Pandagon
Pregsplosion!
It occurs to me upon reading this that the last movie I saw which mentioned condom use was Knocked Up. And they did it wrong.
As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers.
The main reason for the increase?
All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.
How much of this is believable is arguable, but the popular culture argument marries nicely with this Townhall post, declaring that condoms can't solve the pregnancy problem. It's sort of like how food can't solve the starvation problem.
Wait just a minute. How, exactly, would "easier access to birth control" have impacted this situation? These girls decided to get pregnant on purpose. It wasn't that they couldn't get birth control or didn't know how to use it -- as so many proponents of "comprehensive sex education" (i.e., the variety that has students putting condoms on bananas in class) would like us to believe.
From the sounds of the sex ed they got (which ended in ninth grade), it sounds a lot like the only input they got was that pregnancy was awesome (from the Time story):
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. "We're proud to help the mothers stay in school," says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
But by May, after nurse practitioner Kim Daly had administered some 150 pregnancy tests at Gloucester High's student clinic, she and the clinic's medical director, Dr. Brian Orr, a local pediatrician, began to advocate prescribing contraceptives regardless of parental consent, a practice at about 15 public high schools in Massachusetts. Currently Gloucester teens must travel about 20 miles (30 km) to reach the nearest women's health clinic; younger girls have to get a ride or take the train and walk. But the notion of a school handing out birth control pills has met with hostility. Says Mayor Carolyn Kirk: "Dr. Orr and Ms. Daly have no right to decide this for our children." The pair resigned in protest on May 30.
There's a reason that you get in your head that having a baby is going to be a great thing - because there's nobody telling you anything else. I think the popular culture argument is likely crap, but thinking about it...what was the last movie or show you saw that featured a positive, realistic mention of birth control, safe sex, or just plain childlessness?
Either the couple has an unexpected pregnancy that brings them together after the guy realizes he's actually ready to be a father, or (in the case of your "edgier" films) the couple is driven apart. A condom doesn't work or isn't used, or, if birth control is brought up, it's often a deceptive technique used to avoid an otherwise desired pregnancy.
Where are the people, the films, the advocates in popular culture for more sexy, less baby?
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Paragons Of Consistency
At this point, It's a really weird thing how, after more than two decades in public service, he's decided that virtually everything he believed was in need of a refresh. All at once. In the exact same ideological direction. Every time.
Curiouser and curiouser.
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Cincinnati and HIV ads
Heading towards Cincinnati for the National Women's Studies Association conference. Which means blogging might be a bit haphazard over the weekend. For those who are attending, the general plan is that I'm helping Seal Press with tabling, so stop by and say hi.
Meanwhile, I'm linking to this post of copyranter's about some HIV prevention ads from France that show, as usual, that the French aren't quite like us. In a good way. The ads are, in case you haven't guessed, NSFW. Just was curious about people's opinions on them.
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The Log Cabin Republicans' 'education' of the LGBT community on McCain begins
I almost lost my lunch reading this spin. You might recall from a recent post that the Log Cabin Republicans organization said it "will do its part to educate gay and lesbian voters about Sen. McCain in the weeks ahead." Are you ready for the "education"?
As a Republican organization, Log Cabin only endorses GOP candidates. While the organization has yet to decide on endorsing the Republican candidate for president, we're encouraged that U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has won our party's nomination.Sen. McCain has had a long relationship with Log Cabin Republicans dating back to the opening of our organization's national office in the mid 1990s. Log Cabin endorsed Sen. McCain's re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. Log Cabin's national board of directors will soon decide whether to endorse Sen. McCain's presidential bid.
...During his previous run for the White House, McCain met with Log Cabin Republicans in 1999 during the heat of the Republican presidential primary season (which, at the time, no other Republican nominee for president had done). Eager to show his support for the gay and lesbian community, McCain told then-Log Cabin Executive Director Richard Tafel, "I just want you to know, Rich, that I am unashamed, unembarrassed and proud to work with you."
