In which I consider violating my shiny, new policy

TPM has a handy run-down of the latest Right-wing political appointee froth. The newest target appears to be the director of the Office of Safe and Drug-free Schools, Kevin Jennings. Doubtless, the real issue is that Jennings is gay. But, being that you're not allowed to hate gays per se anymore, they've found a closely-related proxy issue.

Behold:

Many of the attacks have centered around a conversation Jennings describes in his autobiography. When he was a 24-year-old teacher, he wrote, he spoke with a male student, a sophomore, who'd had a sexual encounter with an older man. Jennings didn't report the encounter; instead, he gave the student advice and sent him on his way.

I will deal with the substance of this complaint in a moment. But let's go first to a statement from Iowa's own Steve King, a man who has provided lots of blog fodder in the past:

“Kevin Jennings lacks the appropriate qualifications and ethical standards to serve in a presidential administration. Despite serving as the ‘safe schools’ czar, Jennings has demonstrated a willingness to look the other way on sexual abuse. His life’s work has been the promotion of homosexuality, even in elementary schools, and he has demonstrated no qualifications to make students safer in our schools. Jennings is committed to the ‘safety’ of only a narrow portion of American students, while expressing disdain for religion and traditional values. President Obama should fire Kevin Jennings immediately.

I am deeply tempted to spew forth a thick stream of profane invective. But, calling Rep. King a [socially diseased] son of a [practitioner of the world's oldest profession] won't move the debate forward. So, instead, let's talk about what he has to say.

First of all, he and his fellow travelers clearly don't know the difference between sexual abuse and sexual assault. They also clearly don't understand mandatory reporting law. In a nutshell, certain professionals (including physicians and teachers) are mandated to report suspected cases of sexual or physical abuse. Now, law varies by state, and I don't know what it was in Massachusetts at the time, but in the states where I have practiced, there is a clear distinction between sexual abuse (ie. that perpetrated by a care-giver or proxy) and sexual assault (of which statutory rape is a type). The former falls under mandatory reporting, but typically the latter is reported at the discretion of the victim. In other words, if an adolescent has been sexually assaulted and does not want the crime reported, we defer to that.

Now, doubtless Rep. King would object to this wholesale, because a conservative like Rep. King probably values parental prerogatives above all else. But this is out of keeping with how we actually care for adolescents in the real world. If a troubled gay teenager (who, it turns out, was old enough to consent in the first place) doesn't want his parents informed of his relationship with an older man, it is entirely appropriate for a teacher (or pediatrician) to respect that. Doing so is within the law (at least in states where I have practiced) and would be endorsed by most providers trained in adolescent medicine (my subspecialty). Rep. King may not like it, but Rep. King can stick it in his ear.

Moving right along, Rep. King's statements about who should and should not be "safe" and the importance of "traditional values" are telling. Rep. King doesn't actually care about the safety of gay and lesbian students, whose safety impinges on nobody and nothing except the freedom of [site of digestive egress, plural] like himself to hate them. Someday in the not-too-distant future, Critter is going to head off to school with two loving and anxious gay dads hoping he'll be well-looked-after and protected from the cruelty of kids who are raised to share the attitudes of Rep. King. To a certain degree, said cruelty can't be helped, and kids are cruel for all sorts of reasons. The real world, she is a tough place. But, being close friends with the guidance counselors at both the local elementary and middle schools, we are comforted to know that kids of same-gender parents are, indeed, well-looked-after, and the schools (yes, even at elementary level) make sure all families are respected. Rep. King clearly thinks that's wrong, because Rep. King is an awful person.

An unsightly shade of green

The President talked about health care reform at the White House today, surrounded by a bunch of doctors.

Surrounded by about 150 doctors in white lab coats in the Rose Garden today, President Obama continued his push for health care reform, thanking the doctors for their support.

"What's most telling is that some of the people who are most supportive of reform are the very professionals who know the health care system the best, the doctors and nurses of America," Obama said.

I don't have much to say about this. Yay, health care reform! Etc.

Why am I bothering to mention it then, you might ask. Good question. Because one of those 150 doctors is one of my partners in the practice. And I am just ill with envy.

