Charles Murray and the deepening class divide

Ben and I talk about Charles Murray's new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" in this week's Scripps column. We jointly note: "He argues that America is increasingly, dangerously divided between an out-of-touch upper class and a lower class that has abandoned the virtues of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religiosity." My take:

Here's the good news: Somebody influential on the right -- and Murray is beloved by many conservatives -- is acknowledging the growing class divide in America. That is a breakthrough.

The bad news: Murray is big into victim blaming. If life among America's working class has declined during the last 50 years, Murray says it's because its members have abandoned the habits of work and marriage that made the country great. He offers a lot of statistics to prove his point.

But there's a crucial piece missing in Murray's story.

It is most apparent when he describes the "real" Fishtown, a Philadelphia neighborhood several miles from where I live. Murray describes in great detail the rise of single motherhood and jobless men in the neighborhood.

But he never mentions Fishtown's most-defining feature: It was once a center of manufacturing and industry -- particularly the textile industry -- and now it isn't. The factories are gone. Residents can no longer walk out of the neighborhood school and into a decent job that can sustain a family.

That's precisely what happened across the country over the last 50 years: The manufacturing sector withered -- jobs went overseas -- and so did the wages of many Americans. Read The Atlantic's January cover story, "Making It In America," and you'll find many manufacturing jobs that mostly go to Americans with a costly college degree in science or math.

Simple hard work doesn't get you as far as it used to. This matters.

Murray talks about the disintegration of the working class, but not the disintegration of the work. "I focus on what happened, not why," Murray writes. Without the "why" though, he cannot and does not offer plausible solutions.

Instead, Murray urges the elites to preach more about virtue to the working class. Workers don't need a lecture, though. They need real opportunity. That can't be found in Murray's book.

Ben says "America's ruling elite has much to answer for." Mostly, they have to answer about sex. You'll have to go to the link to read his take.

UPDATE: The sex comment was kind of a cheap oversimplication on my part. I apologize to Ben.

David Frum on the contraception fight

If the audience is paying attention, for example, it will notice that Republicans are not proposing to allow employers and plans to refuse to cover blood transfusions if they conscientiously object to them (although there are religious groups that do). Or vaccinations (although there are individuals who conscientiously object to those as well). Or medicines derived from animal experimentation. (Ditto.)

No, Marco Rubio's Religious Freedom Restoration bill provides for one conscientious exemption only: contraception and sterilization. 

via thedailybeast.com

Obama, religious liberty, and contraception

Some of my conservative friends have challenged me to take a position on President Obama's rule that religiously affiliated organizations must provide contraception coverage as part of the health insurance they provide employees.

Truth be told, I've been torn.

On the one hand, I'm a big believer in religious liberty. E.J. Dionne—no squishy liberal—makes a lot of sense to me when he upbraids the Obama Administration for its choice. He wrote: "Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here."

On the other hand, I believe that women have a right to contraception and to make their own choices about their health care—and that's a choice effectively denied many women if their employer's health coverage won't cover contraception. Charlie Pierce makes this case more pungently than I would, but he's succinct: "Of course, you're not a Dominican Episcopalian making $16,000 a year cleaning bedpans in a Catholic hospital who can't afford the $600 a month co-pay for the birth control she needs to control her heavy bleeding and yet who, through no fault of her own, finds that she has to live with the theological horse-pucky of Humanae Vitae as enshrined as an 'exemption' in American secular law."

Right. And actually, that highlights the real problem here: ObamaCare is kind of a mess.

There were always going to be conservatives who protested universal health care as a tyrannical threat to liberty. But the way the law actually has been implemented—between this rule and the individual mandate that forces individuals to buy health coverage—seems designed to make many Americans feel like conservatives were right.

It is too late to re-fight this battle. But...

We'd be avoiding a lot (not all) of these problems if we simply had a single-payer system provided by the government. Since that seems to be politically untenable—since the preservation of private health insurance companies was apparently a major goal of the process that created the Affordable Care Act—the next best choice would've been a "public option"—a cheap government-run insurance option to stand right beside private options in the marketplace. Either option would've given folks an easy way to obtain the coverage they needed or wanted without trampling on the consciences of their employers. Despite the rhetoric of the right, the government-centric options are those which would've been most compatible with the interests of liberty.

That's what I wish would've happened. That's what I wish would happen still. But we're years away from such developments—if not decades. And we have to decide what to do with the laws we have now.

And ultimately, I have to come down—somewhat reluctantly—on the side of the Obama Administration. Not because I don't believe in religious liberty—but because I believe that in weighing the competing claims, I must side with individuals over institutions. It is not optimum for the federal government to require Catholic charities to go against their conscience. But it is even less optimum, I think, for the government to stand back and let Big Religious Institutions make that choice for their employees.

If those employees do not want contraception, they do not have to obtain it. No harm done. But if they want or need it, they won't have the choice denied them by their employer. Individual choice is preserved.

I know that some of my conservative friends will A) be disappointed in me and B) point out the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, while it does not confer a positive right to cheap contraception. I don't have a good answer to that objection, frankly. But if it is wrong for government to override the consciences of individuals, I'm not sure it's much more correct to let non-governmental institutions do so. Both have immense power over the lives over the lives of individuals.

