I used to think being gay was wrong. I supposed that if you asked me, I would have said “being gay” wasn’t wrong, but “choosing to live as a gay person” was. I’m not sure I made that distinction at the time. I also thought it was appropriate for the state to encode its objection against homosexuality in its laws. While I probably would not have supported outlawing gay sex or instituting/continuing a formal program against gays, I believed the state shouldn’t offer any protections to gay people as gay people.

For example: In 1992 (I was 18 then), Cibolia had an amendment up for consideration by voters that would have invalidated then existing civil rights protections for gay people. These were laws that Danvar and a couple other cities had adopted to forbid discrimination in housing, hiring, and other practices based on sexual orientation. I supported that amendment, not so much because I bought into the “special rights” argument that amendment supporters invoked. I supported it because I thought such anti-discrimination laws meant the state “legitimized” and therefore implicitly recognized that being gay was acceptable. (For the record, the amendment passed and was overturned by the US Supreme Court 4 years later, the first of a string of decisions written by Justice Kennedy that led to Obergefell.)

My views then made up an almost textbook case of “bigoted position.” I can see that now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn’t see that then. It took me a long time to change my mind on such issues.

The principal reasons I changed my mind were the following, in descending order of importance:

1. I noticed a pretty strong disjuncture between the Lockean idea of consent of the governed and the need for civil liberties with laws restricting gay rights.

2. As I grew up and from a variety of personal experiences and revelations, I came to have more empathy for gay persons.

3. Gay rights activists forced me to try to justify and rethink my position.

No. 3 was in last place for a reason, and in my opinion, was the least important for my conversion. My anti-gay views at the time certainly had a hearing at Cibolia State University, but it was a minority view there. I don’t think I ever voiced it, in part because the pro-gay rights position, as I heard it, was of the shaming sort, similar to what we find in Sam Wilkinson’s post Over There. It wasn’t uncommon to hear any objection to gay rights be answered with “why are you insecure about your sexuality?” or with a lecture about how Ancient Greeks thought homosexuality was good, so we should, too.

One thing the activists accomplished, however, was to compel me to justify, at least to myself, why I opposed gay rights. The stark reasons I mention in the first paragraph of this post solidified as my own answers to activists’ positions. As later events challenged and undermined those reasons, I began to see them as I see them now, as bigoted positions.

Perhaps my position would have changed sooner if the activists had tried to engage people like me more empathetically than they did. Perhaps not. But I realize that the goal of such activism isn’t necessarily to change my or anyone else’s mind or to honor my position on the matter. It could be to rally those who already agree, or to marginalize a certain position as bigoted or beyond the pale. In 1992, it was probably as much of a defensive posture as anything. Matthew Sheppard’s murder still hadn’t happened yet. And not only was Cibolia State University very close to where the murder would happen, it wasn’t a comfortable place to be gay or to support gay rights despite what seemed to me at the time to be the majority pro-gay rights view. There was one story  of a person wearing a “straight but not narrow” button being physically assaulted, assuming I’m remembering things right.

Even now, in 2015, the righteous, crusading, vengeful tone we see in Sam’s post is probably not wholly about righteousness, crusading, and vengeance. It’s still probably not safe to be openly gay, regardless of what the Supreme Court says about the right to marry. Still, perhaps that tone ill serves the cause, as several on that thread, including Will and Mr. Blue from Hitcoffee, have tried to note there.

1) The political implications of this may be pretty significant. Though the numbers didn’t disfavor the GOP until more relatively recently, this issue was singularly a stumbling block with the GOP towards a significant portion of the electorate with outsized influence. They’re not going to go flocking to the GOP now, and wouldn’t if the GOP had switched sides sooner, but going forward more people might actually be willing to hear the GOP out. This, combined with the disparate impact in housing ruling (which may damage the Democratic Party in the suburbs), has enormous potential consequences for future political alignment.

2) I would have preferred that this be settled democratically, but some of my earlier concerns about bypassing public opinion hold less weight since public opinion on the issue has shifted. While marriage tends to be a state issue within certain parameters, this is a case where a patchwork of wildly different laws was not tenable. So I find myself not particularly inclined to get upset at the “judicial activism” here. As a practical matter, it is time.

3) I am happy with the result, though less than happy with the ruling itself. I wish that Kennedy had used a different bases for the decision. I’m a bit surprised that Roberts didn’t go along, though that might have been with the comfort of the outcome not being in doubt and had Kennedy waivered, he might have switched. Many of Roberts’s criticisms about the nature of the ruling seem on-point. I’m not worried that public approval of SSM will lead to public approval of polygamy, but am worried that this ruling may allow public approval to be bypassed.

