The Rich Really Are Different: Their Incomes Fluctuate More
Robert Frank points out that a lot of the reason states are in so much trouble is that many have become incredibly dependent on high earners for their tax revenues: [snipped quote] This is one of the reasons that we can't fix all our budget problems with higher taxes on the rich--if we do that, revenues are going to collapse dangerously every time there's a recession.
Koch is pretty open about their connection with institutions like IHS, but from what I know of them, astroturfing doesn't really seem like their style. I've seen Koch in action at private events, and though I'll respect the privacy, I'll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, he displayed rather a mania for honest dealing. That's not to say that it's impossible that they do fund FreedomWorks--I'm not particularly conversant with the world of 501(c)(3) funders. But Freedomworks doesn't publish its donor list, and there's no source offered for the claim.
@asymmetricinfo
Megan McArdle
What I like about Mark Ames is that every piee [sic] contains at least one completely new, easily checkable factual error http://bit.ly/gq93Pt
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@petersuderman
Peter Suderman
@SonnyBunch I just think @asymmetricinfo is cute.
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asymmetricinfo Megan McArdle
@ @petersuderman A classic example of bias. The Kochs are probably paying you to say that.
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In its opening phase, at least, our war in Libya looks like the beau ideal of a liberal internationalist intervention. It was blessed by the United Nations Security Council. It was endorsed by the Arab League. It was pushed by the diplomats at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, rather than the military men at Robert Gates’s Pentagon. Its humanitarian purpose is much clearer than its connection to American national security. And it was initiated not by the U.S. Marines or the Air Force, but by the fighter jets of the French Republic.
This is an intervention straight from Bill Clinton’s 1990s playbook, in other words, and a stark departure from the Bush administration’s more unilateralist methods. There are no “coalitions of the willing” here, no dismissive references to “Old Europe,” no “you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Instead, the Obama White House has shown exquisite deference to the very international institutions and foreign governments that the Bush administration either steamrolled or ignored.
I thought of the unceasing reactions to [Sarah] Palin as I sat with two generations of anti-feminists at a book launch last week. Phyllis Schlafly, that brave lone warrior against the Equal Rights Amendment, and her niece, Suzanne Venker, have a book out called The Flipside of Feminism. Schlafly is an unapologetic fan of Palin — much more so than Venker — because she sees this. [This is false; Shlafly has stated that Palin is not up to the job. SoT] She knows this. She’s lived it. Having been called the worst of names simply because she was the most empowered of them all; refusing to surrender what’s only natural to an ideology that, masked as freedom, waged war on the complementary nature of the sexes.
You don’t have to want Sarah Palin to be president to acknowledge that the frenzy around her may have more to do with us than her.
On multiple fronts, the former governor of Alaska is actually much more complicated than most of the debates about her ever indicate. She’s that pro-life mom, a poster gal whom the Susan B. Anthony List was waiting for. But she’s also been known to get her inner Gloria Steinem on — which is ironic given that Steinem’s among those who would excommunicate her from the global sisterhood if she could. She’s very much the product of her times in this way — very much of the moment in this way. Born and raised in a culture where girls were educated as if they were an oppressed class in need of empowerment, often at the expense of boys, she’s representative of a culture that is increasingly coming to grips with the fact that the sexual revolution messed with some very fundamental things. Our opinions about politics sometimes merely reflect our inner struggles and longings in the messiest of ways, providing endless fodder for a ravenous media.
They Know Who Wears the Pants in This Country
March 21, 2011 9:43 A.M. By Mark Krikorian
Look, I’m a sensitive New Age guy — I cook, I do laundry, I choke up at movies (well, Gladiator, anyway). But does anyone think our enemies abroad are as enlightened as we are about feminism? Steyn is right that the specific lesson they’re learning is that nukes are the best insurance against invasion — but a broader one is that our commander-in-chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates. Prof. Althouse notes, “A feminist milestone: Our male President has been pulled into war by 3 women,” and Senator Graham scored points with “I Thank God for Strong Women in the Obama Administration,” but we’re going to pay for this.