...Already, some in the LGBT community are dismissing Sen. McCain's votes against the federal marriage amendment. But this is disingenuous, to say the least. It took enormous political courage for a Republican Senator from red-state Arizona to buck his own party leadership and President Bush on this hot-button issue. And it's important to remember that Sen. McCain didn't just vote "no" on the marriage amendment. He took to the floor of the U.S. Senate and delivered one of the most impassioned speeches against the anti-gay measure, calling it "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans."
Following a recent report by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) heavily criticizing McCain's record on gay and lesbian issues, a McCain campaign spokesperson said: "Sen. McCain is seeking support from all Americans this November, based on his vision for moving America forward and his long record of treating people with respect and dignity. He was proud to receive an endorsement from the Log Cabin Republicans in his 2004 re-election campaign, and we’re confident he’ll win strong support this fall.”
Are you ready to hurl yet? Halt that impulse...there's more after the jump. Here's the Real McCain, according to the LCR, the man who allegedly, quietly, secretly courts your vote.
While we respect those who believe that only traditional "scorecard" LGBT issues such as hate crimes and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) should matter to gay people, we disagree. The vast majority of LGBT Americans are not one-issue voters. Like all Americans, gays and lesbians have wide-ranging concerns—from foreign policy to the environment to soaring gas prices to the size of the federal government and more.McCain's positions on these and many issues will attract independents, including gays and lesbians. Sen. McCain supports taking an aggressive posture against totalitarian regimes—regimes that threaten, imprison, and kill gay and lesbian people. By contrast, Sen. Obama has received harsh criticism (and even some skepticism from his fellow Democrats) for indicating he would meet with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without conditions.
Additionally, Sen. McCain's philosophy on other issues will attract gay and lesbian voters. He supports measures that will benefit gay and lesbian business people. His views on the proper role and scope of the federal government, as well as taxes and spending, energy and the environment may also have wide appeal. He also supports social security reform that may provide for private retirement accounts, which will directly benefit non-married LGBT Americans.
Sen. McCain is undoubtedly running a campaign to reach out to independent voters, including gay Americans. We believe he stands a significant chance of receiving more gay votes than George W. Bush did in 2004.
OK. Reality check time:
"I believe that the institution of marriage should be reserved for the union of one man and one woman, said Sen. McCain. The Protect Marriage Arizona Amendment would allow the people of Arizona to decide on the definition of marriage in our state. I wholeheartedly support the Protect Marriage Arizona Amendment and I hope that the voters in Arizona choose to support it as well."
-- John McCain in 2005, supporting Protect Marriage Arizona's ballot initiative (that eventually failed at the polls)."The legislation unambiguously maintains that open homosexuality within the military services presents an intolerable risk to morale, cohesion and discipline."
--McCain, in an April 16 letter to Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) on why DADT must remain in place.
"John McCain will be a marvelous selection as our nominee. He is with us on abortion. He is with us on the marriage issue."
-- " Rev. Lou Sheldon, of the Traditional Values Coalition
"John McCain is sort of ideal. He doesn't use social issues as wedge issues. He emphasizes the things that united all Republicans."
-- James Vaughn, the California director of the Log Cabin Republicans
It's nice to see the LCRs and the unhinged Lou Sheldon on the same page, huh?
Now, with all that said and done, I will say this -- I don't believe that John McCain is a homophobe when it comes to personal relationships; in fact a little bird told me he has high-level staff that are not only gay, but socially out of the closet. The fact of the matter is that John McCain is unwilling to challenge the far right wing of his party to ensure that good friend Rich Tafel, a man the Arizona senator says he was "unashamed, unembarrassed and proud to work with" has the same civil rights and responsibilities McCain has.
I would support a Republican who was willing to stand up for civil equality - if we were actually a demographic that was openly courted by the GOP; that would actually place more natural pressure on the Democrats to actually do something rather than show us their jellyfish spinelessness time and again. But that's not the GOP I see -- McCain had all primary season long to reject the professional fundie set and come out for fairness. If there are any "promising signs" from the McCain campaign, as the LCR calls them, they were not evident in any of the strategies the public saw.
