Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 324

Police With A Free Pass For Prostitutes

For more than 40 years, officers have been allowed to solicit prostitutes while on duty. And they’re lobbying to keep it that way:

The state law that exempts police officers, which has been on the books since 1972, attracted attention in Hawaii earlier this month when legislators were considering a bill to toughen the state’s laws on prostitution and some other crimes. The new bill didn’t include the exemption for law enforcement officers. That’s when the Honolulu police lobbied to have the exemption put in. The measure subsequently passed by the state House included it.

Sullum rolls his eyes:

Since an entire chamber of the state legislature agreed to this request, the cops must have had a pretty persuasive argument. Here it is, as summed up by Jason Kawabata, captain of the Honolulu Police Department’s Narcotics/Vice Division:

As written, this bill would nullify the exemption if the officer agrees to pay a fee for sexual penetration or sadomasochistic abuse. This would limit the type of violations law enforcement officers are able to enforce. Even if the intent of the amendment is merely to limit actual conduct by the officer, we must oppose it. Codifying the limitations on an officer‘s conduct would greatly assist pimps and prostitutes in their efforts to avoid prosecution.

In other words, if it were generally known that police are not allowed to engage in sexual penetration or sadomasochistic abuse with prostitutes, suspicious hookers might insist that undercover officers do so to show they are not cops. … That scenario seems rather implausible, since a person commits the offense of prostitution as soon as she “agrees or offers to engage in sexual conduct with another person for a fee.” For Kawabata’s fear to be realized, a prostitute would need to have sex first to make sure her customer was not a cop, then negotiate payment afterward, which does not seem like a very good business strategy.

Rebecca Rose is incredulous:

What policies are in place to prevent officers from using this exemption to have sex with people who are being forced into this lifestyle? (Is that even a consideration or concern for Hawaii law enforcement?) How exactly would they even know what someone’s situation is before the bust them? And what about underage sex workers? If a young girl is working as prostitute, what’s to stop an undercover from engaging in a sexual act with her under this exemption?

The bill exempts police officers from the rules governing “solicitation of a minor for prostitution,” although as Mark Memmott notes, it doesn’t address “sexual relations with someone under the age of 18.” Marcotte zooms out:

There’s a heated debate in feminist circles about how best to deal with the issue of sex work. Some feminists support sex work and want to decriminalize it, while others see sex workers as victims but want to focus criminal penalties on the pimps and johns who exploit vulnerable women. These two camps fight a lot, but they do tend to agree on one thing: that prostitutes are too often abused by the police. This bill, which increases penalties for johns and pimps while keeping the selling of sex at a misdemeanor level, suggests the influence of the latter group, but all that could be dramatically undermined if the state continues to give police the authority to have sex with prostitutes and then turn around and cuff them.

Rand Paul’s Weak Spots

Joshua Green thinks he’s “too sensitive.” One example:

Rand Paul has always seemed annoyed by questions about his dad. When I interviewed him last year, he waved off that line of inquiry and focused on dead Fed chairmen. Now Paul is attempting to put the subject officially off limits. Via Slate’s Dave Weigel, Paul declared yesterday that he has “quit answering” questions about his father. “I’ve been in the Senate three years, and I have created a record of myself,” he said. “And I have my opinions.”

As Weigel points out, this is a laughable double standard, since Paul recently tried to associate another politician-with-a-record—Hillary Clinton—to a family member’s “predatory behavior.”

The bigger problem for Paul is that this is like putting up a flashing neon sign that reads “Controversy Guaranteed!” to the political press corps. If there’s one thing reporters are great at, it’s asking the same question over and over again until a politician flips his lid. Paul’s history suggests it may not take very long. If he doesn’t develop a way to answer questions about his dad, his time among the top tier of GOP presidential hopefuls won’t last long, either.

Tomasky points out that, despite some millennials’ libertarian leanings, the divide between them and Paul is immense:

Paul opposes same-sex marriage. So how’s he going to talk about that to voters of the generation that supports it to the tune of 68 percent. He is against marijuana legalization and even backs a bill that recently passed the House that would allow Congress to sue the president for failing to faithfully enforce federal laws. This is aimed in part at states that have legalized pot. The problem for Paul is that 69 percent of Millennials back legalization. Paul is against abortion in virtually all cases, but 56 percent of Millennials say it should be legal “in all or most cases.” And finally, Paul has been against immigration reform, and 55 percent of Millennials favor legal status and a path to citizenship (again, they’re the only group above 50 percent).