One of the reasons Khrushchev gambled on missiles in Cuba is that he perceived JFK as a weak man when they met in Vienna. Conversely, one of the reasons Khomeini released the hostages just as Reagan was taking the oath of office was his “Ronnie Ray-guns” reputation (something the air traffic controllers ignored — which itself became another lesson for our enemies). Do you think Putin and A-jad and Chavez and the ChiComs are more afraid of Obama now? It was obvious to most of us that Hillary has more, uh, stones than Obama, but to have it confirmed so publicly for less-attentive foreign goons means they’re that much more likely to try to push us and see how The One responds.
Before you send me any burning bras, the problem is not with women leaders — the enemies of the Virgin Queen and the Iron Lady can attest to that. The problem is not even with the president having strong female subordinates. Rather, Obama’s pusillanimity has been hugely magnified by the contrast with the women directing his foreign policy and the fact that they nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in. Maybe it’s unfair and there shouldn’t be any difference from having a male secretary of state do the same thing, but there is.
So we have the worst situation of all. Instead of a strong leader resisting calls for an unjustified military action — or even a strong leader resolutely supporting the military action — we have a timorous and irresolute leader reluctantly caving in to the demands of his staff. We are in for a heap of trouble.
Why intervene in Libya and not elsewhere is a question that needs to be asked. But it's not a question that needs to be asked to determine the wisdom of intervening in Libya.
Should we also spend more money to prevent malaria? Yes, we should. But I see zero reason to believe that not intervening in Libya would lead to an increase in in American assistance to prevent malaria.
Why not intervene in Burma or Yemen or elsewhere? I would say the answer is prudential: for various political, geographic, and military reasons, the United States has the chance to prevent slaughter in Libya at reasonable cost, and does not have the chance to do so in Burma.
But suppose there's no answer whatsoever. Does it matter? If it were the 1990s, and the Clinton administration were contemplating an expansion of children's health insurance, would it be important to determine exactly why we're covering uninsured children but not uninsured adults? No. The question is whether this particular policy intervention is likely to succeed or fail.
Now, I think there are very reasonable arguments to suggest that the operation in Libya could devolve into a quagmire, fail to achieve its objections, or achieve them at unacceptable cost.
And, of course, some people -- not Sullivan or Klein -- think the U.S. has no right to intervene in places like Libya. But that's the question. The question of whether or not we ought to intervene in some other country, or in some other way, is an important foreign policy issue, but not an argument against intervention in Libya.
As some of you may know, there have been reports of crazy price spikes in potassium iodide, which can protect against thyroid cancer in the event of radioactive exposure. Some of this is natural--all the world's potassium iodide pills should not be flowing to Japan and its immediate environs, and price signals are a good way to accomplish this. But apparently the soaring demand is not limited to places near Japan--all over the US, people seem to be seeking the stuff.
Presumably at least some of this is for relatives abroad, but it seems unlikely that this is the source of all the demand.Derek Lowe explains, as gently as possible, why it's not a good idea to take potassium iodide:
. . . unless you're actually being exposed to radioactive iodine, it's not going to do any good at all, and can actually do you harm. Pregnant women and people with thyroid problems, especially, should not go around gulping potassium iodide. Nothing radioactive is reaching North America yet - there's the Pacific Ocean to dilute things out along the way - which makes it very likely that more people on this side are in the process of injuring themselves by taking large unnecessary doses of iodide. This is like watching people swerve their cars off the road into the trees because they've heard that there's an accident fifty miles ahead.
As some of you may know, there have been reports of crazy price spikes in potassium iodide, which can protect against thyroid cancer in the event of radioactive exposure.Some of this is natural--all the world's potassium iodide pills should not be flowing to Japan and its immediate environs, and price signals are a good way to accomplish this. But apparently the soaring demand is not limited to places near Japan--all over the US, people seem to be seeking the stuff.
