Dominican Republic Rejects Changes to Marriage Law

Affirms Statement Against Same-Sex Unions

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic, JUNE 11, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The Dominican Republic Congress approved a statement defining marriage as being between a man and a woman.

On Wednesday members of review assembly working on constitutional reform affirmed this definition, and also rejected a proposal to amend the Constitution in a way that would civilly recognize marriages performed in all of the churches located in the country.

The Catholic Church, however, retains the power to celebrate marriages as granted by the state in the signing of a Concordat in 1954.

Today, the Listin Diario reported that this proposal was part of several family-related items under review by the special committee of the assembly.

A total of 108 assembly members voted, with 106 in favor of the deletion of the proposal's statement: "Religious marriages will have civil effects in the terms established by law."

The assembly approved a statement that marriage can only take place between a man and a woman, and closes the possibility to same-sex unions.

The lawmakers also recognized that wives who are in a unique and stable marriage, and children that are a fruit of this union, may inherit property. The proposal states that a man and a woman, "free of impediments to marriage, by forming a home actually create rights and duties in their personal and property relations in accordance with the law."

The committee agreed that men and women enjoy equal rights and duties in building a home, and that the good of the family is inalienable and indefeasible in accordance with the law.

Father Manuel Ruiz, a priest who was in the stands watching the vote, explained that this was not a triumph of the Catholic Church over other churches. He noted that it would have been good for the article to mention the Concordat signed in Rome between the state and the Catholic Church.

The country's population is 89% Catholic.

Feisty Timor Leste Bucks Abortion Lobby, Upholds Right to Life

Volume 12, Number 26 / June 11, 2009

By Piero A. Tozzi, J.D.

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) The parliament of East Timor – a small, Catholic nation in South East Asia recognized as an independent state in 2002 – has resisted concerted pressure from United Nations agencies and pro-abortion non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by enacting a revised penal law that continues to criminalize abortion in virtually all cases.

With last week's 45 to 0 vote with only 7 abstentions on the main operative paragraph, parliament retained penal sanctions on abortion, except in instances where abortion is the "only way" to prevent death to the mother as attested to by three independent physicians. A preambular paragraph states that life "from the moment of conception" is entitled to protection. Abortionists are subject to up to eight years imprisonment, depending on the circumstances. The law also recognizes the conscience rights of doctors to refuse to perform abortions.

Efforts to broaden the abortion license to include cases of fetal abnormality and pregnancies resulting from rape were rejected. In addition, an abortion law that would have included broad exceptions for cases affecting the physical or mental health of the mother that had been adopted in early April by the executive branch's Council of Ministers was effectively overruled by last week's legislative action.

Following the end of Indonesian occupation in 1999, East Timor – or Timor Leste – was administered by the United Nations until independence. The previously existing penal code inherited from Indonesia had banned abortion in all instances.

East Timor has been in the crosshairs of the international pro-abortion movement. The Alola Foundation, an NGO backed by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and headed by East Timor's Australian-born First Lady, intervened repeatedly in the ongoing Timorese debate by seeking abortion liberalization.

In contrast, grassroots NGOs with on-the-ground membership such as Organização das Mulheres Timorenses, whose bona fides were established during the resistance to Indonesian rule, reportedly opposed liberalization, reflecting popular Timorese sentiment.

One international NGO supported by the Australian government and the United States Agency for International Development, the Judicial System Monitoring Programme (JSMP), claimed that "International treaty law specifically supports the right of women to have access to safe abortion methods," including in cases of pregnancy due to rape and incest or where the fetus is abnormal. Echoing arguments made elsewhere by the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, JSMP citied treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination Against All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. There is no support for such assertions in the language of either treaty, however, nor in any other treaty to which Timor Leste is a signatory.

Former United States Ambassador to East Timor Grover Joseph Rees told the Friday Fax that the "claim that access to abortion is an internationally recognized human right" is "outrageous," while commending the Timorese for "remaining faithful to Timor's own best values and traditions – in this case the principle of respect for all human life, including the lives of unborn children."

East Timor will appear before the committee charged with monitoring compliance with CEDAW next month, and it has already submitted a report responding to questioning over its legislation protecting life. It is anticipated that the CEDAW committee will press the country on its new legislation now that it has been finalized.

Are Too Many People Going to College?

Boy, this blog is just chock full of excellent articles lately! This one is great, especially the end.

Are Too Many People Going to College?

By Charles Murray
Monday, September 8, 2008

America’s university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way.

To ask whether too many people are going to college requires us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal education. “Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood,” John Stuart Mill told students at the University of St. Andrews in 1867. “Their object is not to make skillful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.” If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that too many people are going to college? Surely a mass democracy should encourage as many people as possible to become “capable and cultivated human beings” in Mill’s sense. We should not restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarefied intellectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.

Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide those basics are elementary and middle school. E. D. Hirsch Jr. is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Part of his argument involves the importance of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed and comprehension. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch makes three points that are germane here:

Full participation in any culture requires familiarity with a body of core knowledge. To live in the United States and not recognize Teddy Roosevelt, Prohibition, the Minutemen, Wall Street, smoke-filled rooms, or Gettysburg is like trying to read without knowing some of the ten thousand most commonly used words in the language. It signifies a degree of cultural illiteracy about America. But the core knowledge transcends one’s own country. Not to recognize Falstaff, Apollo, the Sistine Chapel, the Inquisition, the twenty-third Psalm, or Mozart signifies cultural illiteracy about the West. Not to recognize the solar system, the Big Bang, natural selection, relativity, or the periodic table is to be scientifically illiterate. Not to recognize the Mediterranean, Vienna, the Yangtze River, Mount Everest, or Mecca is to be geographically illiterate.

College is seen as the open sesame to a good job and a desirable way for adolescents to transition to adulthood. Neither reason is as persuasive as it first appears.

This core knowledge is an important part of the glue that holds the culture together. All American children, of whatever ethnic heritage, and whether their families came here 300 years ago or three months ago, need to learn about the Pilgrims, Valley Forge, Duke Ellington, Apollo 11, Susan B. Anthony, George C. Marshall, and the Freedom Riders. All students need to learn the iconic stories. For a society of immigrants such as ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans.

K–8 are the right years to teach the core knowledge, and the effort should get off to a running start in elementary school. Starting early is partly a matter of necessity: There’s a lot to learn, and it takes time. But another reason is that small children enjoy learning myths and fables, showing off names and dates they have memorized, and hearing about great historical figures and exciting deeds. The educational establishment sees this kind of curriculum as one that forces children to memorize boring facts. That conventional wisdom is wrong on every count. The facts can be fascinating (if taught right); a lot more than memorization is entailed; yet memorizing things is an indispensable part of education, too; and memorizing is something that children do much, much better than adults. The core knowledge is suited to ways that young children naturally learn and enjoy learning. Not all children will be able to do the reading with the same level of comprehension, but the fact-based nature of the core knowledge actually works to the benefit of low ability students—remembering facts is much easier than making inferences and deductions. The core knowledge curriculum lends itself to adaptation for students across a wide range of academic ability.

In the 20 years since Cultural Literacy was published, Hirsch and his colleagues have developed and refined his original formulation into an inventory of more than 6,000 items that approximate the core knowledge broadly shared by literate Americans. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation has also developed a detailed, grade by-grade curriculum for K–8, complete with lists of books and other teaching materials.

The Core Knowledge approach need not stop with eighth grade. High school is a good place for survey courses in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences taught at a level below the demands of a college course and accessible to most students in the upper two-thirds of the distribution of academic ability. Some students will not want to take these courses, and it can be counterproductive to require them to do so, but high school can put considerable flesh on the liberal education skeleton for students who are still interested.


Liberal Education in College

Saying “too many people are going to college” is not the same as saying that the average student does not need to know about history, science, and great works of art, music, and literature. They do need to know—and to know more than they are currently learning. So let’s teach it to them, but let’s not wait for college to do it.

Liberal education in college means taking on the tough stuff. A high-school graduate who has acquired Hirsch’s core knowledge will know, for example, that John Stuart Mill was an important 19th-century English philosopher who was associated with something called Utilitarianism and wrote a famous book called On Liberty. But learning philosophy in college, which is an essential component of a liberal education, means that the student has to be able to read and understand the actual text of On Liberty. That brings us to the limits set by the nature of college-level material. Here is the first sentence of On Liberty: “The subject of this essay is not the so-called liberty of the will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of philosophical necessity; but civil, or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” I will not burden you with On Liberty’s last sentence. It is 126 words long. And Mill is one of the more accessible philosophers, and On Liberty is one of Mill’s more accessible works. It would be nice if everyone could acquire a fully formed liberal education, but they cannot.

