News and commentary

I know I should follow the Supreme Court news from the newspaper. And I am. These are exciting times!

But the Facebook response is so compelling. Friends who've replaced their profile photo* with equal signs of different colors. Some, I think, post one, then switch the color. Some of these profile-switches get more likes than others. Is this about how gay-friendly their friends are? Or how many friends they have, how much their friends like them? Or how late in the day they got around to doing this? Time zones? Is Facebook advocacy inauthentic if not backed up by in-the-trenches support, or better than nothing? What does it all mean?

More substantively, a friend of several friends, a person with I suppose not so strict privacy settings, has produced an epic tirade attacking same-sex marriage and straight allies... from the left. And not just the usual critique from the left, that marriage is a limiting, religiously-tinged institution for boring straight people. This person seems to think straight support for same-sex marriage is some kind of conspiracy to deny AIDS patients medical care, and that to be an ally, you need to fight capitalism. 38 people, last I checked, like this. (So much for the gay, married, and capitalist.) I was on the cusp of considering posting something myself - against my general rule of not getting involved with solving-contentious-issues-on-Facebook - until I realized that the thread didn't originate with anyone I know or even know of, and thus that settings were such that this thread was, for me, read-only. For the best!

I've seen no evidence of anyone on my list (which does have some political diversity, what with my own political meanderings over the years, and what with UChicago) opposing same-sex marriage from the right. I remember a NYT story recently about the existence of young anti-SSM activists, but there are NYT stories about people who eat only farmers'-market food year-round and other ideological micro-minorities. Is my newsfeed devoid of opposition because it's become socially acceptable for conservatives/Republicans to support gay marriage, so whichever percentage opposed it for party-line reasons (as opposed to religious reasons, why-has-sexuality-been-split-from-reproduction reasons, or simple bigotry) now get to either support it or not care either way? Yes, fine, an unrepresentative sample if there ever was one, but it's uplifting all the same.

*My profile picture is my dog in profile, but I am, for the record, in favor of marriage equality. I asked Bisou (note to self: dissertate from a library or coffee shop, not home), and she's on board, although she remains miffed that the boy-dog she chases around the dog run definitively prefers being chased - and caught - by another of his kind. In this way, poodle female adolescence resembles the human variety.

Let them eat genetically-modified cake

So California won't be labeling its GMOs. I've been slightly following this, and it's a funny issue. On the one hand, those against the labeling come across as very Evil Corporation. On the other, there are some very good reasons not to label things with info that's arguably of no consequence.

Because it isn't just that there will be those who for some actual reason care and are happy things are labeled, and those who don't care and no-harm-done. There will also be others - perhaps the majority of consumers - who do uninformed risk-assessment, and who assume if a product is labeled "without X," surely some expert found conclusively that X is basically distilled ebola virus. Remember Ms. "Everything really needs to be paraben-free for me. I mean, because if I’m going to smoke cigarettes, then I need to be aware of all the other bullshit I’m putting into my body."? That's how actual people think. People assume scientists, bureaucrats, someone knows what what's what, and inasmuch as they know where their food (or moisturizer) comes from, they've outsourced this investigation to others.

As I've mentioned here before, I'm not crazy about efforts to put the responsibility for knowing what's dangerous on individual consumers. But it seems especially problematic for there to be state-mandated labeling. If it's voluntary, it's presumably only impacting some limited sector of the economy, where the consumers are kinda-sorta informed on whichever issue. (Only kinda-sorta - see the people who would prefer to get produce from farms big enough to pay for organic certification than from small local farms.) But if everyone's getting these labels, there will - I promise - be people who think no-GMO means low-fat, or high fiber, or makes your hair shiny, or who knows. (See: the people who think kosher is organic.)

Where the government could be involved, I suppose, is in a) standardizing what whichever voluntary labels mean, b) banning labels that are misleading or inaccurate, and c) investigating whether whichever thing (organic, GMO'd-ness) actually means anything, and if so, actually going and taking whichever problematic stuff off shelves.

An only modestly outrageous proposal UPDATED

WWPD's legislative branch proposes the following: a law that would restrict what parents can write online or publish about their own children. (See Item 2 of this post for links.) Not as outrageous as it sounds. Hear me out, and try your best (ahem, PG) to set aside that this law would never ever ever happen:

As it stands, speech is not entirely free, and is restricted if it causes undue harm. We already have a category called "libel." And a parent's criticisms of a child, offered not to the child, not in private commiseration with fellow parents, but to the broader reading public, really should count as such.

We already restrict a great deal of what can be said online or in print about young kids. The very young themselves are not, in principle, allowed unfettered access to the Internet, and tend not to publish books or articles, even if no law prevents them from doing so. Their teachers will (or should) be fired if they go online to rant about Jimmy, a student in their seventh-grade English class, and how he was raised by wolves. These kinds of speech are not, I believe, protected.

But when the parents are the authors, it's different. Why?

For one thing, we assume that we're reading an essay not about Jimmy and his C average, but about the trials and travails of parenting a child who's not Yale-bound. We think that there's a value in parents sharing their experiences, and that there's no way for this to be done authentically without referring back to those specific experiences with specific, readily-identifiable children. We believe that it's brave for Jimmy's dad to have told his story, as if the story were purely his to tell. We think Jimmy's dad is doing this great service, one only he could provide. And we assume goodwill. He loves Jimmy, after all. Plus, Jimmy reflects on him. What's his incentive to paint Jimmy in a negative light?

Children, who are in a position of near-powerlessness regardless, are in a particularly great one with respect to their own parents. Let's say your father writes an essay for the Washington Post about what a dimwit you are, but using a tone intended to make him come across as a really wonderful parent who's done everything. What's your recourse? You're not guaranteed to grow up to be someone with a platform on that scale, and at any rate it'll be years until you've grown up, period. And these people provide the roof over your head and so much more. Parents are meant to be a buffer between their children and the wide world of people who do not love them unconditionally, who don't think they're brilliant and beautiful, even if they're not. By putting their children's lives on display, in particular their moments of weakness, they're failing their kids. Ironic, considering that we're meant to believe the parents with an exceptionally strong interest in "parenting" are the ones producing this genre.

We assume that adults have thick enough skin that they might be publicly mentioned in some unflattering way without being utterly shattered by the experience. But the bar is far lower when it comes to children, who can feel shamed and humiliated so much more easily, especially by their own parents. Your kid did something embarrassing? In the fiefdom of WWPD, you'd have to keep it to yourself.

UPDATE

Yet another reason parents shouldn't be allowed to write about their kids: Parents can (and often do) look at everything their kids do online, including messages they send and imagine to be private. So we have to assume that parents know not only embarrassing things about their kids that their kids know they know ('remember the time I had to come pick you up from school because your menstrual cramps were so bad?'), but also things the kids have every good reason to think are secret. A father might know that his son was rejected by a girl, because he's reading the kid's texts. He might think, 'Aha, a wonderful opportunity to share what it's like to parent a child going through his first romantic rejection.' And because we (for some reason) accept that it's OK both for him to be following his kids' texts in the first place, and to write articles about his 'parenting,' we see no reason why he can't 'write what he knows' in this situation.