Month: May 2016

Don’t believe everything you read, including bold claims about the percentage of Americans who do or don’t support laws requiring transgender people to use one bathroom or another. There is very strong evidence that poll responses can vary dramatically depending on how a question is worded, such that the “hard data” people love to share can start to look pretty squishy.

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) is circulating numbers from January showing that “most (71 percent) Americans, including more than six in ten (64 percent) North Carolina residents, favor general LGBT nondiscrimination laws.”

At the same time, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll finds a bare plurality of respondents answering that “people should use public restrooms according to their biological sex” rather than “according to the gender with which they identify.”

Can both those things be true? 

I could parse the different methodologies, observing, for instance, that PRRI aggregated interviews taken over the course of a full year, while Reuters looks at a five-day rolling average. But the more important thing to understand here is how much question wording matters.

Back in 2014 I pointed out that just adding a reference to “religious or moral objections” could flip people from supporting to opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate (the provision requiring even faith-based employers to provide birth control coverage to their workers). I hypothesized that the same would be true on what we at Reason have come to refer to as the gay cake question. I wrote:

It’s one thing for a respondent to be against letting businesses “refuse to serve same-sex couples.” It’s another thing to say people shouldn’t be allowed to “decline to participate in a same-sex wedding.” The former evokes the image of a restauranteur or shopkeeper throwing gay people out of his business, while the latter sounds more like he’s politely reserving the right not to take someone on as a new client. The end result might be the same, but the connotations are worlds apart.

On the transgender bathroom issue, too, it’s very likely that people are responding more to the way the specific question they’ve been asked makes them feel than they are revealing any deep-seated beliefs about how this controversy ought to be resolved.

To prove my point, I direct your attention to a third survey, this one conducted by ORC on behalf of CNN.

When that poll asked people what they thought of laws “that require transgender individuals to use facilities that correspond to their gender at birth rather than their gender identity,” 57 percent held the “liberal” position of strongly or somewhat opposing such legislation (compared to 38 percent who held the “conservative” position of strongly or somewhat supporting it). But when the same poll asked the same people about “laws that guarantee equal protection for transgender people in jobs, housing and public accommodations,” an overwhelming three out of four took the liberal position of saying they were in favor.

The lesson here is that when you frame an issue in terms of “equal protection” and “guaranteeing rights,” you can get a different picture than when you bring up specific policy questions. Note that PRRI asked about non-discrimination laws generally while Reuters queried people on bathroom use by people whose gender identity differs from their biological sex, a potentially more fraught topic.

Likewise, the Reuters question, which had to do with people’s opinion about which bathroom others should ideally use, returned a more conservative result than did CNN’s, which asked about support for a law that would impose a legal requirement on them. Even if a significant chunk of the population isn’t totally comfortable with biological men using a women’s public restroom (or vice versa!), fewer seem to want to get the state involved to stop it.

The V-chip, a device designed to let parents block TV shows that they don’t want their kids to see, was always doomed to disappoint the social conservatives who pushed for something like it. An assortment of those conservatives—including officials from the Parents Television Council, the American Family Association, Morality in Media, and many similar groups—have just declared their displeasure in an open letter to the Federal Communications Commission.

The most important thing to understand here is that the V-chip never really did what its proponents promised it would do. Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton pushed it as a form of “parental control,” and that phrase keeps recurring when people discuss the technology. Yet parents do not have much say in which programs the chip will block. A distant committee assigns a rating to each TV program, and users then decide what ratings will be filtered from their sets. If Dad disagrees with the committee’s judgment about which shows get which ratings, he’s S.O.L.

Needless to say, plenty of people are going to disagree with the committee’s judgment. Parents are offended by different things, and kids are scared of different things; there’s a big, diverse world out there, and no single set of decisions is going to please everyone in it. But groups like the ones behind this letter are especially likely to object to the ratings.

The ratings-makers, you see, mostly come from the TV industry. (As the letter-writers put it sourly, “the body charged with oversight of the television content ratings system is comprised of those whom it is supposed to be monitoring.”) And from the industry’s point of view, there is a rough social consensus out there as to what sort of programming is acceptable; its task is to figure out those preferences and then reflect them. Groups like the American Family Association, by contrast, want to change the consensus. Their core constituency consists of people who feel left behind by shifting social mores. They’re going to be disappointed with the V-chip directorate’s decisions no matter how conscientiously the committee approaches its task, because it has a fundamentally different attitude toward the task in question.

So have the letter-writers realized the folly of their ways and given up on the V-chip dream? No, of course not; that’s against their domineering nature. They just want people like them to run the committee. “The first step toward correcting the egregious problems with the TV ratings system,” they declare, “must include an overhaul of the self-serving Oversight Monitoring Board.”

Meanwhile, we’re barreling past the Cable Age into an era when “television” dwells online. Traditional TV isn’t dead, but it’s dwindling; each year, a system calibrated for the old broadcast-TV world is going to strike more and more people as anachronistic and useless. The V-chip never was going to give social conservatives what they wanted, and pretty soon we’ll reach a day when it doesn’t even give them the system they got instead.

