Category: Demographics

Becoming Magnetic

Rod Dreher, with the excuse of a David Brooks column to frame the question, returns to one of his perennial Front Porchy type themes: the importance of place. I didn’t read it initially, probably because of the uninspired title: The Geographical Aristocracy Of Meritocracy.

The basic question is “why do young people flee their hometowns, and why do the educated elite among them congregate in a just a few magnet places?” If you immediately answer “Well, duh! Their hometowns are boring while San Francisco is exciting,” then you’re part of (what I think is) a problem. Why should people want excitement above anything else?

Richard Florida has made a career of valorizing of this phenomenon, and telling places in flyover country how they, too, can become magnetic. I’ve always taken him with a grain of salt, not because I doubt that certain creative things may multiply exponentially when a bunch of highly-educated and energetic people cluster in a place, but because

  • I’m cursed with an awareness that exponentially multiplying certain creative things may not be the only thing, or even in the top ten most important things, we should want to do.
  • It has the whiff of opportunism about it: find some troubling thing that’s happening and the people who profit from it may be willing to pay big bucks for you to explain why it’s really wonderful and only a fuddy-duddy could disagree.

Dreher offers an alternate good, that of roots, fully aware of the complications of realizing it in many cases. 

In ages past, the smart kid from a small town may have returned to his hometown and opened a business, or a law or medical practice, and so on. He would have put his talents to use building up his community, not as an act of charity, but because it wouldn’t have occurred to him to do anything but that — or if it had, there were powerful cultural forces pushing against it …

The point here, though, is that nobody these days feels an obligation to anything larger than their own ambition and desire — and that has real-world consequences for places you can find on the map. We are all implicated in this. If you are living in one of these towns, and you are raising your kids with the expectation that they will leave, and should want to leave for the sake of their career, you’re implicated in it too.

On a personal note, I don’t know if I’d have ended up back in my hometown had I not become concerned about whether greening america in the mountains of Arizona was a good long-term plan for a man who wanted a family, and thus decided to return to school to become an attorney, at which profession I’d shown some aptitude and knew reasonably well from having grown up in an attorney’s home. Having done that, and joined my father’s law firm, I’ve probably made significantly more money as an attorney because my hometown’s economic devolopment mucky-mucks have paid guys like Richard Florida, including the guru himself, to come give us some larnin’ on how to be more magnetic.

As a consequence (or maybe just coincidentally, driven by a the presence of a prominent Big Ten-or-however-many-it’s-up-to-now University) we have a downtown that’s relatively teeming with college-age and young adults, a lively arts scene for a city our size, and other features that make it a pretty exciting and remunerative place to live. A single cineplex where a drive-in theater used to be has more movie screens than all surrounding counties combined.  Our Big-Box Stores have replaced all the boring little mom-and-pop shops for those hick counties, too. Our legislators work together effectively across party lines in the state capital. And we’re the envy, along with Bloomington and Indianapolis, of the rest of the state, which I’m told calls us “the Golden Triangle.”

In other words, we’ve won the meritocratic geographic lottery and become aristocratic. Ain’t life great?! C’mon up and over, Indiana. To hell with your boring little hometowns!

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Corporate Freedom of Religion?

I’ve been doing quite a bit of Tweeting and Facebook posting, as well as a couple of blogs (here and here), on various business challenges to the “employer contraceptive mandate” of the PPACA, a/k/a Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare.” I’ve been doing so because of important – and vexing – questions of religious freedom.

I’ve been a bit of a religious freedom head case all my adult life. Forty years ago or more I was reading the Seventh Day Adventists’ “Liberty” Magazine and writing letters to its editor. That was before my delayed law school entrance at age 30. (By the time I got my B.S., I’d been in school away from home, living in dorms or boarding houses, for nine years. I was ready to move on to “life.”)

In law school, I took a special religion clause elective class in Summer School, being edged out for the “A star” (the top A) by my friend Joe Rebone.

I take free exercise of religion very seriously, coming about as close to an absolutist position as one can coherently come without countenancing anarchy. I’m not a relativist – I’m a firm believer in capital-O Orthodox Christianity – but I give wide latitude to people’s right to be wrong, expecting in return that they’ll not try to harm me for calling them Krustians, Happy Clappies, Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, Gnostics, Dualists, Nominalists and other loathsome or risible things.

