It looks like the vote will be close, as a few pledged supporters are now wavering. Nobody seems to know exactly what's changed -- Sam Arora, for instance, pledged his support for the bill (even promised to cosponsor) while he was running, but now has gone mute.
We're so close. A loss at this stage would be devastating.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
On Bad Critiques of Rape Prevelance Studies (Part II)
Earlier, I flagged an article at Harry's Place regarding what the author, Michael Ezra, claimed were bad studies about the prevalence of rape. I didn't focus on Eve Ensler's contributions (though AAB discusses that some here), but on the older Mary Koss study finding that 1 in 3 women surveyed had been victims of rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.
In yesterday's post, I critiqued part of Ezra's argument that Koss' study did not accurately track the true definition of rape. My argument was that (a) the author was positing a single, unified (generally legal) definition of rape that does not exist, (b) that many of the specific alleged shortcomings identified by Ezra themselves do not track any modern definition of rape (e.g., that, in a case where a woman is too intoxicated to consent, the man must have been the person to ply her with alcohol or drugs and done so for the purpose of inhibiting her ability to consent), and (c) that even to the extent that Koss' definition doesn't track all legal variants, it's perfectly permissible for her to advocate her own definition of what rape is and measure accordingly.
In today's post, I want to turn to a very different argument Ezra made: the claim that many of the women surveyed whose experiences were coded as "rape" do not, themselves, characterize what happened to them that way. Again, quoting Gilbert, Ezra writes:
There is obviously something to the notion that we should respect how women characterize their own experience, and should be appropriately skittish about labeling something rape when the alleged victim rejects that terminology. I recognize that, and thus consider this a more substantial critique than the claim of dissonance between Koss' definition and the (mythically-united) legal one.
Nonetheless, there are important limits to this proposition. For starters, to the extent we have some "easy cases" of when something is rape (i.e., ones in which there is considerable overlapping consensus that the event in question is rape), I think we are fair to give the act that label even if the victim herself wouldn't. Imagine the following spousal rape hypothetical, where the victim describes what happened in the following manner:
But when asked whether her husband raped her, the woman responds:
This is a pretty clear-cut spousal rape case. And assuming we do have a consensus that the marital rape exemption is bogus, I think we're right to label the act rape irrespective of the victim's self-description.
But obviously, many cases are hardly that clear-cut, and the problem is less a (mistaken) definition of what rape "is", and more about how people interpret ambiguous facts about (for example) what constitutes consent.
In discussions of rape, I think as a society we still have yet to fully emerge from Matthew Hale's famous claim that "rape is an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder yet to be defended by the party accused, tho' never so innocent." I am exceptionally dubious that this was ever true, much less true now. The instinct seems related to a larger claim about the supposed ease of claiming victimhood. When something bad happens to you, the easiest thing to do is blame someone else, rather than own up to personal responsibility. In the public discourse about rape, this is operationalized as the belief that women who have sexual experiences that they consented to do but later regret retroactively label those experiences "rape". The assumption, following from Hale, is that (compared to the difficulty of admitting one simply made a bad decision), "rape is an accusation easily to be made". It's a cheap out for avoiding personal responsibility.
The idea that crying victim is common resonates with us because I think everybody knows somebody who we feel behaves this way: always blaming the world for his ails, never looking to himself. But what we forget is that we don't like those people. If the supposed benefits of crying victim is gaining public sympathy and avoiding stigma as the sort of person who makes stupid decisions, it tends to fail utterly. And I think that, if we're honest with ourselves, we'd admit that our distaste for this sort of behavior is strong enough that even in factually ambiguous situations, we're loathe to have much sympathy for the complainer. Bad things happen to everyone, but we take our lumps, and we focus on the things we could have done to avoid the harm so it doesn't happen again, rather than passively bemoan the cruel world which besot us with such travails.
In short, for most people and in most cases I think the conventional wisdom has it precisely backwards. There are massive harms associated with claiming to be a victim (both in terms of internal self-evaluation and interpersonal treatment); the path of least resistance is "lumping it", of characterizing the event as an unfortunate happenstance, perhaps, but certainly not rape. There's a good analogy to discrimination claims, which labor under a similar presumption of frivolous victim-claiming. There, too, the research seems to indicate that frivolous complaints are less of a problem than a systematic hesitation -- on the part of both potential victims and fact-finders -- to label anything discrimination. The net result is that we underestimate the degree to which people with legitimate complaints choose not to view them that way, and consequently overestimate the degree to which the claims that are made are just sour grapes:
There is a significant analogue in rape cases, which incorporate many similar concerns. As in discrimination cases, the prevailing narrative about rape accusations being "easily made" means that many woman undoubtedly have internalized the belief that the only sort of person who makes a rape claim (at least, outside certain exceptionally outrageous fact patterns) is the slut who can't own up to the consequences of her own choices. Consciously refusing to define the event as rape enables one to reestablish agency over the situation, maintaining control of the future process as well as preserving a self-image as a person in control of their own destiny.
There are other reasons why potential rape victims have a strong incentive not to view the relevant act as rape but rather, attributable to their own choices. In prior work on the subject, I've made reference to the Just World theory, a cognitive bias by which persons systematically try to interpret events so as to confirm a belief that the world is fair and just. One prominent manifestation of this bias is that, when presented with injustice that an observer is unable to prevent, the observer is far more likely to blame the victim. For example, researchers ran an experiment where a "learner" was given harsh electric shocks for giving wrong answers to academic questions. The research subjects both observed this happening, but one group was made simply to watch, while the other was given the option to end the shocks at any time. The latter set nearly invariably elected to do so and then described the shocking as immoral. The former group (which was unable to stop the shocks) was far more likely to consider the victim to be to blame for her maltreatment.
Why does this phenomenom exist, and what relevance does it have to rape? One of the reasons we believe in a just world is because we want to believe that if we behave correctly, good things will happen to us (or at the very least, bad things won't). Hence, when something bad does happen, it makes sense for us to (if at all possible) interpret it as our own fault. Why? Because if it stems from something we did wrong, then it's something we can fix (from a rationalist perspective, it makes good sense for us to overestimate how much our own actions influence our destiny). The alternative, that it doesn't matter, that you can do everything right and still be raped, is too scary to contemplate. So we shut out that interpretation, and replace it with one in which I did something bad. And if I'm to blame, then I wasn't raped, for rape is something that occurs to the blameless.
I've read many accounts by women who have, belatedly, determined that they were subject to rape but -- in the confused aftermath -- had slept with their rapist again. It is very consistent with this claim of cognitive rationalization by which the event is sanitized in their own mind, restoring their own sense of control and agency. It's part of the process of normalization, of reassuring oneself that nothing bad happened, nothing out of the ordinary happened, that there's no reason not to have sex with this person again. By choosing to have sex with the man the second time, one retroactively affirms that one chose it the first time, and by doing that, one extracts oneself from the status of passive, helpless victim, and back into the realm of a controlled, active agent.
