As I understand the story right now, the FM radio mandate is part of a proposed compromise between two special interest groups lobbying hard in Washington over the relatively obscure issue of broadcast radio royalties.  Under current copyright law, radio broadcasters are only required to pay performance royalties to songwriters, not to artists or recording labels, but internet radio broadcasters are required to pay all three.  Suffice it to say, internet radio broadcasters don’t like this scheme because it places them at a competitive disadvantage, and the recording labels and artists don’t like this scheme because they don’t get paid.  Both groups have been lobbying hard in Congress to change the law to force broadcast radio to pay all three royalties; broadcast radio, of course, prefers the current system.

Congress, being Congress, is apparently considering doing what it does best:  Bailing out special interests with payoffs using our money.

In this case, the scheme involves mandating FM radios in cell phones.  Under the deal, broadcast radio would need to pick up the tab for all three royalties, up to a certain monetary cap.  In exchange, Congress will mandate that FM radio receivers be placed in portable devices including cell phones, presumably along with MP3 players and their ilk as well.  In this way, the artists and labels get their money and FM radio gets receivers in more places which should increase the number of listeners.  Everybody wins.

Everybody, that is, except for people who want to buy one of these devices.

It should go without saying that FM receivers don’t come free.  There’s circuitry involved, an antenna, and given the digital nature of most portable electronics, software to be written as well.  It’s difficult to say how much money it would cost to add FM radios to cell phones, but it’s clear from the overwhelming lack of FM-enabled phones that, whatever it costs, it’s more than people would be willing to pay.  But, with a congressional mandate, the people wouldn’t be left with a choice.  Manufacturers will pass along those costs, and consumers will still need to buy cell phones.

The good news is that this so-called compromise appears to still be pretty far away from making its way into law.  For the love of free markets, I hope it stays that way.

1. Ars, so far, appears to be the only one with this story, with other sources around the Internet simply referring back to their article.  As someone who follows their blog, I have generally found their technology-related writing to be accurate, so I’m inclined to believe that their post reflects something that is actually happening.  Even so, the lack of other sources is worth noting.

The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment states:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside

This clause has two essential parts.  In the first, it identifies a group of people (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”) and then grants that group citizenship.  The essential question is whether or not the children of illegal immigrants are part of the identified group of people.  Based on the text and structure of the Clause, it is apparent that they are.

The part of the Clause that identifies the group is a conjunction of two separate conditions.  To qualify, you must be a person “born or naturalized in the United States.”  Anchor babies, by their very definition, are “born … in the United States,” so they pass this first test.  Having been born in the United States, you then must be “subject to the jurisdiction [of the United States].”  If there is a reason to believe that illegal aliens are not subject to US jurisdiction, it is difficult to imagine what that reason might be.  Illegal aliens are generally expected to obey US law, are subject to arrest, and can be imprisoned — all classic indicators that illegal aliens, while in the country, are subject to US jurisdiction.

However, as Ann Coulter points out:

The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said: “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

She takes that statement as evidence that, when it comes to conferring citizenship on aliens, illegals’ babies need not apply, because the author of the Clause himself was sure that it would not be so.  Her basic argument has two flaws.  First, it is entirely possible that the Clause’s author wrote something that he did not intend; if so, that’s unfortunate, but it is the text, not the author’s intent that controls.  Second, and more importantly, his words do not say what Ms. Coulter takes them to mean.  Senator Howard is not talking about illegal alien babies; he’s talking about “aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

In the constitutional analysis, the difference between illegal alien babies and foreign ambassador babies is important.  Foreign ambassadors, by diplomatic tradition and legal history, do not normally become subject to the jurisdictions wherein they perform their official duties.  This fact is the basis of diplomatic immunity, which ambassadors enjoy along with their families who join them during their travels.  For Senator Howard to say that the Citizenship Clause does not apply to “the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers,” he is not saying anything that isn’t clear from the Clause’s text.  Because they are not “subject to the jurisdiction [of the United States],” they are not part of the group that enjoys automatic citizenship.  Illegal aliens, however, have no diplomatic immunity, or any foreign immunity of any kind.  That fact leaves them in the automatic citizenship group and leaves us with anchor babies.

Ms. Coulter’s other examples of who falls into the group and who doesn’t break down along similar lines.  Native Americans are out because they are under tribal rather than US jurisdiction.  Legal immigrants are in because they have crossed into and, thus, subjected themselves to US jurisdiction.  And she finishes with a tale of welfare state horribles that have nothing to do with the constitutional question at hand.

