Friday roundup

Great Townhall column by Veronique deRugy on what a bad and wrong idea government-mandated paid family leave is.

Last year, the conservative American Enterprise Institute released a joint report with the more progressive Brookings Institution titled "Paid Family and Medical Leave: An Issue Whose Time Has Come." While the authors disagree among themselves about the specifics of a federal program, they "unanimously agreed that some form of paid parental leave should be offered to help workers at the time of birth, adoption, or fostering of a child." 

These authors gathered for an AEI panel discussion on the issue this week to renew their commitment to a compromise solution that falls somewhere between big and bigger government policies. According to the original joint report, the plan "would provide eight weeks of gender-neutral paid parental leave, replace 70 percent of wages, and offer job protection. The policy would be fully funded by a combination of payroll taxes and savings elsewhere in the budget, with no increase in the deficit but also no adverse effects on low-income families," according to the AEI website. Translation: more spending, more taxes and supposedly paid for by savings that will never materialize.

One of the rejoinders often offered when one asserts that paid family leave deserves a big thumbs down is that it, like universal health care, is policy in many other countries (which always brings to my mind our moms' response when we'd plead to be allowed to do something on the basis of all the other kids getting to do it: If all your friends were marching off a cliff like lemmings, would you join them?) Often, Scandinavian countries are trotted out as the examples.

Well, how is paid family leave working out in Denmark?

Denmark is often cited as an example of working-parent paradise. The government offers 52 weeks of paid leave and other generous family-friendly benefits. But even in paradise, there's no such thing as a free lunch. A January 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by economists Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais and Jakob Egholt Sogaard looks at what happened to the earnings of 470,000 Danish women who gave birth for the first time between 1985 and 2003. These researchers found that having children was a career bummer for women.

For instance, they found that while men's and women's pay grew at roughly the same rates before they had kids, mothers saw their earnings rapidly reduced by nearly 30% on average, compared to the trajectory they were on before having kids. Men, on the other hand, saw their pay grow at the same rate before and after their children were born. Women may also become less likely to work, and if still employed, had earned lower wages and worked fewer hours.

I kind of wish deRugy had named names. I've been following the work on this by AEI's Aparna Mathur, and while she's quite the credentialed economist, it appears that organization's more free-market scholars' orientations have not rubbed off on her much. AEI's thinkers really don't march in lockstep.

In a talk on Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation, Jordan Peterson displayed his incisiveness chops big-time:

Life satisfaction comes when we believe we are making our way to a “valid endpoint,” Peterson said, and this mentality isn’t really “optional,” even for nihilists—who deny all meaning in life—because their misery is what gives them meaning.

“The destruction of the narratives that guide us individually, psychologically, and that also unite us, socially, familially … it’s an absolute catastrophe,” Peterson said. And this reality is the result of the “unholy marriage of the postmodern nihilism with this Marxist utopian notion.”

Despite the philosophical incompatibility of these concepts, they have been combined into a potent stew in the late modern age, where group identity is all that matters and individuals are subsumed to the collective.

The intellectual divide between these concepts and classical Western views go “way deeper” than our political divides, Peterson said.

To address the growth of nihilism, it’s important to build the self-worth of individuals so that they can find strength from within, Peterson said. Unfortunately, for half a century, we’ve been teaching people that they are fine just the way they are, he said, but this is a terrible message for those who are “miserable and aimless.”

From the get-your-kids-out-of-government-schools-yet-this-afternoon file comes this grim report by Helen Raleigh at The Federalist:

Should a six-year-old be taught to use transgendered pronouns and believe in so-called gender fluidity? The leaders of Superior Elementary School in Boulder Valley School District, Colorado, think so.

Last November, the school showed children from kindergarten to fifth grade videos from “Queer Kid Stuff” and a stage play about transgenderism to promote “acceptance and inclusivity” especially related to the transgender community. Some parents are outraged and are seeking possible legal remedies.

 

Superior is a small Colorado town with a population of 13,000. It’s about 20 miles east of the “Republic of Boulder,” which is known for being the home of University of Colorado and the most liberal city in Colorado.

On November 16, 2018, the day before Thanksgiving break, parents received an email from Jennifer Bedford, the school’s principal. Buried deep in all the other normal school updates was a “Save the Date” announcement. It stated that Phoenix, Colorado’s “Trans Community Choir,” would perform a play titled “Raven’s True Self” for children between first and fifth grade.

According to the memo, “This story is about a transgender raven in a community of animals … The story’s message is about the importance of being seen for who you are on the inside, rather than how you are perceived on the outside.” On the day this email came out, the same choir performed the same show for the first to fifth graders at Nederland Elementary School, another school of the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD).

But children at Superior elementary were promised more. The email included links to three videos that would be shown to kids prior to the musical performance: “He, She, and They – What is Gender,” “No More Gender Roles,” and “Expressing Myself, My Way.”

What outfit cooked up this "curriculum"?

