William Saletan in Slate:

Yesterday I caught parts of a Talk of the Nation interview with Russlyn Ali, a Department of Education official in charge of civil rights. Here’s the transcript.  They were talking about the new DOE report showing that black students are disciplined in schools disproportionately. It’s worth quoting this exchange at length:

[HOST:] … In terms of African-American students and more so boys than girls, having these really disproportionately high rates of expulsion, is there a perception either that they’re misbehaving at a higher rate, or is a different thing, that they’re misbehaving at the same rate as everybody else but that they’re being punished at a different rate, that there’s a double standard in operation?

ALI: Unfortunately in too many circumstances, we have seen the double standard. We’ve seen instances across the country where students with the very same histories of conduct, who can – who for the very same offense received differing punishment, oftentimes with African-American students receiving a much harsher punishment.

But that is not the only answer. These data, as you mention, portend a very disturbing picture. The reason for them vary. These data, though, raise a lot more questions than they answer, and step one is getting to the root cause of why these patterns exist.

You mentioned, John, on boys versus girls. Yes, we’re seeing in the sample, for example, that although boys and girls represent about half each of the sample size, boys – 74 percent of the expulsions are given to boys. It could be the perceived or very real behavioral struggles that happen too often in our schools, but when we unpack those data further and, for example, look at the rate of suspensions for those students suspended out of school, when we look at the rate for black boys and the rate for black girls, we realize that African-American students are suspended at significantly higher rates than their peers.

African-Americans, about one in five will be subject to at least one out-of-school suspension sometime during their schooling career and over one in 10 African-American girls. So while there is no one answer or one solution to these problems, for sure we know that this kind of disparity is hugely concerning. Where there is treatment, different treatment or disparity impact in violation of the nation’s federal civil rights laws, we will enforce vigorously.

But it requires a lot more supports and training for schools and school leaders that are struggling with classroom management and school culture issues is one way.

Notice how she sidesteps the rather huge issue of whether or not black students are disproportionately behaving in ways likely to lead to their suspension and expulsion. She says that there have been “instances” across the country where black kids were punished more harshly than non-black kids for the same offense. I can well imagine that that’s true. But how many “instances”? Is it anecdotal, or is there evidence that it’s happened so often that it’s clear evidence of racism? It seems more likely that Russlyn Ali believes that “disparity impact” is conclusive evidence of racism.

The transcript goes on to include several phone calls, including one from a school security officer who said that in his experience, most of these serious disciplinary problems come from kids who have no family support at home. And then there was this call:

DIANE: I’m a 40 – retired 40-year teacher. I spent a lot of time in classrooms where oftentimes I was the only white person in the classroom. It’s all black kids. I want to focus and address that kid who comes to class – black, white, boy, girl – who’s done his homework, who’s here to learn, and nothing can get done in the classroom. He’s – because of the bad behavior of some kids. And the teacher spends well over 50 percent of the time trying to get that kid to cooperate with the lesson.

And what’s happening is all the kids are watching, and they’re – what lesson are we teaching if we just keep – I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I mean, I went to the very end of it before I kicked the kid out of class. But it – but when the kid was gone, learning took place for that little quiet kid sitting back there who comes every day.

I’m on the side of that little quiet kid. Thomas Sowell calls the DOE report a “big hoax.” Excerpt:

Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students — and with it destroy their chances for a better life.

Judges have already imposed too many legalistic procedures on schools that are more appropriate for a courtroom. “Due process” rules that are essential for courts can readily become “undue process” in a school setting, when letting clowns and thugs run amok, while legalistic procedures to suspend or expel them drag on. It is a formula for educational and social disaster.

Now Secretary Duncan and Attorney General Holder want to play the race card in an election year, at the expense of the education of black students. Make no mistake about it, the black students who go to school to get an education are the main victims of the classroom disrupters whom Duncan and Holder are trying to protect.

What they are more fundamentally trying to protect are the black votes which are essential for Democrats. For that, blacks must be constantly depicted as under siege from whites, so that Democrats can be seen as their rescuers.

Coors launches an iced-tea flavored beer.  On the one hand, this is disgusting, perhaps a sign of the impending Apocalypse. On the other hand, at least some form of Coors will taste like something other than the chilled piss of albino marmots. That’s not nothing.