Although it would be nice if the existence of anchor babies rested entirely on a misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment, that is, unfortunately, not the case.  By its plain terms, if you are born in the US and subject to US jurisdiction, you’re automatically a citizen.  Because babies born to illegal aliens on US soil meet both criteria, their citizenship is constitutionally guaranteed.

Standing

I have wondered since I first heard that the US government was suing Arizona how the federal government would justify standing to bring forth its lawsuit.  In making her ruling, the judge offered no insight as to how she found the federal government to have standing.  Though I wasn’t surprised by this — neither side briefed the issue (that I saw) and nobody (I’ve seen) has asked this question besides me — I was disappointed.

The question of preemption is fundamentally a question of which law applies to a particular case.  In the normal preemption case, a party is challenged under a state law, and mounts a defense saying that the state law is preempted by federal law.  If the state law and federal law conflict, the Supremacy Clause dictates that federal law must win, meaning that the state law is preempted.  The conflict can either be direct, in the sense that the federal law and state law say two incompatible things, or the preemption could be made by rule, if the federal government affirmatively prevents the states from legislating in a given area.  Regardless of how preemption happens, the party harmed was always the person or entity against whom the state law would apply if not for preemption.

Today, without any discussion, the judge has necessarily found that the federal government is itself harmed when a state passes a law which is incompatible with federal law.  While it’s possible that I’ve missed something about how standing works, this (implicit) theory of standing seems incredible to me.  Last I checked, the federal government doesn’t have a free-standing license to challenge any state law that it doesn’t like.

Of course, for the sake of fairness, I should note that it’s at least plausible that the federal government could claim to be harmed by the “burden” Arizona would place on it by running immigration checks and referring illegal aliens to ICE for processing.  However, that only opens the door to some of the challenges posed to the Arizona law, not to the entire thing.

Section 2b

In striking down this section, the judge makes much of a drafting error made in the original SB 1070 and later corrected in a subsequent amendment passed in short succession.  The judge is quick to criticize the second sentence of this section, which says that “[a]ny person who is arrested shall have the person’s immigration status determined before the person is released.”  In the law, as amended, this naturally follows the preceding sentence which says what Arizona law enforcement must do “[f]or any lawful stop, detention or arrest.”  The judge, however, refused to read the two sentences as a cohesive whole because the original unamended SB 1070 spoke only of “lawful contact,” rather than of “lawful stop, detention or arrest.”  There is little reason to doubt that the Arizona legislature intended both forms of that sentence to mean the same thing, and that the amendment was made to clear up the obvious vagueness of what “lawful contact” actually entails.  The judge, however, would apparently hold the two phrases to mean something so radically different that the second sentence and first sentence should be read as if they are in entirely separate sections, despite the absurd result that analysis produces.

Section 5

In striking down this section, the judge turns established precedent squarely on its head.  She begins with the following observation:

“States possess broad authority under their police powers to regulate the employment relationship to protect workers within the State.” De Canas, 424 U.S. at 356. Interpreting De Canas and considering a state law sanctioning employers who hire unauthorized workers, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that, “because the power to regulate the employment of unauthorized aliens remains within the states’ historic police powers, an assumption of non-preemption appli[ed].” Chicanos Por La Causa I, 544 F.3d at 984; accord Wyeth v. Levine, 129 S. Ct. 1187, 1194-95 (2009) (observing that “[i]n all pre-emption cases, and particularly in those in which Congress has legislated . . . in a field which the States have traditionally occupied, . . . we start with the assumption that the historic police powers of the States were not to be superseded by the Federal Act unless that was the clear and manifest purpose of Congress” (internal quotations and citation omitted)).

Having read that paragraph, it would appear that the viability of a law limiting illegal aliens from applying for or performing work should be an easy win for Arizona.  Arizona’s law is, after all, directly on point with the above cited cases.  By the end of the section, however, the judge has talked herself into the exact opposite conclusion.  The linchpin: Arizona attaches a penalty to violating its law.

Although I haven’t read the cited precedent, I find it highly unlikely that the cases above involved state laws with no penalty for non-compliance.  After all, police powers are rather meaningless if the police have no power to enforce them.

