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Times Watch for
December 3, 2003
Blasphemous to Oppose Gay Marriage
"Lovers Under the Skin," Nicholas Kristof's Wednesday column, gets Biblical while coming out for homosexuality as an inherited trait and by comparing gay marriage favorably to interracial marriage: "In 1959 a judge justified Virginia's ban on interracial marriage by declaring that 'Almighty God...did not intend for the races to mix.' Someday, we will regard opposition to gay marriage as equally obtuse and old-fashioned. No force is more divine than love, and if some people are encoded to love others of the same sex, how can that be unholy? To me, the blasphemy is not in those who want to share their lives with others of the same sex, but rather in anyone presumptuous enough to vilify that love."
For the rest of Kristof on gay marriage, click here.
• Gay Marriage | Nicholas Kristof | Religion
Wednesday's lead story laments the apparent killing of the Kyoto Protocol, an environmental accord which would have required draconian cuts in the output of greenhouse gases on the part of industrial nations (but not "developing" nations like China and India). A subhead reads: "Treaty to Curb Harmful Gases Cannot Take Effect," which assumes scientific certainty on a topic still open to debate.
Reporters Steven Lee Myers and Andrew Revkin write: "Russia signed the treaty in 1997, as the United States did under President Bill Clinton, and expressed support for it until about a year ago. The Bush administration rejected the pact, essentially giving Russia veto power over its enactment. Barring a reversal by Russia, the treaty appears all but dead, leaving uncertain the future of international cooperation on the question of global warming."
What they fail to mention is that it wasn't a mere matter of Bush unilaterally rejecting a Clinton decision. The U.S. Senate also rejected the pact in 1997, during the Clinton administration, through the Byrd-Hagel resolution ("Expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the conditions for the United States becoming a signatory to any international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations") by a margin of 95-0.
For the rest of Myers and Revkin on the apparent killing of Kyoto, click here.
• Environment | Kyoto | Steven Lee Myers | Andrew Revkin | Russia | Senate
Socialized Medicine as "Social Justice"
Tuesday's Health & Fitness section features an interview of Dr. Steffie Woolhandler which is one long plea for socialized medicine under the gauzy guise of "social justice." In "Heal Health Care System? Start Anew," reporter Judy Foreman describes the good doctor's plan for cradle-to-grave national health care: "Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, 52, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Cambridge Hospital, wants to change the health care system. Soon, and not in the way Congress just did. Her plan is simple. Get rid of the private health insurance industry and abolish Medicaid, the government's health insurance program for the poor. In their stead, set up a national health insurance system that would cover all Americans by expanding Medicare, the old-style Medicare, to include everyone from birth to death."
Foreman tries to gloss over the political import of such a radical move by folding it into a broad notion of "social justice." She asserts: "Dr. Woolhandler's commitment to social justice began in her childhood in Shreveport, La. Her father was a doctor and her mother a homemaker who died when Steffie was 8. Her father hired black women to take care of his four daughters, who sometimes visited these women in their shacks on roads the city never paved. That injustice was not lost on the Woolhandler girls. At medical school at Louisiana State at New Orleans, she became exasperated with what she felt was the conservatism of many medical professionals, she said, and opted to do her internship at San Francisco General Hospital and at a public hospital in Oakland, Calif."
For the rest of Foreman's interview with Dr. Woolhandler, click here.
• Judy Foreman | Health | Medicare | Socialized Medicine
Another story from Tuesday's Health & Fitness section also covers up liberal, Ralph Nader-style advocacy in fuzzy notions like "learning how to quantify hope." Sharon Lerner's "Medical Students Go Beyond Books to Learn About Activism," Lerner reports on health activism courses taken by New York-area medical students. Of one medical student, she writes: "She already knows how to read an EKG. And she was taught to measure blood pressure three years ago. But in her fourth year of medical school, Hilda Fernandez is learning how to quantify hope."
Some of the big issues under discussion: "Students in the health activism course in the Bronx hear from many of today's physician advocates, including Dr. Oliver Fein, a vocal supporter of a single-payer health care system, and Dr. Bertrand Bell, a surgeon who led a successful campaign to limit medical residents' hours in New York State....To Dr. Peter Lurie, a physician who has helped plan many of these new courses, such policy-oriented work goes hand in hand with the practice of medicine. 'Physicians are inherently activists,' said Dr. Lurie, who works for the health research branch of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen."
Though Lerner doesn't tell us, that would be the liberal, Ralph Nader-founded group Public Citizen.
For the rest of Lerner's piece on "health activism," click here.
• Health Care | Labeling Bias | Sharon Lerner | Ralph Nader
Joyce Wadler, the Times unacknowledged gossip columnist, describes meeting combative conservative author Ann Coulter at a Lincoln Center gala. The headline writer's take on Coulter for Wednesday's edition: "Her Personal Ad Reads 'Born Too Late for
Torquemada.'"
What Coulter would have in common with a 15th-century inquisitor and torturer of Jews and heretics is left unclear, but apparently the Times trusts its liberal readers to make the connection and see the "humor."
For more Coulter, click here.
• Ann Coulter | Gossip | Headlines | Joyce Wadler
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org