wired | The transhumanist age -- where radical science and technology
will revolutionise the human being and experience -- will
eventually bring us indefinite lifespans, cyborgization, cloning,
and even ectogenesis, where
people use artificial wombs outside of their bodies to raise
foetuses.
Breeding controls and measures make more sense when you consider
that some leading life extensionist scientists believe we will
conquer human mortality in the next 20 years. Already, in 2010,
scientists had some success with stopping and reversing ageing in mice. The obvious question is: In this
transhumanist future, should everyone still be allowed to have
unlimited children whenever they want?
In an attempt to solve this problem and give hundreds of
millions of future kids a better life, I cautiously endorse the
idea of licensing parents, a process that would be little different
than getting a driver's licence.
The philosophical conundrum of controlling human procreation
rests mostly on whether all human beings are actually responsible
enough to be good parents and can provide properly for their
offspring. Clearly, untold numbers of children -- for example,
those millions that are slaves in the illegal human trafficking
industry -- are born to unfit parents.
In an attempt to solve this problem and give hundreds of
millions of future kids a better life, I cautiously endorse the
idea of licensing parents, a process that would be little different
than getting a driver's licence. Parents who pass a series of basic
tests qualify and get the green light to get pregnant and raise
children. Those applicants who are deemed unworthy -- perhaps
because they are homeless, or have drug problems, or are violent
criminals, or have no resources to raise a child properly and keep
it from going hungry -- would not be allowed until they could
demonstrate they were suitable parents.
starbuckseverywhere |
Society's ills will never be corrected by attacking the symptoms, which
is the path taken by many, from politicians to charitable organizations.
To solve the world's problems, we need to attack the root causes.
Religion is one such cause, as is overpopulation. Related to
overpopulation is the idea that people should have the right to
procreate according to their desires. Besides overpopulation, this right
creates other problems, the primary of which is an inability to tackle
the number one root cause of humanity's troubles--human nature itself.
Below are examples of how society has been harmed by allowing people to
procreate at will.
WaPo | This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a
time when his progressive allies are hailing him as a revolutionary, a
man who only last week broadened the power of priests to forgive women
who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion
during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. On
Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter
to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum seekers risking all
to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.
Yet
as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a
conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the
church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior
church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more
polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the
great papal reformers of the 1960s.
The conservative rebellion is
taking on many guises — in public comments, yes, but also in the rising
popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis
dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative
clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news
media, aimed at Vatican reformers.
In his recent comments, Burke
was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope,
church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal
reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is
complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into
tangible changes.
“At least we aren’t poisoning each other’s
chalices anymore,” said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, a liberal British
priest and Francis ally appointed to an influential Vatican post in May.
Radcliffe said he welcomed open debate, even critical dissent within
the church. But he professed himself as being “afraid” of “some of what
we’re seeing”
royalsociety | Studies aimed at explaining the evolution of phenotypic traits have
often solely focused on fitness considerations, ignoring underlying
mechanisms. In recent years, there has been an increasing call for
integrating mechanistic perspectives in evolutionary considerations, but
it is not clear whether and how mechanisms affect the course and
outcome of evolution. To study this, we compare four mechanistic
implementations of two well-studied models for the evolution of
cooperation, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) game and the Iterated
Snowdrift (ISD) game. Behavioural strategies are either implemented by a
1 : 1 genotype–phenotype mapping or by a simple neural network.
Moreover, we consider two different scenarios for the effect of
mutations. The same set of strategies is feasible in all four
implementations, but the probability that a given strategy arises owing
to mutation is largely dependent on the behavioural and genetic
architecture. Our individual-based simulations show that this has major
implications for the evolutionary outcome. In the ISD, different
evolutionarily stable strategies are predominant in the four
implementations, while in the IPD each implementation creates a
characteristic dynamical pattern. As a consequence, the evolved average
level of cooperation is also strongly dependent on the underlying
mechanism. We argue that our findings are of general relevance for the
evolution of social behaviour, pleading for the integration of a
mechanistic perspective in models of social evolution.
medicalexpress | People with psychopathic characteristics are
less likely to be affected by "contagious yawning" than those who are
empathetic, according to a Baylor University psychology study.
Yawning
after spotting someone else yawn is associated with empathy and
bonding, and "catching" yawns happens with many social mammals, among
them humans, chimpanzees and dogs, researchers say.