Specifically: When College Board researchers defined “college readiness” as the SAT score thatis associated with a 65 percent chance of getting at least a 2.7 grade point average in college during the freshman year, and then applied those criteria (hardly demanding in an era of soft courses and grade inflation) to the freshmen in a sample of 41 major colleges and universities, the threshold “college readiness” score was found to be 1180 on the combined SAT math and verbal tests. It is a score that only about 10 percent of American 18-year-olds would achieve if they all took the SAT, in an age when more than 30 percent of 18-year-olds go to college.

The income for the top people in a wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that require a B.A.

Should all of those who do have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal education get one? It depends. Suppose we have before us a young woman who is in the 98th percentile of academic ability and wants to become a lawyer and eventually run for political office. To me, it seems essential that she spend her undergraduate years getting a rigorous liberal education. Apart from a liberal education’s value to her, the nation will benefit. Everything she does as an attorney or as an elected official should be informed by the kind of wisdom that a rigorous liberal education can encourage. It is appropriate to push her into that kind of undergraduate program.

But the only reason we can get away with pushing her is that the odds are high that she will enjoy it. The odds are high because she is good at this sort of thing—it’s no problem for her to read On Liberty or Paradise Lost. It’s no problem for her to come up with an interesting perspective on what she’s read and weave it into a term paper. And because she’s good at it, she is also likely to enjoy it. It is one of Aristotle’s central themes in his discussion of human happiness, a theme that John Rawls later distilled into what he called the Aristotelian Principle: “Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of the irrealized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.” And so it comes to pass that those who take the hardest majors and who enroll in courses that look most like an old fashioned liberal education are concentrated among the students in the top percentiles of academic ability. Getting a liberal education consists of dealing with complex intellectual material day after day, and dealing with complex intellectual material is what students in the top few percentiles are really good at, in the same way that other people are really good at cooking or making pottery. For these students, doing it well is fun.

Every percentile down the ability ladder—and this applies to all abilities, not just academic—the probability that a person will enjoy the hardest aspects of an activity goes down as well. Students at the 80th percentile of academic ability are still smart kids, but the odds that they will respond to a course that assigns Mill or Milton are considerably lower than the odds that a student in the top few percentiles will respond. Virtue has nothing to do it. Maturity has nothing to do with it. Appreciation of the value of a liberal education has nothing to do with it. The probability that a student will enjoy Paradise Lost goes down as his linguistic ability goes down, but so does the probability that he works on double acrostic puzzles in his spare time or regularly plays online Scrabble, and for the identical reason. The lower down the linguistic ladder he is, the less fun such activities are.

And so we return to the question: Should all of those who have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal education get one? If our young woman is at the 80th percentile of linguistic ability, should she be pushed to do so? She has enough intellectual capacity, if she puts her mind to it and works exceptionally hard.

The answer is no. If she wants to, fine. But she probably won’t, and there’s no way to force her. Try to force her (for example, by setting up a demanding core curriculum), and she will transfer to another school, because she is in college for vocational training. She wants to write computer code. Start a business. Get a job in television. She uses college to take vocational courses that pertain to her career interests. A large proportion of people who are theoretically able to absorb a liberal education have no interest in doing so.

And reasonably so. Seen dispassionately, getting a traditional liberal education over four years is an odd way to enjoy spending one’s time. Not many people enjoy reading for hour after hour, day after day, no matter what the material may be. To enjoy reading On Liberty and its ilk—and if you’re going to absorb such material, you must in some sense enjoy the process—is downright peculiar. To be willing to spend many more hours writing papers and answers to exam questions about that material approaches masochism.

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a few people. Most students at today’s colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don’t want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn’t make sense for them.

For Learning How to Make a Living, the Four-Year Brick-and-Mortar Residential College is Increasingly Obsolete

We now go from one extreme to the other, from the ideal of liberal education to the utilitarian process of acquiring the knowledge that most students go to college to acquire—practical and vocational. The question here is not whether the traditional four-year residential college is fun or valuable as a place to grow up, but when it makes sense as a place to learn how to make a living. The answer is: in a sensible world, hardly ever.

Start with the time it takes—four years. Assuming a semester system with four courses per semester, four years of class work means 32 semester-long courses. The occupations for which “knowing enough” requires 32 courses are exceedingly rare. For some professions—medicine and law are the obvious examples—a rationale for four years of course work can be concocted (combining pre-med and pre-law undergraduate courses with three years of medical school and law school), but for every other occupation, the body of knowledge taught in classrooms can be learned more quickly. Even Ph.D.s don’t require four years of course work. The Ph.D. is supposed to signify expertise, but that expertise comes from burrowing deep in to a specialty, not from dozens of courses.

As long as it’s taboo to say that college is intellectually too demanding for most young people, we will continue to create unrealistic expectations among the next generation.

Those are the jobs with the most stringent academic requirements. For the student who wants to become a good hotel manager, software designer, accountant, hospital administrator, farmer, high-school teacher, social worker, journalist, optometrist, interior designer, or football coach, four years of class work is ridiculous. Actually becoming good in those occupations will take longer than four years, but most of the competence is acquired on the job. The two year community college and online courses offer more flexible options for tailoring course work to the real needs of the job.

A brick-and-mortar campus is increasingly obsolete. The physical infrastructure of the college used to make sense for three reasons. First, a good library was essential to higher learning, and only a college faculty and student body provided the economies of scale that made good libraries affordable. Second, scholarship flourishes through colleagueships, and the college campus made it possible to put scholars in physical proximity to each other. Third, the best teaching requires interaction between teachers and students, and physical proximity was the only way to get it. All three rationales for the brick-and-mortar campus are fading fast.

The rationale for a physical library is within a few years of extinction. Even now, the Internet provides access, for a price, to all the world’s significant technical journals. The books are about to follow. Google is scanning the entire text of every book in the libraries of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library, the Bavarian State Library, Ghent University Library, Keio Library (Tokyo), the National Library of Catalonia, University of Lausanne, and an expanding list of others. Collectively, this project will encompass close to the sum total of human knowledge. It will be completely searchable. Everything out of copyright will be free. Everything still under copyright will be accessible for a fee. Libraries will still be a selling point for colleges, but as a place for students to study in pleasant surroundings—an amenity in the same way that an attractive student union is an amenity. Colleges and universities will not need to exist because they provide libraries.

The rationale for colleges based on colleagueships has eroded. Until a few decades ago, physical proximity was important because correspondence and phone calls just weren’t as good. As email began to spread during the1980s, physical proximity became less important. As the capacity of the Internet expanded in the 1990s, other mechanisms made those interactions richer. Now, regular emails from professional groups inform scholars of the latest publications in their field of interest. Specialized chat groups enable scholars to bounce new ideas off other people working on the same problems. Drafts are exchanged effortlessly and comments attached electronically. Whether physical proximity still has any advantages depends mostly on the personality of the scholar. Some people like being around other people during the workday and prefer face-to-face conversations to emails. For those who don’t, the value of being on a college campus instead of on a mountaintop in Montana is nil. Their electronic access to other scholars is incomparably greater than any scholar enjoyed even within the world’s premier universities before the advent of the Internet. Like the library, face-to-face colleagueships will be an amenity that colleges continue to provide. But colleges and universities will not need to exist because they provide a community of scholars.

The third rationale for the brick-and-mortar college is that it brings teachers together with students. Working against that rationale is the explosion in the breadth and realism of what is known as distance learning. The idea of distance learning is surprisingly old—Isaac Pitman was teaching his shorthand system to British students through the postal service in the 1840s, and the University of London began offering degrees for correspondence students in 1858—but the technology of distance learning changed little for the next century. The advent of inexpensive videocassettes in the 1980s opened up a way for students to hear and see lectures without being in the classroom. By the early 1990s, it was possible to buy college-level courses on audio- or videotape, taught by first-rate teaching professors, on a wide range of topics, for a few hundred dollars. But without easy interaction between teacher and student, distance learning remained a poor second-best to a good college seminar.

Once again, the Internet is revolutionizing everything. As personal computers acquired the processing power to show high-definition video and the storage capacity to handle big video files, the possibilities for distance learning expanded by orders of magnitude. We are now watching the early expression of those possibilities: podcasts and streaming videos in real time of professors’ lectures, online discussions among students scattered around the country, online interaction between students and professors, online exams, and tutorials augmented by computer-aided instruction software.

