Actually, we don’t know the motivations of the Orlando shooter, and we probably never will. We certainly do not know what thought processes immigrants might bring with them from the zones Trump identified (the short list — in addition to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria — includes the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Mali, Niger and Nigeria). Many of these potential immigrants might be fleeing jihadist violence in their home countries.
The government can’t make you use ‘zhir’ or ‘ze’ in place of ‘she’ and ‘he’
Josh Blackman is a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law, Houston. He is the author of “Unraveled: Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power.” Josh blogs at JoshBlackman.com and tweets @JoshMBlackman.
The New York City Commission on Human Rights recently announced that employers, landlords and other professionals are required to use a transgender person’s preferred pronoun “regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth.” The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission similarly determined that failing to use a person’s preferred pronoun could violate federal anti-discrimination laws.
Though these mandates may seem like acts of civility, they in effect impose ideas about gender identity on speakers. Requiring people to voice beliefs that they do not hold, or even understand, is a flagrant and unacceptable violation of the freedom of speech.
Transgender law shouldn’t be written by psychiatrists
Gregg Bloche is professor of law at Georgetown University and author of The Hippocratic Myth.
Should psychiatrists have the power to rewrite civil rights law by revising their diagnostic categories? By basing its push for transgender rights on a change in clinical taxonomy, the Obama Administration is giving them this authority.
From 1980 until 2013, American psychiatrists applied the term “gender identity disorder” to people whose sexual anatomy didn’t match their sexual identity. This diagnosis mobilized medical technology (and health insurance) to fulfill transgender people’s desire to bring their anatomy into line with their sense of self.
Why gun control is such a losing proposition
Early Sunday morning in Orlando, a gunman armed with an AR-15 type assault rifle opened fire inside a crowded gay nightclub, leaving 49 dead and 53 injured. The massacre at Pulse nightclub is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, perpetrated by an Islamic State sympathizer who had already twice come under investigation by the FBI for potential ties to terrorist groups but who was nonetheless able to legally purchase two guns, including the one he used to commit the act, only days before the event.
The political response has been predictably mixed.
How should we include transgender people under the law?
Should the federal government legally define “transgender” or “gender identity,” and if so, how? Where do we draw the line for what constitutes discrimination? Are these questions of discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation or something else entirely?
Our obsession with integration is hurting kids of color
Chris Stewart publishes Citizen Education, a weekly education reader focused on improving educational options for communities of color. He is also the Director of External Affairs for the nonprofit publication Education Post.
Let’s agree about the benefits of racial diversity in education. Social science has long settled the issue. Only members of America’s most backward social networks are willing to speak in opposition.
Yet two of the biggest school integration supporters I have met —one in journalism, and one in research—have both admitted to selecting segregated schools for their own kids. One of them is white, the other is black, and both are preaching one thing while doing another.
How unfair funding makes it harder to desegregate schools
Danielle Farrie is Research Director at the Education Law Center, and co-author of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, an annual report on the condition of states’ school finance systems.
While Brown v. Board of Education eliminated de jure segregation in schools in 1954, in 1973 the San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez decision all but guaranteed that de facto segregation would continue.
That decision was about school funding. In Rodriguez, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a system of relying on local property taxes for supplemental educational revenue was nondiscriminatory, even though it meant that schools in poorer districts without a high property tax base would inevitably receive less funding.
By limiting any federal oversight of states’ school funding systems, the Rodriquez decision maintained a status quo in which states, not the federal government, were responsible for making sure school funding systems meet constitutional standards. This has not been a success: Despite dozens of state-level legal challenges about equitable school funding since the 1973 case, the condition of state school finance in most states remains unfair and inequitable, depriving millions of poor and minority students of the opportunity for school success.
The biggest threat to education today isn’t school segregation
Gerard Robinson is Resident Fellow in Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Diamonds are forever. Desegregation orders will be, too, if our end goal for Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is merely to color code American classrooms rather than to create equality of opportunity.
To really integrate schools, focus on wealth, not race
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of “All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools through Public School Choice” and the editor of“The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy.”