Democrats may not be right on all the issues - I've certainly had problems with all of the candidates this year, but Barack Obama and those who ran in 2008 have been clear in their support for pro-LGBT legislation on all fronts, with marriage equality as the obvious stumbling block. That's a world of difference from McCain's public stand and all of his votes aside from FMA.
That's the bottom line - personal statements of support are not equivalent to working publicly to expand rights, not restrict them. That's my problem with the LCRs. I agree with their mission of moving the GOP toward a more inclusive view, but LGBTs have been vilified incessantly by this party for DECADES - where is the improvement? It's not a single-issue matter for gays to avoid voting for a candidate who says he would want to put another Roberts or Alito on the SCOTUS, or openly opposes hate crimes legislation or ENDA. If there isn't a candidate in favor of the most basic protections of LGBTs, I'm sorry, a promise of permanent tax cuts doesn't mean much out here in Red State America when you can be fired for being gay.
This little vignette from the LCR convention in May 2007 says it all about the mindset:
David Keeton, a small-business owner in Dallas, and his partner, Rob Schlein, said they supported Giuliani because of his record as New York mayor and his response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. "I'm an American first, then a Republican second, and gay falls in third or fourth," said Keeton, who wore a Ronald Reagan pin on his lapel.Both said they recently met former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at a fundraiser and had their picture taken with him. They were offended when Romney told the crowd that he opposed gay marriage and civil unions. "We're part of the Republican Party, but he just alienated people who had paid $1,500 for a table," Keeton said.
Well, while Keeton is ranking and voting his loyalties, it may not occur to him that there are a hell of a lot of people without the means or circumstances in Red states to place being a Republican higher over the problem of being fired from their job or worry about being gay- or trans-bashed.
Related:
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We Make Shit Up
Congressional Quarterly seems to be admitting that ideological rankings of Senators and Representatives, including their own, provide inaccurate, selective and mislabeled impressions of politicians.
Yet, for some reason, they keep doing them.
The Voteview approach is widely praised by political scientists because it has been very accurate at predicting how members vote. But Poole acknowledges his liberal-conservative scale doesn’t fully capture the complexity of lawmakers’ viewpoints.
“American politics is a philosophical mess in that there is no philosophical coherence to political parties. The parties are just groups of issue positions,” he said.
Green, the National Journal editor, says voters shouldn’t rely on a single rating to determine a candidate’s ideology.
“There’s pluses and minuses to each rating system. If you look at a number of them, I think you have a pretty good picture,” he said.
Of course it would help if, perhaps, these ranking groups didn't try to boil down fundamentally incongruent, complex forms of decision making into #1 Super Most Liberal Time Happy Explosion. That's just a thought.
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Are you racing to buy tix for the Values Voter Summit?
Mark your calendars! On September 12-14 at the Hilton Washington Hotel the professional "Christian" set will hold its 2008 Values Voter Summit. Featured confirmed speakers include Newt Gingrich, Tony Perkins, Michael Medved, Phyllis Schlafly and Gary Bauer. The bleating in the press release indicates California marriage equality is going to be the rallying cry for this dying, hypocritical fundie movement.
The summit, sponsored by FRC Action, Focus on the Family Action, American Values and the Alliance Defense Fund, will equip voters to defend marriage, life and religious liberty.“Family advocates may feel disheartened in light of the attack on marriage in California,” said Sonja Swiatkiewicz, director of Issues Response for Focus on the Family Action. “The Values Voter Summit will equip voters to make a difference at the ballot box this year — despite the judicial activism.”
Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly, a featured speaker at the briefing, said she is hopeful the California court decision will inspire others to fight to save marriage in their states.
“We should make sure that all the other states stand up and say, ‘We are not going to follow the leadership of California or recognize the unconstitutional things that they’re doing,’ ” she told Family News in Focus. “Just because the judges have ruled that way, it should not be accepted by the American people.”
