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What science found out

Maybe they should seek out tribes in the Amazon.

A study into how porn affects men was dropped - when experts failed to find ANY young men who had not watched it.

Researchers in Canada wanted to compare the behaviour of men who consumed porn with those who had never looked at it all.

Montreal University professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse said: “We started our research by seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography.

“But we couldn’t find any at all!”

However, the research did find that on average heterosexual men first glimpsed porn at the age of 10 years.

Single men look at porn on average for 40 minutes, three ?times a week, while those with a partner for 20 minutes twice a week.

Paul Ryan joins with science denier to fight women

Here.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), erstwhile vice presidential candidate in the failed presidential run of former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), has signed on as cosponsor in a draconian new bill aimed at curtailing women’s reproductive freedoms.  According to Huffington Post, in spite of the defeat of so-called “fetal personhood” laws in 2012, Ryan and his colleagues are forging ahead with a new measure that classifies all embryonic tissue as a human life from the moment of fertilization.

Ryan and Georgia Congressman Rep. Paul Broun — who gained notoriety in 2011 when video surfaced of him calling scientific facts “lies from the pit of Hell” — cosponsored the bill, which is called the Sanctity of Human Life Act.  Broun first introduced the measure in 2011, but Ryan re-introduced it on the Hill last week.

The measure specifies that a “one-cell human embryo,” even before it has implanted itself in the uterine wall and resulted in a pregnancy, should be granted “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.”

According to the ACLU, voters have rejected fetal personhood legislation in droves.  A measure trying to establish the citizenship rights of fertilized eggs was voted down by a margin of 16 points in Mississippi, one of the most conservative states in the nation.  Petitions to get fetal personhood measures on the ballot in Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, Montana, Nevada, Arkansas, Florida and California all failed to receive enough signatures to qualify.

Voters and civil libertarians are concerned that the laws are so strict and unreasonable that they would make some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization illegal, as well as all forms of abortion, including cases of rape and incest and instances where the health of the mother is threatened.

An Oklahoma court struck down that state’s “personhood” law on the grounds that it was plainly unconstitutional and imposed unreasonable restrictions on women’s ability to make their own reproductive choices.

Broun, for his part, disregards these concerns.

“As a physician, I know that human life begins with fertilization, and I remain committed to ending abortion in all stages of pregnancy,” he said in a statement.  I will continue to fight this atrocity on behalf of the unborn, and I hope my colleagues will support me in doing so.”

The bill has a total of 17 cosponsors.  Ryan, who is rumored to have presidential ambitions for 2016, de-emphasized his extreme anti-abortion views for the sake of the 2012 campaign.  He cosponsored 2011′s House Resolution 3, one of the first bills out of the tea party-heavy Republican Congress.

When do Republicans get embarrassed by these guys?

It wasn't always this way

Short attention span folks sometimes forget that eternal verities of their religious leaders aren't anything of the sort. Read on.

The picture of Christianity revealed in the 1978 study document is very different. Mind you, across the board we do see an ancient religious tradition that treats life as sacred and human life as the pinnacle of creation. Outside of Christianity, these are not points of universal agreement. A secularist might treat the loss of early embryonic life with pragmatic acceptance — more than half of fertilized eggs self-abort; human reproduction is a funnel designed so that lots of false starts produce a few healthy adult offspring.

Secular ethics and law concern themselves with the well-being of persons who can think and feel, who can actually desire life, liberty and happiness. A secularist might work to reduce abortions primarily because they are emotionally, financially or otherwise costly to conscious persons. By contrast, the Protestant voices represented here give pregnancy some of the same sacred weight it is given by their Catholic brethren, and so they find the termination of pregnancy, even in early stages, to be morally complex. Even so, they balance the value of embryonic life against other values they hold sacred:

Humility: “Philosophical uncertainties lasting over the centuries now appear in the form of disagreements among Christians who yet revere God’s call to life. . . . Our vision and understanding are limited, and Christ calls us to see our differences as a call to larger vision.”

Freedom: “Very near the center of the Christian life is Christ’s call to freedom, both in the inward form of our lives and our outward social structures.”