Bonus link: Back in 2004, after one of Janet Jackson’s areolae made a surprise cameo at the Super Bowl, I made a similar point about the FCC’s indecency regulations:

[T]he war on indecency isn’t going to do what its supporters want it to do. It might chill a lot of speech and cost some broadcasters a lot of money, but the angry mammophobes pushing the FCC to regulate the airwaves more harshly aren’t mad merely because one nipple popped out on national TV and one rock star said the F-word at an awards ceremony. The whole halftime show was smutty, not just the flash at the climax; and you can’t walk two blocks in any densely populated area without hearing someone cursing. Social mores have changed considerably in the last four decades, and the FCC isn’t exactly equipped to change them back again. So no matter how much the government does, there’s going to be pressure on it to do more; the censors’ victories will feel as frustrating as their defeats. That’s why it’s possible for [FCC Commissioner] Michael Copps to wail that his commission isn’t “taking a firm stand against indecency on the airwaves” even as it’s taking its firmest stand in years.

You can read the rest here.

Bonus link #2: One person who signed the letter to the FCC is Nell Minow, daughter of former FCC chief Newton Minow. And it was 55 years ago today that Minow delivered a famous speech declaring TV a “vast wasteland.” For more on Minow’s misbegotten speech, go here.

• North Carolina and the Department of Justice are suing each other over HB2, the state law that (among other things) requires transgender people to use the bathrooms of whichever gender is on their birth certificates in government buildings and public schools.
• The latest Donald Trump ¯\_(ツ)_/¯: Maybe he didn’t actually mean he was willing to raise taxes on the rich, after all.
• A pair of studies claim that Bernie Sanders’ spending plans would increase the federal deficit by $18 trillion by 2026, even when accounting for the candidate’s plans to increase federal revenue.
• A Muslim student whose name is Bayan Zehlif was rechristened “Isis Phillips” in her California high school yearbook. The school says it was mistake and that there’s another student at the school who is actually named “Isis,” and this might not have been intended as a reference to the terrorist group. But they’re investigating.
• The new speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress has annulled the vote to impeach President Dilma Rousseff.
• Austria’s chancellor abruptly resigned Monday citing lack of party support and decreased popularity of the Social Democrats.

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Oxford University has joined American law schools in discouraging the teaching of uncomfortable subjects—such as laws relating to sexual violence. The university evidently sees no problem with humoring the emotional fragilities of its would-be lawyers and judges—rather than force them to confront what they fear, it would rather let them remain uneducated.

I previously reported on the testimony of Jeannie Suk, a Harvard University law professor who reports that teaching rape law has become an impossible task for many professors. Squeamish students—some of them victims of sexual assault—veto discussions of subjects that offend them. One professor, according to Suk, was asked by a student to stop using the word violate—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because it was reminiscent of violence. Faced with such a minefield of potential triggers, many professors feel they have no choice but to skip over challenging subjects.

A similar climate is overtaking Oxford, according to The Daily Mail:

They are destined to be barristers and judges – but undergraduates studying law at Oxford are being told before lectures on cases involving violence or death that they can leave if they fear the content will be too ‘distressing’.

The revelation marks the arrival from the US of ‘trigger warnings’ – the politically correct notion that students should be warned before they encounter material that could elicit a traumatic response.

Lecturers have been asked by the director of undergraduate studies for law to ‘bear in mind’ using trigger warnings when they give lectures containing ‘potentially distressing’ content.

One law student explained: ‘Before the lectures on sexual offences – which included issues such as rape and sexual assault – we were warned that the content could be distressing, and were then given the opportunity to leave if we needed to.’

Warning students that they are about to encounter difficult material is one thing. Exempting them from studying it entirely is quite another. A university education should in some sense, require students to grapple with touchy subjects. And  it’s obviously the case that law students who were accommodated every time a professor provoked them will be unprepared for law in the real world. Judges, attorneys, and prosecutors involved in sexual assault cases won’t have the option of leaving the courtroom to protect themselves from exposure to potential triggers. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. 

A professional sports team threatens to leave a small to mid-sized city unless a publicly-financed arena is provided to them. Politicians sell the idea of spending millions of dollars on a speculative real estate project for a private company on the grounds that the investment will “pay for itself.” The project becomes a money-loser and taxpayers are left holding the bag. 

It’s an all-too-familiar tale of crony capitalism, and the latest victim of the worst suckers’ bet in sports is the city of Portland, Maine. The picturesque port town was informed last week that its minor league hockey franchise, the Portland Pirates, would be breaking its lease two years after a $34 million renovation of the team’s home, Cross Insurance Arena, was completed.

Voters approved the bond which financed what was then called the Cumberland County Civic Center in 2011, and according to the Portland Press-Herald, “The lease has provisions in the event the team breaks the agreement that limit the damages the arena can claim to $100,000.”

The Pirates had the worst and second-worst attendance in the American Hockey League (AHL) in each of the past two seasons, drawing on average about 3,000 fans in an arena that seats over 6,700. The arena reportedly ran a $600,000 loss last year, which the taxpayers are also on the hook for. 

We have noted often here at Reason that professional sports arenas are almost always a detriment rather than a stimulus to local economies, and publicly-financed arenas are misbegotten boondoggles which enrich no one but wealthy team owners and politicians who live to be photographed holding shovels at sdium tagroundbreaking ceremonies. 

Watch Reason TV’s doc on Hartford (Conn.)’s experience in subsidizing a minor league ballpark below.