If you’re planning on passing through South Dakota, it might be worthwhile brushing up on the credentials some people think you should require to qualify for an abortion. Even if you’ve been raped, you’ll still need one or two small extra things to get over the bar.

From NARAL News:

State Sen. Bill Napoli (R-Rapid City) gave this shocking description of the circumstances under which he thinks abortion should still be permissible when he told The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer:

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

That’s right: all you loose atheists are asking for it!

My friend and colleague Paul Verhaeghen is a truly talented individual indeed. Paul is a renowned psychologist, specializing in cognitive aging: what happens to older peoples’ working memory and long term memory as they age (OK, I copied this straight from his web site). This is all well and good, and I would normally be delighted to have talented colleagues, and not at all threatened by their accomplishments. Paul also plays a crucial role as co-organizer of Cafe Scientifique Syracuse, which is wonderful and also unthreatening, since I’m also involved in that.

But there’s this other thing. Something that just eats away at me, particularly given my love of contemporary literature and my secret writings that will never see the light of day. You see, Paul is an author. And not just any old author; Paul is an award winning author who critics have compared to David Foster Wallace – a favorite of mine (when I can get past the footnotes). Damn you Verhaeghen!!!! At least he’s not a nice guy with cool glasses, or this could really start to bother me.

In January, Paul accepted the Flemish Culture Award (Cultuurprijs) for Fiction – roughly the equivalent of the National Book Award in America, but given out once every three years. His winning novel, Omega Minor, was therefore considered to be the best work of Flemish fiction published between 2003 and 2005.

Unfortunately, my own linguistic limitations mean that I’m going to have to wait for the English translation, which Paul is doing himself and is due in 2007. This also means I can’t tell you much about the novel here, although you can read about it in this Syracuse University News article.

But there’s another aspect of Paul winning the Cultuurprijs that’s worth telling you about, and that’s his extraordinary acceptance speech. I won’t provide commentary, but here it is

Ladies and Gentlemen,

At the end of the nineties, when I started working on this book, I thought I was writing historical fiction. A story about the rise of fascism, a story about the totalitarian regime in the German Democratic Republic, a story about the horrors of war. A historical novel. It all happened a long time ago.

This is 2006.

When I was writing Omega Minor, I would never have guessed that the country I live in, the United States of America, would ever resemble Germany in the 1930s. Now there are concentration camps for presumed enemies of the regime — more than 83,000 people have been detained since 9/11, and 14,000 are still ‘in custody’ –, and just like the Nazis, who exported the horror to Poland, the American government detains these people in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Egypt, on Cuba, and in countless other places. There are again torture rooms, and eager torturers, and the architect of the legal underpinnings of torture is now attorney general.

In Omega Minor, I wrote: “What if the terrorist networks and the political reality overlap? What if the violence of the new state is the same as the violence of the vanquished Reich? What if those who liberated the camps fill them up again with ideological adversaries?” We have seen pictures of shiny happy torturers in Abu Ghraib, and hazy photographs of cages in Guantánamo Bay. We have heard the persistent rumors of secret CIA prisons in Romania and Poland, and with a signing statement the president of the United States of America has kept the door wide open for the use of torture against non-citizens — pushing aside both the Geneva convention and the laws of his own country.

The invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq was unnecessary, senseless, barbaric, and immoral. However one looks at it, the 28,293 Iraqi civilians — men, women, children — who died in war and the 2,247 American soldiers who gave their loves for a political lie that only served to keep a political dynasty in power are not a worthy monument for the three-thousand civilian victims of 9/11. Bring this up and you will be denounced as un-American.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have made the calculation. If I would accept the 12,500 euros associated with this award, about five-thousand dollars would flow into the American Treasury. I could pretend that this money will be used to finance public schools or medical care, or will help to alleviate the suffering of the forty million Americans who live below the poverty line. But who would I be kidding? The president just asked Congress for an extra 120 billion in emergency funds for the war. I gladly accept the award, but the money — no, that I cannot accept. This money would be paid for in human blood.

Omega Minor, very last sentences: “The world ever ends. It never ever ends.” When I wrote those words, they were meant to inspire hope. Now I am not so certain that the eternal recurrence of the same leaves any room for hope.

