The case against nature

PREFACE--WHY WOULD I MAKE SUCH A CASE?

I am an unorthodox thinker, for good or ill, having the frequent experience that the questions I ask don't seem quite 'normal' to their recipients. One thing that I have asked people about over the years is why they very often express an opinion that 'natural ingredients' are always vastly superior to any 'substitutes.' One such ingredient that attracts negative attention is sweetener. This is a common substitute because sweetness serves a function that doesn't need to be performed by something natural, or at all. You couldn't, for example, have artificial food, because most of us need at least some amount of digestible nutrition. But sweetening can be achieved by something that isn't even really itself a caloric food product--in fact that is the idea.

This topic has been an interest of mine before, because sugar itself obviously has bad health consequences, at least in large quantities. I used to diet before mysteriously loosing my appetite, and I had best results avoiding sugar/starch. It was frustrating how rare good alternatives to sugar are, and even more so because I suspect this rarity is related to just this vilification. No food company would be super eager to manufacture a product that will be scrutinized in every direction for any hint of the danger people feel very strongly must be there, thus there have only been a few main choices, even though a good tasting and versatile one would be a holy grail for dieters and a gang buster seller.

Seeking specifics on reasons for automatic mistrust of something meant to instead be a healthier alternative, I queried a local BB about why some of them had stated this mistrust when the subject came up. Answers were along the lines of 'I figure I might as well avoid artificial ingredients' or 'call me trendy, but that's where I come down.' Not really answers--at most restatements of the original position, with occasional justification that no reason at all is necessary in the case of something so obvious.

'MAKING CASES' VS. 'JUST BECAUSE'

Opinions are everywhere, but it doesn't always follow that their owners have thought them through. I am sure I don't always, but I do value giving some thought before I introduce a habit impacting my life like my diet would, or doing anything that has a consequence for me or anyone else. When I don't get the chance, I prefer to say I have no strong opinion on a topic like say gun control, rather than take one anyway, which in my opinion is a problem. It seems common to come down on one side or another rather than just abstain.

I try to learn about what goes into others' thinking. I might ask about things said in the process of making small talk, online or spoken, even though it isn't a big deal, just curiosity. But sometimes my attempt to just be social, even supportive by showing interest in someone's views, is interpreted as 'pinning them down.' I am not sure why, maybe how much actual homework goes into an opinion always makes people nervous, it does me. Maybe the answers seem plain obvious: everyone knows that is just the way to think, etc. (Slade gets this all the time, too, who even more than I do, commonly leaves people nonplussed).

Bumper-sticker-ready statements, substituting near-universal thinking for individual opinions, are ripe territory. ("Of course it must be good to have natural ingredients--every box of anything touts them!") When something is understood to be good it can practically travel through the air all the way to the status of a passionate mission statement. The whole 'natural is best' reflex I am quite sure otherwise intelligent people buy into because it seems rather harmless at worst, and it could be.

But any 'everyone is doing it' reasoning is surprising in this commercial environment, where some companies can suggest 'apply directly to the forehead' even without bothering to mention WHY ANYONE WOULD EVER WANT TO DO SUCH A THING! Seriously, this particular product launch is so choice; it is unbelievable but obviously in some marketing meeting someone discussed their belief that they never even had to mention pain or make a claim that this product is an actual remedy in any way, but they are probably right and someone is marching out to buy it anyway.


'CULTURAL MYTH'--THE HARM OF 'JUST BECAUSE'

It never IS, BTW, the intellect of someone that I question in any case that I make for something being less than a super idea. There are many reasons why intelligent people can end up wrong. Plato was not a stupid person but it has taken 2500 years to fight back some of the attractive but destructively unhelpful concepts he introduced, such as dualism. Cultural myths, found in all ideologies and levels of education, don't have anything to do with capacity, they result when that capacity is surrendered voluntarily. Rather than analyze an idea a belief held by the larger culture is deliberately substituted. While there are many reasons this is done (efficiency or the pleasure of positive association), in fact it seems to result sometimes from deliberate anti-intellectualism, where someone chooses to for whatever reason reject possibly improving on their views. (This demonstrates that I am distinguishing a choice, rather than claiming some better ability, which I do not.) And this choice can be inconsequential in some cases, but the potential for danger in resisting rigorous analyisis in areas of diet and health seems large to me.

And claiming these are matters of preference, perhaps that it comes down to what we feel like doing, say to even purposefully attempt a placebo effect, is also a bit dangerous. If something can have a good effect it can just as easily have a bad one. This might seem obvious stating it out of context, but there are clearly those who would have us believe that if something is 'natural' it can't harm us . But that ultimately implies that something natural can't do anything physical to us at all, revealing that some proponents and users of say alternative medicine really do believe we are talking about inert substances. But anything that we think does something physiological, or that could, is medicine, however you slice it--little distinction about levels of naturalness can really be made. And if a substance does anything to us, it could just as easily be what ails as what cures, unless the rationale behind it is good. Good reasoning is therefore what I am advocating, not a particular substance or abstinence.

To be clear, I have little opinion one way or the other about food additives other than preferring nothing like say rat poison in my food, because current state of knowledge on what constitutes 'harm' is unfortunately little more helpful than to avoid the obvious. One of my ongoing goals is to avoid questionably-generated or biased opinions, and getting rid of the ones I am sure that I have. The process of submission of my current opinions for evaluation and critique by others, to benefit from perspectives I haven't thought of, is one way to achieve that goal.

OK, FINALLY, THE CASE AGAINST NATURE

My husband all the time at work asks his colleagues (most of them developing the typical pot-bellied engineer physique) why they don't drink diet soda. They say, 'I am not going to put those chemicals in my body!' Somehow in this simplistic response, very intelligent men are able to ignore that that drinking 200+ calories of concentrated sugar in one small serving is not only ingesting a chemical, that particular chemical regularly in those quantities produces in the body the surge of a habit-forming drug--insulin--which has many harmful secondary and tertiary effects on health. Most likely that drug has medicated an extra 30 lbs onto their bodies at least. And unlike the harms of insulin surges, harms of the chemicals that could substitute for concentrated natural sugars are unspecified.

Large numbers of people prefer to ignore the known health hazards of ingesting the artificially sweet--and I make the distinction of artificial sweetener and artificially sweet because very few foods in nature (if any) have such concentrated forms of sugar as soda. Thus any soda, however it is sweetened, is a somewhat 'unnatural' thing. Instead what causes more general alarm are non-specific substances not known to harm anyone in any way, particularly not in any known ways like the ones that their sugary drinks are now.

What is strangest to me is how it is that the term 'natural', even though it provocatively undefined, bears the association of benign health consequences. Here I am, thinking in my typically contrary way, that it is obvious to me that in a large number of cases, natural substances are the ones known to have the greatest capacity of known or unknown harms.

The reason for that is that they are made specifically to have effects on living things, whereas substances foreign to biological systems are often capable of passing through us without even communicating with any of our tissues.

