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John Howard suggests civic partnerships as a compromise in the gay marriage debate (how very original!), on the basis that procreation is the essence of marriage and that keeping marriage and civil partnerships separate will make clear that only a husband and wife may have children, thus supposedly limiting the spread of radical reproductive technologies. He thinks his proposal will differentiate supporters of gay partnership from advocates of such technology. However, his compromise completely elides three basic facts.

First, many gay advocates appear to believe that marriage offers social validation of their relationship, not a passport to children. Moreover, the majority of people in the USA do not believe procreation is the essence of marriage, so there is no reason for gay marriage advocates to begin from that position. The United States is unusually strong in its majority rejection of the very idea that children are the main reason for marriage:

Fact two. While American society is not exactly friendly to single parents, it does not actively prosecute people for having children out of wedlock. More than a third of American births happen outside marriage [National Center for Health Statistics]. Forcing gay partners to make do with civil partnerships would do little to establish a strong connection between marriage and procreation.

Fact three. Thousands of men and women already use reproductive technologies such as fertility treatment and surrogacy in the creation of children. Three million people have been born worldwide with the help of IVF [BBC News]. Excluding gay couples from marriage will do little to stop the demand for reproductive technology. But promoting the idea that procreation is central to marriage is sure to increase it. Over at Crooked Timber today Harry asked for ‘a really good article, by someone philosophically sophisticated, which argues against gay marriage’ and the tumbleweed rolled past. Commenting on Somerville’s opposition to gay marriage for fear that it will open the door to radical reproductive technologies, ‘susanc’ notes that:

Strangely enough, similar concerns make me opposed to reproductive definit[i]ons of marriage. Suppose some really extreme government limits marriage to couples who have biological children (so post-menopausal women or men with too low a sperm count can’t marry). This would create a strong incentive to use reproductive technologies (that might not be entirely safe) just to have children, in order to get married. When, absent the biological definition of marriage, couples might have been happy getting married and adopting, or not having children, or having children via a sperm donor etc.…)

It’s striking that the most enthusiastic adopters of IVF have been in Israel, where a majority do believe that children are the main purpose of marriage.

• Smith, Tom W. (1999), The Emerging 21st Century American Family (National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago (PDF).

Over at Cliopatra, Oscar Chamberlain bewails the amazing loss of NASA’s original tapes of the Moon landing. See the original report by John M. Sarkissian (warning: big PDF) for the full gory details. The films in question were of much higher quality than the versions eventually broadcast. Some hope that this could finally stamp out the conspiracy theories about the moon landings being faked, though to me this idea seems to show a certain naivety. Chamberlain complains that: ‘The real crime here is that NASA seems to have no historian, which is truly extraordinary. And quite sad.’ He’s echoing The Telegraph, which reported:

‘I just think this is what happens when you have a large government bureaucracy that functions for decade after decade,’ said Keith Cowing, the editor of the website Nasa Watch.

‘It’s not malicious or intentional, but I think it’s unfortunate that Nasa doesn’t have maybe just one more person whose job it is to look back at its history.’

But NASA has had a history programme — and an official chief historian — since 1959. The current encumbent in Stephen J. Dick. So there must be some miscommunication here somewhere.

Sorry for the general lapse in blogging. I’ve been very busy with moving house and work. Seemingly over the past few months, blogging has been half-heartedly adopted by the national media in Britain. Sadly this doesn’t seem to have made journalistic coverage of the blogosphere any better, judging by Catherine Bennett’s latest contribution in The Guardian, arguing that blogging is replacing angling as some sort of sexist old boys’ club. She’s distortingly selective in her examples, largely drawn from blogs that are either conservative or where right-wingers feel at home. For instance, nicknames like ‘9inchknobber’ are hardly typical of Harry’s Place! And that Bennett seems to think only men are interested in cycling perhaps says more about her than about blogging. While I welcome Bennett’s challenge to casual sexism, I would suggest that it would be more properly directed at the casual sexism of men who happen to blog then any special bias of the political blogosphere. Bennett’s article did a deep disservice to women bloggers by not bothering to mention any of them, such as the excellent Antonia Bance and The F-word (group) blog. It’s also revealing that she didn’t to bring any international dimension to her article. In particular, she didn’t mention the fact that political bloggers in the US used to have discussions about where all the female bloggers were — discussions that tended to reveal that there were plenty of female bloggers who weren’t getting the visiblity they deserved. Of course, even those discussions now look out-of-date given that you can’t swing a cat without coming across some women blogging about American politics (Majikthise and Pandagon are both fabulous), and that one of the biggest fish in the sea is Michelle Malkin. Under the guise of a feminist critique, Bennett has offered up a hackneyed portrayal of blogging as yet another man’s world — a portrayal which doesn’t help female political bloggers gain recognition, and is seemingly oblivious to those already well-known to bloggers everywhere.

Tim Worstall questions whether Polly Toynbee was correct to call Britain a ‘low-tax country’. His commentators attempt to answer this by comparing corporation taxes and OECD figures for the tax burden.

No-one on the thread has yet remarked that if the relevant comparison point is indeed OECD figures for total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, then Britain clearly could be called a ‘low-tax country’. In 2003, the UK was at 35.6%, which is below the OECD average of 36.3%.

However, I am not sure it is correct to interpret Toynbee’s ‘low-tax country’ as making a simple claim about the UK’s tax burden (that is, tax as a percentage of income) compared to other countries in the world. The fact that Worstall and his commentators contrast the British tax burden with only selected countries like the United States (rather than with average figures), and the fact that dsquared immediately started talking about corporation taxes are both signs of this. The tax burden figure is pretty meaningless without any consideration of population, the distribution of wealth and taxes, the nature of taxation, the benefits received back by the taxpayers, etc. For example, by paying more tax, citizens of a small, rich country can realise some extraordinary social benefits (like the NHS), while citizens of a large, poor country might only provoke a subsistence crisis. What is an overly high tax burden for a poor country might well be an overly low tax burden for Britain (a similar concept lies behind progressive taxation of the rich within Britain, of course).

Toynbee herself questions the conceptualisation of tax in terms of a burden in her very next sentence: ‘Campbell promises to keep the tax “burden” at exactly Labour’s level, while redistributing within it, more from the rich to the poor, and new green taxes.’ Free-market ideologues like Tim Worstall may see tax as an obstacle, but Toynbee clearly sees taxation as an opportunity: ‘nothing is for free, better public services have to be paid for, and only tax buys the things that most people want.’ It seems to me the sort of crude statistical comparison practiced by Worstall and his commentators neither critiques nor confirms Toynbee’s position at all. The point at issue is surely whether British taxes are too low for Britain. The example of other countries can and should be brought into the analysis, but we must be explicit about why we are bringing in those countries and not others.