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When Your Parents Divorce Late In Life, Ctd

A few more readers chime in:

I love your blog, but your comment on this subject, sadly, missed the point. I agree that it’s never too late to seek happiness in life. I divorced after a 10-year marriage (no kids) and have discovered happiness and a life now that is more complete than I ever imagined.

I’m also an adult child of divorce. My parents split when I was in my late 20s (and while I was still married). It has had a profound impact on me. When you’re an adult child, the roles are reversed. You aren’t the “kid” who mom or dad or other family members reach out to make sure you’re ok and handling the grief of seeing your family being torn apart. You are the “adult” who becomes the shoulder for your mom and/or your dad to deal with their grief and their emotions.

They open up to you about the other in ways that make you look back and question memories of your childhood. The father I thought I knew becomes an ex-husband who “wasn’t this and wasn’t that”. The mother I thought I knew, becomes a ex-wife who “wasn’t this and wasn’t that”. People think since you’re an adult and already grown up, it’s easier for you to rationalize that relationships fail and deal with the loss.

Even though we’re adults, we’re still kids at heart. Experiencing the break-up of your family and loss of decades of established family traditions is hard too. Yet few recognize the impact this has on us kids even when we’re grown-up. We’re expected to understand. And, as a result, the loss and grief we go through are often ignored.

Another makes an interesting point:

Several readers wrote in objecting to the use of “stepmother” to refer to someone you first met as an adult. English is a flexible language.  It is up to us to determine what words mean.

Reading the letters of how people think of a person who becomes attached to them as a result of the legal act of marriage, I realized that these people are discussing their “stepmothers” exactly the way I think of my two mothers-in-law (I’m widowed). Neither one was someone I had a choice in. Both were attached by marriage.  One is someone I’m cordial to, but not all that close. The other is a great friend.

I just realized that these people are describing mothers who arrived by marriage.  If she arrives when you’re already and adult, your dad’s new wife is really a “mother-in-law”, not a “stepmother”.

How Risky Is Going After Big Coal?

For Democrats, not very:

The war on coal hasn’t hurt the Democrats very much in presidential elections. Since 2000, when coal country and Appalachia helped cost Mr. Gore the presidency, Democrats have built an alternative path to victory with large margins in diverse, well-educated metropolitan areas, like Northern Virginia, Denver and Columbus, Ohio. Additional losses in coal country haven’t changed this because the areas don’t have enough voters to make a difference in battleground states.

And coal country has clear boundaries that limit harm to Democrats. In 2012, Mr. Obama suffered significant losses in the coal country of southwestern Virginia, losing as much as a net 30 points in traditionally Democratic Dickenson and Buchanan counties. Yet just a few miles to the east, in counties where there are no coal mines, Mr. Obama retained nearly all of his support. The same was true in southeastern Ohio.

Alec MacGillis adds:

Take Kentucky, the focus of much of the punditry, given the close race between Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes. Coal-mining employment in the Bluegrass State has plunged by more than half in the past three decades, from 38,000 in 1983 to under 17,000 in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. (Nationally, there are 78,000 people employed in coal mining—well less than half as many as are employed in oil and gas extraction, and not much more than the number of people employed in logging.) To put that in perspective: the auto manufacturing industry in Kentucky employs three times as many people as the coal industry does today. When is the last time you heard pundits making grand predictions about how new auto-industry regulations would affect Kentucky “Car Country”?

China Gets Serious About Climate Change?

Maybe:

China said on Tuesday it will set an absolute cap on its CO2 emissions from 2016 just a day after the United States announced new targets for its power sector, signaling a potential breakthrough in tough U.N. climate talks.

Plumer unpacks the news:

If China ever did put a cap on its absolute carbon emissions, that would definitely mark a big policy shift. For now, China has only aimed to restrict its “carbon intensity” — the amount of carbon-dioxide it produces per unit of economic output. That means China’s overall emissions keep growing as the nation’s economy expands. A cap on emissions, by contrast, would require overall emissions to peak.

Also:

It’s not yet guaranteed that China will actually announce a cap. The man who made the announcement — He Jiankun, chairman of China’s Advisory Committee on Climate Change — is an adviser to the government, but he’s not a government official. So we’ll still have to see if this is the official Chinese government’s position. … More importantly, we don’t yet know the details of this supposed cap. What emissions will get capped? All of them? Some? How stringent will the cap be? Will it be enforceable?

