When eternal damnation just isn't deterrent enough...

From "While you were sleeping" by William Falk for the New York Times, highlighting stories from 2005 not given audible media play:

FORBIDDEN VACCINE Every year, about 500,000 women throughout the world develop cervical cancer. In the United States alone, the disease kills about 3,700 women annually. This year, scientists developed a vaccine against human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that is the primary cause of cervical cancer. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the 6,000 women who received it as part of a multinational trial. As soon as the vaccine is licensed, some health officials say, it should be administered to all girls at age 12. But the Family Research Council and other social conservative groups vowed to fight that plan, even though it could virtually eliminate cervical cancer. Vaccinating girls against a sexually transmitted disease, they say, would reduce their incentive to abstain from premarital sex.

Because everyone knows if you're not a good, pure Christian who upholds her maiden virtue, you deserve to be riddled with tumors. It's natural selection. Just directed by God.

Let's see, they also make vaccines for rabies and tetanus. Now that I think about it, that means I have a reduced incentive to abstain from harassing foaming rodents and self-mutilating with shards of rusty metal. Well god damn, sounds like I have plans for New Year's Eve after all!

I hope someone somewhere is working on a vaccine against social conservativism.

Ribbons are officially beyond meaningless

I was behind a car today that had one of those ubiquitous ribbon magnets on it. It was green. It said "I [heart] Irish dancing." People, honestly. Just stop it. All you're doing is advertising the fact that you're tools.

Who says women can't run a war?

Researchers Find Barbie Is Often Mutilated
By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press WriterMon Dec 19, 6:02 PM ET

Barbie, beware. The iconic plastic doll is often mutilated at the hands of young girls, according to research published Monday by British academics.

"The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity," said Agnes Nairn, one of the University of Bath researchers. "The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving."

Coming this Christmas direct from the upper tiers of the Bush administration's covert warfare apparatus to your precious little aspiring interrogator... Enemy Combatant Barbie!

Enemy Combatant Barbie arrives bound, gagged, blindfolded and ready for hours, weeks - possibly even years of fun beyond the reach of domestic law and international human rights protocol!

Barbie not telling you the details of the plot you know she's concocting to attack our brave and righteous nation? String that tramp up by her bleached blond hair and force the truth out of her with a wide assortment of authentic "cooperation facilitation devices," including exposed electrical wires, syringes full of mind-altering drugs and an array of blunt and pointy instruments that would make Alberto Gonzales giddy as a little girl.

Press the buttons on Barbie's passport to hear her plead such amusing phrases as "But, I'm an American citizen!" and "Don't you need a court order to do that?"

Plus, flaunt Constitutional limits on power just like the president by tapping calls Barbie receives on her working pink cell phone and then using the information you obtain to refine your "technique"!

Water-boarding, stress positions, vicious dogs with big pointy teeth, horrendous physical pain and twisted psychological degradation - with Enemy Combatant Barbie, the fun never ends as long as she's a hazily categorized and conveniently non-specific threat to American security!

This is your war, too, kids - get your Enemy Combatant Barbie today and start acting like it!

(Dream Underground Detention Facility at a Top Secret Location in an Undisclosed Eastern European Nation sold separately.)

Editorial: Have yourself a merry little... whatever

The next time someone wishes you “season’s greetings” or “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” don’t take it as a pleasant tidbit of cheer. According to right-wing commentators like Fox News’ John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly, it’s all part of a “liberal plot to ban the sacred Christian holiday.”

And if you think they’re spouting screwball conspiracy and getting unduly worked up, you’re a poor, deceived creature who just doesn’t see that Christmas–and by extension Christianity–is under siege.

Despite polls showing roughly 80 percent of Americans are Christian, a third of all respondents to a Dec. 1 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll estimated that less than half the country was Christian, with the most devoutly so thinking themselves an even smaller minority.

The fact is that Christians, however insecure, are not some persecuted, powerless, put-upon minority in this country. As Adam Cohen pointed out in a recent New York Times piece, they rule all three branches of the federal government, as well as dominate every state’s supreme court and legislature.

