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Now Playing at Reason.tv: Who's Waging the War on Sex?

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

reason.tv recently caught up with author Marty Klein to chat about his book America's War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty.

"Our glorious Constitution," says Klein, a certified sex therapist and frequent expert witness in anti-censorship court cases, "guarantees us the widest range of right civilization has ever seen. Why are those rights systematically damaged and repealed when it comes to sexual expression?"

Click below to watch this four-minute video.

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reason on sex here.

On censorship here.

On free speech and First Amendment issues here.

"It Is Unclear Why He Did That"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:38:00 EDT

A tidy example of how government can corrupt business, rather than the far more frequently chronicled reverse case:

In my idyllic suburban hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, the police shut down a brothel a few days ago. According to the Wellesley Townsman, one of those arrested for running the business was a man named William Eastwick.

The paper also notes that six months ago the Wellesley police shut down a similar operation nearby. That police action was based on a tip from the same William Eastwick. Oddly, when referring to the Eastwick tip, the town paper says "it is unclear why he did that."

The temptation to shut down your competitors using the heavy hand of the state is ever-present. This little example of dueling rats is basically the same thing as, say, protective tariffs on steel or corn subsidies. Because the businesses in question happen to be illegal, the instruments are even blunter than usual.

Via Greg Mankiw

John Stagliano on Censorship

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:57:00 EDT

Over at The Los Angeles Times' Opinion section, adult moviemaker and distributor John Stagliano—currently facing federal obscenity charges that could put him in prison for almost 40 years—is debating Pepperdine Law School's Barry McDonald all week about free expression. Briefly, Stagliano is for it, McDonald not so much. (Full disclosure: Stagliano is a supporter of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.)

Here's a passage worth reading from Stagliano, auteur of the popular Buttman series and the award-winning Fashionistas:

Barry, your point is that people must be forced to not think things that you don't like, and for that you'd have me put in jail. Your comment that it "seems" to you that viewing images "to obtain sexual pleasure cannot be the healthiest way of experiencing sex" seems not a good enough reason to imprison me for 39 years. In fact, using a proper concept of morality based on individual rights, it is you and those who would put me in jail when I did not infringe on anyone's rights who are behaving immorally.

More here, today and the rest of the week.

Check out Stagliano's Defend Our Porn! website.

If you subscribe to the print edition of reason (only $19.97 for a year's worth of the mag ABC News' John Stossels says is "one sane voice fighting tons of nonsense"), look for a Q&A with Stagliano in the August/September double issue, now winging your way. And look for an extended interview soon at reason.tv, our video site featuring the Drew Carey Project.

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Hustler, Once More Into the Constitutional Breach

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:23:00 EDT

In the hometown of pornographer and First Amendment defender Larry Flynt, another constitutional battle is a-brewing due to Hustler:

A Northern Kentucky mother of two is suing Ohio's attorney general, seeking to overturn part of a new Ohio law that requires those convicted of selling obscene material to register as sex offenders
The woman, identified only as G.B. in the suit, is a manager of the downtown Hustler store that sells magazines, DVDs, videos, lingerie, lotions and other items of a sexual nature.
"She's not been convicted or charged with anything. She's frightened," attorney Lou Sirkin said Monday.
The woman is afraid, Sirkin said, because under the current law, if she sells something at the store that is deemed—even years later—to be obscene, the law requires her to register as a sex offender for 15 years.

More here at The Cincinnati Enquirer.

Update: Now ad-free!

What's in the Teen Pregnancy Pact's Fine Print?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

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The Cunning Linguist

info@reason.com (Marty Beckerman) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Every obituary for George Carlin will cite his "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV" routine in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence. The monologue led to Carlin's arrest and a 1978 Supreme Court obscenity case. (Carlin admitted that he was "perversely...proud of" the federal legal drama that his dirty words caused.)

But Carlin's comedy was not simply about dirty words; it was about the English language, and our collective fear of it. He used more expletives than Howard Stern, but his obsession was linguistics, not lasciviousness. As Carlin told CNN in 2004, "[I]f I hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved-to teach it, probably...Language has always fascinated me."

He was especially fascinated with the blunting of language for comfort's sake. Carlin ridiculed our watering-down of sexual descriptions and ethnic categories, not to mention our mourning clichés, all of which he believed were the real-life manifestations of George Orwell's "Newspeak," utilized to obscure reality, numb the mind, and discourage criticism. As much as Carlin loathed theology, war, greed, and hypersensitivity, he was most disgusted when religous puritans, the military, corporations, and P.C. "classroom liberals" mangled the language for the purpose of soothing the masses. When I saw Carlin perform in the ‘90s, the biggest laugh of the night came from his observation that "the unlikely event of a water landing," discussed in every preflight safety lecture, sounds suspiciously like "crashing into the fucking ocean."

In fact, Carlin was disgusted with the mangling of English for any reason. He hated anyone who pronounced forte as "for-tay," insisted that "no comment is a comment," and advised us that "unique needs no modifier; very unique, quite unique, more unique, real unique, fairly unique, and extremely unique are wrong and they mark you as dumb, although certainly not unique." For all of his lifelong ranting against conservatism, Carlin was a diehard traditionalist when it came to grammar and vocabulary.

This mastery of the language allowed Carlin to craft his puns ("Soft rock music isn't rock, and it ain't music...it's just soft," "I thought it would be nice to get a job at a duty-free shop, but it doesn't sound like there's a whole lot to do in a place like that"), but also gave him the ability to see how we pad our existences with pleasant lies. In Carlin's mind, language should not be safe, and neither should life. Children, he argued in his final HBO special, this year's It's Bad for Ya, should play with sticks, not have "play dates" under the ever-watchful eyes of overprotective, micro-managing parents. (He had previously complained, with his trademark growl, "We've taken all the fun out of childhood just in the interest of saving a few lives.")

Near the end of his career, Carlin was more bitter than funny—It's Bad for Ya is a righteous tirade that provokes more nods than laughs—but he never lost his unparalleled ability to play with words. He deconstructed the phrases that we use absentmindedly, exposing our hypocrisies—and our human condition—in the process. He was a comic genius because he was a linguistic master. As Carlin said in his most famous routine: "I thank you for hearing my words... They're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have, really."

