Disparate Impacts

There’s a new Uncommon Knowledge interview with Thomas Sowell, with the release of a new book—his fifth since turning 80. The book is called Discrimination and Disparities. I’m glad he keeps writing, even though he’s no longer doing a weekly column; it’s never enough.

Thomas Sowell, Uncommon Knowledge, May 3, 2018

Much of the discussion is about the term disparate impact, which Wikipedia defines this way: 

Disparate impact in United States labor law refers to practices in employment, housing, and other areas that adversely affect one group of people of a protected characteristic more than another, even though rules applied by employers or landlords are formally neutral.

It’s a controversial idea, because it’s ostensibly about fairness while being literally unfair. And it introduces into law the idea that a person with no intention of discrimination is held accountable as if there were mens rea (intent to commit a crime) based on outcomes that simply appear discriminatory.

Interviewer Peter Robinson starts the discussion with a quote from the book:

The disparate impact standard represents a major departure from American legal principles where the burden of proof is usually on those making the accusation.

Disparate impact is a tool used in cases of employment, housing, and credit, among others. And, for the sake of setting up the discussion Robinson asks,

the latest book by
Thomas Sowell
cover image from Amazon

But, Tom, what about the notion that we need a disparate impact test because discrimination, particularly racial discrimination, particularly against African Americans, is so deeply embedded in the fabric of this country that people discriminate all the time without even being aware of it?

And Thomas Sowell answers:

If you're going with that assumption, then you don't need the disparate impact theory. You just simply say what you've just said. To dress it up as the disparate impact theory, the disparate impact theory depends upon the truth of the assumptions.

What assumptions?

This implicit assumption that all of the groups are very similar in their capabilities, what they want to do and so forth. When you look at facts, you find disparate impacts everywhere.

For example, he looks at three groups of immigrants: Irish, Jewish, and Italian. Disparities depend on what you’re looking at:

If you look at things like politics, the Irish were so far more advanced politically than either the Italians or the Jews that for generations you had Irish politicians representing neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Italian or Jewish.

Many disparities are natural. Like tornadoes.

You find 90% of all the tornadoes in the entire world occurring in one country, namely the United States. And only in a part of the United States. You don't hear about tornadoes in Maine or in the Pacific Northwest. So think how much land area there is in the world, and 90% of them right in this one little place.

If disparities are not an inherent evil, but simply part of nature, do we accomplish something good by adjusting to get rid of the disparities? Or do we accidentally cause some other problem?

Maybe we should start by questioning the assumptions. Are differences necessarily the result of bigotry? Or are some differences the result of personal choice and ability?

Sowell’s book refers to a 50-year study of 1500 people with IQs in the top 1%.

What I point out in the book is that the disparities within that narrow range, the top third, for example, had more than 10 times as many post-graduate degrees as the bottom third, among people who were all in the top 1%. So there were obviously many other things that had to come together. The other thing was that two people who failed to make the 140 IQ cutoff ended up getting Nobel Prizes in physics. There's nobody among these 1,500 that did, so obviously there have to be a lot of things coming together.

So intelligence is not the differentiating factor. What is? Family background.

It doesn't matter how much brain power you may have, if you're not raised in a home where people are thinking, where they're doing intellectual things, you're not in the same position as someone with the same IQ who's in a family that has that kind of background.

I talked about that in the last post. It’s not really about victimization, or a victimized underclass. It isn’t even much about innate ability. It’s about family.

Government interference—on the assumption that society is doing something evil, such as bigoted oppression—doesn’t get the positive results it claims to want, because it isn’t addressing the actual problem.

Dr. Sowell even gives examples of societies where there is actual racism, and government interferes by enforcing that racism, and yet people flout the law when it makes economic sense to do so. It happened in Apartheid South Africa. More black workers were hired than white, even in jobs where it was illegal to hire blacks. More blacks than whites lived in white-only neighborhoods.

Quoting the book, “Black incomes in 1900 were almost half again higher than they had been in 1867 to ’68.” So, in the American South, after the Civil War, where employers had agreed to suppress earnings for black workers and sharecroppers, black earnings had a higher rate of growth than the American economy overall.

The market is more powerful than racism, or any other bigotry.

Dr. Sowell explains this related to minimum wage laws:

If you have a minimum wage, and that's set above where it would be in a free market, then that means you're going to have more people applying because there's a higher wage, and there are going to be fewer people hired because of the higher wage. So you're going to have a chronic surplus of applicants.

Now, in a market where there's, say, a chronic surplus of qualified people of, say, 200, and there a hundred blacks, for example, who are qualified, then if the employer refused to hire all hundred black qualified people, he still has 200 others he can call on, and that's it. And it's cost him nothing. But if there's no minimum wage now, and there's no chronic surplus, every time he turns away a qualified black person, he has to have someone who's not black who's also qualified that he can hire….

[And he may not be able to find that person] at that price. Therefore, the price will have to go up, so it's costing him. And if he doesn't raise the price, he's going to have to keep his customers waiting because he doesn't have enough people to do the job.

In short, minimum wage laws are going to have an intensifying effect on existing racism, while free markets tend to lessen discriminatory hiring.

Another example of unintended consequences is housing in northern California, where home building is restricted in the name of saving the environment. The result, of course, is higher housing costs. And then officials ask, “What can we do to get more affordable housing?” The obvious answer is, build more houses. Instead, they appoint a committee to study the issue. Dr. Sowell quips,

It's like appointing a blue-ribbon committee to go out there and find out why the ground is wet after the rain. I think it's almost miraculous the way they can avoid the obvious.

