the Revision Division

NEVER DONATE. EVER. Judge rules that Kansan who provided sperm to lesbian couple owes child support.

“In this case, quite simply, the parties failed to perform to statutory requirement of the Kansas Parentage Act in not enlisting a licensed physician at some point in the artificial insemination process, and the parties’ self-designation of (Marotta) as a sperm donor is insufficient to relieve (Marotta) of parental right and responsibilities to the child,” Mattivi wrote.

The Kansas Department for Children and Families filed the case in October 2012, seeking to have Marotta declared the father of a child born to Jennifer Schreiner in 2009. The state’s objective was to hold Marotta responsible for about $6,000 in public assistance the state provided, as well as future child support.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Obamacare Security Risks Abound.

MANN-MADE: The Inventor of the Global-Warming ‘Hockeystick’ Doubles Down.

SUSPICIOUS: Scientists detect “spoiled onions” trying to sabotage Tor privacy network.

IMPROVEMENT: Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein Leaves WaPo Same Day Libertarians Join Up.

Joining the paper will be the blogging team put together by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, known in the web world for his libertarian-conservative political views and his love of data and free speech. Unlike Klein, however, Volokh and his co-bloggers will not make the pretense that their ruminations are utterly devoid of ideological thinking. . . .

While Klein’s discordantly named Wonkblog (two words that should never have been invented much less combined) became one of the Post’s more popular regular sections, he did come under criticism for his creation of a secret email discussion group called “JournoList” which encouraged left-leaning pundits and political aides to collaborate with supposedly objective journalists to generate both research and talking points. Since the list was exposed and shut down, Klein and his co-bloggers compiled quite a record of defending and cheer-leading for President Obama and other liberal Democrats while refusing to properly admit their own allegiances.

The Volokh hire is an interesting one as it brings some more balance to the paper while also ensuring that the intellectual calibre of the Post will increase.

PATENT TROLL: MPHJ Exposed: The Real Dirt on the Notorious Scanner Troll.

MPHJ owns a handful of patents, which it claims covers the basic technology for scanning documents to email. You read that right—simply scanning documents to email. . . .

Think, for a second, about the proposition that one party can claim that its patents (in this case five—four of which come from the same family) tie up every American business that uses basic scanning technology. Clearly, the patent system isn’t working. The patents are too broad and vague, and there is no evidence that they somehow advanced scanning technology. And when these patents end up in the hands of parties like MPHJ, they become tools for abuse.

BILL VALLICELLA on how to deal with self-proclaimed relativists. I’m including the following excerpt to stand as an example of what one should do when confronted with the claim that making moral judgments is wrong:

3. If your friend thinks it is wrong to make moral judgments, ask him whether he thinks it is morally wrong.  If he says yes, then point out that he has just made a moral judgment; he has made the moral judgment that making moral judgments is morally wrong.

4. Then ask him whether (a) he is OK with contradicting himself, or (b) makes an exception for the meta assertion that making moral judgments is morally wrong, or (c) thinks that both the meta judgment and first-order moral judgments (e.g., sodomy is morally wrong) are all morally wrong.  (C) is  a logically consistent position, although rejectable for other reasons.

5. He might of course say that ‘must not’ in ‘must not be judgmental’ is not to be construed morally, but in some other way.  Press him on how it is to be construed.

UK: Football Fan Arrested for ‘Ripping up Koran’.

Police have arrested a man on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after he allegedly tore up pages of the Koran during a match at Birmingham City’s ground. . . .

Whilst on bail, the suspect is banned from attending any football games and must not visit any city where Middlesbrough FC are playing.

RUSS ROBERTS: Unintended consequences. “Sometimes, when you try to achieve something, you don’t just fail to do it, you actually achieve the opposite.”

WHICH GETS VOTES? Should we care if universal pre-K programs actually, you know, work — or is caring enough?

Earlier: Brookings: New Evidence Raises Doubts on Obama’s Preschool for All.

COMMON SENSE FROM BILL VALLICELLA: Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination.