Friends. This world belongs to us; to all of us. Be vigilant. Do the right thing.

May you fare well.

– Paul Verhaeghen, Brussels, February 6, 2006 –

Good news: U.S. launches charm offensive to bridge new ties with some of our traditional rivals! Bad news: our new point of agreement is the need to squelch gay rights. From Human Rights News, via Sadly, No!

In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities. [...]

In voting against the applications to the NGO committee, the U.S. was joined by Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.

I miss the days when we were the good guys.

Perhaps to show solidarity with our newfound friends, ballot measures for the 2006 elections are springing up around the country, concentrating on denying homosexual couples the right to adopt children. (USA Today, via Balloon Juice.) Do you think these efforts arise from a sincere desire to protect children, perhaps bolstered by studies showing that it’s better to be raised in an orphanage than by loving same-sex adoptive parents? Of course you don’t.

Election-year politics. Republicans battered by questions over ethics and Iraq “might well” use the adoption issue to deflect attention and draw out conservatives in close Senate and governor races in states such as Missouri and Ohio, says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, University of Southern California political scientist.

The aim is to replicate 2004, says Julie Brueggemann of the gay rights group PROMO: Personal Rights of Missourians. She says marriage initiatives mobilized conservative voters in 2004 and helped President Bush win in closely contested states such as Ohio. Republicans “see this as a get-out-the-vote tactic.”

You can look back through history and see people arguing passionately in favor of all sorts of positions that today we would characterize as absolutely beyond the pale: slavery, denying women the right to vote, the divine right of kings, and so on. I used to wonder, what is it that we are doing now that will seem most embarassingly backward a hundred years from today? Major contenders, off the top of my head:

• Denial of civil liberties to gays and lesbians.
• Erosion of privacy and the right to a fair trial in the name of homeland security.
• Attacks on science and on intellectuals and experts more generally.
• Arrogant and uninformed unilateralism in foreign policy.
• A startling lack of urgency on issues such as nuclear proliferation and alternative energy sources.

Okay, that’s depressing, I’ll stop now. Happy day-after-President’s Day!

I’m guessing that you’ve heard about the Mohammed cartoon controversy (see Wikipedia article). To make a long story short, Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, just trying to do their bit for world peace and harmony, invited artists to submit cartoons with the prophet Mohammed as their subject. They published twelve of them, featuring various degrees of ridicule of Islam. (You can see the cartoons here.) Muslims worldwide reacted with outrage, featuring protests, rioting, arson, and at least one counter-cartoon contest — sponsored by an Iranian newspaper, asking for cartoons about the Holocaust. (Presumably because they think that Danes were the major targets of the Holocaust?) There is no shortage of blogging on the topic; for contrasting views, see series at Daily Kos and the Volokh Conspiracy.

I haven’t said anything about the controversy, both because I’ve been busy and since I thought the major points were perfectly obvious. The most-discussed points of contention seem to have been: “Did the Danish newspaper have the right to publish such offensive cartoons?”, and “Did the protestors have the right to resort to arson and rioting in response?” Put that way, the answers are obviously “Yes” and “No,” and there’s not much more to say.

Denmark, as far as I know, is not covered by the First Amendment, but in a democratic society newspapers should be permitted to publish just about whatever they want. The fear of offending people is no reason to suppress public speech. (Speech within private associations is a different matter.) The correct response, if something is said with which you disagree, is to say something else in return — the free market of ideas. True, the cartoons in question are low-brow and intentionally provocative, not the expression of any subtle argumentation. But quality of the speech is not relevant. If you don’t like it, let your displeasure be known, like this London (!) protester is doing:

A little self-undermining, maybe, but certainly taking advantage of an appropriate outlet for his own personal expression.

The violent reaction from some Muslims (not all, certainly) is completely inappropriate by any standard. This kind of destructive impulse is not something unique to Islam; it’s a familiar human response, one that is encouraged by fundamentalism of all kinds. At its source, it’s the same impulse that leads people to bomb abortion clinics or set fire to rural churches. Demonization of people unlike you, and violent action against them, is a frequent feature of extreme religious belief; not all religious belief, obviously, but a particularly virulent strain. It is antithetical in every way to the values of a liberal democratic society. This is a paradox of free societies: they must tolerate all sorts of belief, even those that are incompatible with freedom.

