Sheila has a point, but kind of veers off into just plain ranting at about the time she gets to saying, "Girls got pregnant in high school. But nobody talked about it."

Uhhh, perhaps she hasn't noticed that the high school pregnancy rate in These Enlightened Times™ is quite a bit higher than it was back then? And one doesn't have to be an advocate for returning to those mores to think that perhaps the pendulum has swung a bit too far...

Respect Bill Bennett Joe?

Bill got his head start in politics not in the re-education ministry but in persecuting users of unapproved drugs.

His moral crusade was more of the same.

Bill represents much of what is wrong with American politics. A man on a moral crusade who intends to make you moral at the point of a gun.

On top of that like all agents of morality he lied left and right about the dangers of some drugs and the people who use them.

Every single drug czar must tell bushel baskets of lies about some drugs in order to do his job. Respect?

The man is a walking dung heap. Among the worst of the morally putrid. Touting evil as good in order to uphold his vision for the world.

Sheila O'Malley was way too measured in her criticism of Bennett.

Interestingly enough, the moonbat faction of the left also has an obsession with fitionalized past, it's just further back. Waaaay further back, so there conveniently aren't any written records of the egalitarian feminist utopia in which all people lived in harmony with nature.

People just don't want to face the fact that despite all its flaws the world we live in right now is better than its ever been. Anyone living in the industrialized world today is better off than the vast majority of people throughout human history, including royalty. If we can avoid screwing it up by trying to build the perfect world, it will slowly, ploddingly, continue to get better.

I submit that the cold war and the current war share this common thread: the enemy is a belief that the world can be made more perfect via some shortcut rather than the slow hard slog that has brought us this far. It truly is a war on bad philosophy.

Great points, Andrew.

Andrew - I agree - great points. Normally I think of the "moonbat left" as being in love with some unrealistic utopia in the future ("Come on - can't we all just hold hands and love each other??"). But yes - conservatives don't corner the market in fictionalizing the past.

and Kirk - Of course I have noticed the higher rate of teenage pregnancy in these modern times. the point of my post was to attack those who would rather go back in time to when such difficult issues were not openly discussed - or even acknowledged.

Joe - thanks for the link.

OK, I'll be the grown up.

Says Sheila, "But I do not care what music they listen to. I do not care who they have sex with. I do not care if they are married or unmarried."

A quick google reveals this

"Children born out of wedlock to never-married women live in poverty 51 percent of the time. By contrast, children born within a marriage that remains intact are poor 7 percent of the time. Thus, the absence of marriage increases the frequency of child poverty 700 percent. However, marriage after an illegitimate birth is effective, cutting the child poverty rate in half. "

"From the very beginning, children born outside of marriage have life stacked against them. In addition to poverty, children born into illegitimacy are more likely to experience retarded cognitive development (especially verbal development); lower educational achievement; lower job attainment; increased behavioral and emotional problems; lower impulse control; and retarded social development. Such children are far more likely to engage in sexual activity; have children outside of marriage; be on welfare as adults; and engage in criminal activity. "

Sheila is just plain stupid.

"and Kirk - Of course I have noticed the higher rate of teenage pregnancy in these modern times."

We don't have a higher rate of teenage pregnancy in these modern times. We have a higher rate of unmarried teenage pregnancy in these modern times.

Lengthening our children's childhoods and demanding that they just bend over and take it and remain celibate until we finally get around to teaching them something useful hasn't worked, and it's long past time we abandon that idea.

Jon,

I think pointing out the faults of society is a good thing.

Trying to fix them at the point of a gun is not.

Now the funny thing is that if you are familiar with population demographics and it's relationship to sociology you will find that Bennett's drug war had a lot to do with the explosion of teen pregnancy.

You can read about it here:

http://www.nap.edu/issues/13.2/courtw.htm

That is if understanding is more important to you than holding a position.

Bennett actually did a lot to cause the problem he decries. Which is exactly the results we have been getting from moral scolds aproximately forever.

Remember the history of alcohol prohibition Jon?

Here is the subtitle of the article I gave a link for:

Imprisoning so many urban black males is discouraging marriage and the formation of families, thus contributing to moral and social breakdown.

and here is the link again:

http://www.nap.edu/issues/13.2/courtw.htm

*Imprisoning so many urban black males is discouraging marriage and the formation of families, thus contributing to moral and social breakdown. *

Now might I note that the article was published in 1996 and I was familiar with the basis for the article well before that. i.e. that the Male to Female ratio in a population affects social behavior.

You see the funny thing is that moral scolds do not study the subjects they are scolding about. Being morally right they think they know it all.

M., The subtitle is not the only point of the article. It case you missed it, it also says

"Sending fewer black men to prison, in short, is not going to solve the problem by itself. Black families are in trouble for many reasons, among them labor-market changes, a legacy of welfare dependency, racial and class segregation, and the inversion of traditional values, both within the street culture of the ghetto and the larger, eroticized, commercial culture of the mass media."

The point I was objecting to in the cited website, which I am assuming (for lack of further interest) was written by an immature female, was the notion that whether a person is married or not is an unimportant distinction. It seems that Mr. Courtwright and I agree on that.