So to sum up, there are many reasons why we should expect women who have been subjected to acts legitimately termed "rape" to not label their experience that way. First, there may simply be disagreement over what counts as rape, as in the case of people who believe that marriage creates irrevocable blanket consent to sex, and we can thus simply claim that some conclusions are wrong no matter who is promulgating them. Second, identifying oneself as a rape victim clashes with important aspects of most people's self-identity -- in the popular lexicon, it forces them to admit that they are vulnerable and that they weren't in control, and then forces them to exacerbate that lack of control by placing their experience into the public eye and open themselves to judgment. Third, people are well aware of the fact that most people don't like those who complain about anything, and thus have a strong incentive to not come off as a whiner, even when they have a very real and legitimate grievance. Fourth, reinterpreting the events in question as being one's own fault is cognitively more soothing than the alternative -- a brutal, capricious world where bad things happen to good people and you can be a perfectly good citizen and still be raped.
For those reasons, I think there is ample room for divergence between our measurement of how prevalent rape is, and how individual victims characterize their own experience.
In yesterday's post, I critiqued part of Ezra's argument that Koss' study did not accurately track the true definition of rape. My argument was that (a) the author was positing a single, unified (generally legal) definition of rape that does not exist, (b) that many of the specific alleged shortcomings identified by Ezra themselves do not track any modern definition of rape (e.g., that, in a case where a woman is too intoxicated to consent, the man must have been the person to ply her with alcohol or drugs and done so for the purpose of inhibiting her ability to consent), and (c) that even to the extent that Koss' definition doesn't track all legal variants, it's perfectly permissible for her to advocate her own definition of what rape is and measure accordingly.
In today's post, I want to turn to a very different argument Ezra made: the claim that many of the women surveyed whose experiences were coded as "rape" do not, themselves, characterize what happened to them that way. Again, quoting Gilbert, Ezra writes:
When asked directly, 73 percent of the students whom Koss categorized as victims of rape did not think that they had been raped. This discrepancy is underscored by the subsequent behavior of a high proportion of identified victims, forty-two percent of whom had sex again with the man who supposedly raped them. Of those categorized as victims of attempted rape, 35 percent later had sex with their purported offender.
There is obviously something to the notion that we should respect how women characterize their own experience, and should be appropriately skittish about labeling something rape when the alleged victim rejects that terminology. I recognize that, and thus consider this a more substantial critique than the claim of dissonance between Koss' definition and the (mythically-united) legal one.
Nonetheless, there are important limits to this proposition. For starters, to the extent we have some "easy cases" of when something is rape (i.e., ones in which there is considerable overlapping consensus that the event in question is rape), I think we are fair to give the act that label even if the victim herself wouldn't. Imagine the following spousal rape hypothetical, where the victim describes what happened in the following manner:
I was in bed with my husband, about to fall asleep, when he climbed on top of me and tried to enter me. I told him I didn't want to have sex and tried to push him off, but he ignored me and kept thrusting.
But when asked whether her husband raped her, the woman responds:
Oh, no. I wish he hadn't done it -- I wish he had listened when I told him no, and I hate when he forces himself on me -- but ultimately, we're married, and it's his prerogative to have sex with me at his discretion.
This is a pretty clear-cut spousal rape case. And assuming we do have a consensus that the marital rape exemption is bogus, I think we're right to label the act rape irrespective of the victim's self-description.
But obviously, many cases are hardly that clear-cut, and the problem is less a (mistaken) definition of what rape "is", and more about how people interpret ambiguous facts about (for example) what constitutes consent.
In discussions of rape, I think as a society we still have yet to fully emerge from Matthew Hale's famous claim that "rape is an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder yet to be defended by the party accused, tho' never so innocent." I am exceptionally dubious that this was ever true, much less true now. The instinct seems related to a larger claim about the supposed ease of claiming victimhood. When something bad happens to you, the easiest thing to do is blame someone else, rather than own up to personal responsibility. In the public discourse about rape, this is operationalized as the belief that women who have sexual experiences that they consented to do but later regret retroactively label those experiences "rape". The assumption, following from Hale, is that (compared to the difficulty of admitting one simply made a bad decision), "rape is an accusation easily to be made". It's a cheap out for avoiding personal responsibility.
The idea that crying victim is common resonates with us because I think everybody knows somebody who we feel behaves this way: always blaming the world for his ails, never looking to himself. But what we forget is that we don't like those people. If the supposed benefits of crying victim is gaining public sympathy and avoiding stigma as the sort of person who makes stupid decisions, it tends to fail utterly. And I think that, if we're honest with ourselves, we'd admit that our distaste for this sort of behavior is strong enough that even in factually ambiguous situations, we're loathe to have much sympathy for the complainer. Bad things happen to everyone, but we take our lumps, and we focus on the things we could have done to avoid the harm so it doesn't happen again, rather than passively bemoan the cruel world which besot us with such travails.
In short, for most people and in most cases I think the conventional wisdom has it precisely backwards. There are massive harms associated with claiming to be a victim (both in terms of internal self-evaluation and interpersonal treatment); the path of least resistance is "lumping it", of characterizing the event as an unfortunate happenstance, perhaps, but certainly not rape. There's a good analogy to discrimination claims, which labor under a similar presumption of frivolous victim-claiming. There, too, the research seems to indicate that frivolous complaints are less of a problem than a systematic hesitation -- on the part of both potential victims and fact-finders -- to label anything discrimination. The net result is that we underestimate the degree to which people with legitimate complaints choose not to view them that way, and consequently overestimate the degree to which the claims that are made are just sour grapes:
[A]ccording to one study, two-thirds of white women and members of minorities who report they have experienced discrimination on the job refrain from complaining to any third party, including legal officials, despite their rights under the laws against discrimination. Kristin Bumiller’s study of discrimination victims who do not sue concludes that they perceive the high costs of complaining and the real benefits [of] ‘lumping it,’ or absorbing the injury without complaint. Her interviews show that complaining through the civil rights laws means accepting the role of victim, which is itself demeaning and also ‘transforms the conflict into an internal contest to reconcile a positive self-image with the image of oneself as a powerless and defeated victim.’ In addition, complaining forces the individual into a visible role and, paradoxically, demands the differential treatment of public attention and dispute because of allegations of differential treatment. A new label, ‘troublemaker,’ also carries negative consequences for the individual. And besides risking a painful reconstruction of the discrimination event before an agency or court, the potential complainant may fear that the process will be unavailing. Other people may fail to confirm the story, or the legal system will prove unresponsive; meanwhile, the individual loses control over the incident and the process. There are special costs involved in hoping and then losing, costs that may even be more painful than never hoping at all.