Besides, the origins of Christmas in America are commercial, not religious. Orders beginning with the Puritan pilgrims resisted it as impious, decadent and distracting, noting that according to the Bible, Dec. 25 was just another day. It was not until the 1920s that Christmas as we know it caught on, de-fanged by the emerging retail sector into an event more material than spiritual.

Now, amid the “Keep Christ in Christmas” signs popping up on pious lawns, using the Savior as a commercial pawn is not just benign, it’s praiseworthy. Crusaders are assaulting all sorts of targets for foregoing “merry Christmas.”

The Catholic League launched a boycott of Wal-Mart after it discovered searching the store’s Web site for “Christmas” took browsers to a page titled “Holiday.” The American Family Association aimed its arrows at Target, hoping to set an example for other retailers not using “merry Christmas” in their advertising.

On a November edition of “The O’Reilly Factor,” Bill insisted stores that don’t say “merry Christmas” to avoid alienating the fifth of their customers who are not Christian are “insane.” He also argued that while “merry Christmas” shouldn’t offend non-Christians, non-denominational greetings absolutely and rightly offend the faithful flock.

(Never mind that the “Christmas store” on O’Reilly’s personal Web site was a “holiday store” until bloggers called him on it. The site’s graphics remain offensively atheistic, with lots of snowflakes, wreaths and bells, but nary a Messiah or Magi.)

In a recent set of “talking points,” O’Reilly heralded Wichita, Kan., for changing the name of its city tree to a “Christmas tree” from the downright obscene “community tree.”

Is there truly such a shortage of substantive wrongs to right in the world today that such things matter?

We should all relish any form of seasonal goodwill sent our way, whatever inspires it, and stop being so easily riled over trifles.

And if it makes them happy and keeps them quiet, we say let the Christians deck the public halls with their tacky trimmings. Judging by the gaudy “holiday tree” currently marring the view of the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda, the only thing truly offensive about such displays taking up secular space are their aesthetics.

News analysis: The other 'moral issues'

While national leaders are occupied etching out a legal definition of torture, fighting and funding a war of dubious inception and enacting policies many perceive as socially unjust, somehow, the sphere of “moral issues” in American public discourse has come to consist essentially of abortion, homosexuality and religion.

Other serious ethical problems lurk behind the more traditional, routinely addressed “moral issues.” These are often overlooked by the simple “culture war” script of the socially conservative right versus the liberal left according to which national debates on ethics tend to be directed.

Take stem cell research, which is abhorred by many because the embryos containing the versatile cells must be destroyed in order to extract them. Politicians and pundits argue long and loud on moral grounds over what becomes of excess embryos, but the procedures that create them not only go unchallenged in contemporary culture, but are generally encouraged in the name of helping the infertile generate genetically genuine families.

More than 9 million American women of childbearing age have undergone infertility treatment. To date, 15 states have requirements that health insurance providers must cover infertility treatments for women, making it a pertinent financial issue for the entire health care system. As reported by ABC News, a single round of in vitro fertilization treatment can cost more than $10,000, with many women making multiple attempts to successfully conceive a child.

According to Centers for Disease Control data, fewer than one third of all “assisted reproductive technology” procedures are successful, in that they result in at least one live birth.

With infertility treatments, particularly in vitro fertilization, more embryos are created than will be implanted, much less gestated into children. The unused embryos are generally frozen and stored, for the time being indefinitely. Estimates vary, but according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an organization of fertility doctors, there are upwards of 400,000 embryos currently frozen in storage in fertility clinics across the country.

In May, to protest a proposed bill broadening federal support for embryonic stem cell research, President Bush held a news conference posing with parents and their “Snowflake children,” conceived using embryos donated from other couples through the Christian-based Snowflakes program. The children represented a solution, which the program and the president termed “embryo adoption,” to the question of what to do with leftover embryos from infertility treatments. It works by allowing couples who have undergone infertility treatment to donate the embryos they did not use to another couple, who “adopts” them and uses them in their own attempts to conceive.