In sum, on issue after issue, Paul is not merely at odds with Millennials. He’s about eight or nine area codes away.

(Photo from Getty)

An Acid Test For Francis, Ctd

Barbie Latza Nadeau is  about Pope Francis’ appointees to a new commission designed to deal with sex abuse in the Catholic Church:

The more surprising members of the group are the female members. Marie Collins is a married Irish woman who was raped at the age of 13 by a priest. She is an activist for child safety within the Catholic Church and has been vocal about how she was snubbed by her local parish and told to “protect the priest’s good name” when she accused him.

The eight-person commission includes four women and five lay people, a development Collins described as “encouraging.” Still, the committee’s mandate remains : its first responsibilities are “determining the commission’s structure, outlining its duties, and putting forward names of other candidates who might join its work.” John Allen has a cautious analysis:

[N]aming people to a commission is not, in itself, reform. It remains to be seen if this group can successfully ride herd on forces in the church still in denial, or help the pope hold bishops and other Catholic leaders accountable if they drop the ball.

If the commission turns out to be a dud, Saturday’s announcement won’t be enough to save the pope from the disillusionment that will ensure. For now, however, the lineup card revealed by the pope not only amounts to a clear statement of seriousness about the abuse issue, but it also shows a deft political touch.

Bill Donohue Asks To March In A Gay Pride Parade

YES! Let Bill march in the gay pride parade: http://t.co/8NhQRkgXgf. And straight people *are* great—particularly at making gay people!

— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) March 19, 2014

This is priceless:

He filed a petition with the organizers of the New York Gay Pride Parade requesting that he be allowed to march under a “Straight is Great” banner. He was sure that this was a message that gay people would find offensive. And, being a hate-filled asshat, he assumed that gay people would act with the same animus and exclusion towards him that is Donahue’s standard action towards us.

But, of course, we don’t hate straight people. And we agree, straight actually is great – just like gay and bisexual. And, though Donahue probably didn’t know it, many many straight people – Catholics, even – happily march in the parade each year to show their support for the community. Heck, some Catholic churches even have delegations.

So the organizers immediately said yes. Sarah Kate Ellis, the head of GLAAD and a fellow Irish New-Yorker, said she’d be happy to march with him. The irony is, of course, that the last thing Donohue wants to do is march in a gay pride parade. And now, having been greeted with graciousness, he’s looking for a way to weasel out.

How more perfect could this response have been? You see: the gay rights movement can be magnanimous – and have some fun. Let’s get Bill some rainbow boas to make a splash. Update from a reader:

You missed the latest from yesterday: Donohue replied to the invitation saying that he would not be marching in the parade because he objected to mandatory attendance at what he called “gay training sessions” that, in reality, “address line-up times, check-in locations, our moment of silence, dispersal activity, NYPD safety policies, attire and vehicle/sound permits.”

And the beat goes on …

Great Music For Awful Days

by Matthew Sitman

Nick Rynerson praises one of my favorite bands, the Drive-By Truckers, for the way they “write songs about real people having bad days — or bad lives.” He thinks Christians could learn from their honesty:

Life is hard — for everybody. Well, maybe not everybody, but more people than you think. Pastors, accountants, students, baristas, and cashiers are all trying to keep their head above water, just like you. And Christianity is not a quick fix emotional high that takes away all of our sin, problems and struggles. And in the fight of faith, sometimes we just need to be reminded that what we are going through is normal.

Christians aren’t immune from hard marriages, toxic jobs, and alcohol problems. Instead of judging our brothers and sisters or at least pretending that we aren’t as bad off as everybody else, we can empathize. The Truckers write and live in the world we know so well, but are afraid to tell anybody about.

Jesus isn’t typically in the business of saving people who have it all together; in fact, it’s usually the misfits, failures and screw-ups who best understand grace. Following Drive-By Truckers, we can learn from people who are hurting. And we can admit that we rank among their numbers. In sharing the garbage of our lives, we can do more good than if we pretend to have all the answers.

Reviewing the Truckers’ just-released album English Oceans, David McClister highlights “Primer Coat,” a song about “a factory foreman, a Southerner, sitting by his pool and thinking about his twentysomething daughter leaving home,” that exemplifies the kind of writing described above:

This is an unusual subject for a rock ‘n’ roll band, which is more likely to focus on freewheeling characters in the no-man’s land between school and marriage/career. But the Truckers have always specialized in characters with jobs, spouses, little glamour and lots of debt.