So, what is the disparate impact of the higher housing costs resulting from government imposed home-building limitations? Blacks, among others who started out lower income, instead of moving up in the economy, get priced out—what Peter Robinson calls a sort of “soft version of Jim Crow.”

The progressive/liberal/tyrannists tend not to apply their disparate impact rules on their own “good intentions,” however. Because they want to keep feeling good about their intentions regardless of the harm they do.

Here’s another quote from the book:

The plain fact is that the black poverty rate declined from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960, prior to the expansion of the welfare state that began in the 1960s under the Johnson administration. There was a far more modest decline in the poverty rate among blacks after the war on poverty began.

He lists several more disproportionately negative effects for blacks. Quoting the book again:

In the United States, murder rates, rates of infection with venereal diseases, and rates of teenage pregnancies were among the social pathologies whose steep declines were suddenly reversed in the 1960s. Nowhere was rampant violence and other social pathology as common among low-income people in the first half of the 20th century, when they were more deprived, as in the second half, when the welfare state had made them better off in material terms.

Since we’ve been talking about sex education in schools recently, let’s look at that. Sex education was implemented in schools in response to disease and teenage pregnancy—both of which were going down on their own. By 1960 the rate of venereal disease was half what it was in 1950. Then they started teaching it in the schools, and rates rose dramatically, as did teenage pregnancy. And that hit blacks particularly hard.

In 1960 two-thirds of black children were being raised in families with both parents. By 1995, two-thirds were born out of wedlock. Today 85% of black children live in single-parent households. And that’s while, in some places, like New York City, more black babies are aborted than are born.

We know—the data is astoundingly clear on this—that children fare best in homes where they are raised by their two parents. The results of failure to these children is calamitous.

As Thomas Sowell puts it,

It’s not the legacy of slavery that destroys the African American family. It’s the legacy of the welfare state that destroys the African American family.

And, if you want to destroy or oppress a people, the simplest way is by destroying the family—the basic unit of civilization.

Did they do it on purpose? I’m not willing to go that far. But, if they had intended it, they couldn’t have done a more thorough job.

Dr. Sowell puts it this way:

For one thing, it [the welfare state] makes it unnecessary for fathers to support their offspring. And in fact, it makes it counterproductive in many cases. A very poor man who might be able to support his family realizes his family will be better off without him. But on the other hand, someone who's strictly irresponsible, either the man or the woman or both, now pays no price for being irresponsible. The taxpayers pay the price. And actually, the harm done to the taxpayers, which is serious, still is not comparable to the harm done to the families, especially the children.

Thomas Sowell is an economist; he’s about data. Let the data take you where it takes you, and then see what conclusions you need to draw. You don’t start with a premise and then dismiss data that doesn’t fit. Sometimes there’s an outlier, but sometimes it’s a clue that your original assumptions are wrong.

Disparate impacts—or simply differences—are not necessarily the result of a nefarious plot even so secretive that people don’t know they’re thinking it up. The simpler answer might be that there are a lot of factors—including personal choice—that go into various differences.

But allowing for freedom, and free markets, along with encouraging strong families—that gets us to better, more positive outcomes overall, than interference gets us, no matter how well intentioned.

Maybe we ought to switch it around: hold government accountable for negative impacts of their interference, and put a stop to it. And stop holding individuals and businesses accountable for discrimination that was never intended, thought, or practiced.

Disparate impacts, then, are really just a narrow, limited view, of one portion of a larger picture that, if you could see the whole picture, would become nothing worth acting on.

How do you know whether a particular policy is one of those, or something really worth acting on? Try applying this Spherical Model axiom about unintended consequences:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

Class, Culture, and Moving Upward

I mentioned the other day that I’ve been reading J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. It’s been on my reading list since late 2016, when it made a stir by explaining why so many people who used to vote reliably Democrat voted for Donald Trump.

I heard about the book when the author gave an Uncommon Knowledge interview. What interested me wasn’t so much the explanation for Trump voters, although that’s interesting. But it explains the value of social capital, and most particularly the value of strong families.

J. D. Vance (right), screen shot from Uncommon Knowledge

I appreciate Vance’s ability to identify the social and psychological issues, with a clear, insider’s view of what policies haven’t worked and why. By the end of his Marine Corps service, he was politically conservative. And life—if you can understand it from the inside—probably leads naturally to that viewpoint.

What surprised me much more than I expected about the book is how much his story resonates with me personally. So I’m working through that too.

But I’d like to share a few of Vance’s insights, because I think it’s another support of the Spherical Model, with the political, economic, and social spheres all interrelated.

In his late teen years, J. D. worked at a local grocery store. He handled plenty of people on welfare, and gained some insights:

I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

Mamaw [his grandmother] listened intently to my experiences at Dillman’s. We began to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust. Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole. Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else. This was my mind-set when I was seventeen, and though I’m far less angry today than I was then, it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be (pp. 418-420)[i].

He adds in some outside commentary at this point:

Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re getting’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”[ii]

He goes on to share a bit more of Mamaw’s seemingly contradictory feelings—more like “those hateful Republicans” than the Democrat voter she was:

Hillbilly Elegy
cover image

She’d rant against people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.”