However, as reported by The New York Times, “embryo adoption” is not something most people undergoing infertility treatment are comfortable with, on either the giving or receiving end. The vast majority of infertility patients choose to freeze and store their excess embryos, with a mere 2 percent donating them to other patients and a mere 3 percent donating them to research in 2003.

Even then, only about half of donated embryos are viable after being thawed, and even fewer of those result in actual births.

To increase the odds for success, a newly offered procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis promises to screen embryos so that the healthiest can be implanted. It is performed when the embryo is only composed of six to eight cells, any one of which is still capable of developing into an organism. (When an embryo reaches 16 cells, it begins to differentiate and gives rise to stem cells. But by that point, removing any one cell destroys the entire embryo, creating the main ethical snag for stem cells.)

However, such a screening procedure carries its own ethical gray areas. With this technology, parents can unnaturally select the fittest embryos and discard the genetically “inferior,” to a greater and more precise degree than with previous techniques. Ethicists warn this could be a significant step toward selecting children for traits like sex, eye color or even intelligence.

It also allows parents to more easily have custom-tailored, tissue-matched children to provide spare biological parts to treat an existing child’s ailments. Recently termed “save-your-siblings” in The New York Times, surely the mere existence of such a category has to strike many as at least ethically questionable, if not plainly immoral.

Especially if any notion of “playing God” or overstepping one’s human boundaries–criticisms commonly leveled against abortion, stem cell research and even birth control–enters the discussion, the entire enterprise of assisted reproductive technology starts to look equally suspect.

While questions over when life begins have long floated about the “moral issues” discussion, another key issue centers on what rights individuals and their families have to control how life ends. Euthanasia and end-of-life care issues raised by increasing lifespans and improving medical expertise have been around for some time, but have not yet commanded the attention or spurred the serious national discussion they arguably deserve.

The “right to die” issue flared most noticeably with the Terri Schiavo case earlier this year. Public opinion polls revealed government intervention in Shiavo’s death by Republican leaders including President Bush, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to be a substantial public relations misfire, with a strong majority of Americans viewing it not as a noble attempt to save a life, but as an insulting, meddling and moralizing political stunt. Following a reported rush among Americans to draft living wills, the issue soon left the spotlight.

In October, with little publicity, the Supreme Court took up the Bush administration’s challenge to the state of Oregon’s “Death With Dignity Act,” which allowed doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to competent, terminally ill patients who wished to end their lives. The act was approved twice by state voters, and more than 200 residents ended their lives under the act before it was challenged in 2001 by then-Attorney General John Aschcroft.

The case is John Roberts’ first as the Supreme Court’s new chief justice, but during his confirmation process, attention remained focused largely on how he might steer the Court regarding abortion rights. This other life-and-death issue, with the potential for wider reach into the lives of ordinary people planning for their own deaths or dealing with the deaths of loved ones did not enter the audible discourse.

Yet as reported by The Boston Globe, Roberts appears to be leaning toward the Bush administration’s position on denying states the right to decide on such issues and deferring to federal authority, which would outlaw Oregon’s act and set national precedent–a position plainly discordant with popular opinion, but unassailed in the media or in legislative debate with pre-emptive cries of judicial activism.

The Court’s ruling, expected sometime before June 2006, will have serious implications for how all Americans are allowed to live and die–yet the case barely made news.

Though to some abortion and gay marriage are the most pressing “moral issues” facing the country today, they are far from the only ones. Other ethical issues are waiting in the wings while the “culture war” drama plays out among politicians, the press and the public, and though they are rarely called out and seriously entertained, they are no less important.

News analysis: In search of the 'values vote'

Much has been made of the 2004 presidential election exit poll in which a plurality of voters revealed “moral issues” were the most influential in determining how they cast their ballots.

The notion of the “values vote,” a new, powerful, downright deterministic electoral contingent moved largely by opposition to abortion and gay marriage, was born–but perhaps prematurely.

