One-handed typing: the doom of mankind!

[elfs]

Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent from the ruling Lawrence v. Texas, said that the court's overturning its own opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, "calls into question state laws against masturbation."

Remember, this isn't just Scalia spouting off here. His version of the constitution may be weird, but it's consistent in the notion that some things, such as sexuality and privacy, which aren't explicit in the constitution, are not to be dealt with by the courts but must be deferred to the states. On the other hand, religion, which is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, is the province of the Court, which has the final say and sometimes defers to "the verdict of history." Anyone who remembers the Judge Bork case can remember his dissenting opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut.

As if that weren't bad enough, the religious right is now interested in "strengthening marriage," which include "addressing deliberate childlessness is marriage."

Isn't that special?

Comments

*boggle*

[jenkitty.livejournal.com]

Are they now saying that people who choose not to have children for whatever reason should not be married? They just declared my marriage invalid. *grrrr*

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment: if you were to assume that the declining birthrate amongst successful professionals was a bad thing (without any religious overtones to the judgement - let's just suggest that it makes for bad demographic trends), what policies and programs would you design to encourage said people to at least breed to replacement (two kids per couple) levels?

[intrepid-reason.livejournal.com]

I will say that it is frightening that the demographics are looking as if the majority of people choosing not to have children are in the intellectual top 5%-10% in the nation.

[(Anonymous)]

"The Handmaid's Tale" comes to mind...

[riverheart.livejournal.com]

" "If they're isolated — if we don't address cohabitation and casual divorce and deliberate childlessness — then I think they're futile and will be brushed aside." "

Cohabitation and divorce and childlessness and enjoying sex for its own sake and people *gasp* actually choosing to be something other than fundamentalist Christian...oh, yeah, that's the problem, all right. Special, indeed.

What about those who can't have children with each other? Should we not be permitted to marry? What about people who shouldn't, for any number of reasons, many of them genetic, have children with each other? What about late-life marriages where kids really aren't an option?

Grrrrrrrr....there is more to marriage than procreating.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

if you were to assume that the declining birthrate amongst successful professionals was a bad thing (without any religious overtones to the judgement - let's just suggest that it makes for bad demographic trends), what policies and programs would you design to encourage said people to at least breed to replacement (two kids per couple) levels?

First, I'm going to assume that you mean "declining birthrate amongst successful professionals that would, if continued, eventually mean no professionals at all if we assume that no one in any other non-professional class could become a professional." Because otherwise the question would be moot, as the children of non-professionals would become educated and enter into professional lives.

Just a few suggestions off the top of my head.
Second, I would certainly encourage a more child and family-friendly environment in the work-place of said professional environments. It's not that professionals don't want to breed. It's that it's damn hard to breed and maintain a family *and* professional life when your boss tells you you are married to the company. Mothers with help with daycare make for women who can show up for work regularly. Mothers whose husbands can take a couple of weeks off for family time after the baby is born can get mom back into the work place quicker too, and makes for an easier transition to fatherhood for dad in the workplace (the first couple of weeks are the hardest as you learn a whole new life...by the time you've gone a couple of weeks, you've settled into a bit of a routine).

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

There's always the Gorean method: don't allow professional women to be hired until after they've had 2 kids. (Women of the caste of physicians were trained, but not allowed to practice until they had made the replacement ratio)

This would also get the childbearing done in the 20s when fertility is the highest, and the body is young enough to bounce back quickly. Trust me when I say there is a HUGE difference between recovery at 24 and recovery at 33.

Also, basic family-friendly corporate culture: 40 hour weeks (not 60 or 100), on site day care--including sick child care, paid health insurance, telecommuting. These have all been shown to save money and training time by retaining talented women.


And for intrepid_reason: I read recently the average IQ of women having children is 94. It's a truism that the better educated and more intelligent a woman is, the fewer children she will have.

(I'm an exception, but I have a strong sense of eugenic responsibility.)

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Everyone has two sets of potential: what they themselves can do, and what genes they can pass on in their issue. An ideal society would seek the full realization of both sets of potential in every individual.

I know that having a career and being a parent is hard. There are distinct disincentives to doing both as our society is currently organized, and lots of professionals do the rational thing: they avoid parenthood. That does, in general, increase their material wellbeing - kids are expensive and time-consuming.

Given this, it means that the next generation of professionals is going to come from somewhere else, i.e. they will be someone else's kids. I am not trying to suggest that if professionals don't breed that there will be no succeeding professionals. Professionals have dumb kids, too. Non-professionals have smart kids. The question is more one of societal optimization: if you have a population with a proven track record, don't you want them to have kids in preference to those who do not have such a track record?