Marty Beckerman is the author of Dumbocracy, which will be released this September. His website is www.MartyBeckerman.com

The Economics of "Elder Porn"

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:36:00 EDT

To follow up on my fascination with geriatric coitus, here's a little snippet from a Time article on senior citizen pornography in Japan:

A WHO report released in March found that one in four married couples in Japan had not made love in the previous year, while 38% of couples in their 50s no longer have sex at all....Yet, at the same time, the country has seen a surge in demand for pornography that has turned adult videos into a billion-dollar industry, with "elder porn" one of its fastest-growing genres.

I found it interesting (god and H&R readers forgive me for bringing it here) that the trend towards producing porn with more "mature ladies" is occurring in response to market signals:

A popular young actress can earn up to $100,000 per film, while a mature actress is paid only $2,000. The market for "elder porn" has doubled over the past decade, according to Kadowaki. "In the view of the aging society," he adds, "I think that in the future we will see a steady increase in demand."

I wrote about dementia patients conducting steamy love affairs here. Senior Editor Kerry Howley wrote about a seemingly global lack of libido here.

Baby Bust!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Dr. Love is struggling. Oh, the business side of things is going well. There’s the couples cruise, the magazine, the singles nights, the self-authored sex ideology he calls “bio-communication.” And the international media still can’t get enough of him: A few years back, seemingly every wire service in the world had a story on the young gynecologist’s forthcoming “super baby making show,” which would pit 10 couples against one another to see who could conceive first in a public assault on Singapore’s shockingly low fertility rate. As a government-backed baby booster for the island city-state, Wei Siang Yu just wants couples to work less and fornicate more. But try as he might, the good doctor can’t seem to coax Singapore’s child-free twentysomethings into bed.

Ask young women about Dr. Love, and you’ll get derisive giggles. Ask for his allegedly widely available pro-sex DVD at the local entertainment megastore, and the seller won’t have a clue. Ask one of the assistants at his home office whether young lovers actually rent out his bally-hooed procreation pad, which is dominated by a complicated looking “sex swing” and other accoutrements of venturesome lovemaking, and he’ll change the subject.

Dr. Love’s allies in the war on childlessness have fared no better. The Singaporean government’s official matchmaking agency, the SDU—the initials stand for Social Development Unit, but it’s known to snarky islanders as “Single, Desperate, and Ugly”—is situated just off the city-state’s main shopping thoroughfare, and it doesn’t seem nearly as popular as the nearby Emporio Armani.

These days the official slogan of Singapore’s baby-making campaign is “Three or More.” But Singaporeans of childbearing age grew up listening to an altogether different appeal: “Stop at Two.” As in much of East Asia, the tiny island’s population exploded after World War II—by more than 90 percent between 1957 and 1970 alone. In the Age of Aquarius, billboards and posters warned young couples “the more you have, the less they get” and “girl or boy, two is enough.” Parents who agreed to be sterilized after having two children got priority placement for their kids in elementary school.

Since then, demographic conditions have changed radically, but the state has maintained its intense interest in procreation. Singapore’s “total fertility rate,” a crude prediction of how many children a woman will bear in her lifetime if current patterns persist, is among the lowest in the world at 1.07, but the baby bust is not a future the island faces alone. From Hong Kong (0.98) to Italy (1.29) to Russia (1.39) to Canada (1.61), most of the world’s population will soon live in nations where the fertility rate is below the “replacement” level of 2.1. Governments far less authoritarian than Singapore’s are intruding into childbearing choices. After 200 years of exponential population growth, and just four decades after overpopulation doomsaying began filling the bestseller lists, the First World is suddenly gripped with underpopulation hysteria.

And everyone has an explanation for it.

“Europe is facing a demographic disaster,” said quondam Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in his February concession speech. “That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality.”

The late Pope John Paul II agreed with America’s most famous Mormon, speaking of a “crisis of births.” On the liberal side you can find demographic thinkers such as Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, and the Australian demographer Peter McDonald, who argue that we’re headed for a dark future unless governments begin bestowing mothers with some serious baby shower gifts.

Books like P.D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men (made into a bleak film in 2007) join Mark Steyn’s America Alone in depicting a harsh and violent babyless landscape. Even in the United States, where population growth remains uniquely irrepressible among wealthy nations, ideologically driven concerns about demography have crept into the national conversation. They appear in the 2004 science fiction comedy Idiocracy, in which intelligent women and men, by failing to produce children, have doomed the world to collective mental incapacity by the 26th century (when the U.S. president is a porn star and the most popular TV show is Ow! My Balls!). They appear in the hysterical 2008 documentary Demographic Winter, in which we can watch a lone, naked boy shivering in an empty warehouse.

The developed world is experiencing a wave of pro-natalist sentiment that threatens to bully the childless, tax the single, and reorient states toward the production rather than the protection of citizens. In most developed nations with below-replacement fertility, governments are attempting to align incentives so that women will use their bodies for the purpose of childbirth. In the U.S., right-wing religious groups are calling for a rollback of contraceptive freedom and a return to patriarchal arrangements, all in the name of something called “demographic balance.”

It may sound like a movement of sorts, but it is far from cohesive. Although pro-natalists share an obsession with procreation, they are driven to this anxiety by a host of different fears. As a group, they worry that their countries are admitting too many immigrants, and too few; that we have liberated women too much, and not enough; that welfare states are too strong, and too weak. Pick any divisive social issue—a lack of religiosity, say, or an excess of the same—and you can find someone to draw the connection to demographic decline.

Modern fertility panic stems from a desire to reshape polyglot cultures, to regain control over women’s reproductive choices, and to locate a single, easy-to-understand culprit for disparate social problems. As they have for hundreds of years, societies are projecting their deepest anxieties onto empty wombs.

Bye-Bye Baby
If you’re a woman of childbearing age in a developed country, there’s a good chance your government will pay you to reproduce at the currently desirable rate. Russian women who opt for a second child receive a lump sum of 250,000 rubles ($9,200)—not bad compared to Poland’s going rate of a measly 1,000 zloty ($460) per kid. France and Sweden combine pro-natalist incentives with more traditional social welfare schemes. Fecund couples in Sweden, for instance, receive a combined 13 months of parental leave, 11 of which can be taken by one parent, and during which the government provides 80 percent of a parent’s former income. Parents collect 900 euros ($1,410) per year; bosses then must allow their employees to work part time for prorated pay once they become parents.