These were bizarre views for my bleeding-heart grandma. And if she blasted the government for doing too much one day, she’d blast it for doing too little the next….

Mamaw’s sentiments occupied wildly different parts of the political spectrum. Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat…. I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse (pp. 223-227).

Even though he wasn’t much of a student in his teen years, he was a curious reader. This section strikes a chord with me:

I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.

Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities. The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal Losing Ground, another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies—which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state (pp. 432-434).

Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart talks about some of the same issues, although more generically about the poor and their behavior that keeps them from social and economic mobility, rather than about blacks in particular. The wealthiest zip codes live a certain way, morally, but they don’t seem to dare share those secrets with the working poor.

Vance continues:

It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith (p. 435).

In Vance’s case, he manages to graduate from high school, spend four years in the Marines, graduate from Ohio State, and then Yale Law School.

It turns out that, for someone of his income level, Yale Law School is not only a better education, but a cheaper option than anything else he might have tried. They have needs-based financial aid available just for such cases. But students like him have no way to know that. As he says, “That first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn’t know how the world worked” (p. 626).

An earlier example is the picture of him and his grandmother, near the end of his high school years, trying to fill out financial aid forms, being asked about his father’s income. But his legal father had been totally absent from his life for over a decade. Obviously, the form wanted to know what other resources the student had, and clearly his father wasn’t a resource. But, to them, puzzling through something they have no experience with, they’re trying to figure out how to get this unknowable piece of information in order to comply to the powers that be.

This was so familiar to me. Back in junior high (7^th-9^th grades) I was earning straight As, but at that point in my life, I was completely unaware that there was any possibility I could ever go to college. The message I got was, people like us (i.e., lower-middle-class people like our family) don’t get those kinds of lives.

By 9^th grade my friends planted the idea that, of course I could go to college; I just needed to get a scholarship. I thought that meant I had to be the one, smartest, highest GPA student in the high school, and once we combined with another junior high for high school, I didn’t believe that could be possible. (Fortunately, even when I thought that, I didn’t give up. Eventually I got scholarships—after filling out all the forms myself—that covered more than half my tuition, and I graduated, paying my own way through, without debt.)

When I asked about college at home, I was told, “Why would you want to do that? You’re just going to be a housewife.” And, “You’ll have to pay for that yourself, because we’re not paying for it.” Also, I wasn’t allowed to work unless my mother decided to be willing to drive me to and from—walking alone as a girl was not allowed. There was also a slightly more subtle, class-based discouragement: “People that go to college think they’re so smart. They just want to look down on people.”

There’s a lot about my story that is simply about my mother’s psychological issues. But some of the discouragement stems from a lower-middle-class farm and labor environment. I’ve wondered about the Scots-Irish connection, which does appear in that family line. But I think it’s more a matter of living without the understanding of what’s possible.

Vance talks a little bit about solutions—and the difficulty of finding them:

People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the problems of my community. I know what they’re look for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist. A good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the plight of the working class, once told me, “The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things. They’ll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.”

There were many thumbs put on my scale. When I look back at my life, what jumps out is how many variables had to fall in pace in order to give me a chance (p. 711-712).

In his favor were his grandparents’ constancy. And, among the “revolving door of would-be father figures,” at least his mother never chose abusive men. There was his sister, his aunt and uncle, good teachers, and friends.

Remove any of these people from the equation, and I’m probably screwed. Other people who have overcome the odds cite the same sorts of interventions.

He lists several. Here’s what they had in common:

They had a family member they could count on. And they saw—from a family friend, an uncle, or a work mentor—what was available and what was possible (p. 721).

I’ve often discussed with my husband the people I was surrounded by that made a difference in my life. As I’ve written before, I grew up in Utah, at a time when the community was pretty safe, and families were large and strong. Despite the message I got from home that the happy successful world wasn’t available to someone like me, I had teachers and friends, and mentors from church, who told me otherwise.

I was also blessed that, because we were Mormon, there was no drinking in our house. The most negative person in my life was always sober. And I had examples all around me of people living the lives of civilization to good effect.

While there was a lot of discouragement and uncomfortable angst in my home (and probably less verbal expression of love than J. D. had), I wasn’t in a neighborhood that kept my possibilities limited. Until quite recently, I didn’t recognize how different my growing up experience was from so many friends around me; when you’re a fish swimming in the water, you don’t realize you’re wet. I see now that I was lucky to have gone on to thrive. That thumb was on the scale for me.

As Vance points out about the results of one study, “I wasn’t surprised that Mormon Utah—with its strong church, integrated communities, and intact families—wiped the floor with Rust Belt Ohio” (p. 724).

The problems Vance sees with his community, and maybe other similar poverty pockets, aren’t really about programs. As he says, “the fault lies almost entirely with factors outside the government’s control. It’s what happens at home” (p. 731).

Here’s Vance’s conclusion:

As a cultural emigrant form one group to the other, I am acutely aware of their differences. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn….But I have to give it to them. Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer” (p. 752).

That’s the message we need to find a way to share with anyone who’s willing to hear it.

---

[i] I used an e-reader edition, which identified page numbers when I saved my notes. However, the print edition is listed as having 288 pages, so my page numbering seems to relate more to location within the book than to actual pages. It looks like there are around 770 digital pages.