Twenty-two percent of all respondents to the 2004 National Election Poll cited “moral issues” as being most salient in deciding their votes. Twenty percent cited economic issues, 19 percent cited terrorism and 15 percent cited the war in Iraq.

Seventy-nine percent of the “moral values” voters cast ballots for Bush, while only 18 percent voted for Kerry. Conversely, 80 percent of those who responded that economic concerns most influenced their votes cast ballots for Kerry, while only 18 percent voted for Bush.

Poll results were widely reported the day after the election, providing a convenient, compelling and memorable news script to cast the relatively close outcome as the product of a sharply polarized electorate (even though it was quietly revised in the press within days).

To complete the red vs. blue culture war narrative, it was reported that 35 percent of self-identified Republicans voted based on “moral values,” while only 10 percent of Democrats did likewise. Regular churchgoers also tended to vote for Bush, while the lower income brackets aligned with Kerry.

Interesting figures, but it’s hardly a revelation that poor people vote Democratic and religious people vote Republican, and therefore no compelling argument for a “values vote” deciding the election for Bush.

“Moral issues” did not move mass numbers of swing voters. Relative to the entire electorate, more “values voters” reported they had already decided one month before the election how they were going to vote.

Neither did “moral issues” drive a significant number of new voters to the polls. Nine percent of “moral issues” voters were first-time voters, compared to 11 percent of all voters. (In comparison, 20 percent of voters who cited education as their paramount concern had not previously voted.)

In states with gay marriage bans on their ballots, voter turnout did not markedly increase relative to other states (just 0.4 percent). Marriage amendments did not automatically color states red, either: Bush’s vote share actually decreased by 0.3 percent from the 2000 election in states voting on gay marriage bans in 2004. Kerry also won Michigan and Oregon even as voters passed “traditional marriage” amendments to their state constitutions.

It is an axiom of electoral politics that party identification is by far the most reliable predictor of how a given person will vote, not specific issue positions. Voters with pre-existing support for other Bush policies–namely, those who thought the war in Iraq was going well and those who reported they were better off financially–were significantly more likely to name “moral values” as the decisive factor in their votes. When the Bush campaign started talking “moral values,” those who already leaned Republican for other reasons adopted the language, and parroted it back to pollsters when asked to rationalize their votes.

“Values voters” were members of the Republican base grounded in money and militarism, not converted swing voters who tipped the electoral scales. If there is any “values vote” to speak of and stump on, it is as a means of mobilizing existing supporters, not inspiring new ones.

Whether the “values vote” exists beyond the 2004 election and can surface to command its alleged clout in future contests remains to be seen, largely thanks to the policies President
Bush has pursued since riding its supposed wave to victory.

Since cutting federal funding for stem cell research and outlawing “partial-birth abortion” in his first term, Bush has done nothing of “valuable” substance. In fact, excepting an occasional passing statement, he has made scant mention of the issues his socially conservative base claims moved it to deliver him the election, even sidestepping them in the midst of the recent Supreme Court battle.

In response, Bush’s base is deserting him. According to an AP/Ispos poll released in October, white evangelicals have lost the most faith–their support for the president’s policy agenda was down 30 percent from November 2004. Support for Bush from Republican women and Southerners also dropped more than 25 percent during the past year. While two-thirds of all Republicans strongly approved of Bush’s performance last year at this time, only half do so currently.

For many longtime supporters, the death knell for Bush’s credibility sounded when he nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. And by failing to nominate overt social conservatives to either vacant seat he has had opportunity to fill, Bush angered and betrayed his allies on the religious right.

Bush’s departures from ideological party lines have also cost him, tossing aside fiscal restraint and integrity for runaway federal spending and executive branch scandal over the CIA leak and the buildup to war in Iraq.

Public opinion of the administration’s mishandling of the war is also a decisive factor, with the majority of the country now, for the first time since the invasion, reporting disapproval of Bush’s Iraq policy.

During his electoral campaigns and during his first term, Bush was able to walk a more moderate line, pleasing his far-right base without unduly riling the center, or the left. In his second term, Bush’s policies have caught up to him, and are now sprouting malcontents across the political landscape.