Presumably at least some of this is for relatives abroad, but it seems unlikely that this is the source of all the demand.Derek Lowe explains, as gently as possible, why it's not a good idea to take potassium iodide:
. . . unless you're actually being exposed to radioactive iodine, it's not going to do any good at all, and can actually do you harm. Pregnant women and people with thyroid problems, especially, should not go around gulping potassium iodide. Nothing radioactive is reaching North America yet - there's the Pacific Ocean to dilute things out along the way - which makes it very likely that more people on this side are in the process of injuring themselves by taking large unnecessary doses of iodide. This is like watching people swerve their cars off the road into the trees because they've heard that there's an accident fifty miles ahead.
Some of this is natural--all the world's potassium iodide pills should not be flowing to Japan and its immediate environs, and price signals are a good way to accomplish this.
God Bless
March 11, 2011 6:18 A.M. By Kathryn Jean Lopez
the people hit by the earthquake in Japan — and all the subsequent tsunamis . . . including in our Hawaii.
art.the.nerd
03/11/11 11:57
Do I understand this correctly? "God bless the people whose lives and property are at risk because of an act of God"?
The lion’s share of negative vibe in Dealey Plaza, however, isn’t generated by happenstance or traffic accidents. It comes from the fact that the place is in such a miserable state of disrepair that it amounts to a disgrace for the city of Dallas, the state of Texas, and the United States of America.
I live in Los Angeles. In what’s called the slums of Beverly Hills. But what I’m about to say goes for virtually everywhere in Los Angeles. There is more attention paid to the grounds keeping and upkeep and beautification of EVERY apartment building on my street, every street in my neighborhood, and just about every building, house, park, intersection, center divider or median strip, car wash, parking lot, and public restroom than there is at the site of the assassination of the 35th president of the United States.
Paint is chipping badly. Rust stains are everywhere. The grass is trodden over, smashed down to dirt and mud under the feet of visitors. Graffiti covers key components of this historical site including the picket fence behind the Grassy Knoll where some say a second shooter may have fired shots at the president’s motorcade.
But there’s one thing even worse than the disrepair at Dealey Plaza and it is an insult to history and everyone who visits the place as well as to the memory of the slain president and of the events that happened there
Most people who exercise won't lose much, if any weight without calorie restriction. And most people who try to restrict their calories below what their body wants fail over the long term--eventually, their appetite wins.
McArdle approaches obesity as if it were a Foucauldian construct: a category invented by the government to justify an exercise of power. The government has no business intervening on the level of individual choice and it shouldn't get into the business of behavioral suasion because it always fails. She's right to note that information about health risks associated with overconsuming fat and sugar and salt are saturated throughout society, even supersaturated. Everyone knows how bad this stuff can be. For her, that's the end of the argument. Government can help to provide information about how to make better choices, but it cannot and should not try to persuade people to make better choices. Indeed, the push for people to make better choices produces the stigma that makes the bad thing bad in the first place.
This assumes that the stigma itself is misplaced. It isn't. Fat stigma is bad and harmful, and it ought to be reduced. But reducing fat stigma doesn't reduce the incidence of obesity; it actually seems to increase it in certain populations. What produces fat stigma is not a government or culture that hectors people to lose weight and exercise and then excoriates them when they can't; it's a government that expects individuals to lose weight on their own (which is next to impossible) while making policy that keeps people fat. The discrepancy between expectations and reality is cruel, especially for children.
...
Lo and behold, government policy has helped ensure that the raw foodstuffs that go into all the starchy, sugary foods that we eat are much cheaper. And when compared to the consumer price index, fruits, vegetables and healthy foods are more expensive than they were 30 years ago. If government policy influences diet on a macro scale, and if there is evidence that the diet is harmful, then, in theory, there would be no additional intervention if, say, Congress began to subsidize tomatoes in the same way it subsidizes corn, just a change in policy.
None of this argues for a soda tax, or a tax on sugar, or a ban on, say, food marketing to children. It's just to say that if the obesity epidemic was nurtured by policy -- and it clearly was -- perhaps it can be undone by policy, too.
