduct committed on U.S. soil, not just abroad” and that “according to the government’s theory, the Judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law.”
The panel added that it was “the central judgment of the Framers” that “whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake.”
By sending this case back to the lower courts, the Ninth Circuit has ensured that these rendition victims can finally have a day in court, and that there can be a judicial reality check on executive branch claims of secrecy. Most importantly, the appeals court reminds us today that the widely-known fact of a U.S. torture program can't be deemed a "state secret" just because the government doesn't want to talk about it.
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I'd love to respond on everyone's Regnerus essay comments, and to
Bonnie on spinsterhood, a word derived from the spindle—spinning having been assigned to an unmarried woman, back in the traditional days when the average age of marriage
for women ran between 27 and 29. Getting promoted from being a spindle-wielder to being the shop's mistress—running the shop, rather than doing the day labor—was a promotion earned in part by having spent
all those years saving up money as a...spinster. Only from your years of labor would you, oh working girls, become a good catch,
someone who could help your husband invest in a shop that the two of you could
call your own.
That late-twenties average age of marriage was called the "Western model," since it took hold in Western Europe, not southern or eastern. Some historians have suggested that the relatively high traditional average age of
marriage was one of the economic engines behind western Europe's success. People in eastern and southern
Europe married their daughters off at comparatively young ages, with correspondingly
damaging effects on fertility (high), maternal and child mortality (high), and
female productivity (low). If you wait to get married, and both parties save up
their pennies to invest in the shop and the kids, it's good for you, good for economy,
and good for society. It's ahistorical to suggest otherwise. So there.
BUT I can't pause to write that paragraph because like Emily
B, I am absolutely gobsmacked by Specter switching parties. Yes, the Republican
party has moved sharply to the right (and to the south—the olde New England
Republican, capitalist, fiscally moderate, and socially liberal, is on life
support) since he was first elected. Are Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe next?
Like you, Emily, I have the image of Arlen Specter attacking
Anita Hill's credibility—and doing it hatefully, misogynistically—seared into my retinas. I swore back then never to forgive, as I suspect did hundreds of thousands of women, appalled by what we saw. But waiting right
beside that image is another one: of Ted Kennedy sitting limply on the same Senatorial
panel, silent and powerless to defend Hill because of his own mottled history. Politicians
are imperfect, much like the rest of us, albeit with more power and more media exposure.
I suppose—like the rest of us—they must be assessed by the totality of
their deeds, not by the worst of their televised moments.
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As Dayo points out, there is much to puzzle over in Mark Regnerus' push for earlier marriages in the Washington Post. For one, we're never actually told why late marriage is a problem, only that marriage "wisely entered into" has various social and economic benefits. (Note the hedge; bad marriages hit wellbeing hard.) We're told that the "fault" for this trend "lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents." Where is the evidence for this claim? It would seem to contradict a decade of research weighing the influence of parents versus the influence of peer groups. No responsible sociologist would privilege the influence of parents over the influence of friends in reference to say, declining birth rates; is there something special about marriage? Or is it just convenient to pretend that the desire for late marriage is imposed from above, forcing young women into a position they'd rather avoid?
Because he refuses to allow for the possibility that 21-year-olds just don't want to get married, Regnerus backs himself into a contradiction. He portrays young women as fickle children, desirous of marriage yet incapable of resisting the demands of career-focused parents. But given the thrust of the argument, he also needs to portray the same women as independent, responsible decision makers. "Most young women," he asserts, "are mature enough to handle marriage." Which is it? Surely a college kid helplessly subject to the whims of her mother is not ready for a ring.
I'm less troubled by the piece's clumsy condescension than its attempt to sell ideology as sociology. Regnerus claims that marriage is environmentally beneficial without any acknowledgment of the fact that marriages occasionally produce children, whose existence will surely wipe out the energy-saving benefits of combining households. He simply states, without explanation, that late marriage is an "emotional problem." Objective! But remember, we're doing science here, ladies: Though it may not be "cool" to state the cold, hard facts, Regnerus sighs, "My job is to map trends, not to affirm them." Oh, the courage.
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Sen. Arlen Specter is switching parties, from Republican to Democrat, Chris Cillizza reports for
the Washington Post. I am flamboozled. I understand the calculus—the
word from my family in Philadelphia was that he really was going to lose the
Republican primary to challenger Pat Toomey. What's throwing me, as a
native Pennsylvanian, is all my years of Specter despising. For his
prosecutorial strafing of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas
hearings, first and foremost. Yes I know the right hates him, but I hated him too! Even if he did upbraid Alberto Gonzales over wiretapping without a warrant, and vote against his (former) party almost 40 percent of the time. But now he is lecturing about rolling back executive power in the New York Review of Books and joining Obama and giving the democrats a filibuster-proof 60 senators once Al Franken is seated. What if he gets health care reform through, and good Supreme Court justices, and more immediately ends the confirmation block of Department of Justice appointee Dawn Johnsen? I'll have to eat all those votes I cast against him. Or just appreciate the spectacle of political metamorphosis.
