Nutrition for the Brain.

Two intelligent articles worth spending your time with...

Dahlia Lithwick reviews Univ. of Minn. Law Prof. Dale Carpenter's book on the Lawrence case background:

Whereas only a decade ago public-opinion polls showed Americans opposing gay marriage by a two-to-one margin, new polls show that slightly more than half of Americans are in favor of it. What explains the shift? The most commonly accepted account is what could be called the “Will & Grace” theory. A mainstream television comedy featuring openly gay characters demonstrated what social scientists have long known: the single most important indicator of one’s support for gay rights is whether one knows someone who is gay. In a pinch, it seems, a fellow on TV will do.

Of course, “Will & Grace” was never real. It replaced America’s unspoken nightmares about homosexual deviancy and dangers with a gorgeously lacquered world of lovable narcissists with enviable kitchenware. Yet the cultural logic was hard to resist. In order to counter centuries of vague horror, the real Lawrence and Garner had to be concealed behind a tasteful scrim.


Lawrence and Garner may have been reluctant to talk to civil-rights lawyers from the outset, and reluctant to become the face of gay sodomy in Texas, and yet this imperfect test case could be made over into something more than serviceable. Lambda Legal, a national gay-rights advocacy group, agreed to represent them as a means both of directly challenging Bowers v. Hardwick and of highlighting the consequences of criminalizing consensual gay sex. Sodomy laws were almost never enforced, but their very existence legitimatized a culture of homophobia, and as long as Bowers was still on the books gay-rights arguments would be stymied in the courts.

The legal opportunity depended, however, upon persuading the defendants to go along with an unusual strategy. High-powered lawyers would represent Lawrence and Garner, as long as they agreed to stop saying they weren’t guilty and instead entered a “no contest” plea. By doing so, the two were promised relative personal privacy, and given a chance to become a part of gay-civil-rights history. The cause was greater than the facts themselves. Lawrence and Garner understood that they were being asked to keep the dirty secret that there was no dirty secret.

That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.
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Carpenter’s painstaking interviews establish that Garner and Lawrence not only weren’t having sex but were clothed (Lawrence was in his underwear, preparing for bed) and in separate rooms. This makes sense if you consider the timeline that night (Eubanks was ostensibly just slipping out to buy a soda) and the fact that there was yet another man still in the apartment. But the defendants’ accounts were never disclosed to the media. Nor was the existence of Lawrence’s longtime boyfriend, Jose Garcia. Requests by lawyers that the privacy of the two plaintiffs be respected meant that little attention was ever paid to their personal lives. Lawrence and Garner, for their part, were given strict instructions by the lawyers to shun the press. (Carpenter is careful throughout to show that none of the civil-rights lawyers lied or misrepresented the facts.) The litigation strategy, as the case made its way up through the trial courts and appeals courts, was deliberately framed to highlight the need to decriminalize homosexual conduct as a means of recognizing and legitimatizing same-sex “relationships” and “families.” In short, the legal issue was not that free societies must let drunken gay Texans have sex; it was that gay families around the country, in the words of one of the lawyers in the case, “are essentially just like everybody else.”
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National gay-rights advocates certainly got a boost of confidence when, on the day of oral argument at the Supreme Court, someone in the audience whispered to Smith that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—one of two potentially “gettable” swing voters on the Court—had recently sent a baby gift to a former clerk and her same-sex partner. That’s how much sentiment at the Court had shifted. Justice Lewis Powell, Jr., the swing vote in the 1986 Bowers decision, was seventy-eight when the case reached the high court. Baffled, he told his clerk, “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” That clerk, as it turns out, was gay. But by the time that Lawrence arrived to challenge Bowers the Justices had openly gay clerks, and prominent lawyers who were gay were arguing major business cases at the Court. Insofar as this case could be packaged as a fight for the dignity and respect of a class of successful clerks, advocates, and lawyers now well known to the Justices, it was much easier for Kennedy to conclude, as he did, that “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.”
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Does it matter that, in Justice Kennedy’s stirring meditation on privacy and dignity and the “manifold possibilities” of liberty, the truth of the non-relationship between the non-lovers John Lawrence and Tyron Garner was lost? Does it matter that our collective memory locks the two men together in a mythic embrace? The plaintiffs who seek redress at the Supreme Court are rarely as polished as the movie versions that the Court can bring itself to love. But it’s rare that they disappear altogether, the way Lawrence and Garner did.

