Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Harrods bans soldiers on Poppy Day

Might the fact that Harrods is owned by a Muslim have something to do with it?

A serving Army officer was banned from entering Harrods on Remembrance Day in case his uniform upset other shoppers. Lieutenant Daniel Lenherr had just taken part in a parade honouring Britain's war dead when the London department store turned him away at the door. The security guard told him other customers might be intimidated by the uniform.

The 26-year-old soldier, who serves in the 1st regiment of the Royal Horse Artillery, had been at commemorations in Hyde Park Corner last weekend when he decided to visit the shop with his wife Michelle and their one-year-old son. Mrs Lenherr, who lives in Tidworth, Hampshire, said: "We were horrified when we were refused entry on a day when we honoured the men who sacrificed so much for our freedom. I find it sad this can happen."

The store has stood by their dress policy, saying: "There is a long-standing tradition at Harrods that would normally preclude customers who are wearing non-civilian attire from entering the store. "A lot of people assume that somebody in uniform is either there on official duty, which could cause them alarm, or they assume they're a member of staff and ask them where the lavatories are and so on."

But the shop came under fire for its ban. Shadow Defence Minister Mark Harper said: "It's an outrageous slap in the face to our Armed Forces who are serving our country around the world. On Remembrance Sunday it's even more of an insult. I cannot see any legitimate reason for a shop not to let in members of the Armed Forces in uniform."

And Thomas Carter MBE, a former Warrant Officer in the Royal Horse Artillery, said Mr Lenherr had been treated disgracefully. The 78-year-old said: "Harrods' policy is a load of rubbish. It treats members of the Armed Forces as sixth-rate citizens. It definitely makes it worse that it was on Remembrance Sunday, as that's the day everybody wears uniform." Rival department stores Selfridges and Harvey Nichols said they had no problem with service personnel entering their stores in uniform.

Source



AN "INCORRECT" VIEW OF AIDS IN AFRICA

At just twenty-six, economist Emily Oster may have the highest controversies-generated-to-years-in-academia ratio of anyone in her field. That's because, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, she chose to hop the fence and explore a topic already claimed by doctors, social scientists, and policy wonks: the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Her studies suggest some uncomfortable possibilities-not least that the so-called experts have gotten their approach to the crisis dead wrong. Now a Becker Fellow at the University of Chicago, Oster continues to blur academic boundaries with further work on AIDS and a volatile new interest: the reported wave of female infanticide in Asia.

When I began studying the HIV epidemic in Africa a few years ago, there were few other economists working on the topic and almost none on the specific issues that interested me. It's not that the questions I wanted to answer weren't being asked. They were. But they were being asked by anthropologists, sociologists, and public-health officials. That's an important distinction. These disciplines believe that cultural differences-differences in how entire groups of people think and act-account for broader social and regional trends. AIDS became a disaster in Africa, the thinking goes, because Africans didn't know how to deal with it.

Economists like me don't trust that argument. We assume everyone is fundamentally alike; we believe circumstances, not culture, drive people's decisions, including decisions about sex and disease. I've studied the epidemic from that perspective. I'm one of the few people who have done so. And I've learned that a lot of what we've been told about it is wrong. Below are three things the world needs to know about AIDS in Africa.

1. It's the wrong disease to attack.

Approximately 6 percent of adults in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV; in the United States, the number is around 0.8 percent. Very often, this disparity is attributed to differences in sexual behavior-in the number of sexual partners, the types of sexual activities, and so on. But these differences cannot, in fact, be seen in the data on sexual behavior. So what actually accounts for the gulf in infection rates?

According to my research, the major difference lies in transmission rates of the virus. For a given unprotected sexual relationship with an HIV-infected person, Africans are between four and five times more likely than Americans to become infected with HIV themselves. This stark fact accounts for virtually all of the difference in population-wide HIV rates in the two regions.

There is more than one reason why HIV spreads more easily in Africa than America, but the most important one seems to be related to the prevalence of other sexually transmitted infections. Estimates suggest that around 11 percent of individuals in Africa have untreated bacterial sexually transmitted infections at any given time and close to half have the herpes virus. Because many of these infections cause open sores on the genitals, transmission of the HIV virus is much more efficient.

So what do we learn from this? First, the fact that Africa is so heavily affected by HIV has very little to do with differences in sexual behavior and very much to do with differences in circumstances. Second, and perhaps more important, there is potential for significant reductions in HIV transmission in Africa through the treatment of other sexually transmitted diseases. Such an approach would cost around $3.50 per year per life saved. Treating AIDS itself costs around $300 per year. There are reasons to provide AIDS treatment in Africa, but cost-effectiveness is not one of them.

2. It won't disappear until poverty does.

In the United States, the discovery of the HIV epidemic led to dramatic changes in sexual behavior. In Africa, it didn't. Yet in both places, encouraging safe sexual behavior has long been standard practice. Why haven't the lessons caught on in Africa? The key is to think about why we expect people to change their behavior in response to HIV-namely because, in a world with HIV, sex carries a larger risk of death than it does in a world without HIV. But how much people care about dying from AIDS ten years from now depends on how many years they expect to live today and how enjoyable they expect those future years to be.