[ii] Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008

Evidence and Axioms

I had a conversation recently about the evidence of God. In academia, and media, there seems to be an assumption that there’s no proof, and therefore no evidence, of God’s existence. I shared with my friend that, in my life, there’s a lot of experiential evidence. When I experience the spiritual presence of God, I often feel particular physical indicators. I was surprised, a few years ago, to learn that those physical sensations don’t happen to everyone. But they do happen to me, consistently under spiritual circumstances.

Also, there’s the way words come clearly into my mind, after prayer, when I’m paying attention. Sometimes long after a prayer, when a circumstance arises that seems to answer that prayer, I ask, “Was that…?” And the answer comes, “Yes.”

I can’t say that I can get the words I need on demand, at any moment, without some spiritual struggle. But I can say that my evidentiary experience that God is there is significant enough to convince me.

I described this evidence to my friend, who is also Christian but not of the same faith as me, and he said that was exactly how it was for him too. Also, he’d be reading scriptures (he has learned Hebrew to read in the original when possible), and his mind would open up and ideas and connections would come, seeming to just flow in, beyond anything he could think up himself. It wasn’t something he was imagining.

That happens to me too. They say, when you want to talk to God, pray; but when you want to hear from God, read the scriptures. The words on the page may or may not be your direct answer, but those words will seem to lead you to thoughts and connections that you needed as an answer.

For those of us who are religious, there’s so much evidence that it’s puzzling when people say there isn’t any.

There’s a new Prager U video about the evidence for God, as well as a number of older ones. But that’s not really what I’m looking at today. I’m interested in what religion is.

It's a principle of the Spherical Model that religion is necessary for civilization.

I’ve finally been reading J. D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy. In it he talks about his grandmother’s personal brand of religion:

cover image from Amazon

The theology she taught was unsophisticated, but it provided a message I needed to hear. To coast through life was to squander my God-given talent, so I had to work hard. I had to take care of my family because Christian duty demanded it. I needed to forgive, not just for my mother’s sake but for my own. I should never despair, for God had a plan (p. 262).

There was a brief time in his life when he went to live with his biological father, who became strictly religious after leaving the family and starting anew. Vance didn’t quite ever feel at home there, but he did appreciate some things about that peaceful, structured, religious world (the footnote is included in his book):

Dad embodied a phenomenon social scientists have observed for decades: Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.[i]

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber even found that the relationship was causal: It’s not just that people who happen to live successful lives also go to church, it’s that church seems to promote good habits (p. 282).

There’s plenty of social science discussion in that book for another day. But there’s another somewhat unorthodox definition of religion I came across in a Jordan Peterson Q&A at Lafayette College. I’m including the question, to give a bit of context, and I highlighted the essential definition:

Q: I was watching a few of your interviews in preparation for this, and I heard you speak about religion quite a bit. And, if you look up what religion means in the Webster dictionary, you get something like, “a system of faith centered on a supernatural being or beings,” or something like that. But I’ve heard you use religion to describe something like punk rockers, for example, that that’s a religious experience. So my first question would be, how do you define what is considered religious? ….

JP: Religious is what you act out.

Q: What’s that?

JP: Religious is what you act out.

Q: Anything you act out?

JP: Everything you act out is predicated on your implicit axioms. The system of implicit axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief system. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist or not. That’s just surface noise.

Q: So it has nothing to do with divinity or—?

JP: No, I didn’t say that. No.

Q: It doesn’t necessarily have to do with those?

JP: No, it probably necessarily has to do with it too. But it doesn’t necessarily have to do with your voluntarily articulated statements about whether or not you believe in something like a transcendent deity. So, what you act out is much more what you are than what you say about yourself. And what the hell do you know about what you believe, anyways? You’re complicated, man.

Q: It’s a fair question.

JP: Well, seriously, people are complicated. You know, like, we’re not transparent to ourselves at all. That’s why we have to go to university and study psychology. It’s like, we’re not exactly black boxes, but we are the most complicated things there are. Right? And we can’t even program our VCR clocks. So, it’s like, how the hell can we propose to understand ourselves? And, you know, I’m existentially oriented, which is to say that I think that what you hold to be true is best determined as a consequence of an analysis of your actions, rather than as a consequence of an analysis of what you purport to believe.

Jordan Peterson at Lafayette College

Now, in order to act—  You can’t act without a hierarchy of values… because you can’t act unless you think that one thing is better than another. Because, why would you act, otherwise? So that means that you’re embedded within a hierarchy of values, whether you know it or not. Or maybe multiple fragmentary and competing hierarchies of value, which is all the worse for you, by the way, because it just makes you very confused.

That hierarchy of values has an axiomatic—  It’s based on axioms. And the probability that you understand them is very low, because generally people don’t understand their axioms. But that axiomatic system is essentially your religious system. And there’s no way out of that, as far as I can tell.

And you can say, “Well, it isn’t predicated on a conscious belief in a transcendent deity.” OK, have it your way. But, you know, most people in this room act out a Judeo-Christian ethic. And not only do they act it out, if they’re treated in a manner that’s not commensurate with that ethic, they get very, very annoyed.

For example, if I fail to treat you as if you’re an embodiment of a divine fragment, let’s say, that’s characterized by the ability to make free choice, and to determine your own destiny in some sense, or if I fail to treat you as if you’re a valued member—a valued, contributing member of the polity, as a sovereign individual, then you’ll find that very offensive and become angry. OK, then, that’s what you believe.

If I ask you if you believe any of that, well, that’s a whole different story. You might give me some radical leftist nonsense. But that doesn’t take away from the fundamentals of your actions.