Justice: “Medical intervention should be made available to all who desire and qualify for it, not just to those who can afford preferential treatment.”

Balance: “Instead of a single guide, we have recognized several guides, each of which speaks with the others and balances the others where they become one-sided. These are scripture, church tradition, reason, [and] personal experience.”

Compassion: “The tragedies of rape, incest, child abuse, the ‘unwanted’ child, as well as the special difficulties of the poor in dealing with abortion all stand as signs that we have not realized Christ’s call for community. “

Responsibility: “We confess that we are part of a society that contributes to abortion by denying parents the support and assistance they need.” “The Gospel call to reverence for life challenges us to do all we can to change those situations that make abortion necessary for some people.”

Anyone who has ever found his or her own deeply held values in conflict will recognize the tone of these quotes — the introspection, the reluctance, the struggle with difficult decisions that force us to choose between different kinds of good or different kinds of bad or some messy and uncertain mix of both. It stands in stark contrast to the righteous certitude of today’s culture warriors.

The Protestant denominations involved in the ecumenical study group were mainline traditions that today are considered theologically liberal. Most continue to affirm quietly that abortion decisions are best trusted to a woman and her understanding of God, with spiritual council and community support. It may be more surprising to many people that at the time many biblical literalists similarly saw abortion as a matter of individual decision. Jonathan Dudley, CNN commentator and author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics, lays it out:

In 1968, Christianity Today published a special issue on contraception and abortion, encapsulating the consensus among evangelical thinkers at the time. In the leading article, professor Bruce Waltke, of the famously conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, explained the Bible plainly teaches that life begins at birth:

“God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: ‘If a man kills any human life he will be put to death’ (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22–24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense… Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.”

The magazine Christian Life agreed, insisting, “The Bible definitely pinpoints a difference in the value of a fetus and an adult.” And the Southern Baptist Convention passed a 1971 resolution affirming abortion should be legal not only to protect the life of the mother, but to protect her emotional health as well.

The WAC members sought to discern God’s will through a combination of scripture, tradition, reason and experience, but evangelical Christians claim to speak from the authority of the Bible alone, a Reformation principle known as “sola scriptura.” Consequently, one striking feature of their shift on abortion is that biblical authority now must be invoked to support an anti-abortion stance. Rick Warren, whose book, The Purpose Driven Life, cherry-picks from over 10 Bible translations to best underscore his points, said in 2008, “The reason I believe life begins at conception is because the Bible says it.”

Ironically, as theology blogger Fred Clark has pointed out, sometime between 1968 and 2008, biblical literalists became so sure God opposed abortion that they actually changed the language of the Bible to fit their new position on God’s unchanging will. The passage cited by Bruce Waltke was the sticking point because it is the only passage in the Bible that explicitly addresses the legal status of a fetus. In 1977, the New American Standard translation of Exodus 21:22-25 read as follows:

And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is not further injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

By 1995, an updated version of the translation had changed the meaning.

If men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

The original treats the death of a fetus differently than the death of a person. By changing “so that she has a miscarriage” to “so that she gives birth prematurely” this little barrier to anti-abortion unity was removed. The change, however, is at odds with centuries of church tradition, Jewish interpretations of the same passage, and the clear intent of earlier near Eastern legal codes in which the passage appears to have had its roots.

What has happened? Why are those who so clearly asserted 30 or 40 years ago that the biblical God was pro-choice now even more confident that he wants us to protect fertilized eggs from the time of conception?

As the pattern of history reveals, God changes his mind when we change ours. In this case, God changed his mind for the reasons he typically does: He responded to shifts in human power structures and culture that in their turn were triggered by changes in technology. Much has been written recently about the systematic way in which Republican strategists courted once-diverse Evangelicals, how Falwell and his colleagues worked to bring Evangelical views on conception and abortion into line with those of Catholics in order to form a voting block (here, here, here, here). In short, they effected a theological and cultural shift for political reasons. But those same strategists could not have done what they did without help from the current of history. They were swimming downstream thanks to two waves of technology change and the way those new technologies triggered hard-wired aspects of human psychology.