Even today, the quality of student-teacher interactions in a virtual classroom competes with the interactions in a brick-and-mortar classroom. But the technology is still in its early stages of development and the rate of improvement is breathtaking. Compare video games such as Myst and SimCity in the 1990s to their descendants today; the Walkman you used in the 1990s to the iPod you use today; the cell phone you used in the 1990s to the BlackBerry or iPhone you use today. Whatever technical limitations might lead you to say, “Yes, but it’s still not the same as being there in the classroom,” are probably within a few years of being outdated.

College Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

College looms so large in the thinking of both parents and students because it is seen as the open sesame to a good job. Reaping the economic payoff for college that shows up in econometric analyses is a long shot for large numbers of young people.

When high-school graduates think that obtaining a B.A. will help them get a higher- paying job, they are only narrowly correct. Economists have established beyond doubt that people with B.A.s earn more on average than people without them. But why does the B.A. produce that result? For whom does the B.A. produce that result? For some jobs, the economic premium for a degree is produced by the actual education that has gone into getting the degree. Lawyers, physicians, and engineers can earn their high incomes only by deploying knowledge and skills that take years to acquire, and degrees in law, medicine, and engineering still signify competence in those knowledges and skills. But for many other jobs, the economic premium for the B.A. is created by a brutal fact of life about the American job market: Employers do not even interview applicants who do not hold a B.A. Even more brutal, the advantage conferred by the B.A. often has nothing to do with the content of the education. Employers do not value what the student learned, just that the student has a degree.

Employers value the B.A. because it is a no-cost (for them) screening device for academic ability and perseverance. The more people who go to college, the more sense it makes for employers to require a B.A. When only a small percentage of people got college degrees, employers who required a B.A. would have been shutting themselves off from access to most of the talent. With more than a third of 23-year-olds now getting a B.A., many employers can reasonably limit their hiring pool to college graduates because bright and ambitious high-school graduates who can go to college usually do go to college. An employer can believe that exceptions exist but rationally choose not to expend time and money to identify them. Knowing this, large numbers of students are in college to buy their admission ticket—the B.A.

Employers do not value what the student learned, just that he has a degree. They value the B.A. as a no-cost (for them) screening device for academic ability and perseverance.

But while it is true that the average person with a B.A. makes more than the average person without a B.A., getting a B.A. is still going to be the wrong economic decision for many high-school graduates. Wages within occupations form a distribution. Young people with okay-but-not-great academic ability who are thinking about whether to go after a B.A. need to consider the competition they will face after they graduate. Let me put these calculations in terms of a specific example, a young man who has just graduated from high school and is trying to decide whether to become an electrician or go to college and major in business, hoping to become a white-collar manager. He is at the 70th percentile in linguistic ability and logical mathematical ability—someone who shouldn’t go to college by my standards, but who can, in today’s world, easily find a college that will give him a degree. He is exactly average in interpersonal and intrapersonal ability. He is at the 95th percentile in the small-motor skills and spatial abilities that are helpful in being a good electrician.

He begins by looking up the average income of electricians and managers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, and finds that the mean annual income for electricians in 2005 was$45,630, only about half of the $88,450 mean for management occupations. It looks as if getting a B.A. will buy him a huge wage premium. Should he try to get the B.A. on economic grounds?

To make his decision correctly, our young man must start by throwing out the averages. He has the ability to become an excellent electrician and can reasonably expect to be near the top of the electricians’ income distribution. He does not have it in him to be an excellent manager, because he is only average in interpersonal and intrapersonal ability and only modestly above average in academic ability, all of which are important for becoming a good manager, while his competitors for those slots will include many who are high in all of those abilities. Realistically, he should be looking at the incomes toward the bottom of the distribution of managers. With that in mind, he goes back to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and discovers that an electrician at the 90th percentile of electricians’ incomes made $70,480 in 2005, almost twice the income of a manager at the 10th percentile of managers’ incomes ($37,800). Even if our young man successfully completes college and gets a B.A. (which is far from certain), he is likely to make less money than if he becomes an electrician.

Then there is job security to consider. A good way to make sure you always can find work is to be among the best at what you do. It also helps to have a job that does not require you to compete with people around the globe. When corporations downsize, they lay off mediocre managers before they lay off top electricians. When the economy gets soft, top electricians can find work when mediocre managers cannot. Low-level management jobs can often be outsourced to India, whereas electricians’ jobs cannot.

What I have said of electricians is true throughout the American job market. The income for the top people in a wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that require a B.A. Furthermore, the range and number of such jobs are expanding rapidly. The need for assembly-line workers in factories (one of the most boring jobs ever invented) is falling, but the demand for skilled technicians of every kind—in healthcare, information technology, transportation networks, and every other industry that relies on high-tech equipment—is expanding. The service sector includes many low-skill, low-paying jobs, but it also includes growing numbers of specialized jobs that pay well (for example, in healthcare and the entertainment and leisure industries). Construction offers an array of high-paying jobs for people who are good at what they do. It’s not just skilled labor in the standard construction trades that is in high demand. The increase in wealth in American society has increased the demand for all sorts of craftsmanship. Today’s high-end homes and office buildings may entail the work of specialized skills in stonework, masonry, glazing, painting, cabinetmaking, machining, landscaping, and a dozen other crafts. The increase in wealth is also driving an increased demand for the custom-made and the exquisitely wrought, meaning demand for artisans in everything from pottery to jewelry to metalworking. There has never been a time in history when people with skills not taught in college have been in so much demand at such high pay as today, nor a time when the range of such jobs has been so wide. In today’s America, finding a first-rate lawyer or physician is easy. Finding first-rate skilled labor is hard.



Intrinsic Rewards

The topic is no longer money but job satisfaction—intrinsic rewards. We return to our high-school graduate trying to decide between going to college and becoming an electrician. He knows that he enjoys working with his hands and likes the idea of not being stuck in the same place all day, but he also likes the idea of being a manager sitting behind a desk in a big office, telling people what to do and getting the status that goes with it.

However, he should face facts that he is unlikely to know on his own, but that a guidance counselor could help him face. His chances of getting the big office and the status are slim. He is more likely to remain in a cubicle, under the thumb of the boss in the big office. He is unlikely to have a job in which he produces something tangible during the course of the day.

There has never been a time in history when people with skills not taught in college have been in so much demand at such high pay as today.

If he becomes a top electrician instead, he will have an expertise that he exercises at a high level. At the end of a workday, he will often be able to see that his work made a difference in the lives of people whose problems he has solved. He will not be confined to a cubicle and, after his apprenticeship, will be his own supervisor in the field. Top electricians often become independent contractors who have no boss at all.

The intrinsic rewards of being a top manager can be just as great as those of a top electrician (though I would not claim they are greater), but the intrinsic rewards of being a mediocre manager are not. Even as people in white-collar jobs lament the soullessness of their work, the intrinsic rewards of exercising technical skills remain undiminished.

Finally, there is an overarching consideration so important it is hard to express adequately: the satisfaction of being good at what one does for a living (and knowing it), compared to the melancholy of being mediocre at what one does for a living (and knowing it). This is another truth about living a human life that a 17-year-old might not yet understand on his own, but that a guidance counselor can bring to his attention. Guidance counselors and parents who automatically encourage young people to go to college straight out of high school regardless of their skills and interests are being thoughtless about the best interests of young people in their charge.


The Dark Side of the B.A. as Norm

It is possible to accept all that I have presented as fact and still disagree with the proposition that too many people are going to college. The argument goes something like this:

The meaning of a college education has evolved since the 19th century. The traditional liberal education is still available for students who want it, but the curriculum is appropriately broader now, and includes many courses for vocational preparation that today’s students want. Furthermore, intellectual requirements vary across majors. It may be true that few students can complete a major in economics or biology, but larger proportions can handle the easier majors. A narrow focus on curriculum also misses the important nonacademic functions of college. The lifestyle on today’s campuses may leave something to be desired, but four years of college still give youngsters in late adolescence a chance to encounter different kinds of people, to discover new interests, and to decide what they want to make of their lives. And if it is true that some students spend too much of their college years partying, that was also true of many Oxford students in the 18th century. Lighten up.

About a third of all those who enter college hoping for a B.A. leave without one.