But even I pause at the idea that corporations and LLCs have a right to freely exercise religion — which comes into play when a smaller, or closely-held, business entity objects to buying contraceptive coverage for its employees on religious grounds. That’s the “vexing” part of these cases, and courts have split.

Personally and politically, I think the contraceptive mandate is sheer political pandering and a gratuitous insult to the kinds of folks who would almost certainly not vote for Obama.

First, it’s not insurance. It’s pre-payment of predictable “medical” expenses. But to talk much about that opens a can of worms because that’s exactly what “traditional” employer-provided health insurance has been since World War II. (For more on that topic, check this podcast.)

Second, to put it bluntly, young single women and single moms are disproportionately Democrat, compared to married women with children, who trend Republican. And the “Pro Choice” lobby is overwhelmingly Democrat, and loves slipping a wedge into the door, to be pounded on later to open it further. I don’t know how consciously the pandering to them figured in the initial passage of ACA, but the Julias of this world, dependent on government at all stages of life including their choice to have children out of wedlock, became a conscious target in the re-election campaign.

But legally, that doesn’t get us very far. Bad policy and political pandering isn’t necessarily unconstitutional.  Elections matter.

Nevertheless, a program like this that’s generally “constitutional albeit stupid and odious” (I just made up that category) might be unconstitutional as applied to particular employers. Howard Friedman, author of the Religion Clause blog, recently stepped out of his role as neutral chronicler to do some substantive commentary on the topic for Religion Dispatches:

Can business owners assert that their free exercise is being burdened when the coverage mandate is imposed not on them, but on their business? Does the for-profit corporation or LLC have religious beliefs of its own? Does General Motors practice religion? If not, do smaller corporations exercise religion? Or are the small businesses really asserting the religious rights of their owners?

It might seem strange to claim that a corporation (or an LLC) has religious freedom rights separate from those of the “real people” who own or manage it. An Oklahoma federal district court, rejecting a challenge by Hobby Lobby Stores to the coverage mandate, thought it was, finding:

General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion. They do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously-motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors. Religious exercise is, by its nature, one of those “purely personal” matters… which is not the province of a general business corporation.

Hobby Lobby appealed, but the 10th Circuit Court refused to enjoin enforcement while the appeal is pending. So did Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Neither resolved the question of whether the business entity itself has religious rights.

However, in other ways, corporations often do have constitutional rights. A corporation cannot be convicted of a criminal offense without the protections given by the Constitution to criminal defendants. And in the famous 2010 Citizens United case, the Supreme Court held that corporations have the same First Amendment rights of political speech that “real people” do. If the First Amendment has been interpreted to guarantee a corporation’s free speech rights, does it also have free religious exercise rights guaranteed by the same Amendment?

…

This idea—that a corporation and its owners should be treated as the same person—is a well-known concept in corporate law, commonly referred to it as “piercing the corporate veil.” Most of the time, lawyers warn their corporate clients to do everything possible to avoid this “piercing,” since the doctrine is usually invoked when creditors of a business are making claims against the personal assets of a company’s shareholders, seeking to recoup their losses from an insolvent business by going after its owners. There is a vast amount of case law on when a court should allow “piercing the corporate veil” to reach shareholders’ personal assets, often focusing on abuse of the corporate form, misleading of creditors, or lack of corporate formalities. Business lawyers look to whether the corporation is the mere alter egoof its owners and routinely advise their corporate clients to emphasize the corporation’s separate existence from its owners.

However, the pleadings filed in many of the contraceptive mandate challenges purposely blur this line, collapsing the beliefs of the business with its owners, inviting “piercing.” As the district court concluded in a challenge brought by Tyndale House, a for-profit publisher of Bibles and Christian books:

when the beliefs of a closely-held corporation and its owners are inseparable, the corporation should be deemed the alter-ego of its owners for religious purposes.

Courts that have allowed businesses to assert the religious exercise rights of their owners have rarely, if ever, referred to the “piercing” cases brought by corporate creditors against business owners. This omission hides the unintended consequences that may be in store for small business owners who identify too closely with their business firms. These owners may be unaware of the new personal liability for business debts—including liabilities to the government—that they are risking by equating themselves with their business for purposes of religious expression. They may be inadvertently inviting the government to hold them to their word—that they and the business are one—when it comes to other matters as well.

