A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

The Indiana Law Blog has some detailed analysis about what has changed with the new Indiana Code website provided by the Indiana General Assembly. It also includes mention of my less refined bellyaching on Twitter.

Friday Lafayette attorney Doug Masson had these tweets:

LSA’s new website for the Indiana Code is incredibly unwieldy and a downgrade from what was available before.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the new Indiana Code website stinks out loud.

Navigation through the Code exclusively through drop down menus. Displayed only in framed PDFs with limited scrolling.

I agree with the ILB’s analysis that the new site might work for occasional use but is a significant step backward for new users and heavy users alike. It’s too much of a learning curve for new users. It’s too slow and too frustrating for heavy users.

I seem to have it in my head from somewhere that the new design elements, in particular the heavy use of PDFs instead of html, are a response to some sort of security concerns. But, if I ever knew what they were, I can’t begin to articulate what those security concerns may have been. (I know back in my LSA days, there was concern that someone might counterfeit a bill and misrepresent the language in the actual bill somehow. I think bar codes or maybe watermarks on the original versions were an effort to counter that anticipated threat.) Again, this is all very vague, but I’m offering the dim memory as I struggle to figure out what this redesign was intended to fix at such a loss in functionality.

But, yeah, at the moment — stinks out loud.

Every year, we see a flurry of ISTEP news reports (see, e.g. here and here and here) telling how various schools did on the tests, whether they did better or worse than last year, and how they did compared to the rest of the state. You get the sense that these scores are a major source of anxiety and concern for most involved.

Which is one of the reasons I enjoyed seeing Rocky Killion, Superintendent of West Lafayette Schools, comment on ISTEP scores:

“Comparing ISTEP scores won’t make our education system better,” he said. “There’s much more to all of our public schools than these scores.”

As a superintendent of a public school system that routinely performs well on these tests. Rocky’s in a fairly unique position to offer this critique. No one can accuse him of sour grapes or of making excuses for poor performance. In any event, the ISTEP story is an easy narrative for the reporters. It reminds me a little of the horse race narrative you see way too often in politics where the substance of the campaigns and the policies are glossed over in favor of reporting on how the candidates are doing in the polls.

For my kids, I see the ISTEP as a waste of time. Because I’m a doting father, I’ll brag a little bit. They’re going to pass every year, and they’re going to pass by a lot. If they had their testing days back and if their teachers didn’t have to concern themselves with the administrative hassles, I daresay the quality public school teachers my kids have would have that much more freedom to teach my kids in useful ways.

James Pethokoukis, writing for “The Week,” has a column taking note of the fear of inflation among certain conservative lawmakers and thinkers which is seemingly resistant to data.

As Ron Paul, the libertarian former GOP congressman and presidential candidate, said back in 2009: “More inflation is absolutely the wrong way to go. We’re taking a recession and trying to turn it into a depression. We’re going to see a real calamity.”

Many GOP politicians have since echoed Paul’s prediction. But the Next Great Inflation never happened. The Consumer Price Index, including food and energy, has risen by an annual average of just 1.6 percent since 2008, below the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target. During the Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s, by contrast, prices rose five times faster.

Instead of being relieved that inflation hasn’t materialized, some folks are apparently insisting that inflation really is high, the government statistics are wrong.

He speculates on the reasons for the impulse to see inflation around every corner:

Why this GOP inflation obsession? Maybe it’s a legacy of how rapidly rising prices in the 1970s swept conservatives into power in both America and Great Britain. Maybe it’s how many conservative talk radio shows are sponsored by gold companies who stand to benefit from inflation hysteria. Maybe it’s a belief that every single economic metric must be a nightmare under President Obama.

I’m not convinced those reasons are really on the mark. There might be some of that, but probably the deeper reasons are elsewhere; particularly in the case of someone like Ron Paul.

Ron Paul sees little use for government outside of preserving property rights. Inflation tends to hurt creditors more than debtors. So, in that sense, inflation tends to impair property rights. Furthermore, the spending policies they see as leading to inflation tend to tax the wealthy in order to provide services to the poor (or at least less wealthy). That sort of policy impairs property rights as well. My guess, then, is that if you see someone who worries about inflation more than the data would seem to justify, you’ll find someone with a very deep concern for property rights almost to the exclusion of other sorts of rights.

Back in December, I posted about attending the premiere of “Rise Above the Mark,” a documentary aimed at starting a discussion about the merits of privatization/voucher/charter movement on public schools:

It is an effort spearheaded by the West Lafayette Schools Education Foundation — an organization associated with West Lafayette School Corporation but funded separately. WLCS superintendent, Rocky Killion has been instrumental in its development. The documentary, I think, has two primary goals: start a discussion that is focused on finding the best way to develop the children who will be our citizens in the future; and to give a voice to the public schools and public school teachers who feel that they have been largely voiceless in the debates that have gone on in recent years. The pro-voucher side is well-funded, well organized, and seems to have the ear of most of the decision makers.

Relentless standardized testing is panned by this film. We spend a lot of money paying testing companies to waste a good bit of our kids’ educational time in order to provide information that the teachers and principals already knew. (The implication (not mentioned in the film) is that those advocating standardized testing don’t particularly trust public school teachers and administrators.) It also distorts the educational process; tending to produce students who lack creativity and the ability to self-direct their studies. Our democracy depends on creative, self-directed citizens far more than it relies on citizens with superior Scantron bubble filling skills.