Again, we wouldn't be having quite this argument if government were providing the insurance instead of requiring others to provide or obtain it. (I have no doubt there'd be spectacular fireworks over whether government-run insurance would cover abortions and the like, however.) But this is where we're at. And the Obama Administration's ruling is the best of several bad choices.

As long as Obama approves of drone strikes on American citizens, it's OK

Greg Sargent:

Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.

It’s hard to imagine that Dems and liberals would approve of such policies in quite these numbers if they had been authored by George W. Bush.

That's right. I've already written about my angst about President Obama and the way he's gone against my hopes and expectations, where civil liberties are concerned. But Sargent is right: If George W. Bush was commanding drones to assassinate American citizens, the left would be up in arms. But somebody from our tribe is pulling the trigger now, so no big thing, right?

If you trust Obama with that power, liberals, understand: Eventually there will be another Republican president. Maybe not in 2012. But it will happen. Will you trust that president—Rick Santorum, say, or Paul Ryan—to use that power in a way that you also trust? And if not, how do you craft a reasonable rule that gives Obama the go-ahead while leashing President Bachmann? It's probably not possible. If you roll over for Obama, you'll have little standing to complain a few years from now. I certainly won't want to hear it.

Hello, there, reader in Washington D.C.!

Checking my traffic logs, I can't help but notice that somebody in Washington D.C. is apparently going through my archives quite a bit over the last 12 hours.

A sample:

This, of course, makes me feel quite curious. If you're my D.C. reader, feel free to drop me a line!

E-books are not the end of democracy

Ben and I use this week's Scripps Howard column to consider recent comments by novelist Jonathan Franzen. Do e-books signal the end of democracy? My take.

Last year, I read "The Federalist Papers" for the first time. The book is a collection of 200-year-old newspaper essays from Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison -- Founding Fathers all -- explaining and defending the Constitution of the United States. I read almost none of it on paper.

Instead, I read the venerable document on these devices: a netbook, an iPhone, my iPad, a desktop computer and a Kindle. I took notes and made highlights, and many of the ideas I discovered and engaged in that book, on those devices, later became the basis for points I make in this weekly column.

According to Franzen, though, my experience is impossible. According to Franzen, I should've opted to use those devices to play "Angry Birds" instead.

When new technologies come along, old technologies are replaced. It's true that sometimes we lose something of value as a result. I've been an avid reader since I learned how to read; I love bookstores and I love having shelves of books. It makes me sad to see stores like Borders go out of business because times have changed.

Here's another truth: The rise of e-books has opened up worlds of opportunity for writers whose work didn't fit the templates of old-school publishers. A friend of mine, Justin Blessinger, self-published a comic novella at Amazon, because print publishers don't have much use for novellas. More famously, writer Amanda Hocking got rich selling her fantasy novels as e-books -- and only then was signed to a major publisher. Similar stories abound: Publishing has become more egalitarian, and democratic, thanks to e-books.

The Founders didn't need books, exactly, to break away from Britain and create the Constitution -- they needed the ideas contained in those books. E-books are just a new way to create and pass down those ideas.

They're doing the job quite well

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I tried to avoid utopian-type talk in my take; Ben gives in to his dystopian side, basically suggesting us e-book readers will rue our proclivities when the revolution comes and electricity is denied the masses. Less darkly, he also notes that cloud-based reading puts readers at the mercy of the cloud providers. A good objection. Not, at this point, a fatal one for me.

Christine Flowers' confused take on child rape

The Daily News columnist takes it to a new level today, trying to find an avenue through which she can praise the now-late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua while also coming to terms with two grand jury reports that suggest he covered up expansive child sex abuse by priests under his command. Here's the weirdest part of a weird column:

The truth is, Anthony Bevilacqua was no saint. If the grand-jury allegations are true and he transferred known sex offenders to other parishes instead of notifying the police that crimes were occurring on his watch, his conduct was criminal.

Stop right there, Christine, that's great. No need to elabora—

And yet, perhaps it was his sense of propriety - and redemption - that led him to shuffle priests as if they were chess pieces, believing that the interest of the church, the priests and the alleged victims would be better served by silence. It's a concept that doesn't carry much weight in a society that now rewards shouts and exhibitionists, and calls anything less than full exposure a "cover-up."

Oh, hell.

Maybe Bevilacqua really did believe that stuff. It does not redound to his credit.

The idea that child rape should be reported, so that authorities can prosecute it, is not the product of reality-show television culture—is not a sign that our society has become frivolous and flighty. It's an idea born of the idea that children are innocent, deserve our protection, and that forcing sex on them—or on anybody, child or not—is a criminal act, among the very worst acts it is possible to commit.

Child rape is against the law. It is also a sin.

There is nothing honorable about shielding priests from prosecution. There is nothing honorable about putting families at risk—families that rely on your authority and guidance!—in order to protect the interests of the church. And if a "sense of propriety" kept Bevilacqua from taking other, better, actions, then that "sense of propriety" was twisted into a criminal—evil—series of actions.

Flowers is so eager to stick it to liberals that she is sometimes incapable of simply calling a wrong thing wrong. She makes excuses for the cover-up of child rape. How sad. How wrong. So let's be clear: Anthony Bevilacqua died a disgraced man. That disgrace was well-deserved.