So if I were going to want my toothpaste to taste like mint (something rather unnecessary as opposed to something like nutrients, much the way sweetness itself is), why would I want to insist that the mint taste come from plant chemicals rather than something manufactured for that purpose alone? Anything found in a plant is by design going to have an affect living things--wouldn't I be better off with something not meant to do anything to me at all rather than risk an unwanted interaction which is more likely to exist in the case of the plant chemical?

This argument may be obvious to me, but I don't really have the standard of relying on something's seeming obvious in cases where I profess strong opinions (or reject them, which is more typical of me personally, because I prefer not to have strong opinions whenever it can be avoided). So to evaluate either the the 'natural is best' presumption or its opposite, in addition to the fact that by association it is very often that most examples of actual known harmful substances are natural or semi-natural, I will want an actual argument one way or the other to nail things down.

ARGUMENT AGAINST FEAR OF THE MANMADE SUBSTANCE

And the main argument I see against the likelihood that it is a formerly-unevaluated 'unnatural' chemical which might pose the greater health risk to me than a natural one, is that If a substance is capable of harming me, it must have a mechanism for doing so, or it cannot do so. By definition the natural substances are the ones that most often have mechanisms of doing ANYTHING to a biological system.

Mechanisms for something being harmful to the body include the following:

1. Things can mimic or suppress natural processes of the body.

Like artificial hormones, these can do things that the body recognizes and allows in predictable ways. An enzyme has to be a certain shape or it won't fit, like a key in a lock. Neurotransmitters and minerals have certain channels that they travel, and other foreign substances can't use them. This is why most potent substances, like arsenic, cyanide, heroin are usually things already found in nature, made to be like them or as in natural sugar, are a highly concentrated form of them. The fact that most of the most potent substances we can think of come from living things means that potency often amounts to making use of substances that serve known functions in some or other biological system.

(An aside would be that I am no big fan of synthetic hormones. But the fact that they are synthetic is not exactly what makes them harmful, it is that hormones are so complicated and we don't understand them well enough to be creating versions of them to treat various conditions. Most typically (and this is true even for naturally occurring hormone substitutes such as the one in soy) if we use a substitute of something that our body needs in subtly diverse and complicated ways, there will be unintended consequences, at least for the time being. Some day we may nail it all down and then I say let's go for it.)

With this in mind, theoretical predictions can be made about what effect things might have, particularly on pregnancy. The possibility that DES, a synthetic female hormone that caused problems in developing girls 30-40 years ago, might influence a developing reproductive system is something that careful scientists would probably be able to guess. Paning artificiality probably has much to do with fear the unknown, but there are actual things we can predict theoretically and rule out, and others that we can notice are harmful after only a small amount of good science is applied.

2. Things can be toxic.

Toxicity is a level to which a substance needs to attain in the body to cause a harmful environmental situation for organs and bodily processes. This can happen all at once, such as in poison, or it can happen over time, but it can only happen over time if it is actually stored in the body over that time because it must eventually reach some level at which the harmful condition is potentiated. Something can't harm us over time if it isn't stored, or at least its effect would not be considered toxicity in that case. Buildup in the body's tissues can be measured and detected and usually is. One of the things they test for in FDA approval is I think just this, whether it or its metabolites store in the body, usually in several predicted places like the liver or fat, which tend to do this.

As in #1, no fear of the unknown required, because toxicity is readily determinable.

3. [Few] Things can communicate molecularly.

Viruses are one of the very unique things that can mess directly with molecular structure, primarily functioning to rearrange strands of genetic molecules--but no one would be surprised by the idea that a virus would cause harm or sickness in living things, so again knowns tend to be the bad guys rather than unknowns.

There are very few other ways that substances can directly affect living things at the level of specific particles, but radioactive elements are some that can cause damage to cells that weren't necessarily designed to recognize them. But this feature makes them some of the most dangerous in the world. The fact that these things can aggressively mess with the structure of other molecules is something that accounts for this uniqueness and danger, and other things don't do it.

Developing babies can be particularly vulnerable to both viruses and radioactivity because most of the time in adults a certain number of abnormal cells can be repaired and no harm is done in the mean time. But if a virus infects the mother at the right time, or radiation affects the right cell at the right time, even during a short period of time it can put development off course. And most things that affect developing babies also do so predictably, as do things through these other mechanisms. Something like Tylenol or even heroin for that matter won't do anything to a foetus that it wouldn't do to an adult. Things that affect rate do, because development has a strict time schedule. That is why cigarettes and alcohol are some of the worst things, being respectively stimulants and sedatives. (Heroin does affect the rate of respiration, but since newborn babies don't breathe, they aren't vulnerable to this property).


4. Things can cause physical obstruction, blockage or erosion.

Bacteria deposit plaque (which are really like another aggressive organism like the shark that could eat us I suppose), they wear away our teeth, and acid wears away our stomach and esophagus. The milk that might be fine in someone with my particular makeup (I am the Dairy Queen), in others it can disrupt digestion by failing to break down. Other ill effects of milk are usually attributed to its artificial hormone or antibiotic content, which would be considered #1 and also very predictable, and also because of the way these substances mimic natural substances and not the degree to which they are artificial.

5. Secondary effects: irritations, infections.

Smoking and asbestos are often thought to be somehow directly carcinogenic, based on a flawed and outdated model of cancer. The assumption for the first 50 years or so that lung cancer was understood as a cellular phenomenon was that chemicals within cigarette smoke must have some kind of direct carcinogenic affect on the lung tissue. In actuality smoke (and it is likely that most kinds of smoke blown through the lungs with such intensity and frequency) causes an environment of irritation in the respiratory system. But as there is in most of the cancers that are better understood, there is a secondary mechanism based on an actual way that they have of affecting us that is directly observable. They simply irritate lung cells faster than we can repair them, and eventually a malignant cell is allowed to survive and multiply.

I am sure there are other ways that substances can be harmful than those I just listed, but essentially when there is a possibly harmful substance, to know for sure scientists usually first want to know one major thing:

What would be the mechanism for that thing harming us?

Because something can't just be harmful in general or 'bother' the body in some vague way. The famous study in 1977 that after years of biased attempts to prove a harmful effect, finally established some kind of link between saccharin and some type of health concern (the study was since discredited and removed from labels in 2000), is not applicable to humans because rats have a mechanism that makes saccharine harmful to their bladders. It causes a precipitate in their urine, and this precipitate, not the saccharine itself, is what may possibly lead to more cancers. In humans, the fact that there would not be such a mechanism, means also that there is no such risk.

Cancer as I said about lung cancer and smoking is usually caused by a more predictable way of something harms the body and not some sort of vague direct effect of a chemical on the tissues or cells. This actually eliminates the mechanism that most people use to argue unknown effects of certain chemicals, that they might just 'somehow' result in a malignancy in their bodies. Studies attempting to prove cancer from pesticides were motivated by this assumption, and few of them have any affect on us at all, and the ones that do do so not because they are artificial chemicals but because they are natural chemicals that do something in particular like have an effect on an insect's reproductive system that might also affect humans in a similar way.