The subtleties of the cartoon issue only arise when we move from the question of whether Jyllands-Posten should have been allowed to publish the cartoons (since they obviously should have been), to whether it was a good idea to actually do so. Just because speech is allowed doesn’t mean it is mandatory. Knowing that the cartoons would offend the sensibilities of many Muslims, should the newspaper have printed them?

It’s easier to defend freedom of offensive expression when you’re not the one being offended. The same newspaper has apparently been less willing to publish potentially offensive cartoons about Jesus, for example. And many of the folks who are vociferously defending the cartoons are less willing to stand up for freedom of expression when it comes to flag burning. On the flip side, they have asked whether those who wring their hands over giving offense were all that bothered about works of art that offended Christians, such as Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ or Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary (you know, the one with the elephant dung).

Whether or not a group should offend another group (granting that they have the right to) isn’t a matter of fundamental rights, it’s a matter of politeness and civil discourse. The analogy between the Mohammed cartoons and Piss Christ is not a very close one. The former were published in a newspaper, almost begging to be distributed as widely as possible. The latter was shown in an art museum; if you didn’t want to go, nobody was forcing you. Art is (sometimes) supposed to be shocking and provocative; the idea that a gallery should refrain from displaying pieces that offend some people’s sensibilities is dangerous and counter-productive.

Still, even though it was a much more public forum, I don’t think that requirements of civility and politeness are paramount here. It’s true that, although I personally am happy to explain to Muslims why their ideas about religion are completely incorrect, I wouldn’t go out of my way to simply be offensive to their beliefs. But it’s not my newspaper. The editors of Jyllands-Posten weren’t being offensive by mistake; they were making every effort to be offensive, but it’s not like they were putting up posters in downtown Mecca. I may think it’s juvenile and stupid (and I do), but it’s their choice. I doubt that many of the rioters are regular readers of Jyllands-Posten, a right-wing Danish rag; they should have just ignored it.

Unfortunately I can’t demonstrate my good faith by my willingness to allow anyone to offend my own beliefs in the same way, since my beliefs are of a somewhat different character. But, for the record, if anyone wants to draw some offensive cartoons about Galileo, or John Stuart Mill, or Charles Darwin, or Virginia Woolf, or Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, or Bertrand Russell, be my guest. I promise not to riot.

Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It is also Blog for Choice Day. It has also, by way of a sharp stick in the eye to those who believe women should be the ones to choose to have abortions or not, been declared National Sanctity of Human Life Day by President Bush. This is from the President’s proclamation.

National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2006
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

Our Nation was founded on the belief that every human being has rights, dignity, and value. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we underscore our commitment to building a culture of life where all individuals are welcomed in life and protected in law.

America is making great strides in our efforts to protect human life. One of my first actions as President was to sign an order banning the use of taxpayer money on programs that promote abortion overseas. Over the past 5 years, I also have been proud to sign into law the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and a ban on partial-birth abortion. In addition, my Administration continues to fund abstinence and adoption programs and numerous faith-based and community initiatives that support these efforts.

When we seek to advance science and improve our lives, we must always preserve human dignity and remember that human life is a gift from our Creator. We must not sanction the creation of life only to destroy it. America must pursue the tremendous possibilities of medicine and research and at the same time remain an ethical and compassionate society.

It’s funny, but try as I might, I can’t “remember” that my life is a gift from a mythical Creator. And I wish the President would stop trying to enshrine his personal beliefs as national policy.

But the Culture of Life does crack me up. In this week’s New York Review, Garry Wills reviews the latest book by Jimmy Carter, on the hijacking of moral values by conservatives.

Yet the anti-life movement that calls itself pro-life protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rigid system of the “pro-life” movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leaves, and lack of health services and insurance. In combination, these policies make ideal conditions for promoting abortion, as one can see from the contrast with countries that do have sex education and medical insurance. Carter writes:

Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany…. It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs.