This song is sung by the foreman’s son, who knows more than he’d like about painting houses. His mother may be as plain as a primer coat, he realizes, but there’s a clarity and necessity in that undercoat of paint that shouldn’t be underestimated. In four minutes, [guitarist Mike] Cooley lets us know all four members of that family, while his Keith Richards-like, just-ahead-of-the-beat guitar riff and Morgan’s Charlie Watts-like, just-behind-the-beat drumming supply all the tension the story needs.

“I had this image of this guy, middle-aged and working class, sitting by his swimming pool,” Cooley explains. “I didn’t know what he was thinking about, but I liked that image. I thought he might be thinking about politics and how working class families can’t afford pools like they used to. But that wasn’t it; he was thinking about his daughter. The mother of the family’s almost always stronger, especially when it comes to things that kick you in the gut. She’ll do what she has to do; she won’t be moping by the pool.”

Make It Rain … Animals?

by Jessie Roberts

Apocalypse isn’t the only explanation for creatures falling from the sky:

Reasons for animals hurtling from the sky range from signs of the apocalypse (dating back to the Bible) to an everyday — or at least every-few-yearsish — act of meteorology. One of the most confusing parts of this persistent phenomenon is the notion of “falling.” For instance, when dark-brown snakes filled streets in Tennessee in January 1877, it wasn’t that they came from the sky.

Rather, torrential rains that morning may have dislodged the serpents from underground and flushed them to the surface. Similar deluge events may also explain some of the worm rains, some of the fish rains and the snails. New Year’s Eve fireworks exploding near blackbird roosting sites may have caused the 2011 Arkansas bird fall. And as wonderfully frightening as a rain of Brazilian spiders sounds (as was reported in the town of Santo Antônio da Platina last year) the phenomenon has been attributed to the species Anelosimus eximius, which spins massive group webs that can span trees and telephone poles and be scattered into a rain in strong winds. And the suspected deer or sheep meat that fell over Kentucky in 1876? Vomiting buzzards, or, as jokingly reported in the New York Times, a “meat meteorite.”

But what about the fish and frogs?

“It is certainly within the realm of possibility that fish and frogs could rain from the sky,” says Greg Carbin, a severe weather expert with the National Weather Service. “Especially when you look at the power of some thunderstorms and tornados, there’s a tremendous vertical component to the wind that can suck things up and deposit them far from where they were picked up.”

(Video: A scene from Magnolia)

Seeing The Light Inside

by Jessie Roberts

Rose Eveleth explores why people sometimes hallucinate during meditation:

Buddhist literature refers to lights and visions in myriad ways. The Theravada tradition refers to nimitta, an vision of a series of lights seen during meditation that can be taken to represent everything from the meditator’s pure mind to a visual symbol of a real object. In one Buddhist text, called The Path of Purification, the nimitta is described this way:

It appears to some as a star or cluster of gems or a cluster of pearls, […] to others like a long braid string or a wreath of flowers or a puff of smoke, to others like a stretched-out cobweb or a film of cloud or a lotus flower or a chariot wheel or the moon’s disk or the sun’s disk. …

What is it about meditation that opens the brain up to these kinds of hallucinations?

To answer that question, [researcher Jared] Lindahl and his team looked for occasions where the descriptions he gathered from meditators intersected with descriptions of neurophysiological disorders. They found that both the first-person accounts and the Buddhist literary descriptions of these lights intersected pretty well with the experiences of people undergoing the intentional practice of sensory deprivation.

Hallucinations are relatively well-documented in the world of sensory deprivation, and they dovetail with the lights seen by meditators. Where meditators describe jewel lights, white spots and little stars, those under sensory deprivation sometimes describe dots and points of light. Where meditators see shimmering ropes, electrical sparks, and rays of light that go through everything, the sensory deprived might see visual snow, bright sunsets, and shimmering, luminous fog. Neuroscientists think that when the eyes and ears are deprived of input, the brain becomes hypersensitive and neurons may fire with little provocation, creating these kinds of light shows. Lindahl suspects that the lights that meditators see are the result of the same phenomenon—that meditating is itself a mild form of sensory deprivation.

(Image via Alan Levine)

Telling Jewish Tales

by Katie Zavadski

J.P. O’Malley reviews Simon Schama’s book, The Story of the Jews, a tie-in to a BBC and PBS series of the same name:

Reading Schama’s heart-wrenching tales of suffering bought home an important point: the horrors of Nazism didn’t spring up in isolation. It also made me think of Marx’s observation that “history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.”

This epic historical narrative is one that has already been widely covered in recent decades by writers such as Stan Mack and Paul Johnson. But Schama’s prose has a melancholic music that you rarely find in historical writing. It’s this ability to empathize with his narrative, rather than just coldly regurgitating the facts, that makes Schama one of the finest historians of his generation.