I’ve said before that, while it’s possible for atheists to live moral lives, they’re not doing it in a vacuum; they’re doing it within a civilization that sets up certain values.

·         We believe that each human life is precious.

·         We believe that human life is more precious than non-human life.

·         We believe that human beings should be free to choose how to live their lives—how to earn a living, how to form and raise their family, how to live out their religious beliefs.

·         We believe that people can own property, and we need to respect that ownership.

·         We believe that people should tell the truth to one another.

·         We believe that people should keep their word—have integrity, not betray one another.

·         We believe it is good to voluntarily help one another, especially the less fortunate.

·         We believe that purposely harming another person is wrong, except in self-defense.

We have laws against stealing, against perjury and bearing false witness. We have laws against murder and assault. We argue about the rightness of capital punishment (which takes non-innocent life as a response to serious crime), and about abortion or euthanasia (which takes innocent life but involves issues related to choice).

We think we should be decent toward one another, and generally polite. It makes it easier for all of us to live in peace, which we prefer.

The Ten Commandments
at the Texas State Capitol

An atheist can tell you these things are right and good, and moral, and that’s why he does them. But all of them relate to the Ten Commandments. They are moral questions, very much in the religious sense.

If an atheist lives in a savage community, never being exposed to the moral codes of civilization, what are the odds he will invent for himself a civilized moral code? Is it possible that he's actually a believer—as his actions show—even though he is unwilling to say so, even to himself?

I’m interested in that Judeo-Christian ethic that Dr. Peterson talks about. Do you feel “annoyed”—or hurt, or betrayed—when someone lies to you? Do you like it when the person you’re in a committed relationship with has sex with other people? Do you think it’s fine for people to be violent against you? If not, maybe you actually prefer civilization. We agree on that. That makes me hopeful.

In this world, in which we are split and splintering, I’m looking for things we have in common. It just might be that the Judeo-Christian foundation of this country is worth preaching—and by that I mean explaining better, more clearly, including the evidence we experience. Also by our actions. And by telling the actual truth. It may require that we stand up and insist on truth, while we still have the freedom to speak it.

We’re not a country built on geography or tribal heritage. We’re built on the idea that all of us human beings are created equal, with inherent rights—that come from God, not government. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which includes property as well as all the other personal choices in our lives and families. And government’s limited role is solely for the protection of these rights.

You don’t get a country that doesn’t infringe on those rights unless you value these very religious ideas.

As I think about it, the very creation of this country is additional evidence that God exists.

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[i] Linda Gorman, “Is Religion Good for You?” The National Bureau of Economic Research, http://wwwnber.org/digest/oct05/w11377.html

The God-given Rights of Parents

It isn’t possible to repeal a God-given right. It isn’t possible for a government to bestow a God-given right; God already did that. It is possible for tyrannical governments to refuse to respect those rights.

Not all God-given rights are spelled out in the Bill of Rights. That’s why we have the 9^th and 10^th Amendments, pointing out that, whether it’s listed or not, people still have those rights, and only if it’s enumerated does government have powers.

But government, like wildfires, tend to spread and burn things they weren’t intended to burn.

One God-given right, understood everywhere outside Nazi and Communist nations, until very recently is the right of parents to see to the care and upbringing of their children. Serious neglect or abuse can trigger government intervention. But otherwise parents are in charge of the big (and little) decisions about their own children.

If a government is stepping in and usurping the authority of parents, that is tyranny.

Tyranny is happening in England right now. This is a similar story to Charlie Gard exactly a year ago. This time it’s a little boy name Alfie Evans, just coming up on his second birthday. When he was a few months old, he became mysteriously ill and slipped into a coma. Time and again this little child has fought back and survived. Fairly recently a chest infection caused him to need a ventilator.

Alfie Evants
image from here

His parents have been seeking experimental treatment, because it is possible he is suffering from a mitochondrial condition. Italy is offering transportation and treatment, following encouragement from the Pope—and have even granted the boy citizenship. Nevertheless, the UK says no.

It isn’t a matter of cost; if taken out of the UK, the cost to the National Health Service becomes zero more. It has become a matter of control. The doctors have decided the boy should die, and that is final.

They took him off the ventilator and stopped feeding him. He breathed on his own, and at this writing continues to do so. It looked back to be starving a child to death who was breathing on his own, so they quit doing that purposeful murder in favor of a slower wait for death. They placed armed guards around the child to prevent anyone from transporting him. And they refuse to allow the boy to go home with his parents until the parents have a "sea change" in their attitude, meaning they have to come to agree with the doctors that the boy should not have further treatment but should die.

Andrew Klavan spoke on this case today, and I couldn't say it better myself:

It would be hard—I mean, the angriest, backwoods preacher pounding on his Bible could not use language more condemnatory of what’s going on than I would use. I think this is an atrocity. I think it is pitiful that the British, who stood alone against the slaughter of babies in Germany in 1940, and now the only one who’s showing that kind of English spirit is this baby, who stands alone against the people who want to slaughter them now.

Andrew Klavan
screen shot from here

Klavan ended with this:

This is a kind of madness, and it only happens when the state believes that you belong to them. Because parents don’t do this. Remember the state, the court, the judges—they didn’t know this baby’s name before this case came before them. The parents knew the name. And so, the state’s attitude now is basically, this mom could have aborted this child before he was born, but now can’t decide to keep it alive. 

