Several states have recently considered bills requiring a photo ID to vote.  On its face, requiring some form of verification of ID to vote doesn’t seem at all unreasonable.  After all, ensuring that the people voting are who they say they are would prevent (or at least severely hinder) candidates from stacking elections by getting supporters to cast multiple votes or block rivals’ supporters from voting by impersonating them before they vote.  So what’s wrong with these laws?

Well, first of all, vote fraud, especially in the form of impersonating someone, is exceedingly rare.  Virginia, for example, turned up only around 400 cases of apparent fraud in 2008 out of 3.75 million votes cast, resulting in only 38 convictions, none of which were related to this kind of misrepresentation.  So requiring ID to vote would do nothing to solve this problem because, frankly, it is not a problem, at least in this country at this time.

The second, and probably more important, point is that requiring photo IDs actually makes it more difficult to vote for many law-abiding citizens.  Getting a photo ID in the first place is relatively expensive and inconvenient, especially for those of us who don’t own cars.  I moved from New Hampshire to New York last August, and when I got my New York driver’s license, I had to present several other forms of identification when I turned in my old New Hampshire license.  This process, while secure (or perhaps because it’s secure?), places an unreasonably large burden on a variety of people trying to get either a driver’s license or a non-driver ID.  If you live far from your DMV, work multiple jobs, or can’t easily get breaks during the work day, it may simply be so inconvenient you decide not to vote.  If you live paycheck-to-paycheck so that the cost of a photo ID is a major investment, are unemployed (or worse, homeless) so you don’t have sufficient proofs of ID, it imposes a burden you may not be able to overcome.  And, most importantly, for some people it would be literally legally impossible to vote. 

Yes, if you’re black and you were born outside of a hospital during segregation, you were not issued a birth certificate and therefore can’t obtain the proper ID to vote, at least according to the voter ID law that South Carolina considered.  Seeing as South Carolina is not exactly a state famous for protecting the civil rights of its black residents (and that most of the other states voting on such laws over the past year have also been former Confederate states), I would not be at all surprised if this were deliberate racism disguised as sensible policy.  Luckily, the South Carolina law was prevented by the federal government from coming into force, but the debate still exists, as we see from the more recent consideration of such a law in Virginia.  Regardless of whether the legislators backing these proposals are motivated by racism or ignorance of how their own state’s laws operate (unfortunately, both options seem pretty likely), the risk of massive disenfranchisement of the poor and non-whites very clearly makes these voter ID laws not just an unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem but a solution worse than the problem it pretends to fix.

As you may have heard, “Obamacare” is going before the Supreme Court this week.  Now, I had known for a while that universal insurance had previously been a Republican proposal, but today I stumbled upon the Heritage Foundation’s coverage of the Supreme Court debate.  Which is… interesting, because they’re credited with creating the very provision the Court is considering the legality of: the individual mandate.

Compare:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/11/repealing-obamacare-and-getting-health-care-right
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-think-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/

So… the Heritage Foundation is now lobbying against its own law. Good job, guys.  I don’t know whether to call this partisan hypocrisy or a genuine change of opinion about whether they had a good idea, but either way it shows how the Right is much different today than it was only 20 years ago…

So, I’d like to ask you a general question, if you will indulge me, dear readers.  No, not a semicoherent comment thread debate.  There are enough of those already on other blogs.  I want to hear brainstorming!  Submit what changes YOU would make to the U.S. healthcare system, and I will compile the most interesting ideas (regardless of whether I agree with them) as a new post.

This is a much better analysis than what I’ve said so far…

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/how-would-santorum-do-without-gingrich/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/02/us-usa-politics-breitbart-idUSTRE8201AV20120302

I have only one question: would it be okay to take the opportunity to insult him less than a day after his death, like he did to Ted Kennedy?

I think this video can stand on its own with no additional commentary.

“Both house and ground were vested in trustees, expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people at Philadelphia; the design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general; so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammadenism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”

– Benjamin Franklin, on a public meetinghouse in Philadelphia

There is a persistent myth that the United States was intended as a Christian country.  Although it is true that almost all of the colonists who settled here were Christian, this doesn’t mean a thing for the foundation of our legal system.  In fact, many of the “Founding Fathers”, who are often cited, dubiously at best, to support this claim, were very much in favor of freedom of religion applying to all religions.  I bring this up because of a news story that vastly disappoints me.  Pennsylvania, home of the above-quoted Benjamin Franklin, one of the colonies/states to officially permit all monotheists to practice their various religions*, has just turned on 331 years of being a world leader in freedom of religion and unanimously passed a House resolution declaring 2012 “the Year of the Bible”.

Why is this bad?  Isn’t the Bible pretty much the most influential books in the history of the world?  Shouldn’t we learn about it?  Well, yes, of course, but that’s not the problem.  The problem is that the resolution cites the “we are a Christian Nation” myth as part of its justification, credits God with making the U.S. what it is today (a curious position to take, considering how much religious people like to complain about moral decay), and explicitly refers to the Bible as “the word of God”.  This is hideously inappropriate and obviously unconstitutional (and apparently one of Ron Paul’s goals, but that’s another story).  It is, simply, not the government’s job to promote religion, and it is both offensive to anyone who supports freedom of religion and playing with fire for the government to officially declare a particular religious text to be true.