The first wave was the advent of modern contraception. For the first time since our species emerged, women had relatively reliable control over their fertility. Futurist Sara Robinson describes the cataclysmic effect of the Pill on old cultural agreements:

Far from being a mere 500-year event, we may have to go back to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire to find something that’s so completely disruptive to the way humans have lived for the entire duration of our remembered history.

Until the condom, the diaphragm, the Pill, the IUD, and all the subsequent variants of hormonal fertility control came along, anatomy really was destiny — and all of the world’s societies were organized around that central fact. . . . Our biology reduced us to a kind of chattel, subject to strictures that owed more to property law than the more rights-based laws that applied to men. . . . . Men, in return, thrived. The ego candy they feasted on by virtue of automatically outranking half the world’s population was only the start of it. They got full economic and social control over our bodies, our labor, our affections, and our futures. They got to make the rules, name the gods we would worship, and dictate the terms we would live under. In most cultures, they had the right to sex on demand within the marriage, and also to break their marriage vows with impunity — a luxury that would get women banished or killed. As long as pregnancy remained the defining fact of our lives, they got to run the whole show. The world was their party, and they had a fabulous time.

Even when the world isn’t their party, humans tend to have a love-hate relationship with change. Family systems therapists talk about patients receiving indirect “change back” messages from husbands or wives or parents who genuinely want them to get well but who also have habituated to the status quo. In the case of modern contraceptives, women had a lot to gain. Men had a lot to lose. The sexual property ethic that Robinson mentions has ugly implications that I laid out in a recent article, “The Bible Says Yes to Legitimate Rape and Rape Babies.” But dependency also has its privileges, and some retrogressive religious institutions have been able to tap both male and female yearnings for a mythical past in which all was right with the world because women knew their place under men who knew their place under God. The Tea Party, which was largely a rekindling of the old Moral Majority, tapped the same yearnings for a fantasy past, the same anxiety about an uncertain future, and the same anger about privilege lost. Outrage over abortion, now narrated as outrage over the murder of helpless little unborn babies, was a natural fit.

Aid for the “unborn baby” framing came from another technology sector that has become a silent game-changer in the reproductive rights conversation: fetal imaging. Eager prospective parents now watch video screens as ultrasound technicians check the development of internal organs and closure of the neural tube. Little arms and legs appear on the screen, maybe a penis. Maybe even a face. At baby showers the same parents are given colorful books of exquisite photography that trace fetal development and the passage through the birth canal. In 1978, pregnancy was largely a black box. It is no longer.

One hallmark of human information processing is that vision is our dominant sense. When it comes to the status of a fetus, a visual array that looks in the slightest like an infant may have the power to trigger an instinctive person-reaction. In particular, we appear to have a specialized module in our brains that reacts to anything remotely like a human face. The instinct is so hard-wired that human infants preferentially attend to two black dots with a slash underneath. For a rabbit, whether something smells like a baby might be key to activating maternal instincts. A mole might be uninterested unless something feels like a baby mole. But for us, curving white lines co-mingled with static on a dark screen are sufficient.

When an image or object activates the brain systems that are designed to store and analyze information about other people, we ourselves fill in the gaps. Children lend their voices to spun polyester bears and molded plastic dolls. Facebookers send around captioned pictures of big-eyed cats. None of this requires that the bear or doll or cat actually have any of the attributes of philosophical personhood that would generate the words: consciousness, sentience, the ability to feel pleasure and pain, preferences or intentions, the ability to form attachments, or to value existence. But in the presence of certain kinds of visual input we react as-if they did. We almost can’t help ourselves. Better said, it takes a conscious effort to over-ride impulse and instinct and ask ourselves to differentiate what we see from what we know. The kind of deep, thoughtful wrestling that went into that old 1978 study document requires another level of exertion altogether.