4) That this was settled the way it was is due in good part to a failure of opponents to read the very clear writing on the wall and navigate the situation better once it was clear how this was going to turn out in the long run. Sometimes compromise puts you in a worse position by moving the Overton Window, but sometimes – as in this case – you’re merely propping up a dam that would will only burst with a greater flood when it comes down.

5) A significant chunk of the Democratic Party should be pretty ashamed of themselves. This all could have happened sooner – and with more democratic legitimacy – if they’d shown an ounce of courage on the issue. I’m not even talking about 2004 when there was a significant price to be paid, but between 2007 and 2012 when there wasn’t a huge price (or maybe even a price at all), and they declined to pay it anyway. They could have helped drive public opinion.

6) Twitter was pretty depressing. A lot of liberals seem less happy about their victory than that the other side lost. A lot of otherwise pragmatic conservatives seem to want to dig in rather than say “let’s move on.” This is in contrast to Facebook, which for once actually seemed more grounded in its response.

7) I don’t have a particular problem with states wanting to change the marriage process to avoid clerks being required to issue marriage licenses to marriages that they disapprove. I didn’t object wildly to plans in Oklahoma to do this, and I thought Alabama’s plan made good sense. The latter didn’t pass, and now we’re in a situation where clerks are refusing to do their jobs and gay couples are either left in limbo or having to county-shop when they shouldn’t. The likelihood of this ruling was known well before know. The time to make these provisions was this spring, when legislatures were in sessions. If you didn’t do it then, that’s not anybody’s problem but the state’s. If they want to try again, they can, but until then the county clerks need to do their job or be removed from their post. I support a right of any pastor – whether at a church, running a business, or itinerant – to refuse to perform these services. But public officials are public officials. A judge or JP may have absolute discretion over with whom to conduct ceremonies, but a clerk should issue licenses or file them without regard to personal beliefs. Our government simply can’t function otherwise.

8) I am unclear on what the social status of a rainbow confederate flag is (which I saw in several pictures during the brief window when gay marriage was previously allowed in Alabama).

Conservatarian values collide on the question of guns and employment. Specifically, a Tennessee law that would bar employers from taking action against employees who bring a gun to their work place. There was a law passed that allowed people to legally take their guns on to others’ property as long as they kept it in their car. The law was amended to prevent employers from firing employees for doing this.

Dustin Siggins and Doug Mataconis argue that the law goes too far because it infringes on the property rights of the employer. Jazz Shaw argues:

There is also the question of where the employer’s “property” ends, which Dustin correctly notes in his piece. True, the parking lot is the property of the employer, but does that make the employee’s automobile their property as well? You either allow employees to park in your parking lot or you don’t. What they have in their cars – assuming it’s legal – is really their business if it’s not being brought into the workplace and potentially affecting the owners and staff. In a parallel case, many employers with security concerns do not allow workers to bring their cell phones into the office because of the camera and audio recording capabilities of modern phones. But they pretty much universally allow the workers to lock them in their cars while at the office. And most importantly, that scenario applies to a device which isn’t even covered by your constitutional rights.

This law seems to me to have been a good compromise. The employer can bar carrying weapons in the workplace, but the employee’s car is not the workplace. And punishing them for such storage is an unreasonable burden on their constitutional rights.

On the property rights question, I am actually squarely on Shaw’s side. When I was substitute teaching, I was technically violating city law and school policy because brought tobacco on to the premises. However, my belief is that since it stayed in the car, it was more on my own property than theirs until or unless I took it out of the car. (Which, also technically I did, but only to transport it off school grounds so that I could smoke, but we’ll forget that for a moment.)

The conflict to me is not between the Second Amendment and property rights, but the Second Amendment and the right of employers to hire and fire as they please. And here, I actually side with the employers. While I would criticize any employer who refused to hire people who (for instance) own guns at home, I don’t believe that gun ownership should be – at the current time – a protected class. If such policies become sufficiently widespread, then I might reconsider. Such policies are likely to be more widespread when it comes to “No guns in your car” policies, but the rationale for such a policy is notably more acute.

So my split-the-baby solution is that, given that Tennessee is an employment-at-will state, I would allow them to fire employees under the EAW doctrine. However, I would not view that particular reason for doing so as a “For Cause” firing. Meaning, the employee would be eligible for unemployment provided that at no point they presented a danger to anyone else (by either taking the gun out of the car, or threatening to).