Michael Hiltzik finds the book at times struggles to separate myth from history:

Schama attempts to finesse the uncertainties of the historic record by reporting on the present-day archaeological investigations that strive to fill in its blank spots or perhaps reinterpret the discoveries of earlier generations of archaeologists. This is a fascinating story, yet it feels misplaced in this volume, especially because the conclusion one draws from Schama’s extended description of the excavations at Khirbet Qeyafah, an ancient fortress a few miles west of Jerusalem, is that the history of the Jews of its time (about 1000 BCE or earlier) is still being prised from beneath the dust deposited by the succeeding millenniums.

Schama is on firmer ground as he moves forward to the Christian era. Here a dark story grows darker, shadowed by a conflict that began, Schama writes, as a “family quarrel. That, of course, did not prevent it from going lethal, early; perhaps it guaranteed it.”

Schama talked to Ray Suarez about why he chose to write the book now:

When the BBC said, “We would actually like to do ‘The Story of the Jews,’“ I thought, “How many years have you got left? You can’t not do this.” Partly because Jewish history for people who are not Jewish tends to be so overwhelmingly dominated by the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And those are not incidental historical events — they still rightly exercise the world. But they, in some ways, kind of close off the accessibility of Jewish history, which is such a rich and complicated and not always horribly tearful story, as one might imagine. So, I thought, “Well, here’s the possibility in Europe, and I think even a possibility in the United States, to provide a point of access — for non-Jews as well as Jews — to actually enter this story, which has had such a profound impact on the world.”

Adam Kirsch jumps to the five-part BBC series:

The Story of the Jews does not scant those dark passages of Jewish history. Much of the second episode is devoted to the harrowing experiences of the Jews in medieval Christian Europe—including, pointedly, in Britain, where Schama visits the shrine of “Little Hugh of Lincoln,” a child supposedly murdered by local Jews in the 13th century. (Today, Schama notes, the shrine includes a sign regretting long history of anti-Jewish violence spurred by blood libels like Hugh’s.) That episode culminates in the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, which Schama dramatizes by reading a contemporary register of Ferdinand and Isabella’s decree.

Yet that is not the end of the episode. Instead, Schama moves from Spain to Venice, where a community of Jews found asylum after the expulsion. They were confined to the quarter called the ghetto—thus giving the world a new word in the vocabulary of exclusion—but even there, they managed to build a synagogue of extraordinary elegance and spaciousness. Standing in that synagogue five centuries later, Schama feels the pull of “irrational memory”—“I feel I’ve been here before,” he says. It is especially important to him as a proof that, when they could, the Jews gave expression to a longing for beauty and splendor equal to that of any other civilization.

(Video: Trailer for The Story of the Jews, which premieres in the US on PBS on March 25th)

Is Hypocrisy Necessary?

by Jessie Roberts

Clancy Martin suggests it may be unavoidable. He draws on Robert Kurzban’s book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite:

Here’s the good news from Kurzban, if you can call it that: we’re all hypocrites. We’re hard-wired for it, in much the same way we’re hard-wired for self-deception and other forms of cognitive dissonance. In his straightforward and elegant book, Kurzban explains how contemporary neuroscience regards the structure, psychology, and evolutionary benefits of hypocrisy. Briefly, the self, as Nietzsche once helpfully described it, is a kind of oligarchy wherein different sets of beliefs can be entertained (and even committed to, cherished, defended) depending on the needs of the self in different situations. A brutal tyrant can still be a loving father, because those roles require different and incompatible belief sets.

How on earth does this work? Well, the brain — and thus, on Kurzban’s account, the self — is partitioned. The coordinated brain structures that function to “govern strangers well” or to “hunt deer well,” let’s say, are not fully accessible — and are sometimes completely inaccessible — to the brain structures that function to “raise one’s children well” or “love one’s spouse” or (in contrast with the deer-hunting example) “care for one’s beloved deer hounds.” This partitioning develops not merely because the brain can only focus on and master certain kinds of tasks at particular times, though that’s part of the account. It’s also because the evolved human brain has to become skilled at activities that require incompatible sets of beliefs. To be a brutal warrior demands beliefs and attitudes that are fundamentally different from the beliefs and attitudes needed to be a loving parent.

Mental Health Break

by Chris Bodenner

Now that spring has finally sprung, a requiem for winter:

Ice Crystals Timelapse from Shawn Knol on Vimeo.