So you’re always going to be on this precipice, because the state never really has—you’re always an expense to the state. You’re always a problem to the state. You’re always taking up space. So your life, it is not sacred. If it’s not precious, if it does not somehow go beyond the natural, then there’s nobody there to protect it. This is a disgrace. And it speaks to the death of a great culture, and a great continent, and it’s just too bad.

When things are this crazy, sometimes parody news is more accurate than it ought to be. The Babylon Bee tells the story this way:

LONDON—Upon the news of a high court ordering life support removed from 2-year-old Alfie Evans, English Prime Minister Theresa May issued a brief, friendly reminder to citizens of the U.K. that the all-powerful state actually owns their children.

In a video circulated online, May informed parents who were “getting a little too attached” to their children that they need to keep in mind that the United Kingdom is the actual legal parent, and the kids are simply on loan to them until the State decides it’s time for them to die.

“Yes, we’re gracious enough to allow your kids to reside with you and for you to make lots of the decisions in their day-to-day lives, but when the rubber meets the road, we just want you to remember that the Almighty State straight-up owns your kids and will do with them as we will,” she said. “We make all the big decisions, and you have pretty much zero say when it comes right down to it. Just keep that in mind and stay in your place.”

The Prime Minister further reminded Britons that they gave up their right to make major decisions for their household when they decided to hand over control of healthcare, social security, education, guns, and free speech to the government.

Too much truth.

If you think that can't happen here in America, where we're free from tyranny, maybe you should review the Justina Pelletier case from 2014. And remember, we learned in the discussion around Obamacare that death panels are always a feature of socialized medicine.

Other "household decisions" include things like how children should be educated, and what they should be taught. In Orange County, California, this means government has decided how, when, and what children should be taught about sexual deviancy in order to inculcate an acceptance and preference for it from a very young age. And parents are being told they do not have the power to have their children opt out.

A memorandum from the Orange County Board of Education says: “Parents who disagree with the instructional materials related to gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation may not excuse their children from this instruction.” In what they seem to think is a generous concession, they will allow parents to tell their kids that they personally disagree with the required curriculum.

The curriculum breaks anti-obscenity laws, yet parents cannot protect their children from it. It is pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, and “encourages children as young as six to question their sexual orientation and gender identity, while teaching them how to use a range of vegetables as sex toys, and promoting anal sex as ‘normal.’” One article provides photos (which I'm not willing to include here), of a teacher demonstrating how to strap on and use sex toys—or vegetables, if toys are unavailable. We have trouble getting kids to learn to write a comprehensible sentence or do basic algebra, but this is a priority?

The Soros-supported curriculum is part of the California Healthy Youth Act of 2015, which includes language protecting parental rights, because “parents and guardians have the ultimate responsibility for imparting values regarding human sexuality to their children.” But Orange County BofE general counsel advises that the law’s opt-out provision “does not apply to instruction, materials, or programming that discusses gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, discrimination, harassment, bullying, intimidation, relationships, or family and does not discuss human reproductive organs.” How they construe these things to not be part of “imparting values regarding human sexuality to children” is a mystery.

No, not really a mystery. It is tyranny.

We talked last summer about a similar curriculum in Washington State (in two parts, starting here). I shouldn't continue to be shocked, but I am.

I know this next statement sounds radical, but get your children out of public schools while you still can. You’ve been indoctrinated to think that you have no other options, because education is so expensive. In the UK, they were convinced they had no other options for healthcare, because healthcare was so expensive.

Letting someone else control the costs means letting someone else control the decisions you should be making. And letting government do what it shouldn’t be doing always means you get less of what you want at a higher and higher cost.

Healthcare is only “free” if you’re willing to “pay” the life of your child, or your elderly parent, or yourself when you become too much of a cost burden to bother with.

Education is only “free” if you’re willing to sacrifice the morals of your children, and possibly affect their psychological well-being and their future family life.

As parents, you have God-given rights. You’d better assert them before they’re completely lost.

Afterward

I want to mention, before the main part of my post, the passing of former First Lady Barbara Bush this past week. She lived here in Houston, and the funeral was here, so we have been especially aware of her life and passing. And the comments are overwhelmingly positive, for good reason.

Barbara Bush
image from CBS News

Funerals at my church tend to be somewhat celebratory, especially when the deceased has lived a good and full life. I watched a recording of Barbara Bush’s funeral and found that it was that kind of event. People told stories—most of them funny, because she had that natural gift—and there were few tears and no regrets. It was lovely. The recording is available on Facebook: here. 

Facebook was filled with collections video clips showing her humor and caring nature. I especially enjoyed a personal note posted by my friend Leah Christie, founder of Not On This Watch, about the time she wouldn’t accept the then-Vice-President’s wife’s check, and how the great Enforcer handled that. Worth the read: here. 

The other story for today is follow-up to Hurricane Harvey. It has been eight months now. If you don’t live around Houston, maybe you’re not aware, but there are still thousands of people not back in their homes—2160 households still in hotels or temporary housing, according to NPR. And there are thousands more back in homes without all the repairs done, still waiting for flooring, drywall, cabinets, painting, etc.

Last month, during spring breaks around the country, youth groups traveled here to put up drywall and anything else they could do. Some were staying the week, living out of the church I go to one night a week for music jams. It’s touching to see that people still care. The need is less evident now than it was last August and September, but it’s still there.

