Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The South, Slaves and Subversives
Old times there are not forgotten,
Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.
A song, Dixie
It’s easy to make fun of the South. It was, of course, made easier by Virginia Governor, Robert F. McDonnell who declared April Confederate History month and in so doing omitted any reference to slavery. Explaining the omission Mr. McDonnell said: “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” He also said he hoped to promote tourism by issuing the proclamation and referring to slavery, he probably thought, was not apt to attract a cotton candy eating crowd. Nonetheless, the governor recognized the error of the proclamation and corrected it.
On April 8 he said failing to refer to slavery in the proclamation constituted a major omission. He issued an amendment to the proclamation that said slavery “was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders.” It seems a bit awkward to be expressing thanks for slavery’s eradication as if it had just occurred a few months ago, but when curing an insensitive proclamation it’s better to go too far than not far enough. Those who took the occasion of the poorly proclaimed proclamation to describe the south as insensitive have probably failed to notice the steps taken by another southern state to acknowledge the follies of an earlier era. That state is South Carolina.
South Carolina has lately been in the news primarily because of the dalliances of its governor, Mark Sanford. In a welcome distraction, legislation has been introduced in the state legislature that would repeal a statute that was enacted in 1951. It appears in Title 23 of the South Carolina Code of Laws and has the catchy title of ”“Subversive Activities Registration Act.”:http://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t23c029.htm” It applies to Subversive Organizations and to Organizations Subject to Foreign Control as broadly defined in the act. In order to keep track of these organizations the statute requires that “Every organization or person coming within the provisions of this chapter shall file with the Secretary of State all information which he may request, on the forms and at the times he may prescribe.”
The Secretary of State of South Carolina prepared a form that the described organizations are required to fill out. The form asks for the name of the organization, the name and address of its chief agent and then asks pleasantly: “Do you or your organization directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina or any political division thereof? “ If the agent checks “yes” the agent is requested to outline the organization’s “fundamental beliefs” and to attach its bylaws or minutes of meetings from the preceding year. The form must be accompanied by a $5.00 filing fee.
In late February South Carolina State Sen. Larry Martin said that the legislature should take steps to get rid of the statute. Although not articulated by him, there are at least three reasons it might be good to rid itself of the statute and the legislature will probably come up with others.
The first is that terrorists are unlikely to be aware of the act’s requirements since no one else seems to be and thus are unlikely to have registered, thus making them scofflaws as well as terrorists. (It wouldn’t hurt for the FBI or Secret Service to stop by the S.C. Secretary of State’s office and check to see if any terrorists have registered. It would be amusing and embarrassing if it turned out that Osama bin Laden had registered and lives not in a remote region of Afghanistan but in South Carolina, perhaps along the Appalachian Trail.)Another reason for repealing the statute is that since its existence came to light within the past weeks it has competed with the governor for attracting ridicule among talk show hosts and others.
The last reason for repealing the statute and one that probably appeals to the S.C. legislature is that the statutory description of the kinds of organizations that must register under the Act could describe the Tea Party movement. The rhetoric one hears from its members and the crazies who show up at rallies, some carrying weapons of minor destruction, and all railing against the U.S. Government, may easily cause them to fall within the purview of the statute. South Carolina would be embarrassed were it required to prosecute them under the provisions of the Act. Tea party members would take great offense at the idea that they are considered no better than, and treated the same as, communists were in 1951. Everyone will have cause to celebrate the law’s repeal. Christopher Brauchli can be emailed at rauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. For political commentary see his web page at http://humanraceandothersports.com
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Papal Public Relations
The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
The problem lies with the Public Relations Office. He was doing fine until the buck, as it were, landed in his collection plate.
On October 28, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI was in Ireland and had occasion to address the sex abuse scandal that had engulfed the church in that country. He asked the Bishops of Ireland to come to terms with and explain the cause of the sexual abuse.
In April 2008 he visited the United States and met with a small group of people who had been sexually abused as children by members of the clergy. In one of his homilies while visiting he said: “No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse.”
In July 2008, he visited Australia. Speaking at a mass attended by seminarians and bishops, the Pope acknowledged the “shame that we have all felt as a result of the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy” in Australia. He said: “Those responsible for these evils must be brought to justice.”
He returned to the Irish problem in November 2009 when the Murphy Report that examined more than 300 abuse claims in the Archdiocese of Dublin between 1975 and 2004 was released. (The Murphy after whom it was named was not the Murphy who, we learned in March 2010, abused more than 200 deaf children in Wisconsin. The Murphy report said that instead of being concerned for the victims of abuse, the church was more concerned about “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets.” Responding to the report the Pope said he shared the “outrage, betrayal and shame felt by the faithful in Ireland.” He promised to write a pastoral letter addressing the issue. The pastoral letter was slow in coming. That’s probably because a pastoral letter is not the kind of letter you sit down and write when you are having trouble sleeping. It took the Pope almost four months to figure out exactly what to say to the Irish faithful. In the letter he said: “I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them. . . . For my part, considering the gravity of these offences, and the often inadequate response to them . . . I have decided to write this Pastoral Letter to express my closeness to you and to propose a path of healing, renewal and reparation.”
