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Culture Clips - October 25, 2005

Deviled Eggs

The “tiny cross” people at the American Civil Liberties Union are at it again. These are the folks with extra-keen eyes and powerful magnifying glasses, who examine the official seals of towns and counties, looking for miniature crosses that ACLU lawyers like to trumpet as grave threats to separation of church and state.

This time around, the folks with the magnifying glasses are leaning on the village of Tijeras, New Mexico, whose seal contains a Conquistador’s helmet and sword, a scroll, a desert plant, a fairly large religious symbol (the native American zia) and a quite small Christian cross. “Tiny cross” inspectors are not permitted to fret about large non-Christian religious symbols, only undersized Christian ones, so the ACLU filed suit to get the cross removed.

The cross is obviously not an endorsement of religion, any more than the Conquistador helmet and sword are endorsements of Spanish warfare. The courts have ruled, not always consistently, that crosses, as historic references in such seals and logos, are permissible. But the ACLU, these days, is strongly committed to seeing church-state crises everywhere, and thus pushes things way too far.

Last year the ACLU demanded that Los Angeles County eliminate from its seal a microscopic cross representing the missions that settled the state of California. Under threat of expensive litigation, the county complied. The cross was about one-sixth the size, of a not-very-big image, of a cow tucked away on the lower right segment of the seal, and maybe one one-hundredth the size of a pagan god (Pomona, Goddess of Fruit) who dominated the seal. Pomona survived the religious purge. She is not the sort of god that the ACLU worries about, whereas the flyspeck-sized cross was a threat to unravel separation of church and state, as we know it. What will happen if the ACLU learns that Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Sacramento, San Francisco, St. Louis and Corpus Christi actually have religious names? We shudder to think.

John Leo
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/
opinion/columns/johnleo/2005/10/24/172505.html

Political Virus

Why there’s only one drug to fight avian flu.

No one really knows how great the avian flu threat is. Public-health officials have been warning about it ever since new studies suggested that the infamous 1918 flu outbreak originated in birds. Warning is what these folks get paid to do. Other experts argue that 1918 was a fluke and that the current avian virus is unlikely to become a mass killer of humans.

Whatever the risk, some good will come out of this public alarm if we use it as an opportunity to understand why the U.S. is now so poorly armed to cope with a deadly flu outbreak. The reason is that our political class has spent the past 30 years driving the vaccine industry out of business with its own virus of over-regulation, price controls, litigation and intellectual-property abuse.

The U.S. today has only three large vaccine makers — down from 37 in the 1960s. This is the reason that, as recently as 2001, there was a shortage of eight of 11 critical childhood vaccines. It is also the reason the U.S. fell drastically short of flu vaccine a year ago, after a shut-down of one of two major flu-vaccine makers. And it is the reason only one company, Switzerland's Roche, is being counted on for a drug that would potentially protect against bird flu.

Despite these warning signals, Washington has done almost nothing. One problem is the Food and Drug Administration, which puts safety above developing rapid cures. Flu-vaccine makers face particular difficulties because they must effectively gain approval for a new product (for each new flu strain) every year. The vaccine is still grown in chicken eggs — a process that takes up to eight months. The industry has revolutionary new technologies — reverse genetics and mammalian cell culture — that would dramatically reduce the time and cost of development. Europe is moving toward products using these new techniques, but the FDA refuses to adapt and allow more rapid approval.

The feds have also done their best to remove any financial incentive — i.e., profit — for developing new vaccines. The Vaccines for Children program, a pet project of Hillary Clinton back in her First Lady days, has been especially destructive. The program now buys more than 50% of all private vaccines, and it uses this monopsony clout to drive prices down to commodity levels.

When one pharmaceutical company offered to sell a new pneumococcal vaccine to the government for $58 a dose, the Centers for Disease Control demanded a $10-a-dose discount. Politicians want companies to take all the risk of developing new vaccines, but they don't want the companies to make any money from taking those risks. Then the politicians profess surprise and dismay that there's a vaccine shortage.

Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/
weekend/hottopic/?id=110007444

Sex and School Kids

Brookline High teens face charges of statutory rape," read the headline in Wednesday's Boston Globe. The story below it reported that two 17-year-old boys at Brookline High School — a celebrated public school in suburban Boston … have been charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 15-year-old girl, a classmate who said the sex was consensual. This is the third time since February that students at Brookline High have been accused of having sex with a minor …

In a letter sent to parents and students last week, Brookline High principal Robert Weintraub described the latest incident as "deeply disturbing." But only, it seems, because it was technically illegal. "Our society is highly sexualized," Weintraub wrote. "At Brookline High, we have clear rules on sexual behavior which reflect our own values and Massachusetts law. Anyone who has sex with a person under the age of 16 is violating the law. And it doesn't matter if both people are under 16. It is against the law. Once again, the law was not a deterrent."

But is there no higher value than a state's age-of-consent law? Is that really all the guidance that Brookline High has to offer its kids as they wrestle with something as overwhelming as their sexual drives and impulses? Shouldn't those charged with the education of teenagers be pushing back against the relentless sexualization of the culture instead of knuckling under to it? With sex bombarding them everywhere they turn, don't kids need more than ever to be taught that sex is for grown-ups?

"This is such a sexualized society," Weintraub repeated, almost plaintively, when I phoned the other day. "Just look at the internet. Look at the music. You're fighting against the whole world. You're fighting against a society that doesn't supervise its children as carefully as it once did." On school grounds, he said, Brookline students are bound by a code of conduct that bans "inappropriate sexual behavior," such as sexual touching, prolonged kissing, and removal of clothing ("your own or another's").

But isn't all sexual behavior "inappropriate" when you're a kid, whether or not you're on school grounds? Isn't that what students really need be hearing?

Weintraub demurred. "Well, now you're talking about a specific code of morality," he said.

There is something awfully sad and strange about a culture in which teenage sex is condoned so long as it is "safe," while teenage smoking is denounced as categorically wrong. Sex has become a mere issue of health and the law, while morality is reserved for tobacco.

Jeff Jacoby
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/
opinion/columns/jeffjacoby/2005/10/24/172497.html