A forum for the irrelevant

Oh. Gary Bauer. I'd kind of forgotten that you existed. Apparently, someone somewhere cares enough about your opinion to give you some space over at Politico. How nice. Because nobody could possibly guess what a strident, socially conservative martinet would have to say about President Obama. Oh, well. Let's see what you've got.

[W]hereas most liberal politicians are content to confine their religious references to public statements about things like caring for the poor expressed through government funding for welfare programs or through minimum-wage increases, Obama goes much further. He often invokes God at what seem the unlikeliest moments — in support of policies condemned by the Bible and most major religions. Obama gets away with it only because he benefits from a curious double standard.

And right away, Bauer begs the question so hard his knees are practically bleeding. One of the most ready arguments against religious orthodoxy, particularly when applied to social policy, is that you can find justification for just about anything if you look for it. Bauer obviously considers himself such an authority on God that he can claim to speak definitively for what the Bible does and does not condemn, and expects that we agree. (I don't.)

For example, Obama has referenced the Sermon on the Mount in support of special rights for homosexuals, despite the Scriptures’ clear support of marriage between one man and one woman and its admonitions to celebrate sex inside the married relationship only.

Hmmmm. Really, Gary? One man and one woman? Inside married relationship only? Because I think your memory of scripture may be a little bit weak. A few notable exceptions to that "clear support" spring easily to mind. They're famous guys in the Bible, and I'm kind of surprised that you don't remember them.

Life and death issues became the spark igniting the public backlash against Obama’s plans. They arose from concerns over possible death sentences for the ill and elderly should care be rationed and from concerns about tax-payer funded abortions, to name a few. Obama wrapped himself in Scripture to combat opposition to his plans. At one point, he alleged that Obamacare opponents were not just mistaken but also immoral and “bearing false witness” for worrying about taxpayer funding of abortion under his plan.

No, Gary, he wasn't saying they were immoral for "worrying" about the funding. He was saying they were bearing false witness because they were alleging the existence of something false. In this case, "death panels" and public funding for abortions. Nice slippery language there. Very moral.

I don’t mean to question the sincerity of Obama’s faith. This is a discussion of language. Increasingly, it seems as though the president’s deepest belief is in his own ability to disregard his critics’ moral objections by touting abstract religious principles and embracing empty religious symbolism. Obama seems to think that Americans will accept his out-of-the-mainstream views on moral issues as long as he claims those views arise in part from his religious beliefs.

Golly, Gary. How to put this nicely? I don't believe you. I think you do mean to question the sincerity of Obama's faith, and I think maybe your protestations to the contrary are not 100% honest. And I really don't think that love for one's neighbor, or a religious imperative to care for them are particularly abstract. Further, as time goes by, I think you'll be surprised which of the two of you ends up "out-of-the-mainstream." (Hint -- not him.) The times, they are a-changin'.

For the record, I believe elected officials should talk about faith. Our founders believed the moral principles of faith were indispensable to our nation’s survival. The Declaration of Independence mentions God four times. And faith has been a source of many of America’s most important social movements, from abolition and civil rights to the right to life.

But in using faith to advocate positions that are contrary to the teachings of Scripture, Obama undercuts his credibility. As Obama writes in “The Audacity of Hope”: “Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith, ... such as the politician who ... sprinkles in a few biblical citations to spice up a thoroughly dry policy speech.” Obama should heed his own advice.

For the record, I think you're full of baloney. You think elected officials should talk about faith if their beliefs comport with yours. Your mention of civil rights is especially wry, given how clearly you think gays don't deserve any.

And, again, you hold forth about what scripture does and does not teach, as though we are all on the same page. But the thing about faith is that it is incredibly personal, and unless you have a problem with an especially vexing sin, you don't hold forth that yours is more valid than anyone else's. Once you embark on that path, you end up in all sorts of crazy places, like deciding the Bible isn't conservative enough. (I really, really wish I were making that last thing up, but the link speaks for itself.)

And, since we're talking about advice that should be heeded, I would direct you to some from Paul.

More bad arguments for defensible positions

I'm generally not a fan of prescriptive grammar. Yes, there are occasions that call for using what is widely considered to be proper grammar. I don't like when students email me (and they do!) with "Hey prof, what article do u want us 2 read 4 class 2morrow?" However, I also am not entirely comfortable with people who sound like an Oxford don in casual conversation. Certain social situations call for certain levels of both sartorial and grammatical formality. I also love the flexibility offered by certain violations of grammar, such as split infinitives, verbal nouns, and ending sentences with prepositions. The use of a phrase such as "very unique" seems more akin to using the wrong fork for salad than to picking one's nose at the table. It also doesn't genuinely say much about a person's intelligence.