Keating hopes the Chinese follow-through:

The Chinese government and official media often present the U.S. position on emissions as deeply hypocritical. China, after all, still has much lower emissions per capita than the United States, and the U.S. and Europe were able to pollute their way to prosperity in an era before concerns about global warming. Why, the argument goes, should China and other developing countries shoulder the burden for a problem largely created by the West?

This argument, paired with the American aversion to any new emissions rules that won’t also apply to China, creates a perfect feedback loop of inaction, with both countries arguing that the issue is the other side’s problem. While still very preliminary, this week’s news could be an indication that the two countries are starting to break out of the cycle and take some action on their own.

What Andrew Revkin is hearing:

I consulted with The Times’s Beijng bureau. Christopher Buckley, a reporter [based in Hong Kong] who in 2011 had covered China’s emissions plans [and similar pushes from advisers to adopt a cap] while with Reuters, spoke with He Jiankun, who told him repeatedly that he did not in any way speak for the government, or the full expert climate committee. Here’s Buckley’s translation:

It’s not the case that the Chinese government has made any decision. This is a suggestion from experts, because now they are exploring how emissions can be controlled in the 13th Five Year Plan…. This is a view of experts; that’s not saying it’s the government’s. I’m not a government official and I don’t represent the government.

Keith Johnson adds more context:

Beijing’s formal environmental goals are designed to make the economy relatively cleaner but allow overall greenhouse gas emissions to keep rising as the economy keeps growing. The latest official targets, for instance, are meant to cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 2015, rather than cutting carbon emissions outright. China is struggling to meet even those lower targets. Meeting these potentially more ambitious ones will be even harder.

The View From Your Window

Williamsburg, New York, 4 pm

Obama’s Global Warming Long Game

Lizza describes the president’s climate agenda as evidence of his “left conservatism”:

It’s hardly unheard of for a President to be cautious about pushing social change, and it would be more surprising if a President didn’t move in the direction of shifting public opinion. Obama and his aides like to see him as someone who plays a long game. They sometimes suggest that his movement on these issues is all part of a grand plan. More likely, Obama is what might be called a “left conservative,” a phrase that Norman Mailer briefly popularized when he ran for mayor of New York, in 1969. Obama obviously shares the outlook of the left on these cultural issues, but he’s temperamentally cautious and rarely believes that it’s worth his effort to act until his own liberal base has moved the country along with it. And, even then, he sees his job as moderating the passions of the activists.

But this interaction between Obama and an activist left that is slowly pushing the country in its direction—especially among younger Americans—is becoming the main subplot of the Obama years. While people like  [environmental lawyer] James Milkey push for change at the bottom, they are increasingly finding an ally at the top.

Bouie credits Republicans for forcing the EPA’s hand. He recalls how they killed climate legislation in 2009:

It’s not that EPA action wasn’t possible, but that the administration wanted legislation and would make key concessions to get it. In the absence of a law, however, the White House was prepared to act alone. “If Republicans didn’t respond to the proposed deals,” wrote The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, “the White House could push them to the table by making a threat through the Environmental Protection Agency, which had recently been granted power to regulate carbon, just as it regulates many other air pollutants.”

With a little cooperation, Republicans could have won a better outcome for their priorities. They could have exempted coal from more stringent spectrum of regulations, enriched their constituencies with new subsidies and benefits, and diluted a key Democratic priority. Instead, they’ll now pay a steep substantive price for their obstruction, in the form of rules that are tougher—and more liberal—than anything that could have passed Congress.

Brentin Mock focuses on the racial justice angle of the new EPA rules:

President Obama hit on carbon pollution impacts on black and Latino kids within the first couple minutes of his talk with reporters yesterday, in a press call hosted by the American Lung Association. “The health issues that we’re talking about hit some communities particularly hard,” he said. “African-American children are twice as likely to be hospitalized for asthma, four times as likely to die from asthma. Latinos are 30 percent more likely to be hospitalized for asthma. So these proposed standards will help us meet that challenge head on.”

The fact that the EPA and Obama are holding up asthmatic kids of color as the avatar for the new carbon regime testifies to how much environmental-justice advocates have shaped this climate conversation over the past few years.