And I think the fact that most of the ill effects of substances that people actually have mentioned as being demonstrably harmful, like DES or milk, are only harmful in very in predictable ways proves the point that it really isn't very likely that some synthetic chemical pointedly designed to not be recognized by the body will have some unknown or unpredicted harm. No one in my entire query of why they believed artificial to be worse than any natural equivalent brought up a single established harmful substance that has none of the above known mechanisms for interacting with the body, and most of them are the most harmful because they are the most natural, like estrogen or milk. If it can't do any of the above things, it probably won't do too much. It just hasn't happened, as long as people have been watching for it to happen.

CASE FOR AVOIDING NATURAL HARMS

Essentially this leads me back to my more obvious reaction, that the more natural and central to how the body works something it is, the larger affect it can have, even such an unpredicted effect. That is why I have been so frustrated that artificial sweeteners are maligned more than sugar itself. Sweeteners that are not processed as energy are specifically designed to not cause the harm that sugar causes because our body doesn't recognize them, and thus they also have no mechanism for harming us.

And a substance's harm, even unknown, will be limited by its ability to impact major systems of the body. Salt, long thought to cause health problems, only affects the body's fluid retention and can't do much else. Radioactive iodine can kill off the thyroid, but it can't do anything else, even in large quantities. But things the body itself secretes like estrogen and insulin do hundreds of things, half of which we don't understand, and this means there could be many, and some unknown, consequences to introduce artificially. And this potential effect is proportional to its omnipresence in living things, not its foreignness or artificiality.

SCIENCE--THE TOOL-KIT OF CASE-MAKING, IS OUR FRIEND

The good news for me is that there is also not enough reason for the pessimism that science won't be able to figure out what will hurt us so that we are safer just with our own random irrational fear. In all of the cases of harm I mentioned, most historically harmful things have been, based on this principle, able to be eliminated early either in theoretical science or initial empirical data about how they affect living things. Thalidomide was demonstrably and highly tetratogenic in animals and never should have been used in pregnant women. DES was a reproductive hormone and its effect on the developing reproductive system was not a stretch. Radioactivity has a highly unusual capability of changing cells on a molecular level and more caution should have been taken before it was initially overused in medicine. The fact that these things did eventually cause harm was because good science was for whatever reason not applied, not that it wasn't available. With the scrutiny, even character assassination, that things like artificial sweeteners have received, it really does become highly unlikely that there are looming unknowns, given that these known mechanisms for their harming us have been eliminated.

The result? There probably are, to quote a recent talk by Jane Goodall at TED, probably about fifty chemicals in our bodies that weren't there fifty years ago. Sounds like a wild and crazy coincidence of the number fifty, but I have no problem with that estimate. Unless those substances have a way to harm us, though, they can't. As my sister Donna pointed out, a couple of those chemicals are probably prolonging her life, and her husband's, her mother's...

Elephants at the party and the GOP's Mormon problem

There is a saying that when elephants start dancing, mice get out of the way.

The GOP's most elaborate and embarrassing dance steps yet are for placating their large evangelical component. My feeling is that party leadership would prefer to condemn any hint of religious bigotry toward otherwise qualified candidates such as Romney. But instead they avoid it, hoping to keep peace with this feisty faction rather than risk its wrath themselves. And wrath is truly the word--this group is famous for it. And often they confuse the wrath of God with their own. They can turn any issue, seemingly as innocent as where people buy their toothpaste, into one of imminent hellfire for any unsuspecting discount shoppers, as they did in a recent documentary.

Most conservative leaders and strategists don't deny that some party constituents have deliberately sabotaged elections of otherwise viable Mormon GOP candidates--handing congressional seats and governorships to democrats by default. Beyond that, it starts getting tricky because, fairly so, people reject being broadly characterized when there is unpopular behavior involved.

To get beyond that tediousness, I will try sound as though I do not wish to speak definitively for all members of these religious groups or even know exactly what to call them. So because I know that ignorance about my religion and who exactly comprises it causes obvious mistakes, I will at least try to admit a certain amount of ignorance about who these groups are or what they call themselves--purposely avoiding overly-specific labels or absolute certainty about why their members do certain things (like picketing my church services, for example, which I know that someone does).

Whoever these exact people are and whatever they are called (evangelicals will suffice here until someone better informs me), the results, when they become politically active in the name of religion, are clear. Many examples could bolster my case but one is sufficiently illustrative: When Matt Salmon was running neck and neck for governor of Arizona in 2002, his Democratic opponent eventually gained the upper hand after a group of concerned citizens put banners on his billboards with the nasty suggestion to 'vote Mormon.'

The GOP's glossing over this problem as an unfortunate but inevitable reality isn't necessary, and the longer they do, the more candidates will be sacrificed to an appetite for religious ideological purity that is not appropriate in politics. If it is instead confronted once and for all, everyone will benefit--everyone except for those with indefensibly bigoted positions, of course. And history is not kind to those who are caught defending such positions in the name of any excuse. Consider how civil rights activists treat past historical figures that even tolerated the status quo about race relations--ultimately, we are held to a higher standard, the right standard.

And why should the GOP continue to risk an unfavorable association with those that they don't even support? It certainly should not be because of something as lame as never getting around to raising the issue. The issue being whether they are willing to hand over the reigns of the party that values a broad religious tent (the only party that does), to the left, whose leadership would ban everyone's sacred practices with Marxist zeal. Would this sacrifice be worth it simply so a privileged few can exorcise a personal religious beef?

Well as unfortunate as it is, the party leaders prefer to avoid this confrontation like they would avoid kicking a bees' nest, leaving them quite free to contaminate the reputation of the larger party with rhetoric about faiths (only including Mormons, but actually encompassing Islam and most bravely even Catholicism) that evangelicals happen to think are 'heretical.' Party leadership claim relative powerlessness in the face of such powerful beliefs, but why evangelicals even get to label heresy, and why placement of that label on candidates during elections is even appropriate at all, is a matter that they can definitively decide if they have the stomach for the unpleasant task.

Out of the context of this particular election (where they can avoid any more conceded larger point by insisting that the problem is actually Mitt himself and perhaps Mormonism itself), if the GOP could possibly drop the kid gloves they would do well to once and for all pose this question: can individual religious beliefs of any party constituents receive larger party sanction in any way under any circumstances?

If asked and answered in the affirmative, the question will simply mean that the party ceases to be a political party and starts to be a religion. Are there those who actually might prefer us to have religious elections every four years? That is something that does get said about the right, so we had better not do anything to confirm it if it doesn't fit. Most believers in the party itself do NOT want to give up the hope of reaching broad ideological consensus among those of different religions, but if they want to substitute that consensus for a future contest between narrow religious sects, they should by all means permit such internal squabbles. But I hope they welcome the party's pejorated reputation resulting from giving the right to religious ideological purification to a group that claims hellfire as the destination of a large number of the electorate.

And I mention that fact not because it is a point of religious contention with me personally (because it is--I don't think those who don't think as I do are going to hell, and I especially wouldn't relish the thought.) But rather I mention their curious focus on doom for the unbeliever because in my opinion when evangelical doctrine is scrutinized like they themselves would scrutinize Mormon doctrine now, is what won't go over particularly well with all of the supposed 'damned' voters (most of them). It turns out, Mormons are only a small number of the 'un-elect.' In fact, some particular brands of evangelical brethren are not even mutually assured salvation it seems, depending on who has irritated whom recently.