Culture warriors who think they speak for God — the new God, the one who hates abortion in any form at any point in gestation for any reason — are hoping that young American Christians won’t go to the trouble. That is why, even as they keep the focus visual, they carefully avoid images of early abortions, in which the actual tissue removed may look downright boring. They avoid indicating size, since at six weeks, the gestational sac is about the size of a dime. They also avoid images of fetal anomalies, which could remind viewers that occasionally a fetus has no viable path to becoming a person and might even raise questions about whether God guides pregnancy more than any other natural process.

To date this strategy has worked, but technology may be changing the conversation once again. As the evangelical consensus against abortion has grown, the procedure itself has become a shrinking target. With both pregnancy and fetal anomalies diagnosed earlier, more than 60 percent of abortions now are done before the ninth week and 90 percent before the 12th. A contraceptive revolution is causing a steep drop in abortion rates through better prevention. It is also ramping up the economic justice aspect of the abortion fight, because women who can afford the up-front cost of long acting contraceptives rarely need abortions. As these factors converge, it may become hard to sustain the current level of horror about an “abortion holocaust.” On top of this, women who have terminated pregnancies are using social media to tell their stories and connect with each other, undermining the community advantage once held by churches.  The culture warriors may soon find that a new technology nexus has once again changed the cultural dynamic.

What God will think at that point, only heaven knows.

Which reminds me of that old Tony Danza TV show, "Who's The Boss?" And a Paul Krugman observation.

There’s a strand of thought — I identify it especially with Corey Robin, although he’s not alone — that says that conservatism isn’t really about the things it claims to be about. It isn’t really about free markets and moral values; it’s about authority — the authority of bosses over workers, of men over women, of whites over Those People.

Score one on the morality front: Pat Robertson, stern moral lecturer, says that it wasn’t Petraeus’s fault because “he’s a man”.

 

80 million years without sex

What do you do for new genetic material? the bdelloid rotifer figured out what it had to do, sitting alone at the party, drying out. Sounds a little disgusting, though.

Bdelloid rotifers are best known for going 80 million years without sex, as they have evolved to reproduce successfully without males. Many asexual creatures go extinct without the benefit of traditional genetic evolution. However, bdelloids have flourished by developing ingenious ways of overcoming the limitations of being asexual.

Bdelloids have also developed the fascinating ability to withstand almost complete desiccation when the freshwater pools they typically live in dry up. They can survive in the dry state for many years only to revive with no ill effect once water becomes available again.

"We were thrilled when we discovered that nearly 10 per cent of bdelloids' active genes are foreign, adding to the weirdness of an already odd little creature," said Professor Alan Tunnacliffe, lead author of the study from the University of Cambridge. "We don't know how the gene transfer occurs, but it almost certainly involves ingesting DNA in organic debris, which their environments are full of. Bdelloids will eat anything smaller than their heads!"

Because some of the foreign genes are activated when the bdelloids begin to dry out, the researchers believe that the genes play a role in bdelloids' ability to survive desiccation.

Professor Tunnacliffe added: "Other researchers have shown that bdelloids contain powerful antioxidants, which help protect them from the toxic oxidising agents that are the by-products of desiccation. These antioxidants have not yet been identified, but we think that some of them result from foreign genes."

For the study, the researchers extracted all of the messenger RNA (genetic code similar to DNA which provides a blueprint for the creation of proteins) from bdelloid rotifers and sequenced each message, creating a library of the animal's active coding information. Using a supercomputer, they then compared these messages with all other known sequences and found that in many cases similar sequences had been found in other organisms.

Strangely, however, these other organisms were often not animals, but simple microbes. This means that bdelloids have genes that are not present in other animals, but have been acquired from micro-organisms and adapted for use in the rotifer.

The other side of Naomi Wolf's new book

There seems to be a lot of opposition in the media to Naomi Wolf's new book, Vagina: A New Biography. 

Here's a thoughtful opposing point of view. After all, if you've seen a TV commercial for Viagra or other "ED" meds you know that there's a definite brain-penis connection.

A curious dialogue has developed with the publication of Naomi Wolf's new book, Vagina: A New Biography, one that seems hellbent on poking holes in her central theme that the connection between the vagina and the brain influences a woman's mood and creativity.