School integration is good for kids and for society, but adults have made achieving a diverse school system difficult. A focus on socioeconomic status rather than race could make the latest pro-integration policies more appealing.
Should desegregation be the top priority for school reform?
The Cleveland School District in Mississippi has two high school communities, separated by railroad tracks. White students go to the west-side school; the east-side school is 100 percent black. It’s been this way for decades, but just last month, a federal court ordered the district to take steps to desegregate. This is the second time […]
Editor’s choice!
Welcome to summer! To take advantage of a shorter work week, In Theory took a break from the series format to focus on a few individual topics, ranging from the democratization of music to the Peter Thiel vs. Gawker debate. We also revisited a few past topics that have moved back into the public eye. Enjoyed it? […]
Your favorite songs all sound the same — and that’s okay
Imagine you’re in the car with a friend of yours and you turn on the radio to listen to [insert your favorite genre here]. Your friend rolls his eyes and complains, “[Said genre] all sounds the same,” he says. “It’s so formulaic.”
You probably rush to defend your music. But your friend is probably right. It is formulaic — and that’s not a bad thing.
Why we’re all a little bit at fault in the Gawker case
For a brief period yesterday morning, the phrase “I Stand with Gawker” was trending on Twitter, as the result of an New York Times op-ed by Esquire writer Stephen Marche. After allowing that the gossip website had attacked him for nearly the entirety of his career, he wrote: I believe that Gawker serves an essential […]
Here’s how lawmakers want to fix our kidney shortage
A little-discussed medical crisis in the United States finally seems to be getting a lot of attention: our massive shortage of living organ donations. Lawmakers introduced legislation last week that may make it easier to reward people who donate their organs, which would hopefully help close the gap. As of January, more than 121,000 people were on waiting lists to […]
The anti-porn movement is growing. The public is just catching up.
Haley Halverson is Director of Communications at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. She is a passionate advocate for human rights with a focus on those exploited in the sex trade.
Utah has passed a resolution declaring pornography a “public health crisis,” a step that shocked the public conscience. However, the movement to address the harms of pornography — and more importantly, the research on the subject — has been steadily growing and gaining momentum for years.
This shift resulted in part due to the rapid escalation of harm following the advent of the Internet. Before the Internet, most pornography was only accessible if you walked to the “wrong side of town” and furtively ducked into a porn shop. Now, the only barrier between you and millions of free pornographic videos is the click of a mouse. As a result, rising generations have experienced an unprecedented onslaught of hardcore pornography, not only through intentional searches but also through accidental exposure from pop-ups and “recommended” videos online. These experiences have manifested in numerous neurological, physiological, and sociological harms, which are being recognized by individuals of diverse political and philosophical backgrounds, and which call for a public health approach.
Pornography is more than just sexual fantasy. It’s cultural violence.
Dr Julia Long teaches Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is a feminist activist and campaigner, and the author of “Anti-Porn: The Resurgence of Anti-Pornography Feminism.”
In March 2016, the U.K. government published its second National Strategy to End Volence Against Women and Girls. This is an extremely important lever for U.K. campaigners against pornography and its harms, as it recognizes that young people in particular have unprecedented access to online content and that some of that content may of course be harmful. A current government inquiry into sexual harassment in schools and a new cross-party campaign to tackle misogynist abuse online have all highlighted the ways in which pornography contributes to and legitimizes negative attitudes with very real impacts on the lives of women and girls.
It is crucial to understand pornography as a form of violence against women. Overwhelmingly, content is produced and consumed by men, with strikingly consistent themes. The content categories of two of the most popular tube sites — XHamster and Pornhub — reveal a dismal pattern of endless scenarios of male dominance and female subordination, categorized by specific acts, female body parts, race and age.
The conversation we’re not having about porn
Alexander Rhodes is the founder of NoFap®, a platform dedicated to providing tools and support for people who want to quit porn.
Recently, a nonbinding resolution declaring pornography a “public health crisis” passed by unanimous vote through Utah’s state House and Senate, and was signed by Gov. Gary Herbert. In response, droves of Internet commenters tore into the legislators and the activists who pushed for its passage. Often, they discounted the resolution as theocracy or moral policing masquerading as public health policy, ignoring any evidence-based merit it might have.