In today's On Language column in the NYT, Ammon Shea makes two really bad arguments against prescriptive grammar. I agree with you, but make the right argument!

Shea says:

We have all heard admonitions at some point or other that the word unique cannot be modified — a thing is either unique or it is not. This would be considerably more convincing if it were not so obviously untrue, as people modify unique quite frequently, and have done so for a long time.

This is what we call in philosophy 'begging the question' (and yes, I do insist, because it blurs a useful distinction, that you do not use 'beg the question' to mean 'raise the question'!). To beg the question is to assume your conclusion in the premises. Shea argues that because people use modifiers for 'unique,' it is correct to do so. I'm sure the militant grammarians among us would agree that people can use modifiers for unique, and that most people do. The grammarians, however, think that correct grammar is not necessarily the one of common consensus, but a sort of academically dispensed grammar from on high. So the grammarian would not be convinced by Shea.

What Shea, I think, meant, and what he should have said, is that language, by its nature, is a matter of social conventions. Words only have meaning because the majority of speakers of a certain language agree on meanings. To insist that a word really means one thing, even though almost everyone uses it another way, doesn't really make sense. Words are not attached to Platonic forms in the aether - a word only means what we are all agreed it means. And, as Shea points out, language changes. "Nice" used to mean something like "fastidious." But since the vast majority of English-speakers now use it to mean "kind," the word meaning has changed. It's not really fastidious. It was, but now it isn't. Most grammarians would agree. The question is why and how it changed. The reason it changed is because of social conventions.

The other bad argument Shea employs is:

Through the magic of Google Books you can now search through enormous numbers of books and magazines from the 19th century and see literally hundreds of writers who use more unique, less unique and even that bugbear of the purists, somewhat unique.

(And speaking of literally, the next time someone tells you that it cannot be used to mean aught but literal, you might point out that it has been used in various figurative and nonliteral senses for hundreds of years, by such literary figures as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Richard Milhous Nixon.)

Whatever the grammarians agree is the codification of correct grammar, that codification is surely not located entirely in the works of great authors. It does seem possible, if there is a correct grammar, that a great author violated it. Just because Jane Austen said it doesn't mean it is correct.

Again, I agree with Shea. But his arguments are nothing a convinced grammarian should latch on to!

In defense of "retarded"

Some of you loyal readers might remember that I was, until recently, pregnant. A month ago, I gave birth to a bouncing (and huge! and very cute!) baby boy.

We discovered soon after his birth that my son has some very rare chromosomal abnormalities. He will, most likely, live to adulthood. However, both his motor skills and cognition will be severely impacted, and perhaps his sensory abilities as well.

Among many other (and many far more pressing) issues we've had to think about in recent days, I've thought about the issue of language. We have received a crash course in the current terminology, e.g., my older son is not normal, he is typical. My newborn little guy will not be retarded, he will be intellectually disabled. He will experience developmental delays. He has special needs. (I have seen some references to letting parents choose their own words for the disorder their child has, but there are some generally accepted preferred terms.)

I do not have a knee-jerk aversion to politically correct updates of terminology describing sub-groups of people. Sometimes the alteration of language seems warranted, sometimes less so (Personally, I'm not a big fan of reclaiming insults, such as queer). However, if a group demands to be called something, and seems they are largely agreed...why not? The subgroup of which I'm speaking, though, has not demanded this change in language. Other people have decided this for them, presumably because words such as "retarded" have become pejorative. Such words no longer merely describe the condition, they also evaluate it (negatively). So others have, with the best of intentions, changed the language.

I see two problems with this.

1) The first is simply that it is less accurate.