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I'm glad E.J. mentioned the outdated and offensive label "spinster" (evoking the hag cartoon on an "old maid" playing card deck), because recently in news stories describing talent show contestant Susan Boyle, I've noticed the insulting characterization making a comeback. But what is the correct term for unmarried women in the post-feminist world? As Kerry noted recently about sociologist Andrew Cherlin's research, in a culture where "marriage matters more here than elsewhere," in the United States, "only a marriage ring guarantees first-class citizenship."
Meantime, though the term spinster is rude, the condition it describes, unmarried women over 40, is common. I'm very glad Dayo brought up the Mark Regnerus essay on the appallingly short shelf life of women. Like Emily, I married relatively late in life. I was 35 when I got engaged, 25 years ago, and had life experience, a career, and a child. But, as a baby boomer, even at my mid-career age, there were comparatively plenty of single available men. Although I agree with Meghan's assessment that Regernus presents a narrow-minded and patronizing sociological premise, he was not wrong when he wrote, "Marriage will be there for men when they're ready. And most do get there. Eventually." Distressingly, however, somewhere along the line, many single ladies with career and education priorities find they have entered a no man's land. Awkwardly, as Jess facetiously (I think) supports, the geezerish single men my age prefer to date women 10 to 20 years younger.
In the sixth season of Sex And The City, the inestimable Candice Bergen, as Carrie Bradshaw's powerful, glamorous, Vogue editor, scolds the younger woman for dating Aleksandr Petrovsky (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov), one of the infinitesimally few age-appropriate men available. As Enid, Bergen tells Carrie, "There are no men, anywhere. I am a 50-something woman and there's a very small pool, it's very small, it's a wading pool, really." She tells the advice columnist, "so what I want to know, is why are you swimming in my wading pool?"
The answer is that a man shortage also affects women in Carrie's cohort. The character Mia played by Hope Davis in the new season of another HBO series, In Treatment, despairs of ever meeting a "smart, interesting, available man who's over 40." She tells the single, attractive therapist played by Gabriel Byrne, "they're either married or there's a very good reason why they're not...and if they're divorced, they want them young."
It sounds grim, but it's not necessarily so. A close friend much younger than I, who treats my husband and me so nicely that our daughter wrote on her Facebook page "thanks for taking care of bonnie and jim" is a former lawyer in her early 40s, stunningly attractive and funny, who has a gardening and flowers business. Though not lacking in male friends who "shoulda put a ring on it," my friend has never married. Wondering if, as an old married lady, I was poorly attuned to the word's connotations, I asked what she thought of the word spinster. "Sure, I'd like a partner and children" she answered the more general question, "but right now I have neither and I'm still pretty happy." In fact, she told me, "I'm into spinster power."
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The other day, Dana posted about Tom Hodgkinson's series on the "idle parent." According to Hodgkinson's new book, The Idle Parent, if more parents, well, just parented less, their kids wouldn't be so, well, crazy. Reading it, I couldn't figure out if Hodgkinson was being serious or pulling some sort of Swiftian joke. I asked Lydia Netzer, a busy mother of two, homeschooler, and writer, what she thought of this strange vision of the 21st century idle parent. Her response follows.
Tom Hodgkinson, principled idler and haughty bastard, has delivered his latest installment of parenting advice: "Don't take your kids to amusement parks or museums." The piece, at first read, is a trifling bit of silliness. Hodgkinson posits with strange earnestness, for example, that playing with your child when you really don't feel like it might give you cancer.
Idle silliness notwithstanding, Hodgkinson has actually figured out something really important. He just doesn't know it yet. Maybe reading his article, backward, starting from the end and working toward the beginning, will shed some light.
Let's begin with his conclusion: As a parent you must always consider yourself and your own happiness first. Putting your children first will cause resentment and ugliness. Moving from this backwards to his hideous opening anecdote, with the screaming children and the raging parents, the deathly detachment of parent and child, and the "interminable torture" of leaving the house, can't one perhaps infer a cause-and -effect relationship?
Maybe, just maybe, this laissez faire parenting isn't working out so well in practice. If my children behaved the way this man's children do, I wouldn't take them anywhere either. But it doesn't take me an hour of screaming to get out the door with my kids. I must admit that on many occasions I have put their happiness first, put their development, their ability to ride in a car without causing the driver to strike the windshield with his fist, ahead my own interest in reading a biography of William Morris. Now we can go to a museum without drawing repeated comparisons to hell. Good for me.
