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More on Cuccinelli's Defense of Virginia's Anti-Sodomy Law

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 12:38 PM PDT

I should elaborate a bit on yesterday's story about Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's request for a rehearing on the state's anti-sodomy law, which has gotten a lot of attention online. A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that the state's "Crimes Against Nature" law, which forbids anal and oral sex, whether practiced by straight or gay people, is unconstitutional. But the AG wants the full 15-judge appeals court to hear the case again.

Cuccinelli's spokeswoman said Wednesday that the case "is not about sexual orientation," but about "using current law to protect a 17 year-old girl from a 47 year-old sexual predator."

This specific case deals with a man who was prosecuted under the "Crimes Against Nature" statute for having had oral sex with women, a felony offense under that law. The man in the case, William MacDonald, was in his late 40s when he was charged with having consensual oral sex with two young women who were, at the time, ages 16 and 17. While that might be seen as creepy, in Virginia, the age of consent is 15 years old. It is considered statutory rape—a felony offense—to have sex with anyone under that age. Under state law, an adult can be prosecuted for "causing" delinquency by having sex with someone between the ages of 15 and 18, but that is only a misdemeanor. MacDonald was convicted of such a misdemeanor, and his lawyers aren't challenging that conviction. But they have challenged—so far, successfully—the state's attempt to prosecute him for violating the "Crimes Against Nature" law.

Because Virginia still has this anti-sodomy law on the books, the state wants to use it against MacDonald and win a felony conviction. The state, however, couldn't prosecute him under this statute if he had engaged in vaginal sex. That is, the state is trying to use a loophole in the law that makes oral, but not vaginal, sex a felony in order to go after this guy. The court of appeals determined that MacDonald could not be prosecuted under this law because the US Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that such laws are an unconstitutional "intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual."

If Cuccinelli's concern is sex with minors, he should focus on changing Virginia's age of consent rules, not defending a law that the Supreme Court has said is indefensible. But in 2004, when a bipartisan group of Virginia legislators tried to change the law so that it would only apply to public sex, sex with minors, and prostitution, Cuccinelli opposed the bill. "My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong," he told a local paper in 2009. "They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. … They don’t comport with natural law."

My colleague Adam Serwer has more on Cuccinelli and the crimes against nature law.

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Cuccinelli Campaign Won't Say If He's Committed Any Crimes Against Nature

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 12:38 PM PDT
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli at the Values Voters Summit in 2011

The campaign of Virginia state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli won't say if he's committed any crimes against nature.

Cuccinelli, who is running to be Virginia's next governor, recently petitioned a federal court to reverse its ruling that the state's archaic "Crimes Against Nature" law is unconstitutional. That statute outlaws oral and anal sex between consenting adults—gay or straight, married or single—making such "carnal" acts a felony. The law is unconstitutional because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated such "anti-sodomy laws" across the country.

As my colleague Kate Sheppard notes, Cuccinelli's office claims that it is appealing the decision because the state's regular statutory rape law doesn't allow it to pursue the harshest punishment against a 47-year-old man who solicited oral sex from teenagers (who were above the age of consent at the time). But as Josh Israel recounts at ThinkProgress, Cuccinelli helped kill an effort to reform the Crimes Against Nature law in order to make it comply with the Supreme Court's ruling in Lawrence, possibly because the proposed law didn't focus on homosexuality. "My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong," Cuccinelli said in 2009. "They're intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law-based country it's appropriate to have policies that reflect that…They don’t comport with natural law."

If Virginia's ban on "unnatural" sex acts applied nationwide, the Virginia law would make 90 percent of men and women in the United States between the age of 25 and 44 criminals. Here's a chart from the National Center on Health Statistics on sexual behavior in the US:

Violating Virginia's Crimes Against Nature statute was a class six felony in the state, and carried a penalty of between one and five years in prison. The Virginia Department of Corrections only has a capacity of around 30,000. Given that 64.6 percent of Virginia's 8 million residents are between the ages of 18 and 65, the state most likely lacks the prison capacity to house millions of Virginians who, in Cuccinelli's view, have committed crimes against nature.

But what about Cuccinelli and his aides? Mother Jones asked his campaign if Cuccinelli or anyone working for his campaign had ever engaged in any of the prohibited conduct and whether Cuccinelli would fire any campaign staff who had done so. We have received no response. But if Cuccinelli's campaign is being run by criminals against nature, don't the voters have a right to know?

Mark Follman on MSNBC: The NRA's Phony School Shooting

Thu Apr. 4, 2013 12:34 PM PDT

When the National Rifle Association unveiled its 225-page report for safeguarding school children, it cited a recent massacre in Minnesota as part of its rationale for arming and fortifying America's schools. But as senior editor Mark Follman reported, the massacre that the NRA presented as evidence does not actually exist. Watch him discuss that and other dubious aspects of the gun lobby's report with MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell:

Read our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

Mark Follman is a senior editor at Mother Jones. Read more of his stories and follow him on Twitter.

Can Computers Teach Students to Write Better?