Since 'normal' and 'typical' mean roughly the same thing, I'm guessing that the reason for the change is that the word 'normal' is derived from 'norm,' and thus has connotations that 'normal' is the state that one ought to be in, whereas typical has nothing to do with oughts, and represents instead the state most people actually happen to be in. But the thing is, of course I would rather my son did not have disabilities. Aren't we all agreed on this? One ought to aim for optimal cognitive and motor development. This is why we tell pregnant women not to drink or smoke or take certain medications. This is why we tell parents to talk to their babies and play them music and not shake them. I will do everything in my power to use early intervention strategies to help my baby walk and talk. In other words, I will aim for him to have as close as possible to the kind of life that his brother is expected to have. So there is a way one ought to be - it is better to be able to walk than not. It should go without saying that claiming that one ought to be disability-free if one possibly can is not implicitly claiming that people with disabilities should be treated as less than fully human or should not be appreciated and loved. The fact that someone is not what one ought to be is not a reason to reject a person. In fact (aside from Dan, of course) I don't know anyone who is everything one ought to be. I worry that it does not go without saying, however, and so I'm saying it.

'Intellectual disabilities' is technically accurate. I have found, however, that people take this to mean something akin to 'learning disabilities.' This gives the impression that with a little bit of accomodation, training, and extra time for exams, someone with such disabilities could perform college-level work. The word 'retarded' simply gives a more accurate picture to those not clued in to current terminology. 'Developmental delay' implies that he will develop normally, simply later. And 'special needs' dances around the problem. Yes, he does have special needs. But he has special needs because he has disabilities. The root of the issue is not his needs, but his lack of certain abilities.

2) The second is that it is pointless. People do use the word retarded pejoratively. But first of all, I suspect that many times, phrases such as "That is so retarded" or "What are you, retarded?" are something of a dead metaphor. Or, if not a dead one, at least not a fully live one...maybe an undead metaphor? I think many people have used such phrases without summoning an image of someone who is actually mentally retarded -- I know I have. (Dan -- want to step in with your thoughts on "That is so gay"?)

Even if it's not a dead metaphor, the fact that is used to describe a less-than-ideal state of affairs for a person means that it is likely to end up being used pejoratively by unkind people and children. The word 'special,' designed to avoid the pejorative connotations of 'retarded,' has itself become pejorative. I think any word thus coined would likely end up that way.

I want the world to treat my son with kindness, sympathy, and respect. Well-meaning changes in language, however, are an ineffectual route to such treatment.

Update: Oops! Per the comment left by my indefatigable co-blogger, let me clear: I don't think it's good, or even innocuous, to say "that is so retarded" (or lame, or dumb, or stupid, or that someone's a pussy, or any other negative word derived from a denotation or a feature of a sub-group of the human race). I'm just saying that I do believe a) it is often used without any mean-spirited intent, and b) probably shouldn't be motivation to actually change the word to describe the subgroup.

And you thought we were done with Roman Polanski!

I know this is the blogging equivalent of hanging a suction-cup Garfield in my car window or wearing acid-washed black denim, but even though we're all done with Roman Polanski, one more thought occurred to me.

Specifically, I was thinking about the movie of his I re-viewed most recently: Repulsion. In it (sort of a spoiler alert, but it's really not a plot-driven movie), the female character has been driven mad by (it is strongly suggested) having been sexually abused as a child. She continues to suffer at the hands of sexually exploitative men. The movie is basically about how sexual exploitation has destroyed this woman's sanity.

(By the way, I found the movie overrated, but I find much film widely considered great that was made between 1960 and 1990 to be overrated, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.)

This reminded me of one of Polanski's recent defenders, Woody Allen. He seems to have some amount of contempt for older, smarter women (forget his personal life: see Manhattan for exhibit A). At least, he has a strong desire to escape relationships with them - for sexual reasons, yes, but also because he prefers playing Pygmalion to having a relationship of equals. Yet he is able to have his older, smarter, rejected female characters describe their pain at being rejected.

In both cases, you have a director who chooses to depict the pain he is willing to inflict. They are aware of the effects of what they do, and they do it anyway. Neither has an empathy deficit. Nor are either unwilling to closely examine those effects. Both simply prove unwilling to act on that empathy at the cost of the satisfaction of their own sexual or romantic desire. Perhaps they are even more disturbing than those who act that way because they are unable or unwilling to put themselves in women's shoes.

Yes, but how do I spend it?

I don't have sound on the computer where I do most of my Internet trolling, so I can't really judge the majority of the content in a recent bloggingheads conversation between Megan McArdle and Noam Scheiber about health care reform (among other things).

