I went to a duel on a recent evening in a large auditorium at the University of Virginia, with Linda Chavez and the dean of admissions, Mr. Blackburn, speaking on affirmative action. Both had good points, but I’d give Blackburn a clear victory. I’d guesstimate three-quarters of the audience had decided on that outcome in advance. The crowd was slightly rowdy, by UVa lecture-hall standards.

Chavez spoke first. She runs the Center for Equal Opportunity, in DC, and their reports on read more

The living wage campaign as a national phenomenon has grown rapidly. Twenty-nine cities, counties, and school boards have passed explicit living wage ordinances raising the minimum wage for anyone employed directly or indirectly by that body. These wage rates vary, but are often an amount designed to keep a full-time worker’s family of four out of poverty.

A Living Wage ordinance stipulates that the minimum wage level will be adjusted for inflation and cost of living annually. Other cities read more

The Washington Post reported on April 20th that a New York-based human rights group called Human Rights Watch has found that two new super-max prisons in Virginia are marked by racism, brutality, and inhumane conditions, and that, with room to spare in these highest security prisons, state officials are rushing to fill them with prisoners “better suited to less harsh conditions.”

In the view of many advocacy groups, including Amnesty International and the ACLU, ALL prisoners are better read more

Why do kids get shot in schools in the U.S.? The vast presence of guns is one possible contributing factor. So is the violence in U.S. movies, music, books, magazines, and video games. The extreme inequality in wealth in the U.S., poor child raising, high divorce, and low quality schools are other possible culprits. It’s also possible to suspect an American genetic tendency toward violence, but I don’t believe we know enough to address that possibility.

Guns are defended as necessary read more

If you listen to the advertisements of candidates for state delegate from Virginia’s 30th district you may be surprised to learn that socialism is alive and well in this rural section of the piedmont just to the south of booming Northern Virginia and just to the north of Charlottesville where the University of Virginia and strange liberal ideas can be found.

Independent candidate, J.D. “Dori” Callahan is campaigning against socialism. A homemade sign in a yard in Culpeper reads read more

One good reason to read history is to discover that many of the worst aspects of our lives today are very recent inventions. It’s extremely fast today: the time that it takes an innovation of the worst sort to become thought of as the way things have always been.
After WWII incomes over $400,000 were taxed at 91 percent. By stages, this has been reduced to 28 percent. As a result, between 1978 and 1990 the net worth of the Forbes 400 tripled and $70 billion per year was lost in read more

First, it takes life.

Second, it encourages the taking of life and other forms of revenge. Not only is there no evidence that it reduces crime, but it is defended in the same terms that many criminals use to defend their actions.

Third, it is dishonest. If we are going to kill people, we should do so publicly and graphically. Outside of Florida, where the victim’s head sometimes catches on fire in the electric chair, we have made murder look like a tetanus shot. When we hide from ourselves read more

Believe it or not, there was a time in this country, and there soon will be again, when “morality” or “ethics” was not shorthand for cruel talk about sex. When Upton Sinclair said, “My efforts are to find out what is righteousness in the world, to live it, and try to help others to live it,” he was talking about helping huge groups of people out of misery, helping them to lead fuller lives. In other words he was “mixing” ethics with economic issues. read more

Orange County Review
12 Oct. 2000

To the editor:

Tamara Jones’s letter in your Oct. 12 issue advises people to vote in the upcoming elections not with regard to “the economy” but with an eye toward supporting the idea of “the family.” I’d like to argue that families often stand or fall because of economic matters, such as the declining wages most Americans are receiving for increased hours at work.

Jones blames smaller paychecks on taxes, but taxes have not read more

This letter was printed in an edited form in the USA Today on Oct. 10, 2000.
4 October 2000

To the Editor:

I’m glad to hear Philip Meyer is planning to vote, and hope he votes for the candidate I favor. But what are we supposed to make of his list of reasons not to bother voting? He suggests that people do not vote because they are content. No doubt, there are some of these. But I know a lot of people who do not vote because they don’t see a candidate they like and are disgusted read more