The word ‘prejudice’ needs analysis. It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar. . . .

‘Prejudice’ could also mean ‘prejudgment.’  . . .

My prejudgments about rattle snakes are in place and have been for a long time. I don’t need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a ‘unique individual,’ whatever that might mean. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa. What experience has written, she retains, and that’s all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice. The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark. Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father’s prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not ‘discriminating’ against them? Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates. Liberals are especially discriminating. The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in. Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways. That’s why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction. . . .

‘Profiling,’ like ‘prejudice’ and ‘discrimination,’ has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.  Unjustly.  What’s wrong with profiling?  We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.  Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can’t answer this question, then you lack common sense. But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a five-minute romp. Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

MARK PERRY: Teen employment and the minimum wage over 60 years.

HEATHER MACDONALD: The Humanities and Us.

The UCLA English department—like so many others—is more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.

Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies. The 2014 Modern Language Association conference, for example, the annual gathering of America’s literature (not social work) faculty, will address “embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed . . . to expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”

It was not always so.

DIVERSITY MEANS “GET BENT”: The new intolerance: will we regret pushing Christians out of public life?

I was invited to speak at a conference on marriage last summer, to be held at the Law Society in London. The government had just launched a public consultation on changing the law to allow same-sex marriage. The conference was a chance for supporters of traditional marriage to contribute to the debate. . . .

A few days before the conference, someone from Christian Concern, the group which had organised the event, rang me in a panic: the Law Society had refused to let us meet on their premises. The theme was “contrary to our diversity policy”, the society explained in an email to the organisers, “espousing as it does an ethos which is opposed to same-sex marriage”. In other words, the Law Society regarded support for heterosexual union, still the only legal form of marriage in Britain, as discriminatory.

Hurriedly, another venue was found, the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in the heart of London. . . .

With only 24 hours to go before the conference, managers at the QEII centre told Christian Concern that the subject it planned to discuss was “inappropriate”. The booking was cancelled. When challenged, the QEII centre’s chief executive, Ernest Vincent, cited its diversity policy as reason for the cancellation. A journalist asked for a copy of the diversity policy. The centre refused to provide it.

FOR “THE CHILDREN”: NY Pols Seek Youth Football Ban.

Michael Bennedetto has introduced legislation to ban tackle football for children under fourteen. The bill, which could subject Pop Warner coaches to fines, enjoys the support of five co-sponsors. Because nearly three-quarters of athletes participating in the sport do so at the sandlot level, the bill would ban the vast majority of tackle football played in the state.

“No child thirteen years old or younger shall play, practice, or otherwise engage in organized tackle football,” decrees the bill forwarded by the Bronx Democrat. The five-term assemblyman advanced a similar bill last year. He then justified the legislation by telling the New York Daily News, “I want to protect the children.” . . .

Despite comprising the vast the majority of tackle football participants, youth players comprise just a tiny fraction of collision fatalities. For instance, during the decade from 2003 to 2012 a sandlot player died from a football hit every other season on average. Not only are the total youth player collision deaths dramatically lower than such fatalities among their high school and college counterparts, their fatality rate—given that there are around 3 million sandlot players competing—is dramatically lower, too. This fall, collisions killed more skateboarders in the city that Assemblyman Benedetto hails from than youth football players in all of the United States.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION and Forensic Science Scandals.

Law enforcement and criminal justice rely on modern, First-World police science—medical examiners, crime scene investigators, ballistics experts and forensic scientists. These people conduct autopsies; gather evidence at crime scenes; dust for fingerprints; test-fire and examine suspected murder weapons and ammunition; and weigh and test substances suspected to be drugs in narcotics cases.

If the “experts” are incompetent and/or dishonest, countless innocent people will be doomed to spend years in prison, some may even be executed, while the guilty will go free.

Thanks to the blessings of diversity, America has now reached this level of Keystone Kop police science. . . .

On paper, Gilchrist, Dookhan, and Salvador were all qualified. They all had the requisite college degrees. And yet, they were all utterly unqualified.

Such scandals could have easily been prevented by exercising the hard-won knowledge that has grown out of generations of the development of tools such as college admissions and professional tests. But such tests had been ruled “racist” because blacks, Hispanics, and many other non-white groups did not do as well, on average, as whites and Northeast Asians did.

STEVE SAILER: NYT, 1986: Boyhood Effeminacy and Later Homosexuality. “Here is a very interesting New York Times article from over 27 years ago on a classic long-term study. I’m not aware of this type of study ever being done again. . . . There are simply so many more minefields these days that it’s hard to imagine reading a single article this dense with information and analysis without long stretches of moralizing filler.”

From the comments: “It’s depressing in a way to read this article. It reflects a time in which science was far less constrained as to the outcomes that were acceptable to publish. One of the most frustrating things about the current reign of political correctness on all of these gender/sexuality issues is that we will never be allowed to know the unvarnished truth about any of them.”

THE FREEMAN interviews professor of sociology Anne Wortham. Here are some excerpts:

Throughout the twentieth century blacks have had the opportunity to present their demand for civil rights in a way that would move Americans and their government toward a greater appreciation for individual rights. However, in every instance, black and white civil rights advocates have reinterpreted the Constitution as protecting group rights to justify and expand the welfare state. Rather than liberating blacks from their dependency on the state that began with the New Deal, and respecting them by insisting that they take responsibility for their freedom, civil rights leaders, politicians, and the American people proceeded to expand New Deal policies with Great Society policies that have cultivated the American people’s expectation that the costs of an individual’s risky behavior will be borne not by the individual but by a pool of people—by taxpayers in general, by “the rich” in particular, by society at large.

Whenever there is a crisis that is defined as exacerbating the wound of racism, the air is filled with the ritualistic cry for a “conversation on race.” The problem with the call for a conversation is that it requires that whites and blacks lie to each other. The conversation is stymied by two pathologies: the self-indictment of whites who were raised to believe that acknowledgment of collective guilt is a badge of honor, and the self-indictment of minorities who were raised to believe that collective victimhood is a badge of moral superiority. With such irrational sentiments on the part of both whites and blacks at their disposal, “diversity” merchants and political race hustlers can play their deuces wild in perpetuating the lies that all whites are variously racist, and that black race consciousness is a rational response to inherent white racism, and should therefore be tolerated.

I very much resent being viewed as a source of validation by virtue of my racial and gender categories. It evades the fact that I represent myself, that my commitment to the principles of liberty rejects the equation of individuals with statistical categories. It is bad enough that race-conscious collectivists portray my defense of liberty as a cover for the rejection of my race. But it would be doubly insulting and ludicrous for white advocates of liberty to view my presence among them as proof that they are not racists—as though they allowed me to their ranks. It is also disturbing when white freedom supporters judge the validity of their ideas by what pro-freedom black writers, politicians, and pundits say. Their thinking is: “If Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, or Dr. Ben Carson says it, it’s okay for me to say so as well.” My response to this attitude is: Assume ownership of your own thinking.

TYLER COWEN on minimum wage studies. “Now, I don’t intend this as any kind of snide, anti-theory, or anti-technique comment, but when there is a clash between simple, validated observations and complicated regressions, no matter how state of the art the latter may be, I don’t always side with the regressions.”

JAMES JOYNER: Scientific Research Is Unreliable, Unreliable Scientists Report. “The problem, unfortunately, is getting worse rather than better. The use of statistics to make academic research, even in ‘soft’ fields like psychology and political science, more ‘scientific’ has become the norm over the last half century. Unfortunately, most of us in those fields—and for that matter, most chemists, physicists, and physicians—don’t truly understand the increasingly complicated statistics we’re employing. That is, we roughly understand what they’re supposed to do but not the math behind them. And that makes us oblivious to errors.”

REDISTRIBUTION ROUNDUP: Questions for proponents of government-controlled redistribution of wealth. Some good links to Don Boudreaux and Mark Perry. Also of interest is a link to an article from last month: CBO:Top 40% Paid 106.2% of Income Taxes; Bottom 40% Paid -9.1%, Got Average of $18,950 in ‘Transfers’.

BILL VALLICELLA: Hoplophobia in New York.

STRONG, INDEPENDENT WOMAN: Wendy Davis Shows How You Climb the Ladder, Feminist Style.

A major part of the image she’s running on is her self-made single teen mother story, which plays very well to elderly Northeastern Democrats, hence her favorable coverage in media outlets such as the NY Times. It helps, that she also has a degree from Harvard, but until recently the story behind how she got it has remained unchallenged.

The Dallas Morning News helps set the record straight.

First, she never was a single teen mother. In fact, she was married when she had her first child, and divorced her husband at the age of 21. . . .

Very soon after her divorce, her father introduced her to an older man named Jeff Davis. Mr. Davis, a 34-year-old lawyer, began dating her, and married her within a couple years, when she was 24 years old. By this time, she had enrolled at Texas Christian University, and her new husband paid her tuition at the college. After graduating, she was accpeted at Harvard Law School, which Mr. Davis also funded by cashing in his 401(k) and taking out a loan. In the meanwhile, he worked hard and took care of her daughters back in Texas while she worked on her Harvard degree.

In the years after Wendy Davis graduated from Harvard, her husband continued to pay off the loan that put her through Harvard and to be a father to her children.

This is what happened next:

Over time, the Davises’ marriage was strained. In November 2003, Wendy Davis moved out.

Jeff Davis said that was right around the time the final payment on their Harvard Law School loan was due. “It was ironic,” he said. “I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.”

UK: Being judgemental on divorce would be ‘unhelpful’, says bishop.

“Our clergy are already engaged a great deal with the support of families and married couples, both with their own skills and commitment and working with other agencies … wherever possible a marriage that might be in danger can be supported and assisted rather than allowing it to collapse.

“Sadly, there will be marriages that for one reason or another have died.”

Bishop Platten rejected the idea of being more “judgemental” on divorce, saying such an attitude was “unhelpful” and “implies somehow that whoever is making the judgement is better or knows better than the person about whom they are talking”.

DOG BITES MAN: Middle School Displays Graphic List of Sex Acts for ‘Health’ Class.

CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION primarily at the hands of Muslims.

The majority of anti-Christian persecution in the world in 2013 took place at the hands of Muslims, according to a list by Open Doors USA .

The nondenominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide recently released its 2014 World Watch List, that describes and ranks anti-Christian persecution in a list of the 50 worst countries for the past year.

It reported increasing violence against Christians in Africa, and said radical Muslims were the main source of persecution in 36 countries on its list – both in Islamic countries and in non-Muslim countries such as Kenya (ranked 40th), Ethiopia (17th) and Tanzania (49th). . . .

“The one glaring fact that emerges from this report,” American-born scholar Raymond Ibrahim said in his analysis of the statistics on the Christian Broadcasting Network News website, “is that the overwhelming majority of Christian persecution around the world today is being committed at the hands of Muslims of all races, languages, cultures and socio-political circumstances: Muslims from among America’s allies (Saudi Arabia) and its enemies (Iran); Muslims from economically rich nations (Qatar) and from poor nations (Somalia and Yemen); Muslims from ‘Islamic republic’ nations (Afghanistan) and from ‘moderate’ nations (Malaysia and Indonesia); [and] Muslims from nations rescued by America (Kuwait).”

WESLEY J. SMITH: Sex Change Ruled “Medically Necessary”.

A federal appeals court has upheld a trial ruling that requires taxpayers to pay for a murderer’s sex change. . . .

This probably means that Bradley Manning will eventually win his claim that becoming Chelsea Manning is a civil right.

People who predicted that Obamacare and health insurance would soon be paying for sex change surgeries were once laughed at. But if sex change surgery is medically necessary–rather than elective–under the law, I don’t see how Obamacare won’t cover it.

Meanwhile, in California, a new law essentially states that every gay person in the state is entitled to group health insurance coverage for fertility treatments if they want a baby. They may be biologically fertile, but are considered infertile because they don’t want heterosexual intercourse.

Straights, in contrast, have to demonstrate actual infertility to be entitled to mandatory group health insurance coverage for infertility.

Our medical priorities are shifting from being concerned foremost with saving or extending life, to facilitating fulfilling lives as determined by the patient’s internal narrative.

CHICAGO given 180 days by federal judge to formulate new law governing gun stores.

Judge Edward Chang of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, granted the city’s request for time to craft an ordinance reflecting, as one municipal official said, “many detailed components, including zoning, licensing and operational requirements for gun dealers.”

In his original Jan. 6 ruling, Chang not only struck down Chicago’s decades-old ban on firearm sales and transfers, but opined that the ban in America’s third-largest city doesn’t necessarily reduce violent crime, as the city has long insisted as a rationale for the prohibition.

“Chicago’s ordinance goes too far in outright banning legal buyers and legal dealers from engaging in lawful acquisitions and lawful sales of firearms,” Chang wrote, according to Forbes, “and at the same time the evidence does not support that the complete ban sufficiently furthers the purposes that the ordinance tries to serve.”

ROBERT SPENCER: UK Muslim who faked evidence of “wave of attacks on Muslims” after jihad murder claims rise in “anti-Muslim attacks,” calls for speech restrictions.

Fiyaz Mughal is clearly not interested in defending innocent people, but in inflating the numbers of attacks on innocent Muslims, so as to create and perpetuate the false and tendentious claim that resisting jihad terror and Islamic supremacism somehow endangers innocent people. Tell Mama and Faith Matters showed this clearly when they demanded that the UK Home Office ban Pamela Geller and me from entering the country; the Home Office should have recognized the dishonesty at the heart of their effort in light of their manipulation of the “Islamophobia” figures.

And now, even though Fiyaz Mughal has been thoroughly discredited, the tools at the Voice of America are repeating his distortions and calls for restrictions on the freedom of speech — for by “hate speech,” Mughal means any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism.

UK: Murders, rapes, honor killings, FGM going unreported in Sharia no-go zones.

DOG BITES MAN: Gawker Got Literally Everything Wrong About Florida’s New Warning Shots Bill.

Gawker reporter Adam Weinstein wrote Friday that Marion Hammer, a former NRA president and lobbyist for the Unified Sportsmen of Florida, was responsible for writing and pushing the bill.

In an interview with the Free Beacon, Hammer said that was not the case.

“We did not write it,” Hammer said. “It’s Families Against Mandatory Minimum’s bill, and my understanding is that Greg Newburn and his staff wrote it. They just came to us and asked if we’d endorse the bill.”

Greg Newburn, the Florida director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), corroborated Hammer’s story.

“Marion is correct,” Newburn said via email. “I asked for her help in reforming 10-20-Life, and she’s been tremendously helpful in that effort. But the NRA had nothing to do with writing the original bill.”

STEVE SAILER: Hispanics led the Housing Bubble. Blacks did not.

PRESUMED GUILTY: Colleges think men accused of sexual assault get too much of that due process and fairness stuff.

The consequences for someone expelled for sexual assault are life-altering. Prof. Cynthia Bowman of Cornell said “they will follow him throughout his life.” Even Brett Sokolow, the most prominent champion for sexual assault victims’ rights in American academia, has expressed concerns about the consequences of expulsion and has said “that a lot of colleges now are expelling and suspending people they shouldn’t, for fear they’ll get nailed on Title IX.”

In Virginia, Delegate Rick Morris has introduced a bill that would grant students facing college disciplinary charges punishable by a suspension of more than 10 days or expulsion the right to be represented by an attorney or other advocate of the student’s choosing.

Mr. Morris had better be prepared for a fight. Last year, North Carolina passed a similar law, and university officials were not happy about it.

Lynn Roeder, Dean of Students at East Carolina, said she that adding attorneys to the disciplinary process would take away an opportunity for students to learn from their mistakes. She said: “‘The whole process is not to be adversarial . . . . We know students make mistakes and what we want to do it make sure we’re able to help them make better decisions so that’s why we never had lawyers.’”

How do you know a student made a “mistake” without a fair hearing, Ms. Roeder?

WARREN MEYER: Unreported Obamacare Data: Exchange Sales Conversion Is Much Worse When The Taxpayer is Not Subsidizing the Policy. “In essence, applicants are more than 3 times more likely to sign up if they are getting taxpayer money. The exchanges are not selling health care, they are selling subsidies. People sign up, check to see if they have money coming, and go away if they don’t and stay if they do.”

EDUCATIONREALIST on memorization:

Realize too that the memorization battles are just another front in the skills vs. knowledge debate. The skills side, touted primarily by progressives and, separately, many teachers themselves, emphasize the need for students to know how to do things—think critically, problem solve, analyze information. The knowledge side, headed by the great E. D. Hirsch, complain about the skills stranglehold and want to emphasize the need for students to know things—facts organized into a logical curriculum. Those pushing for memorization are squarely on the knowledge side of things, and often mock teachers for being too stupid to understand the importance of knowledge.

I have not entered this debate because until now I haven’t had a framework for my answer of “it depends”. Do we want to reward bright kids for memorizing content knowledge without a clue about what it means and little ability to use it, as is de rigueur in many Asian immigrant populations? I submit that we don’t. Do we want our kids of middle ability or higher to memorize math facts and general content knowledge, the better to improve their reading comprehension and understanding of advanced math? I submit that we do. And how much memorization, exactly, can we expect and demand from our low ability kids? I submit that the answer is “We don’t know, and are scared to find out”.

In other words, memorization requirements, like everything in education, is ultimately set by student cognitive ability, which we aren’t allowed to discuss in any meaningful way.

“DIVORCE IS WAR. Total war. A war on children, a war on family, a war on culture and a war on nations.” “Divorce war is a scorched earth affair, and the only really winning side, is the financiers who supply the weapons and artillery to the participants and stand back and count their profits while the only world the children have ever known, gets annihilated on the battlefield.”

SCOTLAND: Socialising in pubs “boosts mens’ mental health”. The researcher, a woman, doesn’t seem to have considered that it’s not simply buying a round that encourages male friendship, but rather being in a male-only setting.

Earlier: The decline of the all-male club.

ALANA S. NEWMAN remarks on her experience at a recent “third-party reproduction” conference.

Gay male couples are the Number One demographic to be targeted by American surrogacy agencies. This is for several reasons. For starters, partnered gay men are wealthier than any other demographic, earning an average of $116,000 per year per household, which is $21,500 more than the average heterosexual household. Secondly, LGBT individuals and couples are under great social pressure to have children. Their parents want grandchildren. Their friends and colleagues still connect marriage with child-rearing and begin inquiring about plans for parenthood soon after same-sex ceremonies. And some are pressed to acquire children for the sake of the LGBT agenda and the promotion of a la carte families. Children are the latest statement accessories.

India, which was formerly the world’s premier reproductive tourism destination, now bars gay couples and unmarried or un-partnered single-parents-by-choice from using their women as surrogates. These demographics are now “forced” to go elsewhere to procure babies. The United States is an English-speaking nation with get-what-you-pay-for customer-service standards, making it a very appealing market. As a result, American surrogacy agencies are cranking out marketing materials made specifically for gay and single men. This sector of the American reproductive market is booming. . . .

Richard A. Wilson of Grund & Leavitt, a divorce and ART (Assisted Reproductive Technologies) attorney, explained how the divorce revolution has enabled marriage redefinition and its lucrative sister, parenthood redefinition. Thrilled about the end of DOMA, Wilson said with a smile on his face, “Same-sex marriage never would have been possible without the high number of divorces in recent years.” Wilson has apparently profited handsomely from our country’s epidemic of broken families.

AARON CLAREY: Why You Want to be Alton Brown.

WE CAN ONLY HOPE: White Feminism Nearing Endpoint.

This inclusion of women-owned firms under affirmative action has been a great boon to a number of white men who happen to have good wives. Just keep the company in your wife’s name, and it qualifies as a “disadvantaged” business. Affirmative action for white women has not done much for singlemoms, but it’s made a lot of rich white folks’ lives easier (their daughters could take advantage of affirmative action), and it has raised some others into the middle class or above. Those who can keep their marriages together despite having working wives have probably fared best. Overall, due to the negative effects on family formation, it’s probably a wash, but possibly somewhat better for whites than if they were entirely denied affirmative action. . . .

Today, white women are outnumbered by nonwhites in the Democrat coalition, and the numbers count. I’ve predicted for years now that ethnic concerns would eventually trump sexual politics, but I think a lot of people will be surprised by how quickly white women abandon feminism when it no longer provides them with any material benefits. This hasn’t quite come to pass yet, but the writing is on the wall.

SUNSHINE MARY: How do we stop penalizing masculinity and creating foppish men?

SEEKING A NEW LIFE After Lesbianism. “People outside the community don’t know, I think, but very masculine lesbians are ‘allowed’ oftentimes to act like men, while men in our society are afraid to or are shamed for doing so. They are often protective and authoritative, and want to take care of a woman. I longed for that feeling so much that I became very confused. Now I feel like damaged goods and like a good man will not want me.”

ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM, EXTREME EDITION: When a medical miracle leads to painful choice. Yes, we all know what “choice” means. Interestingly, this involves an Irish couple and an Indian IVF clinic making that choice for a surrogate mother. Euphemisms abound [with comments in brackets]:

It’s the medical miracle that can become a nightmare. “Pregnancy reduction” — as it’s euphemistically called — is a horrific decision for any would-be parent to have to confront. [Would-be parent? Also, apparently you “confront” decisions rather than make them.]

It can go wrong and endanger the other foetus. [God forbid we hurt one baby while trying to kill another.] And just how ethical is it to create a pregnancy and then decide to terminate it? [Actually, the pregnancy would continue — just with two instead of three. Translation: And just how ethical is it to make a baby and then decide to kill it?]

Irish couple Fiona Whyte and Sean Malone, who had twins using a surrogacy clinic in India, were the subject of an Irish Independent feature and an RTE documentary called ‘Her Body, Our Baby’ this week. [It’s a “baby” when you want it, but a “foetus” when you don’t.]

The documentary focused on what the couple called their “dilemma” of aborting one viable foetus with a heartbeat to allow the birth of their twins. [Actually, those “twins” are two triplets whose sibling was killed.]

The Indian clinic’s rules didn’t allow for triplet surrogate births. [No euphemism here, it seems. But wouldn’t it have made sense to read the rules first? Then there would be less need to confront a decision.]

MARK PERRY: Update on Eric Holder and the false information that remains on the DOJ website.

In a speech on August 3, 2009 in Long Beach, CA at a conference sponsored by The University of Minnesota’s Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community, Attorney General Eric Holder made the following claim: “Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45. These statistics are shocking and completely unacceptable.” . . .

In a February 4, 2011 op-ed in USAToday, AEI scholar Christina Hoff-Sommers pointed out that Holder’s statistic on the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45 was in fact false. Very false. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) clearly show that the leading causes of death for black women in that age group are cancer, heart disease, unintentional injuries. . . .

In response to Glenn Kessler’s investigation that verified Holder’s claims in 2009 about the leading cause of death for black women were in fact false, DOJ officials promised Kessler and the Washington Post in mid-December that “in the coming days” they would “append a note to the Web pages in question making clear that the claim is not valid.” As of today (January 16, 2014) the false claims remain on the DOJ websites here and here. . . .

Because the source of Eric Holder’s erroneous information has now been traced by the Washington Post to Professor Jacquelyn Campbell and her co-authors, perhaps they can now help correct Holder’s erroneous statement that “intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45.” Unfortunately, that false statement has spread so widely over many years that it has been quoted in books, on websites at the University of Minnesota and Harvard University, in articles by the Huffington Post and the Dallas News and on YouTube, among many other examples. To quote and paraphrase Christina Hoff-Sommers, “Victims of intimate violence are best served by the truth. Eric Holder should correct his department’s website immediately and Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell should help correct and stop the spread of this false information.”

DON BOUDREAUX: The Essence of Antitrust and Regulation. This is a good commentary on “net neutrality.”

UH: Does this disgusting crime have a name?

Lippert, who died in 1999, is suspected of having substituted his sperm for use in an unknown but potentially large number of cases:

. . . Lippert also worked in the lab, and he kept a collection of baby pictures behind his desk.

“He seemed friendly and was very proud of all those pictures,” Paula said. It almost seemed like a brag board up there. Those were the children that he had helped people have.

The in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic closed in 1998, so there may be some difficulty in identifying other cases where Lippert substituted himself for the intended biological fathers.

RUSS ROBERTS at a loss for words regarding Paul Krugman’s duplicity.

There’s nothing wrong with arguing that extending unemployment benefits is a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with arguing that extending unemployment benefits might reduce unemployment benefits  by increasing aggregate demand. But how do you argue that your opponents are ideologues because they believe the opposite–that paying people to be unemployed increase unemployment when you yourself have conceded that that idea is true?

How do you write a post on unemployment benefits without conceding the possibility that your opponents might be right, given that you have made a similar argument to theirs?

COOL: How a Robot Can Sort 2 Tons of Grapes in 12 Minutes.

Each morning Leveque feeds 200 perfect grapes to the machine, which digitally photographs them and forms a kind of Platonic ideal of a grape. Then the sorting starts. Gobs of grapes pour in and the machine snaps a picture of each, 10,000 frames per second, comparing every one to Leveque’s nonpareil. Acceptable? Go on, become wine. Subpar? A quick stream of air blasts it out of the lineup and into obscurity. In action, the machine sounds like popcorn popping.

“Most wineries can sort about two tons an hour, using 15 human sorters,” Leveque says. Hall processes the same amount in twelve minutes, with zero human sorters. And that’s just half of the appeal.

JUST GIVE US MONEY. NOW GET BENT: Planned Parenthood Denies Lawmakers’ Request to See Its Graphic Sex Ed Curriculum.

After parents told state representative Bob McDermott about Pono Choices—the program that teaches middle school students about same sex relationships and oral and anal sex—McDermott attempted to get copies of the entire curriculum from the state department of education, but incredibly, his request was denied. He then approached the University of Hawaii, which received, in partnership with Planned Parenthood, almost a million dollars in a teen pregnancy prevention grant to develop and implement the program. The state legislator was once again turned down. He was instead invited to review the curriculum under supervision, which he declined.

Why was this elected representative of the people of Hawaii not given an opportunity to have possession of the curriculum and all materials that would be used in conjunction with it? Donalyn Dela Cruz, a DOE spokeswoman, told reporters that “the curriculum is sensitive in nature and can be misinterpreted.”

MICHELLE MALKIN: Hated For Marrying A White Man—Tamera Mowry Is Not Alone.

Actress Tamera Mowry, who is black, wept in an interview with Oprah Winfrey over the vile bigotry she has encountered because of her marriage to Fox News reporter Adam Housley, who is white. Misogynist haters called Mowry a sellout and a “white man’s whore.” International news outlets labeled the Internet epithets she endured “horrific” and “shocking.”

Horrific? Yes. Shocking? Not at all. What Mowry experienced is just a small taste of what the intolerance mob dishes out against people “of color” who love, think and live the “wrong” way. I’ve grown so used to it that I often forget how hurtful it can be.