And evangelical belief in who may be hellbound goes beyond, in my opinion, their mere objective judgment of it in my opinion; it actually seems quite important to some religious persuasions that their fellow human beings are destined for eternal suffering. And one of the reasons they consider Mormons heretical is they don't share this feeling with them. When my oldest son was four he attended a 'non denominational' preschool. When he questioned, mildly, that those born in India or Africa and who would never hear Jesus Christ's name mentioned should have to suffer like any unbeliever, he was kicked out of the program. I am not making that up. She said she couldn't tolerate heresy in her home. And what was his heresy? My son simply thought that others' suffering seemed unfortunate and unfair in his mind. So the definition of a nonheretical doctrine must be one that also maintains a properly enthusiastic attitude about the damnation of others, and doesn't just acknowledge the fact of it.

In their most comfortable expression these non-heresies, evangelicals often say that Catholicism, just like Mormonism, ‘isn’t really Christian.’ But what evangelicals often say among friends or while teaching preschool children wouldn't ever be as surprising as their liberty to pass such notions for public political ones. Perhaps it is good that the GOP does not scrutinize all done in the name of private expressions of faith--because it is true that politics shouldn't be about such things. But the problem is that they are the only ones that don't currently use smearing someone with any associated religious belief as a strategy in politics. Allowing that kind of scrutiny of Mormons alone, if they allow any at all, will eventually sanction the scrutiny of all religious members of their party by democrats if Huckabee were to get the nomination by running on an anti-Mormon ticket.

So the question about Romney in particular this year shouldn't be whether Southern or Iowan evangelicals will excuse him for what they find problematic about Mormon doctrine. The question the GOP should make sure it asks and answers before sacrificing one more Mormon candidate like him is whether--in a world where any beliefs associated with a candidate's religion are mete to rule out his candidacy--evangelicals will fare any better with their critics than the Mormons do with now with theirs.

They should hope so because refusing to deal with this issue will hasten the day when religious beliefs are held up for approval right along with the candidate's other qualifications. Democrats will eagerly encourage any sense among the electorate that the whole politics thing is actually about what attitudes and prejudices they might have about this or that faction of the right. They would love it if rather than having a debate about conservative principles, which as a party we all think will win every time they are actually tried, the electoral process should instead be about whether the public shares individual religions' positions about Catholicism, or even which principles they think should be basic to Christianity itself. Of course no one will agree about any faith issue in a political election--that forum for discussing them isn't appropriate.

And thus the vote for no religion at all will win the day. Why didn't Marx himself think of anti-Mormonism as a way to have the populace vote against religious expression? It would have been quite effective if it had been tried just this way.

How far does it get the GOP to not deal with where this is all headed, when the reality is that if Huckabee were to win the nomination, someone on the left will waste no time pointing out that his denomination believes that Catholics aren’t Christian, and thus along with Mormons, Jews and Muslims, probably 95 percent of the world’s population is going to hell? Aside from that bleak statistic not being very enthusiastic on the accomplishment of the all-important work of creationism of the evangelicals' God, this opinion just won't be something that wins elections. And so unless GOP leaders actually feel comfortable voicing those types of opinions they better be prepared to at least deal with them, because by association, most people will think they share them.

For now the GOP is trying to bide time, allowing this large, loud and powerful portion of their base to skate by on this one. But the risks of failing to maintain the ideal of religious tolerance that the larger party embraces are dire--and GOP leaders that attempt to save themselves while this group publicly embarrasses the rest of us (elephants really shouldn't dance at all, frankly) will like mice, look cowardly and small.

Huckabelievers: Don't find yourself Huckstered--his excuses are weak

It seems like every time Huckabee opens his mouth about Mitt Romney and the Mormon Church recently, he needs two or three excuses to explain what he said, why he didn't say something else, why he waited so long to say it, etc. It seems like if someone is always needing excuses for it, it might be a bad sign about what he seems to be talking about. And unfortunately one of the things he has talked about lately is that he was concerned about one of Mormonism's doctrines.

And it seems the larger religion of which he is an active part, evangelical Christianity, is also quite often coming up with excuses about why it is that even mentioning a candidate's religion in a political campaign is appropriate, much less their dubious stance toward these other ideologies. They particularly attempt to justify why some of them oppose members of those groups in primaries in their own party, often causing the democrat to win as a result.

These groups as I mentioned sometimes respond to what little scrutiny they receive about the issue with the concern that Mormons, belonging to a church named 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' since its inception in 1830, are not Christian. But would this concern fly about a Jewish candidate? Evangelical attitudes seem the same toward a number of other groups to which the 'not Christian' label wouldn't ever apply, including Judaism and Islam, with slams on new-ageism, paganism and whatever 'ism they can think of on top sounding extremely similar.

If I had to guess it is just an instinctual response to anything that presents ideological competition for these religions to scare their faithful into action. And the use of preaching is a much wider mechanism for interaction with the flock. Billy Graham participated in a documentary alleging that discount stores were threatening the souls of unsuspecting budget shoppers. But the fact is that preaching at the pulpit is an effective way to clarify any threat from any evil, in this case against threatening candidates, and pointedly do so when the collection plate goes around also helps I imagine.

And but it is important to distinguish that using this threat as an excuse is baffling because, unless candidates are really running in a race of religion and there is not actually a wider body of political philosophy that unifies conservatives, Mormon candidates pose no loss of political power as would perhaps a pro-choice candidate.

Thus the fact that they believe there should be some kind of showdown when a candidate is among the less tolerated groups highlights the fact that some factions on the right DO think that it is perhaps not really a political contest but a religious one. The larger party, which does not feel this way, should of course be careful giving any such sanction--after all this is one of the spectres the left waves to attract voters away from our party. We would bring that spectre to life if we indulged such excuses.

Thus holding the religiously intolerant to account to avoid these problems will have wider implications than just this election. But this election itself will make it much harder to turn a blind eye, particularly recent attention to statements made by Mike Huckabee a 'religious conservative' and former preacher himself. If those like Huckabee continue to make ridiculous statements about Mormons, eventually they will attract enough of this negative attention to party infighting that no one will ever forget that crazy cousin party leaders keep trying to hide in the political family.

I think Huckabee was relying on just this practice of turning a blind eye to evangelicals' issues when he made recent statements about Romney's faith. Probably many heard about it; I did, and I don't follow the whole sad saga of GOP primaries closely. But others, and not just Mormons or their friends, found Huckabee's recent claims dubious. He said that he was inclined to be tolerant and fair toward Romney and Mormons personally, but that he was concerned that Mormons held the view that Christ and Lucifer were brothers. Just concerned, that is all.

Right. I am at best skeptical here. Without a better explanation than that, this 'concern' makes much more sense as a deliberate slander on Mormons in general and Romney in particular as his rival. I am sure that Huckabee and his people are somehow aware of how easy it is to stir up this animosity and fear among those who are so inclined toward Mormonism, and rather than to choose a high profile moment to rise above it, he instead jumped in the fray.