At a press conference after the decision was announced, Lawrence read a brief prepared statement and Garner said nothing. Some advocates hoped that Garner might have a career as a gay-rights spokesman. After he gave a drunken speech at a black-tie dinner in the plaintiffs’ honor, that idea was scratched. The case is called Lawrence v. Texas. John Lawrence died last November. Almost no one took note. Garner died five years earlier, at the age of thirty-nine. When Lambda Legal proved unable to raise funds for a proper memorial or burial, Harris County cremated him and sent his ashes home to his family in a plastic bag. There was no funeral. ♦

and, (now that we're past the namecalling, hurt feelings, and personal presidential "support" of young activists), anybody up for a serious numerical analysis of what Ms. Fluke believes she and her friends are entitled to? If so, check this out. Well written, well argued, and ... honest.

Avik S. A. Roy:

There have been, of course, a lot of pixels spilt in the Great Contraception Debate of 2012. But I want to talk about an underappreciated aspect of the story: how the new federal rule forcing all insurers to cover birth control will dramatically inflate the price of contraceptives.

To review, in January, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that, under Obamacare, HHS was issuing a "final rule on preventive health services" that would "require most health insurance plans to cover preventive services for women including recommended contraceptive services without charging a co-pay, co-insurance or a deductible." (Emphasis added.)

Thus far, the big controversy has been about the fact that the HHS rule applies to some entities owned by religious institutions. And justly so. But another big problem with the rule is that it will enrich drug companies at the expense of people who want access to basic contraception.

Today, oral contraceptives are really cheap. At Wal-Mart, a one-month supply of Sprintec or Tri-Sprintec, manufactured by Barr Laboratories (a unit of Israeli drug giant Teva Pharmaceuticals) costs a grand total of $9. It profits the Obama Administration nothing to infringe on religious liberty for ideological reasons...but for $9?
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The reason why birth control is so cheap is because there are no longer any patents covering the use of a combination of estrogen and progesterone for the purpose of oral contraception. The first Pill, Enovid, was made available in the U.S. in 1957. These hormones are very inexpensive to synthesize and manufacture.

Under the current system, drug companies have an incentive to compete on price. If you have health insurance that covers birth control today, your insurer is likely to charge you a higher co-pay for expensive, "branded" versions of birth control over cheaper, generic ones. If you don't have health insurance, and you're buying the Pill directly from the pharmacy at Wal-Mart, you have even more incentive to shop on price.

Under the new mandate, this price incentive disappears. Insurers will be required to pay for any and all oral contraceptives, without charging a co-pay, co-insurance, or a deductible. This "first dollar coverage" of oral contraception kills the incentive to shop based on price.
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If you were surprised that PhRMA, the pharmaceutical trade group, backed Obamacare, now you can see why: the HHS contraception mandate alone will be a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle for the pharma industry. If your health insurance plan allowed you to buy a television, of any price, without any cost-sharing on your part, would you buy a 13-inch CRT or a 60-inch flat screen?

This gets us to a broader question: how the definition of insurance has lost any meaning in the context of American health care. Insurance, traditionally defined, is meant to protect us from the risk of unexpectedly incurring catastrophic costs. Car insurance, for example, protects us against collisions, but doesn't cover our purchase of wiper fluid or gasoline. Homeowner's insurance doesn't cover the cost of air conditioning. And yet, now, we have a federal law that forces health insurance to cover something that is even cheaper than gasoline or air conditioning.

It's this perversion of the term "insurance" that helps highlight the weirdness of Democrats accusing Republicans of wanting to "ban" contraception. If a politician were to oppose a mandate forcing insurers to pay for gasoline or air conditioning, would he then be supporting a "ban" of these products?

The contraception contretemps is a case study in how thoughtless laws and policies drive up the cost of health care, making it less accessible to those who are most in need. The path to truly affordable health care involves moving in exactly the opposite direction: restoring the notion that health insurance is meant as protection for catastrophic costs, and letting people buy birth-control pills for themselves.

This is what's created when big government gets into bed with big business. Don't say you weren't warned...