Fat tissue makes people want to eat--it sends out for takeout. And hunger is a signal on par with thirst or pain. You can ignore it, if you have sufficient willpower. But just as most people can't withstand torture (a minority can), most people can't ignore the constant demand from their body for food.
The other is that while I do buy some of the arguments about hyperpalatable food like Doritos (though I personally find Doritos eminently resistable [sic] most of the time), the fact that a really attractive food combination has been cooked up by food scientists does not mean that you get some kind of free pass to deny it to everyone. Whether a dish was dreamed up by Mario Batali or the staff at the Cheesecake Factory, preventing people from having it "for their own good" still represents an actual hedonic loss, as well as an actual loss of freedom. You may think they have some meta-self which will thank you later, but their current self has still had both its liberty and its joy restricted. Invoking the demon food scientists of agribusiness does not actually relieve you of the obligation to prove that intervening in the liberty of both the customers and the company is morally pressing.
To be sure, even I, the pessimistic libertarian, do not see any actual means for the government to prevent food processors from making their food taste very good. (Thank God). I just suspect that more than one of my interlocutors is casting around for just such a means.
The government could raise the price of fat, salt, and sweeteners, processed food, and restaurant meals. But I very much doubt that if our legislators actually enacted a food tax adequate to prevent obesity, they would get much thanks from anyone except the sort of people who ask each other, with wide eyes, if anyone else has noticed how disgustingly fat all the people are at the mall--and never eat at Cheesecake Factory. So I think that this, too, is unlikely.
Ultimately, the answer to "what could it hurt"? is that all actions have costs, which you cannot assume away on the grounds that those costs don't interest you. But they should interest you, because not least among those costs is the simple fact that the government cannot do everything well. Making all sorts of changes in the name of obesity means not making others that might be more important, because we have limited political and bureaucratic bandwith. [sic] Do you want obesity intervention, cap and trade, or health care reform? You may not be able to have any of them. But you probably can't have all three. And if you did, you'd make it more likely that the government would screw all of them up.
And I suppose I would make the point that at the margin expenditures of funds to fight this tendency are going to do a lot more to improve public health than will expenditures of funds to treat people's diabetes.
That presumes you can find a marginal dollar that will reduce peoples' tendency to eat more than they burn just as effectively as we treat diabetes. Seven years ago, when I investigated fast food lawsuits, I found very little evidence for that proposition. Pretty much every public health effort to get people to eat less has proven a dismal failure. As Paul Campos has noted, telling people to eat less and exercise more is the most exhausitvely [sic] attempted experiment in the history of science. And we have 200 million data points that prove just how badly it works at keeping Americans slender.
I'm thus pretty skeptical that we're going to do much about obesity through the sort of mild nudges that a lot of the discussion about changing peoples' eating habits implicitly imagines. For example, I'm a big fan of Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating, which details all the ways that we take in more calories than we think. But I'm skeptical that in the long run, these factors make all that much difference. If you think about it, taking in an extra fifty calories a day more than you need--half a piece of bread, or a few cocktail nuts--is enough to pack on an extra five pounds a year. If we really at that mindlessly all the time, we'd all be morbidly obese. I expect that in any given sitting, things like portion size, or calorie counts, can cause people to reduce their intake. But over time, I doubt they'll have much impact.
That leaves more illiberal options, like forcing manufacturers to change their foods in order to make them less apealling, [sic] or massive taxes on fat, sugar, and salt. Even if I thought there was a practical, and politically acceptable, way to carry this out, I'd be against it. Enacting national health care, and then declaring that it now gives you the right to dictate how people will eat . . . well, that's exactly the sort of thing libertarians are talking about when they bemoan the creepign [sic] nanny state.
Since Megan McArdle is stuck in Tallahassee wrasslin' gators and listening with rapt attention while Jeb Bush's cronies tell her that there's never been a better time to Buy Florida, let's take a look at Paul Krugman's op-ed in the New York Times.
A) It matters whether the arguments in favor of policies are true, even if the policies themselves are good.
B) I happen to care about bankruptcy statistics.