If the only people we had to worry about were those who are on college campuses and doing reasonably well, this position would have something to be said for it. It does not address the issues of whether four years makes sense or whether a residential facility makes sense; nevertheless, college as it exists is not an intrinsically evil place for the students who are there and are coping academically. But there is the broader American society to worry about as well. However unintentionally, we have made something that is still inaccessible to a majority of the population—the B.A.—into a symbol of first-class citizenship. We have done so at the same time that other class divisions are becoming more powerful. Today’s college system is implicated in the emergence of class-riven America.

The problem begins with the message sent to young people that they should aspire to college no matter what. Some politicians are among the most visible offenders, treating every failure to go to college as an injustice that can be remedied by increasing government help. American educational administrators reinforce the message by instructing guidance counselors to steer as many students as possible toward a college-prep track (more than 90 percent of high-school students report that their guidance counselors encouraged them to go to college). But politicians and educators are only following the lead of the larger culture. As long as it remains taboo to acknowledge that college is intellectually too demanding for most young people, we will continue to create crazily unrealistic expectations among the next generation. If “crazily unrealistic” sounds too strong, consider that more than 90 percent of high school seniors expect to go to college, and more than 70 percent of them expect to work in professional jobs.

Today’s college system is implicated in the emergence of class-riven America.

One aspect of this phenomenon has been labeled misaligned ambitions, meaning that adolescents have career ambitions that are inconsistent with their educational plans. Data from the Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development conducted during the 1990s indicate that misaligned ambitions characterized more than half of all adolescents. Almost always, the misalignment is in the optimistic direction, as adolescents aspire to be attorneys or physicians without understanding the educational hurdles they must surmount to achieve their goals. They end up at a four-year institution not because that is where they can take the courses they need to meet their career goals, but because college is the place where B.A.s are handed out, and everyone knows that these days you’ve got to have a B.A. Many of them drop out. Of those who entered a four-year college in 1995, only 58 percent had gotten their B.A. five academic years later. Another 14 percent were still enrolled. If we assume that half of that 14 percent eventually get their B.A.s, about a third of all those who entered college hoping for a B.A. leave without one.

If these numbers had been produced in a culture where the B.A. was a nice thing to have but not a big deal, they could be interpreted as the result of young adults deciding that they didn’t really want a B.A. after all. Instead, these numbers were produced by a system in which having a B.A. is a very big deal indeed, and that brings us to the increasingly worrisome role of the B.A. as a source of class division. The United States has always had symbols of class, and the college degree has always been one of them. But through the first half of the 20th century, there were all sorts of respectable reasons a person might not go to college—not enough money to pay for college; needing to work right out of high school to support a wife, parents, or younger siblings; or the commonly held belief that going straight to work was better preparation for a business career than going to college. As long as the percentage of college graduates remained small, it also remained true, and everybody knew it, that the majority of America’s intellectually most able people did not have B.A.s.

Over the course of the 20th century, three trends gathered strength. The first was the increasing proportion of jobs screened for high academic ability due to the advanced level of education they require—engineers, physicians, attorneys, college teachers, scientists, and the like. The second was the increasing market value of those jobs. The third was the opening up of college to more of those who had the academic ability to go to college, partly because the increase in American wealth meant that more parents could afford college for their children, and partly because the proliferation of scholarships and loans made it possible for most students with enough academic ability to go.

The combined effect of these trends has been to overturn the state of affairs that prevailed through World War II. Now the great majority of America’s intellectually most able people do have a B.A. Along with that transformation has come a downside that few anticipated. The acceptable excuses for not going to college have dried up. The more people who go to college, the more stigmatizing the failure to complete college becomes. Today, if you do not get a B.A., many people assume it is because you are too dumb or too lazy. And all this because of a degree that seldom has an interpretable substantive meaning.

Let’s approach the situation from a different angle. Imagine that America had no system of postsecondary education and you were made a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. Ask yourself what you would think if one of your colleagues submitted this proposal:

First, we will set up a common goal for every young person that represents educational success. We will call it a B.A. We will then make it difficult or impossible for most people to achieve this goal. For those who can, achieving the goal will take four years no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward for reaching the goal that often has little to do with the content of what has been learned. We will lure large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability or motivation to try to achieve the goal and then fail. We will then stigmatize everyone who fails to achieve it.

What I have just described is the system that we have in place. There must be a better way.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This article is adapted from “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.” Copyright © 2008 by Cox & Murray, Inc. Published by Crown Forum, a division of Random House, Inc.

Book Review of "The Student Loan Scam"

Lenders of First Resort
More and more, student lending is becoming a rigged game.

By Robert VerBruggen

Modern American college students are some of the most fortunate people ever to inhabit the earth. Why should we feel sorry for them?

Because they’re saddled with “the most oppressive debt in U.S. history,” argues Alan Michael Collinge in his new book, The Student Loan Scam. This is, of course, quite false: The most oppressive debts in U.S. history probably occurred when this country had debtors’ prisons.

Unfortunately, Collinge is filled with such unjustified indignation. He makes a big deal about high interest rates on private (non-federally guaranteed) loans, as if students aren’t given that information when they sign up. He seems offended by the mathematical fact that when you don’t pay your debts, interest and fees accumulate, and you can end up owing several times what you borrowed.

But there is a very important story in this book: Collinge, who is himself buried in defaulted debt, explores the alliances that student-loan companies have established with universities and the government. By sharing profits with schools in exchange for preferential treatment, the industry’s biggest players have shielded themselves from free-market competition; and through intense government lobbying, the industry has secured exemptions from laws that apply to other forms of lending. No matter how wrongheaded his analysis, Collinge’s facts should evoke cringes from Americans of all political stripes.

Schools’ relationships with the major lenders will come as a shock to many — especially those who’ve taken advice from purportedly neutral university employees. Through “school as lender” programs, lenders can essentially give schools a cut of the profits in return for financial-aid officials’ steering borrowers their way. (Technically, the school makes the loan, and then the lender buys the debt at a premium.) Lenders often sweeten the deal by offering officials lavish parties and trips. Sometimes, lenders have even run financial-aid call centers on universities’ behalf, with lenders’ employees claiming to represent the schools.

Lender-state ties are no more innocent. The problems began in the 1970s, when the federal government created Sallie Mae as a “government-sponsored enterprise” that would buy student loans (much like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did for mortgages). Sallie grew through the 1980s, took a hit when the federal government began issuing loans directly in 1993, and began privatizing in 1997.

Today it’s a fully private entity, but Sallie and other big lenders have used their size and sway on Capitol Hill to their great benefit. For example, while there have long been limits on bankruptcy protection for student loans (some worry that it’s tempting to file for bankruptcy right after graduating), the student-loan industry managed to eliminate bankruptcy protection in 2005. No matter how long it’s been since you took out the loan, and no matter the size to which the debt has ballooned, you typically cannot discharge a student loan in bankruptcy. One can argue that bankruptcy laws in general should be stronger than they are, but it’s hard to make the case that student loans should be treated so differently from every other form of debt.

Also, Sallie has been able to work around laws that prevent it from outright buying guarantors — the companies that are supposed to oversee it, and that are required to purchase loans that go into default. Basically, lenders can own the collection agencies with which the guarantors contract, a situation that gives lenders the perverse incentive to let loans go into default rather than trying to collect them. When a borrower defaults, the lender can get repayment from the federal government, and stands to make more money on the collection agency’s work for the guarantor. Once, Sallie was found to have pushed loans into default without even attempting to collect them first, and had to pay $3.4 million. It’s also worth noting that in the student-loan industry, where bankruptcy is not a threat and collection powers include wage garnishment, defaulted loans are actually profitable on balance.

Many other foolish ideas have been adopted. According to federal law, a borrower can only consolidate his student loans once; then he’s stuck with that lender, even if a different lender is willing to pay off the loan and accept a lower interest rate. Also, to punish those who don’t pay their debts fast enough, collectors can have borrowers’ professional licenses taken away. Obviously, without being able to practice in the field for which they borrowed money to train, there’s little hope of these folks’ digging their way out of debt.

Collinge provides some good suggestions for dealing with these problems. He says kickbacks to schools should end, and he would like to see bankruptcy protection restored to student-loan debt.

His most ambitious solution, however, would probably be counterproductive. Collinge says the government should stop subsidizing loans, and instead dramatically increase direct aid to schools and students. In doing so, he says, the government would not only reduce the burdens on students but also stop college costs from rising. He does manage to cite an academic study to this effect, but he doesn’t consider that many economists think such a policy would have the exact opposite result.

Their theory (which John Hood has explained in NR) goes like this: College aid increases the demand for college, and it makes students less price-sensitive. Therefore, when the government increases aid, colleges can simply take that aid by raising tuition, putting students pretty much back where they started.