And if you have such a goal, what policies and programs do you enact?

To be completely clear: I want everyone to have the opportunity to reach their full potential in this society. There will no doubt be resource waste involved, but I'll bet a whole lot that the waste will more than be made up by those individuals who contribute to society far in excess of what it took to feed, clothe, and educate them in the first place.

The reason such policies have to come from the state (in the generic sense of that term) as law is that a normal capitalist business will look to the short term bottom line and want its workers to work towards its ends to the limit of the law because to do otherwise is to give your competitors an edge which might put you out of business.

Just to complicate things further, let's throw in globalization: every society on earth is competing with every other. America has done well over its lifetime for a wide range of reasons: some legal, some cultural, some a question of being in a place with natural resources. However, the world system is changing, most importantly in that professionals are sought after and have increasing mobility.

Who's to say that America will continue to have the best set of laws, culture, etc., that will continue to attract professionals here, unless we think carefully about how to remain "the best" and thus continue to both generate and attract the most prolific contributors?

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

I'm a libertarian, so I don't want to prohibit or limit freedom (within obvious limits: stealing, killing illegal). However, I have no problems with setting incentives such that the path of least resistance is for the smartest people to pop out kids around optimum child bearing age.

Put another way: if we don't like the current outcome of choices people make, how can we change the rules so that choices we'd prefer people make are the easiest, most rewarding, most pleasureable, most [...] ones for them to make?

The really hard part is that you may not know who's "smartest" until they're well past childbearing age, if you rely on "track record." This quickly leads into the debate about the efficacy of IQ tests and whether parental performance is predictive of the performance of their kids.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Why would you assume that? It's not as if intelligence is an inherited trait, and the assumption that those in the 90% below "the top" don't care about education is, well, not warranted.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Everyone has two sets of potential: what they themselves can do, and what genes they can pass on in their issue. An ideal society would seek the full realization of both sets of potential in every individual.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with both of these premises: that we have two sets of potential, and that it is the responsibility of an ideal society to seek the full realization. We don't have two sets of potential, we have just our own; it is unfair to put the burden of our own failure to acheive on future generations, and that's exactly what you do when you put our potential to make of ourselves what we can and our genetic potential into the same argument.

I also disagree that society has any responsibility whatsoever. Individuals have responsibility; society is the epiphenomon of individuals working together. It is the duty of those individuals to craft a "society" that gets out of the way of individuals. Anything else invites abuse "in the best interests of society" or "in your best interests, whether you know it or not."

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

Estimates of the inheritance of intelligence suggest that the heritability of intelligence may be as high as 50%. In other words, intelligence appears to be inherited, but nurture has an equivalent effect.

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

There are other factors involved in the choice to not bear children. I know perfectly healthy individuals who are so self-centered that they can not interrupt their lives to have children.

It's not that the cost is too great; to these individuals, any cost is too great.

I suggest that the numbers of these self-centered individuals may be the bulk of childless professionals.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Intelligence is actually, to some small degree, inherited. It's mostly a crapshoot anyway and not hard-and-fast that intelligent people will have intelligent kids (or that morons won't have any smart kids). However, the most important factor in fostering intelligence in the population is generally going to be found only in households with intelligent/successful parents. This factor is a stimulating, open-minded environment during the formative years that teaches the offspring to reason for themselves and to shun irrational prejudice.

Now I don't want to sound too classist or anything, but doing the most simple math, there IS a troublesome trend. The open-minded population tends to be more concerned with problems they perceive for the Earth as a whole, one of which is overpopulation and all that. They tend to make up a large percentage of the childless-by-choice couples. Much of the remainder are successful professionals as others have noted.

On the other hand, another major segment of the population has narrow-minded religious ideals, and unfortunately they tend to breed like rabbits. Take your average devout Catholic couple, based on those friends I know personally who were raised in Catholic homes, I'd predict an average of no fewer than 5 kids per couple for Catholics. Even assuming 20% of their offspring bails on the faith and gets open-minded and educated, that's still a SERIOUS exponential rate of growth. The friends I have who were raised in other Christian denominations stayed mostly at the net replacement (families with 2 kids on average), but the trend of having families with closed-minded "values" breeding at faster rates is going to have consequences that will be reflected in the general tolerance and open-mindedness of the population as a whole.