While people are entitled to their skepticism regarding the backgrounds or motivations of those behind the resolution, this does not address the reasoning behind its arguments. In reality, criticisms of pornography transcend religion and morality.
How porn makes inequality sexually arousing
Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of “Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully” and “Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.”
Commercial pornographers want us to believe that their product is just routine sexual activity on film. While there is considerable variation in graphic sexually explicit material, the most common pornography offers sexualized male dominance on screen, with the gonzo genre pushing the boundaries of the degradation of, and cruelty toward, women. Beyond the extreme material produced by the “legitimate” pornography industry are even harsher genres that sexualize every inequality you can imagine, especially racist porn. At its core, that’s what pornography does: It makes inequality sexually arousing.
Who defines pornography? These days, it’s Facebook.
Jillian C. York is a writer and activist whose work lies at the intersection between technology and politics.
In the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio — on whether the state of Ohio could ban the showing of a film it had deemed obscene — Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined hardcore pornography, a genre not constitutionally protected, by saying: “I know it when I see it.” The film in question, he elaborated, was not that. Less than a decade later in the case Miller v. California, the Supreme Court developed a three-prong legal framework to determine obscenity — called the Miller Test — based on what an average person would find offensive.
The trouble with effectively applying these standards to Internet pornography, even outside of a judicial context, is the manner in which cyberspace is governed. The spaces in which we interact online are largely controlled today by corporations, which by and large rely not on some semblance of the Miller Test, but on Justice Stewart’s older “I know it when I see it” standard. As Rebecca MacKinnon has asserted, these unelected “sovereigns of cyberspace” operate without accountability, and often with little respect to our hard-won freedoms.
The case for banning pornography
Matthew Schmitz is literary editor of First Things.
It is time to ban pornography.
Nothing can shock us except this suggestion. We find it perfectly acceptable that smut, no matter how bestial or misogynistic, should be widely available. We even think it a moral imperative, a dictate of freedom. It does not trouble us that children can view acts of rape, real or simulated, with a click of a mouse, but if someone proposes that we prevent them from doing so, dirty old Uncle Sam begins to shudder. Respected citizens stand up to object. Gallant young civil libertarians come riding into town, ready to defend the imperiled modesty of Lady Liberty.
Porn isn’t a public health hazard. It’s a scapegoat.
Mireille Miller-Young is associate professor of Feminist Studies at University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography
Is pornography a public health crisis? Of course not. While it is not surprising to see the Utah legislature unanimously declare it one — the anti-pornography movement has been quietly building momentum for a state-by-state takeover for some time — what remains shocking is the perceived legitimacy of anti-porn activists, despite the profound unreliability and inconsistency of their hyperbolic claims about porn’s harms to society.
How has a movement based on such shaky theoretical ground succeeded in a massive campaign to convince the public that sexually explicit media is responsible for an epidemic of sexualized violence against women and children; the rise of a zombie army of emotionally robbed and sexually desensitized men; and the explosion of an underworld of prostitutes trafficked directly from porn sets to street corners across the nation? This is not real. This is what a sex panic looks like.
Porn: You know it when you see it. But should it be regulated?
“Is porn immoral? That doesn’t matter: It’s a public health crisis” — so read the headline of last month’s PostEverything commentary by sociologist and anti-pornography activist Gail Dines. Dines was writing in support of a resolution passed by the Utah state legislature in March, which declared pornography “a public health hazard leading to a broad […]
How DIY bio-hackers are changing the conversation around genetic engineering
Ellen Jorgensen holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology and spent 30 years in the biotech industry before founding the nonprofit Genspace, the world’s first community lab.
CRISPR is a controversial new technology for genetically engineering cells and making those changes heritable. It and other new gene-editing technologies have both raised hopes of speedier biomedical breakthroughs and concerns that they could eventually enable the modification of healthy humans. But what is not generally known is that the use of CRISPR as a research tool has already become so widespread that even community labs have access to it – and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Technology won’t undermine human dignity. Fear of change will.
