Here’s an interesting story out of Cabell County, West Virginia. Apparently, the Cabell County court decided that a mother had to share custody of her three-year-old daughter with the girl’s babysitters:

The sitters intervened in Cabell County Family Court in March 2006, after the mother told the court she planned to move to Texas.

The sitters were distant cousins of the child’s father, who did not live with the mother and the child.

Family Court Judge Patricia Keller immediately awarded complete custody to the sitters.

According to the article, the sitters’ lawyer has not argued that the mother in this case is unfit, just that “his clients [meet] the standards as psychological co-parents”, whatever that means^[a].

I am not a lawyer, so I can’t argue whether the sitters are legally entitled to any custody rights based on “psychological” parentage. However, as a human being with some capacity for rational thought, I can’t believe that there is a standard in our society that allows anyone who shares a bond with a child to assume parental rights when the actual parents have neither a.) been found to be unfit or b.) willingly given up custody. It’s absurd. While Justice Maynard’s flippant “Chuck E. Cheese” remark may be a slight example of hyperbole, the fact remains that emotional bonds between the sitters and this child are not sufficient to give them custody of her.

1. As of this writing, the only six instances of the phrase “psychological co-parents” found by Google all pertain to this case. [↩]

When I wrote about the Jena 6 before, I took the most biased site I could find (one specifically dedicated to defending the sextet) and assumed everything they said was true^[a]. I still found their arguments unconvincing, and concluded that the Jena Six should be punished.

Now, the Christian Science Monitor has an article by Craig Franklin, who lives in Jena, exposes some of the Media Myths About the Jena 6. Here’s a sample:

Myth 2: Nooses a Signal to Black Students. An investigation by school officials, police, and an FBI agent revealed the true motivation behind the placing of two nooses in the tree the day after the assembly. According to the expulsion committee, the crudely constructed nooses were not aimed at black students. Instead, they were understood to be a prank by three white students aimed at their fellow white friends, members of the school rodeo team. (The students apparently got the idea from watching episodes of “Lonesome Dove.”) The committee further concluded that the three young teens had no knowledge that nooses symbolize the terrible legacy of the lynchings of countless blacks in American history.

While it seems absurd on the face of things that these students didn’t know what these nooses symbolized, that may actually lend credence to the committee’s findings. After all, the committee (presumably made up of officials from the school district) is essentially finding that the district’s American History teachers have utterly failed to do their jobs, and it would have been much easier just to throw the book at the students.

Read the whole thing. Even if you don’t believe all of Franklin’s points, it’s worth noting that there is more to the story than most people seem to know.

( þ NRO’s The Corner )

1. Well, except in the case of the “stroke of a pen” threat by the DA, where I found the reaction to be so over-the-top as to be unbelieveable, and went looking for corroboration [↩]

I thought some of the costumes at the Halloween party that my girlfriend and I attended were a little too revealing, but because they were on adults, I figured it was their choice. This, on the other hand, is just disgusting.

Megan McArdle writes about vouchers. Specifically, she writes about individuals who have enough money to pull their kids out of public schools and then oppose the idea of helping poorer families do the same:

I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers “destroying” the public schools by “cherry picking” the best students, when they’ve made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today. Now, I don’t accuse David Nicholson of this particular sin . . . yet. Right now he’s only guilty of the lesser sin of viewing real estate purchases as the natural vehicle through which one should excercise educational choice. Perhaps he favors vouchers to help the kids he’s left behind. But if he does, I sure wish he’d mentioned it.

Is the problem with vouchers the cherry-picking of the best students? I wouldn’t have thought so. Cherry-picking the best students seems like a lesser problem to me. It is true that the best students tend to be those with the most involved parents, and the most involved parents would be the most likely to make use of a voucher system. That would leave the worse students (and some good students who happen to have less involved parents) in the public school system. If that cherry-picking of students was all that happened, the voucher system wouldn’t hurt anyone. It wouldn’t help everyone, but it would help enough individuals that it would be an overall positive for our society.

It seems to me that the more valid argument against vouchers is not that it allows for the cherry-picking of the best students, but that it allows for the cherry-picking of the best teachers. A school that offers better teachers would get more students (and, thus, more money). As a result, schools would not only be competing for students, but also for teachers. The better teachers would be able to demand better salaries at these schools, leaving only the worst teachers for the worst schools. Arguably, this, not the cherry-picking of students, is what hurts the most, because the students who are left behind are left behind in a lower-quality school than they would otherwise have attended.

Despite this, I believe that the overall effect of a voucher system^[a] would be positive. I readily admit that I could be wrong about that, but our current public school system is very broken and fixing it is a very difficult problem. Vouchers seem to me to be the best option to fix the system at this point, but I am more than willing to examine other alternatives.

1. I’d even take a pseudo-voucher system, where parents and students were given the right to choose from a selection of public school options. [↩]

For those who missed it, J.K. Rowling recently told fans at Carnegie Hall a secret about Albus Dumbledore — he was gay.

I foresee a number of protests about this in the future, mostly from the same people who protested the books before. If they weren’t willing to read the books before they protested that the books would seduce young people into witchcraft and Satanism^[a], they probably aren’t going to go read the books before protesting that the books attempt to seduce children into a homosexual lifestyle.

In the absense of new works set in the Potter universe, I really couldn’t care less what Rowling has to say about the universe. As I’ve learned from reading comics and watching television shows, creator comments outside of the story itself are non-canon, and thus secondary to what is actually seen in the works. Dumbledore doesn’t become gay simply because Rowling says he was — the books don’t give any definitive hints one way or the other, so it’s open to the reader’s interpretation. Her words may lead some people to read the clues that way, but if others prefer to read the stories as though he’s heterosexual, I see nothing wrong with that, either. I’m reminded of something that Orson Scott Card said in the foreword that appears in my copy of Ender’s Game:

All of these uses are valid; all of these readings of the book are “correct.” For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender’s Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and audience. The “true” story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

The story of Ender’s Game is not this book, though it has that title emblazoned on it. The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.

The story of Harry Potter was created by J. K. Rowling, but she no longer owns it solely. If readers prefer to read the text as though Dumbledore is heterosexual, and there is nothing in the text to say explicitly otherwise, then, for them, in their version of the story, he is heterosexual.

That said, if Rowling intended Dumbledore to be gay from the outset, I’m actually somewhat pleased about how she handled it. The role that Dumbledore played never required that his sexuality be highlighted, and, so, it wasn’t. Many liberal writers who intend a major character to be gay tend to not only make the character’s sexuality known, they tend to make it the defining trait of the character^[b].

I applaud Rowling for her restraint in the way she portrayed Dumbledore’s character (again assuming she always meant for him to be gay). This is how minority groups will finally end the various types of discrimination that they face: instead of bashing others in the face with their differences, they need to make it obvious that the ways in which we are all the same greatly outweigh any minor differences like sexual orientation or skin color.

1. The “witchcraft” in these books has as much to do with real witchcraft as the Hardy Boys series has to do with real detective work. [↩]
2. My guess would be that this is related to the liberal tendency to believe that the groups to which one belongs should be more meaningful than one’s individuality — this is why the issues of Obama’s race and Clinton’s gender are so important to them, as well as why we hear people pondering such nonsense such as whether Obama is “black enough”, but that’s just my guess. [↩]