The study—"Contagious yawning and psychopathy"—involved 135 college student respondents and was published online in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
"You may yawn, even if you don't have to," said lead researcher Brian
Rundle, a doctoral student in psychology and neuroscience in Baylor's
College of Arts and Sciences. "We all know it and always wonder why. I
thought, 'If it's true that yawning is related to empathy, I'll bet that
psychopaths yawn a lot less.' So I put it to the test."
Psychopathy is characterized by an antisocial lifestyle, including
being selfish, manipulative, impulsive, fearless, domineering and, in
particular, lacking in empathy, previous research has shown.
Students in the Baylor study first took a standard psychological test—the
156-question Psychopathic Personality Inventory, with questions aimed
at determining their degree of cold-heartedness, fearless dominance and
self-centered impulsivity. "It's not an 'on/off' of whether you're a
psychopath," Rundle said. "It's a spectrum."
Next, students were seated in a dim room in front of computers. They
wore noise-canceling headphones, with electrodes placed below their
eyelids, next to the outer corners of their eyes, on their foreheads and
to index and middle fingers.
They were shown 10-second video clips of different facial movements—a
yawn, a laugh or a neutral face—with 10 seconds of blank screen
separating 20 video snippets of those expressions.
Based on the psychological test results, the frequency of yawns and
the amount of physiological response of muscle, nerve and skin, the
study showed that the less empathy a person had, the less likely he or she was to "catch" a yawn.
LATimes | It's been argued that warfare is as old as humanity itself -- that the
affairs of primitive society were marked by chronic raiding and feuding
between groups.
Now, a new study published in Science argues just the opposite.
After
reviewing a database of present-day ethnographies for 21
hunter-gatherer societies -- groups that most closely resemble our
evolutionary past -- researchers at Abo Akademi University in Finland
concluded that early man had little need or cause for war.
Though these so-called mobile forager band societies -- referred to
in the report as MFBS -- were not free of violence, researchers said the
mayhem was very unorganized and seldom involved rival groups.
In
fact, the violence practiced by these wandering societies was
overwhelmingly murder, plain and simple, according to Douglas Fry, an
anthropology professor, and Patrik Soderberg, a developmental psychology
graduate student.
"Many
lethal disputes involved two men competing over a particular woman
(sometimes the wife of one of them), revenge homicide exacted by family
members of a victim (often aimed at the specific person responsible for
the previous killing), and interpersonal quarrels of various kinds; for
instance, stealing of honey, insults or taunting, incest, self-defense
or protection of a loved-one," authors wrote.
The researchers
examined 148 killings and their reported cause. For the most part, the
21 groups were peaceful, but one group in particular stood out for its
violence, the Tiwi of Australia. They generated nearly half of the
lethal events.
"The findings suggest that MFBS are not
particularly warlike if the actual circumstances of lethal aggression
are examined. Fifty-five percent of the lethal events involved a sole
perpetrator killing only one individual (64% if the atypical Tiwi are
removed). One-person-killing-one-person reflects homicide or
manslaughter, not coalitional killing or war," the authors wrote.
Only 15% of the lethal events occurred across societal lines, however.
helian | So who is Jaak Panksepp?
Have a look at his YouTube talk on emotions at the bottom of this post,
for starters. A commenter recommended him, and I discovered the advice
was well worth taking. Panksepp’s The Archaeology of Mind,
which he co-authored with Lucy Biven, was a revelation to me. The
book describes a set of basic emotional systems that exist in all, or
virtually all, mammals, including humans. In the words of the authors:
…the ancient subcortical regions of mammalian brains
contain at least seven emotional, or affective, systems: SEEKING
(expectancy), FEAR (anxiety), RAGE (anger), LUST (sexual excitement),
CARE (nurturance), PANIC/GRIEF (sadness), and PLAY (social joy). Each
of these systems controls distinct but specific types of behaviors
associated with many overlapping physiological changes.
This is not just another laundry list of “instincts” of the type often proposed by psychologists
at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
Panksepp is a neuroscientist, and has verified experimentally the unique
signatures of these emotional systems in the ancient regions of the
brain shared by humans and other mammals. Again quoting from the book,
As far as we know right now, primal emotional systems are
made up of neuroanatomies and neurochemistries that are remarkably
similar across all mammalian species. This suggests that these systems
evolved a very long time ago and that at a basic emotional and
motivational level, all mammals are more similar than they are
different. Deep in the ancient affective recesses of our brains, we
remain evolutionarily kin.
