Porn
Chic
The Washington Post recently reported, and then mocked, plans at the FBI
to put a few field agents on pornography prosecutions.
One unnamed FBI agent who, according to the Post
was awarded anonymity since "poking fun at headquarters
is not regarded as career-enhancing," derided the
idea, saying, "I guess this means we've won the
war on terror." The Post reporter also recycled
jokes made at FBI headquarters, such as "Things
I Don't Want On My Resume, Volume Four," and "I already
gave at home."
It
was a cheap and easy dig. No one puts pornographers
in a league with Osama bin Laden as a lethal threat
to national security. But the FBI is involved in other
criminal matters that also look trivial next to terrorism.
(A look at the press-release archives will acquaint
you with the crackdown on fake asbestos-training certificates.)
So why is the FBI doing this? With an eye on public
disgust, Congress funded an anti-obscenity initiative
in fiscal 2005 and specified that the FBI must devote
10 agents to adult pornography. The FBI put all 10 in
the Washington field office, presumably where Congress might see them
more clearly.
It's
clear that pornographers in this new century have a
much greater reach with the technological boost of the
Internet. Hundreds of thousands of web pages are devoted
to pornographic images, and one prosecuting boomlet
is catching the porn merchants constantly spamming adults
— and children — through their e-mail accounts. Porn
peddlers catch many children through simple internet
searches for "DragonBall
Z" cartoons and Harry Potter books. But pornographers
aren't prosecuted as much as celebrated by our cultural
elites. Congress echoed what seems to be a growing movement
to expose and confront this repugnant scab on American
society.
Whether
or not federal prosecutors find successes with juries
in enforcing a notion of "community standards"
on the porn industry, parents across America ought to be the first line of defense against "porn
chic."
No
one wants to be the father of the unhappy man who can't
build a marriage with a three-dimensional woman, or
the mother of the manipulated woman who sells her sexuality
(and her soul) to a porn mogul or the fly-by-night Internet
webmaster for chump change. And yet, hundreds of thousands
of parents face that predicament because they did nothing
to prevent the sewage of pornography from seeping into
their homes.
Brent
Bozell
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/brentbozell/bb20050923.shtml
--
In
Loco Parentis Goes Loco
Are
college students children or
adults?
Last
spring, Goucher College president Sanford Ungar was at a college reception in Denver when he was accosted
by an angry mother. Her son was a student at Goucher,
she said, and she was outraged because the Baltimore-area
institution wouldn't let her see his grades. Mr. Ungar
explained that a federal law known as Ferpa
prohibits schools from releasing information about students
over 18 without their permission, and that if her son
had refused to sign a consent form, there was nothing
Goucher could do.
"I
think at the end of our conversation, she still didn't
believe me," Mr. Ungar
recalls. But he spoke the truth. Ferpa,
the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974,
is a perfect example of a law with unexpected consequences.
It was meant to protect students from being haunted
in later life by inaccurate or irrelevant information
stored in school records, e.g., IQ scores, teacher assessments
and disciplinary reports. A key provision forbids any
school that receives federal funds from releasing parts
of an individual's education file without the permission
of parents or, in the case of non-dependents over 18,
of the students themselves.
The
absurdity of tuition-paying parents being unable to
see their child's grades is amusing. Yet the fear of
violating Ferpa has often
led schools to withhold vital information — including
details of campus crime that might be important for
the safety of the college community and instances of
student behavior, such as drug and alcohol abuse,
that parents would want to know.
Tweaks
in the original law have given schools some leeway on
disclosure when safety, and lives, may be at stake.
Even so, to judge by Ferpa's
basic approach, college students are adults who deserve
the privileges of privacy even at the expense of their
parents' claims to basic facts. To judge by a raft of
lawsuits, however, students are also children in need
of supervision.
Opinion
Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007300
--
All
in the Family
It
took the media a while to acknowledge that most of Katrina's
victims were black. Apparently, it will take longer
to mention that most of the victims were women and children.
I noticed three commentators who brought up the delicate
subject of the mostly missing males — George Will, Gary
Bauer, and Thomas Bray, a columnist for the Detroit
News. Will noted that 76 percent of births to Louisiana's
African-Americans are to unmarried women,
and probably more than 80 percent in New Orleans, since that is the usual estimate in other inner cities.
Will wrote: "That translates into a large and constantly
renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males,
and that translates into chaos, in neighborhoods and
schools, come rain or come shine."
A
good deal of hard evidence shows that this is so. Two
decades of research produced a consensus among social
scientists of both left and right that family structure
has a serious impact on children, even when controlling
for income, race, and other variables. In other words,
we are not talking about a problem of race but about
a problem of family formation or, rather, the lack of
it. The best outcomes for children — whether in academic
performance, avoidance of crime and drugs, or financial
and economic success — are almost invariably produced
by married biological parents. The worst results are
by never-married women.
High
crime. In
a policy brief released last week, the Washington-based
Institute for Marriage and Public Policy looked at 23
recent studies dealing with family structure and youth
crime. In 19 of the 20 studies that found family structure
to have an effect, children from nonintact
or single-parent families had a higher rate of crime
or delinquency. Neighborhoods with lots of out-of-wedlock
births have lots of crime. Ominously, one study said
that the more single-parent families there were in a
neighborhood, the more crime there was among two-parent
kids living around them. Again, these studies are controlled
for race.
John
Leo
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/johnleo/jl20050926.shtml
--
The
Left University
More
than 16 million students are now enrolled in colleges
and universities in the United States, the largest number ever. In two years, the figure will exceed
17 million, and it will continue to grow, as the high
school graduating class of 2008 will be the largest
in history. Today nearly 70 percent of the 18-to-24
age cohort attends college in one form or another, and
more than 80 percent of high school graduates do so.
College attendance has become a near universal rite
of passage for youngsters in our society, and a requirement
for entry into the world of middle-class employment.
When
this year's freshmen enter the academic world, they
will encounter a bizarre universe in which big-time
athletics, business education, and rigorous science
programs operate under the umbrella of institutions
that define themselves in terms of left-wing ideology.
This is especially true of the 100 or so elite public
and private institutions that are able to select their
students from among a multitude of applicants seeking
entry, and true also of the humanities and social science
departments that define the political and social meaning
of the academic enterprise. These students will enter
the world of what we may call the left university.
The
ideology of the left university is both anti-American
and anti-capitalist. The left university, according
to its self-understanding, is devoted to the exposure
of the oppression of the various groups that have been
the West's victims — women, blacks, Hispanics, gays,
and others that have been officially designated as oppressed
groups — and to those groups' representation. This is
the so-called "diversity" ideology to which
every academic dean, provost, and president must pledge
obedience and devotion.
As
it happens, the contemporary university is diverse only
as a matter of definition and ideology, but not in practice
or reality. A recent national survey of college faculty
by Stanley Rothman, Robert Lichter,
and Neil Nevitte showed that
over 72 percent held liberal and left of center views,
while some 15 percent held conservative views. The survey
also found that, over time, and especially since 1980,
academic opinion has moved steadily leftward as the
generation shaped by the 1960s has taken control of
academe. In the humanities and social sciences, where
political views are more closely related to academic
subject matter, the distribution of opinion is even
more skewed to the left. Unlike professors in the past,
moreover, many contemporary teachers believe it is their
duty to incorporate their political views into classroom
instruction. Thus students at leading colleges report
that they are subjected to a steady drumbeat of political
propaganda in their courses in the humanities and social
sciences.
James
Piereson
Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/120xbklj.asp