Ronald Bailey is the science correspondent for Reason magazine and the author of “Liberation Biology” and most recently, “The End of Doom.”
“What ideas, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?” When the editors of Foreign Policy magazine posed this question to a group of prominent policy intellectuals in 2004, neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama chose transhumanism as the world’s most dangerous idea.
The prospect of technologically enhanced human flourishing makes some people uncomfortable. The “bioconservative” alliance of moralizing neoconservatives and egalitarian left-wingers fears that the new bio, nano-, and info-technologies threaten human dignity and human equality, but these egalitarian worries are overblown — and in fact they go against the liberal society that transhumanism’s opponents revere.
Soon we’ll use science to make people more moral
James J. Hughes Ph.D. is the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and the associate provost for institutional research, assessment and planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Sometimes, people do terrible things because they have a tragic misunderstanding of what it means to be good. Sometimes we do regrettable things because we aren’t strong enough to be as good as we would like. Fortunately, emerging neuroscience suggests that we will soon be able to both fix those with broken moral compasses and tune up our own internal morality.
In defense of transhumanism
David Vincent Kimel is a doctoral student at Yale in the History department and the founder of Yale Students and Scholars for the Study of Transhumanism.
When I first tried to start a club for the study of transhumanism at Yale, I was astounded by the university’s response. The chaplain intervened and vetoed the request. An email explained to me that there were already enough atheist groups on campus, assuming evidently, that the words humanist and atheist were synonyms. I found myself awkwardly assuring a series of administrators that transhumanism had nothing to do with trans-students who didn’t believe in God. Broadly speaking, it involves the use of futuristic medical technology to lower the incidence of disease, enhance the capacity of the imagination, and prolong the human lifespan. “We’re into things like cyborgs and genetic engineering,” I said.
Eventually, the chaplain was overruled. For all of the humor and frustration of the process, on some level I could sympathize with the confusion of the administration. Pinning down the meaning of transhumanism is not so simple.
Transhumanists are searching for a dystopian future
Charles T. Rubin is author of Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress (Transaction). He teaches political philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
For its proponents, transhumanism — the idea of using technology to redesign humans beyond our biology — is just common sense. Who doesn’t want to live a healthier, happier and wealthier life? And wouldn’t it be great to live such an “enhanced” life indefinitely? For nearly as long as we have written record humans have rebelled at the limits of the human condition, but with the development of modern science and technology we have become increasingly able to overcome what once seemed like absolute limits. Advances in fields like genetics, synthetic biology, neuropsychology, robotics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology are putting us on the verge of even more radical breakthroughs, allowing us to imagine that we can ultimately rebuild completely the flawed human product that evolution has bequeathed us.
But the transhumanists are not the only ones imagining the impact of these technological possibilities. In popular fictional depictions — such as in Marvel’s superhero television series “Agents of SHIELD” and the much more acclaimed science fiction series “Orphan Black” — “transhumanist” is used more or less as a synonym for “mad scientist.” The notion of humans taking charge of human evolution is strongly associated with those who seem to be the bad guys.
Will technology allow us to transcend the human condition?
While it may sound like something straight out of a sci-fi film, the U.S. intelligence community is considering “human augmentation” and its possible implications for national security. As described in the National Intelligence Council’s 2012 long-term strategic analysis document — the fifth report of its kind — human augmentation is seen as a “game-changer.” The […]
Donald Trump is wrong about paid family leave.
Jody Heymann is the dean of the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA and a distinguished professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs, the David Geffen School of Medicine, and the Fielding School of Public Health. Aleta Sprague is a legal analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Throughout the primary season, candidates from both parties have put forth proposals to expand paid parental leave, shifting the question from whether to provide leave to how to do it. Yet paid leave still has some outspoken detractors who express concerns about the economic impacts. Among them is Donald Trump, who has urged that “we have to keep our country very competitive, so you have to be careful of [paid leave].”
It’s a question worth engaging: Can countries stay competitive while providing paid leave?
