Month: June 2002

— TAP: Web Feature: Tapped:. by . May 28, 2002. is unkind toward libertarianism:

A NICE QUICK TAKE ON LIBERTARIANISM. From Chris Bertram over at Junius. (Charles Dodgson has some thoughts, too.) Tapped once spent three days at a Cato Institute retreat at the Rancho Bernardo Inn near San Diego. We came away with the view that libertarianism — especially the Ayn Randian kind — is the Scientology of politics: If you accept the premises, it all makes perfect sense. Kind of like Dianetics. Certainly the Cato conferees seemed liked cultists. When Tapped told one of them we sorta believed in gun control, he turned to us, glared menacingly, and said “You’re either ignorant, or evil. And either way, I’m going to take steps to protect myself against you.”

Welcome aboard the Cluetrain, Tapped – you’ve graduated from adolescent to adult politics. Now if we can wean you off liberalism, you’ll be there.

The Bertram v. Lindsay debate is first rate, however.

— In the California Legislature, bill passage from committees and the floor requires a certain fixed number of votes: 41 on the Assembly floor, 21 in the Senate, and a majority of all members of a committee. So the best way to hurt a bill a member doesn’t like without going on record in opposition is to abstain from voting. Like a ‘no’ vote, an abstention doesn’t count toward the total needed for passage. Feminist Democrats opposed to AB 2240, the bill by Rod Wright that relieved men falsely charged with paternity from the obligation to support another man’s child, drew an extremely large number of abstentions in the Assembly, one by the bill’s most vocal critic, lesbian Jackie Goldberg. This article from
The Stockton Record explains:

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, argued against the bill but withheld her vote rather than voting “no.”

She said a man whose only relationship with a child has been as sender of monthly court-ordered checks should be let off the hook if a DNA test shows he is not the biological father. But she doesn’t like the idea that someone learning the truth during a divorce might decide he no longer wants to support a child whom for years he has taken as his own.

“If you say that DNA is the only determinant of fatherhood, you narrow the whole scope of what fatherhood is,” Goldberg said. “You reduce the father to a sperm donor, and if we do that, then why do we need you at all?

“Fatherhood,” she said, “is a relationship.”
And, she said, letting judges sort out those finer points may not solve the problem, since “the bench is still predominately male.”

“I know how these things end,” said Goldberg, who represents urban Los Angeles. “They end with a woman and a child in poverty.”

She said she wasn’t surprised so many Democratic women “stayed off” the bill. And many other women around the Capitol also understood.

The sole determinant of “motherhood” in such cases is biology, of course, which creates problems for lesbians who’ve raised a sperm-donor child together. The mother has custody rights, but the partner doesn’t unless she formally adopts the child. This is a background issue for Goldberg, but not the only reason for her vote.

A list of the 21 abstainers can be found here. Some of the notables include:

Goldberg
Dion Aroner, Goldberg’s college roommate.
Manny Diaz, smeared by an opponent as a deadbeat dad.
Carole Migden, San Francisco lesbian
Tim Leslie, ultra-conservative
Joe Simitian, Santa Clara Assemblyman

San Diego lesbian Christine Kehoe voted for the bill, so it wasn’t so much a question of a lesbian position on paternity driving the opposition as a callous disregard for justice.