Wait a minute. Were these not the same characters supporting last-minute races to the courthouse to file ludicrous petitions at the feet of the activist judges to try to stop the marriages from going forward?
I just want to ask these people one question -- using their logic, shouldn't all civil rights be determined at the ballot box (including womb control and fetus citizenship), including religious freedom, the rights of racial minorities, the disabled and women? Should we just hold a nationwide poll to determine such matters? Or is the issue that Mother Schlafly's gay son and the rest of LGBTs -- deserve second-class status? Oh never mind.
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Molecularly Composed of Fail
Without comment, from Protein Wisdom:
#
Comment by syn on 6/19 @ 4:26 am #
‘It’s a matter of civil rights’
Homosexuals have always been able to marry, even have children, even divorce and marry again just not to a person who is of the same sex, and just like everyone else they cannot marry two people of the same sex or three or four and so forth.
What’s is a ‘gay’ anyway? Does that mean ‘two males engaging in sex with one another? And if that’s the definition of ‘gay’ and there is this thing called ‘gay marriage’ is it not discriminatory towards lesbians?
How come there is no ‘lesbian marriage’? Why are Marxist discriminating against females?
Lastly, how does gay prove they’re gay when they get a gay marriage license? I mean people have been having sex with people of the same sex since the dawn of time, however they don’t consider themselves gay..anyone can have sex with anyone….what makes gays so different that they need special laws just for them?
And what about my homosexual friends who don’t like gay and don’t believe in gay marriage and wish the gays would get over their rainbow and give my friends their lives back.
Do gays care at all about homosexuals?
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Hip Hop Is Dead In '08
No, L'il Wayne will not resurrect the game. Every time he releases something like this:
He releases five songs like this:
I do have one bone to pick with the reviewer - if Baby the Birdman is (justifiably) called out as one of the worst rappers alive, Rick Ross makes him look like NWA circa 1986. He will always draw every ounce of ire I have for making the man who helped introduce crack to the ghetto a pop culture touchstone.
That is all. And fuck Rick Ross. Again.
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Cookie McCain
I have no earthly idea why first ladies are expected to have recipes for everything - besides the fact that everything on a campaign happens by committee and the ultimate recipe is likely going to be something nobody in the candidate's family has made themselves in years, if ever, it's not really like the candidates are sitting down and enjoying home cooking...well, ever.
But really, if you're going to participate in the charade, don't just openly steal something. Even if it's not your own, just credit whatever box you got it off of the back of and call it a day.
Of course, the fact that Cindy McCain keeps stealing shit (and the fact that the right is trying to turn Michelle Obama into Hilliqua Clinton) has helped opened up a dialogue on whether or not wives are fair game in this election.
I do have one big issue with this - Michelle Obama is functioning as Obama's wife in the campaign, speaking in support of him, making appearance, etc. There's no indication that, other than the normal consulting role a spouse would have in a marriage, that she has any other role in the campaign which would legitimately open her up to attack.
Cindy McCain is a financial backbone of the McCain campaign. She's not simply a surrogate testifying to the wonders of the man that is Johnny Mac, but lending the campaign her personal resources (and the McCain marriage is structured so that most of the big assets are in her name alone) worth millions of dollars. She's certainly not fair game for the inevitable smears that will come Michelle Obama's way (her sleeves make her look trashy!), but the McCain campaign can't be allowed to sweep that under the rug using the general haze of keeping the wives out of the line of fire.
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Looking beyond just getting every sick person to a doctor
Salon has a doctor writing about how even "socialized" health care is way too expensive because the emphasis is on "get sick, go to the doctor" instead of on prevention. Like pretty much all decent people outside of the U.S., he takes first world nations' responsibility to see to the health care of all citizens as a moral given, much the way Americans see "socialized" education, roads, and fire departments as a given. So really, this is just an argument about the hows, not the whethers. It's worth noting that Dr. Parikh uses Canada as his main point of comparison, and theirs considered one of the most inefficient universal health systems.