In May 2004 the Australian government tried to boost its birthrate of 1.76 by announcing that the parents of children born after July 1, 2004, would receive 3,000 Aussie dollars ($2,800). As Australian economists later noticed, pregnant women due in June did not leave it up to nature whether the maternal stipend would come to them; more babies were born on July 1, 2004, than on any day in the previous 30 years.

Singapore’s SDU offers a free government dating adviser who interviews young singles about themselves and their ideal partners. The adviser chooses a match, and the eligible bachelors watch videos of one another before agreeing to the date. Before the big night, both are offered makeovers, and the SDU gives free lectures on personal grooming. “Personal hygiene doesn’t end with a shower and clean clothes,” reads a helpful dating guide. “For close encounters between the sexes, oral hygiene cannot be ignored.…Extreme halitosis may require medical attention.” The largesse extends well past date night. First and second children bring in baby bonuses of 3,000 Singapore dollars ($2,200) each, while third and fourth children garner 6,000 Singapore dollars ($4,400) each. The government also matches parental investment in special children’s savings accounts, which can be used for day care or other child-related expenses, dollar for dollar.

In Singapore and elsewhere, the shift from baby boom to baby bust effected a remarkable role reversal among those obsessed with procreation. Pro-family conservatives went from reliably urging calm in the face of books like William Paddock’s Famine 1975!, which proposed a system of triage for dealing with inevitable mass starvation; to fanning the flames of birth-rate fear. Allan Carlson, the head of the World Congress of Families and long one of the most virulent opponents of United Nations population control policies, began telling audiences that “the demographic problem facing the twenty-first century is depopulation, not overpopulation.”

Of all the possible American narratives to explain fertility decline, none seems to hold more power than a story of leftist values leading inexorably to extinction. In March the Illinois-based Family First Foundation released a documentary called Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family. As a variety of experts explain our descent into extinction, the producers lay out their hypotheses in bullet points: Divorce, Working Women, Prosperity, The Sexual Revolution, and what’s termed “Ideologies.” Frolicking children fade and disappear into nothingness—a rapture of sorts visited upon us repeatedly throughout the film. Cohabitation, feminism, and pop culture do not fare particularly well. Our economies will fall apart—“Who will man the factories?” asks a tag line, a thought that should keep you up at night only if you suspect producers will die off while consumers live on. The Fall of Rome is invoked, the rise of “the East” mentioned more than once. Kay Hymowitz, a conservative social critic, describes the advent of the “man-child,” more interested in Maxim than procreation, as the film cuts to a man playing his Wii intently, his presumably childless wife looking on gloomily from the side.

Across the Atlantic, the British press is full of self-loathing op-ed pieces about a people too self-absorbed to reproduce. Representative articles include a Sunday Times article headlined “Sorry, baby, but our lifestyles come first” and a Daily Mail piece more directly entitled “Why ARE We Too Selfish to Have Children?”

Are lad mags and the Nintendo corporation responsible for a global decline in birthrates? Broadly, nations that are more developed (and therefore more likely to produce video games and men’s magazines) produce fewer children than less developed nations. But while Demographic Winter uses Europe as the ultimate cautionary tale, Europe’s current demographics largely contradict the idea that more socially conservative societies tend to produce more children.

Religion? It is the most religious European countries, such as Italy, that have the continent’s lowest fertility rates; secular Norway is just under replacement level. Working women? European countries with the highest work force participation rates, such as Sweden and Norway, tend to have higher fertility than those with a comparatively small percentage of women working, such as Greece.

Cohabitation? France, where shacking up is a social norm, has a higher fertility rate than any of its immediate neighbors. Family instability? In a forthcoming book, Demographic Challenges for the 21st Century, the demographer Tomas Sobotka argues that divorce rates in Europe might be positively correlated with birthrates. “Many countries which have advanced furthest in the decline of traditional family and the spread of less conventional and less stable living arrangements,” he writes, “record relatively high fertility when judged by contemporary European standards.” Low levels of economic development coupled with social conservatism may well produce high fertility levels; but in modern Europe, it seems that the combination of a modern economy and social conservatism may produce some of the lowest fertility levels on Earth.

In the first half of the 20th century, demographers generally held that urbanization, industrialization, and education were the chief determinants of fertility decline. Later, neoclassical economists hypothesized that the rate of decline would correlate with the rates of increase in the opportunity cost of women staying out of the work force and in the relative cost of raising children.

The latter theory is useful “as a way to structure thinking,” according to the American Enterprise Institute demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, but, as with nearly every theory of fertility, there is much that it fails to explain. The relative cost of having children is indeed very high in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States, but these countries have markedly different birth rates. Nor does it explain why the birthrate is lower north of the Canadian border than south of it.

Strangest of all, total fertility rates are dropping most rapidly in predominantly rural countries with low female literacy rates and few work force opportunities. Dramatic drops in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, absent much economic development, have come as a surprise to economists and demographers alike. In 1970, according to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, Bangladesh’s total fertility rate was 6.4. In 2006 it was 2.9. Zimbabwe’s rate dropped from 7.4 to 3.3 during the same period.

The theory that economic development leads to fertility decline breaks down at the very first demographic data point on record. The first country to enter a sustained fertility decline was not England, the cradle of the industrial revolution. “It was France!” exclaims Eberstadt. “France was rural and poor and was very largely illiterate and, not to put to fine a point on it, it was Catholic. That kind of confutes a lot of things we think are supposed to connect between modernization and fertility change.”

The Baby-Welfare State
The conservative narrative of fertility decline is part of the right’s culture war weaponry, engineered to find praise in the pages of Human Events and criticism in the pages of The Nation. But it’s more nostalgia than political program, a generalized condemnation of progress rather than a plan for the future. After a screening of Demographic Winter at the Heritage Foundation, a socially conservative D.C. think tank, a panel of enthusiastic commentators was asked how to achieve the massive cultural rollback required to stop collective extinction. Judging by the film’s logic, this would involve reversing the sexual revolution, bringing women back into the home, curtailing an ethic of individualism, and ending the welfare state. Most of the panelists had little to say. One piped in with “virtues education.”