I know online petitions may not be as effective as physical ones, but at least it’s something.  Please sign this petition started by one of my friends demanding that Pennsylvania’s legislature move on from the 17th Century and repeal its resolution.

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*Presumably, it did not occur to them that there were any polytheists or atheists, or, if it did, they assumed it wouldn’t be an issue.  They also restricted service in government to Christians, but they explicitly stated in their charter that it did not matter what denomination of Christian you were — a shockingly bold step in 1681, especially for a colony of a country that not only has a state religion, but has its monarch as the official leader of the state religion.

This story comes, again, from Facebook, although not from Tea Party Friend this time.  Those of you who spend time on that site and have friends under about age 60 know that there are several other websites out there devoted entirely to housing quotes that people can Like and share on Facebook.  The following is my reaction to one of those quotes, which one of my friends just posted.  It is (allegedly — you can never be sure of the sources of these pseudonymous posts) a 13-year-old girl ranting about the moral decay of the rest of her generation, specifically in regards to sex.

Now, I think most people who share this post react with a gut agreement with the author, but I saw this and immediately had a very different reaction.  As easy as it may seem to go “right on!” to the author of this (alleged) post and condemn “kids these days” as promiscuous and shameless, it’s worth taking some historical perspective.  It’s only about the last century or so that 13-year-olds having sex has been frowned upon, and even then only in certain countries, cultures, and contexts.  Sex between teenagers has been around as long as sex and teenagers have, and, of course, so have bad decisions about sex by teenagers.  I believe that we, on average, deal with those facts much better now than we used to.

Most human societies have associated sex with marriage of some sort, and have accordingly married off teenagers without a choice.  This comes with the expectation that they’ll start having sex and producing babies for the alleged Greater Good ASAP, whether it’s for God or for the Nation, or just to keep the farm running.  This still goes on in extremely conservative countries like Yemen or Saudi Arabia, where, regardless of the letter of the law it is customary for girls to be arranged to be married as young as 8.  The connection between marriage and sex is even higher, and the regard for individual rights (especially if the individuals are women) is even lower, in Afghanistan, where wives can be starved for refusing sex.  Holdovers from this more conservative time that, through nostalgia-tinted glasses, looks more moral, are everywhere in our laws.  My home state of New Hampshire allows boys as young as 14 and girls as young as 13 to get married with the permission of their parents.  I don’t know what rationale was given at the time that law was written, but I suspect it was a proposed “cure” to their own generation of morally degenerate teens daring to do exactly what their biology overwhelmingly commanded.  One need only look as far as other states to see that kind of law explicitly-written: there is an exception to the minimum age of marriage in Georgia for young parents.

Now, defenders of the doctrine of “puberty = marriage = sex = babies” may have had a practical point (if not necessarily a moral one) as recently as the 1700s, when infant mortality in such comparatively advanced societies as England was as high as one in three, but you can’t really make that kind of argument in the modern U.S. and claim that pragmatics should trump the right of the individual to choose how to live their life.  This means that, far from being in a state of sexual moral decay, our society today is better than those past ones because we don’t believe that relationships, and therefore sex, are obligatory.  But how should sex in adolescence work?

The issue of individual rights is, for me at least, a tricky one from a psychological standpoint.  An adolescent is definitely not fully thinking at an adult level, and should not be automatically be granted the rights of one, but they are, on the other hand, trying to integrate themselves into adult society, and they should!  Nobody becomes good at something, including maturity, immediately.  I would suggest, then, that the best strategy to allow healthy and happy psychological maturation in regards to sex would be for parents and culture at large to allow it, and the data backs me up.

Now, in case it seems like I’m swinging too far in the other direction and defending the alleged behavior of the author’s classmates, I don’t think it’s wise for 13-year-olds to be having sex.  I’ve been 13.  I know that I was not mature enough then to handle a sexual relationship, and luckily, through a combination of introspection and fear, I knew it then, too.  I’m saying that, given that some young teens do have sex, the best way to deal with it is not to condemn them.

And, getting back to the original complaint that set me off on this speech, the good news is, in fact, not very many 13-year-olds actually do have sex, so the author is likely talking to an unrepresentative sample of her classmates, or (and I suspect that this is more likely), they’re exaggerating what little experience they may have in a peer-pressure-driven contest to sound more “grown up”.  And that certainly doesn’t mean that this generation of somewhat-sexually-active, peer-pressure-driven teens is any worse than its predecessors, more likely that they’re just willing to admit it now, and by being open about sex, they’re setting themselves up for a future of responsible use of contraceptives and non-abusive relationships.  So the moral of the story: don’t get too caught up in complaining about moral decay or you might miss the moral growth that has happened.