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 11:49 AM PDT

I've been fascinated for a long time by the prospect of grading school essays by computer. Just to put my own beliefs firmly on the table, I think it's surprisingly accurate already; is going to get a lot more accurate very, very soon; and the folks fighting it are basically dinosaurs.

This is not, oddly enough, because I think computer grading is all that great. We're still a long way from true AI. It's because I think that most human grading is far more formulaic and pedestrian than we usually give it credit for. That's why I appreciated this comment from Mark Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron, which came at the end of a New York Times piece about critics of using machine feedback to help students write better essays:

“Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

Roger that. There's no question that a good reader, given sufficient time, will do a far better job of grading and feedback than any machine. That may change someday, but it's certainly true today.

But the vast majority of grading isn't done by top notch readers given plenty of time. It's done by harried, mediocre readers. Can machines do as well or better than they do? Probably.

In any case, I found the article pretty interesting for its focus on feedback, not just grading:

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers....There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Mr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

....Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

Anyone who teaches writing will tell you about the value of having students write often and with quick feedback. Every day if possible. The problem is that, practically speaking, it's not usually possible. So if an automated system can handle short student essays and provide decent—not great, but decent—feedback immediately, that has huge potential. This software may not be 100 percent ready for prime time yet, but it's getting there. And it could be a game changer.

Christian Roots of School Voucher Movement Still Pretty Obvious

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 10:20 AM PDT

The hits just keep coming from the Tennessee legislature. This time it's the sudden realization that if you provide state money to religious schools, you can't just limit it to Christian schools:

In Tennessee, [] a plan to transfer taxpayer money to religious academies is running into trouble as GOP lawmakers slowly realize that all religions will be eligible for public funds.

....For voucher proponents, the first thought tends to be, "Never mind the separation of church and state; let's use taxpayer money to finance religious education." Which is then followed by a second thought: "Wait, you mean religions I don't like might get my money?"

Conservative intellectuals like to make the case that they support school vouchers because the free market will produce better educational outcomes, especially for inner-city kids stuck in terrible schools. And I suppose that maybe conservative intellectuals really do support vouchers for that reason. The problem is that those of us who are over the age of 40 and have three-digit IQs remember where this all started: with segregated Christian schools in the South who were denied tax-exempt status in the 70s. This was one of the formative protest issues for the Christian right, and led directly to their campaigns for state and federally funded vouchers for parents who sent their kids to Christian academies.

Have times changed? Sure. There are now more respectable reasons to support school choice. But as Tennessee and other states have shown, the explicitly Christian roots of this movement are still plainly visible to anyone who doesn't deliberately avert their gaze. Outside of the think tanks, the primary motivation for vouchers isn't to help inner-city kids or improve America's STEM pipeline, it's to funnel money into Christian schools.

Demands to denounce your allies are tiresome. I get that. But if voucher proponents want to be taken seriously on their own terms, they need to be far more active about publicly denouncing the kind of shenanigans that are going on in Tennessee and other states. Intellectuals on the right insist that promoting conservative Christianity isn't the real reason for supporting school vouchers. If that's the case, they need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for April 4, 2013

Thu Apr. 4, 2013 9:47 AM PDT

Sgt. Justin R. Pereira, from Gooding, Idaho, and Laika 5, a Tactical Explosives Detection Dog with 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, provide security as Afghan Border Police break ground on a new checkpoint March 25, in Spin Boldak district, Kandahar province, Afghanistan. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Shane Hamann, 102nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment.

 

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Needed: Clever Economists to Study Benefits of Marrying Early

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 9:00 AM PDT

Which is better, getting married early or getting married late? Beats me. My mother got married at 21 and everything turned out pretty well. I got married at 32, and that turned out pretty well too. So I have no nifty anecdotal data to share on this. But how about some nifty statistical data instead? Dylan Matthews throws out a caution:

First, some throat-clearing. None of the data we have on marriage are definitively causal. That's a good thing. To have rock-solid evidence that marriage causes anything, we'd need to randomly require some people to marry at one age and others to marry at another age and then compare the results (and even that study design would have plenty of problems). Human Subjects Committees generally consider such studies unethical and don't let them happen.

This is just begging for one of those clever natural experiments so beloved of economists these days. I'm not clever enough to think of one, but somewhere there has to be something. Like, say, a huge natural disaster somewhere that delayed lots of marriages by a year while everyone was busy rebuilding their towns, while two counties away everyone got married at the usual rate. Or a law that lowered the marriage age in one place but not in a similar state a few hundred miles away. There's gotta be something like that around, doesn't there? Where's freakonomics when you need it?

Women Are Dying at Higher Rates in Nearly Half of All Counties

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 8:47 AM PDT

I don't have access to the original article, but Bill Gardner, a psychologist who studies the mental health service system for children, links today to a map of female mortality published this month in Health Affairs. It turns out that male mortality mostly improved or stayed the same from the mid-90s to the mid-aughts, but female mortality increased in 43 percent of all counties:

The counties are mapped below: red means that female mortality worsened. You can see a strong regional pattern: just about every county showed had worsened female mortality in several southern states, while no county showed such decline in New England. There are many questions about what explains this pattern. For example, did healthier women migrate out of the south from 1992 to 2006? Nevertheless, the map depicts a shocking pattern of female hardship, primarily in the southeast and midwest.