Besides avoiding the negative consequences of complaining, people may discover direct benefits from enduring discrimination without complaint. Members of minority groups, especially minority women, come to expect discrimination as inevitable and may find an opportunity to exercise strength and pride in surviving without confrontation. The very act of submission may be an expression of autonomy and dignity precisely because it is a chosen response. Similarly, in her study of a religious Baptist town in Georgia, anthropologist Carol Greenhouse found women who tended to internalize conflicts within their families, coming to terms with such conflicts by refining their own roles and by focusing on their spiritual identities. Although this solution may work for some, it suggests complex reasons why people refrain from using the avenues of relief that law makes available. Most important, individual decisions to swallow injury fail to alter sources of hurt or discrimination, leaving those who cause harm undisturbed." (Martha Minow, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Cornell UP: 1991), 92-93)
There is a significant analogue in rape cases, which incorporate many similar concerns. As in discrimination cases, the prevailing narrative about rape accusations being "easily made" means that many woman undoubtedly have internalized the belief that the only sort of person who makes a rape claim (at least, outside certain exceptionally outrageous fact patterns) is the slut who can't own up to the consequences of her own choices. Consciously refusing to define the event as rape enables one to reestablish agency over the situation, maintaining control of the future process as well as preserving a self-image as a person in control of their own destiny.
There are other reasons why potential rape victims have a strong incentive not to view the relevant act as rape but rather, attributable to their own choices. In prior work on the subject, I've made reference to the Just World theory, a cognitive bias by which persons systematically try to interpret events so as to confirm a belief that the world is fair and just. One prominent manifestation of this bias is that, when presented with injustice that an observer is unable to prevent, the observer is far more likely to blame the victim. For example, researchers ran an experiment where a "learner" was given harsh electric shocks for giving wrong answers to academic questions. The research subjects both observed this happening, but one group was made simply to watch, while the other was given the option to end the shocks at any time. The latter set nearly invariably elected to do so and then described the shocking as immoral. The former group (which was unable to stop the shocks) was far more likely to consider the victim to be to blame for her maltreatment.
Why does this phenomenom exist, and what relevance does it have to rape? One of the reasons we believe in a just world is because we want to believe that if we behave correctly, good things will happen to us (or at the very least, bad things won't). Hence, when something bad does happen, it makes sense for us to (if at all possible) interpret it as our own fault. Why? Because if it stems from something we did wrong, then it's something we can fix (from a rationalist perspective, it makes good sense for us to overestimate how much our own actions influence our destiny). The alternative, that it doesn't matter, that you can do everything right and still be raped, is too scary to contemplate. So we shut out that interpretation, and replace it with one in which I did something bad. And if I'm to blame, then I wasn't raped, for rape is something that occurs to the blameless.
I've read many accounts by women who have, belatedly, determined that they were subject to rape but -- in the confused aftermath -- had slept with their rapist again. It is very consistent with this claim of cognitive rationalization by which the event is sanitized in their own mind, restoring their own sense of control and agency. It's part of the process of normalization, of reassuring oneself that nothing bad happened, nothing out of the ordinary happened, that there's no reason not to have sex with this person again. By choosing to have sex with the man the second time, one retroactively affirms that one chose it the first time, and by doing that, one extracts oneself from the status of passive, helpless victim, and back into the realm of a controlled, active agent.
So to sum up, there are many reasons why we should expect women who have been subjected to acts legitimately termed "rape" to not label their experience that way. First, there may simply be disagreement over what counts as rape, as in the case of people who believe that marriage creates irrevocable blanket consent to sex, and we can thus simply claim that some conclusions are wrong no matter who is promulgating them. Second, identifying oneself as a rape victim clashes with important aspects of most people's self-identity -- in the popular lexicon, it forces them to admit that they are vulnerable and that they weren't in control, and then forces them to exacerbate that lack of control by placing their experience into the public eye and open themselves to judgment. Third, people are well aware of the fact that most people don't like those who complain about anything, and thus have a strong incentive to not come off as a whiner, even when they have a very real and legitimate grievance. Fourth, reinterpreting the events in question as being one's own fault is cognitively more soothing than the alternative -- a brutal, capricious world where bad things happen to good people and you can be a perfectly good citizen and still be raped.
For those reasons, I think there is ample room for divergence between our measurement of how prevalent rape is, and how individual victims characterize their own experience.
Huckabee Plays Footsie with the Birthers
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R) (in what a spokesperson now is claiming was simply a misstatement) claimed that President Obama grew up in Kenya and expressed, at the very least, ambivalence regarding his place of birth.
Kevin Drum gives Huckabee credit for the best birther-dodge he's seen -- playing off the image of the Clinton's as ruthless smear-merchants as a reason why he's "not as confident" about the birth certificate being a legitimate issue. Unfortunately, the interviewer's follow-up managed to destroy that, as he plays off the emergent-theme of the Obama campaign as Chicago-style mafiosos as well: "The Clintons probably - there was probably a lot on the Clintons that the Obamas could have said, 'yeah, you do that, we'll come back with this.'" In any event, "I'm not as confident" is hardly the resounding rejection of birtherism that we ought to expect from any serious political figure.
Meanwhile, Jon Chait wonders why Obama's supposed "Kenyan anti-colonialism" is supposed to be a bad thing, given that the Tea Party is metaphorically inspired by ... resistance to British colonialism.
The only reason I'm not as confident that there's something about the birth certificate, Steve, is because I know the Clintons [inaudible] and believe me, they have lots of investigators out on him, and I'm convinced if there was anything that they could have found on that, they would have found it, and I promise they would have used it.
Kevin Drum gives Huckabee credit for the best birther-dodge he's seen -- playing off the image of the Clinton's as ruthless smear-merchants as a reason why he's "not as confident" about the birth certificate being a legitimate issue. Unfortunately, the interviewer's follow-up managed to destroy that, as he plays off the emergent-theme of the Obama campaign as Chicago-style mafiosos as well: "The Clintons probably - there was probably a lot on the Clintons that the Obamas could have said, 'yeah, you do that, we'll come back with this.'" In any event, "I'm not as confident" is hardly the resounding rejection of birtherism that we ought to expect from any serious political figure.
Meanwhile, Jon Chait wonders why Obama's supposed "Kenyan anti-colonialism" is supposed to be a bad thing, given that the Tea Party is metaphorically inspired by ... resistance to British colonialism.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
On Bad Critiques of Rape Prevelance Studies (Part I)
Michael Ezra of Harry's Place has a post up critiquing some of the literature regarding the prevalence of rape in our society. The immediate hook is some quotes by Eve Ensler at a recent talk, but the post quickly segues into an attack on the famous Mary Koss study which claimed that 1 in 4 college women surveyed have experienced rape and/or attempted rape at some point in their life. Contrary to Ezra's claim and popular belief, Koss did not originally publish this claim for Ms. Magazine, but in a peer-reviewed journal (Sexual experiences survey: A research instrument investigating sexual aggression and victimization, 50 The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 455 (1982)). Ms. Magazine helped support a national follow-up study, but that too was peer-reviewed and eventually published at 55 The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 162 (1987).