If you are an astute student of the Blank Slate phenomenon, dear
reader, no doubt you are already aware of the heretical nature of this
passage. That’s right! The Blank Slaters were prone to instantly
condemn any suggestion that there were similarities between humans and
other animals as “anthropomorphism.” In fact, if you read the book you
will find that their reaction to Panksepp and others doing similar
research has been every bit as allergic as their reaction to anyone
suggesting the existence of human nature. However, in the field of
animal behavior, they are anything but a quaint artifact of the past.
Diehard disciples of the behaviorist John B. Watson and his latter day follower B. F. Skinner,
Blank Slaters of the first water, still haunt the halls of academia in
significant numbers, and still control the message in any number of
“scientific” journals. There they have been following their usual
“scholarly” pursuit of ignoring and/or vilifying anyone who dares to
disagree with them ever since the heyday of Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin. In
the process they have managed to suppress or distort a great deal of
valuable research bearing directly on the wellsprings of human behavior.
sciencemag | If you stuck to Aesop’s fables, you might think of all ants as the
ancient storyteller described them—industrious, hard-working, and always
preparing for a rainy day. But not every ant has the same personality,
according to a new study. Some colonies are full of adventurous
risk-takers, whereas others are less aggressive about foraging for food
and exploring the great outdoors.
Researchers say that these group
“personality types” are linked to food-collecting strategies, and they
could alter our understanding of how social insects behave.
Personality—consistent patterns of individual behavior—was once
considered a uniquely human trait. But studies since the 1990s have
shown that animals from great tits to octopuses exhibit “personality.”
Even insects have personalities. Groups of cockroaches have consistently shy and bold members, whereas damselflies have shown differences in risk tolerance that stay the same from grubhood to adulthood.
To determine how group behavior might vary between ant colonies, a
team of researchers led by Raphaël Boulay, an entomologist at the
University of Tours in France, tested the insects in a controlled
laboratory environment. They collected 27 colonies of the funnel ant (Aphaenogaster senilis)
and had queens rear new workers in the lab. This meant that all ants in
the experiment were young and inexperienced—a clean slate to test for
personality.
The researchers then observed how each colony foraged for food and
explored new environments. They counted the number of ants foraging,
exploring, or hiding during set periods of time, and then compared the
numbers to measure the boldness, adventurousness, and foraging efforts
of each group. They also measured risk tolerance by gradually increasing
the temperature of the ants’ foraging area from 26°C to 60°C. Ants that
stayed out at temperatures higher than 46°C, widely considered to be
the upper limit of their tolerance, were considered risk-takers.
When they reviewed their data, the scientists found strong personality differences between colonies, they reported online this month in Behavioral Ecology.
Some were bold, adventurous risk-takers with highly active foragers.
Others were shy, risk-averse, and fearful of new environments. Their
foragers were less active, and they were less inclined to search for
food at very high temperatures. When the team performed the same tests
11 weeks later, they saw that these differences persisted over time.
More than half of all variation between colonies fell into distinct
categories known as “behavioral syndromes.” These syndromes—similar to
personality types among humans—are present across the animal kingdom and
include categories like “proactive” (animals are bold, aggressive, and
risk-prone) and “reactive” (animals are shy, calm, and risk-averse).
pri | When two groups of chimps bump into each other in the forest, it
always leads to conflict. Males threaten each other with loud calls and
aggressive gestures. And, occasionally, things escalate to physical
violence and warfare.
"If they can grab a member of the other community, they may beat on
them, bite them, and continue doing so until they're very severely
injured or killed," says Wilson.
(See this video for an example of inter-group conflict among chimps.
It was recorded by Wilson's colleague in Tanzania, in 1998.)
He says it makes sense chimps defend their territories. Several
studies have shown that a bigger territory means more food for the
group, and a better chance of survival.
But if chimps say anything about our own evolutionary past, so do
bonobos. They're a smaller species of apes, also closely related to us.
Primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University has studied what happens when two groups of bonobos encounter each other.