Utah is talking about bringing back the firing squad:

The proposal from Republican Rep. Paul Ray of Clearfield would call for a firing squad if the state cannot obtain the lethal injection drugs 30 days before the scheduled execution.

Utah dropped firing squads out of concern about the media attention, but Ray said it’s the most humane way to execute someone because the inmate dies instantly.

“We have to have an option,” Ray told reporters Wednesday. “If we go hanging, if we go to the guillotine, or we go to the firing squad, electric chair, you’re still going to have the same circus atmosphere behind it. So is it really going to matter?”

Firing squads are technically still an option for those on death row, if they were sentenced to die before 2004. I’m not sure how many condemned are left where that qualifies. The last time it was used was, according to the article, 2010.

Setting aside the limitations on lethal injection that are precipitating this proposal, Utah has a special relationship with the firing squad due to the Mormon belief in blood atonement, which was one of the stumbling blocks to getting rid of it:

The term refers to an arcane Mormon belief that a murderer must shed his own blood–literally–to be forgiven by God. Since Mormon pioneers first arrived in 1847, most formal executions (until recent decades) have been by firing squad, which is a lot bloodier than hanging or lethal injection.

When state Rep. Sheryl Allen began proposing eliminating the firing-squad option in the late 1990s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself did not object. Yet talk of blood atonement percolated “in quiet, backroom discussions,” she recalled.

“A couple of people in prominent positions said to me, ‘We’ve got to have blood atonement.'”

I don’t have a particularly negative view of firing squads compared to other forms of capital punishment, provided that the shooters can aim. Particularly if it’s just an option, and if there is a religious rationale for the condemned. I’m against the death penalty writ large, excluding hypothetical cases, but beyond that I actually think the more options that the condemned has, the better.

This, of course, relates to the most recent front that opponents of the death penalty have been fighting, which is by denying states the chemicals needed for lethal injection. Specifically, they were able to cut states off from sodium thiopental. Gabriel Rossman argued that those trying to prevent access to these chemicals bear some of the responsibility for the recent spate of botched executions:

Over the last months there has been a great deal of outrage over botched executions in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona in which the executions did not go as planned and in at least one of the three cases the condemned suffered prolonged excruciating pain. Many stories about these executions explained that states had been experimenting with new formulas because anti-death penalty activists and governments had systematically cut off their supplies of sodium thiopental — the old and much more reliable lethal injection chemical. However this was all in terms of the historical chain of events and I saw basically nobody saying that the anti-death-penalty activists were morally at fault for preventing a well-established and relatively effective means of execution or that the Lockett, McGuire, and Wood executions demonstrate the need to restore access to sodium thiopental. Rather the ubiquitous assumption was that once sodium thiopental was cut off that the states of Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona should have said “wow, looks like you got us into a checkmate, guess we’ll just commute every sentence on death row even though our electorates favor capital punishment.”

When I linked to it, Alan Scott argued that this moral calculus is faulty:

And to say that an entity is to blame for a grisly death because they chose not to supply the killer with a more humane weapon is really, really gross.

I wouldn’t want a product I produce used in the death penalty. But it would be a part of my own moral calculations that the moral purity of refusing to participate comes at the cost of potentially making the executions less humane. Since that’s a foreseeable consequence of my actions, I don’t think I can turn around and wash my hands of it when less humane executions are performed. In other words, if I’m going to try to use my chemical as leverage to end the death penalty – and that is something that would interest me – I had better make sure it will work.

Will it? As Utah demonstrates, if you want someone dead, you can kill them dead. The calculus of those seeking to deny means of execution are hoping that there are lengths to which states won’t go. That’s probably right in some states, though Texas will keep executing by whatever means they can. If you view the means of death as actually unimportant, a saved life in a borderline state is worth a botched execution in Oklahoma.

As public opinion is less firmly in favor of the death penalty, it may be a calculus that ultimately works in all but the most execution-happy states. There is likely a group of states that doesn’t have the energy or momentum to abolish the death penalty, but neither do they have the energy or momentum to shoot people dead or even re-draft laws. Intuitively, I’m not a fan of “heightening the contradictions”, as Rossman puts it. But if it works, it works.

A town in Massachusetts was looking at becoming the first in the country to ban tobacco products:

This sleepy central Massachusetts town of 7,700 has become an improbable battleground in America’s tobacco wars. On Wednesday, the Board of Health will hear public comment on a proposed regulation that could make Westminster the first municipality in the United States to ban sales of all tobacco products within town lines.

‘‘To my knowledge, it would be the first in the nation to enact a total ban,’’ said Thomas Carr, director of national policy at the American Lung Association. ‘‘We commend the town for doing it.’’