As you knew they would, feminist critics of Rush Limbaugh have overshot. Conor Friedersdorf, who has long been a critic of Limbaugh’s rhetoric, is on the case:

 There is no bigger critic of the man than me. I am nevertheless appalled by the prominent liberals who want the state to use its coercive power to silence him. Writing at CNN.com, Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem actually compare the talk radio host to Josef Goebbels before arguing that if Clear Channel won’t drop him the FCC should throw him off the air because his broadcasts aren’t in the public interest. In a separate effort, celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred has sent the Palm Beach County state attorney a letter urging that office to prosecute Limbaugh under an antiquated law that treats as a misdemeanor speaking about a woman and “falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity.”

Neither effort is likely to succeed. And thank goodness. The precedents these women would set are orders of magnitude more damaging than any offensive remark that Limbaugh has uttered.

 

My TAC magazine piece about the Prince of Wales as a traditionalist conservative is finally available online. Excerpt:

The heir to one of the world’s oldest monarchies, a traditionalist? You don’t say. But Charles’s traditionalism is far from the stuffy, bland, institutional conservatism typical of a man of his rank. Charles, in fact, is a philosophical traditionalist, which is a rather more radical position to hold.

He is an anti-modernist to the marrow, which doesn’t always put him onside with the Conservative Party. Charles’s support for organic agriculture and other green causes, his sympathetic view of Islam, and his disdain for liberal economic thinking have earned him skepticism from some on the British right. (“Is Prince Charles ill-advised, or merely idiotic?” the Tory libertarian writer James Delingpole once asked in print.) And some Tories fear that the prince’s unusually forceful advocacy endangers the most traditional British institution of all: the monarchy itself.

Others, though, see in Charles a visionary of the cultural right, one whose worldview is far broader, historically and otherwise, than those of his contemporaries on either side of the political spectrum. In this reading, Charles’s thinking is not determined by post-Enlightenment categories but rather draws on older ways of seeing and understanding that conservatives ought to recover. “All in all, the criticisms of Prince Charles from self-styled ‘Tories’ show just how little they understand about the philosophy they claim to represent,” says the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton.

Scruton’s observation highlights a fault line bisecting latter-day Anglo-American conservatism: the philosophical split between traditionalists and libertarians. In this way, what you think of the Prince of Wales reveals whether you think conservatism, to paraphrase the historian George H. Nash, is essentially about the rights of individuals to be what they want to be or the duties of individuals to be what they ought to be.

More:

The most complete statement of Charles’s worldview is his 2010 book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, co-written by Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly. In its opening line, England’s future king declares, “This is a call to revolution.” Against what? Nothing less than “the current orthodoxy and conventional way of thinking, much of it stemming from the 1960s but with its origins going back over 200 years.” Charles believes Western civilization took a wrong turn at the Enlightenment, is headed toward destruction (especially environmental), and cannot save itself without an abrupt change of intellectual and spiritual course.

His criticism of the Enlightenment has nothing apparently to do with monarchical politics. It is chiefly a matter of philosophy. According to the prince, modernity occasioned a loss of vital wisdom that had been discovered, developed, and preserved in a number of ancient civilizations. The essence of this wisdom lay in seeing the world as cosmos—characterized by order, hierarchy, and intrinsic meaning. Moreover, the cosmos has a spiritual dimension, the existence of which is intuitively present in natural man. These principles are denied by modernity, which recognizes no meaning in the natural world aside from what man imposes on it, and the empiricism of which marginalizes “the non-material side to our humanity.”

Read the whole thing. 

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has suspended the Rev. Marcel Guarnizo, the priest who declined to give an open lesbian communion at her mother’s funeral. In a letter read to parishioners yesterday, an archdiocesan official said that the suspension has nothing to do with the lesbian communion incident, but rather for “engaging in intimidating behavior toward parish staff and others that is incompatible with proper priestly ministry.” The church’s pastor added that it had to do with unspecified things Fr. Guarnizo is supposed to have done over the last couple of weeks.

Since I last blogged about this, a couple of bloggers pointed out that Barbara Johnson, the lesbian who first publicized the complaint against Fr. Guarnizo, openly identifies as a Buddhist.  Note well: she is not even a Roman Catholic any longer, yet she presented herself for communion, knowing perfectly well that communion in the Catholic Church is not given to non-Catholics. This is common knowledge among Catholics, and if that weren’t enough, the reminder that communion is only for Catholics is printed in the missalette at every mass. It is simply not credible that Barbara Johnson, a Buddhist, did not know she was not entitled to receive communion in a Catholic mass.