Is it time for a shorter workweek?
Isabel Sawhill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her most recent book, “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage,” is about changes in family life in the U.S.
Throughout the past year, we have heard paid leave debated in state houses and on the campaign trail. I am all in favor of paid leave. As I have argued elsewhere, it would enable more people — especially those in lower-paid jobs — to take time off to deal with a serious illness or the care of another family member, including a newborn child.
But we shouldn’t stop with paid leave. We should also consider shortening the standard work week. Such a step would be gender neutral and would not discriminate between the very different kinds of time pressures faced by adults. It might even help to create more jobs.
We need more than just paid leave. We need more parents.
Vicki Larson is a longtime journalist, blogger and co-author of “The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels’
There was much celebration recently when San Francisco approved six weeks of fully paid leave for new or adoptive parents — the first city in the U.S. to do so. But regardless of whether other states follow its lead or not, there’s still something essential missing from the paid parental leave discussion: What happens after the leave ends?
How a lack of paid leave is making wealth inequality worse
Ruth Milkman is distinguished professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, president of the American Sociological Association and author of the new book, “On Gender, Labor and Inequality.”
The U.S. is famously exceptional in its failure to guarantee paid family leave to new parents. What is less well-known is that this failure contributes to the growing problem of income inequality, widening the gap in well-being between the haves and have-nots.
In 21st century America, paid leave is available to most upper-level employees, especially professionals and managers, when they become parents or need to care for a seriously ill family member. However, the nation’s burgeoning ranks of low-wage workers typically have no access whatsoever any kind of paid leave. Instead, they are repeatedly forced to choose between earning a day’s pay and providing vital care to their families. When they choose the latter, they fall even further behind.
Stop saying businesses can’t afford paid family leave
Sarah Jane Glynn is Director of Women’s Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress.
Opponents of a national paid family and medical leave program often argue that paid leave is simply too expensive, too burdensome for employers and that it will kill jobs. But these are the same claims that have been used for more than a hundred years, whenever the conversation has turned to improving labor safety standards. The same talking points that were once used to oppose the installation of water sprinklers after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire — which killed 146 workers.
Today, a new and ironic chapter has been added to this antiquated tale of woe: Opponents claim that paid family and medical leave would hold back the very working women it is intended to help. After all, critics contend, there is international research indicating that maternity leave makes women less likely to return to work and more likely to experience employment discrimination.
I live in a country with paid family leave. It’s no magic bullet.
Carrie Lukas, a mother of five, is the managing director of the Independent Women’s Forum.
Americans often hear about Europe’s superior benefit system. Where I currently live in Germany, women receive 14 weeks of fully-paid maternity leave and an additional 12 months of partially-paid support. The benefits of such a policy are clear: Women have ample time to recover from birth and bond with their babies. Yet there are also real drawbacks, which include and go far beyond the expense for taxpayers and businesses.
A modern paid family leave policy needs these three things
Anne-Marie Slaughter is president and CEO of New America, a nonpartisan think tank and author of Unfinished Business: Men, Women, Work, Family. Brigid Schulte is director of the Better Life Lab at New America and author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play when No One has the Time.
The bad news: In the latest World Bank report on the paid family leave policies of 175 countries, the United States once again shows up as one of only four that offers no such thing — alongside Tonga, Suriname and Papua New Guinea.
But here’s the good news: As the research mounts about the physical and mental health, child development and economic benefits of paid family leave, as states continue to pass local policies, and as presidential candidates from left and right have offered proposals, there is a slow and growing consensus that a national paid family leave program in the United States is no longer a matter of if, but when.
What’s stopping paid family leave?
Mother’s Day has come and gone — and most mothers have gone back to work. But being a mother in the workforce is uniquely challenging in the U.S. — the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t have some kind of universal paid maternity leave program.
Though policy proposals vary, paid family leave is possible, as nearly every other country in the world has shown. What is the best way to make it a reality in the United States? And what does our reluctance to embrace paid leave say about the way we view family and work?
Be the first to comment on "Are multinational corporations undermining freedom in poor countries?"