That said, I agree with him that an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure in health care. Which is why I lose my shit watching wingnuts in D.C. redirect HIV aid from prevention to treatment, because I believe they think AIDS is a good disincentive/punishment for having sex and they don't want to interfere with catching it. No matter if you can get AIDS drugs to every man, woman, and child who needs them around the world, you'll save more lives if you blunt the spread of the disease through condoms and education. Few diseases, once acquired, have a magic bullet cure. To use a more mundane example, think about dentistry. They can do amazing things in that field, fix teeth that a century before would have fallen right out your head with a lot of pain attending. If you do lose your teeth, they can make new ones for you. But there's no crown, no filling, no dentures that can equal the tooth you grew by yourself, and any dentist will tell you that. The disease of tooth decay wasn't cured, really, but its worst symptoms were managed. Same story with heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses that plague our health care system.
The problem is imagining a way to really get prevention at the forefront of a health care system. Dr. Parikh has ideas.
Incentives can be directed at doctors. A new game-changing concept is called "pay for performance," whereby doctors are rewarded based on whether they meet quality goals that push prevention, such as making sure a patient's asthma or diabetes is well controlled.
It sounds ideal, and doctors can work to counsel against, screen for and prevent disease. But it neglects patients' role in making healthcare better. Most health decisions are made at home in the little things we do, and most of those choices aren't very good ones. Economists refer to this as a lack of moral hazard, and healthcare is riddled with it. Only about half of Americans regularly exercise, and less than a third of us eat the recommended servings of fruits and vegetables each day.
We also seem too casual in our acceptance that medical breakthroughs will help us live longer, and too quick to forget that there are things we can do to prevent us from needing those breakthroughs (and their expensive price tags) in the first place. It would be better if our health insurers reimbursed us for buying healthier groceries or taking laps in the swimming pool at the local Y instead of paying for heart bypass surgery or the Lipitor we take just before we go out to eat a double cheeseburger and fries.
I recently attended a healthcare conference, where a representative from IBM told the audience how it provided a $150 break on insurance premiums to employees who joined a gym and worked out regularly for eight weeks. The IBM rep claimed the gym policy has made its healthcare costs rise more slowly than other companies'.
All these things are extra complex because even if we get universal health care, it's not going to be nationalized, but a series of private insurance companies, at least for the time being. I personally see the advantages of yes, doctors getting paid directly by the government, even though people have nightmares of doctors getting soft and lazy without the incentive of an annual Mercedes purchase.* (Which "Sicko" addressed brilliantly, by lavishing attention on the cars and homes of national health service-paid doctors.) You can easily track results and pay prevention bonuses to doctors.
What Dr. Parikh has more in mind, though, is creating patient incentives to look after your own health, which is a trickier game to play. Again, I think if health care was nationalized, it would be easier to pull it off. Because one reason people don't exercise is an infrastructural issue---they don't have time to do it and our transportation system rewards laziness. Changing the country so that most people find it a lot easier to walk and bicycle more (with all attendant services for disabled folks) will cost a lot of money, but the cost will be easier to justify if you see it as an investment in reducing the cost of health care, which comes out of the same pool of money. As it is, the price tag on changing our infrastructure is intimidating, and the direct savings seem hard to calculate.
Direct incentives to people strikes me as too hard to do. After all, it doesn't make sense if you're not monitoring whether or not they actually go to the gym or eat their vegetables, and really even bringing up that kind of surveillance makes me squirm. It's just like what I suggest with environmental changes, and a lot of the changes would be the same---make it frustrating not to exercise and easy to exercise. On the fruits and vegetables front, things are just going to get worse as the price tags in the produce section continue to climb upwards. How can we reverse that trend?
