Did We Do That?

Among the atrocities that Frances and Dan Keller were supposed to have committed while running a day care center out of their Texas home: drowning and dismembering babies in front of the children; killing dogs and cats in front of the children; transporting the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army; dressing as pumpkins and shooting children in the arms and legs; putting the children into a pool with sharks that ate babies; putting blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; cutting the arm or a finger off a gorilla at a local park; and exhuming bodies at a cemetery, forcing children to carry the bones.
Linda Rodriguez McRobbie "The Real Victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse"

Wow. How did I ever manage to forget about the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare of the 80s and 90s? I think, had you asked me about it last week, I would have suspected you were pulling my leg. But reading the Slate article about the Kellers reminded me of all of the bizarro-world craziness that seems to have gripped the entire nation. For most of the hysteria, I was in high school and college - too young to be a parent with a child targeted by Satanists, and too old to be a target myself. So it was all just something strange to watch unfold on television news. By the time that it really got rolling, I likely found the whole thing to be ridiculous; it was my skepticism around the existence of Satan (more so than my lack of sincere faith in God) that had driven me to stop paying lip service to my nominal Roman Catholicism. A religious comic book in which a mixed-race group of born-again Christians battled Satanists (who had a penchant for the human sacrifice of svelte hitchhikers), which a cousin had given me, was kept around main for comedy value. (Considering how often the story's Satanists wore their black robes, it was remarkable that no-one else ever seemed to notice them.) So, to me, of course the accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse were bunk. (But I'll admit to the flaw in my logic. If hundreds if millions of people could go to church every week and worship a deity I was pretty sure was fictional, it should have made logical sense that their could also be a church for the devil, as well, regardless of my conviction that it, too, was a fiction. And there is, or was, a real Church of Satan out there.)

But I think that a lot of us had forgotten about the SRA scare. In hindsight, it seems to be a bizarre and superstitious episode for the late 20th century. Hadn't we gotten past literal witch hunts back in the 1600s? (Or whenever it was.) After all, I knew a handful of people who styled themselves as modern-day Wiccans, and everyone thought that they were merely (very) eccentric, rather than dangerous. They seemed to be fairly open to talking about their supposed "powers," and were even willing to give demonstrations - not that they were particularly convincing (but a couple had been interesting).

I wonder if we always forget about moral panics, or any other type of scare, as time moves on, and new anxieties push their way to the forefront. Maybe it's just the nature of hysteria that while it seems to be the only important thing in the world while it's happening, once it's over, it simply fades away. But, of course, as Ms. McRobbie's article points out, there are lasting consequences to these things, and forgetfulness doesn't change that.

One Thousand, Two Hundred

1,200 posts. It feels like a different number, but strangely, I couldn't tell you what it was, or even if it were higher or lower. Having done this now for a little over seven years, I don't know that it's done for me what I intended it to. I still don't feel like a competent writer or particularly adept at getting my thoughts together quickly. But still I chug away at it. I'm not sure I understand why. When I started, it felt like an attempt to build discipline. Then it took on the character of maintaining a new habit, and not letting it fall by the wayside. Now, it sort of feels like OCD. (In the snarky, non-clinical way that us laypeople in the public use the term, anyway.) It's morphed into a part of me, rather than simply a form of expression.

As a very rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation, I've maybe typed somewhere in the vicinity of half a million words into this thing over the years. And released them out into the ether to an unknown fate. In a way, weblogging isn't my cup of tea, because I'm a better responsive writer than an expressive one. (I suppose this is why so many of my posts are responses to things that I've read.) But, having started this, I don't know what finishes it. Perhaps 2,400 will give me more insight into that.

With This Shotgun...

[James] Taranto [of the Wall Street Journal] then builds on their [George Akerlof and Janet Yellen's] assumption that men are marriage-reluctant by arguing that women are also marriage-reluctant. Indeed, he paints a picture of men and women as natural enemies who can only be brought together under duress, specifically women's duress, which makes women desperate enough to manipulate men into unhappy marriages through sex and guilt trips.
Amanda Marcotte "WSJ Writer Blames the Rise of 'Fatherless' Children on Women"

I remember having discussions about this topic back in my twenties, and was always surprised by the argument that marriages were often miserable was no reason to remain single, given that it made perfectly good sense to me. To a degree, I think that it was something that grew up at the intersection of the ideas that marriage was as once permanent and a duty. If, once you married someone, you were stuck with that person for life, it paid to be very careful about going into it - and if that caution meant that someone never married, so be it. But rather than argue that the stereotype of the unhappy couple trapped in a marriage that neither one wanted was different from most people's actual experience with marriage, the common response to this was that circumstances should be altered so that the need to marry simply overwhelmed any impulse to be cautious.

There has always been a certain low-level hysteria surrounding the rate at which people married. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, the fact that no-one in my social circle had tied the knot was a constant source of consternation to some of the older people that we knew, who were certain that we were the vanguard of a new wave of unwed libertines who would gleefully sleep around instead of treating our sexuality as the exclusive property of some future spouse. And if walking down the aisle meant being an unhappy spouse rather than a happy single, that was simply the price to be paid to avoid a Post-Marriage World. Which, of course, never arrived. The rate of eventual marriage still hums along at about 9 out of 10 people, and single are still regarded as somewhat odd.