Town health agent Elizabeth Swedberg said a ban seemed like a sensible solution to a vexing problem.

‘‘The tobacco companies are really promoting products to hook young people,’’ she said, pointing to 69-cent bubblegum-flavored cigars, electronic cigarettes and a new form of dissolvable smokeless tobacco that resembles Tic Tac candies. ‘‘The board was getting frustrated trying to keep up with this.’’

It… didn’t end well:

Emotions flared at the hearing, where about 500 people crowded into an elementary school gym. When one resident loudly pronounced himself “disgusted” that the board would make a proposal that infringed on personal choice, the crowd roared with approval.

After several failed attempts to bring the hearing to order, chairwoman Andrea Crete gaveled the session to an end. As police shadowed Crete out of the building, many in the audience broke out in a verse of “God Bless America.” Opponents also collected signatures on a petition to recall the three elected board members.

“It was going to get out of control,” Crete said later. “We don’t need any riots.”

According to a Selectman, it was voted down unanimously.

And this, apparently, is where the slippery slope ends. Or, at least, this slippery slope. There are still plenty of places that people are allowed to enjoy cigarettes, and they will presumably be targeted until everyone has to commute to Iowa.

Restricting sales is likely to be much more difficult than restricting smoking. The “second hand harm” argument doesn’t really fly for it. That in and of itself doesn’t really matter all that much these days, though. What really matters is that livelihoods depend on this. Not evil tobacco company execs and their minions, but neighborhood convenience stores.

As mentioned in the articles, this is a really big deal. Smokers do a lot to keep these places afloat. Not just by buying cigarettes, but by getting other things when they come in to buy cigarettes. When we bought our house, I made a mental note of where the nearest convenience store was. This was important because… wait, I don’t need to know where to get cigarettes anymore, do I? And with that (or without that), my convenience store food and drink purchasing has fallen dramatically. It’s difficult to over state, really.

So a plan like this was bound to meet with a lot of resistance. Ban tobacco sales, and convenience stores will go out of business. Not all of them, obviously, but some of them.

Which is actually kind of a shame. Because you know what? I almost support this proposal. Almost. I think it’s a bad idea to do it on a township basis. You’d (at least potentially) be destroying businesses in your township as smokers start not only getting their cigarettes (and food and drinks) elsewhere, but also their gas and whatnot. No, you’d need to do it statewide. Except that’s overkill.

But if you want to look at the Next Great Way to reduce smoking, it’s getting them out of convenience stores and into tobacco shops. If you’re trying to quit smoking, convenience stores remain one of the biggest ways to relapse. If you’re a young person that might kinda-sorta be interested, there they are right there. You could quite easily continue to allow smokers to purchase tobacco products while at the same time reducing temptations and creating a safe space for would-be quitters.

The two big problems with this are, of course, the damage that this would do to convenience stores, and slippery slope concerns. This failed, and so the slope is ended, but if they actually got them out of convenience stores, the precedent would indeed be set and the temptation would be great to start regulating tobacco stores into the ground. Which in and of itself could backfire if encourages smokers to buy cigarettes by the carton, which increases consumption among the damned.

So in the end, this was likely a non-starter and will continue to be except at the sorts of places that don’t actually need convenience stores (as such), which makes it less likely to spread like wildfire the way that smoking bans did. I still wish that there were a way to get them out of convenience stores, especially if you would allow those convenience stores to carry ecigarettes (“I can’t find a smoke, maybe I’ll try one of those things. Hey, these aren’t mad. Maybe I should go with these instead”) but the War on Tobacco remains a war, and we have long-since forsaken reasonable policy as the pendulum swung from one extreme to another.

Back in the day, Web was a frequently critic of the Innocence Project on the basis that they make the system look worse than it is. I never bought in to that argument, but recent revelations are quite disturbing:

The investigation by the Innocence Project, she said, “involved a series of alarming tactics that were not only coercive and absolutely unacceptable by law enforcement standards, they were potentially in violation of Mr. Simon’s constitutionally protected rights.”

The truth took 15 years to come out. That’s 15 years that Simon, now 64, spent behind bars.

“Believe me, it is mentally painful to walk around every day, locked up for something that you know you didn’t do,” Simon told Shawn Rech, whose film about the case, “A Murder in the Park” now has an ending. It premieres at a film festival in New York on Nov. 17.

Simon, who moved to Milwaukee from Chicago in the 1980s to find work, is not granting interviews, his attorney, Terry Ekl, told me. But Ekl echoed Alvarez’s criticism of former Northwestern journalism professor David Protess, who led the Innocence Project, and the investigator on the team, Paul Ciolino.