There are plenty of better ideas for rejiggering the way we pay for college. One is for students to give up a percentage of their income after graduation, instead of making traditional tuition and loan payments. Not only would this go easy on folks who have money troubles (no income, no payments due), it would take the burden off parents and the government. It would also provide schools with a very explicit way to compete on price: With loans, grants, and parental dollars out of the way, a student would have to ask himself if it was really worth X percent of his income to go with college A instead of college B.

Better yet, this could be done through private lenders, who’d have an incentive to pick the students who would stick with college and benefit from it. Such lenders would pass over the many students who shouldn’t be going to college and often drop out.

The Student Loan Scam is an eye-opening work of investigative journalism, despite its frequent hyperbole. Students are indeed fortunate people, even when they have to borrow money, and there’s every reason to support lenders’ right to collect the debt they’re owed. But Collinge demonstrates convincingly that lenders have gotten in bed with universities and the government, with predictably bad results.

— Robert VerBruggen, an NR associate editor, edits the Phi Beta Cons blog.

Source: National Review

When Stem Cell Research Gets Personal (Part 2)

Interview With Bioethicist on Umbilical Cord Cell Banking


By Kathleen Naab

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, JUNE 9, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The debate about stem cell research is under way in legislatures around the world, but there is an element to the research that is debated within the home.

This intimate level of the discussion happens every time a pregnant couple faces the possibility of storing their newborn's umbilical cord blood (or rather, the stem cells it contains) in hopes of future treatment or cures, should they be necessary.

ZENIT spoke with Father Alfred Cioffi about stem cell research and the particular promise offered by these powerful cells found in umbilical cord blood.

Father Cioffi, a priest of the Archdiocese of Miami, is a research ethicist for the National Catholic Bioethics Center. He has done extensive study and work in bioethics and research, focusing his first doctoral thesis from Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University on "The Fetus as Medical Patient: Moral Dilemmas in Prenatal Diagnosis." He earned a second doctorate in genetics from Purdue University, with a thesis on "The VWG Hypothesis: Predicting Distinct Chromatin Structures from the DNA Sequence."

Part 1 of this interview, detailing the basics of stem cell research, was published Monday.

ZENIT: Going to a more particular question, what is the difference between adult stem cells and stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood?

Father Cioffi: Regarding umbilical cord stem cells, bioethically, they represent a special category. It turns out that the blood inside the umbilical cord also contains stem cells. Since the umbilical cord comes from the human embryo (or fetus), then these are embryonic stem cells. The umbilical cord is normally discarded once the baby is born, but these embryonic stem cells can be extracted from that cord blood without having to do the least damage to the baby. In a sense, this is the best of both worlds because, on the one hand, umbilical cord stem cells have the plasticity and high-quality healing capacity of embryonic stem cells and, on the other, the baby certainly doesn’t have to be killed in order to obtain them.

ZENIT: So then let's turn to another side of this issue: parents considering storing their newborn's stem cells. Some -- perhaps most -- pregnancy books, obstetricians and pediatricians are cautious about recommending umbilical cord banking and even somewhat discouraging. Would you say this is a justified attitude? Does it reflect a lack of information? Or perhaps the effects of an anti-life ideology?

Father Cioffi: The downside of umbilical cord stem cells is mostly financial. It is relatively expensive to extract them -- I've heard for the United States, perhaps about $1,000 -- and then there's a monthly fee -- of about $100 -- to store them. How long would they be stored? Essentially, for life, or until the newborn has an injury or disease sometime in his lifetime. And, hopefully, that injury or disease could be healed with the saved umbilical cord stem cells.

ZENIT: So what would you recommend for pregnant couples? Is umbilical cord banking worth the price tag?

Father Cioffi: You have to consider several factors: How much is it likely to cost; up front and in the long run? What cures could be expected realistically, and in what time frame? Since cord blood stem cell research is an industry that is just now beginning, perhaps for now the couples who would benefit the most from storing cord blood stem cells are the ones who have another child who was either born with some illness or acquired some illness or injury that could be cured with the stem cells of the sibling, since coming from the same parents the tissue match would likely be a good one.

In the long run, umbilical cord stem cells offer tremendous potential, so my bottom-line recommendation for couples considering their storage when giving birth is this: If the couple can afford it (perhaps even with some help from family and friends -- “baby-shower donations accepted!”), then they should do it. Why? Because, in addition to obvious advantages to their baby, siblings and close relatives, this would also further this fledging industry that is indeed very pro-life, and needs all the help it can get in getting started.

If the couple cannot afford it, they could consider putting some “friendly pressure” on their health insurance company to cover, at least, some of the cost. I think that it is important to get health insurance companies to understand that their investment in umbilical cord blood stem cell storage is to their financial advantage in the long run. Why? Because, as more and more cures come about in this field, on average, more and more of their clients would benefit from them -- say, for instance, an injured teenager whose cord cells were saved, and who will now heal better and faster because of them, thus reducing his hospital stay and treatment sessions, thus reducing health care insurance costs.

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On the Net:

National Catholic Bioethics Center: www.ncbcenter.org

Stem Cell Research: www.stemcellresearch.org

Part 1 of this interview: www.zenit.org/article-26117?l=english

When Stem Cell Research Gets Personal (Part 1)

Interview With Bioethicist on Umbilical Cord Cell Banking


By Kathleen Naab

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, JUNE 8, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The debate surrounding embryonic stem cell research is portrayed as an exercise in discerning politics from science.

But there are undoubtedly some personal issues involved. The stem cell debate gets personal when citizens' tax dollars are used to fund the research, regardless of if the citizens are in agreement.

As the U.S. government follows President Barack Obama's March 9 executive order to direct U.S. tax dollars to the funding of embryonic stem cell research, ZENIT spoke with Father Alfred Cioffi about stem cell research and the particular promise offered by these powerful cells found in umbilical cord blood.

Father Cioffi, a priest of the Archdiocese of Miami, is a research ethicist for the National Catholic Bioethics Center. He has done extensive study and work in bioethics and research, focusing his first doctoral thesis from Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University on "The Fetus as Medical Patient: Moral Dilemmas in Prenatal Diagnosis." He earned a second doctorate in genetics from Purdue University, with a thesis on "The VWG Hypothesis: Predicting Distinct Chromatin Structures from the DNA Sequence."

ZENIT: There is still a lot of public confusion about stem cell research and what it's all about -- oftentimes confusion amplified by false or misleading press reports. Could you explain the basics of the research?

Father Cioffi: The cell is the basic unit of life on this planet earth. All living creatures are made up of cells. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells: bone cells, skin cells, liver cells, brain cells, etc,. Stem cells are cells deep within our body that produce other cells; stem cells make other cells. So, when we are either developing, or when there is an injury or disease, stem cells are active making new cells -- either to form an organ or tissue, or to repair a damaged organ or tissue.

Stem cell research uses stem cells in the lab to try to heal injured organs and tissues of the human body. It does this by seeking to turn human stem cells into cell lines. Our bodies are made up of approximately 220 cell lines: bone cells, muscle cells, brain cells, liver cells, etc,.

According to their origin, there are two types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cells come from embryos; adult stem cells come from "adults," that is, from people who are already born -- so, even babies have "adult" stem cells, because they are already born. So far, the only stem cells that have given results are the adult stem cells, and there's a fairly simple explanation for this.

Embryonic stem cells actually have too much potential; why? Because all of the organs and tissues of the embryo come from embryonic stem cells -- the whole embryo is formed from embryonic stem cells. So, when embryonic stem cells are transplanted into an injured organ or tissue, they actually grow uncontrollably, too fast, too much. The end result is a tumor: cancer. Why? Because, essentially, the whole little embryo wants to grow there, where the embryonic stem cells have been placed.

To obtain embryonic stem cells, the embryo has to be killed, destroyed. That is why the Catholic Church, and many people of conscience, are opposed to embryonic stem cell research.

In contrast, adult stem cells, coming from the various organs and tissues of our bodies, are more tame, and do not grow as fast or as much. Why? Essentially, because all that is needed to heal, say, a skin cut, is for the adult skin stem cells to grow just enough skin to replace the damaged area. In other words: Adult stem cells are already pre-programmed to replace the various organs and tissues of our body, each according to its type.

No one has to be killed to obtain adult stem cells. In fact, an added advantage is that they can be obtained from the same patient, thus avoiding the problem of immune rejection of the embryonic stem cells. That is why the Catholic Church actually encourages adult stem cell research.