The “culture of life” idea traces its origin to the Catholic doctrine that life is a seamless garment, to be respected from conception to grave — but its American incarnation has dropped some of the inconvenient bits, like opposition to the death penalty. As Governor of Texas, Bush presided over a record spree of executions, while ridiculing death row inmates’ pleas for clemency. Wills continues:

Capital punishment is also a pro-death program. It does not protect life. It aligns us with authoritarian regimes: “Ninety percent of all known executions are carried out in just four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia—and the United States” (emphasis added). Execution does not deter, as many studies have proved. In states that abolished it, Carter writes, capital crimes did not increase:

The homicide rate is at least five times greater in the United States than in any European country, none of which authorizes the death penalty. The Southern states carry out over 80 percent of the executions but have a higher murder rate than any other region. Texas has by far the most executions, but its homicide rate is twice that of Wisconsin, the first state to abolish the death penalty. It is not a matter of geography or ethnicity, as is indicated by similar and adjacent states: the number of capital crimes is higher, respectively, in South Dakota, Connecticut, and Virginia (all with the death sentence) than in the adjacent states of North Dakota, Massachusetts, and West Virginia (without the death penalty).

How can a loving religion or a just state support such a culture of death? Only a self-righteous and punitive fundamentalism, not an ethos of the gospels, can explain this.

On its anniversary, Roe v. Wade is threatened as never before. Perhaps it will have to be eviscerated beyond recognition before the American public will make an effort to preserve abortion rights.

One of my earliest childhood memories was going up to strangers at our local polling place in 1972 and trying to convince them to vote for Richard Nixon. My family was always staunchly conservative, and the notion of voting for a Democrat was anathema; my six-year-old self went along enthusiastically. (Nixon vs. McGovern was not a close election, so I doubt that my efforts made a difference in the ultimate outcome.)

Myself excluded, my family’s allegiance to Republicans has never waned. The only exception (that I know of) was in the 1990′s when my Mom confessed the possibility that she might vote for Bill Clinton. When I asked why, she gave a simple answer: he was in favor of abortion rights, and she thought that was really important. Now, my Mom was certainly not in a position where she would worry about the prospect of getting an abortion for her own sake, and she has long been the kind of person who uses “feminist” as a slightly disreputable epithet. But this one issue was important enough to her to call into question a lifelong loyalty to Republicans. The reason is simple enough: as a woman, she understood the potentially life-altering consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, and felt that it was crucial to protect other women’s right to avoid that possibility, even if it wasn’t relevant to her own situation.

I bring this up not to explain why abortion rights are important (although they are), but to make a more narrowly political point: fighting to protect such rights is not a losing move for the Democratic party. (To a large extent I don’t care about the political ramifications, as I am happy to support wildly unpopular positions when I think they are important, but sometimes what is right actually aligns with what is popular, and why not take advantage?) Guys tend to not quite appreciate how important the right to choose really is to women, and they also tend to forget that women are a large fraction of the voting public, including a lot of Republican voters. As the Alito nomination moves us just a little closer to eroding the right to choose, this issue is going to loom increasingly larger in voters’ minds. Rather than validating centrist bona fides by prevaricating on the issue of abortion, Democrats should be proudly emphasizing that they are the party of choice — a lot of suburban swing voters might actually move their way.

This is also Blog for Choice month. More details here.

Just to make things clear. The United States now has a policy, referred to euphemistically as simply “rendition,” of flying terror suspects to foreign countries to torture them.

We aren’t sorry about it.

Even though it doesn’t work.

Many of the countries in which the torture is carried out are in Eastern Europe. Indeed, we have adopted a great deal of the old apparatus of Soviet imperialism.

It is often the case that the people being tortured are completely innocent.

“They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism, one CIA officer said.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when we thought we had evolved beyond such behavior. Apparently not.

