More on Teens, Sex, Crime, and Now Drugs
Yesterday I noted the weird schizophrenia in American public opinion regarding adolescents. Conservative states such as Mississippi will treat children as young as 13 as adults in certain criminal cases, but requires both parents’ assent before a female as old as 17 and 11 months can have an abortion.
Liberal opinion is just as schizophrenic in reverse: Progressives think kids who want abortion are mature enough to decide for themselves, but kids who commit homicides don’t fully realize what they’re doing.
Today, Heather Mac Donald points out in a New York paper that
The Obama administration OK’d the sale of “Plan B” post-coital emergency contraception over the counter without prescription (or parental consent) to girls as young as 15. At the same time, the City Council moved a step closer to banning anyone under the age of 21 from buying cigarettes (the legal age is now 18).
Apparently, a 15-year-old is a fully mature adult (a “woman,” in nauseating feminist parlance) when it comes to deciding to have sex. But a 20-year-old, in the City Council’s eyes (or a 17-year-old, under current law), can’t be trusted to make her own informed decisions on smoking and must be restrained by the government.
Whatever happened to the feminist slogan, “Keep your laws off my body”?
Teen-Agers, Sex, and Crime
The debate over whether to sell Plan Be contraception to teen-age girls exposes, once again, Americans’ schizophrenic attitudes about teen-agers, sex, and crime.
As far as most conservatives are concerned, young people lack the maturing and judgment to make sensible decisions about contraception and abortion. Yet many of those same conservatives will turn around and insist that a 14-year-old who commits a homicide should be tried as an adult.
For example, Texas sets the age of consent for sexual activity at 17. But it tries children as young as 13 as adults for certain criminal offenses.
Texas also requires both parental notification and consent before a minor can have an abortion. So in the state’s eyes, some 14-year-olds who commit crimes have the maturity and judgment of fully grown adults, but no 17-year-old has the maturity and judgment to make a medical decision for herself. Those two positions cannot be reconciled.
Texas isn’t alone. Virginia law takes the same two positions. In Mississippi, children as young as 13 can be tried as adults not only for violent felonies, but for any criminal offenses whatsoever – and they must be tried as adults for some felonies, including capital crimes. But both parents must agree before a Mississippi girl just shy of her 18th birthday can have an abortion. In Kansas, the discrepancy is even more stark: 17-year-olds must obtain consent from both parents for an abortion, and the age of sexual consent is 16 – but children can be charged as adults for any sort of crime starting at age 10.
This is simply incoherent.
The orthodox liberal opinion is just as incoherent, but in reverse. Progressives maintain that teen-agers who are too young to drive are mature enough to buy contraception and obtain abortions without parental consent or even parental notification. Yet most also argue that young people who commit crimes should not be held fully responsible because their brains have not developed enough to think through the long-range consequences of their often impulsive behavior.
Public policy has to draw lines somewhere, and those lines often will be set arbitrarily. But they should not be set so arbitrarily that they end up being mutually contradictory.
The More Interesting Question About Hobby Lobby Is Not…
… why Hobby Lobby thinks it should not be made to provide coverage for contraception. The more interesting question is: Why do other people think they are entitled to make Hobby Lobby do so?
Inflammatory bonus point: Isn’t using the power of the state to make Hobby Lobby provide contraception coverage rather like using military intervention to impose a no-fly zone over Iraq? After all, in each case the relevant national or interntional body voted in favor of imposing the policy. Does that justify the armed intervention?
Pro-Life Lawmaker Offers Pro-Choice Bill
Bob Marshall, the most notorious legislator in Virginia, is like the broken clock in the adage: Egregiously wrong much of the time but right on the dot now and then.
It is hard to know which Marshall abhors more — gays and lesbians, or a woman’s right to control her body. He sponsored Virginia’s constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and tried to get openly gay men banned from the Virginia National Guard (because “If I needed a blood transfusion and the guy next to me had committed sodomy 14 times in the last month, I’d be worried”). This past February, his GOP colleagues backed away from a bill requiring transvaginal ultrasounds of women seeking abortion. Marshall did not: “There’s no reason to,” he said. He once sponsored a bill to prevent unmarried women from conceiving children through medically assisted means.
Last year Marshall introduced a fiercely debated fetal-personhood bill. That bill was carried over, which means it will come up for debate again when the General Assembly convenes Jan. 9. Marshall also has filed legislation to forbid abortion for the purposes of sex selection. He might have more bills up his sleeve (he often does). Progressives will have plenty of reasons to shake their fists at him.
But they should cut him a break when it comes to contraception. On that issue, he has taken the truly pro-choice position and they have not… .
Contraception, Rights, and Access
Certain people (you know who you are, ThinkProgress!) seem to consider the UN declaring access to contraception a univeral human right is some sort of thump on those who would rather not pay for other people’s birth control. Take that, you horrible conservatives!
Nonsense.
The Supreme Court has declared that individuals have a right to keep and bear arms.* That doesn’t mean I’m entitled to a free Smith & Wesson. It means that, if I want to buy one, nobody should be able to stop me.
I support a woman’s right to choose. And her right to a gun. Neither of those rights imposes a duty on me to fork over my wallet.