Anyway, that's the least substantive of my problems, which can be grouped into two major categories (sufficiently disjointed that I'm writing this as two separate posts). The first, which I'll focus on here, is that Ezra and his colleagues forward an unduly ossified conception of what "rape" is, when (as his own post makes clear) the contours of rape have been historical extremely variable and contested. In the subsequent post, I'll take issue with the weight Ezra puts on the fact that many of the women whom Koss claims were raped do not adopt that label to describe their own experience.
Ezra opens with a methodological objection that purports to demonstrate that Koss' questions improperly categorized as "rape" ambiguous or even clearly non-rape behaviors:
This is a very bizarre objection, on a couple of levels. First, note the claim that Koss needs to tailor her questions so they match the "legal definition of rape". This implies that there is (a) a single, unified legal definition of what rape is and (b) that neither Koss, nor anyone else, has the right to contest that definition or provide a counterdefinition. The former is false, the latter ridiculous.
Rape, both legally and in terms of public conception, has had a diverse array of definitions over the years and across societies. Ezra, of course, implicitly concedes this insofar as he nutpicks a few radical feminists with exceptionally broad conceptions of rape as examples of how ridiculous the whole field is. But even putting them aside, it's obviously the case that there are and have been different legal definitions of rape. For example, there is divergence in whether the victim must physically resist the rapist for it to be rape and, if so, what degree of resistance was required (some only required any amount of resistance, other states, notably Louisiana, require that the victim resist "to the utmost"). Whether spousal rape even exists has legally been in flux, with the consensus in favor only being established towards the end of the 20th century. There remains dispute, unfortunately, as to whether consent can be withdrawn -- that is, whether rape can occur if penetrative sex begins but does not cease if one of the party's withdraws their consent mid-coitus. Hence, actions which are rape in one jurisdiction might not be in another; Ezra and Gilbert are proffering an impossible demand if they expect Koss to be able to unify these by-design divergent threads.
But even if the definition was unified, there is no reason why Koss must defer to it. Many jurisdiction's have hideous definitions of what rape is, and Koss would be quite within her rights to define rape more expansively than they do. For example, at the time of her study, not all states had abolished the exemption for marital rape (North Carolina was the last to do so, in 1993). Should Koss have included a question asking her respondents to check off if any of the potentially-rape acts were committed by their spouse? Why? I imagine Koss thinks, and I agree, that for purposes of social science research we should label such acts rape regardless of whether the state defines it so or not.
I can't access Koss' study myself, so I don't know if she forwards a specific definition of rape. My rough-and-ready definition is that rape is when a person engages in a penetrative sexual act without consent (and sexual assault is when a person engages in any sort of sexual act without consent). That's a reasonable enough definition, in my view, albeit more expansive than many state definitions (it also locates nearly all of the action at the question of "consent" -- most of the radical feminists Ezra derides claim, incorrectly in my view, that various aspects of patriarchy make meaningful consent usually or always impossible in heterosexual encounters. That claim may be wrong, but I don't think it argues against the claim that consent is the sine qua non of what is and isn't rape). It may be one pole of the debate (the other being, as one wag noted, rape being only "forcibly raping a baby who wasn't too much of a slut."), but it's one I'm willing to defend, in contrast to the "middle ground" which adds in requirements of physical coercion, unmarriedness, virginity, or what-have-you.
Ironically, the specific objection Ezra and Gilbert raise "that the man had administered the alcohol for this purpose [of rendering the woman incapable of granting consent]" corresponds to no legal definition of rape that I'm aware of -- at least, of those for whom intercourse with a woman too intoxicated to give consent would count as rape. If a woman is in a position where she is incapable of granting consent due to intoxication, not only does it not matter if the man intended for her to get that way, it doesn't matter if he played any role whatsoever in intoxicating her -- a man who randomly stumbles across a woman too intoxicated to consent and sleeps with her anyway strikes me as a very easy case for conviction, and I think it would be in most jurisdictions.
Finally, with respect to the "legalization" of this discussion, it's also worth noting that it's perfectly consistent to have different standards for what rape is from the perspective of answering "was this woman raped" and "should we impose criminal liability on the accused"? Mistake-of-fact defenses, where we believe both that the woman did not consent to sexual activity, but the man reasonably believed that she did, are an example where many people would be willing to simultaneously say that the woman was raped but that the man shouldn't be punished. Not everyone, and not always (we don't admit a mistake-of-fact defense in statutory rape cases, for instance, and there are some who would extend that to all rape prosecutions and would suggest that sexual partners always be sure to gain active consent before any encounter), but the distinction itself is coherent. Law -- criminal and civil -- isn't capable of correcting or even encompassing every wrong, but that doesn't mean law ought exhaust our moral vocabulary.
Anyway, assuming Koss' definition of rape roughly tracks my own, and is intended not to focus on the perpetrators (how many men should we punish as rapists?) but on the victims (how many women have experienced what is properly termed rape?), the challenged questions seem perfectly appropriate. Koss seems invested in the notion that sex is only legitimate when all parties involved wish to have sex -- hardly a morally shocking claim or indicative of academic malpractice. By contrast, Ezra and Gilbert both falsely posit a legal unity to the definition of rape (one whose contours are vague but seems, in important respects, far narrower than that extant in many if not most legal jurisdictions), then demand that it colonize the entire field such that no researcher or advocate can ever challenge it. That's a bad critique.
UPDATE: Part II is now available here.
Anyway, that's the least substantive of my problems, which can be grouped into two major categories (sufficiently disjointed that I'm writing this as two separate posts). The first, which I'll focus on here, is that Ezra and his colleagues forward an unduly ossified conception of what "rape" is, when (as his own post makes clear) the contours of rape have been historical extremely variable and contested. In the subsequent post, I'll take issue with the weight Ezra puts on the fact that many of the women whom Koss claims were raped do not adopt that label to describe their own experience.
Ezra opens with a methodological objection that purports to demonstrate that Koss' questions improperly categorized as "rape" ambiguous or even clearly non-rape behaviors:
Neil Gilbert (“Realities and Mythologies of Rape” [subscription required] Society, May/June 1992 pp.4-10) commented on the questions that were included in the survey. As well as those that referred to the threat or use of “some degree of physical force,” there were the following two questions:
Have you had a man attempt sexual intercourse (get on top of you, attempt to insert his penis) when you didn’t want to by giving you alcohol or drugs, but intercourse did not occur?
Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?