So that's the reason just being concerned about Mormonism, doesn't wash. If Huckabee were actually interested (even concerned) about this issue, he wouldn't have had to raise it with Romney himself in the context of a national political election.

Any average, every-day Mormon has some kind of an answer to this question, precisely because it has been asked so long and so often by similar detractors. Any church representative of average learning or expression could give a fairly basic explanation of their thinking that all beings living or otherwise are siblings on the spirit level. Basically anyone that has a name--Lucifer, Jesus, Sally, Arnold, anyone--is the spirit brother or sister of any other, because all of us call God 'Father.' That doesn't speak to whether Sally or Arnold are spiritually identical, even humans have the equivalent of some kind of half siblings, so their is plenty of conceptual room for an understanding that the belief that having a common father can make brother and sister of various spirit entities in a way that even if not consistent with their personal views of God or the human soul, few people would find 'concerning' if explained in this way.

Thus it would be very easy for someone to understand at least how Mormons themselves feel about this issue without the necessity creating some strange association of Jesus Christ with the devil at the national level to besmirch a candidate in a GOP primary. It is very easy for any basically intellectual person to get the whole story on this issue without raising it in this type of debate.

I also doubt the validity of his second excuse, that Huckabee felt compelled to make this statement about Mormon doctrine because he feared silence would imply acceptance. Somehow, though, most high-status members of the GOP, such as Reagan who has spoken warmly of the Mormon church at BYU, and George Bush senior who welcomed Romney to speak on this topic at his library (and both who have met amicably with Mormon church leadership), have been able to avoid coming down on either side of the issue. No one was confused that these presidents might be closet Mormons if they neglected to speak harshly on one of the church's possible doctrines. The last four presidents, actually, have been extremely positive about Mormons in general without feeling obligated to endorse or even mention any specific doctrine or other.

Nothing really makes sense here except Huckabee's eagerness or at least willingness to make some kind of cheap shot to access ambient negativity toward Mormonism among his potential supporters. The GOP continues to allow this, and this is perhaps why they often give excuses of their own that don't wash. There seems to be the belief that in general Mormons are an expendable group and no hardened secular politician will grieve for them if they are out of the party. They are consolidated in western states we don't need, etc.

Even if GOP leaders were to think such states of affairs are unfortunate, they must use the excuse for inaction that doing anything is hopeless, because it is obvious that evangelicals among them tolerate Mormonism less than losing political control. But if the GOP were willing to talk about this problem in the open, the obvious either or fallacy in their thinking would emerge: Mormon conservatives should not just be assumed damaged goods for risk of angering evangelical constituents; in fact, appealing to the reasonable among evangelical groups would clearly benefit all parties. These Mormon candidates (at least the conservative ones) would actually wield that power in a manner more highly favorable to many evangelical political objectives, more so than even the statistical average among their evangelical brothers, and definitely more so than the resulting democrat they may help into office.

In fact it is easy to point to elections that Mormons win, in a wide variety of states. And they are particularly able to win in states when a large contingent of out of state religious conservatives doesn't come around with their usual anti-Mormon tracting. So this would be an easy one: leave your proselyting for your missionaries--the Mormons do. Not one of the members campaigns for any candidate as part of their church affairs, they wouldn't risk their tax exemption among other things.

But there is the state of Mormons and then their direction. As they are, Mormons are an increasingly untapped leadership resource, that if the GOP continues to automatically rule out, will be a big waste. Mormons are the MOST Republican of ALL GROUPS (Yes of course I know that there are exceptions--even one in ten is a very strong conservative trend though that ten percent represent a large number of people). In the 2000 election, for example, about 90% of the voters in Utah cast for Bush. It was the third election in a row in which the democrat came in THIRD (remember Perot?) in that state. I would think that the party faithful would think this tendency made the Mormon component of conservatism to be desired and cultivated rather than thrown to the dogs.

Mormon percentage of the population could even grow and even out among the states. A presence within the party that is enthusiastically supportive of both party candidates and principles you would think that the GOP would cultivate and emulate rather than automatically subject it to capricious abuse to keep them from running or worse voting.

Another GOP excuse might be that they don't really know any very well on the east coast, but surely Mormons are pretty creepy, right? I think we need to go no further than two words: Mitt Romney. In fact, Mormon Republicans are like Romney, among the most user-friendly conservatives around. They don't tend to have quite as many skeletons in the closet that will come out on election eve like that DUI that everyone hoped would just go away. No MAJOR behavioral and character flaws like some of the conservative ideological leaders have been embarrassing the party with. (And though Rush Limbaugh has been making many of these points like a champ, this one he has avoided, for obvious reasons).

I am not saying that Mormons are perfect--they aren't. And in fact a fair criticism of Mormons (that I will even admit to myself) tends to be of their hypocrisy because of their high standards. We do have a pretty long and strict list of behavior and character restrictions, and so of course we will have a hard time living up to all of them. The fact that Mormons are not perfect is fair and I won't argue (even though it really is obvious and thus unhelpful)--but for GOP leaders looking for candidates to prop up, it is at least somewhat handy that Mormons have these high aspirations in the first place. They tend to at least limit the amount of say substance abuse, womanizing, or gambling that any GOP candidate or intellectual will obviously get rubbed into his face.

So what I am saying is that although true, the excuse by anyone that Mormons don't live up to their own standards 100%, having those standards at all allows GOP leadership some amount of comfort that a Mormon candidate, increasingly a higher and higher percentage of the true-believing conservatives out there, won't end up with some horrible failing to sabotage them at the last minute, or the first minute for that matter.

It is so hilarious to watch the likes of Chris Matthews, with obvious tedious frustration that there is little to smear Romney with. ('Moderate' candidate fans, like those for Guiliani and McCain, just wait until after the primary to see the big party the media has pulling them down because of their personal lives, and I hope you will be happy to at least have gotten rid of Romney). But for now, I think assuming that he won't be the candidate and they have to use all their dirt now, Matthews keeps running shows with his own excuse that he has nothing to smear him with: Who IS this Mitt Romney? What do we REALLY know about him? (He tries to sound as if he hasn't actually been trying REALLY HARD to get to know Mitt Romney, at least to dig up some amount of dirt on him).

But more importantly for the party, even if Mormons must remain a necessarily untapped resource for conservatives for whatever excuse that well they just seem oh-so-unsavory, there are those eager to point highlight the situation and say that it represents wider superstitious bigotry on the right, to the detriment of all conservatives and the GOP, even though the left are no great fans of Mormons themselves.

My feeling is that at least one of these people is going to eventually get sick of using tired excuses and someday decide to do something about the tanking Mormon candidates get from those in their own party. When this is addressed we will not only have some increasingly better candidates to run, but we will honestly, without excuses, be able to say that we stand up for freedom of religion, and that we value a candidate's faith but don't evaluate it in the voting booth. What the evangelicals are doing would change that and no one will be happier than the democrats.