ZENIT: So when U.S. President Barack Obama spoke of the triumph of science a few weeks ago with his reversal of the Bush ban for federal funding on stem cell research, he missed the mark?

Father Cioffi: He missed the mark indeed. Sadly, that decision was entirely driven by an ideology that puts a particular agenda in front of whatever scientific evidence there is. The reader can go to www.stemcellresearch.org, and see for himself the dozens of cures that have already been obtained with adult stem cells, and the zero cures with embryonic -- all documented with research articles in scientific journals.

ZENIT: So why is there interest in embryonic stem cells?

Father Cioffi: Three main reasons, I believe: finances, theoretical biology, and ideology.

Finances: Sadly, because of the money involved. It's all about the patents. It turns out that, since there have been so many successes in adult stem cell research, practically all of the patents are already taken up by biotechs and pharmaceuticals. However, due to the lack of results with embryonic stem cells, the slightest success in a particular biochemical pathway breakthrough is patentable, and the patent field here is wide open. Certainly, this is highly speculative research (using embryonic stem cells), which is what tends to give better returns when there is the tiniest hint of possible success. At a time when the economy is struggling, these speculative investments are a big temptation to provide the “quick fix” that everyone is desiring, so promises sell big during these times. To witness: In 2004, pro-embryonic stem cell ideologues convinced the people of California to devote $3 billion of their state taxes to this research, sold as the “cure-all” for the state’s financial bankruptcy.

Theoretical biology: Theoretically, embryonic stem cells should be able to regenerate and replace all of the 220 cell lines that make up the tissues and organs of our body. Why? Because they come from the Inner Cell Mass of the very early human embryo (the blastocyst: about one to two weeks old), and the entire embryo develops from the Inner Cell Mass. In practice, however, as I explained above, these cells have too much potential, and end up growing uncontrollably, causing tumors. Therefore, some scientists are saying: “Give us enough time and money, and we’ll tame these ‘wild’ embryonic stem cells to grow into the various cell lines needed.” And that’s precisely what we, as pro-life people, don’t want scientists to do, because using more time and more money means destroying many more human embryos in the process. And, of course, if they are successful eventually, that would only stimulate even more scientists to destroy more human embryos for their coveted stem cells.

Ideology: Embryonic stem cell research has nothing to do with the legalization of abortion, and has everything to do with the legalization of abortion. It has nothing to do with the legalization of abortion because there is no pregnancy involved. That is, these early embryos (blastocysts) are typically frozen in liquid nitrogen (cryopreserved) in in vitro fertilization clinics, and are considered “excess” by their parents, since their parents already obtained the pregnancy and birth of the baby that they wanted. If there is no pregnancy, then there is no “conflict of interest” between the mother and her unborn. On the other hand, it has everything to do with the legalization of abortion. Why? Because, by giving some human status to these frozen human embryos, it begins to undermine the abortion mentality that says, “They are not really human beings.” In other words, the pro-abortion (pro-choice) forces in our society are adamantly opposed to any suggestion of even the earliest human embryo being recognized as human. In the mind of these ideologues it is essential to continue to promote the perception that these early human embryos are “just a clump of cells” that should be used for advancing medical cures.

[Part 2 of this interview, offering a look at the pros and cons of umbilical cord banking, will be published Tuesday.]

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On the Net:

National Catholic Bioethics Center: www.ncbcenter.org

Stem Cell Research: www.stemcellresearch.org

The Spanish Inquisition: Fact Versus Fiction

by Marvin R. O'Connell

"Even while I breathed there came to my nostrils the breath of the vapor of heated iron. A suffocating odor pervaded the prison. A deeper glow settled each moment in the eyes that glared at my agonies. A richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood. There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors. Oh, most unrelenting! Oh, most demoniac of men! 'Death,' I said, 'any death but that of the pit.'"

And so on for twenty pages reads the most familiar literary indictment of the wickedness of the Spanish Inquisition. Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Pit and the Pendulum," is, to be sure, a piece of fiction, its author a specialist in creating scenes of horror and dread, as the titles of some of his other works suggest: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Haunted Palace," "The Conqueror Worm." Yet Poe's hideous image of the red-hot poker being prepared as an instrument of torture by grinning Spanish sadists–the "most demoniac of men"–did not strain the credulity of his readers a century and a half ago, nor does it today. We may indeed express our abhorrence a little more light-heartedly - when Professor Higgins, in My Fair Lady, wishes to evoke the most frightful of possible alternatives, he sings, "I'd prefer a new edition/Of the Spanish Inquisition," and, with the shivers running up and down the spine, we know exactly what he means.

At a rather more sophisticated level was the picture drawn by Dostoyevsky who, in The Brothers Karamazov, imagines the Grand Inquisitor, with "his withered face and sunken eyes," in confrontation with Jesus on the streets of Seville, where the Savior has just restored life to a dead child. "The Inquisitor sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at Jesus' feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows, and his eyes gleam with a sinister light. He holds out his finger and bids the guards arrest Jesus. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of a deathlike silence they lay hands on Jesus and take him to the Inquisitor who says: 'Tomorrow I shall condemn thee and burn thee at the stake as the worst of heretics.'"

Once more, suspension of disbelief is not so difficult, because it is a given that the officers of the Spanish Inquisition were so glutted with pride and blood-lust that they would not have stopped at deicide to gain their ends. Does not the very name of Torquemada summon up visions of ruthlessness and cruelty?

And then of course there is the cinematic conception of the era of the Inquisition, brought to the silver screen in dozens of swashbuckling melodramas, in which the upright, truthful, intelligent, compassionate, handsome, brave Anglo, with his light complexion and buff-colored hair –this last constituent sends a strong ethnic message– crosses swords with the cruel, devious, lustful, foppish, superstitious, cowardly Spaniard with –please notice –his swarthy skin and greasy black hair and mustache. Needless to say, North Atlantic virtue always triumphs over Mediterranean depravity in these contests, Protestant blue-eyed heroism over intrinsically inferior Catholic dark-eyed perfidy, and the audience goes home contented, having seen the Spanish galleon, all afire, sink beneath the waves, while the gallant Erroll Flynn (or someone like him) stands coolly self-possessed on the main deck of his ship, his protective arm around the waist of the beautiful blonde lady he has just rescued from the clutches of villainous Latins.

These pulp-fiction romances seldom advert directly to the Inquisition; movie moguls make it a rule to keep their plots uncomplicated. But they do trade in a deep-seated prejudice that has been so carefully cultivated over so long a time that it has become an integral part of our culture. It was not only Poe and Dostoyevsky and even Professor Higgins who assumed that the Spanish Inquisition was wicked because it was Spanish; the rest of us, the hoi polloi, concluded the same. To assert that conclusion was enough to establish its truth; no evidence was required and no rebuttal allowed. In one of the most enduring public relations victories ever accomplished, the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain's Golden Age, was consciously and methodically distorted by what scholars now candidly call "the Black Legend." This collection of bitter fables, with their overtones of bigotry and racism, proves once more –if proof were necessary– that a lie told often enough and convincingly enough will in the end be accepted as gospel. "One of the great conditions of anger and hatred," the wryly cynical Thackeray observed, "is that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object in order to be consistent." The lies in this instance about the Spanish character and about the Catholicism practiced in the Spain of Queen Isabella, St. Teresa of Avila and Cervantes, were told in order to promote a Protestant and particularly an English Protestant ascendancy, which in due course crossed the Atlantic with the colonists who eventually founded the United States; the sad irony is that though any serious commitment to that cause has long since vanished from the old world and the new, the racist and bigoted distortions put on the record in its behalf by the concoctors of the Black Legend have proved to have a life of their own.

But perhaps the Spanish Inquisition was indeed a wicked institution. If so, that judgment should be made on the basis of those discernible facts an honest examination is able to reveal, and not upon the fevered testimony of self-interested politicians, biased preachers, witless pamphleteers, or–deriving from one or more of these–naive writers of fiction. And, as is the case with any historical reconstruction of a phenomenon now passed away, to understand the contextual framework is a condition for understanding the phenomenon itself. An organization as consequential as the Spanish Inquisition could not have taken shape in a vacuum, nor could its activities have been divorced from the circumstances of its time and place. The same principle therefore holds good in its regard as it does in analyzing other events contemporaneous with the early years of the Inquisition. Thus, for example, we need to know what political and social as well as theological concerns persuaded Queen Elizabeth I of England to treat her Catholic subjects with such barbarity; similarly, we need to recognize that the fanaticism that drove Dutch Calvinists to hang all the priests and vandalize all the churches that fell under their control was not unrelated to a primitive nationalism and even to a primitive capitalism.