I can see why Dr. Parikh wants to focus more energy on patient incentives over doctor incentives. There's only so much a doctor can do by scolding or trying to get people on good nutrition plans. Almost any system that works requires more work than most people are currently doing in the eating department, like keeping a food diary so that you know exactly what you calorie consumption and nutritional standing is. One thing that might work is requiring that restaurants put their calorie and fat counts on their menus, at least any corporate restaurant, especially fast food, that competes in markets that rewards attracting customers by upping the amount of fat and calories and sugar in food. A lot of those enticements work subconsciously. How many people are congratulating themselves for picking the "healthier" Chipotle's burrito over a Big Mac, unaware that the burrito has almost 1300 calories? And of course, part of what makes Americans so unhealthy is the abundance of corn syrup, which is amendable to policy pressures. One thing that would help a lot is convincing people to cook more often, but how would we do that? Cooking is just more time-consuming than eating out nowadays, and the one thing people don't have is time. What can we do to change that?
One thing we definitely need to do is stop conflating "catching it early" with genuine prevention. A lot of people think "prevention" means regular screening. But if they catch your cancer or or hearth disease or diabetes early, while that's better than letting it fester, it still means that the disease was not technically prevented. That bit of clarity in the debate will improve discussion tremendously.
*Considering that more than half of med school grads are now women, though, maybe people will be more inclined to start paying doctors more like we pay school teachers. Sexism---make it work for you!
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Yet another attempt at scientific gaydar
A couple of times a year you see a rash of news articles about some institute or scientists trying to prove there's a way to tell whether someone is gay by one trait or another. In the LA Times we have a nice listing of some of the proto-scientific gaydar crap out there -- it's pretty amusing.
Studies contradict each other, and some promising paths don't pan out. (A link between male homosexuality and finger lengths isn't holding up, and a claim that gays have distinctive fingerprint ridge patterns is largely discredited.) Scientists don't always agree on how to interpret the results, and more progress has been made with regard to men than to women.
Below the fold are some of the entertaining items in this particular report. * The big brother studies. Some data shows that gay men have more older brothers than straight men do. The problem is that only big brothers count and the increase in chances of turning out homo rise with each older brother by 33%. Naturally, this doesn't seem to bear out for lesbians. A note for the Phelps clan breeding patrol: if the U.S. went to a one-child-per-family policy, this would lower the number of fags churned out by 29%.
* Lefties and lesbians. Apparently if your left hand is your dominant hand and you're a woman, your chance of being gay increases by 90%. (That didn't work out for me - I'm a deviant righty, lol). For guys, it's less of a factor -- an increase of 34%. The theory here has something to do with fetal development and the amount of testosterone in the womb. Whatever.
* How your hair grows. OK, this one is simply weird. In 2004, a study was conducted on Delaware's Rehoboth Beach, and another beach not known to be popular with gay men, and out of nearly 500 men examined, if your hair grew in counterclockwise pattern, you were 3.5 times more likely to be gay; the majority of people it grows clockwise. My question on this particular effort -- what about those of us who have kinky hair? It's not clear to me that there is a pattern of growth that is applicable at all.
The study, although intriguing, suffers from a lack of scientific rigor. The author walked around while on vacation, collecting hair-whorl observations on men from a discreet distance. He didn't know anyone's sexual orientation for sure, and didn't objectively examine any scalps up close. Rahman's group is attempting to replicate the results in the lab.
* Pick a pecker. The old penis size studies.
Anthony Bogaert of Brock University in Ontario and his colleagues re-analyzed data on 5,000 gay and straight men from sexologist Alfred Kinsey's famous files, collected from the 1930s to the 1960s. The results, published in 1999, showed that gay men had longer, thicker penises than did straight men: on average, about 6.5 inches long and 4.95 inches around when erect, versus 6.1 inches long and 4.8 inches around for straight men.
You know what the next studies on the horizon are?
* A look at how gay and straight brains navigate new cities
* The difference in response to erotic images
* the effect of the scent of sweat and urine in the two groups.
I don't know if any of these studies can come up with anything definitive, particularly since lesbians are (as usual), rarely studied and bisexuality doesn't seem to exist at all.
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John Lott: Still Wrong After All These Years
Via Plunderbund, John Lott (or as he's known in superhero circle, the Drastically Unethical John Lott) is back to prove that all of our problems surrounding out of control gubmint spending stem back to...women.