Gilbert declared:Forty-four percent of all the women identified as victims of rape and attempted rape in the previous year were so labeled because they responded positively to these awkward and vaguely worded questions. What does having sex “because” a man gives you drugs or alcohol signify? A positive response does not indicate whether duress, intoxication, force, or the threat of force were present; whether the woman’s judgment or control were substantially impaired; or whether the man purposely got the woman drunk to prevent her from resisting his sexual advances. It could mean that a woman was trading sex for drugs or that a few drinks lowered the respondent’s inhibitions and she consented to an act she later regretted. Koss assumes that a positive answer signifies the respondent engaged in sexual intercourse against her will because she was intoxicated to the point of being unable to deny consent (and that the man had administered the alcohol for this purpose). While the item could have been clearly worded to denote “intentional incapacitation of the victim,” as the question stands it would require a mind reader to detect whether an affirmative response corresponds to a legal definition of rape.
This is a very bizarre objection, on a couple of levels. First, note the claim that Koss needs to tailor her questions so they match the "legal definition of rape". This implies that there is (a) a single, unified legal definition of what rape is and (b) that neither Koss, nor anyone else, has the right to contest that definition or provide a counterdefinition. The former is false, the latter ridiculous.
Rape, both legally and in terms of public conception, has had a diverse array of definitions over the years and across societies. Ezra, of course, implicitly concedes this insofar as he nutpicks a few radical feminists with exceptionally broad conceptions of rape as examples of how ridiculous the whole field is. But even putting them aside, it's obviously the case that there are and have been different legal definitions of rape. For example, there is divergence in whether the victim must physically resist the rapist for it to be rape and, if so, what degree of resistance was required (some only required any amount of resistance, other states, notably Louisiana, require that the victim resist "to the utmost"). Whether spousal rape even exists has legally been in flux, with the consensus in favor only being established towards the end of the 20th century. There remains dispute, unfortunately, as to whether consent can be withdrawn -- that is, whether rape can occur if penetrative sex begins but does not cease if one of the party's withdraws their consent mid-coitus. Hence, actions which are rape in one jurisdiction might not be in another; Ezra and Gilbert are proffering an impossible demand if they expect Koss to be able to unify these by-design divergent threads.
But even if the definition was unified, there is no reason why Koss must defer to it. Many jurisdiction's have hideous definitions of what rape is, and Koss would be quite within her rights to define rape more expansively than they do. For example, at the time of her study, not all states had abolished the exemption for marital rape (North Carolina was the last to do so, in 1993). Should Koss have included a question asking her respondents to check off if any of the potentially-rape acts were committed by their spouse? Why? I imagine Koss thinks, and I agree, that for purposes of social science research we should label such acts rape regardless of whether the state defines it so or not.
I can't access Koss' study myself, so I don't know if she forwards a specific definition of rape. My rough-and-ready definition is that rape is when a person engages in a penetrative sexual act without consent (and sexual assault is when a person engages in any sort of sexual act without consent). That's a reasonable enough definition, in my view, albeit more expansive than many state definitions (it also locates nearly all of the action at the question of "consent" -- most of the radical feminists Ezra derides claim, incorrectly in my view, that various aspects of patriarchy make meaningful consent usually or always impossible in heterosexual encounters. That claim may be wrong, but I don't think it argues against the claim that consent is the sine qua non of what is and isn't rape). It may be one pole of the debate (the other being, as one wag noted, rape being only "forcibly raping a baby who wasn't too much of a slut."), but it's one I'm willing to defend, in contrast to the "middle ground" which adds in requirements of physical coercion, unmarriedness, virginity, or what-have-you.
Ironically, the specific objection Ezra and Gilbert raise "that the man had administered the alcohol for this purpose [of rendering the woman incapable of granting consent]" corresponds to no legal definition of rape that I'm aware of -- at least, of those for whom intercourse with a woman too intoxicated to give consent would count as rape. If a woman is in a position where she is incapable of granting consent due to intoxication, not only does it not matter if the man intended for her to get that way, it doesn't matter if he played any role whatsoever in intoxicating her -- a man who randomly stumbles across a woman too intoxicated to consent and sleeps with her anyway strikes me as a very easy case for conviction, and I think it would be in most jurisdictions.
Finally, with respect to the "legalization" of this discussion, it's also worth noting that it's perfectly consistent to have different standards for what rape is from the perspective of answering "was this woman raped" and "should we impose criminal liability on the accused"? Mistake-of-fact defenses, where we believe both that the woman did not consent to sexual activity, but the man reasonably believed that she did, are an example where many people would be willing to simultaneously say that the woman was raped but that the man shouldn't be punished. Not everyone, and not always (we don't admit a mistake-of-fact defense in statutory rape cases, for instance, and there are some who would extend that to all rape prosecutions and would suggest that sexual partners always be sure to gain active consent before any encounter), but the distinction itself is coherent. Law -- criminal and civil -- isn't capable of correcting or even encompassing every wrong, but that doesn't mean law ought exhaust our moral vocabulary.
Anyway, assuming Koss' definition of rape roughly tracks my own, and is intended not to focus on the perpetrators (how many men should we punish as rapists?) but on the victims (how many women have experienced what is properly termed rape?), the challenged questions seem perfectly appropriate. Koss seems invested in the notion that sex is only legitimate when all parties involved wish to have sex -- hardly a morally shocking claim or indicative of academic malpractice. By contrast, Ezra and Gilbert both falsely posit a legal unity to the definition of rape (one whose contours are vague but seems, in important respects, far narrower than that extant in many if not most legal jurisdictions), then demand that it colonize the entire field such that no researcher or advocate can ever challenge it. That's a bad critique.
UPDATE: Part II is now available here.
Being Better = Cheating
Shorter Newsreal:
Obama's proposal to let states offer alternative health care plans so long as they "can cover as many people as affordably and comprehensively as the Affordable Care Act does, without increasing the deficit" is a trick, because (unlike single-payer, which meets this requirement handily) every GOP health plan covers fewer people at greater cost. This demonstrates, not that Republicans don't have a serious agenda with respect to health care, nor that single-payer is a good idea, but that Obama is "cheating".
Obama's proposal to let states offer alternative health care plans so long as they "can cover as many people as affordably and comprehensively as the Affordable Care Act does, without increasing the deficit" is a trick, because (unlike single-payer, which meets this requirement handily) every GOP health plan covers fewer people at greater cost. This demonstrates, not that Republicans don't have a serious agenda with respect to health care, nor that single-payer is a good idea, but that Obama is "cheating".
Back in Chicago
I just got back in this afternoon. It was an exhausting weekend -- Chicago to Florida to DC and back in the space of four days. And yet, in the immortal words of Faithless, "I can't get no sleep."