Section 6

In sum, this section amounts to unconstitutionality by virtue of hopelessly confusing federal policy.  The essence of the judge’s conclusion on this section is that it is simply too hard for Arizona police to know what is and isn’t a removable offense, so that “there is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens.”

Although I find it illogical to say that this law is preempted as opposed to, say, that it is unconstitutionally vague, I find it hard to fault the judge too deeply for her outcome on this point.  From everything I understand, the entire concept of a “removable offense” is, truly, a mess.  Nobody really knows whether or not an offense mandates removal of the alien until the final appellate court has its say.  This is an area where Congress really should step up and add some much needed clarity to the law.

Conclusion

Overall, the quality of the ruling strikes me as being pretty bad.  The key through it all, however, is that the court bought the federal government’s argument of preemption and ran with it to every area of the law where it was necessary to strike the law down.  The ruling, however, leaves open some important questions which should be addressed in a final ruling on the merits at some point in the future.

It goes virtually without saying that the interest in merging Sharia law with US law is an exercise being undertaken exclusively by leftists.  Britain, of course, has actual Sharia courts, established as arbitration tribunals, which hear cases and issue rulings which have the force of law.  In other European nations, national courts have occasionally ruled consistent with Sharia principles despite national laws which point in the opposite direction.  France, though they haven’t got Sharia courts, do have a Sharia tax code which aims to deal with some of the peculiarities of Islamic financial management.  The US, so far, has only rogue judges in liberal states.

So far, Sharia courts and Sharia-related court decisions have all been based on one of three general legal categories: probate, equity, and domestic violence.  It is the cases of domestic violence which are most troubling, and the case in New Jersey illustrates precisely why.

In the New Jersey case, as mentioned, a man raped his wife on multiple occasions under the belief that it was his right, as her husband, to do so.  Had he done that even 35 years ago, it would not have been a crime in the US.  However, as of 1993, spousal rape became a crime in every corner of the United States at the urging of the feminist movement.  In addition to US law, spousal rape is identified in the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, Article 2(a) as a form of violence against women.  There is, I think it is safe to say, a solid consensus which sweeps broadly against ideological lines that cannot tolerate the behavior that took place in New Jersey.  As the self-declared champions of women’s rights, women’s equality, and the fight to end violence against women, it would seem that the left has a vested interest in making sure that no woman is ever raped by her husband ever again.

The stakes, however, go even beyond the question of spousal rape in Islamic marriages.  From what I have been able to find of the trial judge’s logic, it appears to be relatively unbounded.  If the touchstone of the judge’s ruling is the “belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to,” what about that is so closely bounded to Islam that it could not be applied elsewhere?  After all, that was everyone’s belief — and the law — until 1975, meaning most of America grew up in a country where there was no such thing as spousal rape.  And even further, what if I find that it is my belief as a man my “desire to have sex when and whether [I want] to” with anyone that I please?  There would be no such thing as rape, if only I didn’t believe in it.

Rulings like one in New Jersey place the left on a collision course with itself.  It is simply not possible to champion women’s rights and a culture which systematically represses and does violence to women at the same time.  But perhaps the thought that they might even try is part of the reason that the left, right now, has a woman problem.  I, for one, would rather see them win some women back than bury the rest of us under Islamic law.

Fortunately, it seems that the next crisis may not be too long in coming.  Though nobody can predict a crisis with certainty, it does appear that the country is on a dangerous ledge.  Even Dodd says so.  But with the bill in place, we can at least be secure in the knowledge that we will be able to find out, through the course of the crisis, how well law prevents the next crisis from occurring.

If that seemed like it was worded awkwardly, it’s because the concept itself is awkward.  According to Dodd, we can only know how well the bill works when the next crisis hits.  But the supposed point of the bill is to prevent another economic crisis from ever occurring.  The tautology is fascinating, because between Dodd and Obama, we know for a fact that the only thing this bill can do is fail.

Of course, the open secret about te bill is the fact that it has nothing to do with actually preventing another crisis. In truth, Obama and Dodd are probably looking forward to another crisis, in hope of using their new toolkit to extend their stranglehold over American business.

But for ordinary Americans, the key measure of success won’t be whether the government can successfully wind down a bank that’s “too big to fail.” Success to us means having jobs, having an accurate value for our homes and financial investments, having money left after taxes to put in the bank, and having a bank left to put our money into. Nothing in the bill addresses any of those concerns.

Once again, the government has (willfully) missed the point.