Mitt Romney, Mormons and Modern fashion

A few years ago I saw an obstetrician on one of those Maternity Ward type of shows and I found myself thinking automatically: ‘That man is Mormon.’ Why? I am not sure, because really the only thing that I could tell about him outside of his professional context was his dress: a dark suit, white shirt and tie. But possibly, that combination is getting more and more stereotyped as something that Mormon men do.

It occurred to me that maybe this image of the power suit, really only popularized in the 80’s, just happened to coincide with a period of explosive growth in the church’s worldwide missionary prominence: the widespread image of two youths in white shirts walking down the road happened to become universally recognizable also at a transitional period where boys' serving missions got closely associated with with their level of religious devotion, considered more of a commandment after this period than just an option.

The result of some of these coincidences is that if I had to guess, we have in recent times begun down a fork in the road of dressing in a manner unique to our culture that might actually end up giving this clothing symbolic significance for us like other formalized religious apparel has.

If you think about it, it already has such nearly arbitrary significance. White shirts don’t universally carry the connotation of respect or holiness that would brand a righteous priesthood bearer as such, we have really infused that meaning onto them over time and after associating that combination with men who are missionaries, bishops or GA's--and happen to be displaying particularly high levels of religiosity while wearing them.

And other religious clothing is probably quite similar, the difference is the respective age of the religions. The Mormon church is less than 200 years old, Catholicism, Islam and Hinduism, where religious clothing is more pronounced, have been around 1000+ years. So I think the small changes in psychology of wardrobe can be pretty small and end up adding up down the road.

Now in priesthood bearers the situation is that what was originally a purely cultural result of fashion (Joseph Smith obviously didn’t make up the missionary dress code) ends up being a barometer for the wearer’s level of devotion.

So that obstetrician on t.v. (and turns out he IS a local Stake President here in Beaverton), was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and colored tie—big deal. Right now those are all available in any department store. When the current fashions get very far away from that, though, it will be harder and harder to blend in if we are still outfitting ourselves that way for religious purposes, particularly if it becomes any kind of strict code (like it already is with missionaries). Over time this costume WILL communicate a man’s religion outwardly in this obvious way.

Better off TED?

I happened to be indulging in TED lately, a somewhat guilty pleasure, admittedly, because I of the ideological agenda that many of the speakers don’t bother to even hide. Obviously the ethical fraternity of these speakers makes them confident enough to betray their long ago passing from objective inquiry into open advocacy, in all of its potential for suppression of Copernican-type revolutions of thought. The prevention of heresy, in any already successful organization, seems more important than the encouragement of enlightenment.

But they don’t seem to be concerned. Magnificent scientists like Jane Goodall, giddy in this feel-good environment, publicly besmirch any credibility from any of their otherwise fair-minded research. Goodall originally gained a name for herself impressive enough to gain an honorary Ph.D. without a baccalaureate by correcting many of the ideologically driven perceptions existing before her about the field of great apes. Previous rain forest thinking saw in these species only vegetarianism and general peaceful and nonviolent interaction that critics of our own species could only pine for.

Yet she has of late been willing to make the current focus of her public speaking, not to augment or for heaven's sake outdo to her past accomplishments, but to risk the everyman ring of the kind of cliché tripe every other lukewarm intellect is sounding these days--exactly the level of the politically motivated nonsense she has so carefully debunked with her empirical observations rather than reliance on authoritarian precedence.

In a meandering mix of stories about chimps, denigrations of our own species, and pleas to save the earth that probably dazzled the audience by being something for everyone, I was particularly struck by some what she said about the native peoples of Ecuador living in the rainforest.

She described the unexpected sight of the village chief using a laptop computer to get her a laugh out of the audience, admitting that they want to use such technology to better their lives by using such innovations of the intruding white man (her words) as running water, a half an hour per home of electricity a day, and combating tropical diseases. But these only in a larger context of how sad it is that such advances are destroying their culture--surely the greater evil for Ms. Goodall than the suffering eradicated by use of the new technology.

Does it ever occur to any of these social scientists that say such things how selfish to their own interests it is to fight such changes for the purpose of preventing ‘the loss of cultural diversity?’ What right does any one of us have to say that other people any place in the world only need a half an hour of electricity per night and one laptop among them? Would anyone suggesting this place herself under such a restriction?

It is obviously fascinating to those who would have their fellow men as museum exhibits to see 'primitive chiefs wearing regal finery’ as some type of time-travelling curiosity. But in the name of preserving such fascinating displays for our own enjoyment, would we allow anyone to have a say in decisions about our own lives?

I don’t know what notion of intellectual superiority blinds people to the unsavoriness of saying that other people are incapable of making important decisions for themselves, other than the obviously very common human tendency to tolerate different rules for ourselves than for others. Most who pan 'materialism, 'consumerism' or the latest 'ism' that refers to human beings having bettered their circumstances do so with the understanding that THEY of course, will be able to choose exactly WHICH comforts and conveniences of modern society they and their own are able to enjoy, while the less fortunate are relegated to whatever is chosen for them.

One person might insist that of course laptops and cell phones are a basic right in the new information age, but large housing square footage is a gross overindulgence, another may believe that of course they have earned the luxury of early retirement, a stay at home wife, or acreage on their farm, but the computers and cell phones of the first person, who of course is in term calling them idle or wasteful, just clutter our lives and can be dispensed with, etc--the obvious problem being that one man's sinful indulgence is another's cherished, hard-earned necessity, and it is extremely problematic to get into the game of pointing fingers and characterizing another's naturally differing values or preferences.

Curiously, Ms. Goodall, in her humdrum, monotone cry of the evils of modern society, doesn’t seem to lack the information that society has produced. She is obviously intelligent and well exposed to the latest scientific evidence along with it does and does not support--she knows what she is doing, and thus like her associates at TED is an advocate rather than a believer. When she makes her unnecessarily Cassandra-like depictions of the current state of the planet, she knows better than to get too specific, to quote any outcome of particular science such as she herself is known for when communicating her alarm that some unspecified children somewhere in the world are eating poisoned food or drinking poisoned water.

And sure, anyone can easily claim that children are being poisoned by the toxic consequences of human technology, as long as they don’t get overly specific about what they mean by that. If one defines poisoning as simply a consequence of man-made chemicals entering our bodies, without any particularly harmful consequence befalling them as a result, one could claim that we all poison our children each time we give them their daily multivitamin.

And it is obvious that this is very close to her actual definition. She mentions some fifty chemicals in our bodies that weren’t there fifty years ago. That somehow seems a strange coincidence of the number fifty but I will bite and assume it’s true. It would still require a willing leap from her audience for them to assume any relationship between these chemicals and any particular consequence.

Indeed, she knows she must say that such toxicity could account for only possibly the ills of maybe asthma or ‘particular types of cancers,’ as surely she is aware of the larger body of information and what it is concluding about manmade chemicals and health. Children everywhere are freer from major diseases than ever, and even all but smoking-related cancer, allowing for population and age of its sufferers, is on the decline. This data despite the file-drawer phenomenon bias that has for a century characterized investigations attempting to pin synthesized chemicals with absolutely any possible health problem.