But this week, one house, symbolic for many of us of the eventual return to normal, the Houston Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is ready for our return.

Water at the front door of the Houston Temple
after Hurricane Harvey
image from here

The "lake" in front of the Houston Temple
is actually Champions Forest Drive
photo by Robert Boyd

During the Tax Day Flood of 2016, Cypress Creek, in the Northwest Houston suburb of Spring, flooded the area around the temple. Water came up to the doors of an ancillary building, and it looked like a lake in the front, but the temple—built several feet above ground level—was safe. But there’s a big difference between 15 inches of rain and 60 inches of rain, which we got in Hurricane Harvey. After two steady days of downpour, nearby church members went by kayak to inspect the building, and water was about a foot over the front door level. That meant the interior was flooded.

Oxen in the baptistry
image from the book Gift of Love:
The Houston Texas Temple, p. 88

The baptistry is on that level, and by tradition a baptismal font must be below the ground—to symbolize the death and resurrection of Christ. So there is actually a below ground level in the temple, unusual around here. The whole basement was filled. The twelve Oxen, symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel, along with the font, like a small pool, were submerged. And there was another foot of water on the whole level. There’s a kitchen/break room on that floor, waiting rooms, changing rooms, rest rooms, the entry desk, security, and a first-aid room. As with so many other buildings, that meant removing all the drywall, any non-permanent flooring, all the furniture, art, equipment—just everything. All needed gutting, mucking out, and rebuilding.

It was about two weeks before people could get inside to inspect and start the recovery process, just like so many other people in their homes. Around that time, one of the temple presidency members talked with us. He and his wife, in their 70s, also had their own home flood. So they managed that move-out, muck-out, and recovery at the same time, and also helped other people in similar circumstances. This dear man told us that he knew for a fact that his wife’s faith is so strong, that it could have prevented the flood waters from breaching the temple. But the Lord seemed to be saying, “I know what you’re going through.” And that sharing of our griefs and carrying our sorrows was part of what needed to happen at this time.

So we’ve been waiting anxiously to return to the Lord's house.

Yesterday the building was rededicated in a small, private ceremony, making it a sacred place yet again following the repairs. Today was a training day for workers. My husband and I volunteer one afternoon a week, so we were there for that today. The temple opens for work again tomorrow.

It's good to be back.

Word to those getting ready to attend for the first time since rededication: there’s a new painting just inside the door of the upstairs women’s dressing room, of baby Moses being discovered in the river, that is so beautiful, it was the most memorable thing I noticed. Just, wow!

When a temple is located in a community, that’s a good thing—not just for the people who go there. Good things just happen. Housing prices rise. Good people are attracted to the community, people who help out in the community. Strong families get stronger. There’s a positive influence that emanates out from the temple.

You might say, when God lives in his house in the neighborhood, the whole neighborhood is better off. He’s a good neighbor to have. Having His house restored now, after eight long months, makes many of us feel like the end is in sight for the Harvey hardships.

I hope people continue to pray for those still in the midst of their recovery. If there was any good that came out of the epic flood, it’s that people care about each other. Their love and sacrifice, often for people they don’t even know, is a true sign of civilization. We Houstonians are grateful.

The Alternate Narrative

Andrew Klavan spoke at University of Texas Austin last night, and I listened in online. Klavan is a novelist, of gritty crime stories, and has been a screenwriter in Hollywood, recently authored a book about his conversion to Christianity (The Great Good Thing), and does a podcast for The Daily Wire. He’s been around a while, and spends a lot of time thinking about the culture. In fact, I first got acquainted with him through his “Klavan on the Culture” videos for PJ Media.

Anyway, he was talking about the left’s control of the narrative. He says, in film, “What the left does is they solidify the narrative made in the news in historical films.” And he gives examples, and shows how they skew reality. [Note: I generally avoid the terms left and right, because the Spherical Model has a better way. But, in this piece today I’ll go with his term, which means the statist tyranny perspective, located south and east on the Spherical Model; it's opposite is freedom in the north.]

For example, Klavan told the story of the JFK assassination. Besides the news story itself, there was a front page editorial on day one in the New York Times (which he always refers to as a former newspaper, and in this telling says this was when they were still a newspaper). The editorial tried to claim the assassination wasn’t a crazy communist acting on his own—even the Soviet Union had refused to take him, he was so crazy—because he was afraid President Kennedy was somehow going to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba. The editorial claimed, instead, that it was Republicans who were afraid Kennedy would pull out of the Vietnam War.

I’d need to see the editorial, because I was too young then to know much, but I’m aware that the US didn’t get involved in the Vietnam War until Lyndon B. Johnson was president—and we were in it until Nixon pulled us out. Then, after winning all the battles and agreements, it was a Democrat Congress that gave away the peace. Anyway, not his point. His point was that the editorial started the conspiracy theory that was debunked repeatedly, including in court. But it lives on, because in the 90s Oliver Stone made a movie depicting the conspiracy as if it were the truth. So that is what people who don’t remember history actual think is true.

Another example was Argo, about the cruise ship full of people taken hostage by Iranian terrorists. President Jimmy Carter was ineffectual and disastrous in that event. The hostages were held for something like 444 days—released on the inauguration day of President Ronald Reagan. But the movie, while it depicts Carter only briefly, lionizes him as heroic. So people who didn’t happen to be aware of what was happening in the late 1970s think that might be the true story.