These videos come from a YouTube channel called the “Queer Kid Stuff,” which bills itself as providing an “LGBTQ+ educational webseries for children ages 3+, hosted by a tie-wearing queer lady, Lindsay, and her non-binary best-stuffed friend, Teddy. Gender Studies 101 meets Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood!” Some other videos from this channel include “Dragqueen Makeup Transformation” and “Unicorns Are Queer Horses.”

Since the email came right before the holiday, many parents didn’t pay attention to it. After the holiday, a few parents finally clicked the video links and were shocked. For example, in the video “He, She, and They – What is Gender,” Teddy, the gender-confused teddy bear tells Lindsey, “I still don’t know if I am a boy or girl.” Lindsay responds, “Well Teddy, some people aren’t boys or girls. Some people are boys, some people are girls and some people are people.”

Teddy says, “I don’t feel like a ‘he’ or ‘she’ so I guess my pronoun is ‘they.'” Lindsay gives her wholehearted approval: “That’s really awesome, Teddy.” In the other video titled “No More Gender Roles,” Lindsay tells Teddy that “traditional gender roles are “mean, They are not fun and they are big problems.”

How did things get this far in this school district?

Even more shocking to many parents is their discovery that BVSD has been trying to indoctrinate their kids for years.  BVSD reportedly pays about $19,000 annually for its staff to be trained by “A Queer Endeavor,” a program in the CU-Boulder Department of Education, on how to embed LGBTQ worldviews into curriculum—a process they call “Queering the curriculum.”  Their founder states, “Our approach moves beyond the anti-bullying discourse and works toward systemic change.”

Idiotic yet culturally poisonous blurtings from Dem presidential candidates who thought it was important to speak at the national convention of racial-attack-hoax-perpetrating, Jew-hating fraudulent "minister" Al Sharpton's National Action Network. Pete Buttigieg apologized for using the phrase "all lives matter" in 2015, saying he "didn't understand the cultural context." And Elizabeth Warren told the crowd that "voter suppression" was why Stacy Abrams did not assume her rightful place as Georgia governor.

From the Democrats-are-venom-filled-savages file:

Republicans are trying to secure a House vote on the Born Alive Survivors’ Protection Act, which would ban infanticide in the context of a failed abortion. The procedural mechanism is a discharge petition, but Republicans can’t get Democratic Congressmen to sign on. Not even Congressmen like Minnesota’s Collin Peterson, who is a co-sponsor of the Act.

Carly Atchison is a staffer with the National Republican Congressional Committee. She sent emails to editors of a variety of publications in districts represented by Democrats who are declining to come out against infanticide. One such Democrat is Ron Kind of Wisconsin. Atchison’s email to a seemingly innocuous publication–Cheese Reporter–drew a hateful response that was also a non sequitur: “Hey, Carly–Hope you don’t get raped at a MAGA rally and have to carry that child to term. DON’T EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN.”

The email came from Moira Crowley, an assistant editor for Cheese Reporter.

From the Yale-has-become-an-agent-of-cultural-poison file:

What happens at our nation’s elite law schools rarely stays there.
That is why recent events at Yale Law School are so disturbing. In an effort to appease campus protesters, Yale announced that it would begin discriminating against religious students. This should concern all who value intellectual diversity and religious freedom. But even more troubling is the fact that this anti-religious bigotry is unlikely to confine itself to the ivory tower for long.

In February, the Yale Federalist Society scheduled an event with Kristen Waggoner, an attorney at Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the nation’s premier religious liberty organizations. Waggoner recently argued Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission before the Supreme Court and won in a 7-2 vote. The case involved anti-religious discrimination against a Colorado baker.

As Justice Elena Kagan explained, the government acted unconstitutionally because it exhibited “hostility to religious views.”

One might expect an event with a successful Supreme Court advocate to be welcomed at an elite law school. But before the event had even taken place, more than 20 student organizations publicly condemned the event and speaker.

Par for the course at Ivy League institutions, a list of demands soon followed. The organizations called on Dean Heather Gerken to implement policies that would make it more difficult for students to work at “discriminatory” organizations, like those promoting religious liberty. They also asked her to consider denying admission to applicants who worked on certain religious liberty efforts before law school. Such lists are normally good for a laugh. And this one seemed no different.

But in late March, Yale Law School adopted a novel tactic: one-upping the protesters. It announced three major policy changes that went further than many of the protesters’ demands, all under the guise of an expanded nondiscrimination policy. 

The new policies require all employers to swear that, when hiring students or graduates who benefit from certain Yale funding, they will not consider an applicant’s “religion,” “religious creed,” “gender identity” or “gender expression,” among other factors. The effect of this, for instance, is if a Yale Law student or graduate wishes to work for an organization that does consider religion in hiring — say a Catholic organization or Jewish advocacy group — Yale will cut them off from three important programs.

First, Yale will ban them from receiving the school’s “summer public interest funding.” This is more important than it sounds. Between students’ first and second years of law school, they typically volunteer at nonprofits or in government. (Most law firms, quite understandably, are not interested in hiring first-year students.) To help defray students’ living expenses during this first summer, Yale offers financial grants. Last summer, for example, Yale provided more than $1.9 million to more than 200 students.