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Traveling
Going to Florida, then Maryland on family business. Be back Tuesday. Probably will blog little, if at all. Behave yourselves until then.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Gay Marriage Bill Passes Maryland Senate
The final tally was 25 ayes to 21 nays. The bill now moves to the state Assembly, which had traditionally been considered more friendly to gay marriage than the Senate. But according to the WaPo, equal rights supporters are still counting votes, and are not 100% confident of passage ("confident but not overconfident", is how the majority leader puts it).
Fiscal Hackery FTW
Can you smell the seriousity?
I'm not sure how serious to take any one on the question of deficits (I'm not sure how much I care about the topic myself). But with Republicans, I really think it's difficult to even draw a coherent line through their fiscal positions. They support slashing public programs to groups they don't like, but they turn around and plow the savings back into tax breaks for the wealthy -- a massively regressive upwards wealth distribution. None of it goes into deficit reduction. And of course, there are plenty of governmental spending categories -- particularly on the federal level (defense) but also in terms of state-subsidies -- that Republicans absolutely refuse to cut.
Democrats may not be interested in cutting spending (though I'm sure they have their list of programs worth cutting -- starting with overblown weapons budgets and continuing over to abstinence-only education), but at least they're willing to support the tax rates necessary to pay for their ambitions.
Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott Walker, says that concern over his state's relatively modest budget crisis motivates his drive to strip public-sector employees of their ability to bargain collectively. And, yet, he just decided to put Wisconsin into a fiscal strait-jacket, signing a bill Tuesday that would require a two-thirds supermajority in the state legislature or a state-wide referendum to raise a range of taxes. This is not the sign of a serious budget hawk, whatever you think of Walker's policies on public-sector unions.
I'm not sure how serious to take any one on the question of deficits (I'm not sure how much I care about the topic myself). But with Republicans, I really think it's difficult to even draw a coherent line through their fiscal positions. They support slashing public programs to groups they don't like, but they turn around and plow the savings back into tax breaks for the wealthy -- a massively regressive upwards wealth distribution. None of it goes into deficit reduction. And of course, there are plenty of governmental spending categories -- particularly on the federal level (defense) but also in terms of state-subsidies -- that Republicans absolutely refuse to cut.
Democrats may not be interested in cutting spending (though I'm sure they have their list of programs worth cutting -- starting with overblown weapons budgets and continuing over to abstinence-only education), but at least they're willing to support the tax rates necessary to pay for their ambitions.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Union-Busting as Health Care Reform
As Steve Benen reports, what once looked like a wave of Republican union-busting legislation has been more or less arrested at Wisconsin, with a parallel bill in Indiana being withdrawn and GOP Iowa Governor Terry Branstad declaring he isn't interested in similar legislation in his state.
If you had asked me in advance what issue would arouse the soporific left from its torpor, I wouldn't have guessed that collective bargaining legislation would be it. After all, the Democratic salvo in this controversy -- the card-check bill -- died with little more than a whimper last Congress. But hey, catch what can.
It seems to me that this controversy is beginning to trace the trajectory of the debate over PPACA. There, like here, the governing party thought it had the mandate to make a sweeping change. There, like here, opponents were convinced that the other party had overreached, and were able to muster massive and highly publicized protests that fired up their base and re-energized their flagging electoral prospects.
The question is -- what happens next? In the health care debate, Republicans rapidly decided that a mutually-amenable compromise was their enemy. The important thing was prolonging the debate for as long as possible, keeping it in the news as an example of a radical administration that must be stopped. So while there was a lot of talk about "slowing down" and not "ramming the bill" through, the GOP was very careful to not actually make any substantive concessions or proposals of its own.
And Democrats played along, trying, futilely, to garner GOP approval; searching for an elusive bipartisanship that, by design, was never to be. And in their failure, the GOP won the media narrative -- PPACA couldn't be a sensible, practical approach to a serious national problem. Since only Democrats supported it, and we all know that any legislation worth supporting is bipartisan, it must be a partisan hatchet-job, Democratic maximalism promulgated by overconfident, out of touch party leaders. And so it was that a health care reform bill whose primary components were originally Republican ideas became the greatest instrument of socialism since the Cold War.
I'd be interested to see if Democrats play the same game. If you have momentum, don't let the GOP off the hook. Characterize everything as renewed union-busting, the kissing cousin of the radical Scott Walker proposals (how do we know they're extreme? Because real, heartland Americans are protesting them!). No compromises, no mercy -- just hammer it home, day after day: Republicans want to hurt teachers, police officers, and firemen. They want only the middle class to sacrifice while the fatcats get tax breaks. On and on -- a drum beat of progressive fury that does to the GOP what the Tea Party did to us.
Of course, there were many voices within the Democratic Party during the health care debate that understood precisely what was happening, and urged Democrats to actually take a maximalist position. After all, if you're going to get blamed for it anyway, you might as well get some of the sweet with the bitter -- a genuinely ambitious, single-payer health care system. And one wonders if Republicans are keen enough to adopt this strategy -- if they're going to get raked over the coals regardless, they might as well please their corporate clients and blow up the unions.
Anyway, I'm not saying that's how it's going to play out. But I do find it interesting the way that this issue seems to be developing into a genuine Democratic parallel to the Tea Party during PPACA.
If you had asked me in advance what issue would arouse the soporific left from its torpor, I wouldn't have guessed that collective bargaining legislation would be it. After all, the Democratic salvo in this controversy -- the card-check bill -- died with little more than a whimper last Congress. But hey, catch what can.
It seems to me that this controversy is beginning to trace the trajectory of the debate over PPACA. There, like here, the governing party thought it had the mandate to make a sweeping change. There, like here, opponents were convinced that the other party had overreached, and were able to muster massive and highly publicized protests that fired up their base and re-energized their flagging electoral prospects.
The question is -- what happens next? In the health care debate, Republicans rapidly decided that a mutually-amenable compromise was their enemy. The important thing was prolonging the debate for as long as possible, keeping it in the news as an example of a radical administration that must be stopped. So while there was a lot of talk about "slowing down" and not "ramming the bill" through, the GOP was very careful to not actually make any substantive concessions or proposals of its own.
And Democrats played along, trying, futilely, to garner GOP approval; searching for an elusive bipartisanship that, by design, was never to be. And in their failure, the GOP won the media narrative -- PPACA couldn't be a sensible, practical approach to a serious national problem. Since only Democrats supported it, and we all know that any legislation worth supporting is bipartisan, it must be a partisan hatchet-job, Democratic maximalism promulgated by overconfident, out of touch party leaders. And so it was that a health care reform bill whose primary components were originally Republican ideas became the greatest instrument of socialism since the Cold War.
I'd be interested to see if Democrats play the same game. If you have momentum, don't let the GOP off the hook. Characterize everything as renewed union-busting, the kissing cousin of the radical Scott Walker proposals (how do we know they're extreme? Because real, heartland Americans are protesting them!). No compromises, no mercy -- just hammer it home, day after day: Republicans want to hurt teachers, police officers, and firemen. They want only the middle class to sacrifice while the fatcats get tax breaks. On and on -- a drum beat of progressive fury that does to the GOP what the Tea Party did to us.