Re: *boggle*

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Let's just hope they actually suggest that as openly as they try to raise a heu and cry about gay marriage. Because most of the sheeples they've been able to fool so far about the "sanctity of marriage" will see their bigotry and ridiculous agenda for what it is and turn on them. The backlash could result in them losing all their influence.

[solarbird]

Are there other political acts that would reconnect procreation and marriage? Perhaps, if we are prepared to think "outside the box." For example, we could turn one of our opponents' key arguments back on them. Perhaps we should restrict some of the legal and welfare benefits of civil marriage solely to those married during their time of natural, procreative potential: for women, below the age of 45 or so (for men, in the Age of Viagra, the line would admittedly be harder to draw).

From a long Family Research Council paper here: http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=PL04J01

It's all the "fault" of Griswald v. Connecticut, that legalised birth control. That's where things went "wrong" for marriage.

They're deeply crazy, you know.

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

Right. It's not really that the issue is with married people using contraception per se. It's that Griswold v. Connecticut is the first decision that stipulated a right to privacy, on which Roe v. Wade is based. This is another attack on abortion.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Would you agree that public education, in concept, is a good idea, in that (at minimum) an educated electorate will make better decisions than an ignorant one?

Would you agree that public health efforts to control/cure/eradicate infectious disease is a good idea, in that if your neighbor is healthy it is less likely he will pass a contagion to you?

What are, in your view, the minimum functions of good government?

The government we have is the result of 200+ years of mostly agreed-upon social policy, tempered by the courts which try to make sure we live up to the principles set out in the Constitution.

I believe that we suffer too much government and it doesn't often do what it sets out to do in the most efficient or effective manner, and the federal government doesn't live within its means.

The hard part is twofold: first, agreeing on that minimum subset, and secondly, being firm in saying "no" to all those small (in the context of government) requests for resources outside that minimum agreed-upon subset of government functions.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

You are making a poor assumption here: that Catholics cannot be open-minded and educated. Yes, there are some areas we're likely to strongly disagree with, but they shouldn't be made the bogeymen of irrational thought.

No, I'm not Catholic.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Really? How about this: the maximum function of a good government is to use its monopoly power on legitimate violence to the least of its capacity; to enforce contracts between sovereign citizens and to maintain the property rights of individuals. Everything else is extraneous, distracting, and possibly detrimental to the functioning of "good government."

I read the other day that the price of laser eye surgery has dropped precipitously in the past decade even as the procedure itself has become more refined and desirable outcomes more commonplace. It is one of the few corners of the medical establishment where market forces, unskewed by government regulation, has worked.

Why isn't this true of, say, education?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, no, it's not "another attack on abortion." It's an attack on privacy, from which both Roe and Griswold get their premises. I think the RR would be perfectly happy to overturn Griswold, Lawrence and Roe in one swoop, even if it meant in effect that we had no privacy from the intrusion of goverment agencies.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Plastic Surgery is also well regulated by market forces - it's elective, and not (generally) a matter of life & death. I would argue that the healthcare market is otherwise skewed badly by urgent necessity on the part of the consumers.

I'm fully in favor of school vouchers to inject market discipline on the educational system - something the teachers' unions have mostly successfully resisted. I still think that education should be required of all minors, unless we decide that people without a high school diploma (or equivalent) aren't allowed to vote.

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

speaking of religion and marriage, well, isn't this a religious issue? isn't this another way of getting around the first amendment, having the government make laws to protect their version of a 'sanctified' commitment, a religious sacrament?

Um.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

Really? How about this: the maximum function of a good government is to use its monopoly power on legitimate violence to the least of its capacity; to enforce contracts between sovereign citizens and to maintain the property rights of individuals. Everything else is extraneous, distracting, and possibly detrimental to the functioning of "good government."

1) The government (the legal arm of Society) does not have a monopoly power on legitimate violence, or there would be no right to use lethal force in self-defense, or the defense of another life. I can provide you with much case law if you don't believe me.

2) Let's look at minors in our country: Unless violence is performed on a child, any actions, or inactions, that brings danger to a child (such as emotional harassment, neglect, mental abuse, etc) does not fall into the first category of government's role as you stipulated. There are no contracts that our government currently recognizes as existing between child and guardian that can be enforced (the child did not sign a contract), so any actions or inactions that brings danger to a child does not fall into the second category of government's role as you stipulated. And government, and Society as a whole, does not recognize children as "property", so any actions or inactions to a child that brings danger to a child does not fall into the third category of government's role as you stipulated.

So, my question is, where is CPS allowed to exist within your narrowly defined "good government"?

[grum]

Fascinating, mind if I add you to my friends list?