Two advance reviews, one by David Dobbs in Wired Science Blogs, and one by Zoe Heller in the New York Review of Books, take Wolf to task for her reliance on neuroscience to help explain the progressive decline that her lower lumbar and sacral nerve blockage had on her sex life, an effect that clouded over her life in general. It would have been easy at that time for Wolf to construct a socially acceptable and perhaps even politically correct explanation for her lack of desire and passion. But to her utter astonishment, getting her spinal cord repaired restored her to her former self. This experience had a profound effect on her and prompted her to look deeper at how biology -- in this case, the neural reality of her clitoral, vaginal, and cervical sensations -- added desire and passion to her life.

Judging from numerous quality-of-life studies done on men with erectile dysfunction who have had it treated, one could easily argue that the penis-brain connection has a major influence on the emotional and intellectual wellbeing of men. So I must ask why the same would not hold true for a vagina-brain connection?

Wolf's search took her, among other places, to my laboratory. We had been doing research on the role of clitoral and vaginocervical stimulation in the sex and reproductive lives of female rats, work that has been published in high-quality peer-reviewed scientific journals. This work revealed that such stimulation, when applied in the right way, induces a state of sexual reward that conditions place and partner preferences (the latter of which was unexpected in an allegedly promiscuous and polygamous species). Taken together with previous work from my laboratory showing the profound role of dopamine and opioid neurotransmitters in both male and female sexual behavior, and in the context of a more general scientific literature in animals and humans showing that blockade of those transmitters induces varying degrees of an "anhedonic" state akin to depression in which reward does not occur and animals do not focus their attention toward it anymore, it became clear to Wolf that these neurochemicals were important parts of the sexual desire and pleasure systems of the brain. They were activated by clitoral, vaginal, and cervical stimulation, something that had gone missing in action due to Wolf's progressive deterioration of her spinal cord. She was thirsty for knowledge about how those sensations activated the brain. She spent an enormous amount of time carefully making herself aware of the scientific literature on the neuroanatomy and neurochemistry of desire and reward and she and I had numerous discussions about how these things work, and how they can be disabled -- by culture, by experience, by events that ultimately perturb neurons in specific brain networks.

In his review, Dobbs argues that Wolf oversimplifies the role of dopamine, noradrenaline, opioids, and oxytocin. Yet the feelings associated with the decline and resurgence of her sexual self were very real, and I would argue that her take on the role of those neurotransmitters is entirely consistent with current conceptions of their role in, among other things, sexual behavior, feeding, and drug addiction. Heller is more allegorical in her review. She takes Wolf to task for ignoring "common sense and logic" and for "drinking shallow drafts from the fountains of evolutionary biology and neuroscience..." because emotional states like desire, events like orgasm, and the interpretation of pleasure are obviously too complex to be left to anything reductionist. Certainly these are socially constructed at several levels, but there is no denying the reality of Wolf's spinal condition or the way that her sexual and creative feelings came thundering back when the problem was fixed. Is Wolf right in regarding dopamine as the "ultimate feminist neurochemical"? It is certainly unlikely that sea slugs and nematode worms are feminists. But can't we allow an accomplished writer and social critic a little poetic leeway to make a point? If dopamine mobilizes attention to reward, and sexual reward is something that has been elusive for so many women for a slew of cultural and experiential reasons (all of which impinge on the kind of sexual stimulation women learn to allow themselves to make or receive), then the lack of dopamine transmission in the brain in a sexual circumstance would likely lead to disorders of desire, and de facto little or no sexual reward since the person in question would either no longer get herself entangled in a sexual circumstance, or if she did, no longer care if she "spread her legs and thought of England."

Heller should recognize her own glass house before throwing stones. There are more than a few straw men set up in her review. One of the criticisms she levels at Wolf, and is reiterated by Dobbs in his blog, is the "upsuck theory" of orgasm, and how it could facilitate pregnancy. Heller dismisses this as being derived from one study from the 1990s with a single subject. Dobbs suggests that Wolf should have read the literature more carefully. Yet a cursory review of this literature on Pub Med shows papers from Shafik and others that studied specifically this cervico-uterine reflex (sometimes referred to as the "Shafik reflex"). This reflex clearly increases sperm transport into the uterus, and was studied in many women, not just one.

