What We’ve Gained—and What We’ve Lost

ADVOCATUS DIABOLI

What We’ve Gained—and What We’ve Lost

May 10, 2012

If anyone didn't already know that the legalization of same-sex marriage is inevitable, President Obama's dramatic announcement that he supports it should settle the matter. That makes this a good time to appreciate what those of us who favor the expansion of rights as a general principle have gained -- and what we've lost.

There was something tragicomic about Obama's May 9 announcement, coming as it did as a reactive response to Vice President Biden's impulsive endorsement of same-sex marriage on a Sunday morning talk show. The White House spent two days waffling before Obama finally went on TV. His views had "evolved" into favoring same-sex marriage some months back, the official story goes; he'd been planning to disclose that sometime before the Democratic Convention, but hadn't yet chosen a date. "I've been meaning to mention this," the subtext seems to run, "and now that Veep's shot his mouth off I suppose I might as well do it today." Whatever else one might say about this, it falls short of the image of proactive leadership most Obama supporters might have preferred.

What else might one say about Obama's statement? From a secular humanist standpoint, it's surely welcome. As several pundits have noted, no expansion of rights championed by a sitting president has ever failed to become the law of the land. Still, as LGBT-rights activists -- and other supporters of expanding individual rights -- celebrate, we shouldn't lose sight of what has been lost. (What follows draws from my August/September 2009 FI op-ed "Two Cheers for Same-Sex Marriage.")

Fifteen years ago, before the idea that same-sex marriage might be attainable re-directed LGBT activism, the target toward which most LGBT activists strove was civil unions. Civil unions had a lot to recommend them. In time, they would probably confer most or all of the same rights granted by traditional matrimony in such areas as parental rights, sickroom visitation, healthcare decision-making, community property, the right to inherit, and so on. What secular humanists especially liked about civil unions was that they would be a wholly new instiution, conceived entirely within the domain of secular law. They'd be free of matrimony's tangled roots as both a legal and a religious construct, and they'd be free of matrimony's historical baggage as an institution for transferring what amounted to ownership of the bride from her father to her husband. In twenty or twenty-five years, the thinking went, a robust form of civil union would be legal for same-sex couples across the land.

What was wrong with that vision? Today, many activists view civil unions as insufficient, a second-class "gay ghetto" institution that still separates same-sex couples from more favored opposite-sex couples. But don't judge so quickly. Let's jump back to fifteen years ago, and consider what many civil-union supporters (myself included) expected to happen next. Once robust civil unions were the law of the land for same-sex couples, this thinking went, the next step would be legal activism by opposite-sex couples seeking a way to give their unions the protection of law without having to resort to traditional matrimony with all its negatives. Once that was achieved, civil union would no longer be a gay-ghetto phenomenon. Most importantly, the centuries-long monopoly held by traditional matrimony as the only way to legally authenticate a couple's commitment would have been broken. At long last there would be a new, wholly secular, historically unencumbered way for any couple, gay or straight, to seal their shared commitment.

That's what we've lost.

As I see things, there are two ways to view the now (almost certainly) inevitable triumph of same-sex marriage. One: It's a welcome expansion of human rights, following in the footsteps of woman suffrage, the legalization of interracial marriage, and the civil rights movement. And it is, in spades. But here comes Two: It's a regrettable triumph for traditional matrimony, whose oppressive monopoly stands unscathed. Ironically, cultural conservatives should probably applaud same-sex marriage. The LGBT movement was the only social reform movement powerful enough to have shattered matrimony's monopoly, and its abrupt shift from seeking civil unions to seeking same-sex marriage turned LGBT activists from matrimony's most threatening enemies into its newest supporters.

What really happened over the last decade and a half? We've moved to the threshold of legal same-sex marriage across the country, another triumph for rights-seeking activism. But traditional matrimony, that hoary old church-entwined man-buys-woman institution, has ducked a bullet. And those of us, gay and straight, who wanted most of all to undermine matrimony's monopoly have been left behind. That's what we've gained, and what we've lost.

Are We Born to Be Religious?

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Are We Born to Be Religious?

Genes and personality influence our attitudes toward religion

By Vassilis Saroglou  | May 5, 2012 | 40

 

Image: Bara K. Kristinsdottir/Aurora Photos

In Brief

1. Many people change their religious affiliation during the course of a lifetime. Overall attitudes toward belief, however, are generally stable in adulthood.
2. Specific clusters of personality traits correlate highly with particular kinds of religious belief.
3. Although environmental influences play a large role in determining a person’s religious beliefs during adolescence, genetic factors emerge as more important in adulthood.

A deep question pervades the debates surrounding religion—whether God exists, sure, but that one is mighty difficult to answer. Instead we can ask a related, more approachable query: Why does God exist for some of us but not for others? Theologians and ministers preach that faith is preeminently a matter of personal choice. Is it, really?

Not everyone is a believer, of course, nor do we all maintain allegiance to a single belief system throughout the course of our life. Almost half of American adults, for example, have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lifetime, and most do so before age 24, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Although religious affiliation may be fluid, once people enter adulthood they tend to stick with one category, retaining either faith in God or the absence thereof.

For the most part, people are either religious or atheists because they were raised that way. Parents, classmates and other trusted figures impress their views on children and introduce them to a set of rituals and practices. Later in life those influences hold less power. Several forces can diminish a person’s religiosity—frequently cited reasons include the absence of social pressures to be religious or a desire to distance oneself from one’s family. Personal crises can also spur a change, prompting some people to convert and others to abandon religion.