"They have initial hostility, but then they have sex, and they groom,
and very soon it looks more like a picnic than like warfare between
them," says de Waal.
No one really knows why bonobos are friendlier than chimps. It could
be because bonobos live in forests with more food and therefore don't
need to protect their resources from neighbors, de Waal speculates.
So what do we make of our primate ancestry, when two of our closest evolutionary cousins are so different?
We
can look at violence and racism as scourges that all of us must join
together to fight. Or we can turn the issues of crime and policing into
fodder for racial and political division.
In principle, it shouldn’t be hard to recognize two truths.
Too
many young African Americans have been killed in confrontations with
police when lethal force should not have been used. We should mourn
their deaths and demand justice. Black Lives Matter turned into a social
movement because there is legitimate anger over the reality that — to
be very personal about it — I do not have to worry about my son being
shot by the police in the way an African American parent does.
At the same time, too many of our police officers are killed while doing their jobs. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund,
1,466 men and women in law enforcement died in the line of duty over
the past decade. We should mourn their deaths, appreciate the dangers
they face and honor their courage.
Now
I’ll admit: It’s easy for me to type these words on a computer screen.
Circumstances are more complicated for those on either side of
confrontations over the obligations of our police officers. Things get
said (or, often, shouted) that call forth a reaction from the other
side. A few demonstrators can scream vile slogans that can be used to
taint a whole movement. Rage escalates.
RT | Clashes have broken out between refugees and football hooligans as the
latter pelted smoke bombs and fireworks at the asylum seekers at the
Keleti train station in Budapest. At least one person was injured before
riot police intervened.
The refugees responded with plastic bottles and shoes, RT’s correspondent Daniel Hawkins reported from the scene on Friday.
Refugees formed human chain between riot police and their comrades to
stop the violence, he added. Police arrested a number of football
hooligans.
Syrian refugees were shouting “Freedom, freedom, we want peace” as well as “Fascists!” at the radical football fans.
At least one person, a refugee, was injured in the clashes.
On Friday, the so-called Visegrád Four – Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary and Poland –met at an emergency summit in Prague to discuss the
influx of refugees to the EU. As a result the four released a statement
rejecting plans for quotas for refugees seeking asylum in the EU.
independent | Moishy*, 27, is a good-looking young man. Dressed in unremarkable
jeans and a hoodie, he blends in easily: he’s just another ordinary
Londoner. For Moishy, that’s a compliment. Having finally escaped one of
the city’s most secretive religious communities, Moishy has achieved a
dream he’s held for years: to live an everyday, secular life.
Moishy grew up in the ultra-orthodox (‘charedi’) Jewish community in
Stamford Hill, which he describes as “like living in a different world –
it’s like the Middle Ages – totally secluded.” There were no jeans
there: Moishy adhered to a strict uniform of a black suit, a hat, curls
in his hair and a beard trimmed to exactly the right length. Women wear
long skirts, long sleeves and wigs once they are married to protect
their modesty.
Contact between Charedim and the rest of the world
is mainly non-existent, with children taught to fear the non-Charedi
world. Moishy remembers: “As kids we were told that the outside world
hated us, so we were suspicious and afraid of them. We were taught that
non-Jews had no soul and that our duty in life was not to fall into the
trap of going into their world.” That suspicion even extended to
non-Charedi Jews like me – Moishy points to me and says: “They wouldn’t
regard you as Jewish. We weren’t taught that there are lots of different
types of Judaism.”
With Yiddish as their language, most children
are not taught to speak English. Jewish studies replace the secular
curriculum. Moishy explains: “Children don’t need to learn anything.
They grow up controlled and put into arranged marriages. The only thing
you aspire to is to become a rabbi. If you’re not academic enough for
that you’re found a low-paid job within the community. The Government
know about the lack of education in the community, but they don't do
anything about it.” Although girls receive a little more education to
help them raise children – “they learn enough to go to the doctors” –
Moishy says it’s nowhere near enough: “Girls are treated like nothing.
They’re not taught anything. If they knew more they’d know that they
wouldn’t have to marry these boys who don’t know anything either.”
RT | Israeli police and the IDF might be given the right to open fire on
Palestinians who throw stones and Molotov cocktails. Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu also announced deployment of additional police to
Jerusalem, the West Bank, and on a key highway.