Practically speaking, on the policy level, demographic panic is only useful for one purpose: the promotion of social welfare programs many social conservatives would oppose. From France to Poland to Singapore, governments are responding to low fertility with policies social democrats have always favored. Almost any aspect of the welfare state can be construed as encouraging procreation; more to the point, low fertility can be blamed on the lack of any particular social welfare program. A dearth of pregnancies is evidence that protections for workers are too few, social welfare allowances too small, public school days too short, mandated maternity leave too limited. Women want to fulfill their natural roles as mothers, goes the assumption, but dog-eat-dog capitalism stands in the way.

“Evidence reveals that, in most countries, most young people aspire to an enduring intimate relationship and to having children,” wrote Peter McDonald in an influential 2005 paper on fertility policy. “However, faced with the realities of the new social and economic world, many do not achieve these aspirations.” McDonald blames deregulation and “neoliberalism” for an environment hostile to procreation. “States,” he concludes tidily, “must be principal players in restoring the social balance.”

The contention that women aren’t having as many children as they’d like to is rooted in “desired fertility,” or the number of children women say they want as they enter their childbearing years. In Europe, as women increasingly choose to go childless, they continue to tell surveyors that they want two children. That disparity is sometimes deemed “unmet demand”; governments, goes the theory, must assist women in the quest to produce the children they say they want.

When the concept is framed this way, most of us have “unmet demand” for any number of goods—flat-screen televisions, yachts, MacBooks—that taxpayers fail to help us acquire. No one doubts that it is possible to structure incentives such that more women will use their bodies in the way politicians prefer, which is why many liberal arguments for pro-fertility policies are suspiciously self-affirming. Offered millions of dollars per birth, women would indeed go into labor more often. Pregnant women can then be cast as responding rationally to incentives or as “achieving their aspirations” to become a mother. The more relevant question, and the one rarely broached, is whether women who choose not to have children should be forced to subsidize those who do.

There is an alternative explanation for the behavior of young women who declare a desire for two children yet go on to have one or none: Women may be telling pollsters what they think the pollsters want to hear, or simply reciting lines memorized from cultural scripts. “The answers may reflect mere stereotypes,” wrote the demographers Gustavo De Santis and Massimo Livi Bacci in a 2001 study, “and not constitute any reliable guide of people’s true preferences or intentions for the future.” The two-child norm, they add, “generally prevails in our times.” Men and women may continue to idealize the nuclear family—one boy, one girl—well beyond its heyday.

At the moment, small cash handouts do not appear to be doing much to increase birthrates across Europe and Asia. More-sophisticated attempts to reduce the burdens of working mothers, such as subsidized day care or regulations regarding the status of part-time workers, may raise birthrates very slightly, but there is no consensus on whether they are effective. Birthrates rise and fall, and it’s difficult to establish causality even when fertility rates shoot up after a policy goes into effect.

Michael Teitelbaum, a historian of demography, says he knows of only two places where pro-natalist policies have achieved real long-term results. One was communist East Germany, where wages were kept so low that the government could afford to pay baby bonuses that amounted to one-third of what a woman would have made working that year. The other was communist Romania, where dictator Nicolae Ceausescu outlawed contraception and abortion in October 1966 without warning. The resulting spike in birth rates was the largest in recorded history. That worked for about a decade, says Teitelbaum, “until people reconstructed their illegal ways of controlling their fertility.”

Birthrate Pangs
Depopulation panic isn’t new. It’s merely making a comeback after a long, anomalous period of overpopulation panic. Waves of birthrate anxiety swept through France at the beginning of the 19th century and the United States between the world wars. Today’s developed-world worries are in one sense very understandable: No one alive today can remember a time when the global population was not on the rise. Growth has become the norm, and that norm may change in the foreseeable future. “When [growth] goes negative even a tiny amount,” says Teitelbaum, “some people immediately say, well, this is a quantum, dramatic shift in what it means to be a human society.”

Quantum or otherwise, a demographic shift does require adjustment, notably of pension programs that are built on faulty assumptions of endless expansion. Fertility declines alter the basic age structure of a society, much as the baby boom did a half-century ago. Neither gradual declines nor gradual increases in population need be destructive, but the former will require concrete changes in redistribution schemes and a reshuffling of resources.

For those who, with good reason, worry about the solvency of transfer programs in an age of population decline, replacement immigration looks like a partial solution, and therefore xenophobia is part of the problem. But for many if not most of the people preoccupied by fertility rates, immigration is no solution at all. The question isn’t about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it’s about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn’s America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

Michael Teitelbaum and Jay Winter have another explanation for the current fertility panic. “Such worries seem to crop up at predictable moments,” they wrote in a response to Phillip Longman in the September 2004 Foreign Affairs, arguing that “when a dominant political or economic power begins to feel unsure of its mastery and uncertain about the future, many thinkers turn to demography for an explanation of its plight.”

In times of collective insecurity, empty wombs are cast as either a cause or a symptom of a state supposedly in decline. In their 1985 book The Fear of Population Decline, Teitelbaum and Winter say pro-natalism became a French obsession after Germany invaded France in the late 19th century. Emile Zola’s 1899 novel Fecondite is a 19th-century version of Demographic Winter, no less subtle in its message or gentle in its warning. Zola tells the story of a factory worker named Mathieu Froment and his wife, Marianne, who reproduce at a rate that alarms their individualistic, selfish, and more prosperous neighbors. A bourgeois accountant at the factory equates fertility with poverty. Naturally, his wife dies during a botched abortion. Mathieu’s employer mocks the highly fertile, avoids reproduction, and espouses neo-Malthusianism; his single son becomes a murderer and his wife goes mad and dies. The Angelins, a pair of individualists, decide to put off parenthood; Mme. Angelin dies childless, penniless, and thoroughly disgraced. Through it all, the noble Froments continue to multiply. “At one point,” Teitelbaum and Winter note, “Marianne delivers at the rate of one child every two pages.”

Fear of invasion is a theme running straight through the historical narrative of fertility alarmism. It’s no coincidence that the first great wave of American immigration coincided with a period of heightened maternalist rhetoric. President Theodore Roosevelt was particularly concerned about the “race suicide” of white Protestants. “The severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility,” he said in 1910, shortly after his second term had ended. “The first essential in any civilization is that the man and woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease.”

Periods of anxiety over “race suicide” are rarely good times for women. Protestants who were worried about the rising tide of foreign Catholics passed anti-abortion laws in the 1880s that endured until 1973, when Roe v. Wade limited their scope. Embracing historical continuity with the nativists who came before him, Mark Steyn takes time in America Alone to blame women for aborting the generation that might have stood between us and the coming Islamification of the West. It’s not surprising at all that the single greatest social anxiety of our time has been reduced to crude demographic projections that pin the blame on empty wombs.