When I look at the graph, however, I am concerned not just about the women, but also about their children. The mental and physical health of mothers is a key determinant in children’s growth and development. What the map shows is that America has regions of communities with high concentrations of women experiencing substantial hardship. When women are not able to maintain their own health, how well can they nurture their children?

The map is below.

Japan Vows to Give the Expectations Channel a Workout

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 8:14 AM PDT

Japan has been suffering from deflation for most of the past decade, and prime minister Shinzo Abe ran last year on a platform of turning this around. Today, the incoming head of the Bank of Japan announced its new monetary policy:

Following his inaugural policy board meeting, Haruhiko Kuroda said the central bank is pulling out all the stops to get the economy out of deflation, referring to the nine-member panel's unanimous decision to vastly expand government bond purchases, including buying longer-term debt. The BOJ also tossed aside some self-imposed limits that previous leadership had stuck to.

I will not use my fighting power in an incremental manner," Mr. Kuroda told a news conference following the two-day meeting, one of the most closely watched in the central bank's recent history. "Our stance is to take all the policy measures imaginable at this point to achieve the 2% price stability target in two years."

...."I'd give it a 100 on a scale of one to 100, or actually 120," said Dai Sato, a senior dealer at Mizuho Corporate Bank. "In all aspects, the BOJ exceeded our expectations," he said.

There's more in this vein, but the bottom line is simple: Kuroda has made it absolutely clear that BOJ is willing to do anything, and for as long as it takes, to get inflation back up to 2 percent. He's committed to doubling the money supply, and will do even more if that's not enough.

This is a fascinating experiment. One of the cornerstones of the market monetarists who believe the Fed should target NGDP levels—i.e., that it should commit to keeping nominal GDP growing at a preset rate, and should play catch-up if it doesn't—is that the simple act of making that commitment will raise inflation. This is the "expectations channel" of monetary policy.

Well, BOJ has now put the expectations channel into play in about the most dramatic way possible. Its announcement was surprisingly strong, it was unequivocal, it was credible, and it clearly has strong political support. If it doesn't work, it will demonstrate serious limitations for managing monetary policy via expectations. If it does work, it will give a boost to the NGDP crowd. It won't be a decisive demonstration either way, since there's more going on than just expectations, but it will definitely be a strong data point. It should be interesting to watch.

UPDATE: Sorry. My brain abandoned me this morning and I wrote "MMT theorists who believe the Fed should target NGDP levels." I meant "market monetarists who believe the Fed should target NGDP levels." I've fixed this in the text.

Charts: Look At How Badly Obama Lags on Judicial Appointments

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 8:02 AM PDT

Last week, President Obama withdrew his judicial nominee for the powerful DC Circuit Court of Appeals—which hasn't had a nominee confirmed since 2006—because Republicans threatened to filibuster her. This high-profile battle is just the tip of the iceberg. Because of Republican obstructionism, the Obama administration's lackadaisical pace of nominations, and problems with the Senate confirmation process, more federal judgeships are staying vacant nationwide under this president than under President Bush, and Obama's nominees are taking longer to get confirmed.

During Obama's first term, the number of appeals court vacancies rose from 14 to 17. During Bush’s first term, by contrast, appeals court vacancies dropped from 27 to 18. Because Obama has been slower to nominate than Bush or Clinton, the average number of days from the opening of a seat to a nomination increased by 44 percent between Bush's and Obama's first terms.

This graph, by the data visualization shop Remapping Debate, shows the average number of vacancies per year, starting in 2001 (scroll to view all years, and hover over for details):

When the president finally does nominate someone, the Senate is generally reluctant to confirm her. Obama has 15 judicial nominees waiting for Senate floor votes right now. Overall, his judicial nominees wait an average of 116 days on the Senate floor for a vote—three times longer than Bush’s average judicial nominee wait time. When the 112th Congress ended in December, the Senate had approved 175 of Obama's judges. By contrast, Bush had 206 judges approved in his first term, and President Clinton had 204.

The figure below, also by Remapping Debate, compares Bush and Obama's first terms, showing the average number of days between vacancy and nomination, and the number of days nominees were pending before the Senate.

Why is the GOP so obstinate on confirmations? Senate Republicans may be giving Democrats a little payback. "Republicans don’t think Bush’s nominees were treated fairly," Russell Wheeler, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, which has tracked the phenomenon, told Bloomberg News on Wednesday.

Confirmation of a nominee to the DC circuit court, which is one step below the Supreme Court, is particularly important for Obama's second term because the court handles all disputes related to regulations and executive actions. "With legislative priorities gridlocked in Congress, the president’s best hope for advancing his agenda is through executive action, and that runs through the D.C. Circuit," Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, told the Washington Post Tuesday.

Right now that court is conservative-dominated, with four Republican and three Democratic appointees, and four vacancies (twice as many as any other court of appeals). This configuration didn't work out so well in the Obama's first term. The DC circuit court blocked EPA air pollution rules and put a hold on cases related to workers' rights.

Of the DC circuit confirmation, Kendall says "There are few things more vital on the president’s second-term agenda."