Netanyahu called an emergency high-level security meeting on Wednesday to discuss the recent spike of “terror incidents”
taking place within Jerusalem and on Road 443 connecting the capital
Tel Aviv with the city of Modi'in, the Jerusalem Post reports.
The
meeting was attended by top security officials, such as Defense
Minister Moshe Ya'alon, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan,
Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz, General Security
Services head Yoram Cohen, and others.
PM
Netanyahu told the gathering he is not going to tolerate rock and
petrol-bomb attacks on a central road, or inside the city of Jerusalem.
“The policy is zero tolerance for rock throwers and zero tolerance for terror,” Netanyahu said. “Since the legal system is having difficulty dealing with juveniles” engaged in those activities, the Israeli government is going to legislate a minimum punishment for those underage offenders.
Independent | Independently translated from Yiddish for The Independent,
the worksheet's first question reads: “What have the evil goyim
(non-Jews) done with the synagogues and cheders [Jewish primary
schools]?” The answer in the completed worksheet reads: “Burned them.”
Another
question asks: “What did the goyim want to do with all the Jews?” – to
which the answer, according to the worksheet, is: “Kill them.”.
“It
doesn’t explicitly refer to the Holocaust,” the source said. “It’s a
document that teaches very young children to be very afraid and treat
non-Jews very suspiciously because of what they did to us in the past.
"It’s
not a history lesson – you can’t say that. It’s a parable that is
actively teaching the children extremism, hatred and a fear for the
outside world.”
A spokesperson for Beis Rochel said that the
worksheets would be amended and apologised for any offence. However they
argued the phrase “goyim” was not offensive and accusations that they
were indoctrinating children were “without basis”. “The language we used
was not in any way intended to cause offence, now this has been brought
to our attention, we will endeavour to use more precise language in the
future.”
vanderbilt | In the popular mind, mass extinctions are associated with
catastrophic events, like giant meteorite impacts and volcanic
super-eruptions.
But the world’s first known mass extinction, which took place about
540 million years ago, now appears to have had a more subtle cause:
evolution itself.
“People have been slow to recognize that biological organisms can
also drive mass extinction,” said Simon Darroch, assistant professor of
earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University.
“But our
comparative study of several communities of Ediacarans, the world’s
first multicellular organisms, strongly supports the hypothesis that it
was the appearance of complex animals capable of altering their
environments, which we define as ‘ecosystem engineers,’ that resulted in
the Ediacaran’s disappearance.”
The study is described in the paper “Biotic replacement and mass
extinction of the Ediacara biota” published Sept. 2 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“There is a powerful analogy between the Earth’s first mass extinction and what is happening today,”
Darroch observed. “The end-Ediacaran extinction shows that the
evolution of new behaviors can fundamentally change the entire planet,
and we are the most powerful ‘ecosystem engineers’ ever known.”
The earliest life on Earth consisted of microbes – various types of
single-celled microorganisms. They ruled the Earth for more than 3
billion years. Then some of these microorganisms discovered how to
capture the energy in sunlight. The photosynthetic process that they
developed had a toxic byproduct: oxygen. Oxygen was poisonous to most
microbes that had evolved in an oxygen-free environment, making it the
world’s first pollutant.
physorg | Although Europe represents only about 8 percent of the planet's
landmass, from 1492 to 1914, Europeans conquered or colonized more than
80 percent of the entire world. Being dominated for centuries has led to
lingering inequality and long-lasting effects in many formerly
colonized countries, including poverty and slow economic growth. There
are many possible explanations for why history played out this way, but
few can explain why the West was so powerful for so long.
Caltech's Philip Hoffman, the Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor
of Business Economics and professor of history, has a new explanation:
the advancement of gunpowder technology. The Chinese invented gunpowder,
but Hoffman, whose work applies economic theory to historical contexts,
argues that certain political and economic circumstances allowed the
Europeans to advance gunpowder technology at an unprecedented
rate—allowing a relatively small number of people to quickly take over
much of the rest of the globe.
Hoffman's work is published in a new book titled Why Did Europe Conquer the World? We spoke with him recently about his research interests and what led him to study this particular topic.
You have been on the Caltech faculty for more than 30 years. Are there any overarching themes to your work?