I’d say she knew exactly what she was doing, though. Lifesitenews unearthed a paper Johnson wrote in which she talked about being a Buddhist and a lesbian teaching in a Catholic school, in which she described gays as fighting a “culture war,” and described herself as a “naturally born agitator who every now and again enjoys challenging the status quo.”

We don’t (yet) know specifically what took down Fr. Marcel Guarnizo. Perhaps it was this, and the Archdiocese is concocting a cover story. Perhaps he really did do things after the Johnson incident that merited this suspension. One way or another, I’m guessing that the naturally born agitator and culture warrior Barbara Johnson took this priest out.

UPDATE: See this comment from DC Catholic:

I’d urge some of Fr. Guarnizo’s defenders to hold back a bit. The diocese of Moscow stuff is the tip of the iceberg. Fr. G took advantage of jurisdictional ambiguities to jet back and forth across the Atlantic while raising money for a supposed educational foundation. Problem is there isn’t much to show for all this fundraising except a lot of weird property investments and a very nice trans-Atlantic lifestyle. Once Fr. G was in his parish, he started fundraising for various other causes and groups that espoused various worthwhile goals but were also under his control and not transparent about where the donations were going. My suspicion is that some rich, conservative donors to the archdiocese have finally had enough. Fr. G may have purposefully picked this fight in order to go out as some sort of martyr.

I’d say DC Catholic has a point. If there is some fundraising funny business going on, it’ll come out.

I would say it’s not a good idea to get lit when you are having an on the record lunch with a reporter. You might say things that make you look silly. Take Charles Murray, for instance:

The Gavi is going down fast. By now, Murray is positively convivial. “I don’t think this is the gin talking … but I want to be briefly more optimistic,” Murray declares. He discloses that he sometimes plays poker at a casino in Charles Town, West Virginia, and that he will, in fact, head over there after our lunch has finished. “The ways in which it reinvigorates your confidence in America is really interesting,” Murray says.

“I remember sitting at a table a couple of months ago. And at a poker table there’s lots of camaraderie. And so here I am at a typical table at Charles Town. Big guys with lots of tattoos, sleeveless T-shirts, one of them an accountant, the other looks like he comes from a gang. There was an Iranian-American and Afghan-American. Incredible polyglot mix of people – all speak perfect idiomatic English – and the conversation turned to the fact that my daughter was going to marry an Italian. ‘Well, do you trust him?’ they said. ‘You know, you can’t trust those Italians.’”

Murray guffaws at the recollection. “The thing is, it was such an American conversation,” he says. What would they say if he told them he had just eaten truffles in an Italian restaurant with the Financial Times? “Oh, I think they would be very amused,” he replies. “The thing is, I would like to take these parents who insist their children go to the best preschools and then Yale, etc, etc, and grab them by the scruff of their necks and take them to the Charles Town poker room and say, ‘These people are really fun and smart, and [your children] are missing all of that.’”

OK, I reply, but it now sounds as though he is saying the upper classes need to learn from everyone else, rather than the other way round. There is a tension between his hope that the rest of America will ape the elites, and his less than complimentary views about them. “Look, this may be the alcohol talking but I want the elites to fall in love again with what is so wonderful about America,” Murray replies.

The horror:

Another senior military official said the sergeant was 38 and married with two children. He had served three tours of duty in Iraq, this official said, and had been deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in December. Yet another military official said he has served in the Army for 11 years.

In Panjwai, a reporter for The New York Times who inspected bodies that had been taken to the nearby American military base counted 16 dead, including five children with single gunshot wounds to the head, and saw burns on some of the children’s legs and heads. “All the family members were killed, the dead put in a room, and blankets were put over the corpses and they were burned,” said Anar Gula, an elderly neighbor who rushed to the house after the soldier had left. “We put out the fire.”

Actually, the fire, so to speak, is probably just starting, and won’t be put out until we leave. How on earth do we continue to occupy that place after this thing?

I seem to recall there is, but cannot square that with the Cameron government’s intent to argue in court that two UK Christian women disciplined at work for wearing crosses have no right do so under human rights law. Excerpt:

Andrea Williams, the director of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “It is extraordinary that a Conservative government should argue that the wearing of a cross is not a generally recognised practice of the Christian faith.

“In recent months the courts have refused to recognise the wearing of a cross, belief in marriage between a man and a woman and Sundays as a day of worship as ‘core’ expressions of the Christian faith.

“What next? Will our courts overrule the Ten Commandments?”