Columnist.
The New York Times obituary for Thomas Szasz, who died this month at the age of 92, says his critique of psychiatry "had some merit in the 1950s ... but not later on, when the field began developing more scientific approaches." That's a paraphrase of historian Edward Shorter, whose judgment reflects the conventional wisdom: Szasz called much-needed attention to psychiatric abuses early in his career but went too far by insisting on a fundamental distinction between actual, biological diseases and metaphorical diseases of the mind. In fact, however, Szasz's radicalism, which he combined with a sharp wit, a keen eye for obfuscating rhetoric, and an uncompromising dedication to individual freedom and responsibility, was one of his greatest strengths. Beginning with "The Myth of Mental Illness" in 1961 and continuing through 35 more books and hundreds of articles, the maverick psychiatrist, driven by a "passion against coercion," zeroed in on the foundational fallacies underlying all manner of medicalized tyranny.
Sandra Fluke's claim to fame, aside from provoking Rush Limbaugh's misogynistic ire, is that she chose to attend Georgetown Law School, knowing full well that the Catholic university's student health plan did not cover birth control, and then demanded that the policy be changed, under force of law, as a matter of "reproductive justice." Although Fluke could have picked a different school, she told The Washington Post last February, "I decided I was absolutely not willing to compromise the quality of my education in exchange for my health care." Fluke's sense of entitlement and her casual resort to the use of force made her an ideal speaker for last week's Democratic National Convention, where she was joined by many others who believe justice requires that they receive whatever they want (including automaker bailouts and cheap student loans), even if other people have to pay for it. This mentality is so pervasive among Democrats that they seem unable to distinguish between defending rights and soliciting subsidies.
If you don't count Clint Eastwood, whose rambling, Bob Newhartesque conversation with an empty chair included implicit criticism of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rand Paul may have been the only speaker at the Republican National Convention last week who questioned his party's mindless militarism. The Kentucky senator said, "Republicans must acknowledge that not every dollar spent on the military is necessary or well-spent." That mild rebuke -- which came, fittingly enough, from the son of the Texas congressman whose resistance to promiscuous interventionism distinguished him from the other contenders for the GOP's 2012 presidential nomination -- was no match for the foreign policy vision endorsed by the rest of the speakers, which amounted to a full-throated declaration of war on tyrants throughout the world. This view of America as the righter of all wrongs is hard to reconcile with Republican promises of fiscal responsibility.
Last Friday, upon receiving the maximum possible penalty for murdering 77 people in and near Oslo, Norway, a year ago, Anders Behring Breivik smiled. The prison sentence -- 21 years initially, but indefinitely extendable for as long as Breivik is deemed a threat -- meant a five-judge panel had rejected the prosecution's argument that the self-proclaimed anti-Islamic militant was insane when he committed his bloody crimes. Since Breivik feared such a judgment would hurt his political cause, the verdict was, in that sense, a victory for him. But it was also a victory for individual responsibility and the rule of law, both of which are undermined by pseudomedical pronouncements that treat extreme ideas as symptoms of mental illness.
You know a politician has stepped in it big-time when he feels compelled to produce an ad declaring that "rape is an evil act." The spot, in which Todd Akin apologizes for using "the wrong words in the wrong way," is part of his penance for saying, in an interview with a St. Louis TV station on Sunday, that "legitimate rape" rarely results in pregnancy because "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." Akin, a six-term Republican congressman from Missouri who is running for the Senate, has backed away from that poorly phrased, medically dubious claim, which was condemned by a bipartisan chorus of critics, several of whom said he should withdraw from the race. But he stands firm on his position that rape does not justify abortion, and in this respect he is more logically consistent than many other Republicans who call themselves "pro-life," including the party's presidential nominee.
On June 21, 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Texas law that made flag burning a state crime, ruling that it violated the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. A month later, Rep. Jack Brooks, D-Texas introduced a bill that made flag burning a federal crime. Approved by Congress that fall, the new law was overturned by the Supreme Court the following year. The Sanctity of Eternal Rest for Veterans Act, signed into law by President Obama last week, seems destined for the same fate. The law, which prohibits protests within 300 feet of a military funeral from two hours before the ceremony until two hours afterward, represents the same sort of willful constitutional defiance as the short-lived federal ban on flag burning, sacrificing liberty in an ostentatious display of patriotism.
