Is there a problem with poverty in Louisville--or anywhere else in America?

The Louisville Courier-Journal says that 15 percent of Louisville residents live in poverty. Is this true?

Several years ago, I debated a professor from the University of Louisville at a meeting of the Louisville Forum on the issue of welfare reform. That was during the debate that led up to the passage of welfare reform legislation in the Clinton administration.

The professor talked confidently about a number of things related to poverty, including the problem of hunger in America. I pointed out a number of things about the statistics on "poverty," among them, the fact that hunger was far less of a problem among the American poor than was obesity.

Needless to say, that got my picture in the paper the next morning, along with the headline, "Policy analyst says poor people have a problem with obsesity," or something like that.

The reporter from the Courier-Journal followed me out of the meeting, obviously hunting for the most outrageous quote he could get from me. I obliged him as best I could. "Where did you get those statistics?" he asked. "From the same place my opponent got his: from the federal government, mostly the U. S. Census." Apparently he then went out asking a number of different experts about the statistics I had quoted. But (despite what I'm sure was a concerted effort on his part) he couldn't find anyone who could dispute them. The best he could get out of them was that I had "misinterpreted" them.

On my comments about obesity for example, the best he could do was a professor somewhere who said that, yes, obesity was a problem among the poor, but that was because they ate junk food. That was the closest thing to a refutation the reporter could muster.

Several years later I had a debate with the head of social services for Boyle County at Centre College in Danville, who claimed that over 20 percent of children in Boyle County were living in "poverty." I used the same data I had used before, which met with the same indignation, although little could be said to counter it.

Here is an updated version of the statistics I used then, from Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Institute, drawn from several government reports:

• 46 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
• 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• Only six percent of poor households are overcrowded; two thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
• Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.
• 97 percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
• 78 percent have a VCR or DVD player.
• 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
• 89 percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

In Wednesday's Courier-Journal, Marcus Green writes of the problem of "poverty" in Louisville. Is there really a problem of "poverty" in Louisville, much less any other place in Kentucky? When people use a word like "poverty," they picture inadequate food, housing, or clothing. Is this really true?

Not if he is relying on the Census definition of "poverty." Part of the problem is that the Census definition involves only income earned during the year. It does not take assets into account. So if you are a business owner with three homes and a luxury yacht, but you had a business loss that year, you are considered to be living in poverty.

Real poverty is not a major problem in the United States, and certainly not in Louisville. If you want to see real poverty, go to a third world country. They know what poverty is.

My "Bad Sports about Sports" article in today's Courier-Journal

My piece on the attempt by public schools to punish private school athletic programs for their success (see my previous post with the full version here) ran in today's Louisville Courier-Journal. Their title is, "Bad Sports about Sports."

The only good language is a dead language

The College Board has published its national profile report and, once again, students who have studied Latin have acquitted themselves well on the test. The report shows that students with a Latin background scored higher in critical reading skills than students studying any other language with the exception of Hebrew, with which it was tied for first. Here are the scores:
Note that the languages of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem outclassed all the others by a fairly significant margin. Notice also that most schools shun these languages in their curriculum. For one of the few exceptions to this rule, check out Highlands Latin School. Also, my publisher, Memoria Press.

Morte sola lingua immortalis fit: my translation into Latin of Chesterton's dictum that "a language must die in order to become immortal."

Can Evangelicals Write Good Literature?

Donald T. William's article "Writers Cramped," argues, among other things, that the writing of good Christian literature requires a liturgical sensibility. With only one possible exception, Williams argues, all great modern Christian literature has been written by non-evangelicals. The only possible exception he cites is Walter Wangerin, a Lutheran. And even here, he points out, you have someone from a liturgical tradition.

I don't think, however, that Wangerin is even in the same class as Flannery O'Connor or Graham Greene, which leaves us with no protestants at all except C. S. Lewis, who was also from another liturgical tradition: Anglicanism.

Williams seems concerned primarily with fiction, of course, although he includes writers noted at least as much for their nonfiction prose: Chesterton and Lewis being primary among them. Although some of Chesterton's fiction could lay a claim to greatness (particularly The Man Who Was Thursday), I'm not sure Lewis's fiction could quite equal the others on William's list. Lewis traded primarily in allegory, the closest thing in fiction to non-fiction. And, in fact, much of what Lewis said in his fiction could have been said better in the form of the essay.

Williams may indeed be right that there are no modern evangelicals who can claim literary greatness. I suspect he is. But I have a protestant to throw into the mix--one who does not come from a liturgical tradition, although it would be flirting with credulity to call him an evangelical.