I have become uncomfortable with the idea of corporations insofar as they are used to insulate owners from the consequences of reckless, high risk and speculative ventures whereby the owners hoped to “make a killing.” Any time a corporation goes broke, it saddles its creditors with the loss (unless it’s Too Big to Fail, in which case it saddles all of us with the loss, as its executives laugh all the way to the bank). I know one roofer wiped out by the bankruptcy of a large department store chain after he replaced one of their roofs on his own nickel, for instance. If he was smart, and he too was incorporated, he may have saddled his own creditors in turn.

This is exactly what corporations and limited liability companies are supposed to do in the case of honest failure. But after the last few years, “honest failures” barely are visible in the thicket of moral hazard.

Yet some pious business people have chosen to do business in those liability-limiting forms. Their seeking both to limit liability while claiming that the business entity is really them for purposes of free exercise of religion is both dubious (whence numerous losses as well as wins so far on contraceptive mandate challenges) and dangerous if successful, as Professor Friedman outlines.

If you’re even a bit of a religious freedom head case, stay tuned. This probably is going to some interesting and unanticipated places.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Deer Hunting with Jesus

I learn a lot of things from a lot of places, especially from listening to people I formerly blew off.

A book with a title like Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War was kind of irresistible to someone – well, actually, it was my wife – who for some reason – well, actually, it’s because it was on my wish list – gave it to me for Christmas.

All things considered, I suppose it wasn’t too bad. At least I’ve now gotten a flavor of what’s meant by “Gonzo Journalism.”

Joe Bageant is, I guess, a gonzo journalist. He grew up in Winchester, Virginia – unless that’s one of many facts he made up on the fly – and returned to live there after some decades away:

A raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor-and why they hate liberalism.

Deer Hunting with Jesus is web columnist Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, which-like countless American small towns-is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.”

(From the book’s own description)

“Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man’s life in God’s own backwoods.”
—Jeffrey St. Clair, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch

I think “white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose” is a euphemism for “reckless advocacy, indifferent to factual accuracy.”

“Dead serious and damn funny…Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder…Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level. “
—Mother Jones

“Informative, infuriating, terrifying, scintillating … Imagine a cross between Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Hunter S. Thompson’s booze-and-dope-fueled meditations on Nixon’s political potency, and C. Wright Mills’s understanding of the durability of the power elite.”
—The American Prospect

What’s the Matter With Kansas, from what I hear, was a full-length “how effing stupid are these people!?” But I heard it from conservatives, who Thomas Frank thinks are the beneficiaries of Kansans’ effing stupidity. So maybe I was misinformed.

I’ve accused Bageant of factual inaccuracies, and I owe specifics, I think.

1. First, he says (Chapter 5, page 180 in mine) his parents met “at a Billy Graham tent revival during the Second World War.” I didn’t, and still don’t, think that Graham was doing tent revivals then, but he’s a couple of years older than I thought, and there’s some smallish chance, from his abbreviated biography at Wikipedia for instance, that he did tent revivals as part of his “other preaching engagements” during college. But I’d be willing to bet a modest amount that it was a tent revival by someone other than Billy Graham, or that it was later than World War II.

2. He riffs in the same chapter (page 186) on the “blood” motif in fundamentalist Protestantism, concluding with a quote from an English Professor:

There is a big leap from the liberation of Exodus, when Jews sprinkled blood on their doorposts, to the salvation proposed by Christians, in which blood is drunk by the community of faith. The Christian community not only lives after death by the blood of their Christ; but they feed on it in life. What can this mean, to drink blood?

Well, to a fundamentalist Protestant, “to drink blood” means precisely nothing. It’s pure symbolism. They reckon they’re supposed to have a communion service now and again to recollect Good Friday. The 6th Chapter of the Gospel According to John, where Christ says repeatedly, even to the point of driving away some of His disciples, that we must eat His body and drink His blood if we want life in us, is maybe the only Chapter in the Bible that they resolutely refuse to read literally (even in the loose sense of “literal” that’s pandemic these days). They have elaborate tapdances around that chapter, but basically they reject it because it sounds too damned Catholic.

Bageant was grasping for bloody imagery, grabbed the first faux scholarly blood quote he could find, and in the process confounded a sacrament in historic Christianity with the lurid locutions of Fundamentalism. Even he should know better than that.

3. In Chapter 7 (page 243),  Bageant writes about Medicare when he clearly means Medicaid. I know enough about both that I’d bet you any amount he’s wrong.