The pastoral letter was coincidentally sent on March 19, 2010 at almost the same time as tales from the Northwoods of Wisconsin, Germany, the Netherlands and France were being told of sexual abuse of children. Those occurrences took place under Benedict’s closed, if not blind, eye while he served in 1980 as archbishop of Munich and Freising and later as leader of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In both of those capacities many think he knew or should have known what was going on. The compassion button has now been turned off and the PR people have gone on holiday as the Vatican responds to these allegations. Since these acts occurred on his watch, Benedict cannot write yet another pastoral letter expressing “outrage, betrayal and shame felt by the faithful” since he would probably have to acknowledge responsibility as well. It is also good he did not ask Irish Bishops, who similarly overlooked such conduct, to resign (as some had expected he would) since had he done so and that standard been applied to him the same demand might now be made of him.
Statements of contrition and shame have been replaced with attacks on the press. In a Good Friday sermon, Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household, said the concern being expressed over sexual abuse scandals was similar to what happened to the Jews during the holocaust. Stretching reason beyond the breaking point he suggested the collective violence to which the Jews were subject during the holocaust was the same as the collective violence to which the church was subject by those criticizing its behavior in the sexual abuse scandal. Although his sermon was disavowed by some, the attacks on the press continue. The days of papal apologies and expression of contrition and shame have come and gone along with the Vatican public relations staff. The shoe being on the papal foot, the fault is now seen to lie with the reporters-not the perpetrators and those who overlooked their transgressions. Of such stuff is moral courage made.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Health Care and Etymology
Three faces wears the doctor: when first sought
An angel’s; and a god’s the cure half-wrought;
But when, the cure complete, he seeks his fee,
The devil looks less terrible than he.
— Anonymous
Any analysis of a problem, whether extant or solved, requires an understanding of the terms employed. Thus, it is helpful in the very week in which health care reform became the law of the land that we were offered two examples of the impact the law will have on certain conditions. They are “pre-existing conditions” (PE) and “chronic conditions (CC). PE is specifically addressed and the consequences of CC are addressed. The definition of “pre-existing condition” was brought to us courtesy of Houston Tracy.
Houston was born on March 15 and at the time of this writing is only two weeks old. Too young to be instructing anyone in much of anything, he has in fact served as a tutor for his parents in diseases of the heart and etymology.
Houston was born with a congenital heart defect that was “a transposition of the great arteries.” Houston was taken to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Forth Worth and underwent surgery to correct the defect. If Houston’s parents are like many of my readers, prior to their personal experience with this condition, they had no knowledge of the major arteries of the heart nor the possibility that they could be switched. Thanks to Houston they are now more versed in that particular heart defect than they had ever hoped to be. As an incidental benefit they now also know of the meaning of “pre-existing condition.”
The Houstons had always carried health insurance for their children and according to Blue Cross: “Our policy is that if a family has existing coverage with us, a baby can be added to the contract within 31 days without the need for underwriting to assess the baby’s eligibility.” When the Tracys submitted the bills for the surgery to Blue Cross they were told that Houston had a pre-existing condition and could not be added to the policy.
Thanks to the health care legislation if Houston’s delivery could have been postponed until September, Blue Cross could not have denied him coverage since, beginning in September, no one can be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. That includes new-borns.
Another feature of the new legislation is its effect on people with chronic conditions. It says that insurance companies can no longer impose lifetime caps on those with chronic conditions. For informing us how one insurance company has approached chronic conditions in the past, we are indebted to the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof. In a column published March 21 he describes how InterGlobal (IG), an insurance company based in London, interprets that term. (IG insures international travelers living outside their home countries. It may be unaffected by the new law since it has no offices in the United States. Its interpretation of CC is nonetheless a good example of insurance policy interpretation since American policies have had similar limits on coverage for illnesses that refuse to be cured.)
One of Mr. Kristof’s former neighbors, who moved to Hong Kong with her family and was insured by IG, discovered she had late-stage stomach cancer. Her stomach was removed and that was followed by chemotherapy. It was then discovered that the cancer had spread to her intestines for which additional treatment was required. Although her insurance policy had $1.7 million coverage the insurance company did what many insurance companies do when claims are filed. It reread its policy in order to find the applicable exclusion that would permit it to deny her claims. Not surprisingly, since it wrote the policy, it found the applicable exclusion. The exclusion pertained to “chronic conditions” and that, said the company, is what the patient had. Accordingly, under the policy the most it had to pay was $85,000, its limit on lifetime claims for chronic conditions.
When Mr. Kristof asked the company the meaning of CC the company said: “Chronic means a medical condition which has at least one of the following characteristics: has no known cure; is likely to recur; requires palliative treatment; needs prolonged monitoring/treatment; is permanent; requires specialist training/rehabilitation; is caused by changes to the body that cannot be reversed.” Informed but unenlightened, Mr. Kristof asked the company to identify any disease that would not fit within its definition of chronic. Offended by the inquiry, its chief executive declined to answer and expressed disappointment at the “tone” of Mr. Kristof’s inquiry and said he would not have any thing else to say on the subject. Happily, Congress has. Although it may not prevent IG from continuing to defraud its insureds since IG operates outside the U.S., health insurance companies doing business in the U.S. will no longer be permitted to impose limits on how much they’ll pay for those with chronic conditions. That, if nothing else, is good news for those so afflicted.