Wendell Berry.

Berry's book Jayber Crowe, for example, would, I think, have to be classed as a work of Christian fiction. And, as a writer of Christian fiction, I don't see how you could exclude him from a list of Christian writers. I suppose someone might object that he is not a very orthodox Christian. I am willing to concede that point, at leas for purposes of argument. He is, officially, a Baptist, and attends, occasionally I am told, a moderate (or liberal, depending on who gets to label it) Baptist Church. He is, however, a member in good standing of a Christian denomination, and much of his writing deals in Christian themes (his environmental writing is certainly solidly planted in Genesis, for example).

The argument that he would have to be excluded would basically have to boil down to saying that, while he may be a Christian, he is not a very good one. Well, let' say that is true. Graham Greene could not be called a good Catholic, could he? Yet he would make anyone's list of great modern Christian writers. In fact, someone, somewhere, has asked the question, "Why is the best Catholic literature written by the worst Catholics?"

No. I will stand with Berry here as something of a counter-example to William's thesis that all great Christian writers come from liturgical religious traditions, although I do think his thesis is, generally speaking, a very good one.

All bark and no bite

Attorney General Greg Stumbo is threatening to sue the Governor for having too many Republicans on the Boards of Trustees for UK and U of L. Does the Governor really need to worry? Stumbo threatened to sue the universities themselves for domestic partner programs that violated the Constitution too, but he never did. UK's program still does not meet all the criteria the AG laid down in his ruling on the issue, and U of L hasn't changed its plan at all.

Is Stumbo all bark and no bite?

Taking Their Marbles and Going Home: Public School Officials and the Politics of Being a Bad Sport

The Kentucky High School Athletic Association (KHSAA) was recently rebuffed by state lawmakers when it tried to institute a plan that would have placed restrictions on private school athletic programs. A subcommittee of the General Assembly slapped down KHSAA's Proposal 2, which would have required students transferring from public to private schools--or vice versa--to sit out a year of athletic eligibility.

The rejection by lawmakers took the form of a 6-0 vote, and some public school administrators are not taking the loss lying down. Wilson Sears, a superintendent from Somerset, has placed himself at the head of a small band of public school officials, who, upset at private schools that he thinks enjoy a competitive advantage, are now threatening an athletic boycott of private schools.

In short, they are rattling their sabres and chanting "They're being mean to us!"-- words that apparently pass among some public school administrators as a compelling battle cry.

These public school officials have been getting increasingly upset that private schools, which make up a minority of the members of KHSAA, have been winning so many state athletic championships. The public schools have blamed this in large part on the fact that private schools are able to recruit athletes without having to worry about district boundaries.

In other words, public schools, which have carved up the geography and imposed strict requirements that students can attend only the schools they say they can attend, are upset that private schools don't have to do this.

And this is the fault of private schools?

Private schools operate by something called "choice." No one has to go to them. And parents can send their kids to any one they want, no matter where they live and where the school is located. This way of operating schools has resulted in better academic performance and, now, it seems, better athletic performance.

But Sears and his band of very unmerry men, who work in a system that is now being shown up not only academically, but athletically, are determined to require that private schools abide by the same policies that have apparently dragged their own schools schools down.

Why, instead of trying to impose on private schools the same policies that have put public schools at such a disadvantage, doesn't Sears start advocating that the policies that have so benefited private schools be tried out in public schools? Why, instead of requiring that everyone be brought down to his level, can't we try to bring everyone up the level of those he thinks enjoy such an advantage?

This, of course, will never happen, because it goes against the very ethos of the public school establishment and the officials who are charged with protecting it from competition.

In fact, the irony in this new debate over athletics is that athletic programs were the one place, with the exception of Title IX restrictions (may a plague be upon them), which was free from the cloying egalitarianism that has infected every other aspect of public schools. On the basketball court and on the gridiron, no one has any illusions about everyone being equal, no one is held back so that everyone else can catch up, and students are allowed not only to cooperate, but to compete.

The permissivist philosophies taught at teachers colleges that discourage teacher-directed instruction in the classroom, replace discipline with psychology, and promote "child-centered" education are noticeably absent from sports programs. Sports programs are pure meritocracies where the coach is in charge, discipline is swift, individual accomplishment is acknowledged, and there are no excuses.

In athletic programs, excellence is rewarded, and failure has a cost.

The first attempt by public school officials in KHSAA was to separate public and private school athletic competition completely. That way, public schools would never have had to face the better private school teams at all, and no one would know how they compared to one another. This may help some schools and the administrators who run them look better, but it isn't necessarily better for individual students. As one Danville student pointed out at the time, it's good for student athletes to face good opposition. It makes them better athletes.

A student, who would be detrimentally affected by a policy Sears appears to want to attempt again, knows this, but Sears himself is apparently oblivious to it. These people don't really want excellence; they only want the appearance of it. Excellence comes from strong competition, not competition neutered by self-serving political machinations.

The fact is that inequalities are going to plague athletic competition, public and private, whatever policies KHSAA implements. Public magnet schools in Louisville, for example, have similar advantages over other public schools that Sears and his friends charge that only private schools have: they can recruit throughout Jefferson County, a fertile area for athletic talent. Male does this. Manual does this. So do other such schools.

Where is the outcry?

Some schools even merge with each other to get a leg up. Recently, Harrodsburg High School was ingested by Mercer County High School. Various reasons were given for the change, but every knows the real reason: the change will result in better sports teams.

But isn't this unfair? Yes it is. It's also unfair that public schools in larger cities have an advantage over rural schools. For that matter, it's unfair that some public schools have better athletes than other schools. If the Sears Gang is really concerned with fairness, it could find plenty of problems to solve in its own back yard.

Some public school members of KHSAA are also upset that private schools lure good athletes with scholarships.

Excuse me? Did it ever occur to them that the public schools are already giving every student in their school, not just some, a free education? Doesn't that give them an monstrously unfair advantage over private schools when it comes to athletic recruitment? Shouldn't that give private schools an excuse to throw a temper tantrum and try to pass regulations penalizing public schools?

Ironically, no competent coach would abide the attitude from an athlete that some public school officials have been displaying on this issue. If a player were to throw his helmet down and complain that the other team had an unfair advantage, the coach would tell him to suck it up and get out there and play anyway.

Someone needs to tell this to Sears and his friends as they go around the state recruiting other school districts to join them in their not very sporting attempt to take their marbles and go home.

Fear and Loathing in the Homosexual Culture

Are people "homophobic" simply because they believe homosexual behavior is wrong?

Timothy Kinkaid at Box Turtle Bulletin, a pro-gay site, has a post on the "Family Impact Summit," to be held in Florida next month. Many of the sessions, as it turns out, have to do with issues relating to the cultural implications of homosexuality. Kinkaid calls the speakers at the summit (which includes figures such as James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and Don Wildmon) a "Who's Who of Homophobia," which gives me the excuse I have been looking for to talk about the pejorative use of this term.

First of all, what does the term mean? Here is the Wikipedia definition:

Homophobia (from Greek ὁμο homo(sexual), "same, equal" + φοβία (phobia), "fear", literally "fear of the equal") is the fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals. Several dictionaries also associate irrationality with this type of fear. It can also mean hatred, hostility, disapproval of, or prejudice towards homosexual people, sexual behavior, or cultures, and is generally used to insinuate bigotry.

So, briefly, our definition is this: A bigoted or irrational fear or hostility toward homosexuals or their behavior.

Ironically, the term originally had a clinical psychological use and was applied, not to non-homosexuals, but to homosexuals themselves who had a fear of their own homosexuality. It is now used as a political devil-term for people who refuse to lay down and play dead when gay rights groups try to assert their political will on those with whom they disagree.

Before all the national psychological professional associations were politically intimidated into accepting homosexuality as normal, "homophobia" was seen as a psychological condition of homosexuals themselves. Now it used by homosexuals to designate a political pathology of they see in non-homosexuals who refuse to bow to those same political pressures.

The term, in short, is a political term masquerading as a psychological or moral term. Politics always trumps science for gay rights groups.

Homosexuals and the network of groups they have populated our culture with assert that homosexuality cannot be considered wrong because it has no moral implications whatsoever. But in order say this they have to maintain that sexual behavior per se is without moral implications--hardly a self-evident truth.

What has happened is this: homosexuals want to politically intimidate people into believing that, while homosexual behavior is not wrong, the belief that homosexual behavior is wrong is itself wrong. In short, homosexual behavior is not wrong, but opposing it is. It is curious that people who are so adamant about the fact that their behavior has no moral implications should be so adamant about the moral implications of the behavior of those with whom they disagree--simply because they disagree. Homosexuality is morally acceptable, but disagreeing with it is not.