And Ben Adler previews the political battle to come:

Cleaner air, or less global warming, benefits everyone. But it benefits most people only marginally, and invisibly. So, as with many other types of industry regulation, support may be a mile wide and an inch deep. The costs, unlike the benefits, are heavily concentrated. Someone who works for a coal company, or a related industry, or in a community with a large coal presence, may see a direct threat to her livelihood and be much more motivated to call her congress member or show up at a town hall to express her intense opposition.

That’s why the coal industry will focus its efforts in the states that are most dependent on coal for their electricity, or that have it in the ground. “We’ve been seeking to educate and inform consumers through some of our grassroots activities in key coal and coal-consuming states,” says Nancy Gravatt, communications director for the National Mining Association, a trade organization for mining companies. There are 19 states across the Midwest, Appalachia, and the Rocky Mountains that get more than half of their electricity from coal. That’s where NMA will focus. And in Upper Midwestern states like Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois, the group will argue that an increase in electricity costs would damage the manufacturing economy.

The Future Of The Gay Rights Movement Is Evangelical

I met the painfully young Matthew Vines last week, after a few near-misses over the past couple of years. The Dish has been following his work for a while now. Dan Savage gives you the basic biography:

Matthew Vines is a young gay man who grew up in Kansas. His family is Christian and very conservative. After coming out, Vines took two years off college to research and think deeply about what the bible says—and doesn’t say—about homosexuality.

Matthew doesn’t intend to go back to Harvard; indeed he has set his sights on living in Wichita, Kansas, where he is from, and building his fledgling organization, The Reformation Project, to create change within the evangelical church. But the most significant aspect of Matthew is his orthodoxy. His book, God and the Gay Christian, which I recently finished, is not an indictment of Christianity’s long and somewhat callous treatment of homosexuals; it’s an impassioned case that the Bible does not say what many have assumed it to say, once you bore down into the critical verses and chapters and try to understand them faithfully. It’s a thoroughly conservative and orthodox argument. We covered the gist extensively here and here. The video seen above is Matthew’s brand new distillation of the case into a few minutes.

But what thrilled me about the book is that it’s extremely persuasive in utterly orthodox terms. You do not have to pretend that almost all the references to same-sex sex in the Bible are not extremely negative to see more deeply that what these passages are condemning is excessive lust, sexual obsession, and sexual exploitation, rather than homosexual love, as we understand it now. More to the point, several other powerful and more fundamental Biblical passages show how the demand for enforced celibacy for gay Christians is anathema to the human flourishing that Jesus came to foster.

Some of the arguments were familiar to me, and were echoed in my own, somewhat parallel investigation into Catholicism’s natural law arguments against homosexual love. But others were genuinely new and eye-opening. If you read the book alongside James V. Brownson’s groundbreaking new work of Biblical scholarship, Bible, Gender, Sexuality, you begin to see the contours of a revolution in evangelical circles on the subject. Here’s a brief glimpse of an awakening:

What struck me about both books is a new tone. That tone is not defensive or angry, but entirely reasoned and calm. It is the tone I strove to achieve in Virtually Normal all those years ago – a tone designed merely to invite others into a dialogue beyond the polarizing culture and politics of our time. And it is a tone resting on confidence. There is no intellectual straining in Vines’ book; its arguments are simply explained and it is geared almost entirely to a readership that accepts basic evangelical notions about the Bible’s authority and divinely inspired literal truth. I’ve always had a bit of a defensive crouch about the obvious condemnation of some same-sex acts in the Bible, but because my own faith is not built on literalism or entirely on Biblical authority, I didn’t need to defang them. But Vines and Brownson do just that convincingly and then move on to the broader Christian message of the virtue of a commitment to another person, of self-giving to another in love and marriage, in ways that are finally able to include gay people in the broader evangelical community. I won’t read those passages in the Bible the same way again.

People talk about the cutting edge of gay activism, but here is another cutting edge – of gay scholarship in a zone where few openly gay people have felt emboldened to tread. These books may do to the next evangelical generation what John Boswell’s Christianity, Homosexuality and Social Tolerance did to mine. I cannot recommend it – or this fearlessly logical young spirit – highly enough.

Quote For The Day II

“In the eyes of history, President Barack Obama’s legacy will be tainted by his 2009 decision that the Justice Department would ‘look forward, not backward’ on torture. This denied justice and attempted to cover up a dark chapter in American history, putting us at risk for repeating this immorality in the future. It also allowed people like Rodriguez and his former minions to go to the press and repeat their lies over and over again.