All this suspicion and potential harm seen around every corner because of the hatred of human progress and shame for its consequences, in her own extreme words. But why, is the real question. She herself has used technology to better the lives of the beloved chimps she studies, giving them running water and video games, and has encouraged its use to spread the word for the causes she advocates. Why doesn’t she feel hope, judging from the faith she seems to place in it on the one hand, about the possibilities technology offers rather than such shame?

Why do such a large number of its beneficiaries honestly refuse to admit that technology, whatever its consequences, has not changed lives for the better? Do they they were living, (as in some of their own ancestors' primitive state) in superstition-laden Medieval Europe, with all of the barbarism and horror provided by human beings and nature alike? I for one am glad I am not desperately consulting witches and astrologists to save my children from the plague, at least the half I didn’t bury when they were born. And for all the quaintness of primitive societies to scientists, these are many of the realities they still endure.

And just like the dire predictions about mass starvation or other consequences of human manipulation of their environment, it turns out that technology can actually be employed to reverse its own negative consequences, rather than only an evil to be mitigated or fought. But fight on they still do. I get so sad when I hear about some story like that poor kid who went across the country to his miserable end freezing and starving on a diet of only marijuana seeds in Alaska, after he was driven to reject the benefit of his privileged upbringing and education because Cumulative guilt is regularly heaped on the young and impressionable if they dare enjoy or appreciate the improved lot in life they have been given through thousands of years of human industry and struggle. I can't imagine what his fore bearers would think if they were told of how much he had obviously appreciated what they had done to pave the way for him.

And worst if all, the guilt isn’t necessary, rather an obvious manipulation by those who know better. Listen to Pinker’s talk on violence. He probably wouldn’t agree with me, but I think that it is interesting that he has gained enough intellectual status to point to one of the elephants in the room. As long as he puts enough obligatory twists on it to seem kosher to his colleagues he can make the obvious point that there has been widespread tweaking and obfuscating of the worldview of any who have been educated recently in the Western world, for the ideological agenda of studied strategy to so indoctrinate.

Another Tedster brought up the notion of ideas as germs, and it makes sense to look at potentially obvious facts this way. They can be everywhere, like the fact that human population is no longer exploding despite the given in most everyone's mind not up on the latest UN projections. This is an ideal case of what can happen when you wait for the information that is given to you rather than seeking it yourself. In fact human population in most countries and inevitably in all of them is on the verge of precipitous decline. Surprising? Look into it. Chances are your government is already scurrying around trying to do something about it because they were just clued in five minutes ago themselves.

Many governments around the world are worried about the complete unknown affect of the inverted population curve because what would you know it, no one is actually worrying about the problems that will actually befall us. Immune to the actual state of things because we have been inoculated against it by those who have convinced us of a completely alternate reality, people get so riled up by doomsayers about the imagined potential evils and problems. Thus the frightened panic about a future that will never come is what will ironically lead to the actual future we will be to deal with without any preparation by those learned and studied forecasters. Fearing what would happen if our planet was busted by overpopulation, people have amazingly felt guilty about reproducing for the past thirty years and now many cultures such as Russia, Japan, Spain and Germany are staring down extinction. The brilliant ideas that government bureaucrats are coming up with unguided by intellectuals reveal the state of their desperation. Singapore is sponsoring government cruises so people will get married and have kids. Does that sound like anything that is going to be what solves any type of crisis whatsoever?

And that poor kid in Alaska that sacrificed himself to an invisible cause.... It makes me so sad. It makes me certain that for whatever reason incomprehensible to me, some human nature makes people somehow desperately eager to not only see the bad in the world and the future, but in their search for superiority and self-satisfaction, to look for the bad in each other wherever they can find it.

Not being a person that so hopes for the worst in the future or in my fellow human beings, I would prefer a world where only ideas were bad. And at all costs, people wouldn't have to be. I feel that we really only have the responsibility to correct each other's views, and not instead criticize or even worse control their behavior or morals. Especially, any time that I can make things better by doing something easy like just choosing to define my terms a bit differently, like not seeing quite so many 'isms' when there don't absolutely need to be, it can be a very easy way of avoiding Ms. Goodall's unfortunate anger shame or resentment about human activities or endeavors. If I can resist the pleasure of feeling better by thinking others are worse, how much the happier for all of us.

Thoughts on treatment of gifted kids/politics in schools

I thought I would post a copy of an email I wrote to Drake's former principal. It has probably too much info but it has some of my thoughts on his experience the last few years getting properly labled as gifted, and how much better he is doing now that he is. I wasn't aware that there is a faction of teachers very opposed to doing so, and now I know to look out for it,

Hi Principal X,
I hope I have made it clear in the past how highly I regard both both you and your school. I say so whenever I get the chance to whoever will listen. My high esteem of you also has helped me be able to trust your opinion in cases where it differs with mine, something that is very rare for me, and also very useful, because I am sure all too often parents make emotional decisions without the benefit of heeding the advice of professionals.

So my purpose for writing is to give a bit of feedback on the outcome of a circumstance we discussed a few years back. Actually it came about in regard to whether to separate the twins or not. I wasn't sure they were ready, but I deferred to you because of my regard for your experience and my trust that you knew the boys well individually. Overall I am sure that you were right about the twins and the separation was good for Chase and helped him escape his brother's shadow at a crucial time. So my trust in you paid off and I thank you.
One of the peripheral issues that I had at the time was that I was less than thrilled with my oldest son's experience in Ms. X's class and was even more concerned about how his experience would play out with Chase.

I didn't exactly even notice how distinctive certain aspects of her teaching philosophy were until Drake happened to be placed in her sister's class at (another school). It appears that they both have a rather strong preference against labelling children, at least mine, as advanced or gifted, and she seems to be less than laudatory of any prodigial achievement in her students, seeming to for some reason concentrate instead on whatever aspects they do less well at, such as handwriting, and defer any pronouncement on their abilities at a higher level.

The affect of this on my oldest son was quite profound. She was his first teacher that declined to label him as gifted, advanced, or whatever word in current parlance that encompasses those qualities. It happened that it was at a crucial time for him in several ways. One was that my illness made it so that I was less able to focus on what was happening and compensate for it and make any changes. Also the stressful time in our family made it such that he was more likely to respond to the downward shift in his reception at school, and it caused him to disassociate himself with advanced students or higher achievement in general.

Practically, she was the teacher right before his transition to (the new school) causing him to not be recommended for the advanced 'continent' there. He floundered badly his two years there, with one teacher that seemed overbearing to him and thus he was reluctant to do much of anything, and last year with Miss X who was very much the same in philosophy and practice as Ms X. Slade and I had gotten on top of the situation by then and so we fought hard against her decision to not recommend him for advanced placement at (middle school). His test scores were borderline, probably somewhat because of his less than great experience the previous three years, so her opinion had a good deal of weight. Luckily Slade was able to sway the right people and convince them that lowering expectations on a student that was very probably capable of more would result in a reduced performance, and that they should instead do the opposite for the opposite result.