“In my opinion, Northwestern, Protess and Ciolino framed Simon so that they could secure the release of (Anthony) Porter and make him into the poster boy for the anti-death penalty movement,” he said.

Identified by several eye witnesses, Porter was sentenced to death for the fatal shooting of Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green at a south side Chicago park in 1982. He was just two days from a lethal chemical injection when he was freed in February 1999 following Simon’s confession.

I really hope this isn’t as bad as it looks, because it looks pretty bad.

Last year, a clerk failed to properly transcribe the VIN on the Camry. So we got the title for the Forester, but never got the one for the Camry. They sent us a form to fill out where we’d have a police officer verify the number of the car, but that fell through the tracks. It was important, but never urgent.

This year, I went to the DMV to turn in the form, and it created a problem. (Which would be, it turned out, one of several problems.)

Basically, the issue was this:
1) Without the VIN, the car was not officially registered.
2) Registration was required before they could accept the VIN verification form.
3) The car could not be registered without an accepted VIN verification form.

You can prove you have (unofficial?) registration by giving them the temporary registration card, but we didn’t have that. The lady at the DMV was actually skeptical there was any way out of this that didn’t involve buying a new car.

Other problems included the fact that the registration had expired on the Forester (I thought I had until the end of the month, but it turned out that it was the beginning) and that I didn’t have proof of payment of the property tax. That last one confused me a great deal, because we didn’t have to have anything like that the previous year. Further, how did they know we didn’t rent? To add on top of all of this, we moved without informing the DMV. I didn’t want to complicate matters by bringing that up.

It turned out that the state levies property taxes on vehicles. This isn’t too far from what Arapaho did, but in Arapaho they basically altered the cost of registration to meet (to some degree) the value of the vehicle. Here, you apparently have to make a separate trip to the Second County Tax Assessor. I went to the county courthouse to the tax collector’s office, and was told that I needed to go to the Assessor’s office. I went to the Assessor’s office, only to find out I had to go to the second assessor, because the primary assessor only dealt with land property. The Second Assessor was a little cubby hole in the back of the courthouse (metal detector and all).

Believe it or not, I found all of this easier than dealing with the DMV. The Second Assessor couldn’t give me a tax document without proof of registration, but when I explained the situation she did anyway.

When we got back to the DMV, we got a different lady who was much more helpful. Actually, she wasn’t helpful at all, but since it was a complicated situation and she had just started the job two days before, she took us to someone who could help us. Within an hour, everything had been settled. She basically called the person in the state capital who had transcribed the VIN number incorrectly, and they quietly corrected it, with everything quietly falling into place.

The Patent Board has spoken:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has canceled six federal trademark registrations for the name of the Washington Redskins, ruling that the name is “disparaging to Native Americans” and thus cannot be trademarked under federal law that prohibits the protection of offensive or disparaging language. {…}

“The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board agreed with our clients that the team’s name and trademarks disparage Native Americans. The Board ruled that the Trademark Office should never have registered these trademarks in the first place,” Jesse Witten, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, said in a press release. “We presented a wide variety of evidence – including dictionary definitions and other reference works, newspaper clippings, movie clips, scholarly articles, expert linguist testimony, and evidence of the historic opposition by Native American groups – to demonstrate that the word ‘redskin’ is an ethnic slur.”

Neil Irwin argues that this is the beginning of the end.

It has been assumed, by myself and I believe others, that this ruling – if upheld – would mark the end of the team name. Having thought about it more, I am not so sure. The six trademarks that the board revoked all specify the team name. The team would just redub themselves The Warriors and keep everything else – including the Indian head on the helmet – the same. Or they could simply not do that.

The irony of this ruling is that it doesn’t mean that Dan Snyder and his club can’t use the name, but that anyone now can. If they changed their name, tens of thousands of people who are too cheap to buy Washington Warriors shirts could instead wear unauthorized Washington Redskins shirts that the football team cannot stop anybody from making. This is in contrast to the North Dakota Sioux, who in addition to retiring the name, did retain the copyrights to prevent that sort of thing from happening.

More to the point, though, the rest of the Redskins trademarks are still in tact. You still can’t do the Indian head. You can’t replicate a jersey beyond the basics (which I am pretty sure could be done anyway) so long as they replace the “Redskins” with “Washington”. You can’t replicate their hats. The vast majority of their merchandise sales would be entirely unaffected.