This is Wikipedia’s graph of the U.S. federal debt from 1800 to 2000, with major U.S. military operations overlaid by me.  Dark gray represents invasions of other countries that involved actual ongoing fighting, light gray represents lasting occupations or service in an “advisory” capacity where U.S. forces weren’t involved directly in fighting.  Actions that lasted less than a year have been omitted, as have various conflicts between the U.S. Navy and pirates, which were very common in the early 1800s but not particularly large or costly.  The “eras” of military are as follows:

a (1801-1805): First Barbary War — U.S. invasion of Tripoli (now Libya) in response to state-sponsored piracy and a declaration of war.

b (1812-1815): War of 1812 — U.K. invasion of U.S. in response to a declaration of war over “impressment” (kidnapping sailors to force them into British service) and other belligerent acts by the Royal Navy.

c (1835-1842): Second Seminole War — uprising of the Seminole Nation against the U.S. government in Florida over attempts to relocate them (the First and Third wars were not included in this timeline because they were much shorter and less bloody); Intervention in Peru — U.S. forces deployed to “protect American interests” during a revolution.

d (1846-1848): Mexican-American War — U.S. invasion of Mexico in response to a Mexican invasion over the disputed border of Texas

e (1861-1865): American Civil War — mutual invasions by the Confederate and United States of America over the legality of the former’s secession from the latter (which was, in turn, mostly over maintaining the right to keep slaves).  If you don’t know about this and are American, please go back to high school.

f (1865-1877): Reconstruction — military occupation of the Confederacy after the Civil War, ending in the Confederate states being officially readmitted into the U.S.

g (1898-1925): OMG LOTS OF WARS — including the Spanish-American War, the First World War, and U.S. intervention in civil wars or revolutions in Cuba, the Philippines, Samoa, Panama, Mexico, Haiti, and Russia.  Notable in the case of Panama because Panama’s war for independence from Colombia was instigated by the U.S. so we could get permission to build the Panama Canal…

h (1925-1941): OMG LOTS OF OCCUPATIONS — most notably, Haiti until 1935 and an awkward period of military support for the Kuomintang in China that meant, for a few years at least, that the U.S. and Nazi Germany were on the same side…

i/j (1941-1950): Second World War and Occupations of Axis Powers after the War — no explanation needed, I hope.

k (1950-1953): Korean War — arguably the first “war by proxy”, where the U.S. and China intervened on opposite sides of Korea’s civil war.

l/m (1955-1975): Vietnam War (and associated actions) — U.S. “military advisors” and support to South Vietnam that eventually ended in long, costly invasion of both Vietnam and Cambodia by U.S. forces.  Public opposition in the U.S. led to the end of the draft.  (Unified Vietnam went on to win wars against both Cambodia and China shortly after, so I strongly suspect that we would’ve lost no matter what we did, despite what some conservatives claim…)

n (1982-1991) and o (1993-1995): Even More Interventions! — lots of short-term operations, but most notably the First Gulf War (helping Kuwait repel an invasion by Iraq), as well as involvement in civil wars in Lebanon, Honduras, Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti.

I was surprised by two things I saw here.  First, that the U.S. has been pretty much constantly involved in every war everywhere, and second, that increases in the debt are not so much linked to major military actions as they are invasions — with the strange exception of Vietnam, which was very costly in money and lives but which occurred during a period of both high taxes and high productivity, allowing it to not have nearly the effect on federal debt that, say, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have had since then.  Your thoughts?

UPDATE: the original version of the picture that I uploaded marked section “g” as beginning in 1888 instead of 1898.  Sorry.  I fixed it.

Hm.  Now this is something I hadn’t heard before, and it’s forcing me to rethink just how far apart the Republican factions I suggested really are.  I’m too tired to write a full post right now, but please read this: http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2011/12/27/the-best-reason-to-oppose-ron-paul/

This proposal really smacks of the old use of “States’ Rights” as a euphemism/excuse for maintaining segregation.  If this is the kind of thing coming from so-called libertarians in the Republican Party, perhaps they’re not as distinct from the Religious Right as I thought, and Ron Paul should be more accurately labeled as another “Christianist” candidate with a more dedicated base despite having a few policies that are radical departures from the rest of the party.

My previous post needs a disclaimer.  Actually, the more I think about it, Herman Cain really didn’t make religious authoritarianism a key point of his platform (except, of course, for his anti-Islam statements, but those are found in all factions, and are not necessarily a sign of “Christianism”).  So, what accounted for his rise?  The Tea Party.  I would characterize the Tea Party as being reactionary populists, as evidenced by their general (and occasionally vague) policy of “taking us back” to a system based on an idealized version of the past.  Cain was more that kind of candidate than a member of any one faction, which allowed him to bridge the gap between the religious and libertarian factions (but not the moderates, who are “the elite” populism opposes) and rise in the polls despite low name recognition.  However, I am doubtful that such a candidate would hold support in the long-term, even were they to win the nomination, due to diametrically opposing views on some key issues between the factions.  People who believe that the educational system should be decentralized and people who believe that the federal government should use the educational system to indoctrinate children into evangelical Christianity do not seem to me like they should get along well when writing policy…

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Oh yeah, and, happy new year.