Palestinian leaders were understandably insulted when Mitt Romney, noting the huge gap in wealth between Israel and the West Bank during a speech in Jerusalem on Monday, declared, "Culture makes all the difference." Although culture plays an important role in economic development, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee overlooked another key variable: government. Good government establishes conditions that are conducive to production, innovation and trade. I am not talking about the roads, bridges and public schools cited by President Obama in his notorious "you didn't build that" speech. I am talking about a more basic kind of infrastructure: the rule of law, protection of property rights, enforcement of contracts, honest and open government, tolerable taxes and a minimum of interference with transactions between consenting adults.
Hours after last Friday's massacre in Aurora, Colo., New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg demanded that the two major parties' presidential candidates explain how they plan to prevent such senseless outbursts of violence. "No matter where you stand on the Second Amendment, no matter where you stand on guns, we have a right to hear from both of them concretely," Bloomberg said in a radio interview. "What are they going to do about guns?" Whether you accept the premise that something must be done about guns, of course, might be influenced by where you stand on the Second Amendment and where you stand on guns. But according to Bloomberg, even people who object to gun control on practical or constitutional grounds are morally obliged to support it. Such arrogant illogic may help explain why public support for new gun restrictions has been falling for two decades.
Last week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. It was the 33rd such vote taken by the House and, since Democrats control the Senate, no more likely to be successful than the first 32. The day before the vote, however, the House Ways and Means Committee heard testimony that highlighted another, more promising way to override the health care law: Americans can refuse to comply with its command that they obtain government-approved medical coverage, which the Supreme Court has deemed a mere suggestion even though it is essential to the legislation's goals. Furthermore, if ObamaCare objectors take a simple precaution, they can opt out without paying the prescribed penalty. ObamaCare requires insurers to take all comers and charge them the same rates, regardless of health. Those rules create two problems that reinforce each other: They raise premiums, and they encourage people to delay buying medical coverage until they're sick.
Early last year, when the death toll from Mexican President Felipe Calderon's crackdown on the cartels stood at 35,000 or so, Michele Leonhart, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told reporters in Cancun that "the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs." The results of last week's presidential election, in which the candidate of Calderon's National Action Party (PAN) finished a distant third, suggest Mexican voters are no longer buying that counterintuitive argument, if they ever did. Even if the "fight against drugs" were winnable, it would be an outrageous imposition. Why should Mexicans tolerate murder and mayhem on an appalling scale (more than 50,000 deaths since Calderon launched his assault in December 2006), not to mention the rampant corruption associated with prohibition, all in the name of stopping Americans from obtaining psychoactive substances that their government has arbitrarily decreed they should not consume? That sort of arrogant expectation is becoming increasingly untenable.
Last week, supporters and opponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act anxiously awaited the Supreme Court's ruling on the law's individual health insurance mandate. Imagine their surprise when the Court announced, in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, that there is no individual health insurance mandate. Rather than a "penalty" imposed on anyone who "fails to comply" with the "requirement to maintain minimum essential coverage," which is how the law itself describes the policy, Roberts perceived a "tax" that hinges on whether one follows the government's totally nonmandatory guidelines regarding health insurance. This implausible relabeling of reality was Roberts' desperate attempt to uphold the provision formerly known as a mandate without endorsing a boundless view of Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce. Instead he endorsed a boundless view of Congress' tax power that could prove even more dangerous to liberty.
Pity the poor speech regulators at the Federal Communications Commission, who are charged with sifting through complaints about TV and radio programs in a farcical attempt to determine which references to "sexual or excretory organs or activities" are "patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium." Last week, the Supreme Court declined to rule on the constitutionality of this charade, thereby forcing the FCC's butt-coverers and word-bleepers to contemplate a backlog of 1.5 million or so complaints. "The FCC must now enforce our right to decency on the public airwaves," declared Morality in Media President Patrick Trueman. Unpacking that statement reveals the intellectual and constitutional bankruptcy of this whole censorious enterprise. Trueman's "right to decency" is, in essence, a right not to be offended, which sits rather uneasily with the right to freedom of speech. The First Amendment would not amount to much if it extended only to inoffensive utterances.