Over the years I've been interested in a number of different things,
and this new work puts together a lot of bits of my research. I've
looked at changes in technology that influence agriculture, and I've
studied the development of financial markets, and in between those two, I
was also studying why financial crises occur. I've also been interested
in the development of tax systems. For example, how did states get the
ability to impose heavy taxes? What were the politics and the political
context of the economy that resulted in this ability to tax?
What led you to investigate the global conquests of western Europe?
It's just fascinating. In 1914, really only China, Japan, and the
Ottoman Empire had escaped becoming European colonies. A thousand years
ago, no one would have ever expected that result, for at that point
western Europe was hopelessly backward. It was politically weak, it was
poor, and the major long-distance commerce was a slave trade led by
Vikings. The political dominance of western Europe was an unexpected
outcome and had really big consequences, so I thought: let's explain it.
WaPo |In nature, the relationship between
predators and their prey seems like it should be simple: The more prey
that’s available to be eaten, the more predators there should be to eat
them.
If a prey population doubles, for instance, we would logically expect its predators to double too. But a new study,
published Thursday in the journal Science, turns this idea on its head
with a strange discovery: There aren’t as many predators in the world as
we expect there to be. And scientists aren’t sure why.
By
conducting an analysis of more than a thousand studies worldwide,
researchers found a common theme in just about every ecosystem across
the globe: Predators don’t increase in numbers at the same rate as their
prey. In fact, the faster you add prey to an ecosystem, the slower
predators’ numbers grow.
“When
you double your prey, you also increase your predators, but not to the
same extent,” says Ian Hatton, a biologist and the study’s lead author.
“Instead they grow at a much diminished rate in comparison to prey.”
This was true for large carnivores on the African savanna all the way
down to the tiniest microbe-munching fish in the ocean.
Even
more intriguing, the researchers noticed that the ratio of predators to
prey in all of these ecosystems could be predicted by the same
mathematical function — in other words, the way predator and prey
numbers relate to each other is the same for different species all over
the world.
politico | In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status,
arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being
considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in
the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in
motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In
1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students
enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the
following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the
treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government
was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President
Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new
policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United
States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which
forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools
were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and
therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations
to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible
contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially
white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he
could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will
have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed
that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited.
“The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just
waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard
around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own
account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique
evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,”
Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its
first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their
educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of
course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how
to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The
Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob
Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a
part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an
attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the
student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans.
The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial
dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated
interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax
exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally,
Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger,
longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview,
the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school
community about what could happen with government interference” in the
affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue
that got us all involved.”
NYTimes | The political dispute embroiling Planned Parenthood
here and nationwide is over abortion, though public funds are not
permitted by federal law to be used for abortion, except in cases
involving rape, incest or a pregnancy that threatens the mother’s life.
Neither clinic in this state — like nearly half of all Planned
Parenthood centers — performs abortions. What the Louisiana Planned
Parenthood clinics did do last year was administer nearly 20,000 tests
for sexually transmitted infections, as well as provide gynecological
exams, contraceptive care, cancer screenings and other wellness services
for nearly 10,000 mostly low-income patients.
“You
can’t just cut Planned Parenthood off one day and expect everyone
across the city to absorb the patients,” Dr. Taylor said. “There needs
to be time to build the capacity.”
With
the calls to stop funding for Planned Parenthood, a visit to New
Orleans and Baton Rouge suggests that it would not be as easy to do
without the nonprofit centers as some Republicans and their
anti-abortion allies say. Other states would face similar problems.
Louisiana
is among a number of states counted as medically underserved: It has a
large poor and unhealthy population, with high rates of unintended
pregnancies, a shortage of health professionals and too few who will
accept Medicaid, as Planned Parenthood does.
“I
think of it as sort of a triple whammy, particularly in the South,”
said Cindy Mann, who until recently was the federal director of Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended to help low-income Americans get medical care.
Congress’s
investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, reported in
2012 that four out of five Planned Parenthood patients nationally had
incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level, and
two-thirds of states reported difficulties ensuring enough health
providers for Medicaid patients, especially in obstetrics and
gynecology.
Also,
since most funds that Planned Parenthood receives from taxpayers are
reimbursements for tending to Medicaid beneficiaries, experts in health
policy say lawmakers cannot simply take money from the organization and
redirect it to other facilities.
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