Before politics took over, homosexuality was seen as a psychological malady; now homosexual groups are demanding that the rest of us see opposition to homosexuality as itself a psychological condition--and one that needs to be suppressed. They have created a new morality, whose creed is that no one shall disagree with their political agenda, and this new morality, more strident and intolerant even than the old one, is to be to be legislated in place of the old one. And all the while they declare that legislating morality is wrong. Out with the old tyrants, and in with the new.

No one is to be allowed to say that homosexuality is wrong, and no one is allowed to say that opposing homosexuality is right. Homosexual behavior was once illegal; now it is beginning to become more and more apparent that gay rights groups would like to see opposition to homosexuality as itself illegal.

In one Kentucky school district, students are now required to undergo sensitivity training to rid them of their belief that homosexuality is morally wrong. In fact the policy is so Draconian that even the ACLU is now defending a group of parents in a case to overturn the policy. And many colleges now impose speech codes that restrict any public expression of disagreement with homosexuals.

And incidentally, why are gays so intent upon demanding that other people approve of what they do? If I weren't so hostile to the influence of Freud over every aspect of our thought and culture, I would introduce the theory that the whole gay indignation industry, which demands that the rest of the culture cede to its political and psychological claims, was based on a deep-seated psychological insecurity of a group of people who think that other people's approval will somehow make them feel better. But as someone who disagrees with Freud, and thinks that you can't psychoanalyze whole groups of people anyway, I cannot say this.

But do we need to appeal to Freud? What if we were to drop the psychobabble and simply and unapologetically took up the traditional language of morality? What could we say then? What we could say is this: That here we have a bunch of individual people who are morally (rather than psychologically) insecure about what they are doing. And, like so many people who feel guilty about their actions, they think they will feel better about it if they can get other people to approve of what they do. This is why, for example, people with vices often try to recruit others to join in their pursuit of them: it assuages their guilt.

If gays really thought that what they were doing were morally acceptable, they wouldn't so badly need the rest of us to affirm them--and they wouldn't need to politically intimidate the people who, trying to abide by their own moral principles, refuse to give them that affirmation.

12 Things Bloggers Shouldn't Do

Some thoughts on how to avoid bad blogging:

1. Don't talk about what you're going to talk about. Just talk about it. Is it just me, or does anyone else become extremely annoyed when they get posts on their feed reader that talk about what the blog is about and what its purpose is. That shouldn't have to be said. If you're doing something, you don't need to point out what your doing because your doing it and therefore it isn't necessary to point it out. A good blog title (or subtitle) serves the same purpose.

2. Don't self-promote your blog in your posts. If your posts are good, they promote themselves. There's one particular blog on which half the posts are about how great the blog is. No blog that spends half its posts talking about how great it is can possibly be a good blog.

3. Don't be boring. I think there are some bloggers who think they absolutely must blog every day, content be damned. If you can't write an interesting post on Tuesday, then just hang it up until Thursday when you've got something interesting to say.

4. Don't post images (particularly large ones) unless they are directly relevant (and necessary) to the post. If you've got an exclusive image of the first giant squid ever captured, that's one thing, but otherwise, fugget aboud it.

5. Don't post too much. Some blogs just simply have too many posts. If they were all interesting, that would be one thing, but if there are 5 to 10 posts a day on the blog I can't imagine how they could all be interesting. You just finally get tired of hitting the "mark post as read" button on your feed reader and you unsubscribe.

6. Don't post too little. If you seldom post to your blog, then people finally stop checking and your blog is forgotten.

7. Don't write cryptic or uninformative titles. Titles should do several things: 1. Be complete: They need to describe what is in the post is about as fully but succinctly as possible; 2. Be provocative: the post must give the reader a reason to visit the blog; 3. Be clever: This isn't always possible, but a well-written and clever title tells the reader that the post is likely to share the same characteristics. With the advent of the feed reader, titles have become much more important. Often, I judge whether I'm going to read the post solely on the basis of the title. Some readers only list the headline, so that may be all the reader sees--and the only determinant of whether the user actually reads it.

8. Don't be superfluous. Some blogs try to do what too many other blogs already do. It serves no purpose, for example to be the first to break a story, unless 1. It's an important story, and 2. You're really the first one to break it. With very few exceptions, this is not possible for a blog. The vast majority of bloggers have no business trying to tell their readers something new. Instead, they should be about something else, like telling readers something interesting, or unusual, or edifying, or outrageous, or humorous.

9. Don't try to be funny if you aren't. Humor is like poetry: it's either very good or very bad. The worst kind of post is one that the blogger thinks is funny but the reader doesn't.