Of course, the squeaky wheels are the ones that get the grease, and to the degree that marriage boosters see single people everywhere they turn, each new generation of them is going to be just as convinced as the last that Something's Terribly Wrong. And this will push them to see to stem the tide, even when the tide is simply minding its own business.

Does Not Compute

"Utah officials wants an emergency stay so that county clerks in the conservative and predominately Mormon state can refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples," NPR's Howard Berkes reports for our Newscast unit. "The state argues that children generally fare best when raised by heterosexual parents."
Couples Urge Sotomayor To Deny Utah's Bid To Block Gay Marriage

Okay. Let's stipulate (despite the fact that many people dispute this) that children do, in fact, do better with heterosexual parents. In that case, I have one question. Who cares?

The idea that same-sex relationships should be impeded because children will do better with a pair of opposite-sex parents seems to be predicated on the idea that children who would have same-sex parents would instead have opposite-sex parents. What rational basis is there for that assumption?

There doesn't seem to be a means by which blocking same-sex couples from marrying results directly in the children that would live with those couples winding up in heterosexual households. If the same-sex couple goes ahead and has a child or adopts, you wind up with a child being raised (from a legal perspective, anyway) by a single parent. If they would have had a biological child, by whatever means, but then decide not to do so, there is simply no child at all. If they would have adopted a child, but don't, the child stays in the system. And, as a veteran of the child-welfare system, I can say without much fear of contradiction that there isn't a viable amount of competition between homosexual and heterosexual couples for children - it's not like a child that isn't adopted by a same-sex couple has an opposite-sex couple just waiting to take them in.

So why make the comparison between how children fare in homosexual versus heterosexual homes, instead of between homosexual homes and foster care or institutions? Personally, this smacks of anti-homosexual prejudice more than anything else. Having worked with children in both foster care and institutions, I'm pretty sure that a stable family environment is nearly always the better option (there are, however, some youth that just can't make it in less restrictive settings - but they are unlikely to ever be adopted or fostered out in any event) - which may explain why no-one ever makes the comparison. But the current, disingenuous argument seems so openly flawed that I'm impressed that it's trotted out so often. One would think that most courts that weren't already predisposed to agree with the logic would simply disregard it up front.

Of course, I failed Omniscience 101 pretty badly the last time I took it, so the fact that I can't see how you ensure that children wind up with heterosexual parents through the simple expedient of preventing same-sex marriages doesn't mean that it can't be done. But if there IS a way for this to work, I'd like someone to explain it to me, because I've never come across an explanation. Accordingly, I'm inclined to think "that children generally fare best when raised by heterosexual parents," is really just a way of dressing up prejudice in the threadbare cloak of concern for children. (I've already pontificated on how we don't normally, even in reactionary states, privilege the supposed "rights" of children above the freedoms of adults to decide who they will or will not share their lives with, so I won't bore you with that again.) Or, perhaps more charitably, people are simply grasping at straws in the quest for legal standing for their attempts to tell everyone how they should live.

In any event, the choice presented is a false one, whether or not the research is sound. And that makes using it look bad, regardless of the reason.

Fear For The Children

Maybe the lesson here is that Kinder Surprise eggs should be cleared for import.

Both of those children are much more likely to die in a swimming pool than by gunshot. And given the way gun deaths in the United States usually work, if the little girl pulls the trigger, the person she is most likely to shoot is herself. (Note, however, that gunshots are a rare suicide method for women, and rifles aren't normally the weapon of choice for anyone.)

Both the Second Amendment and gun-control types tend to engage in over-the-top fear-mongering, each of them seeking to have us believe that there's a dangerous psychopath around every corner - who either needs killing by "a good guy with a gun" or who would suddenly become a productive member of society if only scary-looking weapons (and a lot of the former Assault Weapons Ban was based on appearance, rather than function) were somehow kept out of the hands of people who tend to treat them like Erector sets (or, as gun collectors themselves tend to put it, Barbie dolls).

The American obsession with safety theater is going overboard. The simple fact of the matter is that banning "assault weapons" (a technical term often misused for the scare factor) wouldn't make a dent in gun deaths in the United States - they're not often used in either street crimes or suicides. This ad is all about ginning up fear of the vanishingly rare occurrence of mass shootings - and the even more rare occurrence of one in a school.

And notice how neither of the children in this ad is of the ethnicity most likely to be subject to homicide by firearm - African-American. Inner city children are dying at an alarming rate. The Assault Weapons Ban, when it was in place, didn't make a dent in that. If it is reinstated, suburban parents might rest a little easier; but the hobgoblin slain will be a mostly imaginary one.

The impulse to attempt to reduce the incidence violence by seeking to remove the tools of violence is an understandable one, but misguided. If the War on Drugs has taught us anything, it's that you can't simply ban your way out of people doing harmful things to themselves or others with inanimate objects. None of this is to say that our world wouldn't be a safer place if there weren't firearms around. Guns are dangerous even when people aren't intending to use them as weapons. But the American penchant for gun violence - which is rather low, in the grand scheme of things - isn't a function of the number or type of guns available to the average citizen. It's a function of a society in which, for many people, violence is an acceptable means of getting what they want (or, perhaps more importantly, feel they need). Banning scary weapons won't help that any. Just like banning chocolate eggs with toys in them doesn't teach children not to stuff things in their mouths.