My studies show that while there have been very limited changes in sexual behavior in Africa on average, Africans who are richer or who live in areas with higher life expectancies have changed their behavior more. And men in Africa have responded in almost exactly the same way to their relative "life forecasts" as gay men in the United States did in the 1980s. To put it bluntly, if income and life expectancy in Africa were the same as they are in the United States, we would see the same change in sexual behavior-and the AIDS epidemic would begin to slow.

3. There is less of it than we thought, but it's spreading as fast as ever.

According to the UN, the HIV rates in Botswana and Zimbabwe are around 30 percent, and it's more than 10 percent in many other countries. These estimates are relied on by policymakers, researchers, and the popular press. Yet many people who study the AIDS epidemic believe that the numbers are inflated. The reason is quite simple: bias in who is tested. The UN's estimates are not based on diagnoses of whole populations or even a random sample. They are based on tests of pregnant women at prenatal clinics. And in Africa, sexually active women of childbearing age have the highest rates of HIV infection.

To eliminate the bias, I took a new approach to estimating the HIV infection rate: I inferred it from mortality data. The idea is simple: In a world without HIV, we have some expectation of what the death rate will be. In a world with HIV, we observe the actual death rate to be higher. The difference between the two gives an estimate of the number of people who have died from AIDS, and we can use that figure to estimate the prevalence of HIV in the population.

My work suggests that the HIV rates reported by the UN are about three times too high. Which sounds like good news-but isn't. The overall number of HIV-positive people may be lower than we thought, but my study, which estimated changes in the infection rate over time, also drew a second, chilling conclusion: In Africa, HIV is spreading as quickly as ever.

Source



DEMOCRACY AND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

By Jeff Jacoby

Matt Foreman, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, was celebrating Arizona's defeat of a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. "It is always wrong to put basic rights up for a popular vote," he said, "and it is nearly impossible for any minority to protect itself when that happens. But today in Arizona the impossible happened."

Constitutional democracy is incompatible with the rights of minorities? That would have come as news to champions of American liberty from John Adams to Martin Luther King. They would have been even more taken aback, to use no stronger term, by the suggestion that there is a "basic right" to homosexual marriage, something American law has never permitted.

Once, Americans who considered themselves progressive had faith in the collective wisdom of the citizenry and fought to extend the franchise to more people (e.g., women) and more decisions (e.g., the election of US senators). Their democratic confidence reflected a civic conviction as old as American independence itself -- that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." But don't talk to advocates of same-sex marriage about the consent of the governed. They appear to regard democracy as a snare to be avoided. Hence their preference for securing gay marriage by judicial command, as in Massachusetts and New Jersey. And hence their aversion to letting voters decide whether the definition of marriage should be changed.

"History is replete with examples of advances in civil rights that would not have been tolerated had they been put to a popular vote," wrote Kathleen O'Connor, president of the Women's Bar Association, about the petition by 170,000 Massachusetts voters for a constitutional amendment defining marriage. "If our Bill of Rights were today submitted for voter approval, it would be defeated as too radical."

Even more scornful of democracy was the Berkshire Eagle. "If civil rights were a matter for the ballot box," the largest newspaper in western Massachusetts editorialized on Nov. 8, "blacks would undoubtedly still be drinking from separate water coolers and riding in the back of buses." When the Massachusetts Legislature corruptly avoided voting on the petitioners' amendment, ducking the vote required by the state constitution, the paper cheered its lawlessness. "Civil rights should never be determined by a majority of voters," it declared. "Ballot questions are blunt instruments, lacking the delicacy of legislation."

It is hard to say which is sadder: the contempt for ordinary Americans that such comments reflect, or the ignorance of American history underlying them. To begin with, it wasn't through "blunt" ballot measures that Southern buses and water fountains were segregated. It took the "delicacy of legislation" to write something so abominable into law. Nor was it by means of a judicial bolt from the blue that segregation was finally crushed. It was through the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- a legislative milestone that would never have been reached if not for the fact that a majority of white Americans supported it.

To be sure, there were court cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education, that played a role in extending civil rights to citizens of every race. But those rulings didn't conjure newfangled "rights" out of thin air. They restored rights that had been created democratically and were already supposed to be the law of the land. The 14th Amendment -- approved by Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the states in 1868 -- had guaranteed equality and due process to blacks and whites alike. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 had barred discrimination in public accommodations. But the Supreme Court had gutted those protections -- for example in 1896, when it authorized streetcar segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. It wasn't democracy that failed black Americans during the long decades of Jim Crow. It was a judiciary unwilling to protect the equality that the democratic process had guaranteed.

The republican form of government to which all Americans are entitled makes them the source of the constitution(s) under which they live. The only valid civil rights are those that have the consent of the governed. Their legitimacy comes from the democratic process, not from judicial fiat or political correctness. "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves," Thomas Jefferson said, "and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." Same-sex marriage will never be a civil right until the people in their discretion make it one.

No comments: