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Monday, November 24, 2008
Sears’ charge on social issue should be cheered
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Until one cultural trend is reversed, conservatives have no hope of slowing the march toward big and rapacious government.
We can’t win elections.
We can’t solve the problems of public education.
We can’t solve those of health care, retirement, crime or any other social policy issue.
At the core, the show-stopper is this: In 2007, 28 percent of white, 50 percent of Hispanic and 71 percent of black babies were born to single women.
Start with that abuse, that terrible wrong to children, and society never recovers. It will never be possible to invent a public education system or a parenting network or a criminal justice avoidance and rehabilitation programs that rescue the masses of children intentionally brought into the world without a mother and father in their daily lives.
Clearly all of us have a compelling interest in reversing this tragic abuse of human life.
The chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Leah Ward Sears, who is 53, announced last month that she’ll leave the high court next June. “I’m interested [in] exploring another chapter in my life,” she told AJC reporter Bill Rankin. “I want to see whatever else is out there.” Her decision thrills — and not because I am in occasional disagreement with her judicial opinions.
It thrills because she is poised, as evidenced by her declared interests, to become an important national voice speaking to other institutions — to the media, to the entertainment industry, to universities, to churches and synagogues and to Oprah — on America’s most threatening social issue.
That is, without question, the harm we are doing ourselves and our nation by intentionally abusing children.
The Georgia Supreme Court last week kicked off the first of what Sears and her co-host, Justice P. Harris Hines, expect to be an annual Supreme Court Summit on Children, Marriage and Family Law. Its premise is this:
“The decline of marriage in America has had a dramatic impact on the well-being of our children. Children born out of wedlock are more likely to live in poverty, be incarcerated later in life, suffer from physical and sexual abuse, abuse alcohol and drugs, and engage in early sexual activity and premarital child-bearing.”
The summit, also sponsored by the New York-based Institute for American Values, brought together experts from across the country to talk about marriage and its importance to children.
The plain reality is that a society that creates human life as trophies of sexual conquest, as fond remembrances of past relationships, as a way to avoid the question “why did you get out of bed this morning?” or as a lifestyle-support claim, is in danger of social destruction.
Some figure of prominence with the credentials to gain entry at the top has to come forth to talk about marriage and children, about the harm the upper and middle classes do with the signals they send that marriage doesn’t matter, that men are expendable and that intelligent leadership can devise an acceptable alternative to a mother and father in the home.
I don’t know Sears and I agree on specifics — I suspect not — but she cares. She’s willing to talk about it. She’s not intimidated into silence, as many upper- and middle-class black people are because of an imagined imperfection — a divorce, for example — in their own lives.
A revolution is required, a revolution on the order of the cultural shift across the media, the entertainment industry, schools, government and other institutions that have virtually eliminated smoking as a lifestyle choice.
On the Supreme Court, she’s at a real disadvantage in becoming the needed national figure leading the charge to change the culture.
Her entry into the topic is the law. The legal code is an aspect of it, certainly. But other institutions need to address, too — like, for example, the constant political correctness in newspaper stories that allow us to tell tragic stories of the suffering of children without ever once bothering to ask the question: “Where’s the child’s father?” The implied message is that he doesn’t matter and is not expected to be a part of the solution anyway.
Sears, the first black female chief justice in America, has accomplished much in her life.
The really important accomplishment could be ahead.
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Obama should cut capital gains tax
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If Congress is about to draft an economic stimulus spending proposal that could cost as much as $700 billion, why not “rescue” the auto industry, resort developers, fast-food franchises and the likes of Citigroup? Free money.
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday that an effective plan would require spending $500 billion to $700 billion, about four times the size of the $1.75 billion proposal President-elect Barack Obama put forth in the campaign.
The stimulus, with a large chunk of spending on infrastructure and “green jobs,” would be “a little like having a New Deal, but you do it before a depression occurs, not after,” he said. Schumer, appearing on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanapoulos,” said Congress could have it ready for Obama by Inauguration Day.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CBS that a giant stimulus package could contain a tax cut.
The tax cut that’s needed is unlikely to be included, of course. That would be a significant cut in the capital gains, something that could draw investors back into the stock market.
The problem is panic and uncertainty about the tax policies of the new administration. Obama has taken some steps to calm those concerns. His Cabinet appointees, especially at Treasury, are calming, as is the advance word that there’ll be no tax increases in the January plan. Now cut capital gains in half — or better yet, to zero as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has proposed.
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