Now, does the cervico-uterine reflex actually influence rates of pregnancy? It could. And it could therefore be a reproductively relevant reason (one of several out there in the scientific literature) to answer the seemingly mysterious question of why women have orgasms. And that is as far as Wolf takes it. Cervical stimulation has long been known in animals to increase sperm transport and induce neuroendocrine reflexes that result in increased prolactin secretion from the pituitary, two essential steps to initiating and maintaining pregnancy. Cervical stimulation occurs during heterosexual sex through mechanical stimulation by a penis and prior to and during orgasm as a "dipping reflex" that is part of a "vaginal tenting" response. Does this make orgasm necessary for pregnancy? Not at all. Nor is Wolf saying so. It simply makes cervical stimulation (and in reality, stimulation of the pelvic nerve) a potentially important promoter of pregnancy. Is orgasm the only reason women have sex? Clearly not. And Wolf does not try to make that case either in her book. Sexual stimulation has many rewards, orgasm being one. Now, saying that, there is no doubt that orgasms feel good and that they are associated in female rats and women with the rush of opioid release in the brain. 

Dobbs states that "Neurocritic says he can find little peer-reviewed literature to back Wolf's claims." Really? I am not sure where he looked. As with the Shafik reflex, a simple Pub Med search on the role of dopamine, oxytocin, and opioids in the sexual behavior of rats, voles, monkeys, and humans reveals plenty of peer-reviewed literature to back Wolf's take on the role of these neurochemicals. This is definitely not, as Dobbs states, "quick-dip pop-science." At least Dobbs doesn't doubt my scientific credentials, though he seems to doubt things that I say. In one, he quotes me as saying:

When you were a twinkle in your daddy's eye

You would have been a person in Arizona.

Arizona‘s Legislature yesterday afternoon passed three harsh anti-abortionbills, including one that defines pregnancy as being two weeks before conception. Known in some circles as the “egg drop” bill, lawmakers apparently believe they are more knowledgable than physicians at determining gestational age. The attempt to redefine pregnancy of course is to reduce the legal window of when a woman may have an abortion. Arizona Republican “pro-life”Governor Jan Brewer would not comment on her intent to sign or veto the bill.

UPDATE: ‘Pregnancy Begins 2 Weeks Before Conception’ Now The Law In Arizona

“State Rep. Kimberly Yee (R-Phoenix), the bill’s sponsor, was not immediately available for comment. Her assistant said that Yee, a former aide to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), was voting on the House floor,” The Huffington Post reports:

State Rep. Matt Heinz (D-Tucson), a physician, said he did not want the state to set the gestational age since science could not provide a precise one. “I imagine it will be a legal dispute. How can a judge determine gestational age?” Heinz said. “If medical science can only determine gestational age to within 10-14 days, how can a superior court judge do it?”

…

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill to prohibit abortions after the 18th week of pregnancy; a bill to protect doctors from being sued if they withhold health information about a pregnancy that could cause a woman to seek an abortion; and a bill to mandate that how school curriculums address the topic of unwanted pregnancies.

The 18th week bill includes a new definition for when pregnancy begins. All of the bills passed the Senate and now head to Gov. Jan Brewer (R) for her signature or veto. Passage of the late-term abortion bill would give Arizona the earliest definition of late-term abortion in the country; most states use 20 weeks as a definition.

A sentence in the bill defines gestational age as “calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman,” which would move the beginning of a pregnancy up two weeks prior to conception.

Elizabeth Nash, states issues manager for Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization in Washington, said the definition corresponds with how doctors typically determine gestational age. She said since the exact date of conception cannot be pinpointed, doctors use the day of the woman’s last menstrual period to gauge the duration of a pregnancy. The method does not provide an exact date.

“It will have some impact, from what we understand there are abortions provided at that point in Arizona,” Nash said. “It will reduce access.”