The story, you see, is about the author who was out driving one day when some guy in a mini-van pulled up along side him and told him that he should be listening to talk radio, rather than the old music he was playing instead.  To most of us, of course, this would come as more than a bit of a surprise.  We don’t normally plan to be interrupted from our cocoons of roadway silence except in case of some sort of emergency, and it would be hard to fault the author for finding the whole encounter rather rude.  And so, like any of us in his place might do, the author decides that the best response is to roll up his window and waste an untold amount of his day following and stalking the van.

The author, it seems, had just entered into to the Left’s curious love affair with hate.

To even think about chasing the van out of town should be far enough over the edge for any man to consider, but as he followed the man in the van, his mind seemed to wind down more bizarre back alleys than his car is ever likely to find.  He “tailed the driver of the Caravan as indiscreetly as possible, hoping he’d see me, realize who I was, get nervous, then scared, then terrified, then have a massive coronary and slam into a 300-year-old sycamore.”  A prayer that another man receive the death penalty, simply for suggesting a different station on the radio.  And a murderous prayer that he would be that conservative’s angel of death.

Luckily, in the end, he backs off from his murderous rage, and sets about writing this interesting anecdote for the paper.  No harm, no foul, I suppose.

But what, I wonder, might be the “symptoms of a sick society” which could cause a man who is ideally so tolerant of the opinions of others to chase out of town those opinions which differ from his own.  It certainly isn’t Internet-promoted “democratization [that] leads people to believe that their opinions not only count but must be broadcast at every opportunity.”  Or, who knows, perhaps it is.  A man with a bumper sticker and who actually gets paid when his ideas are broadcast is certainly going to be farther ahead than a man with an old van with power windows.  But no.  The freedom of speech and an open dialogue of political discourse are the light and cleanser which wipe away rage.  The answer, surely, must be something else.

Perhaps, in the end, the author gives us just the hint that we need to find out what the true source of “uranium-enriched behavior” in political society is.  It may simply be the impulse response to chase away disfavored ideas while casting those who express those ideas in a hostile light.  Perhaps it is not “democratization” that is the problem, but the attempt to shut down, thwart, bypass, suppress, chase away, and ram democracy into a 300-year-old sycamore that is really at fault.

Perhaps what we really need to do is put everyone on the Left through classes in anger management.

Looking back historically, the first two revolutions both have remarkably common elements about them.  Both of the first two revolutions, the American Revolution and the Civil War, were, at an important level, battles over the role of government in America.  This battle is easily seen in the American Revolution, as nearly every history class around will characterize it as a fight against the tyranny of England and the unjust, confiscatory tax policies of King George.  Those who supported American independence were convinced that the Crown was too powerful, and the battle against England was an ultimately successful fight to cast off the reigns of an overpowering central government and return a degree of independence not only to the colonies as nations, but to the colonists as individuals.  Harder to see but no less present are the shades of government oppression in play during the Civil War.  Although the common story is that the Civil War was about slavery, the issue of slaves was more of a proxy for a deeper battle being waged against the reach of the federal government, particularly in southern states which viewed the northern and federal campaign against slavery as an assault on their independence.  The South, of course, lost that battle, and the entire concept of state independence has never quite been the same since.

Of course, at the time of the Civil War, the slow collapse of federalism and the rise of federal power were hardly the foregone conclusions that they appear to have become today.  Nevertheless, the government’s intervention to bring about the demise of slavery set a precedent for using government intervention to cure America’s ills.  FDR and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and everything that the Warren Court did, all take their strength from the fact that the government was able to “solve” slavery by aggrandizing power to itself.

What President Obama has now given us is the clearest glimpse to date of the consequences of reassigning power from the people to the government following the Civil War.  No longer is the government in the business of solving real problems like slavery or segregation — to their credit, my parents’ generation has taken care of the lingering inequalities which had echoed through time all the way since the founding.  What we see instead is that the government spends its time building up power by attacking an endless army of straw men, crafting “solutions” for things which are not problems, imagining problems and then purporting to solve them, and providing solutions to problems which would not have existed if not for the government.

The Tea Party movement — a name which, itself, conjures memories of the first revolution — is the first, best indication that the people have had enough.  As I have said now many times, the culture wars of the current generation will give way to a deeper battle over the role of government itself in America.  Tea Partiers all come from diverse walks of conservatism, and many would certainly disagree on many aspects of the culture wars including such staple issues as abortion, gay marriage, and religion.  They have, however, united under a common banner against the size and scope of the government as it exists today and as its current administration wants to grow it long into the future.  The younger generation has reached the point where the fight over liberty itself has become more important than the petty squabbles over what to do with the freedoms that have been secured.

American revolutions have never been about land, or money, or politics, or power.  They have, fundamentally, been about changing the relationship between the people and their government.  It seems to me that America is closing in on rekindling that old fight.  Shades of 1850 might just be about right.

Coincidentally, during the week that saw the announcement of the report on pornography use at the SEC there also surfaced a comment from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, defending his company’s ban of pornography “apps” for iPhone and other Apple products. Apologizing to a user for mistakenly rejecting an app with a controversial political cartoon, Jobs added, “However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone,” (Android is the comparable product of his new competitor, Google). The Wired article relaying the comment interprets “Jobs’ opposition to porn [as] loud and clear,” but adds no reasons from Jobs for his opposition: Is his a moral objection to pornography, a purely aesthetic distaste, concern about his company’s branding, concern about its market with the parents of young teens getting their first phone, or some combination of all these? The response of many geeks was instantaneous and predictable: Don’t tell me what I can and cannot watch, that’s why I’ll never buy Apple, “The web is about openness. It’s about freedom.” For whatever reason, Jobs seems unyielding and his company vigilant. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition passes muster, even Playboy without nudity and a reader for the iPhone that allows downloading of the ancient Kama Sutra are allowed, but try to sneak pornographic images into an approved app and iTunes will cut you off.

He then adds:

[O]ne can commend Steve Jobs for steadfastly refusing to allow Apple to become a platform for easy access to pornography, and commend him as well for showing that this can be done through determined business leadership, without recourse to government regulation that can threaten legitimate freedom and impose its own social costs.

But can Steve Jobs really be commended for this? I suppose as one of the “geeks” offering the “predictable” response, Mr. Stoner would be unlikely to have much interest in or patience for my views on the subject of Apple and porn.  I think, however, that it is Mr. Stoner who has missed an important reason why there is little to commend about Apple’s decision to ban pornography from its most newsworthy device.  Although Steve Jobs may be able to limit access to porn, such limits are unlikely to change the hearts and minds of people who would otherwise seek to consume it.

The main flaw in Mr. Stoner’s argument is the unfortunate fact that he reads too much into the distinction between government, on the one hand, and Apple, on the other.  It is, of course, undoubtedly true that Apple is not the government.  Unlike the government, Apple cannot force you to buy its products, and it is far easier for me to buy an EVO-4G instead of an iPhone than it is for me to move from Michigan to Peru.  That said, Apple is, without a doubt, the top central planner of the iPhone environment, and within its electronic walls, Apple acts very much like a fascist government.  While Apple may not necessarily choose winners, they undoubtedly choose the losers of its domain, leaving behind the scattered remains of such notable products as Google Voice and Adobe’s Flash Player, along with many other less notable apps which they rejected from the App Store — and, thus, the iPhone — for numerous reasons, including no reason at all.  Also, like a government, Apple collects sales tax on every piece of software sold for the iPhone, and now seeks to do the same for every advertisement by pushing its iAd service.

In short, while it may be easy to avoid the iPhone environment, once inside, there is very little that can be classified as being “legitimate[ly] free[.]”

With freedom, thus, outside the question, I find it difficult to agree with Mr. Stoner that anything about Apple shutting down porn does anything good for society.  If Steve Jobs were blocking porn as a way to send a message about values, then certainly that would be something to be applauded — except that I don’t think anyone believes that to be the case.  Instead, Apple is engaging in a sort of morally void behavior which just happens to have a desired result.  It is doubtful that anyone who wants to consume porn will find themselves not wanting to consume it because Apple has forbidden the stuff from its iPhone.  People will simply need to go find it somewhere else.

When governments pass laws or companies enact policies that mandate some moralistic result, neither are usually very effective at actually transforming the morals of their citizens or customers.  There is, quite simply, no comparison between choosing to do the right thing versus being prevented from doing things wrong.  Imposing a law against pornography does not take away the desires which bring people to consume it any more than imposing a law of gravity takes away man’s desire to fly.

