Time to Pontificate

Of course we bloggers pontificate every day, but it's not every day that the Pope shows up. So a little special commentary is in order.

I sent my resume to the College of Cardinals when Pope John Paul II died. I said I realied that I was a nontraditional candidate for the position, but perhaps the Church could benefit from a little shaking up by a nontraditional candidate.

The first thing I would do if I were Pope -- well, actually, I wouldn't do anything for a couple of years, you'd have to give people a little time to get used to me, and I'd want to go to seminary, but after that the first thing would be to issue a magnificently ambiguous encyclical concerning contraception. I wouldn't touch abortion. But I'd have those superbly subtle scriveners at the Vatican produce a perfectly ambiguous document that conservatives could point to and say, "look, the new Pope has reaffirmed the Church's traditional teaching about contraception," and the liberals could point to and say, "look, the new Pope has determined that the issue of contraception is to be left up to the conscience of the faithful."

And then I wouldn't say anything for five years. Maybe ten. Anytime anyone asked any questions about contraception, I'd refer them to the top Cardinals, who in turn would refer them to the encyclical. All your questions are answered in the encyclical, we'd tell everyone. That's how to make progress. The Church is like a huge ship -- it can't change course 180 degrees in an instant. Things would have to move slowly, and there'd have to be a period of ambiguity.

The other issue I'd move on would be women priests. Lack of applicants for the priesthood is holding the church back. Where can we find more good candidates? Well, duh -- you could increase your applicant pool by 100% instantly by allowing women. But again, it would be too controversial to change positions on this instantly. You'd have to start ambiguously.

Now, you might think that my strategy of ambiguity couldn't work on this issue. Making women priests would be pretty clear-cut.

But the canonical mind is equal to the challenge. I wouldn't actually make women priests. Of course women can't be priests, we'd tell everyone. But women could hold lesser offices -- deacon, perhaps, or perhaps a new lesser office would be invented. Then it's just a matter of gradually increasing the functions that deacons can perform until eventually they're saying mass. But they're not priests, oh no, of course not.

But of course they went and chose that Ratzinger fellow. Some people just can't accept change.

No More Pencils

I just taught my last class -- for 15 months! Now I just have to get through every professor's second-least-favorite task -- writing my exams -- so that I can then do every professor's least-favorite task -- grading the exams -- and then -- yes! -- it's time for my sabbatical.

May 18 is the truly magical date. That's Commencement. After that, I am not required to be any particular where on any particular day until August 2009. Oh yes, this is what professors dream about. It only comes once every seven years, but we're thinking about it for the other six.

Of course, I hasten to add, a sabbatical is not a vacation. I'll be working hard on writing projects. But boy, it sure will be nice to work anywhere and anywhen I want.

Bring on those exams! I can't wait to be done with them.

Your Non-Legal Movie Review

Sorry about the lack of recent content, faithful readers. The end of the term is coming -- always a busy time.

Last night, my girlfriend and I saw Shine a Light, currently playing at DC's last remaining big-screen movie theater, the Uptown. It was sadly misbooked -- the company (which owns pretty much every screen in town) miscalculated and put the film in their big theater, which must have a capacity of 500 or so, but there couldn't have been more than 50 in the audience.

The movie is a concert film -- it's Martin Scorsese's filming of a concert given by the Rolling Stones in New York City in 2006. After a brief intro in which Scorsese gives you some sense of the frenetic preparation work for the concert and the difficulties of filming it, most of the movie is just a film of the concert, with a few clips of earlier Stones interviews spliced in.

All I can say is this: it was terrific. Mick Jagger was sixty-three when he gave this concert, but he filled the entire theater with his energy and intensity. He's up there singing, dancing, strutting, and shaking his ass better than most thirty-year-old performers. His face is craggy and saggy but his body looks great and his stage presence is undimmed -- particularly amazing was how he brought the same vitality to the last number as to the first, after a couple of hours of work that would have tested a professional athlete.

I hope I have that much energy when I'm his age. I'd settle for half as much. One only has to recall Britney Spears sleepwalking through her number at the MTV awards to realize that there's no guarantee that even the best performers will do a good job on any given night. It takes real dedication. Jagger feigns coolness and unconcern, but you can see that he's determined to give the audience its money's worth -- he's putting it out there for us and he won't be satisfied with anything less than his best.

That's what I try to give to my students. I don't always feel up for the game -- professors have much other work to do, of which students are sadly unwaware, not to mention personal lives that could be going well or badly -- but the students have paid big bucks to be there. If you run the numbers the tuition alone amounts to about $100 per class hour, so in my big class the students have collectively paid over $11,000 for me to step into the classroom each day. They're entitled to their money's worth, and I try to give them an appropriate amount of energy and intensity. I'm no Mick Jagger, but I do my best.

Anyway, whatever Mick Jagger is on, I want some. Well, perhaps not -- it's probably something illegal. But boy, he's still got it, and it's an inspiration knowing that you can still be going that strong after sixty.

Your Legal Movie Review

I finally saw the Oscar-winning movie Juno, which was pretty good -- although I did think some of the characters were unrealistically quick-witted for alleged teenagers. But my real interest was, naturally, in the legal aspects of the movie. You need to know the basics of the plot, but it's hardly a spoiler to say that the film is about a 16-year-old girl who gets pregnant and decides to have the baby but to give it up to a childless couple in a private adoption.

Here's the thing: did you notice that everyone (including the lawyer whom the adopting couple hires to ensure the adoption goes off legally) assumes that the decision to give up the baby belongs entirely to the biological mother? What about the father? Doesn't he have anything to say about it? No one seems to think that it's necessary even to ask his opinion, much less get his permission. Even he just sits on the sidelines and does hardly anything for the entire movie.

After doing a little research (all right, what I really did was to ask one of my colleagues who has expertise in this area), I was somewhat surprised to discover that the movie got it right: a biological father who exhibits no interest in asserting parental rights does not have to be consulted before his child is adopted and his parental rights terminated.

Does this make sense? In the age of the more-involved father -- an age in which, in fact, there's a big societal push from those who support women's rights to encourage fathers to play a more active role in child-rearing -- it seems unfair to say that the father would be on the hook for child support if the mother chose to seek it, but that he has no right to claim his child if the mother wants to put it up for adoption.

Fortunately, the matter is not quite so simple -- the biological father's rights are not automatically terminable by the mother's choice to put the baby up for adoption. But the father needs to take more active steps to assert his rights. Had Paulie, the father in the movie, wanted to raise the baby, he would first have had to register with the state's "putative father registry" (luckily for him, Minnesota has one -- only about half the states do). Then he would at least be entitled to notice that Juno was planning to put the baby up for adoption. But even then, state law might or might not recognize his right to the child. He might be limited to being able to keep the child if he could show that that was in the child's best interests.

Normally, a state can't take a child away from its biological parents without their consent unless they are shown to be unfit. Parents otherwise have a right to their children, even if it would be in the child's best interests to be raised by somebody else. But an unmarried biological father may not have such rights under state law. He may be required to take active steps to assume parental responsibilities, and some states have pretty strict requirements. A biological mother who acted badly in the period immediately after her child's birth wouldn't be in this situation -- the father (if he were around) couldn't decide to put the child up for adoption without her permission just because she wasn't taking what state law regarded as a sufficiently active role in raising it. She'd have to be shown to be unfit.

Well, it's a complicated area. Giving biological fathers too much rights to their children could put them in a position to keep adoptions in limbo for a long time, which would be harmful to the child, especially if the father had no real interest in the child and was just acting out of spite or some other improper motive. And it would be too much to require the father's consent in a case in which the father has disappeared or is otherwise unreachable. But there is some tension between the societal desire to encourage fathers to take a more active role in raising their children and telling unwed biological fathers that they may have no protected right to do so.

Latest Silly Argument

The latest silly argument in the Democratic presidential race is that superdelegates should vote for Clinton because she's won states with more total electoral votes. This is a variant on the "she's won the big blue states that we'll need in the general election" argument.

Now look, Senator Clinton is a fine and strong candidate and I will happily vote for her in November if she is the Democratic nominee. But could people please stop with these silly arguments? Even prior analyses don't point out the obvious flaw.

The flaw is this: whether Clinton beats Obama in a state or vice-versa is not much of an indicator of whether either of them would beat McCain in the same state.

It's just a matter of simple game theoretical analysis. Let's imagine hypothetically (these numbers are not meant to reflect the actual state of play) that Democratic candidates A and B are each favored by about 30% of the general electorate and that Republican candidate C is favored by about 40%.

In the primary race, C challengers have all dropped out, so C is coasting toward the nomination, but A and B are still hard at it. In state after state, A and B are running about even, trading victories, and staying close right up to the nomination.

But what happens in November? Whether A or B is the Democratic nominee, those who voted for the other in the primaries are still, primarily, Democrats, and are unlikely to vote for the Republican C over either A or B. Let's imagine that of the 30 percentage points of the public who voted for the Democratic runner-up in the primaries, 25 percentage points vote for the Democratic nominee and 5 for the Republican. The result: The Democrat, whether A or B, wins a handy victory with 55% of the total electorate to 45% for C.

Now, the above hypo is obviously very simplified, and reality is more complex: there are independent voters, some voters will stay home, etc., etc. And the November matchup will feature many subtleties, particularly if both parties put up centrist candidates.

But unless there are a lot of voters whose preference list is Clinton, McCain, Obama, or Obama, McCain, Clinton, the preference between Clinton and Obama is not a strong indicator of how a Clinton-McCain or Obama-McCain matchup would come out.

5, 4000

A double milestone for the Iraq war this past week, neither happy -- the war reached its fifth anniversary and the number of U.S. military deaths reached 4000. It's an appropriate time to look back.

Republicans and Democrats seem trapped in their official narratives about the war. The Republicans seem incapable of admitting that the war was a big, fat, bad idea, and bungled to boot. President Bush started an unnecessary war based on false intelligence, baldly lied about how long the war would take, how much it would cost, and how many casualties would be incurred. He turned it over to the arrogant and incompetent Donald Rumsfeld, who mismanaged it about as badly as could be imagined, so that it's already taken 10 times as long and cost 10 times as much as the least optimistic original estimates, and the end is not in sight. That kind of thing tends to cancel out the good things that your presidency has accomplished -- not that Bush had a whole lot of good things to cancel out, anyway.

On the other hand, Democrats seem incapable of acknowledging that things are going at least a little better lately. U.S. military deaths have slowed to about 1 per day -- an awful figure, but a whole lot less awful than the 3-4 per day we were previously experiencing. Iraqi deaths are down too. It's terrible and tragic that we've lost 4000 troops, but that's still not even 10% of the losses in Vietnam. Democrats also need to acknowledge that as stupid as the war was, it's happened, and can't be wished back into nonexistence. We need a strategy going forward that starts from where we are now.

Unfortunately, it's hardly a great accomplishment to be able to say that after 5 years, 4000 American deaths, and $500 billion, we've managed to get to a situation that's only bad, as opposed to appalling, and that might reasonably be hoped to stay only bad for at least a while now. I heard an interview over the weekend with some returning soldier who suggested that we need to "finish the job." But what is "the job" and what would constitute "finishing" it? To "finish the job" we would need to stay in Iraq indefinitely, probably for another decade, and lose another three or four thousand troops, and spend another trillion dollars or so, and what would be the best result? The original idea of creating a stable, pro-Western democracy seems a hopeless dream.

It's ironic that Republicans would be the first to scream if you seriously suggested a ten-year, trillion-dollar federal government effort to improve society here in the U.S. Yet they're all gung ho to have that same government spend that amount trying to improve things halfway around the globe.

Last week, Barack Obama spoke openly and honestly about problems of race in America. He said things that few politicians have dared to say. He treated us like adults and spoke honestly about the sources of our racial problems.

Could someone, perhaps Obama, do the same for Iraq? I don't see a way to a solution until someone gets honest about the problem.

Proof that America Has Gone Crazy

Just in case you were wondering.

Monty Kerr of Austin, Texas paid $1,350 for a corn flake allegedly shaped like the state of Illinois. The eBay auction was technically for a coupon reedemable for the corn flake, because eBay has a policy against auctioning food items.

Kerr wants to add the corn flake to his "traveling museum," the title of which is presumably the "Hall of Folly" or "You Won't Believe What I Paid for This," or some such endearing name, where people can gaze at it and think, "wow, it looks like exactly like every other corn flake," and "it's not even really shaped that much like Illinois," or "what kind of dope would pay $1,000 for this?"

I know there is no end to the folly of mankind, but I was surprised enough to learn that Governor Spitzer was paying $4,000 for a couple of hours of sex. Compared with Mr. Kerr, Spitzer seems like a smart shopper.