For it to be otherwise, the board would have to say that not only will they deny that trademark, they will deny all trademarks of any organization that uses an offensive name. Among other things, that raises First Amendment issues as that gets into punitive territory. (The police have no positive duty to protect you, but they can’t pass a law saying that they will specifically refuse to protect people who engage in unpopular speech.)

Most owners would probably not go that route. It does seem, increasingly, that the writing is on the wall here. Snyder is stubborn, though, and he may well defy it if the NFL itself doesn’t intervene (which it could). Even so, I naturally resist Irwin’s (or anybody’s) declaration of what the Redskins will “have to do” without demonstration of actual leverage to require them to do it.

I was about to say that it reeks of talk in the late nineties and early aughts that the US would just have to give up control of the Internet because the world was demanding it. But Obama, for no real reason at all, did end up giving it up. Which, despite all of what I say above, may end up being the result here.

At Salon, Kim Brooks wrote a piece about the fallout from having left her child in her car:

I took a deep breath. I looked at the clock. For the next four or five seconds, I did what it sometimes seems I’ve been doing every minute of every day since having children, a constant, never-ending risk-benefit analysis. I noted that it was a mild, overcast, 50-degree day. I noted how close the parking spot was to the front door, and that there were a few other cars nearby. I visualized how quickly, unencumbered by a tantrumming 4-year-old, I would be, running into the store, grabbing a pair of child headphones. And then I did something I’d never done before. I left him. I told him I’d be right back. I cracked the windows and child-locked the doors and double-clicked my keys so that the car alarm was set. And then I left him in the car for about five minutes.

He didn’t die. He wasn’t kidnapped or assaulted or forgotten or dragged across state lines by a carjacker. When I returned to the car, he was still playing his game, smiling, or more likely smirking at having gotten what he wanted from his spineless mama. I tossed the headphones onto the passenger seat and put the keys in the ignition. […]

We flew home. My husband was waiting for us beside the baggage claim with this terrible look on his face. “Call your mom,” he said.

I called her, and she was crying. When she’d arrived home from driving us to the airport, there was a police car in her driveway.

Multiple people on my Facebook timeline shared the article with a comment about never taking any chances. A part of me wonders if they even read the article, or how they might have missed the point so badly. Given the specifics of the situation, there was little or no threat from the weather, from thirst or starvation. The only threat was from the authorities themselves. The threat of a child losing his mother because of a culture that says “take no chances.”

Joseph Stromberg argues that spanking should be illegal:

Research, though, tells us that getting spanked as a child can leave a discernible mark on people: it makes people more likely to suffer from addiction, depression, and other mental health problems as adults. This is one reason why 37 countries have explicitly banned all physical punishment of children — even by parents — since 1979.

Even our own existing state laws generally define child abuse as “endangering a child’s physical or emotional health and development.” By this standard — and given what we’ve recently learned from research — any form of physical punishment violates children’s rights, whether it’s done by a teacher or parents.

Making something – like spanking, or leaving your children in a car, is not simply a matter of saying don’t do it. It doesn’t make it go away. Rather, it’s the initiation of a legal process that threatens to pull apart families. The question is not “Should parents spank their children?” but rather “Should we take children away from homes where they are spanked?” and “Should we send parents to prison who do this?” There is an extremely strong argument, in my view, that there lies the road to far more ruin than the initial offense. My answer to the above three is “no” which, in a legal framework, is inconsistent except to the extent that we believe we should allow people to do things we consider to be wrong. In a best case scenario, such laws would be enforced loosely or inconsistently. The former typically leading to the latter, which has its own problems.

Sayeth Michael Brendan Dougherty:

The novel phenomenon of American upper-middle-class helicopter-parenting, in which kids are scheduled, monitored, and supervised for their “enrichment” at all times, is now being enforced on others.

It’s an odd way to “help” a child who is unsupervised for five minutes to potentially inflict years of stress, hours of court appearances, and potential legal fees and fines on their parents. Children who experience discreet instances of suboptimal parenting aren’t always aided by threatening their parents with stiff, potentially family-jeopardizing legal penalties. The risk of five or even 10 minutes in a temperate, locked car while mom shops is still a lot better than years in group homes and foster systems.

It’s only a slippery slope to talk about such things if we’re talking about making laws that have comparatively little teeth.

Heebie-Geebie wrote on Unfogged:

I have a new theory: a contributing factor might be the rise of the horror-story-as-promotional-device. Did this happen much before, say, MADD? I’ve got it in my head that there’s been a shift from private grief and shameful let’s-never-talk-about-how-cousin-drowned-at-the-picnic to the current model, which is to channel your grief into transforming the world and making sure other parents don’t suffer through your hell. It’s basically a good thing – if your child dies due to complications from premature birth, and as part of your grieving process you become very involved in March of Dimes, then that is absolutely good and productive and so on.