Still, the arc of Bageant’s story is credible. Despite the Medicare whopper, for instance, he “shreds through the lies of our times [about “nonprofit” hospitals] like a weed-whacker in overdrive,” in his chapter An Authorized Place to Die. I just wouldn’t rely on him for any little details, such as “and” and “the.” Read him like a good ole’ boy competing in a Whopper-Telling Contest.

Reading his chapter on guns (Valley of the Gun) was especially timely as the press and Hollywood goad us to “demand a plan” for gun control (i.e., “we must do something, even if it’s oppressive and counterproductive, about evil guns, not about an evil entertainment industry that feeds the imaginations of the unhinged with revenge and other gratuitously violent movies and video games.”):

In 1960 common sense was equally distributed between liberals and conservatives. In those days, even liberal personages such as Democratic senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey said repeatedly that guns had a place in the home because history has shown that governments, even the best of them, have a habit of oppressing people who cannot defend themselves at their own front doors. Imagine any Democrat saying that aloud today.

(Page 132.)

Now that most states have passed laws allowing honest citizens to carry concealed weapons, gun advocates are being proven more right than they ever hoped to be. Joy of joys, it is women – in fact, poor urban women – and the poor in general who benefit most from concealed carry laws. It doesn’t get any better than that when it comes to serving up cold crow to Democratic gun controllers. Large declines in rapes and attacks on women have occurred wherever the laws have been enacted. A study by John R Lott Jr., author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, found that the urban poor and minorities lived more safely with guns in their pockets or purses: “Not only do urban areas tend to gain in their fight against crime, but reductions in crime rates are greatest precisely in those urban areas that have the highest crime rates, largest and most dense populations, and greatest concentrations of minorities.” …
Most liberal anti-gun advocates do not get off the city bus after working the second shift. Nor do they duck and dodge from streetlight to streetlight at 1 AM while dragging their laundry to the doozy duds, where they sit, usually alone, for an hour or so, fluorescently lit up behind the big plate glass window like so much fresh meat on display, garnished with a promising purse or wallet, before they make the corner-to-corner run for home with their now-fragrant laundered waitress or fast-food uniforms. Barack Obama never did it. Hillary Clinton never did it. Most of white middle-class America doesn’t do it either. The on-the-ground value of the second amendment completely escapes them.

(Pages 146-147.)

And he chronicles many other such blows as well, including “economic conscription.” The poor Scots Irish of places like Winchester make up a disproportionate share of our cannon fodder, by economic necessity. The Democrats are little or no better than the Republicans on feeding them to the coffins in our wars of choice.

Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead-end jobs like the one Lynndie had held at the chicken processing plant, though many deny it or did not even see it in their quick and ready patriotism in useful blindness to the larger national scheme of things. These so-called volunteers are part of the nation’s defense code draft – economic conscription. Money is always the best whip to use on the laboring classes. 1300 a month, a signing bonus, and free room and board sure beats the hell out of yanking guts through a chicken’s ass.

(Page 200.)

Other select quotes:

When our town’s educators decided to hold a conference on the future employment needs of our youth, the keynote speaker was the CEO of a local rendering plant, Valley Protein, a vast stinking facility that cooks down roadkill and renders deep fryer fats into the goop they put in animal feed. He got a standing ovation from the school board and all the Main Street pickle vendors, and not a soul in that Best Western events room thought it was ironic. (Page 29.)

Even if we are one house payment away from homelessness, even if our kids can’t read and our asses are getting so big they have their own ZIP Codes, it’s comforting to know we are at least the best place on earth. There is America, and there is the rest of the world – envious and plotting to bring us down and “steal our freedom.” (Page 83.)

The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and mall and eating fried chicken. (Page 110.)

It has been an orgy so glorious and unholy, so mindless that we have now eaten our seed crop in our spiraling consumerism. (Page 112.)

Independent fundamentalist churches are theologically woolly places whose belief systems can accommodate just about any interpretation of the Good Book that a “Preacher Bob” or a “Pastor Donnie” can come up with. (Page 162.)

After a night of political discussion at Royal Lunch, a British relative, a distant continental member of the Bageant clan, called our gang of locals “the most intellectually squalid people I’ve ever met” – and he had chewed qat with Ugandan strongman Idi Amin’s bodyguards. (Page 206-07.)

We live in an age of corporate dominion just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings, and warlords. (Page 262.)

If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably and often exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in prison unless you try to open the door. (Page 263.)