10. Don't write posts that are too long. I violate this one too much myself, partly because I use my blog to write drafts of articles and try ideas out. But bloggers who have other objectives need to keep their posts short. A blog post almost can't be too short. I realized one day that the ideal blog post was the kind of thing I used to read in "The Week" section of National Review magazine years ago. It was a series of short, pithy observations on current events. Some were profound, some were very funny, but they were all witty and amusing. Most of them had great punch lines. I now consciously try to aim for this kind of post (with variable success). Blog posts should either focus on one point or be in the form of a list. If you do write longer articles they should have two or three clear points related to a theme or unified with some central metaphor.

11. Don't publish incomplete thoughts. If you want your blog to have a decent readership, and are not just using it for personal experimental purposes, your posts, unless they are very, very short, need to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They need to be crafted. There's just too much raw information on the Internet. The only thing that is going to stand out is writing that does something interesting with that raw information.

12. Don't write badly. This is perhaps an obvious one, but it is often ignored. Not only should there be an art evident in what you say and how you say it, it ought to follow the standard rules for grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Otherwise, it simply looks careless, ignorant, or, worse, affected. Commas ought to be where commas ought to be, and variant spellings are not very entertaining, except in dialogue. Words that should be capitalized should be capitalized, and words that should not be capitalized should not be capitalized--especially for purposes of emphasis. We don't have typewriters anymore, and have italics ready at hand for that purpose. The AP Style Guide was created for a purpose. Use it.

Hypocritically accusing hypocrites of hypocrisy

Yesterday's Louisville Courier-Journal sported a cartoon by Scott Coffman on its editorial page attacking the Family Foundation. It shows the corner of the building (presumably its foundation), and on each brick has a word written on it: multiple marriages, divorce, avarice, patriarchy, infidelity, immaturity, arrogance, sexual problems, hatred, fear, indifference, affairs, etc.

I presume the point was that the people who publicly defend the model of the traditional family are not perfect practitioners of it themselves, which is of course true, although not particularly insightful or enlightening. In fact, no one is going to be mistaking this cartoonist for Jeff MacNelly or Herblock anytime soon.

Nor does it say anything about the soundness of any set of principles that it's adherents do not live up to the principles themselves. (See my "A Paean to Hypocrisy"). And if it were true that a set of principles could be judged by whether its adherents followed them perfectly themselves, then what would it say about people who are constantly talking about the evils of hatred and fear that they see in cultural conservatives that they have such hatred and fear toward the cultural conservatives they criticize?

It obviously makes people like Coffman feel good about themselves when they find hypocrisy in others. But the worst kind of hypocrisy is accusing someone else of it when you're engaging in it yourself.

To be normal, or not to be normal: that is the question

Comments like these bring to mind once again the bizarre spectacle of a group of people who spend the majority of their public remarks opposing everyone else's concept of normality while at the same time expressing their concern that they be considered normal by everyone else.

Go figure.

Using partial birth abortion to kill chickens

My good friend Mike Janocik at Kentucky Right to Life sent me a copy of the following article he did for the Louisville Courier-Journal on the issue of cruelty to chickens that was just priceless. No word yet from Planned Parenthood on whether they are supporting this proposed procedure:

All of us should be deeply troubled by the spectacle caught on videotape of poultry workers torturing helpless chickens in the course of a day's work. The torture of animals contradicts the goodness of God's creation and human dignity. Many of us were profoundly offended by such heinous acts.

In an effort to alleviate the offensiveness of abusing chickens, I would like to propose a method of killing chickens that has a long pedigree, is perfectly acceptable in our culture and, and is approved by the U. S. Supreme Court.

First, grasp the chicken by the feet and pull it out of its container until the head remains inside the cage. Next, place the index finger on one side of the bird's neck and the middle finger on the other side. Hold the chicken steady as its wings and legs will be flailing about outside the cage. Next, take a sharp object--scissors perhaps--and stick them into the base of the chicken's head and then expand them until there is a sizable hole. Finally, insert a tube and suction out the chicken's brain, leaving it dead and limp. Remove the dead chicken from the cage.

If this method, called partial-birth abortion in humans, is good enough for unborn babies, it ought to be just fine for chickens.

Mike Janocik, Louisville

Harold Bloom's critique of Harry Potter

I am working on a piece titled, "The Return of Real Danger: Why is Harry Potter so Popular?" In the process, I ran across this interesting critique by the great literary critic Harold Bloom in the Wall Street Journal. It's called, "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes." After it ran, the editors called and told Bloom that they had never seen anything like it: they had received 400 negative response letters and only one positive one, and the latter they said they suspected he had written himself!