politics: the state

Sixty-two percent of Americans think that the country should reduce spending in order to cut the deficit.  What do they think we should cut?  Nothing really.

Well, nothing except foreign aid.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones reminds us that foreign aid is about one percent of the U.S. budget.

…there were only four [other] areas that even a quarter of the population was willing to cut: mass transit, agriculture, housing, and the environment. At a rough guess, these areas account for about 3% of the federal budget. You could slash their budgets by a third and still barely make a dent in federal spending.

The Economist, via BoingBoing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dmitriy T.M. alerted us to a new report by the Guttmacher Institute on the characteristics of women who have abortions.  There’s lots of interesting data there, including the figure below that tells us how women are paying for their abortions.

According to the study, 33% of the women in their study were uninsured, but 57% of them paid for their abortions out-of-pocket.  Why?

I was able to track down two reasons.   First, medicaid only covers abortions in the cases of rape and incest or if a woman might die if she proceeds with the pregnancy.  Second, according to another report by Guttmacher, 15 states deny or restrict the coverage of private insurance companies or the insurance plans of employees of the state:

The fact that non-therapeutic abortion is not covered by medicaid and by some private insurers, of course, hurts poor women and their families the most.  While middle and upper class women can always find the money to make up for the gap in their insurance, poor women may not be able to do so.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

It is commonly claimed and, in fact, I have claimed it on this blog (here and here), that the U.S. is especially individualistic.  Claude Fischer, at Made in America, puts this assertion to the test.  “There is considerable evidence, ” he writes, “that Americans are not more individualistic – in fact, are less individualistic – than other peoples.”

He operationalizes “individualism” as “gives priority to personal liberty” and offers the following evidence.

Question: “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?”

Question: “ Right or wrong should be a matter of personal conscience,” strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Question: “People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong,” strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Question: “Even when there are no children, a married couple should stay together even if they don’t get along,” strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Fischer entertains several explanations for these findings.

(1) Americans aren’t really individualistic (anymore).

(2) Americans means something else by individualism (like freedom from government or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps).  Fischer thinks that these are different values, though: anti-statism and laissez-faire, pro-business economics.

(3) Americans are individualistic, but they are also religious and sometimes religion outweighs individualism.  If that’s so, Fischer argues, then maybe it is true that we’re not that individualistic.

(4) American individualism is found not in people’s opinions, but in how we organize our society.  Fischer calls this “undemocratic libertarianism.”

Finally, (5) maybe what is meant by individualism is really voluntarism, the right to leave and join groups as we see fit.

The argument and the answers clearly revolve around how we define (or operationalize) “individualism.”  In any case, the comparative data does put the U.S. into perspective and Fischer’s discussion leaves a lot to unpack.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This 4-minute 20-second video, by Colorlines, uses true stories to illustrate the impact of a 1996 law that authorizes the (sometimes retroactive) deportation of non-citizens convicted of any crime, including misdemeanors and traffic violations.  In 2008, the video reports, the U.S. government deported almost 360,000 people on these grounds.

Via Racewire.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Peggy R. sent in this great vintage ad for Cessna private planes.  Placed in 1941, it suggests that all families should have private planes after the war:

I spoke with my friend and Cessna expert, Stephen Wilson.  He explained that the G.I. Bill, which reimbursed veterans for educational expenses, applied to flying lessons.  Veterans, then, could be reimbursed for learning to fly and Cessna was trying to encourage all veterans and their families to take to the skies.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Amanda S. took a screen shot while doing her taxes online at Turbo Tax.  The program asks if the filer is married or gay married:

What a fascinating moment in U.S. history.  In some states a person can marry someone of the same sex, in others they cannot.  Tax programs trying to help people file their federal and state taxes need to record both kinds of marriages because they collect information for both tax returns simultaneously in order to reduce the time burden on the client.

But why not just ask people if they were married?  Perhaps the people who designed these questions thought that the term “marriage” is so deeply associated with heterosexuality that it wouldn’t occur to people who were married to someone of the same sex to check it.  Then again, I would think that those gay couples who are legally married would be especially cognizant of their right to check the “marriage” box whether same-sex marriage was specified or not.

Or are there different tax rules applied to gay and straight marriage?

In any case, if we’re going to separate homo- and hetero-marriage, why not label “marriage” as “opposite-sex marriage” or “other-sex marriage”?  Why normalize heterosexual marriage (real marriage, you know, the original marriage, marriage marriage!) and mark homosexual marriage (the gay kind, duh, so gay)?

I don’t know what they were thinking… but it’s fascinating.

Happy tax day U.S. Americans!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The Oral Cancer Foundation released this video last month, just a couple of weeks before the FDA was scheduled to vote on approval of the ‘male’ Gardasil vaccine.

Whether you’re pro- or anti-vaccine, you might wonder why has FDA testing of and approval for Gardasil’s use on males lagged three years behind the female-only “cervical cancer” vaccine? Most of us who have followed Gardasil’s development were not surprised when the FDA recently voted to approve its use on boys and young men for the prevention of genital warts. However, this limited focus on male genital warts ignores the growing number of medical studies which have shown causal connections between two cervical-cancer causing types of HPV (covered by Gardasil) and a variety of cancers that can have devastating health consequences in female and male bodies.

In light of this body of research, many were dismayed by the fact that the CDC decided against recommending routine use of the Gardasil vaccine for boys.  A NYT article reported that this committee will likely consider data on Gardasil’s ability to protect against male cancers when it meets again in February.

As more Americans learn about the causal links between HPV strains covered by Gardasil and serious (sometimes fatal) oral and anogenital cancers, it will be interesting to see if U.S. boys/young men get vaccinated at as high a rate as girls/young women.

To educate people about the risk of oral cancer from sexually-transmitted HPV, the Oral Cancer Foundation released this video:

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Adina Nack is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University specializing in medical sociology, gender inequality and sexual health.  Nack’s book, Damaged Goods?  Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases came out in 2008.  You can see an earlier post of hers, about sexually transmitted disease and stigma, here.

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John L. sent in a link to a visual illustrating support for gay marriage by state and age:

The data supports the notion that younger people are more supportive of gay marriage than older people. I also think it’s interesting that, even in states that we normally consider quite hostile to gay rights (the ones at the bottom of the table), there is still a significant age difference:  18-29 year-olds in Alabama, for example, are more supportive of gay marriage than people 65 and older in Massachusetts.  So, while we like to think about states as “liberal” or “conservative,” spreading out the data by age tells a much more complicated story.

For more data on support for gay rights, see here and here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.