Klavan talks about the demise of his career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

One of the reasons my Hollywood career got nailed was during the War on Terror—one film after another—one film after another was made saying that our soldiers were rapists, our soldiers were killers. That was The Valley of Elah. Remember, he comes home and he’s so upset by having been in Iraq that he starts killing people. They were fools. Lions for Lambs, with Tom Cruise; that was where these Republicans wanted a war to manipulate the press, and so they sent these poor, foolish, patriotic clowns off to war and they got killed.

One movie after another. And I started to protest; I started to write pieces about it, because, I didn’t care whether they were for or against the war, but I thought it was wrong to make anti-war propaganda while the soldiers were in the field. That had never happened before. So I started writing about it, and, of course, it was hard to get a job after that, but it was worthwhile.

So, they’re making one picture like this after another. Every one of them bombed. Every one of them bombed. And so, Variety, which is our trade paper, the show business trade paper, started to write pieces saying, “People just don’t want to see movies about the War on Terror.” I mean, that’s how wrapped up in their narrative they are. People don’t want to see movies about the War on Terror.

And then Clint Eastwood made American Sniper, and it became one of the biggest grossing R-rated films in history. And they said, “That’s strange.” You know, “Why did people go to this picture?” Well, it’s because American soldiers weren’t portrayed as rapists and killers and madmen when, in fact, our enemy were the bad guys. You can be against the war, but we weren’t the bad guys. Maybe we shouldn’t have been there, but we weren’t the bad guys. That’s all that American Sniper showed, and people showed up for it in droves.

Why is this important? He illustrates with a quote by Joseph Wilson, who had, back in the day, declared that President Bush had lied, even though he hadn’t; Bush had used the same intelligence as everyone else, including our allies in Britain and elsewhere. Wilson was married to Valarie Plame, whom he frequently introduced as his CIA agent wife. She wasn’t covert. But it became an issue, because the left wanted an issue, and eventually Scooter Libby was entrapped (remembered a detail in the wrong order when talking with the FBI about something they already knew the answer to, and that was not related to a crime to interfere with an investigation of), and he was convicted, and President Trump just recently pardoned him.

Anyway, there was a movie made about the incident called Fair Game, which pretty much no one saw, in which Valarie Plame is turned into a CIA hero, with an evil Dick Cheney and George W. Bush conspiring against her.

So, that Joseph Wilson said, “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.”

Klavan follows with this:

Life is short; art is long. Art lasts forever. Movies will be out there forever. You, one night, at 3:00 in the morning, will be channel surfing, and you will see JFK on TV, and if you don’t know any better, that’s what you think the story is going to be. They own the narrative.

He ends the talk portion of the night with this:

There is another narrative. It’s our narrative, which is the narrative of the truth. You know, I’m not one of these guys that believes that facts are everything. I think the internal world is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The jaguar would not be swift unless we had the word swift in our mind. It doesn’t know what it is; only we know. You know, the inner world matters. But you’ve got to align it with the real world. That’s what stories are for.

And the fact that the right doesn’t know how to tell stories, and the fact that it doesn’t care, and the fact that it doesn’t pay attention to the arts except to complain about them and censor them, is a problem for me.

So, I’ll just leave you with this: the truth will set you free, but you’ve got to know how to tell it. You’ve got to know how to tell the story.

Later, during the Q&A, Klavan talks a little bit about what we, with this alternate narrative of truth, can do. He says we have the upper hand on comedy. That’s why Jimmy Kimmel goes on TV and cries every night. Life isn’t funny to them. They’re angry, pretty much by definition. And cynical. They do biting comedy, but it doesn’t feel good, even to people who agree with them. It’s ugly and tears people down. And for people who like to think of themselves as the good guys rescuing the world from evil, tearing people down has got to wear thin after a while.

He thinks, and I agree, that we can’t just do our thing, badly (like so many Christian attempts at art), and expect to win the culture. We need our own institutions. Our own awards. Our own production companies. And we need to produce things that tell the truth, and tell it well.

He suggests as examples of moral stories told well Crime and Punishment, and even The Godfather. Sometimes you end up portraying ugly things, but you gain insight from that.

Back in literature classes, that was how we looked at tragedy, Shakespearean tragedies, for example. Bad things happen. They’re upsetting. But there’s an enlightenment you get from looking at the way things play out when people choose to do bad things.

When he was talking about getting our own institutions, I was reminded of some other media issues lately. For example, Facebook. It is indeed controlled by people with leftist ideologies. Same with Google, YouTube, and Twitter.

Those are all supposed to be open platforms, an equal playing field for various ideas. We all agree that they shouldn’t be used to incite violence, allow for human trafficking, fraud, theft, or other crimes that are also crimes outside the digital world. But they shouldn’t be “protecting” people from disagreeing ideas. PragerU videos are not a danger. Seriously.

So, the better answer would be to come up with an actual open platform, available to everyone, as an alternative.

That’s not an easy thing. As long as Facebook is there, and that’s where I get a lot of social interaction that I appreciate, I’ll probably be there. But if somebody does come up with an alternative, I’d be willing to try that as well. And then, if the alternative becomes sufficient for my needs, I’d be willing to jump ship.

So, to those daring entrepreneurs, inventors, artists, and world changers, if you’re a seeker of truth, as I am, I’m wishing you the best of luck, and all the support I can manage to give if you can make a way for us to get the alternate narrative—the truth—out there.