C) I didn't mount a case against Obamacare in this post. Had you read it more closely, you would have seen that I am now arguing against a study which theoretically supports "my side"--i.e., the study purports to have found that RomneyCare did not cause medical bankruptcies to fall substantially, even though this was one of the major selling points for ObamaCare.
rortybomb 1 year ago
I don't understand this. Comparing total 2001 and 2007 numbers aren't an apples to apples comparison; the law has been radically changed to a higher threshold, so we expect 2007 to be lower. If it wasn't then something would be up.
Also, 2001 was the busting of the tech bubble and 9/11; it was a terrible year for the economy. 2007 was at the height of the boom. It also suffered was an overhang, where many people strategically declared bankruptcy in 2005 (600K in October alone) to avoid the new law, so many people who would have limped to 2007 called it quits there. Comparing the peak to the valley and only looking at total numbers seems like a sneak.
The relevant question for total would be are bankruptcies rising from 2006-2008, and they clearly are. You should revisit this in 6 months. My projections are at least 1.5m for 2009, beating 2001 even with the new law in effect.
rortybomb 1 year ago
"The relevant question for total would be are bankruptcies rising from 2006-2008, and they clearly are." And she brings this up, in the passage you quote.
Megan McArdle 1 year ago in reply to rortybomb
No, it wouldn't. The relevant question is, are bankruptcies being driven higher by medical bills, as their paper very clearly implies. The relevant answer is, they are lower, not higher. A higher proportion of medical bills may or may not be medically related; their data collection method isn't great. But the increase in that proportion could be--indeed, is more likely to be--driven by the fall in other kinds of bankruptcies, than by the rise in medically driven bankruptcies.
Susan [Yes, that's me] 1 year ago in reply to Megan McArdle
By "driven higher," do you mean an increase in the number of bankruptcies?
Megan McArdle 1 year ago in reply to Susan
The number of medical bankruptcies *fell*. Their paper implies, while never quite saying, that it *rose*.
Susan 1 year ago in reply to Susan
Doesn't the paper say the percentage of medical bankruptcies rose, not the number? The study says "Since 2001, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems has increased by 50%. Nearly two thirds of all bankruptcies are now linked to illness." (bolding is mine)
jstrummer 1 year ago in reply to Susan
This post is totally bizarre. The study is not misleading on its face or obviously wrong. It's talking about what are the major drivers of growth in bankruptcies since 2005. Obviously the 2005 reform cut down on the number of filings. That's not at issue. At issue is what is causing the new growth post-2005. The study talks about percentages and proportions. It's not comparing absolute number of medical bankruptcies today with those 5 years ago. That would be apples to oranges.
[E]arlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.
And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.
This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.
One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–”You know, I’m on the pill…”
Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.
When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.
It’s also what’s at stake in the ongoing battle over whether the federal government should be subsidizing Planned Parenthood. Obviously, social conservatives don’t like seeing their tax dollars flow to an organization that performs roughly 300,000 abortions every year. But they also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe” — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism they’re trying to restore.
Liberals argue, not unreasonably, that Planned Parenthood’s approach is tailored to the gritty realities of teenage sexuality. But realism can blur into cynicism, and a jaded attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social conservatives look at the contemporary sexual landscape and remember that it wasn’t always thus, and they look at current trends and hope that it doesn’t have to be this way forever.
In this sense, despite their instinctive gloominess, they’re actually the optimists in the debate.
I understand that Bradley Manning has probably done something very wrong, for which, if guilty, he deserves a hefty jail sentence and the contempt of his fellow citizens. But this is not what a decent country does to its citizens.
We'd like to put in a tankless water heater, for a number of reasons: it's environmentally sound, it will lower our electricity bill, and I'd like to be able to run a nice, hot full bath.
The problem is, we don't know anything about tankless water heaters: what to look for, what brands are good, or whether they're a bad idea. So I'm throwing the question out to my ever-helpful readers. Is this a good idea? And if so, how does one go about finding a good heater?