Look, you can make an argument for the simple life when it comes to children. Wooden toys, rural pleasures, and all that. We can all appreciate the value of a quiet afternoon at home. But this practice of idleness rings a little false as a philosophy when accompanied by the assertion that a little healthy boredom will prepare children for prison. In this context it becomes apparent that the real reason you don't leave the house on a weekend is that you've ignored your children for so long that you can't.
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The storm of criticism is already brewing, but I for one want to
commend Mary Ann Glendon, a professor at Harvard and a former ambassador to the
Holy See, for refusing to accept the Laetare Medal and speak at Notre Dame's
spring commencement.
I love the eloquence of her open letter to the press explaining why speaking
alongside Obama during the ceremony is against her conscience:
A
commencement, however, is supposed to be a joyous day for the graduates and
their families. It is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the
right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre
Dame's decision—in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops—to
honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church's position on issues
involving fundamental principles of justice.
After all the mind-bending
attempts of evangelical leaders like Joel Hunter to try and prove the existence
of some kind of secret Obama pro-life agenda,
it's a relief that Glendon at least personally recognizes the
contradiction. Not only does she personally recognize it, but it also
feels to me that Glendon has a deeper agenda that motivated the release of her
letter to the press: an attempt to force the some of the institutions and
members of the Catholic Church to do a little overdue soul-searching themselves.
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Hanna asked us yesterday to stand in for the New York Times' ethicist, Randy Cohen, to weigh in on whether it's ethical to request Tamiflu prescriptions from friends and family members who are doctors, even when you're not infected with swine flu. I took the reporter's way out of the assignment: Instead of stepping up to fill Randy's shoes, I asked Randy himself. He pointed me toward his answer to a question from 2005 that also deals with whether to prescribe Tamiflu to friends and family (scroll down to the second question). The 2005 question comes from the doctor being begged for prescriptions rather than the Tamiflu-hungry friend. Here's an excerpt of his advice to that physician:
You should remain firm. Family pressure can be powerful enough to
squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond, but it should not be powerful
enough to compel you to do for a relative what you would not do for
your patients, your spouse, your children or yourself.
You
rightly suggest that doctors should prescribe a medication only when
they believe it to be the best treatment for a condition a patient
actually has, not when it is a sop to a patient's fear of a
hypothetical crisis.
A relative's request is different from that
of a patient, if only because your patients are unlikely to show up at
a holiday dinner and pout. But you must find a way to preserve family
harmony without capitulating to a bully.
So Hanna, even if you decide to go soliciting precautionary flu drugs from your hook-ups in the medical profession (which, apparently, would make you a bully), ethics dictates that they deny you the Tamiflu.
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Give ScienceDaily credit: Next to the write-up of the new study that found a correlation between autism in kids and advanced maternal age (oo, rotten phrase) is a link to the 2006 study that found that "children of men age 40 and older have a significantly increased risk of having autism spectrum disorders compared with those whose fathers are younger than 30 years." There is so much scientists don't understand about the autism spectrum, which may very well turn out to be a constellation of related but different disorders, with their own or overlapping genetic links. Maybe these apparent correlations between the disorder and older parenthood will prove unimportant in the end, or as you suggest, Jess, a proxy for other underlying factors. But at least it's equal opportunity bad news in the meantime. And the findings about older dads reminds me of a Lisa Belkin's argument about why men might want to start worrying about their biological clocks, too. She cited the autism study and another one showing that the children of older fathers have slightly lower IQs. Now maybe focusing on all of this is wrongheaded, because people shouldn't decide when to have kids based on preliminary findings about slight upticks in risk. But since Meghan is right about how much more often women's marketability is on the line, I'm glad to have a reason to bring up men's, too.
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Meghan, I was reminded of your comment about young women being bludgeoned with reports of their declining fertility after age 35 when reading about a new study on autism that claims that autism may be linked to moms 35 years or older. This study, from the University of Utah, also found that autism is more likely in first-born children and also in babies born breech. However, even though the write-up of the study on the website ScienceDaily is quick to note that the research "didn't identify a causal relationship" between these things and autism, I fear this will just be another weapon in Mark Regnerus' arsenal. Especially since:
Their investigation showed that the mother's age when giving birth (older than 34), breech presentation, and being firstborn were significant risk factors for the development of an [autism spectrum disorder]. The researchers also identified a small but significant relationship between the increased duration of education among mothers of those children.
Of course, they don't mention in the article that perhaps more educated mothers get better medical care, and their children are diagnosed with autism more not because they are more likely to have the disorder…but because it's diagnosed more frequently. As you pointed out, Meghan, agency is key here. We're all well aware of the risks of waiting to have children later (even though this particular study seems dubious), and I don't see why a "small but significant" correlation between late child bearing and autism should make us all rush out to get knocked up in our 20s.