The Huffington Post also notes:

The other two bills passed by the House include the state’s “wrongful birth, wrongful life” bill that prohibits lawsuits against doctors who do not provide information about a fetus’ health if that information could lead to an abortion. In addition, parents cannot sue on the child’s behalf after birth.

The third bill requires that schools teach students that adoption and birth are the most acceptable outcomes for an unwanted pregnancy.

 

Birth control and the Rapture

Interesting commentary on the use of condoms and the Rapture.

Something stinks

Russ Baker has an interesting article about how justice is divied up among politicians when it comes to hanky panky.

Does no one else find the very fact of John Edwards being on trial curious? Does no one else wonder about the criminal basis for the prosecution? About who in politics does and does not end up being destroyed by matters related to sexual behavior?

Let me preface my take on the Edwards trial with one general observation: Not all politicians are created equal. And not all are treated equally. Therein lies an issue deserving a much, much closer look: whether vulnerable Democrats, chiefly of the liberal persuasion, are targeted for destruction.  Or at least helped along to their doom by a double standard.

***

But first, the specifics of the Edwards case. He faces a potential $1.5 million fine, but, far more seriously, up to thirty years imprisonment. Thirty years. His crime? Not murder, not torture, not armed robbery, not stealing money from clients. No, his crime was his failure to report campaign contributions. While preparing for his second presidential bid, in 2006, he got caught up in an extramarital affair that produced a child. And, not exactly able to announce that fact or ask his sick wife to sign off, the wealthy Edwards turned to some wealthy backers to take care of the woman and the baby and hide the whole thing from Elizabeth Edwards and presumably everyone else. Two people gave him a total of $900,000.

When someone running for office receives money, or the benefit of money or services, that’s a contribution, and it must both be reported and be subject to restrictions on amount. Unless of course it has nothing to do with the campaign itself. Certainly, candidates receive ordinary income (such as fees for lawyering) that is not subject to those limits. And if someone gives a candidate a gift that is not used for the campaign, it is similarly not subject to campaign finance laws.

So, what’s the ill intent here—and the consequence for the public interest? If this were a bribe by someone seeking to influence Edwards as an office-holder, that would be one thing. If the money were intended to help sway voters to support Edwards, that might be valid cause for pursuing the case aggressively. But nothing about the two donors, both elderly (one has since died), suggests an attempt to gain illegal influence. In reality, both donors –the billionaires Rachel “Bunny” Mellon and Fred Baron—apparently liked and believed in Edwards and, when asked, were quick to aid him in a tough spot.

If it sounds like Edwards still needed to apply FEC rules and limits, consider this: Scott Thomas, a former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission testified that he did not consider that the payments would have come under his agency’s auspices—in part because they were not used directly for the campaign and did not free up any of Edwards’ own money to be spent on the campaign. And Thomas noted that the gifts from one of the donors continued after Edwards dropped out of the race, indicating they were not for campaign purposes. Unfortunately for Edwards, the ex-commissioner, a 37-year FEC veteran with great credibility on these matters,  was only permitted to testify without the jury present—and the jury may never get to hear from him.

It goes on. Very interesting. An observer once noted that American politics was "bedrooms, blackmail and bullets." Sounds about right.

Santorum's sex issues

Rick Santorum talks like he missed the last fifty years of social history, and it sounds like he wants to roll back everything to the 1950s. People who have tried that in the past never succeed. This guy worries me.

Here are some Santorum quotes from this article.

—"Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom." 

—"It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy. And you’re dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s the most central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at."

—"What changed was the ’60s. What changed was sex. What changed was the social and cultural issues that have huge amounts of money because if you look—I haven’t seen numbers on this, but I’m sure it’s true—if you go socioeconomic scale, the higher the income, the more socially liberal you are. The more you know you can buy your way out of the problems that sexual libertinism causes you. You have an abortion, well, I have the money to take care of it. If I want to live an extravagant life and get diseases, I can. ... You can always take care of everything. If you have money, you can get away with things that if you’re poor you can’t."

—"Sex is a means. Evolution is a means. And the aim is a secular world. It’s a, in my opinion, a hedonistic, self-focused world that is, in my opinion, anti-American."