Academics have for some time pondered why the government started growing precisely when it did. The federal government, aside from periods of wartime, consumed about 2 to 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) up until World War I. That was the first war in which government spending didn't go all the way back down to its pre-war levels. Then in the 1920s, non-military federal spending began steadily climbing.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal — often viewed as the genesis of big government — really just continued an earlier trend. What changed before Roosevelt came to power that explains the growth of government? The answer is women's suffrage.
A friend of mine was a professor at a university, and was on a panel interviewing candidates for a teaching opening. One of the candidates came in and presented meticulously assembled information on how the economic fortunes of a certain area of the world were inextricably tied to the charisma of the leaders, citing polling, news stories, reams of information. What he failed to notice, however, was that in lieu of the rough correlation between "charisma" and economic fortunes, there was an exact correlation between the price of oil (which was the basis of each country's economy) and the economic fortunes of said countries.
This is like that, except without the intellectual rigor.
For decades, polls have shown that women as a group vote differently than men. Without the women's vote, Republicans would have swept every presidential race but one between 1968 and 2004.
Meaning (once you get past that startling statistic) that instead of being in power for seven of the past ten terms, Republicans would have been in power for...nine. (The one left out is Clinton's 1992 victory, in which he narrowly carried men.)
Lott goes on to argue what boils down to this: single women and women in bad marriages look for daddy government; women in safe, secure marriages are more comfortable voting for real presidents rather than socialist ratfucks. But what's odd about the argument is that he's arguing a series of inferences that never actually lead to a point. Women are, on average, more likely to support certain policies that require government spending. But for the past forty years, the convergence of the non-male preferred candidate and increased government spending as a result of GDP has happened exactly once, in 1976 with Carter's only term.
So, either the one president that's the convergence of Lott's thesis (women's interference saving us from lower government spending as a proportion of GDP) set government spending on such a rising spiral that the subsequent presidents were powerless to stop it...or the thesis is total crap.
You guess which one it is.
Lott then moves on to state government:
Per capita state government spending after accounting for inflation had been flat or falling during the 10 years before women began voting. But state governments started expanding the first year after women voted and continued growing until within 11 years real per capita spending had more than doubled. The increase in government spending and revenue started immediately after women started voting.
Yet, as suggestive as these facts are, we must still consider whether suffrage itself caused the growth in government, or did the government expand due to some political or social change that accompanied women's right to vote?
Like, I don't know, states now having to actually be responsive to double the number of voting citizens? The Progressive Era? The Great Depression's effect on government spending?
Fortunately, there was a unique aspect of suffrage that allows us to answer this question: Of the 19 states that had not passed women's suffrage before the approval of the 19th Amendment, nine approved the amendment, while the other 12 had suffrage imposed on them.
If some unknown factor caused both a desire for larger government and women's suffrage, then government should have only grown in states that voluntarily adopted suffrage. This, however, is not the case: After approving women's suffrage, a similar growth in government was seen in both groups of states.
Let's ignore the fact that 21 states apparently make 19 for the time being. Lott is arguing that there's a static position of small government that was somehow thrown off (how come white dudes are never tossed out?). He then notices a correlation between suffrage and increased government spending, assuming that the only reason the bad thing - and yes, the point of this is that women can't handle the franchise responsibly - happened was because of the presence of women in the voting booths.
Now, I'm trying to think of reasons that government spending grew between 1920 and 2008. It certainly couldn't be a rapidly industrializing society. Nor could it be the advent of the car forcing drastic and costly changes in the way our living spaces are constructed and maintained. It couldn't be urban growth and suburban sprawl, any number of federal mandates also requiring state compliance, or our post-war population boom. Certainly not any actions during the Cold War or the War on Terror, either, because wars are free.
One of the basic lessons people who aren't John Lott learn early on is that correlation doesn't equal causation. There's absolutely no reason to say that women's suffrage is the only reason that government spending increased (or that if it did, it was due to some specific apparent defect or pathology in women, rather than the doubling of a country's voting rolls), particularly in as sloppy and meandering a fashion as this.
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