If Bush stays his present course, it may not matter whether “values” can rise above other concerns to inspire the electorate. With his approval ratings continually descending into unexplored doldrums, if the president and his advisers truly believed “moral issues” had rallying power, one would expect Bush to try and excavate his numbers by renewing calls for the Federal Marriage Amendment, or pushing the Supreme Court to take up “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance or “intelligent design” in public schools.

Instead, Bush started talking terror. He put out a top ten list of “terrorist plots” his administration had allegedly foiled since Sept. 11 (which experts disputed) to offset criticism of his management of the “war on terror.” He set out on a tour preaching to converted military families and staging “conversations” with U.S. troops to offset criticism of his policies in Iraq. He rolled out a $7 billion plan to deal with a hypothetical avian flu pandemic to offset criticism of his and FEMA’s “heck of a job” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Partisan issue positions are splashing outside the clean lines of the red and blue map that has come to symbolize the 2004 presidential race. However enamored they may be of the “culture war” narrative, when 2006 or 2008 rolls around (especially if the latter brings Hillary vs. Condi, in which case all bets are off) politicians and pundits may well find the “values vote” has been selected out of the political gene pool–or, if you prefer, removed by the hand of an intelligent designer–and has left a murky shade of purple in its wake.

Editorial: Voting down unintelligent designs

Though the verdict in the recently wrapped “intelligent design” trial in Dover, Pa., isn’t expected until January, voters there have already returned the right decision.

Dover’s public school board, comprised of nine Republican members, was sued for unanimously adopting new standards requiring high school science teachers to read a statement offering “intelligent design”–the notion that life is too complex to have arisen undirected–as an alternative to evolution to explain the origin and development of life.

Eight of the nine board members were up for re-election Nov. 8, and Dover voters replaced all eight with Democrats opposed to the standards, which the candidates aptly characterized as a means of weaseling Christian creationism into public curriculum.

Unfortunately, the voters in Dover may be more evolved then much of the general public. In a November 2004 Gallup poll, 45 percent of U.S. adults surveyed said they believed God created all life on earth, in basically its present form, within the past 10,000 years. Thirty-eight percent of teenagers responded likewise in March.

So, why not, in the interest of intellectual freedom, “teach the controversy,” as President Bush and other Republican leaders have so innocently suggested?

Because scientifically speaking, there is no controversy. “Intelligent design” is not a true theory, in that it posits nothing that can be tangibly tested. Having no content of its own, it antagonizes legitimate science and uses the reaction as evidence of contention.

The movement’s lead designer is the Discovery Institute, an organization that, like the movement itself, is essentially politics dusted with pseudo-science. (Remember when it used to be called “creation science?”) As evidence of its supposed mainstream validity, the Institute touts the more than 400 signatures it has gathered to date from scientists who doubt evolutionary theory.

In pointedly clever retaliation, the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education launched its own petition, named “Project Steve” after late theorist Stephen Jay Gould. To date, it has collected more than 600 signatures in support of evolution–just from scientists named or nicknamed “Steve.”

Still in perpetual pursuit of secular credibility, “intelligent design” advocates respond to religious criticism by saying they never specify who or what the “designer” is. But other than little green men, God looks to be the sole contender–assuming we set aside questions over why a perfectly rational deity would design human eyes with blind spots or waste time on vestigial organs and junk DNA.

For all its talk “Of Pandas and People,” “intelligent design” looks beyond the natural world. And despite recent actions by a conservative school board in Kansas (still carrying the torch 80 years after the Scopes trial) to rewrite its definition to the contrary, science is only concerned with natural explanations.

Pennsylvania voters saw past the rhetoric, and we hope to the unnamed“designer” the judge there will follow suit. Though the newly elected Dover board is prepared to overturn the standards regardless, “intelligent design” needs all the condemnation it can get.

When a third of American teenagers tell pollsters they do not know enough to say whether they think evolutionary theory is well supported, the last thing we need is less science in science class.