Rather than trying to outlaw porn, we as a society would be much farther ahead understanding the reasons which bring people to consume it and finding a more wholesome way to satisfy those needs.  If porn is being used as stress relief, we would surely be better off emphasizing other ways to reduce workplace stress either through job restructuring (to combat the cause of stress) or some other physical activity (to direct stressful energies in a more positive direction).  But most important is that people must be made to affirmatively want to do these things, not merely fall into them for lack of a viable alternative.

That said, unlike the government which I consistently believe should be reduced in both size and power, I hold no malice toward Steve Jobs or Apple.  The iPhone, iTunes, the App Store, and all such things are their business and Apple participates in the free market just the same as anybody else.  If Apple wants to banish porn, to choose winners and losers, to lay and collect taxes, or to do any of the other things that they do, then that is entirely their right.

But as I hit “Publish” using my myTouch 3G (with Google), I affirm my own right to make my own choices, and to have my own values to win or lose by the power of persuasion in the marketplace of ideas.

To clarify one point right up front: I do favor assisted suicide and would probably vote to legalize the practice if given the chance.  I say probably because I also believe that any acceptable assisted suicide program will require meaningful (state) government involvement to be implemented appropriately, including creating civil and criminal liability for medical professionals who stray too far in blurring the line between euthanasia and murder.

According to the study, of 208 physician-assisted deaths within their study group, 142 occurred with the explicit consent of the patient, while 66 were performed without patient consent.  The study noted that most of the deaths conducted without patient consent occurred in patients over 80 years old who were hospitalized, and the vast majority were patients who were either comatose or who had dementia.  In over 75% of all cases, the decision to end life was discussed with the patient’s family, and in only a few cases was the decision to end the patient’s life discussed with nobody.

The greatest concern has naturally gravitated toward the patients whose lives were ended without having given their express consent.   Such concerns all share in the same core belief that there is something wrong about other people deciding for us when it is time for us to die.  Without a strong principle of restraint, it is easy to see how lives my be ended for medical or political expediency, to help doctors meet bureaucratically imposed death quotas, or to pinch out a population with disfavored political views.

As assisted suicide continues to gain traction in the United States as an acceptable end of life practice, it is important for all of us to think about the practice in terms of our own end of life planning.  Just as we have grown accustomed to “advanced directives” which instruct hospitals and doctors on when to terminate life-saving care, Americans should begin to think about adding some “really advanced directives” concerning if and when it may be appropriate to medically terminate our lives.  For those without a legal directive on record, we should be able to fall back on the experience and policies which, so far, have been mostly successful at balancing the interests of individuals against their prognosis for life.

With a significant number of assisted suicides being performed in the absence of the patient’s consent, the Belgium study points out the need to be clear about our desires at the end of our lives, preferably long before we get there.  With appropriate protections and respect for patient wishes, there is no reason to think that assisted suicide will become a tool of murder against the unwilling.

Taking for granted that the curriculum in Texas has indeed become politicized, and that this is a bad thing, the obvious question to ask is, “What can be done about it?”  Answering that question depends on properly understanding how education became politicized in the first place.  The author identifies “social conservatives” as the group responsible for the political education that children in Texas may soon receive.  In reaching his answer, the author misses the deeper issue.

To understand how politics gets into the Texas curriculum, the most important factor is the composition of the school board itself.  At present, the Texas school board consists of five Democrats and ten Republicans, with elections every four years.  This makes the composition of the Texas school board identical to almost every public school board in the country: It is 100% composed of politicians.

Whenever politicians become important in any decision making process, it’s a sure bet that the results will be political. To state that any public school curriculum is politicized is to state the obvious.  Of course, what the author undoubtedly means but is not quite prepared to say outright is not that he minds the Texas school board being politicized, but that he minds it reaching a political result with which he disagrees.  Were the school board to have voted to emphasize Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, the benefits of FDR’s New Deal including Social Security, and the great importance of the United Nations to international peace efforts and human rights, I doubt the editorialist would complain very much about politicization at all.

If I am mistaken and the author is truly concerned about politicization of education whether he agrees with the politics being taught or not, then the only real answer is to get rid of the politicians.  This is an area where private education, possibly supported by school vouchers, would be extremely effective.  I know that I would sooner trust a professional educator over a politician to decide what’s best to teach my children.

If, however, the editorialist’s problem is with the outcome, then the real lesson here is a lesson in democracy.  As the political process creates and builds powers, we all run the risk that those powers might be used in ways we do not approve.