But I wonder if the over-parenting vigilance isn’t partly due to the bombardment of individual stories of the child who was only out of sight for three minutes. Like Kahneman says, our brains are really terrible at statistics.

I wonder about a slightly different angle of interest to me. In What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, Jonathan Last explores the various disincentives of people to reproduce. Among them, he talks of the comparatively trivial example of car safety seats. The increased requirements of car safety seats adds a not-insignificant burden to people who want larger families. Every life saved is precious, of course, and it’s wonderful to save them, but requiring them longer and longer means more kids in them at the same time, which requires the expense not only of the seats but of bigger vehicles and more hassle. Making parenthood more expensive, more difficult and less flexible, have an effect on the number of children we choose to have.

A long while back I was in Queen City with Lain. I parked at a parking garage about a mile away. I had to go to the car to get something and took the baby. The problem was that I forgot to take the child seat. The threat to Lain’s life and livelihood on a one-mile drive is probably marginal*. The pain-in-the-ass of walking a full mile back and then forth again was definitely not marginal. One of the things I remember as I stood there on my car was not a fear that something would happen on that straight drive, but that I would get caught and arrested. My decision was made on the basis of the law.

One of the things Brooks talks about in her piece about leaving her son in the car is that in her conversations with people, a whole lot of parents admitted to having done what she did. Some suggested that all parents have. It’s certainly the case that a whole lot more parents have than have been arrested for it. Uncountably more times than a child has died or been hospitalized for it. But the instinctual response – one I have myself – when we hear about something going terribly wrong or getting arrested for it is a variation of putting your child at risk and the unacceptability of ever doing so.

As the article mentions, though, we do it every day. We just draw odd lines on where we should. When we fly, Lain gets her own seat even though one isn’t required until she is two. As a matter of safety, and sanity, we want to do that. Most parents don’t. A lot of people think that it should be legally required. Child safety, after all. But these things come at a material cost. Having to buy a third ticket can be the difference between a family going somewhere or not going somewhere. This matters. It can also be the difference between flying and the more dangerous – with or without a carseat – decision to drive.

There’s something in us that cringes when we see a child in an obvious – even if minute – danger. This is not a bad thing. If we keep it in check.

One of the other things that Last explores in his book is the increasing parental involvement over time.

Here’s where it gets interesting: From 1965 to 1985, mothers actually spent less time taking care of the kids (just 8.8 hours per week in 1975 and 9.3 hours per week in 1985) while fathers inched their numbers up a tiny bit, to 3 hours per week. After 1985, both moms and dads started doing more-lots more. By 2000, married fathersmore than doubled their time with the kids, clocking 6.5 hours a week.

Overall, American fathers have become more involved in raising their children. So much so that, as economist Bryan Caplan jokes, they could almost pass for ’60s-era mothers. But what’s really astounding is what mothers have done. By 2000, more than 60 percent of married mothers worked outside the home. In doing so, they increased their paid work hours per week from 6.0 in 1965 to 23.8. Yet even as they moved out of the house to pursue careers, they also increased the amount of time they spend with their children, cranking it up to a bracing 12.6 hours per week.

Now, on the one hand, this is a happy development. It’s a good thing to have parents taking a more active role in their kids’ lives. But on the other hand, these numbers explain why parents are so frayed and stressed these days: Because however nice it is to be spending more time with your children, it’s also a rising cost. There are only 24 hours a day and if people are spending more time on kids, those hours have to come from somewhere.

The rising expectations of parenthood go beyond money and into rising standards for pretty much everything. Babysitters are not typically required to be licensed and bonded, but I wonder if we’re not too far away from that. There is a lot of movement to make daycare more regulated, and thus more expensive. Which is a mixed bag. Setting aside statutory requirements, though, the pressure parents put on themselves and one another for the right daycare can be quite intense. It sends a message of rising expectation that says “It’s better not to have children if you can’t…” with the sentence ending with an ever-increasing list of demands. It’s a message that arguably resonates most with the greatest tendency towards being responsible. The irresponsible either ignoring the demands, not particularly intending to be parents, or just not thinking that far ahead.