Slippery Science
In 1960 Princeton demographers sought to buttress current population theory in one of the most ambitious demographic projects ever. The European Fertility Project, led by Ansley Coale, collected massive amounts of data from city registers and church basements and mapped fertility rates in 600 European provinces.

The problem: No extant theory would hold the disparate results together. “They ran into a lot of brick walls,” says Eberstadt. “This pattern of diffusion of fertility decline didn’t make a lot of sense to labor force specialists or to industrialization specialists. Then some specialist said, ‘Oh! I see what you have there; you have a map of the language families of modern Europe.’” People who spoke the same language, the researchers found, tended to enter fertility decline at around the same time. Women were having fewer children because their friends were having fewer children. It’s a completely fascinating and utterly question-begging conclusion. What domino sets off the cascade of childlessness?

“The problem,” the historian Charles Tilly writes in the introduction to Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, “is that we have too many explanations which are individually plausible in general terms, which contradict each other to some degree, and which fail to fit some significant part of the facts.”

The result is a plethora of explanatory narratives, some with more predictive power than others but none totally satisfying. What’s more, the “ideal fertility rate” itself is a matter of ideological preference. “It’s not obvious to me what the ‘right’ level for birthrates is for any country,” says Eberstadt. “It is obvious to me what the right direction for mortality is. The right direction is down. But fertility is a much more complicated story.” There isn’t even a consensus about the relationship between population growth and economic growth. Theoretically, individual incomes can continue to rise as the population falls.

The answer is likely to be a complex combination of theories we already have—sociological, anthropological, and economic. In the midst of so many plausible causes, it’s tempting to search for a narrative that conforms to previously held convictions or confirms long-held anxieties. The search for a valueless science of demography continues to be conducted in vain, and the very language we use to discuss falling birthrates is loaded with unscientific judgment. Nations are not just depopulating; they are “dying,” “decaying,” even “autogenocidal.” Fertility rates don’t just decline; they “collapse.” Our future is “barren,” a “demographic winter” marked by “sterility” and “senescence.”

Bogus fears about fertility decline don’t preclude justified ones, and current rates of fertility pose real, though not obviously catastrophic, challenges. In a shrinking society that refuses to welcome more immigrants or reform population-dependent social programs, something will have to give. Cash handouts for kids are a far cry from the more coercive pro-natalist policies of Ceausescu and Mussolini, and pro-fertility policies will cease to provoke charges of totalitarianism when they are wrapped into larger social welfare policies. Many changes sold as supportive of working women, such as extending the public school day to conform with work hours, are often defended on their own merits as well.

But as pro-baby policies are inevitably sold as pro-mother, and by extension pro-woman, it’s worth recalling the sentiment behind the Australian birth premiums and Singaporean matchmaking schemes. At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.”

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.

Eat, Drink, Krugman, Woman

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Paul Krugman is freaking out again today about America's food supply. This time, of course, the problem is tainted tomatoes.

Opting for a Carrie Bradshaw-style lede question, he asks:

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

Last time around, you'll recall, Krugman blamed Milton Friedman for our spinach woes.

Fortunately, Alex Tabarrok isn't afraid of raw CDC data (or raw spinach, for that matter). He crunches some numbers and comes up with this:

On an only slightly related topic, Krugman's headline "Bad Cow Disease" made me think, for one shining moment, that he might have written about the tempest-in-a-teapot scandal over Judge Kozinski's online pictures of "naked women on all fours painted to look like cows."

Take My Kids Instead

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:45:00 EDT

Salon's Louis Bayard poses the question of the day: When a biblical literalist cites the book of Genesis in a protest against sodomy, is he or she in turn advocating parent-sponsored pedophilia?

Genesis 19...is also the source of all the trouble. Lot's house has been surrounded by the men of Sodom, "both old and young," crying: "Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them." Lot, rather alarmingly from modern perspectives, tries to appease the mob by offering his own daughters. The mob refuses. Whereupon Lot's male guests, angels in disguise, strike their would-be ravagers blind. Fire and brimstone follow; Sodom is no more.

Blasts from the past: Managing Editor Jesse Walker's response to the landmark civil liberties case, Lawrence v. Texas; Jacob Sullum on the anti-agists at the Yearning for Zion Ranch; and the legal team that forgot to include scriptural references in its defense.

"And Then They Started Having Sex"

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:08:00 EDT

Melinda Henneberger at Slate writes about 82-year-old Dorothy and 95-year-old Bob, whose love affair at the nursing home for dementia patients is considered adorable until it turns sexual.

To justify keeping the two apart, Bob's family frets about the danger posed by his bad heart (which Dorothy's doctor firmly dismissed as just plain wrong), and then more or less admits that they're opposed to the relationship simply on principle: Old people should be contemplative and chaste. Period.

But what it really comes down to is the money:

Dorothy's son-in-law, who is a doctor, suspects Bob's son of fearing for his inheritance. Bob had repeatedly proposed for all to hear and called Dorothy his wife, but his son called her something else--a "gold digger"--and refused to even discuss her family's offer to sign a prenup.

Families don't want their mentally unsound loved ones entering contracts that will leave children and grandchildren sorting through a mess of legal entanglements--fair enough. And something like the "sexual power of attorney" suggested in the article might be a good option. But do we really want to say that forgetful old people shouldn't be allowed to have sex, just because they're, well, forgetful and old?

If boomers are going to make a case for restricting their parents' liberty in the last few years of life, perhaps they should first look their own futures and ask themselves if they want their children oppressing their sexual appetites in the year 2030.

More reason on dementia.

Chemical Warfare of the Sexes

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:43:00 EDT

Turkey is frequently cited as the most (sometimes only) secular Muslim country, and therefore, the most Western. But then there's Turkey's Department of Women's Oppression:

"Women have to be more careful, since they possess stimulants," and they "have to be covered properly so as not to show their ornaments and figures to strangers."
Those are two of the controversial "dos" and "don’ts" given to Turkish women in the "Sexual Life" article that appeared last week on the website of Turkey’s Directorate on Religious Affairs, the Diyanet.
It added that if women have to communicate to the opposite sex they "should speak in a manner that will not arouse suspicion in one’s heart and in such seriousness and dignity that they will not let the opposite party misunderstand them."