[Hmmmm... can't seem to make the video work.]

However, something in their follow-up posts has caught my eye. Megan quotes herself:

We don't have a unified culture. There's no--Sweden can talk about having a Swedish culture, and to some extent a Swedish status hierarchy and Swedish values. That's just not true of America. Everyone's participating in about 97 different subcultures. So you can invent your own status hierarchy, but you can't get everyone to buy into the idea that we should pay our doctors $60,000 a year and then all love them a lot because they're doctors.

She then goes on to write:

To expand that point a little bit, I think America's income inequality in general makes it harder to force down doctor pay. It's easy to deride this as saying that doctors are greedy--but the more relevant frame is opportunity cost. If people with strong science skills can earn, say, $150,000 in some other profession, you're asking them to sacrifice quite a lot for the privilege of becoming a doctor. Some of them will do it--just as some MBAs become journalists. But others will balk. So either you have to take lower-quality candidates with fewer other opportunities, or you end up with fewer doctors. In Europe, there aren't so many other lucrative opportunities, and status is arguably more valuable than it is here, since in many cases, only a minority of your fellow Americans will recognize the status you've so painstakingly acquired. When you're introduced to a pastor at a party in the rural south, you're meeting an important person. When you meet the same pastor at a dinner party on the Upper West Side, he's a freak who is at best possibly interesting. Multiply that a few hundred times, and it's little wonder that money is the dominant form of compensation in the US--at least, unless you can get God or professors to handle your recruiting.

Scheiber restates his point thusly:

I argued in response that the ability to bathe doctors in social prestige isn't exactly a fixed feature of one's national character--it's not that Americans are genetically incapable of it, or that Europeans naturally excel at it. If doctors made slightly less money, but the system were seen as better for patients overall, the social prestige of doctoring might rise a bit and compensate them for the loss of income.

As I've stated before, Ms. McArdle can sometimes be a bit unclear about where her figures come from, so I don't know where she's getting that $60,000 number. Similarly, I don't know how Noam would define "slightly less." How much less?

For my part, I would be willing to make a bit less if it meant I did not have to worry about "efficient" coding or wrangling with insurance companies. Throw in malpractice reform (and, frankly, I really have no idea what that would mean, in terms of concrete policy), and the deal is a bit sweeter. That being said, and if I'm going to be blunt, there is no way on God's green earth that I would do this job for $60,000. I am regularly called away from home to attend to patients, often in urgent or emergent circumstances and in the dark of night, and every so often I am expected to stand between a small child and serious injury or death. I have the unalloyed pleasure of trying to explain to vaccine refusers that they are doing their children and society in general a disservice, and watching as they refuse them based on celebrity nonsense and unscientific mumbo-jumbo. And I get the pleasure of knowing that anyone at any time can lodge a complaint against my license with the state for any reason, and I would be expected to submit a lengthy defense, no matter how frivolous the substance of the grievance, to say nothing of the fear of malpractice. That is all, of course, what I signed up for as part of my profession, but it just wouldn't be worth it for sixty grand. Too stressful and demanding. Sorry. And I can only imagine what a cardiothoracic surgeon or oncologist would say.

Further, like McArdle says in the full post, who is the "we" that decides doctors will get more prestige. How is prestige quantified? Being a doctor already confers a respectable amount of prestige. (I could tell you that this had nothing to do with my decision to become a doctor, and then you could laugh at what I flagrant liar I am.) How would it be meaningfully increased, and how can something as vague and abstract as prestige be considered appropriate compensation for the loss of something as concrete and necessary as money? Would the bank accept the privilege of housing a doctor as an acceptable supplement to my reduced ability to afford my mortgage? I can only imagine the hilarity that would have ensued if, back in New York, I had called and tried to get a table at Babbo by dropping the pediatrician card.

In a nutshell, I think the "less pay, more prestige" plan is a non-starter. (Subtract the crippling debt that many doctors leave medical school carrying, and maybe there's the beginning of an argument.) I chose medicine because I wanted to have a meaningful career that would make the world a slightly better place, in which I could be helpful. You bet. But I also wanted to have a reasonable expectation of being financially secure so long as I worked. I'm not carrying my pager this weekend for the thrill of it.