Opinion: In today’s pages: Props. 7, 8 and 10
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Christopher Serra, for the Times
Elections fever has infected the Opinion Manufacturing Division, with Nov. 4 being the subject of every editorial and Op-Ed today. It’s a quadfecta! David Blankenhorn, president of the New York-based Institute for American Values, lays out a strong but familiar argument for Prop. 8 (the proposed amendment to the state constitution that would limit marriage to the union of one man and one woman). Citing the work of anthropologists and social scientists, Blankenhorn argues that marriage is a ‘pro-child institution’ designed to tell children that the people who brought them into the world will be there for them:
In 2002 -- just moments before it became highly unfashionable to say so -- a team of researchers from Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center, reported that ‘family structure clearly matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.’ All our scholarly instruments seem to agree: For healthy development, what a child needs more than anything else is the mother and father who together made the child, who love the child and love each other.
He doesn’t address divorce and speaks only in passing about adoption, but there’s still plenty in the piece to argue about. Hit the comment link and have at it, people!
Over in the editorial stack, the Times’ editorial board takes up two of the other, umm, 736 propositions on the November ballot. The board urges a ‘no’ vote on Prop. 7 and Prop. 10, two measures whose environmentally friendly descriptions don’t match their likely effects. Prop. 7, which would require utilities to obtain half their power from renewable sources by 2025, is replete with ill-thought-out provisions that could actually discourage use of clean power by individual businesses and homeowners, the board argues. And in the board’s view, Prop. 10 is a scam to benefit billionaire oilman-turned-natural-gas-magnate T. Boone Pickens:
This measure asks taxpayers to fund $5 billion in bonds -- at a time when the state is in desperate financial straits and may be approaching a dangerous level of indebtedness -- for a scheme disguised as an effort to benefit the environment. Yet its true aim is to subsidize vehicles powered by natural gas, which would build a customer base for its sponsor: Clean Energy Fuels Corp., a company Pickens co-founded that operates natural gas filling stations throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Rounding out the ensemble, columnist (and Barack Obama supporter) Joel Stein writes about an effort by a pro-Obama PAC to prod young Jewish Obamaphiles to visit their grandparents in Florida next month and lobby them not to vote for John McCain:
They will travel to the Fort Lauderdale area, where they will visit their grandparents, organize political salons in their condos and eat incredibly bad food. The grandkids also will meet up at a bar one night, which -- if the psychological impact of spending a few days with frail, elderly, widowed relatives is taken fully into account -- may do more to repopulate the world’s Jews than the creation of Israel.