Check out Contributing Editor Michael Young on Turkish secularism.

Friday Fun Slash Vid

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:30:00 EDT

A parting shot before the weekend:

Broken Contracts, Broken Hearts

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:06:00 EDT

A student in her 20s and an engineer in his 30s marry in France. They are Muslim. It turns out that she is not a virgin and, since the marriage agreement was based on "an error in the essential qualities of the bride,"--forbidden under the language of Article 180 of the Civil Code--the court agrees to annul the marriage.

Is this ruling:

1) "a real fatwa against the emancipation and liberty of women," as Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara says.

or is it

2) a reasonable outcome in a contract dispute?

I'm inclined to favor the latter, especially since the possibility of doing a decent, peaceable, Western thing, like getting a marriage annulled for misrepresentation if the bride fails to deliver a bloodstained sheet, might forestall more grisly extra-judicial solutions, like honor killing.

The woman does not want an appeal:

"I don't know who's trying to think in my place. I didn't ask for anything. ... I wasn't the one who asked for the media attention, for people to talk about it, and for this to last so long."

For his part, the husband says it wasn't the sex, it was the lying.

Discuss.

Via alert reader Mark

Thursday Morning Links

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:15:00 EDT

* Cato embraces micro radio.

* The Nation discovers the Ron Paul Republicans.

* A socialist reads Hayek.

* Debbie Nathan reads Comstock.

* A child of a commune peers at the children of the FLDS.

RIP, Emperor's Club VIP

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:19:00 EDT

With all the fuss over what to do with Eliot Spitzer, rubber-neckers almost forgot about the state's punitive plans for the folks who arranged the governor's good times:

The petite madam at the center of the prostitution ring that brought down Eliot Spitzer is expected to plead guilty as soon as this week and dish dirt in an ongoing federal probe centered on the former governor.
Cecil "Katie" Suwal, 23, agreed yesterday to come clean on her role in the million-dollar Emperor's Club VIP ring, according to a statement by her lawyer, Alberto Ebanks.
"Ms. Suwal agreed to come to terms with the government and will accept responsibility for her involvement in the operations of the Emperor's Club VIP," Ebanks said. "She is contrite and she is determined to right her wrongs in a manner that is just and fair."
A source said Suwal has agreed to testify for the feds in a grand-jury investigation that could lead to criminal charges against Spitzer.

Sewal's and others' testimonies are going to be used in the probe against Spitzer, but one can't help but wonder what will be left of these people and the callgirls they employed when the feds are finished with them. I bet Spitzer's hoping he can quietly sneak back to suburbia without facing any charges. If he makes it out of this without having to wear a state-issued onesy, will he have the balls/integrity to lobby on behalf of the people who are likely to get locked up for providing him with a remedy for his libido-less marriage?

For more reason coverage of Spitzer's downfall, see here, here, here, and here.

FLDS Parents Get Their Kids Back; Church 'Clarifies' Its Marriage Policy

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:34:00 EDT

Yesterday the state of Texas began to allow members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) to recover the children who were illegally seized from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado on April 3. CNN reports that all 468 of the children will be returned except for a 16-year-old girl who, according to her attorney, was an "identified victim of sexual abuse." Speaking of which, yesterday the FLDS Church issued a statement in which it promised to abide by state laws that set a minimum age for marriage:

    * The church's policies regarding marriage have been widely misrepresented and misunderstood. Indeed, much of the misinformation circulating on this subject seems designed intentionally to fuel the flames of prejudice against the church.
    * The church's practices in this regard continue a long tradition of marriage in this country that would have been found to have been unremarkable in 19th century America. In the FLDS church all marriages are consensual. The church insists on appropriate consent, including that of the woman and the man in all circumstances.
    * Nevertheless the church is clarifying its policy toward marriage. Therefore, in the future, the church commits that it will not preside over the marriage of any woman under the age of legal consent in the jurisdiction in which the marriage takes place. The church will counsel families that they neither request nor consent to underage marriages. This policy will apply church-wide.
    * The church believes in purity, cleanliness, and innocence. Our children and families are the cornerstones of our lives and our religion. We hope that this modest clarification in policy will alleviate recent concerns and allow the church and its families to reside in peace among our neighbors.

That sounds like an implicit acknowledgement that FLDS members have not always obeyed state law in this area. When the church says "all marriages are consensual," it does not necessarily mean that the state, which has decreed that girls below a certain age are incapable of giving proper consent, would recognize them as such. At the same time, the church is probably right that its early marriage practices "would have been found to have been unremarkable in 19th century America." In fact, until just a few years ago the minimum age for marriage with parental consent in Texas was 14; the state legislature raised it to 16 in response to concerns about the FLDS presence in Texas.

I don't mean to imply that there should be no minimum or that the state should not enforce it. But it's important to recognize there is a degree of arbitrariness in drawing these lines, especially when animus against a particular religious group seems to be part of the motivation. Lord knows I don't want my 15-year-old daughter to get married, and it's hard for me to sympathize with a father who does. But arranging a match between a girl of that age and a guy in his late teens or early 20s is different from marrying a 13-year-old to a middle-aged man, and both of those are different from "pedophilia," which is how some of the church's harsher critics have described its customs.

The order returning the FLDS children, issued by the same judge who (according to the Texas Supreme Court) erroneously approved their removal, requires their parents to permit unannounced visits by state caseworkers, which "could entail medical, psychological and psychiatric examinations"; to remain in Texas and notify the states of any trips more than 100 miles from home at least 48 hours ahead of time; and to complete "parenting classes." Since the state still has not presented any specific evidence of abuse in the vast majority of these cases, these conditions seem unjustified to me, and the last one is especially insulting. Is there any reason to believe FLDS members lack basic parenting skills, or is it just that state officials don't approve of their religious beliefs?

Previous reason coverage of this story (in chronological order) here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Clarification: As a couple of commenters have noted, the real issue here is (or ought to be) the age of consent for sex. That gets conflated with the minimum age for marriage because having sex with your wife does not constitute statutory rape, no matter how much younger she is, as long as she was old enough to marry with parental consent (and in fact had that consent).

[Thanks to Tracy Cooper for the tip.]