Everyone expected that New York City's Board of Health, all 11 members of which were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, would rubber-stamp his proposed 16-ounce cap on servings of sugar-sweetened soft drinks. But at a meeting last week, several board members zeroed in on the most obvious problem with Bloomberg's plan to treat adults like children: It does not go far enough. Given Bloomberg's avowed goal of reducing New Yorkers' waistlines by reducing their calorie intake, his soda scheme is indeed absurdly inadequate, as he inadvertently emphasizes every time he minimizes the extent to which it will restrict consumer freedom. Once we accept the premise that our weight is the government's business, we open the door to meddling far more intrusive and oppressive than Bloomberg's pint-sized pop prescription, which is bound to fail as an anti-obesity measure but could still succeed as a paternalistic precedent. Although the Board of Health unanimously agreed to hold a hearing on the soft drink regulations next month, followed by a final vote in September, members' comments highlighted the timidity of the mayor's supposedly courageous plan. Joel Forman questioned the exception for milk-based beverages such as coffee drinks and chocolate shakes, which "have monstrous amounts of calories" -- more per ounce than soda, in fact, which is also true of the fruit juices that would be exempt from Bloomberg's serving ceiling.
Last month, when President Obama finally endorsed gay marriage after years of equivocation, he emphasized that he still thinks states should be free to address the issue as they see fit. Since many voters strongly oppose gay marriage, it is clear why Obama advocates a federalist approach to the question. But it is not clear that he logically can. Obama's inconsistency is illustrated by two cases involving gay marriage that the Supreme Court could hear during its next term. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit overturned a law that prohibits federal recognition of state-licensed gay marriages, and last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined to reconsider a case in which it ruled against California's ban on gay marriage. The 1st Circuit case involves Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which the Obama administration stopped defending last year after concluding it is unconstitutional. During the same May 9 ABC News interview in which he declared that "same-sex couples should be able to get married," Obama said DOMA "tried to federalize what has historically been state law."
Casting about for a reason why Rudy Eugene gnawed off most of a homeless man's face in an unprovoked attack on Miami's MacArthur Causeway last month, his girlfriend suggested he may have been the victim of a voodoo curse. Or maybe he was drugged, she told The Miami Herald, adding, "I don't know how else to explain this." While the voodoo hypothesis did not gain much traction, the idea that drugs turned Eugene into the "Miami Zombie" was repeated by one news outlet after another, even though there was little more evidence in its favor. This pattern of credulous reporting, characteristic of drug panics, reflects our perennial readiness to believe that satanic substances hijack people's souls and compel them to sin.
In January, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that tracking a suspect's movements by attaching a GPS transmitter to his car counts as a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. But because the majority opinion emphasized the physical intrusion needed to surreptitiously install the transmitter, it did not resolve the constitutional implications of surveillance using cellphones, the tracking devices that Americans voluntarily carry in their pockets and purses.
Last Thursday, the day after President Obama finally endorsed gay marriage, his campaign released a video that faults his presumptive Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, for not doing likewise.
"I favor legalizing same-sex marriages," Barack Obama told a gay newspaper while seeking his first term as an Illinois state senator in 1996, "and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages." When Obama ran for re-election in 1998, he took the National Political Awareness Test, which among other things asked, "Do you believe that the Illinois government should recognize same-sex marriages?" His response: "Undecided."
"I got five baby mammas, and I put my hands on every last one of them except for one," Rico Gray confessed during a November 2010 deposition. "The way I was with women ... they had to walk on eggshells around me." He recalled punching women in the face, shoving them, choking them and tossing them out the door. Yet somehow, after one of those women fired a warning shot into the ceiling of her Jacksonville, Fla., home to scare him away during yet another violent outburst, prosecutors managed to convince a jury that Gray was the victim. As a result, Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old mother of three, faces 20 years in prison for standing her ground against an abusive husband.