The broader point of whether moral scolding has an important role is the subject of the second half of the section I quoted above. We as citizens need to follow the example of Dan Quayle and call the media when it sets an example that is destructive to society.

I would be open to changes to the drug laws if evidence is shown that drug treatment programs, lenient sentencing, or other ideas actually work in practice. Until then I am willing to pay whatever it costs to keep that scum away from my kids. I am very grateful to the men and women who are willing to sacrifice their lives to prevent the harm that legalized drugs would do. As long as there are people who know enough about life on the street to make that sacrifice, then I am willing to accept my part of the responsibility for the loss of some of their lives.

Jon,

Two points: if there are not enough men it will be impossible to get the women married, other problems or no. What kind of trade do men in prison learn? One that makes them better marriage material? In fact in the current get tough moral climate educational opportunities in prison have been reduced. This reduces the prison costs (nominally) while increasing the numbers returning to prison. Smart move.

Second as we found with alcohol prohibition that prohibition itself puts more of the "scum" in contact with your kids than otherwise.

A big impetus for ending alcohol prohibition was the number of children coming to school drunk. As opposed to the situation before prohibition.

Your rant has gone very far to prove my point. Moralists need not study the subject because they have all the answers given to them from on high.

I haven't even gone into the mental health issues of drug use. The professionals these days consider childhood drug addiction a marker for child abuse.

The best thing you can do to keep your children off drugs is to not abuse them. Another way of looking at it is that it is your relationship to your children that determines their drug habits not drug availability. If your children use drugs chronically it is you who are the scum. In this whole drug war we are jailing the wrong people.

Did I mention another reason for ending alcohol prohibition was the exploding prison population? Funny thing is that since we got serious about the drug war our per capita incarceration rate has gone up by a factor of 4 or more. We have more prisoners now than Russia had at the height of the gulag. We can be proud of being #1.

In any case thank you for your help.

Jon,

We know from previous experience that prohibition doesn't work.

Why continue doing what doesn't work?

Because we don't know what does?

M., No need to worry about my kids. With all that I do with them, if they are at risk of abusing drugs this country is beyond hope! Still, I won't always be with them, so I want to minimize the chance they ever fall prey to some creep who wants to take advantage of them. I am also sympathetic to those kids whose parents are not in a position to provide the attention and upbringing to protect them. It is for those kids also that I rant.

My state of Massachusetts once had a program of providing college level education to inmates (started under Dukakis probably). That went down in flames when it was pointed out that law-abiding citizens were struggling only to find themselves paying taxes to educate those low lifes. I feel no obligation to pay to lift some undeserving slime above the level of the least well off honest person. To do so would make me responsible for encouraging criminal activity.

It is my understanding that many other attempts to educate inmates have been stopped because there was no improvement in the rate of recidivism. If you have evidence otherwise, let's hear it. If there are too many people in prison, maybe it's just not a bad enough place to be.

Prohibition failed because society was not prepared to reject alcohol when it saw it. For other drugs there is enough of an awareness of the harm they do to make it socially unacceptable for most people. I wouldn't be surprised if prohitition eventually slowly crept back like it is for tobacco. There was a big experiment associated with the 60s that will come to an end, just as there was with cocaine, opium and other drugs in the 19th century. That will last until living memory forgets about drugs and the cycle starts again.

God gave us the gift of love, made children adorable, and gave us the institution of marriage which almost a guarentees an exit from poverty. Yet there are people who reject all that to choose a self-destructive lifestyle, and it's my fault because I support making it as hard as possible to get drugs? There are in fact a whole lot of amazing answers from on high, if you open your mind and heart to listen to lessons that go back thousands of years. Those traditions have brought mankind out of civilizations that are far tougher than todays inner city.

"I would be open to changes to the drug laws if evidence is shown that drug treatment programs, lenient sentencing, or other ideas actually work in practice. Until then I am willing to pay whatever it costs to keep that scum away from my kids. I am very grateful to the men and women who are willing to sacrifice their lives to prevent the harm that legalized drugs would do. As long as there are people who know enough about life on the street to make that sacrifice, then I am willing to accept my part of the responsibility for the loss of some of their lives."

What about the people (including children) that aren't willing to have their lives sacrificed just to stop other people from willingly hurting themselves? The homicide rate staged an impressive drop in 1933, and can again if we come to our senses and drop Prohibition again.

Getting people murdered is not an acceptable tradeoff for stopping other people from hurting themselves.

Ken,

Different countries have different problems. Russia, for example, has a very low life expectancy because of alchoholism. The root of that is the economic and spiritual dispair left over from the workers' paradise that they used to have. The US has problems, but if we turned on the spigot and let cheap drugs flow that's what I expect would happen here when our economy goes into the toilet as the productivity of drugged up workers drops to zero.

I haven't seen the figures myself but I am told the life expectancy in Baltimore for example is already at third world levels. So as bad as it is now it would even get worse when that dispair spreads across all classes.

Unless you are proposing legalization of everything including PCP, crack, rufis, and the rest there will always be illegal drugs that people are willing to pay and therefore kill for.

Destroying our society is not an acceptable tradeoff just so people can get some kicks.