Of course, there were many voices within the Democratic Party during the health care debate that understood precisely what was happening, and urged Democrats to actually take a maximalist position. After all, if you're going to get blamed for it anyway, you might as well get some of the sweet with the bitter -- a genuinely ambitious, single-payer health care system. And one wonders if Republicans are keen enough to adopt this strategy -- if they're going to get raked over the coals regardless, they might as well please their corporate clients and blow up the unions.
Anyway, I'm not saying that's how it's going to play out. But I do find it interesting the way that this issue seems to be developing into a genuine Democratic parallel to the Tea Party during PPACA.
Indiana Assistant Attorney General Advocates "Live Ammo" Against Protesters
Absolutely shocking:
I mean, I've enjoyed the solidarity messages coming from North Africa to the American Midwest, but I'd really prefer the similarities end before we have state officials advocating the massacre of unarmed protesters.
UPDATE: The official in question has been fired.
On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn't end up happening—one Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: "Use live ammunition."
From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were "political enemies" and "thugs" who were "physically threatening legally elected officials." In response to such behavior, he said, "You're damned right I advocate deadly force." He later called me a "typical leftist," adding, "liberals hate police."
Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.
I mean, I've enjoyed the solidarity messages coming from North Africa to the American Midwest, but I'd really prefer the similarities end before we have state officials advocating the massacre of unarmed protesters.
UPDATE: The official in question has been fired.
DOJ No Longer Will Defend DOMA
This just out from the DOJ:
I think this makes sense. It is exceptionally difficult to justify declining heightened scrutiny to gays and lesbians; as my Comment points out, the lack of constitutional protection for GLBT persons is more attributable to the badly inconsistent use of "political power" as an operative element in the Court's tiered-scrutiny jurisprudence than anything that can be truly characterized as a "legal" reason (the DOJ announcement also buttresses my larger claim that the constitutional status of gay legal claims will rise in tandem with their increased political and social clout -- the DOJ explicitly notes both legal and political advances by gay rights forces as part of the reason for its reversal). Where there is explicit precedent -- however bogus -- that anti-gay classifications receive rational basis review, it makes sense to defend the law on that axis. Where that precedent is absent and we are reviewing the law of the legal land untainted, the clearly correct position is that these laws are subject to heightened scrutiny, and cannot survive it.
In the two years since this Administration took office, the Department of Justice has defended Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act on several occasions in federal court. Each of those cases evaluating Section 3 was considered in jurisdictions in which binding circuit court precedents hold that laws singling out people based on sexual orientation, as DOMA does, are constitutional if there is a rational basis for their enactment. While the President opposes DOMA and believes it should be repealed, the Department has defended it in court because we were able to advance reasonable arguments under that rational basis standard.
Section 3 of DOMA has now been challenged in the Second Circuit, however, which has no established or binding standard for how laws concerning sexual orientation should be treated. In these cases, the Administration faces for the first time the question of whether laws regarding sexual orientation are subject to the more permissive standard of review or whether a more rigorous standard, under which laws targeting minority groups with a history of discrimination are viewed with suspicion by the courts, should apply.
After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the President has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny. The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the President has instructed the Department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the President’s determination.
I think this makes sense. It is exceptionally difficult to justify declining heightened scrutiny to gays and lesbians; as my Comment points out, the lack of constitutional protection for GLBT persons is more attributable to the badly inconsistent use of "political power" as an operative element in the Court's tiered-scrutiny jurisprudence than anything that can be truly characterized as a "legal" reason (the DOJ announcement also buttresses my larger claim that the constitutional status of gay legal claims will rise in tandem with their increased political and social clout -- the DOJ explicitly notes both legal and political advances by gay rights forces as part of the reason for its reversal). Where there is explicit precedent -- however bogus -- that anti-gay classifications receive rational basis review, it makes sense to defend the law on that axis. Where that precedent is absent and we are reviewing the law of the legal land untainted, the clearly correct position is that these laws are subject to heightened scrutiny, and cannot survive it.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Strange Bedfellows
Glenn Beck is now calling Reform Jews -- a plurality of the American Jewish population -- "almost like" "radical Islam". The line was that, like "radicalized Islam", Reform Jews (specifically, Reform Rabbis) are more about "politics" than they are "religion" -- thus creating two entirely separate points of offense: Comparing the bulk of American Jewry to a movement Beck believes to be at the heart of contemporary international evil, and arrogating to himself the right to define what Jewish religious experience is.
Of course, unlike PG -- who, by merely omitting to play the "do you deny you beat your wife" game, became the greatest enemy of the Jewish people ever to spill ink on this comment section -- some continue to harbor doubts over whether it is really fair to accuse Beck of anti-Semitism. Creating overwhelmingly Jewish "enemies lists? Meh. Accusing a prominent Jewish financier (and Holocaust survivor) of trying to create a "shadow government", being a Nazi collaborator, and manipulating global financial markets for his own personal gain? Shrug.
We'll just "keep watching".
UPDATE: The ADL has condemned Beck for his "bigoted ignorance."
Of course, unlike PG -- who, by merely omitting to play the "do you deny you beat your wife" game, became the greatest enemy of the Jewish people ever to spill ink on this comment section -- some continue to harbor doubts over whether it is really fair to accuse Beck of anti-Semitism. Creating overwhelmingly Jewish "enemies lists? Meh. Accusing a prominent Jewish financier (and Holocaust survivor) of trying to create a "shadow government", being a Nazi collaborator, and manipulating global financial markets for his own personal gain? Shrug.
We'll just "keep watching".
UPDATE: The ADL has condemned Beck for his "bigoted ignorance."
That Can Be Arranged
Well, he doesn't appear to be in Venezuela, and embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has promised to stay in the country he's ruled for 40 years and die as "a martyr".
I have to admit, that doesn't strike me as the worst outcome in the world -- though I suspect the "martyrdom" aspect of it will be limited. Perhaps Daniel Ortega can give a toast in his honor.
I have to admit, that doesn't strike me as the worst outcome in the world -- though I suspect the "martyrdom" aspect of it will be limited. Perhaps Daniel Ortega can give a toast in his honor.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Report: Gaddafi Flees to Venezuela
It isn't confirmed, but reports are that Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi is fleeing to Venezuela. Hugo Chavez -- recipient of Gaddafi's joke human rights award -- is a close ally of the Libyan dictator.
Meanwhile, there are reports that the Libyan air force is firing on protesters, and two pilots have defected along with their jets to Malta after reportedly being ordered to fire on civilian demonstrators.