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* Maybe you disagree with the Supreme Court’s reading of the Constitution. Doesn’t matter for the purposes of this discussion; it’s the law of the land. (Unlike the UN declaration, which is not binding on anyone.)
Catholic Church: Right-Wing Pawn or Commie Front Group?
Hint: It depends on whose ox is being gored:
Take ThinkProgress, the website of the liberal Center for American Progress and the id of the conventional left. During the contraception debate ThinkProgress cranked out scores of pieces explaining why the Catholic Church was wrong to “impose its values on fellow citizens,” as an April 13 post put it. Yet by August, ThinkProgress had discovered the virtues of religion’s participation in politics: “Catholic Nuns Send Letter to Romney Challenging His ‘Woeful lack of Knowledge’ About the Poor,” it bugled a few days ago.
This is all the more odd when you look at what each group of Catholics was trying to achieve. Catholic institutions that did not want to underwrite contraception for their employees were not forbidding those employees to use birth control. They clearly were not constricting the activity of non-employees. They were not trying to overturn the mandate for anyone else — and they certainly were not trying to outlaw the sale of contraception at the corner pharmacy.
By contrast, the Nuns on the Bus and the bishops who objected to Ryan’s budget proposals want the federal government’s coercive taxing power to achieve their social-justice ends. They want the government to make other people underwrite programs that reflect their particular interpretation of the Gospel. That seems a far greater imposition of religious values on non-believers than a request simply to be left alone.
William McGurn certainly saw it that way. A few months ago, the conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal took the view that the Catholic Church “represents possibly the only institution in the world that still speaks the language of the American Declaration.” That was during the contraception fight. Last week, after Catholics began hammering Paul Ryan, McGurn sang a different tune: “Today,” he lamented, “the liberal impulse in American Catholic life has substituted political for religious orthodoxy.” Margaret Talbot sends her sympathies.
Such whipsawing is, literally, old news: During the 1980s Catholic bishops were everywhere denouncing Reaganomics, and calling for a nuclear-weapons freeze, and sticking up for the poor, misunderstood Communists in Nicaragua, and so on. In 1985, the bishops condemned the 7.1 percent unemployment rate as “morally unacceptable” and publicly urged Congress to reject funding for the MX nuclear missile — all of which left many on the right in a purple rage. It was widely felt in conservative circles that the church was a bunch of useful idiots being exploited by the Kremlin. Those on the left, meanwhile, saw in the church a proud, clear model of sanity and compassion in a world gone mad.
Jessica Valenti really doesn’t like this video, and I don’t blame her - for two reasons.
First, gotcha videos like these are inevitably snide, caustic vehicles for mockery. Both sides make them — here’s one laughing at Bush supporters, for example — and they pander to the worst instinct in politics: the tendency to prove to yourself that you were right all along by ridiculing the lowest common denominator of the other side, instead of trying to engage the best arguments from the other side, dissect them, and then demonstrate why your own arguments have more merit.
That brings me to the other reason I don’t blame Valenti for not liking the video. It asks a very good question: If the government should stay the heck out of our bedrooms, then why the heck should it pay for contraception, or force other people to do so?
None of the people in the video seems to have given any thought to that question, and — tellingly — Valenti refuses to engage it as well. Maybe that’s simply not what she was interested in at the moment; her piece is about family politics, after all: She’s upset not by “the video’s content—a ‘gotcha’ compilation about contraception taken at an Obama rally where Sandra Fluke spoke.” Rather, what upset her was “the heartbreaking realization that washes over you when you remember that the opposition to your deeply held values is not just a faceless, evil enemy—it’s family.”
But I sort of wish she had turned that around and given it a harder look. Presumably members of her family are not evil, smirking women-haters. Why, then, do some of them oppose her deeply held values? Could they possibly have a coherent — perhaps even thoughtful; perhaps even persuasive — reason for doing so?
“No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom.’ If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
—
President Barack Obama
Okay, two things.
(A) This is a misattribution. Obama didn’t say it.
(B) Catholic institutions are not forcing women to do anything. To the contrary, they are the ones being forced. Women also have a basic right to own a gun. The Supreme Court — not just HHS regulations — says so. That doesn’t give you the right to a free Smith & Wesson. Don’t like guns? Don’t buy one. But your Second Amendment freedom doesn’t mean you can force other people to subsidize your arsenal.
All clear?
What Do Ultrasounds, Contraception, and the ACA Have in Common?
Answer in today’s column, “Survey Says: Nobody Likes a Bully.”
Hey, look! It’s another one of those darn Catholics trying to “impose their values” on the rest of us! Grrrrrr!
Hey, What Happened to Catholics Not Imposing Their Values on Others?
The Nation approvingly quotes Catholics United on the ostensible immorality of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan:
Ryan’s budget emulates Randian principles by decimating safety net programs and turning them into voucher-based systems, ostensibly ignoring the human dignity of the most vulnerable in society. Catholics United calls on Congressman Ryan to sincerely examine his conscience and recognize the devastating impact his Rand-inspired budget will have on the most vulnerable in society. The social Darwinist teachings of Ayn Rand have consistently been denounced by major Catholic leaders as antithetical to Catholic doctrine…
Etc.
Boy, I remember this one time a while back when people thought the Catholic Church should keep its own darn values to its own darn self. I think it was yesterday, as a matter of fact. And the day before that. And the day before that. And….