Unfortunately, not being at all times in the best mode of controlling myself, at a P/T conference I expressed to Miss X with frankness that I thought they had mishandled my son and led to his floundering the past three years. She was upset, and very much concentrated on how I had made her feel, rather than at all attempting to evaluate the truth of what I had said, which she never ended up doing. This is very commonly how people respond when they feel aptly criticized, to concentrate on the inappropriateness of the exchange rather than the content. If people feel that they can actually respond and counter what you say to them they more likely choose to do that instead.

My apology for the inappropriateness of what I said was all that she really wanted, and after I gave it to her, she never ended up keeping her end of the bargain to fairly consider what I had said.

But the story has an ending which is mostly happy while still somewhat unfortunate. During Drake's first month at (middle school) we had a constant barrage of notes and such requesting that he be evaluated immediately for placement as TAG, and some teachers expressed open confoundment that he had not been previously labeled, considering how clearly advanced he is in their opinions. Because Slade had basically all but insisted, he was placed in Algebra rather than Pre-Algebra as Miss X had suggested, and though he is doing well (he has the highest grade in the class of mostly classmates that have had Pre-Algebra) and has finally found his voice so to speak to inspire him as an achievement-oriented student, we are all very frustrated that he is now behind. He has to spend hours every night on his homework doing things he should have been learning at (other school), and this is not a good situation for the family at this time when my health is still easilly destabalized with the slightest stress. He clearly should have been in Pre-Algebra last year and now feels, even though he is doing as well as he is, that he is having to play catch up.

Though Ms X and Miss X philosophy about this subject seems quite clear and distinctive, I am not, however, able to explain it. It may be a political thing--some teachers feel it is unfair to distinguish some students above others and thus choose not to. They feel education should focus on a common minimum that all can achieve rather than encouraging each to do the best he can, because the latter would have results that would unfairly stratify society in their opinion.
I have no particular answers to these issues other than how they have affected my children. Drake almost visibly shrank in his interest and estimation of school performance during and after Ms X tenure. As soon as he was again made to feel that he was capable of good things, he blossomed immediately. I so wish that he hadn't wasted the last three years like this. He would have been so much better served if he had been in Africa like the twins now are. They are receiving the treatment and preparation that Drake should have had, for he is in no way less capable than either of them. Archer is going to be sent over to the middle school for Algebra even earlier than many of Drake's classmates, and he is no more capable than Drake was.

So telling you this is not to be understood to be any criticism of you or my belief that you were wrong about even a part of your decision. In fact I assume that part of the reason Chase didn't share Drake's fate was that I had expressed this concern to you and you were monitoring the situation, with clear benefits. And it may be that no one had given you this particular feedback about Ms X and the consequences of her teaching philosophy, and so if that is the case it might benefit students down the road to have this feedback from me if you happen to find it useful.
I bear no ill will toward any of those involved, I just happen to disagree with both their decisions and the philosophies that apparently motivated them. The empirical results as soon as he was treated differently have been obvious to everyone, including to him.

At the P/T conference I mentioned, he was initially very embarrassed that I spoke so frankly (I didn't lose my temper or anything, I just said that I didn't agree with how she and her sister had failed to identify him as TAG unlike any of the rest of his previous or subsequent teachers and said that it seemed to be negatively impacting him). Now, though, looking back, Drake sees exactly what I was saying, he agrees fully, and has thanked me for speaking up for him. He sees the episode as evidence that I understand him and am motivated for his interests. My energy level doesn't always allow such enthusiasm.

So it isn't too late for him even though he has to work harder. It may be that it benefits him to resolve the issue of whether he wants to self identify as an achiever now rather than later when the stakes are higher.

And in a somewhat related aside before I conclude, this has not been the only case where the political views of a teacher are somewhat frustrating to me. We tend to tolerate this type of thing because we feel we can usually make up for it at home (this above issue happened to be one that had a large impact), but I wouldn't be fully honest if I didn't express some frustration at the free hand teachers seem to have in expressing their ethical views.

Ms. X, (another teacher) who I personally love and adore and has been very good for my kids so I would forgive her a world of foibles, a few years ago had a political debate in class on the presidential candidates in which she personally cast a vote. Teachers typically are considered to have the 'right answers' so a vote cast openly for a candidate probably does not leave a remotely neutral connotation to students. She also led the class in a debate, with herself as the leader for the D candidate, and my son Archer as the leader for the R candidate. Archer led the president to a victory in his class by one vote (a somewhat similar margin to the national election), but I think that it was a bit inappropriate for a teacher to express such preferences openly to her students considering the influence they would naturally have as an authority figure so often in a position to tell children right vs wrong. Again, this was not a big deal and I didn't want to say anything at the time, and am now doing so because I have brought up the larger context.

Other issues, such as a classroom with a solitary poster theme year after year of evolution or natural selection all over the walls, of all the principles and facts of the natural world to focus on, could perhaps be seen to be chosen because it counters a worldview the children might be taught at home. It could be a reasonable request in my opinion to focus on a natural science theory less associated with controversy and more generally accepted by all worldviews, and any hesitation by teachers to acquiesce might mean they are indeed interested in the indoctrinating potential it provides them.

Today, in Ms X's class, Sadie was taught about Global Warming. I don't think this is inappropriate per se, except that to teach six year olds a theory which has components (planetary atmosphere, states of matter, etc.) that are individually far beyond the level of the students to understand to me smacks a bit of indoctrination--the hope that the overall ethic can be transmitted wholesale before there is an ability or interest on the students' part to analyze what is being presented to them.

These last issues are not that concerning. Overall, unlike the issue of class placement, we feel that they aren't issues that we can't counteract with our own teaching. It is a bit unfortunate, though, that with all the things on earth and in the heavens, teachers often seem motivated to teach things that are of a controversial nature and not among the basic skills or facts that all parties could agree on as a fundamental part of an education to be built on in all cases. For instance, why couldn't these teachers, instead of making manmade GW theory, evolution, environmental activism their focus, couldn't they choose a component such as teaching them some part of understanding the natural or physical sciences to which no parent, no matter the worldview, would object?

I think again, the answer to my own question is that perhaps education is not their only objective, and they are potentially using their influence to guide the ethical and political choices of their students. I feel this is an unfortunate circumstance, particularly because if the ethical and political beliefs that i happen to have were so openly expressed to children those views would certainly be censored, even though they represent another half of the political spectrum and thus one would think they would be equally respected in the education system.
But rather than ask that anyone show respect for my own views, I would much rather any topics which have a controversial nature be avoided altogether.

It is an unfortunately hostile environment for parents with certain non favored politics, and I think it is what forces many of them out of the public school system. We won't go that route, but still we think that it is unfortunate that our efforts need be spent undoing things done at school when it could instead be augmenting something that no one would have any problem with. I would much rather, for example, spend my time supplementing my son's math background than presenting the other sides to controversies. The one is essential, the latter is only required by circumstance.

And certainly I think while my daughter still needs to learn to read and do basic math, controversial political theories don't belong as a prominent part of her school curriculum. I understand that you have many people to please and will again trust your judgement, but I didn't think that there would be any purpose served by my remaining completely silent on the issue, even though I will continue to be supportive of you and your school in any case.
Best,