Increased spending on children is typically lauded. It’s more of a mixed bag when we talk about the time we devote to them, however. Almost always, though, we seem to talk about it being a good thing or a bad thing from the child’s point of view. Increased parental requirements to help kids with their homework becomes a statement about how much pressure kids are under. Helicopter parenting, when criticized, is frequently targeted on how it affects children. I used to wonder if this was a rationalization so that parents could give themselves a break. A part of me actually hopes that is the case, because that is important. But whether it’s a rationalization or whether it truly is all about them, it’s difficult to talk about it in any other way.

The cumulative effect of all of this being a level of responsibility that can be off-putting to a lot of people. Which, people who don’t want kids shouldn’t have them. Pushing the level of responsibility ever-higher, though, can have the effect of making people not want children. Putting a chasm between “parenthood” and “not parenthood” that makes the latter more attractive. Not because of car seats, in particular, or restrictions on leaving your kids in the car in even the most benign circumstances, or the increased investment parents are supposed to make, but the aggregate effect of all of these things and more.

In Michael Connelly’s A Darkness More Than Night, Terry McCaleb says that being a father is like having a gun always pointed at your head. Rationale being the knowledge that if anything happened to your child – if you could have prevented it, anyway – you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself. I feel that very keenly. I also feel, though, that driving yourself into insanity is its own problem. I don’t object to all safety laws, by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t favor needless endangerment. I do favor, though, a degree of sanity. For the kids, but also for the parents.

* – The particular issue being her very young age. Even if a time and place with less restrictive child seat requirements, it would be at best logistically challenging and at worst there would be some definite safety concerns insofar as the number of bad things that could happen in even a minor dust-up. The comparative lack of danger coming, primarily, from the fact that it was a short trip. Nothing, really, in this post should be construed as an endorsement of the notion that babies should not go into car seats or that there shouldn’t be laws to that effect.

So here’s a sad story that made the rounds a little while back, about a guy whose (alleged) child was put up for adoption without his consent:

An unmarried Utah father whose son was placed for adoption at birth without his knowledge or consent has filed a $130 million federal lawsuit against the biological mother, adoption agency, adoptive parents and attorneys alleging they conspired in an “illegal deceit-ridden infant adoption” that deprived him of his son.

In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court, Jake Strickland alleges the defendants acted in a “clandestine” manner and “essentially kidnapped” his son. It alleges the defendants engaged in racketeering, human trafficking and various kinds of fraud as part of a conspiracy to deprive Strickland of his child.

There is a mechanism to prevent this from happening, as Strickland could have put in a paternity registry claim. Since he did not, the husband of the mother was able to (and required to) sign off on it. If the characterization of events is accurate, it does sound like Strickland was wronged, but he was wronged in a sort of bad-faith way that the law can’t really accommodate for. At least that’s my impression, the court case is still pending.

Given the time and distance since the original adoption, it’s a hard case to make that the child could or should be returned to him. Given the bad faith involved on the part of the mother (at least) it seems more possible that there are some monetary damages to realistically be asked for. I have the vague feeling that we may not be dealing with particularly deep pockets here, however.

A more well-known case involves Dustin Brown, which involved some similar circumstances but also our laws with regard to the tribes:

A four-year-old Cherokee girl known as “Baby Veronica” is with her South Carolina adoptive parents Monday, after a fierce custody battle that raised questions about tribal sovereignty and a federal law meant to help keep Native American tribes together.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court [on September 23, 2013] dissolved a temporary order leaving the child with her biological father, Dustin Brown, a member of the Cherokee nation who had fought the adoption.

“She’s safely in her parents’ arms,” said Jessica Munday, a spokeswoman for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, of Charleston, S.C.

Cherokee Nation spokeswoman Amanda Clinton confirmed that Veronica was handed over to the Capobiancos hours after the Oklahoma Supreme Court lifted the stay. Until the Monday night transfer, the Cherokee Nation had insisted the girl would remain with the tribe.

Indian parents (including fathers) are offered some extra protections due to some ugly history of taking their children from them and handing them over to white folks. In this case, though, the Indian heritage was comparatively minor (Veronica is 3/256th Cherokee). This was a turbulent case insofar as the child was relocated a couple of times as the case worked its way through the court system. Brown (the father) himself has relatively loose Indian heritage, but even that granted him some procedural rights that were not followed. Brown himself messed up by waving paternity rights early on (though in an informal way that wouldn’t be accepted under most circumstances).

This case cluttered up my Facebook feed for a while. For whatever reason, a number of typically apolitical friends took a great interest in the story from the father’s point of view.

All of which serves as reminders for young men to be cognizant of who they are sleeping with, the pregnancies that might result, and the extent to which you can trust this person. And in the absence of such trust, being as diligent as possible about following the pregnancy and asserting what rights you have.