A recent study in Britain has found some startling results regarding how the public views murder victims. Here is part of the breakdown:

• One in three people think that if the victim disagreed with things that the murderer said, and debated with them, that they were at least partially responsible for being murdered.
• About the same proportion of people think that victims are partially or wholly responsible for being murdered if they are drunk.
• More than a quarter believe victims are responsible if they wear clothing that hints at violence, such as camouflage jackets or trousers, or jackboots.
• Nearly 15% of respondents thought a victim would be partly responsible for being murdered if he or she was known to take part in boxing, wrestling or kick-boxing as a hobby; and 8% thought that this would make a victim totally responsible.

OK, I’m lying – these statistics aren’t true. I made them up. What a relief; because if they were true, they would be deeply disturbing, painting an unflattering, backward image of society’s attitudes to those people who, through no fault of their own, end up stripped of their human rights by violent predators.

Now take a look at this Guardian article detailing the results of a recent Amnesty International report on rape.

I don’t see any difference and am truly disgusted. We all know that there is the occasional sociopath out there who holds views like this. Heck, some of them have blogs. But the sheer magnitudes of the numbers here amaze me, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be a marked difference between the responses of men and women to the survey questions. I don’t know what’s wrong with people, but it’s serious!

This feisty blog has occasionally talked about issues of discrimination against minority-group members and women, in science, or in academia, or just more broadly. We have also, one must admit, occasionally taken the Bush administration to task for this or that example of egregious malfeasance. Thus, rigorously fair folks that we are, it’s only right that we also mention those instances when the administration takes time off from its busy schedule of intelligence-doctoring, operative-outing, deficit-growing, and hurricane-ignoring to actively fight the pernicious effects of discrimination.

So, here we go: the Justice Department is going to sue Southern Illinois University for discriminating against white males.

No, you can’t make this stuff up. SIU, like almost every university in the country, is seriously under-represented by minority groups among its graduate students; out of 5,500 graduate students, only about 8 percent are Latino or African-American (compared to over 20 percent of Americans). So they have a few fellowship programs that specifically target women and minorities, and help out a tiny number of people — perhaps 40 per year. The Bush administration, tireless warriors for social justice that they are, will stop at nothing to squelch this manifest anti-white bias:

“The University has engaged in a pattern or practice of intentional discrimination against whites, non-preferred minorities and males,” says a Justice Department letter sent to the university last week and obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

The letter demands the university cease the fellowship programs, or the department’s civil rights division will sue SIU by Nov. 18.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to discriminate against someone, I would be able to do a much better job than that. You know, like actually having fewer members of the discriminated class at my university than in the surrounding society, rather than significantly more.

Sadly, this is an issue that (even) scientists don’t always think very clearly about. There is a feeling in some circles that perfect fairness consists of taking the tiny part of society’s workings over which you have control, and pretending within that part that there is no such thing as race or gender, everyone should be treated equally. But in the real world, where we are not all born into equal circumstances and presented with equal opportunities, it makes perfect sense to recognize that and account for it when we recruit and train students.

Of course, people will complain that singling out minority-group status forces us to treat people according to some external characteristics rather than as individuals, and amounts to an insidious form of reverse racism, ultimately hurting the people it tries to help. This philosophically appealing position has the downside of being in flagrant contradiction with the evidence. Although it’s true that programs typically aim (small amounts of) resources at people because of minority-group status rather than a detailed understanding of their personal history in overcoming obstacles, the fact is that this clumsy strategy actually works. People gain access to education and training that they otherwise would not, and the result is that the pool of highly-educated and successful people grows more diverse, which helps both the people in those groups and the society as a whole. As crude as it is, the strategy of targeting fellowships at under-represented groups is both cheap and effective.

Deep down, nobody likes affirmative-action type programs. Nobody. We would all much prefer it if universities and other employers could truly ignore the race or gender of applicants and workers, because they were treated completely fairly throughout all of society. But that’s just not reality. And until it is, making a tiny little effort to help out people who have faced systematic bias throughout their lives — even if the efforts are clumsy and imprecise — is the least we can do.

Or if you really want to be scared, visit 3 Quarks Daily to read Abbas’s story of being arrested at JFK airport for beating himself up several years before. It should give pause to people who think that legal representation for suspected criminals is a sign of bleeding-heart weakness. Not, apparently, that being represented by a public defender is any better than simply throwing yourself on the mercy of the court.