Second, Yale will ban graduates from participating in the school’s loan assistance program. The basic idea is simple: If a student graduates, works full time, and makes below a certain income threshold, Yale will help with their loan payments. Sound too good to be true? Most top law schools have similar programs. Yale previously boasted that this program covered “all jobs in all sectors.” No longer.

Third, Yale will ban them from receiving one of the law school’s 30-plus post-graduate fellowships. These prestigious fellowships offer a year of funding for students to serve in a nonprofit or government position.

And finally, a tweet from neontaster  that articulates a situation I've encountered many times:

If you go after the left and you're not a Trump person, people have no fucking idea how to even approach arguing with you, so they just proceed as though you are a Trump person and bring him up incessantly.

 

The problem? Waggoner's orthodox Christian beliefs and a commitment to religious liberty. Parroting Southern Poverty Law Center talking points, protesters claimed she worked for a "homophobic, transphobic hate group." Never mind that Alliance Defending Freedom has won nine Supreme Court cases in the past seven years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strong families? Yay! Government involvement? A resolute thumbs down

One of the key issues on which we can see that Trump is no conservative and in fact blows with the prevailing winds - in this case, his daughter Ivanka - is the subject of paid family leave.

This matters because since so much of the Right has become slavishly devoted to the Very Stable Genius, you're starting to see supposedly conservative people and organizations get on board with it, as Kira Davis points out at Townhall:

Pundit Dana Loesch recently ignited a mini-controversy on her radio show when she posted her theory that supporting federally mandated paid family leave is not a conservative position.

Like Loesch, I have noticed more and more conservative organizations pushing for some kind of “Paid Family Leave” legislation. The argument is that if Republicans/conservatives really consider themselves to be pro-family then they should be supporting policy that makes it easier for a woman to stay home with her family as long as possible after giving birth.

As a mother who has occupied many different spots on the “mothering spectrum” I have thought long and hard about this. When I had my first child my husband and I agreed that I would stay home to raise our children. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I felt it was best for our family. Later I worked part-time in the non-profit industry and when I moved to writing I was able to work from home and be a stay-at-home parent. I know the unique challenges of being a mother in each of those common situations.

She makes clear that she feels strongly about this. The more time parents - particularly mothers - can spend with young children, the more those children are going to form strong bonds, as well as pave the way for learning life lessons and absorbing the family's values.

But government making private organizations enact certain policies, even if they serve a cause like this?

A resounding no:

What does perplex me is just how many conservatives seem to think it’s acceptable for the government to coerce employers to pay for women to stay at home. My husband’s corporation has an extremely generous paid leave package for new mothers. They do it with pleasure. I applaud any employer who offers this type of support and sensitivity to their working mothers. Bravo!

I cannot in good conscience support the government getting involved in any of this.

Paid leave is a nice idea, but why on earth would we give the government the power to coerce employers to provide this against their will? It might even sound like a good idea under the Trump administration (it doesn’t to me, but to some it might) but how would this power be expanded and wielded under an Elizabeth Warren administration? Or - God forbid - an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez administration?

And let us remember that the leave-taking employee's work still has to get done:

Besides the terrifying potential for more and more overreach, there is the issue of whether or not anyone should ever be forced to pay someone for work they’re not doing. Government mandated family leave puts employers with already tight profit margins in the unenviable position of being forced to pay two employees - the temp and the mother - for months on end when only one is working. This is just more impetus for businesses to find ways not to employ women who may get pregnant during their employment. If you’re looking at choosing between a man and a woman with similar qualifications, you’re probably going to choose the least costly employee. Under mandated family leave, that would be the man more often than the woman.      

I like the way Davis thinks. I, too, am always trying to imagine scenarios that can test the airtightness of my positions. She handles the business about certain kinds of life circumstances that make working and parenting difficult to juggle quite deftly, I think:

“But Kira! Hold on. I would love to stay home with my kids full time but we can’t afford it. It’s tough being a working woman with children. What’s wrong with employers making it easier for us to work and be mothers?”
I’m so glad you asked, imaginary commenter! First, none of this applies to a single parent home (that is obviously a whole other ball of wax). Second, as I’ve stated already there is absolutely nothing wrong with employers volunteering to make your life easier as a working mom. I am only against a federal mandate for paid leave. Third, millions of women in a two-parent family do stay home and they do it by making tremendous sacrifices. Maybe you need to downsize. Maybe you need to take your kids out of private school. Maybe you need to move to a cheaper neighborhood, clip coupons or sell your car for a cheaper model. These are all sacrifices that stay-at-home parents make all the time. Why should we be asking employers to make sacrifices but not ourselves?

In the end, it is about freedom and responsibility. As conservatives we have long been advocates for taking the government out of family decisions. We should not give the government even more of a foothold into our family lives just for the sake of making our life choices easier on ourselves. 

Freedom exists within parameters, but one still has the sovereignty needed to set one's own priorities.

I'd just like to add another important level of consideration to all this, and it's this: In these cacophonous times, conservatives are going to have to check their worldviews for consistency more than ever. There can be no room for tribalism. In other words, just because the Very Stable Genius is for something doesn't mean any one else necessarily should be.