I guess I’d give it four stars for the story arc, but I can’t give five stars or unequivocal endorsement to a book so riddled with unsettling errors.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Evangelicals & Contraception

[I’ve encountered a few things worth digging into a bit, and have been left with too little time for collections. I’ve not foresworn them, though.]

The Spring 2012 Human Life Review opens with 21st-Century Evangelicals Revisit Contraception and Abortion.

You need to realize that the Review is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. That’s just a fact. The Founder was Catholic, his Catholic family carries on the work, most contributors are Catholic (the regulars on the masthead are 4 Catholics, 1 Orthodox, 1 Episcopalian, and 1 Jewish atheist) – and frankly, almost all of the really rigorous prolife thought has been Catholic during my lifetime at least. Thank God for them.

Add that Evangelicalism is decentralized in the extreme, and changes, chameleon-like, to remain “relevant” and I was skeptical that the piece could say much. But it’s one of the great marketing coups of our time that Evangelicals think they’re united, and have largely succeeded in getting people to identify their peculiar sensibility as “Christianity” rather than as a subset or sect. And since there are a lot of folks with that sensibility, if you want a political movement, it will generally be good to enlist them.

I was right about the article not measuring up:

While the evidence is largely anecdotal, there appears to have been an increase over the past two decades in the number of Evangelicals who are reconsidering their support of contraception as they seek to develop a more consistent pro-life witness.

“Anecdotal” is a near necessity, I suppose, as it would be hard to do a study of Evangelicals that wasn’t methodologically dubious.

But the article did pull up some interesting history, parts of which have delighted the “progressives” who aren’t religiously illiterate (think Slacktivist, for instance). I’m going to summarize, with my own personal observations italicized):

  • The Reformers joined Rome (as far back as Augustine, pre-schism but proto-western in his thought) in their condemnation of Onanism – which is about the best one can do at gauging what their view of contraception would have been.
  • Evangelicals (at least as the author views them – consider that caveat as applying to each subsequent occurrence of the term and its cognates) were among the earliest and fiercest opponents of birth control in the late 19th Century. This came as news to me.
  • Anthony Comstock was Evangelical, not Catholic. This, too, came as news to me.
  • Opposition to birth control was generally seen as a reformist and heroic cause.
  • After Comstock’s death, his nemesis Margaret Sanger became ascendant, and the Episcopalians broke millennia of Christian tradition in 1930 by a timid endorsement of contraception for those who can’t remain abstinent, so long as they adhere to Christian principles – principles that the endorsement itself was ambiguating. Soon, “most Protestant groups came to accept the use of modern contraceptives as a matter of Biblically allowable freedom of conscience” (Wikipedia).
  • After World War II, worries about overpopulation became pandemic.
  • By 1950, arch-fundamentalist Dr. Bob Jones Sr., of Bob Jones University, was demanding that newlywed aspiring dorm parents promise to practice birth control if they got the position.
  • By 1973, many Evangelicals viewed Roe v. Wade as a blow for religious liberty. The Southern Baptist Convention was particularly equivocal. (I was then unequivocally Evangelical, and was vaguely uneasy about pro-abortion clergy – none of them Evangelical, in my experience – playing Harriet Tubman to “enslaved” pregnant women. But I was not activated until 1980.)
  • Beginning in late 1979 or so, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop enlisted Evangelicals in the anti-abortion cause with their film and book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? I was one of those enlisted.
  • Evangelicals, however, were still very friendly to contraception.
  • By hanging out with Catholic pro-lifers, some Evangelicals anecdotally are reconsidering contraception, and one of the niche Evangelical markets is “the Quiverfull movement.” But the leaders he cites in support (all three listed here, with a fourth) are generally fringe figures in Evangelicalism – serious Calvinists, in my experience, aren’t entirely certain whether they remain “Evangelical.” 

I have always, since my earliest days of enlistment in the pro-life cause, thought the Bible case against abortion, if all we had was Bible, was one that Evangelicals would never buy if an argument of equal strength told them to do something they found uncongenial. But then, with Bible only, I doubt that Evangelicals would believe in the Holy Trinity or have a remotely correct Christology. They owe a very large unacknowledged debt to the Church that preceded them, and that they typically think is quite corrupt and paganized. Sigh.

But the Church has always opposed abortion, and I’ve come to appreciate the strength of theological arguments (in addition to things I learned in biology class) that are not narrowly Biblical.

In theory, at least, Evangelicals don’t like theological arguments of that sort, so I don’t know how much staying power their renewed opposition to contraception and abortion will show.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.