As far as the Spanish Inquisition is concerned, one must look for context to chronology and geography. Chronology first. The Holy Office, as it was popularly called, was founded in 1478 on the strength of a papal rescript requested by the sovereigns of a newly united Spain, the wife and husband, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. For precedent they cited the functioning of the Roman Inquisition during the thirteenth century when, under this rubric, the popes established special circuit courts to investigate and, when possible, to root up various heterodox movements, especially in southern France and northern Italy. These movements–lumped together under the rather sinister-sounding label "Cathari"–had alarmed the lords temporal of the time no less than the lords spiritual, because the Manichaean doctrines and life-style proposed by the Cathari were deemed as subversive of civil well being as of ecclesiastical. Over the course of a hundred years or so the Cathari were pretty well stamped out or driven underground through the cooperative efforts of Church and State. The inquisitors' job had been to establish the juridical facts in each case, and if, as a result, an individual were judged to be an unyielding heretic, the government's job had been to exact punishment from that person, up to and including death.

Yet in many respects–and here is a truth extremely difficult for us at the end of the twentieth century to comprehend–to speak of "Church and State" during the Middle Ages, and indeed much later, is to draw a distinction without a difference. That the civil and ecclesiastical entities represented essentially separate spheres, that religion should be a strictly private matter left to the choice of each individual, that persons of conflicting religious views or with no religious views at all could live in fruitful harmony–these ideas were unknown during the time the Roman inquisitors were harassing the Albigensians in the south of France, and unknown also when, two centuries later, Ferdinand and Isabella asked for the establishment of an Inquisition unique to Spain. Pope Sixtus IV, in granting their request, explicitly testified to the principle that it was the first duty of kings to nurture and defend the faith of their people, and implicitly he professed what was for him and his contemporaries a truism, that no society could exist without religious uniformity, that–to appropriate a celebrated statement of another era–"a house divided against itself cannot stand." Here was a conviction fully appreciated, incidentally, by the likes of Elizabeth I and the Dutch Calvinists, who gave it full rein in their own persecution-policies.

The organization of the Spanish Inquisition differed markedly from its Roman predecessor. The former, with its emphasis upon centralization and royal control, reflected the emergence of the nation-state and the responsibility the monarchy now assumed to guarantee religious orthodoxy. Thus the Grand Inquisitor was appointed by the king and answerable to him, with only the nominal approval of the pope. The Inquisitor in turn appointed the five members of the High Council over which he presided; this body, with its swarm of consultants and clerical staff, exercised ultimate power within the Inquisition's competence. It decided all disputed questions and heard all appeals from the lower inquisitorial courts, which by the middle of the sixteenth century numbered nineteen scattered across Spain and several more in Spanish-occupied territories in Italy and America. Without the permission of the High Council no priest or nobleman could be imprisoned. An auto-de-fe, the religious ceremony which included the punishment of convicted heretics and the reconciliation of those who recanted, could not be held anywhere without the sanction of the High Council. Control was also enhanced by the requirement that the lower courts submit to the Council yearly general reports and monthly financial ones.

As far as procedure was concerned, the Spanish Inquisition pretty much followed the precedent established in the thirteenth century and the models provided by secular tribunals. The legal machinery was put into motion by sworn denunciation of an individual or, on occasion, of a particular village or region. In the latter instance, prior to the formal inquiry a "term of grace" of thirty to forty days was routinely issued, during which period suspected dissidents could recant or prepare their defense. Once accused, a defendant was provided the services of a lawyer, and he could not be examined by the officers of the court without the presence of two disinterested priests. The identity of the witnesses of his alleged crime, however, was not revealed to him, and so he could not confront them. This was a severe disadvantage, even though harsh punishment was meted out to those revealed to have been false accusers. Judges, not juries, decided questions of fact as well as of law, and in effect the Spanish Inquisition combined the functions of investigation, prosecution, and judgment. Indeed, anyone arrested by the Inquisition was presumed guilty until proven innocent, a circumstance very unsettling to us who have enjoyed the blessings of the English common law tradition. Torture, a commonplace with secular jurisdictions, had been forbidden at first in the old Roman Inquisition, but then it had gradually come into use, with the provisos that it be applied only once and that it not threaten life or limb. In Spain these rules were adopted from the start, but early on Sixtus IV, deluged with complaints, protested to the Spanish government that the Inquisition was employing torture too freely. Unhappily the pope's remonstrances fell on deaf ears.

But to return to the chronological consideration, with a bit of geography thrown in for good measure. In 1478, at the moment the Inquisition was set up, the Christians of the Iberian peninsula had been engaged in a crusade for nearly seven hundred years. The fighting had not been constant, to be sure–it took our enlightened epoch to develop the fine art of total war–but ever since the eighth century, when the Arab Muslims had stormed across the straits of Gibraltar from Africa and with fire and sword had subjugated the peninsula as far north as the Ebro River, the native resistance to their occupation had been constant. And, by fits and starts, with frequent intervals of inactivity, resistance had gradually evolved into counter-attack, into a growing determination to win back what had been lost to the alien invaders. Little by little this relentless process of reconquest–la reconquista–drove the descendants of those invaders, the Moors, ever farther into the south until, in 1478, they had left to them only a small enclave around the city of Granada. The end of the crusade was in sight.

It would be difficult to exaggerate how profound an impact this extraordinarily long and all-consuming cruzado had upon the formation of Spanish public policy. Comparisons are impossible to draw, because no other Christian people had experienced anything even remotely similar. As suggested above, a Europe-wide consensus had indeed developed during the Middle Ages that religious dissidents could not be tolerated if true religion and harmonious society were to endure. Add to this the universal conviction that heretics adhered to their objectionable opinions not out of conscience but out of bad will, and it comes as no surprise that increasingly stringent laws were enacted throughout Christendom against those who refused to conform. Since such a refusal was judged the worst possible crime, the ultimate penalty for it everywhere was the worst form of capital punishment imaginable, burning at the stake. Though this ferocious sentence was carried out relatively rarely, the prospect of it did act as a deterrent and did induce all except the most stout-hearted to disavow their heterodoxies once brought to light by a judicial process. Still, the troublesome possibility remained that those who had formally recanted might have done so out of fear rather than conversion of mind, and that they continued to practice their subversive heresies in secret, waiting for a more propitious day.

In the Iberia of the reconquista a scenario of this kind presented a danger profoundly more serious than elsewhere. As the Christians slowly reestablished their hegemony over the peninsula–expressed in the two distinct political entities, Portugal and Spain–the potential antagonists of religious uniformity they were determined to impose were not indigenous eccentrics, as was the case in other European countries (bear in mind that the Protestant Reformation was at this moment still forty years in the future), but a conquered population linked by ties of race and religion to the Muslims living in the principalities of North Africa, which at Gibraltar lay only sixteen watery miles away. Even more ominous from the Spanish point of view was the fact that these so-called barbary states–the modern nations of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia–formed part of a vast imperial system established by the Muslim Turks, a system as powerful and menacing to western Europe as the Soviet bloc was conceived to be in our day. As the reconquista proceeded, therefore, and especially after Granada and the last remnant of Spanish Islam fell to the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, policy-makers had to decide how to treat the Moors and the relatively small but influential Jewish community which, in marked contrast to what our century has witnessed, had flourished within a larger Islamic society. The Christian victors, fearful of Muslim sympathizers in their midst, offered no compromise: Moors and Jews had to accept baptism or face expulsion from the country now defined as entirely Catholic.

What this decision amounted to, of course, was a policy of forced conversion, something quite incompatible with traditional Catholic teaching. This fact was pointed out by several popes and numerous Spanish theologians over a long period, but the sentiment expressed by one of Ferdinand of Aragon's royal predecessors was the one that prevailed: "The enemies of the cross of Christ and violators of the Christian law are likewise our enemies and the enemies of our kingdom, and ought therefore to be dealt with as such."

Predictably, however, the stark choice between conformity and exile invited pretense and hypocrisy on the part of those dragooned into a faith not of their own choosing. The Jews and Moors who conformed rather than depart the land in which they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years did so with varying measures of reluctance, merging often into downright dissimulation. And this is precisely why the Inquisition was created by the Spanish monarchs: as the etymology of the word implies, the first task of this new judicial body was inquiry, specifically inquiry into the authenticity of the conversion of the Moors and Jews who had come under the sway of those monarchs.