Czechs and the City

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:26:00 EDT

And alert reader points out another thing the Czech Republic's Two Vaclavs have in common−they both like young ladies not named their wives! Of course, that makes them little different from any other Czech male politicians. From The Times of London last month:

When the Czech President confessed that he was having an affair with an airline stewardess less than half his age, most of the country shrugged. Indeed, the nation's biggest newspaper said most people would be impressed and regard him as "a real man".
After all, this was the third time that Václav Klaus, 66, had run off with a young, blonde flight attendant behind his wife's back. Nor was his behaviour out of keeping with other senior politicians. Mirek Topolánek, 51, the Prime Minister, has had a baby son with his 40-year-old girlfriend Lucie Talmanová and moved in with her, even though his wife is refusing to divorce. The leader of the opposition, Jirí Paroubek, 55, is not ideally placed to moralise since he, too, has left his wife and recently married his 34-year-old girlfriend Petra Kovácová, who was his personal translator on foreign trips.
Against this background, the President's latest infidelity has barely raised an eyebrow. His first indiscretion with a blonde stewardess - Eva Svobodová - was in 1991, when he was a rising political star of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. The second time was in 2002, this time with Klára Lohniská, 24, who worked on his official aircraft. Mr Klaus was philosophical: "If a man crosses the street on a red light, then he must be prepared to slip or be run over by a car," he said. The morning after winning re-election last month, he was photographed with Petra Bednárová, 25, also a stewardess on the government aircraft, outside a hotel in Prague. He admitted the affair this week and confessed that it would be difficult to explain to his wife, Livia.

Collectivist Genes

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Are bullying, haranguing, collectivists just expressing adaptive evolutionary behavior? A new paper in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B suggests that when societies are hostile to individualism, sexual selection may be to blame.

Jumping off a growing body of research linking cultural traits to disease risk, the study’s lead author, University of New Mexico biologist Corey L. Fincher, hypothesizes that collectivist behaviors evolved to protect populations from illness. Both ethnocentricism, which discourages contact with disease-carrying outsiders, and conformity, which encourages the transmission of risk-averse behaviors, can serve as buffers against disease. Individualism may be adaptive in that it encourages innovation, but safe, wary behavior could prove more important where pathogens are prevalent.

Fincher and his three co-authors compared data on individualist vs. collectivist values across the globe with data on historical and contemporary measures of disease transmission. Controlling for other factors that may cause cultures to become more individualistic, such as income and urbanization, the researchers found that “worldwide variation in pathogen prevalence substantially predicted societal tendencies toward individualism/collectivism.” In other words, societies living in regions where infectious diseases historically have posed the biggest threats were most likely to discourage individualism. Societies most open to contact with outsiders live in regions where such contact poses the least threat of infection.

The correlation doesn’t explain how these behaviors are passed along through generations. Transmission may be cultural, as with methods of food preparation that guard against infection, or heritable, as a selection process weeds out anti-collectivist tendencies. Either way, the effect is likely to weaken as medicine reduces the risk of infection—good news for individualists, or anyone who dares stray from the tribe.

"Drop Dead Gorgeous—and Military Trained!"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Via the overheated commentary of Extreme Mortman comes this bizarre slow-news-day CNN Situation Room bit on how Israel (that 60-year-old!) is overhauling its image by having former military gals pose for Maxim magazine. "Israel is hip, sexy, and fun," says CNN:

Not sure if Fox News will counterblast with the girls of the PLO.

Gentle reader, does this news change your views on foreign aid?

Or does it merely convince you further that we're living in the Rapture and we don't even know it?

Compensate Much?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:32:00 EDT

Via Reddit, the 50 most popular pages on "Conservapedia," the reference wiki for right-wingers.

The Investigation Continues, but Here Are a Few Reckless Allegations

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:18:00 EDT

Yesterday, attempting to retroactively justify the wholesale removal of children from the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch, Carey Cockerell, commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, insinuated that children at the ranch, which is owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), had been beaten severely enough to break their bones. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Cockerell told a state legislative committee "at least 41 children from the polygamous YFZ Ranch have had broken bones," which he said was "cause for concern." Yet USA Today reports that the medical textbook Fractures in Children "cites data that suggest 42% of boys and 27% of girls suffer at least one fracture before age 16." According to the latest official count, the state of Texas has taken custody of 464 minors who lived at YFZ, ranging in age from less than 1 to 17. If 41 of them have had broken bones, that's less than 10 percent over all, which, pace Cockerell, does not seem to be "cause for concern."

FLDS attorney Rod Parker notes that some of the children at YFZ suffer from brittle bone disease:

That makes some of the children more susceptible to broken bones. The mothers told CPS about that when they were taken in. They've known all along that the reason they might see higher incidence of broken bones was due to this condition. They have no evidence to support the implication it is due to child abuse.

Lloyd Barlow, a physician who lives at YFZ, said he'd seen no signs of abuse:

"Probably over 90 percent of the injuries are forearm fractures from ground-level or low level falls," Barlow told The Associated Press from his office at the Eldorado ranch. "I can also tell you that we don't live in a community where there is a pattern of abuse."
Barlow said he is an FLDS member but also a licensed physician in Texas and Utah and is required by law to report suspected abuse.
"What they are saying is that in the history of the lives of 400 some-odd children, there have been injuries. They are not saying they have 41 [current] fractures," he said.

Cockerell's department later backed away from his insinuation that the fractures were evidence of beatings:

Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Child Protective Services division, said the state was still investigating and Cockerell's comments were not meant to be an allegation of abuse.
"This is pretty early in this investigation, particularly given the number of children we've been interviewing," he said. "We are just looking into it."

This is pretty sleazy: There seem to be a lot of broken bones (though not any more than you'd expect in a random sample of American kids), and we're concerned about that, but we're not saying the kids were abused. We're just strongly implying it.

Cockerell also said "interviews with children and journals found at the ranch" have led investigators to believe some of the boys may have been sexually abused. Anyone who is familar with episodes like the trumped-up McMartin Preschool prosecutions understands how easy it is for social workers, through leading questions and repeated allegations, to elicit testimony from little kids that supports their preconceptions. As for the journals, since Cockerell says only that abuse may have occurred, I assume the written evidence is ambiguous as well.