So my husband informs me that we have a gas water heater, not electric; we live in an older house with what seems to be copper piping, and our water doesn't seem to be unusually hard.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time that companies have made this sort of colossal misjudgment. It wouldn't even be the first time an auto company has done so. (Remember the Edsel)? March and April sales volumes should be telling: gas prices are high, and the Leaf is supposed to hit 4,000 production units this month. If volumes remain low, we may be looking at green elephants.
Megan McArdle Uses Straw Men to Argue Against Principal Mods
Megan McArdle has a post up discussing why she thinks the benefits of principal mods would be “at best small and mixed”.
The problem with her lengthy discussion is that it is rife with straw men.
Before we get to the nitty gritty, I want address two bits of framing at the top which I found troubling. The first was the title, “Principal Write-Downs Still Popular With Wonks”. The “still” suggests that wonks like it even though some, presumably most, yet to be named others don’t. And singling out “wonks” further implies that (aside from homeowners) they may be its only fans.
That is very misleading. Who is in favor of mods? The only people who under normal circumstances ought to have a vote on this matter, namely, the borrowers and the lenders. First mortgage lenders overwhelmingly favor mods to borrowers with who still have a viable income. Why? Do the math [....]
I attempted to rectify the situation by trimming down the excerpts, and naming the site from which they were drawn, but this seems to have somehow only made them madder--perhaps because this is so rare in my ten years of experience blogging that I was mystified rather than sufficiently apologetic.
Why are Republicans waging war on contraception?
It's not the first time the question has been asked, and it won't be the last. Truth be told, Republicans aren't engaging in battle on that front -- but the phrase gets close to a legitimate fight.
Congress, for its part, held an unprecedented vote in the House in February to end funding of Planned Parenthood. It's not a permanent or final vote; it was attached to a short-term move to keep the government funded. The debate in Congress was given momentum by the Live Action investigatory videos, which raised significant questions about what exactly Planned Parenthood is doing; but the rest of us need to discuss why we've let Planned Parenthood step in as a mainstream Band-Aid, throwing contraception and even abortion at problems that have much more fundamental solutions.
While women may want love and marriage, they don't expect it. Justice Sandra O'Connor wrote in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey opinion that women had "organized intimate relationships, and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail." And why wouldn't they? Who, nowadays, encourages them to want more?
We've come to expect less for and from ourselves, and for and from one another. In part, it's the fruit of the contraceptive pill. New York magazine recently observed in a cover feature: "The pill is so ingrained in our culture today that girls go on it in college, even high school, and stay on it for five, 10, 15, even 20 years." That, of course, has had all kinds of fallout: a false sense of freedom, security. And it has ravaged women's fertility, as it seeks to mute exactly what women's reproductive power is all about.
That's why I want to turn back the clock -- to a time when we valued love and marriage and didn't expect, support and even encourage promiscuity. Life and history don't work that way, obviously, there is no actual rewind. But we do have opportunities to learn from our mistakes.
The spending fight over Planned Parenthood in Congress is about a number of things. It's primarily about good stewardship, as so much of the spending debate is. But beyond legislation, beyond anything Congress can or should do, it is a call to arms for a new sexual revolution. It's about wanting more for ourselves and for those whom we love. It's about ending the surrender to a contraceptive mentality that treats human sexuality as just another commercial transaction.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates that than a recent commercial for a contraceptive called Beyaz. Women walk into a store and literally shop for men. "It's good to have choices." A woman happily shakes her head at the stork and its offerings in a sassy "we girls can do anything" kind of way, promenading through an adult Barbie commercial complete with Ken, a dream house and a trip to Paris.
That commercial does not, needless to say, do justice to the pain and desperation many women suffer when they find themselves thinking about an abortion, or popping pills in pursuit of something that masks itself as satisfaction but is really just a bad substitute, oftentimes making true happiness all the more illusory.
As evidence of the reckless and dangerous callousness at institutions supposedly dedicated to women's health -- failure to report the sex trafficking of minors, failure to report child abuse -- continues to emerge, we can't afford to lose sight of another, more fundamental conversation that we've got to have, among friends, in our homes and churches -- a talk about what it means to be human.