This is not to say that the Justice Department has done nothing. After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, I became the subject of a selective and vindictive FBI investigation that lasted more than four years. In 2012, the Justice Department charged me with “disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.” What I had revealed was that the CIA had a program to kill or capture al Qaeda members—hardly a secret—and that the CIA was torturing many of those prisoners. I’m serving 30 months in a federal prison,” – Jon Kiriakou, whistle-blower on waterboarding, from jail.

The View From Your Window

Banaue, Philippines, 11 am

The Curious Case Of Bond v. US

Yesterday, SCOTUS ruled that the federal government cannot use a law implementing an international chemical weapons treaty to prosecute a private citizen. Garrett Epps describes what the court called “this curious case”:

This is the second installment of the soap opera of Carol Anne Bond. Bond’s husband and her best friend conceived a child. When she found out, Bond, a trained laboratory technician, turned to the hostile use of 10-chloro-10H-phenoxarsine and potassium dichromate, both deadly poisons. She smeared them on various doorknobs and car doors at Hayes’s house, on one occasion giving Hayes’s thumb a nasty burn. She also unwisely smeared them on Hayes’s mailbox, which is by law part of the U.S. Postal System. Postal inspectors posted security cameras and caught her on video. Federal prosecutors proclaimed this “a very serious, scary case,” because Bond had stolen four pounds of potassium dichromate from her workplace. They charged her with theft of the mail—and violation of 18 U.S.C. § 229, the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998.

On Monday a six-justice majority, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, told the government it had misread the statute to “sweep in everything from the detergent under the kitchen sink to the stain remover in the laundry room,” and “make[] it a federal offense to poison goldfish.” Roberts was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. All nine justices agreed that the government had gone too far in prosecuting Bond. The majority said the indictment violated the statute; Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito would have held the prosecution unconstitutional.

Amy Howe explains how the justices split on the constitutional question:

Because the Court held that the federal ban on chemical weapons does not apply to Bond, it left for another day whether Congress – relying on its constitutional power to approve treaties – can also pass laws to put a treaty into effect in the U.S., even if no other provision of the Constitution would have given it the authority to do so.  (The Court will often refrain from deciding a question involving the Constitution if it can decide the case on some other, non-constitutional ground – a principle known as “constitutional avoidance.”)

But Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito all would have weighed in on that question, because in their view it was “clear beyond doubt” that the federal chemical weapons law applied to Bond.  They would have struck down her conviction for another reason:  that the mere fact that the Constitution authorizes Congress to approve treaties does not automatically mean that laws passed to put the treaties into effect are constitutional.  And here, in their view, the federal ban on chemical weapons is not.

Noting that “the court was unwilling simply to say that it was interpreting the law flexibly to avoid an absurd result,” Noah Feldman worries that the ruling, though narrower than Scalia, et al. would have liked, will still have broader consequences than it ought to:

See, Congress’s power to pass the chemical weapons law derived from its authority to pass laws implementing treaties. Everyone agrees such authority exists, even though it isn’t expressly stated in the Constitution. But not everyone agrees on whether Congress can use this power to pass laws that might trench on states’ rights. And arguably, the authority to regulate ordinary assaults is within the states’ exclusive power. Drawing on all this, the court, in a 9-0 decision, announced that the law must be found ambiguous in what it called “this curious case” because read literally the statute would be improbably broad, even “boundless,” and would potentially impinge state prerogatives. It held that it would have needed a “clear indication” that Congress intended to apply the law to this conduct — and indication the court found lacking.

If this sounds fine, it isn’t. Despite the court’s apparent preference to cabin its holding to these strange facts, the decision will probably be read to limit Congress’ ability to legislate based on its power to implement treaties. In the future, it can be argued that a given statute shouldn’t be applied because Congress hasn’t been “utterly clear” that it does. This may not bother the states’ rights justices, but it should bother anyone who cares about the U.S. fulfilling its international treaty obligations.

Posner reads Scalia’s opinion as a strategic move meant to head off a very particular threat:

The unstated target of the opinion is the international human rights treaty. Those treaties ban all kinds of police-powers-related stuff. The Senate ensured that they were not self-executing, but I suppose that the next time Democrats control the government, they could pass laws that implement them. At least in theory, a Democratic sweep could result in ratification of a human rights treaty that bans the death penalty, and then implementation of it through a federal statute. Not likely to happen anytime in the next few decades if ever, but you can’t fault Scalia for failing to think ahead.