Meanwhile, there are reports that the Libyan air force is firing on protesters, and two pilots have defected along with their jets to Malta after reportedly being ordered to fire on civilian demonstrators.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Only Difference
There's a ton of talk out there about what Obama should or shouldn't have done with respect to the Egypt and Tunisian rebellions. One major refrain is that the success of the revolts in these two countries show that, had Obama pushed a little harder during Iran's 2009 Green Revolution, that country's dictatorship could have fallen too.
I'm dubious. The US didn't really do much of anything but watch and try and stay out of the fray in Egypt (Tunisia we barely even had time to react to). And when you think about it, how much can we do? Ultimately, any revolution is going to be in the hands of the people revolting -- it's their concerns and their conditions which dictate the course of the movement. Except where the US can credibly threaten to intervene militarily -- implausible in all the countries we're talking about -- there is very little we can do to influence the situation, at least overtly.
Actually, I think there is one very simple reason why Egypt succeeded where Iran failed. As LGM put it, the Tank commander said "no":
And that's the key difference. Protesters rarely stand any chance, pound-for-pound, against a halfway decent state military apparatus. The question is whether, when push comes to shove, the military is actually willing to crush the demonstrations violently, or whether they link up with them. In Egypt, they weren't willing to fire on their own people. In Iran, they were. And so we have our different outcomes.
In any event, we're going to get a bunch of new data points on this shortly. New protests are emerging in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Iran again. Obviously, I hope for the best in all of these countries. But I think the ultimate outcome is not likely to be contingent on what Americans say or do. It has to do with the nerve of the protesters, and the ultimate decisions of the country's military forces -- to join the revolution, or crush it.
I'm dubious. The US didn't really do much of anything but watch and try and stay out of the fray in Egypt (Tunisia we barely even had time to react to). And when you think about it, how much can we do? Ultimately, any revolution is going to be in the hands of the people revolting -- it's their concerns and their conditions which dictate the course of the movement. Except where the US can credibly threaten to intervene militarily -- implausible in all the countries we're talking about -- there is very little we can do to influence the situation, at least overtly.
Actually, I think there is one very simple reason why Egypt succeeded where Iran failed. As LGM put it, the Tank commander said "no":
Last night, a military officer guarding the tens of thousands celebrating in Cairo threw down his rifle and joined the demonstrators, yet another sign of the ordinary Egyptian soldier's growing sympathy for the democracy demonstrators. We had witnessed many similar sentiments from the army over the past two weeks. But the critical moment came on the evening of 30 January when, it is now clear, Mubarak ordered the Egyptian Third Army to crush the demonstrators in Tahrir Square with their tanks after flying F-16 fighter bombers at low level over the protesters.
Many of the senior tank commanders could be seen tearing off their headsets – over which they had received the fatal orders – to use their mobile phones. They were, it now transpires, calling their own military families for advice. Fathers who had spent their lives serving the Egyptian army told their sons to disobey, that they must never kill their own people.
Thus when General Hassan al-Rawani told the massive crowds yesterday evening that "everything you want will be realised – all your demands will be met", the people cried back: "The army and the people stand together – the army and the people are united. The army and the people belong to one hand."
And that's the key difference. Protesters rarely stand any chance, pound-for-pound, against a halfway decent state military apparatus. The question is whether, when push comes to shove, the military is actually willing to crush the demonstrations violently, or whether they link up with them. In Egypt, they weren't willing to fire on their own people. In Iran, they were. And so we have our different outcomes.
In any event, we're going to get a bunch of new data points on this shortly. New protests are emerging in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Iran again. Obviously, I hope for the best in all of these countries. But I think the ultimate outcome is not likely to be contingent on what Americans say or do. It has to do with the nerve of the protesters, and the ultimate decisions of the country's military forces -- to join the revolution, or crush it.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Scareware is Evil
Laptop is deader than dead, thanks to some particularly nasty scareware malware. I'm trying to get my files off the hard drive and then reinstall Windows, but, you know, who knows how that's all going play out (or how long it will take).
Blergh.
Blergh.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Step Backward in NH
As Maryland edges closer to legalizing gay marriage, New Hampshire, which already has such a law, is teetering precariously close to repealing it after Republicans took supermajorities in both legislative houses (they'll need the extra margin, as Democratic Governor John Lynch has pledged to veto any repeal vote).
There is a weird asymmetry between how I perceive failures to legalize gay marriage, and repeals of prior legalization. Obviously, in one sense the difference is obvious -- the loss of something we once had. But I think there's more than that.
I noted in the wake of President Obama's election that there was extra pain in the simultaneous repeal of California's gay marriage legalization, as it represented an affirmative decision to consciously exclude a group of citizens from one of the most important symbols of American inclusion in our nation's history.
From the perspective of New Hampshire law as it currently stands, gays and straights are treated entirely equally. What is being proposed is electing to strip only one of those two classes of the rights and privileges of marriage. At least in situations where the law does not allow gay marriage, one could say with a straight face that the law was written without thinking about gay people, and then rely on inertia for why it wasn't being changed to include them. Here, there is no denying the conscious anti-gay character of the enactment. It is evil by commission, not omission.
There is a weird asymmetry between how I perceive failures to legalize gay marriage, and repeals of prior legalization. Obviously, in one sense the difference is obvious -- the loss of something we once had. But I think there's more than that.
I noted in the wake of President Obama's election that there was extra pain in the simultaneous repeal of California's gay marriage legalization, as it represented an affirmative decision to consciously exclude a group of citizens from one of the most important symbols of American inclusion in our nation's history.
From the perspective of New Hampshire law as it currently stands, gays and straights are treated entirely equally. What is being proposed is electing to strip only one of those two classes of the rights and privileges of marriage. At least in situations where the law does not allow gay marriage, one could say with a straight face that the law was written without thinking about gay people, and then rely on inertia for why it wasn't being changed to include them. Here, there is no denying the conscious anti-gay character of the enactment. It is evil by commission, not omission.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The Votes
We last left off the Maryland gay marriage bill at 21 of the 24 votes needed for passage on the floor, following the stunning and stirring reversal by Sen. Jim Brochin (D). Brochin had been a primary advocate for "civil unions", saying he "stumbled" over the word marriage. But after hearing what he called the "venom" flowing from gay marriage opponents, he decided that his problem with the word marriage was his problem, not the law's.
The bill just passed a key committee vote today, and now heads to the Senate floor. The Washington Post reports that the bill appears to have exactly 24 votes at the moment, with two members undecided. But there are some awfully waver-y folks among that number, and everyone expects the vote to be agonizingly close (the House of Delegates, by contrast, is expected to pass the bill much more easily).
The bill just passed a key committee vote today, and now heads to the Senate floor. The Washington Post reports that the bill appears to have exactly 24 votes at the moment, with two members undecided. But there are some awfully waver-y folks among that number, and everyone expects the vote to be agonizingly close (the House of Delegates, by contrast, is expected to pass the bill much more easily).
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