Another primary point is that we have had 20+ years to experiment with public funding of alternative schools and, turns out, they don’t produce results that are notably better than traditional public schools. Often enough, they perform worse.

The Rise Above the Mark efforts have continued, the latest in Kokomo according to an article by Lauren Fitch in the Kokomo Tribune (who (mistakenly I believe) credits the effort to the West Lafayette School Corporation instead of the Education Foundation). The article indicates that a screening of the documentary and a discussion will take place, starting “at 4:30 p.m. Thursday (July 17) at the Kokomo-Howard County Public Library South Branch, 1755 E. Center Road. The first hour will be a social hour, with the film starting promptly at 5:30 p.m.”

My sense of the privatization movement, as I concluded in my IBJ column in January:

I’m not saying any of the people involved in this debate are nihilistic opportunists, mining the educational system for power and profit. I’m just saying that if such people designed an educational system, it would probably look a lot like the one we’ve been developing over the last 20 years.

Back in December 2012, I posted on a District Court decision that denied a constitutional challenge to Indiana’s marriage solemnization law (IC 31-11-6-1) brought by the Center for Inquiry seeking to require Indiana to recognize marriages solemnized by humanist secular celebrants. IC 31-11-6-1 provides that marriages may be solemnized by members of the clergy of a religious organization, judges, mayors, county and city clerks and clerk treasurers, the Friends Church, the German Baptists, the Bahai faith, the Mormons, and imams.

At the time of the District Court decision, I wrote:

I think the District Court was probably correct, particularly under existing precedent, that this statute does not violate the establishment or free exercise clauses. It is maybe slightly more burdensome for an atheist to get married than a religious adherent. But, the fact is, the secular celebrant can still preside at your ceremony. You just might have to do a little extra paperwork at the Clerk’s office to have your marriage recognized by the State whereas the Muslim can just have the imam solemnize the marriage.

Today, the Seventh Circuit says (pdf) that the District Court and I are wrong.

The State suggested, among other things, that if the Humanists would just call themselves a religion, that would be good enough for the State and they could solemnize marriages. However, the Seventh Circuit observed that “humanists groups that reject the label “religion” are excluded from Indiana’s list of permissible celebrants.”

The Seventh Circuit says that favorable accommodations of religious groups over secular groups aren’t permissible where secular groups are identical with respect to the attribute selected for that accommodation. Such accommodations have to be neutral, particularly when dealing with religious and secular beliefs that hold the same place in adherents’ lives. The Seventh Circuit had previously held that, when making accommodations in prisons, states must treat atheism as favorably as theistic religion. By extension, this applies to humanists as much as it does to atheists.

The Circuit court agreed that humanists could get married by having a celebrant perform the ceremony which has no legal effect, but then could go to the Clerk to get the marriage solemnized. The fact of having to go that extra step was, the court reasoned, impermissible discrimination by the State.

Lutherans can solemnize their marriage in public ceremonies conducted by people who share their fundamental beliefs; humanists can’t. Humanists’ ability to carry out a sham ceremony, with the real business done in a back office, does not address the injury of which plaintiffs complain.

And with that wind up, the Court closes in a fairly scathing manner:

These examples, and the state’s willingness to recognize marriages performed by hypocrites, show that the statute violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the First Amendment. It is irrational to allow humanists to solemnize marriages if, and only if, they falsely declare that they are a “religion.” It is absurd to give the Church of Satan, whose high priestess avows that her powers derive from having sex with Satan, and the Universal Life Church, which sells credentials to anyone with a credit card, a preferred position over Buddhists, who emphasize love and peace. A marriage solemnized by a self-declared hypocrite would leave a sour taste in the couple’s mouths; like many others, humanists want a ceremony that celebrates their values, not the “values” of people who will say or do whatever it takes to jump through some statutory hoop.

(Emphasis added).

Mark Small at Civil Discourse Now has a post that discusses Colorado and its falling rates of teen pregnancy and abortion.

The numbers and rates of unplanned teen pregnancies and teen abortions have dropped over the past several years. Colorado’s numbers and rates have fallen at a quicker pace than other States. In 2008, Colorado was ranked as having the 29th lowest teen birth rate. By 2012, Colorado was 19th.

Part of Colorado’s success has been provision of free birth control, without necessity of parental consent, to teenagers. The Colorado Family Planning Initiative “has provided more than 30,000 intrauterine devices (IUDs) or implants at low or no cost to low-income women at 68 family planning clinics across Colorado since 2009. The decline in births among young women served by these agencies accounted for three-quarters of the overall decline in the Colorado teen birth rate.” That is a summary from the official website portal of Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. At the same time, the “teen abortion rate dropped 35 percent from 2009 to 2012 in those counties served by the initiative.” Id.

The problem, so far as some apparently nontrivial number of abortion opponents are concerned (and Mark alludes to this), is that opposition to abortion is in some measure also a proxy for opposition to unapproved sex. “Consequence free sex” seems to be the phrase du jour. Children are a blessing, but they are also righteous punishment for failing to resist one’s sinful, base animal urges. Which is why abortion opponents will not find common ground with sex education advocates no matter how many studies show that better sex education and better access to birth control reduce abortions.

I haven’t quite decided – and I’m sure it varies from person to person – whether the resistance to birth control & sex education among abortion opponents is more of a “cut off your nose to spite your face” situation or more of a situation where penalizing sex is the underlying point of the pro-life exercise.