Although it may turn out that some of the children at YFZ were abused physically and/or sexually, I don't trust Cockerell's investigators to find the truth, because I don't think they see that as their mission. Instead they are intent on showing, in the face of widespread criticism, that the state was right to separate all the children from their parents, even though there was no evidence of abuse in the vast majority of cases. The thing is, they will never be able to show the state was right, no matter what they find. At the time they forcibly removed these children, state officials conceded they had no reason to believe anyone was being beaten or that sexual abuse extended beyond the underage marriage of teenaged girls (the extent of which is disputed by FLDS members). As I noted in my column yesterday, in more than nine out of 10 cases their argument for separation hinged on the idea that bringing children up according to FLDS teachings was inherently abusive. If they subsequently find evidence of physical or sexual abuse, that does not make their rationale for removal any more legitimate.

Latter-Day Taint

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

I'm not quite as old-fashioned as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), which hews to the early-marriage customs of the 19th century and the polygamous practices of biblical times. But I'm old-fashioned enough to believe the government needs a good reason to pull a crying, clinging child away from her mother and hand her over to the care of strangers.

The possibility that the child might marry an older man 10 or 12 or 14 years from now does not cut it. Citing that long-term, speculative danger to justify the certain, immediate damage it has done by forcibly separating hundreds of children from their parents, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has violated its duty to take such extreme measures only when there's no other way to prevent imminent harm.

The department took custody of 463 minors who were living at the FLDS church's Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch in Eldorado after an April 3 raid that was based on an abuse report police believe was a hoax. On Monday state officials said the children, who are now living in group homes or shelters, include 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17, of whom 31 are pregnant or have children.

I don't know whether to believe that. Texas officials have proven unreliable even on such basic questions as the justification for the raid, which was a report of physical abuse from a 16-year-old YFZ resident who apparently does not exist, and the number of children seized, a figure that was revised yet again this week. Just a few days ago, the number of underage mothers was said to be 20.

It's not clear how the government determined the ages of these girls. It says many who claimed to be adults were in fact minors, while FLDS members say many of the girls the state describes as minors are in fact adults.

Furthermore, the age of consent for sex in Texas is 17, while the minimum age for marriage, with parental approval, is 16 (raised in 2005 from 14 with the FLDS in mind). Hence a pregnant 16- or 17-year-old is not necessarily evidence that any laws have been broken.

Even by the government's account, 463 children were forcibly removed from their homes because 7 percent of them may have been victims of sexual abuse. Although there's no evidence that boys or prepubescent girls were abused at YFZ, the minors in state custody include 213 boys and about 130 children under the age of 5.

What is the state's rationale for taking girls who were not pregnant or mothers along with those who were, for taking boys along with girls, and for taking infants, toddlers, and preschoolers along with teenagers? In an affidavit, it asserts "a pervasive pattern and practice of indoctrinating and grooming minor female children to accept spiritual marriages to adult male members of the YFZ Ranch resulting in them being abused." As for the boys, "after they become adults, [they] are spiritually married to minor female children and engage in sexual relationships with them resulting in them becoming sexually [sic] perpetrators."

In short, the whole FLDS culture is sick and corrupt, so anyone raised in that environment is ipso facto a victim of abuse. This theory of collective guilt, which was accepted by Judge Barbara Walther after a chaotic and cursory mass hearing on April 17, is the antithesis of the individualized risk assessment that is supposed to justify taking a child from his parents.

Some YFZ residents say they do not approve of marriage before the legal age of consent, while others say they do not practice polygamy at all. Yet all were tarred with the same broad brush, based on a principle that church attorney Rod Parker aptly summed up this way: "If you're a member of this religious group, then you're not allowed to have children."

First They Came for the Toddlers...

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:25:00 EDT

The FLDS raid in Texas looks more ludicrous every day. Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Scott Henson takes aim at Judge Barbara Walther:

Excuse me, Judge? You issued a sweeping, house-to-house search warrant based on a highly questionable anonymous call that turned out to be phony. You refused to allow individual hearings for children, grouping them together like cattle. You accepted the testimony of an expert on "cults" who only learned about FLDS from media accounts, rather than an academic who'd studied them professionally for 18 years.

You've ruled the existence of five girls between 16 and 19 who were pregnant or had children was evidence of systematic abuse, even though in Texas 16-year-olds can marry with parental consent. You've ruled young toddlers are in "immediate" danger because of their parents' beliefs or what might happen 15 years from now, not because anyone abuses them.

From the evidence presented publicly, I do not believe that the children have been sexually abused or physically harmed. Allegations of forcible rape turned out to be bogus, and only five girls 16 to 19 years old were found pregnant or with children -- probably about the same ratio you'd find if you rounded up all the kids in my neighborhood....

In Eldorado, no one alleges YFZ parents are themselves abusing children. Instead the allegation (in court, at least) is that they're teaching their kids that a woman's highest calling is giving birth and raising children and that it's acceptable to get married at an early age. Even if it were true, and the allegation was disputed, can this really be enough to seize children from their homes?

Hanson has been covering the case heavily on his excellent blog. Also invaluable: The Polygamy Files, a blog by Brooke Adams of The Salt Lake Tribune, who has been on the fundamentalist Mormon beat for years. One piece of good news: Judge Walther has reversed her decision to separate FLDS mothers from children less than 12 months old.

And yes, it may turn out that there was some genuine sexual abuse in that community. If so, it should be punished. But even then, the approach the government has taken would be deeply harmful overkill, for reasons expressed pithily by Les Jones:

Imagine that some parents in a school district were accused of child abuse. Now imagine that the authorities took every child from the elementary, junior high, and high school away from their parents and put them in foster care. That's a rough analogy of what's happening in Texas.

The difference, I guess, is that the FLDS parents belong to a "cult." And once you've applied that label, it's just a quick step to assuming they do everything en masse.

You Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:09:00 EDT

Be careful what you look at, if you're sitting in a Maine public park. According to a bill that passed the Pine Tree State's House,

a person who, for the purpose of arousing or gratifying sexual desire, intentionally engages in visual surveillance, aided or unaided by mechanical or electronic equipment, of the uncovered breasts, buttocks, genitals, anus or pubic area of another person is guilty of visual sexual aggression regardless of where the surveillance occurs. Surveillance may occur either in a public or private place.

Read more about it over at Advice Goddess Amy Alkon's blog. While you're there, watch her accuse Rebecca Solnit of "grassy-knoll feminism."