But once again we must stress the chronological track, because the bloody reputation of the Spanish Inquisition–though it formally existed for more than three centuries–was earned during its first decade and a half, even before, that is, the capture of Granada. During this unhappy period perhaps as many as 2000 persons were burnt as heretics. Though this number is only a small fraction of what the Black Legend routinely alleged, it is nevertheless sobering enough. Almost all those executed were conversos or New Christians, converts, that is, from Judaism who were convicted of secretly practicing their former religion. It should be borne in mind that the Inquisition, as a church-court, had no jurisdiction over Moors and Jews as such. But, ironically, once such persons accepted baptism they became capable of heresy in the technical sense of the word. Thus the early savagery of the Spanish Inquisition contributes another chapter to the sad history of anti-Semitism, motivated on this occasion, however, more by politico-religious expediency than by racial hatred. It was in any event an enormous and unforgivable miscalculation. Far from constituting a danger to the nation, the Jewish conversos of previous decades had already been admirably blended into the larger community. As Professor William Monter has pointed out, the New Christians "represent the first known large-scale and long-term assimilation of Jews into any Christian society. Although the process included many painful adaptations, some severe backlash and even a decade of brutal persecution under the Inquisition, it ended with their general integration into Spanish society. Their descendants quietly flouted racist codes and contributed to the vibrant Catholicism of Golden Age Spain; St. Teresa of Avila was the granddaughter of a New Christian penanced by the Inquisition."

It seems as though the violence with which the Spanish Inquisition began its tenure exhausted or perhaps shamed it into a moderation which the purveyors of the Black Legend stonily ignore. But the facts cannot be gainsaid. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Spanish sovereignty extended from Italy to most of Latin America, on average less than three persons a year were executed by the Inquisition, which was formally constituted in all those places as well as at home. Or, to give the Spaniards the benefit of the doubt, perhaps as the bitter struggle of the reconquista gradually faded from their collective memory, even as the Muslim threat itself receded, they exercised a restraint consistent with their principles. However that may be, for my part I am glad there is no longer in existence an Inquisition that might have me arrested on the basis of charges lodged by persons unknown to me, as happened to St. Ignatius Loyola. Yet as one who has lived through most of a century in which cruelty and atrocity and oppression have reached a pitch, quantitatively and qualitatively, inconceivable to our ancestors–inconceivable even to Torquemada–I think a measure of discretion would be appropriate when bemoaning the wickedness of the Spanish Inquisition, more discretion anyway than that exercised by Poe and Dostoyevsky.

•This article originally appeared in the November/December 1996 issue of Catholic Dossier.
Web: http://ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/print2005/moconnell_spaninquis_dec05.html



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Marvin R. O'Connell is professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame and a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul.

He is the author of John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (St. Paul, 1988), a prize-winning biography of the redoubtable John Ireland, and several other books, including Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart (Eerdmans, 1997).

Human Rights in China

Population Control Continues To Claim Victims

By Father John Flynn, LC

ROME, JUNE 7, 2009 (Zenit.org).- China’s human rights record was once more the focus of attention as June 4 marked the 20th anniversary of the bloody suppression of pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

The mainstream media focused on civil and political rights, but the denial of the right of families to choose how many children they want continues to oppress many Chinese.

On May 7, LifeNews.com published a report detailing the findings of an undercover investigation by Colin Mason in China.

The fines for having an illegal child are now three to five times the family’s income, LifeNews reported. Not surprisingly, when couples are faced with the prospect of such a fine, many consent to either abortion or sterilization.

According to Mason, in Guangxi province babies born outside the government’s limits are taken into custody by government officials, who hold the infants until the parents are able to pay the huge fines.

On Feb. 15 the London-based Times newspaper reported that the government’s severe restrictions are provoking widespread protests.

According to the report, Chinese media and Internet commentators are breaking restrictions to report birth control abuses.

Among the abuses, the Times mentioned that women who already have one child face regular pregnancy tests, as well as pressure to be sterilized. The means used to oblige women range from financial penalties to the threat of being sacked from their jobs.

Forced abortion

One case the Times mentioned was that of Zhang Linla, who committed the error of becoming pregnant when she had already given birth to a a daughter. Just six days before the date she was due to give birth she was subjected to a forced abortion.

The article mentioned other examples involving forced sterilizations and live babies being left to die.

On Nov. 17 the Christian Post Web site reported on the case of Arzigul Tursun, a Muslim Uyghur woman who faced the threat of a forced abortion. At the time of the article she was more than six months pregnant and was being pressured by authorities to abort as she already had two children.

On Oct. 5 the South China Morning Post newspaper published a lengthy article chronicling the coercive measures faced by couples not obeying the strict family planning laws.

The article detailed the invasive nature of restrictions on families. Every married couple has to answer to the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC). Every village and every street in the cities are monitored by a family planning clinic controlled by the NPFPC.

According to the newspaper, there are officially 650,000 people employed to enforce the family planning laws. However, unofficial estimates say the real number is more than a million.

The South China Morning Post gave the example of Jin Yani, who was subjected to a forced abortion due to her contravention of the strict limits. The abortion was carried out in such a brutal manner that she was in danger of death and subsequently spent 44 days in hospital. As a result of what happened, she will never be able to conceive again.

According to the article, authorities are able to act without scrutiny in the rural areas and they employ brutal methods, including the destruction of houses and forced sterilizations.

The newspaper cited Mark Allison, East Asia researcher for Amnesty International, who said that forced abortions remain common.

Penalties

On May 22 the South China Morning Post reported that government authorities have renewed their determination to enforce strict family planning limits. Among the recent measures announced are the free distribution of contraceptives to migrant workers, and increased penalties for extra children.

Revised family planning regulations released by the State Council announced that fines levied on migrant workers who violated the one-child policy would be assessed based on what they could earn in the place they are working, rather than the income levels of their hometowns.

Setting the fine for breaking the family planning rule in the city where they are living in will result in higher penalties.

Incentives to follow official restrictions include extra holidays for those who wait until they are older to give birth, or who voluntarily undergo sterilization. Compliant couples will also receive preferential treatment from authorities when it comes to running their own businesses or receiving social relief.

Such restrictions go against what the majority of Chinese women want, as even government officials admit. According to a Jan. 16 report by the BBC, Chinese family planning officials say their research shows that 70% of women want to have two or more babies.

According to the BBC, the research was conducted in 2006, but has only been released now. Most women -- 83% -- want a son and a daughter, according to the survey.

Missing girls

Apart from the abuses committed by authorities, another grave problem is a dangerous gap in the numbers of boys and girls being born. A combination of the traditional preference for having at least one male child, plus the restrictions on births, means that millions of baby girls have been aborted.

According to an April 10 report by the Associated Press, the latest data reveals that China has 32 million more young men than young women.

The estimate comes from a report published in the British Medical Journal. Moreover, the imbalance is expected to worsen in coming years.

The study found that China has 119 male births for every 100 girls, compared with 107 to 100 for industrialized countries.

The study found that the biggest boy-girl imbalance is in the 1- to 4-year-old group -- meaning that China will have to face the effects of that when those children reach reproductive age in 15 to 20 years.

Even though the government has banned the use of ultrasound tests to determine the sex of a fetus, they are still commonly done.

The consequences of a girl shortage are already being experienced, as the Sunday Times reported May 31. The London-based newspaper chronicled the increasing level of kidnappings of young girls. The girls are kidnapped to eventually be brides for men in regions where there is a severe shortage of girls being born.

The article said that the public security ministry admits to between 2,000 and 3,000 children and young women being kidnapped each year, but local media put the figure as high as 20,000.

A Web site established for parents to put up details of their missing children has information from more than 2,000 families. The hopes of resolving these kidnappings are, however, faint. After two years the site has had only resolved seven cases successfully.

Essential principles

The anniversary of Tiananmen comes shortly after the United Nations commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See's permanent observer at the U.N. offices in Geneva, addressed the subject of human rights in a speech delivered Dec. 12.

“By speaking of the right to life, of respect for the family, of marriage as the union between a man and a woman, of freedom of religion and conscience, of the limits of the authority of the State before fundamental values and rights, nothing new or revolutionary is said,” he commented.

Human rights are not just entitlement to privileges, the Vatican representative pointed out. Unfortunately in China and other countries basic rights regarding the family are still not respected, a situation crying out to be rectified.

American capitalism gone with a whimper

27.04.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru
URL: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-american_capitalism-0

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Stanislav Mishin

The article has been reprinted with the kind permission from the author and originally appears on his blog, Mat Rodina


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