Recent research suggests, however, that this is not the whole story. By studying the correlations among thousands of individuals’ religious beliefs and measures of their thoughts and behaviors, scientists have discovered that certain personality types are predisposed to land on different spots of the religiosity spectrum. Genetic factors account for more than half of the variability among people on the core dimensions of their character, which implies that a person’s feelings regarding religion also contain a genetic component. By analyzing twins, some of whom share the same DNA, psychologists have begun to collect evidence for the genetic roots of religiosity. These studies are starting to explain what makes some of us believers, whereas others end up rejecting supernatural notions.

Bringing Up Believers

The search for a biological basis for religion has gained wide appeal as the tools to probe our internal makeup have improved. Numerous brain-scanning experiments have sought to pinpoint one or another brain region as being important to the religious experience, prompting occasional claims that humans are equipped with a “God module,” a part of the brain that causes us to have religious beliefs. In 2004 a much hyped book called The God Gene proposed that a particular gene, VMAT2, was linked with religiosity. The data supporting that claim, however, were never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and other scientists never replicated the purported results.

Discerning how genes lead to behavior is one of biology’s toughest tasks. Genes make proteins, and figuring out how those proteins give rise to behaviors, let alone beliefs, pushes at the edges of our scientific knowledge. What is clear is that genes are not a blueprint; instead they interact with environmental influences in many complex ways, twisting fate at every turn. One way to examine the question is to look at personality characteristics: genes predispose a person to particular traits, which can manifest as certain behaviors.

The study of personality began almost a century ago, when pioneering psychologists working in the 1920s and 1930s became inspired by biology’s orderly classification systems and set out to codify personality. They started by scanning the dictionary for all the terms that captured some aspect of a person’s character, producing a list several thousand items long. Factions of psychologists debated over which descriptors, and how many of them, were needed to capture the essential dimensions of personality.

  

More recently, psychologists have rallied around “the big five,” as psychologist Lewis Goldberg of the University of Oregon called them in 1981. These five traits—extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness—have been shown to be independent of one another and to remain stable throughout most of life. In work published in 1987 Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa of the National Institutes of Health verified the five factors by administering questionnaires and collecting self-reports and peer ratings from thousands of people. Subsequent surveys in many languages and countries have contributed to the dominance of the five-factor model in personality psychology today.

According to this model, the ways in which individuals’ personalities differ from one another can be organized along five main dimensions. People differ in extroversion: extroverts are dynamic, gregarious and socially warm, whereas introverts are timid and reserved. Neuroticism refers to a person’s tendency to be anxious, depressed and generally emotionally vulnerable, as opposed to emotionally stable and positive. A third facet is agreeableness, which captures whether a person is empathetic, helpful and trusting of others, as opposed to mean, individualistic and arrogant. Conscientious individuals are methodical, self-controlled, and willing to establish goals and work toward achieving them, whereas those low in conscientiousness tend to be impulsive and disorganized. Finally, we can differ in openness: whether we like novel, challenging and complex ideas, experiences and feelings. Less open individuals prefer to stay within their comfort zone.

Linking Personality and Religion

To find links between a person’s religious beliefs and any other facet of life, scientists must sift through enormous quantities of data. In 2010 I published an in-depth analysis of 70 previous studies seeking to link religion and personality with a total of more than 21,000 participants. These papers covered several decades, ages and religions, although Christianity was most heavily represented. Several of these reports corroborated self-assessments, with ratings provided by family members, friends and colleagues.

What those studies revealed is that religious people consistently differ from low-religious or non­religious individuals on two personality dimensions: agreeableness and conscientiousness. The effects were modest in size: 60 percent of religious versus 40 percent of nonreligious people are agreeable or conscientious. Yet this correlation showed up in study after study. It was present in both men and women, from teenagers to adulthood, and among several cohorts ranging from the 1970s to the present, as well as in a study from the 1940s. We saw this trend in people of all major religions, not only in Protestant and Catholic  but also in Jewish and Muslim faiths. Several behavioral experiments bolster the idea that religious individuals tend to display agreeable and conscientious behaviors. For example, religious people are inclined to show cooperation in laboratory experiments and to volunteer in real life. They also endorse healthy lifestyles that reflect self-control such as low alcohol, drug and tobacco use. Again, these effects are modest, but the fact that they are pretty consistent across studies makes them notable.

One could argue that rather than certain types of people being more likely to become religious, religion might instead instill agreeableness and conscientiousness in believers. To answer this question, researchers examined data from the Terman Longitudinal Study, a project that followed people with high IQs throughout their life. In the early 1920s, when these participants were between the ages of 12 and 18, their parents and teachers evaluated various aspects of their personalities. In 2003 Michael McCullough of the University of Miami and his collaborators found that of the 492 subjects they analyzed, the children and adolescents rated as more agreeable and conscientious turned out to be more religious 19 years later than the individuals who were rated lower on these measures as children. Another analysis published two years later examined changes in religiosity of Terman study participants over the course of 50 years. The people who were high in agreeableness in their early adulthood were more likely to remain believers or even to become more religious later than those who were less agreeable as young adults.

These results are in line with personality theory. Personality traits are already present in early childhood. Later in life they heavily shape social attitudes, values and identities. It thus becomes clear that rather than religion making people agreeable and conscientious, it is personality that determines religiousness.

If further research, especially in Eastern cultures and religions, confirms this pattern, we may have psychological evidence in favor of some of the universal functions of religion. Scholars have long suggested that because religion fosters social cohesion, it may have played an important evolutionary role by enabling larger groups of people to band together. These findings on personality traits support that idea. Agreeableness and conscientiousness together denote a preference for social harmony and personal order—in other words, stability.

A Profile of Belief

We can add even more nuance to our personality profiles of believers. In my 2010 meta-analysis I also reviewed studies that had focused on either spirituality, which encompasses more modern forms of faith not necessarily connected to religious institutions, or fundamentalist types of religion. About 62 percent of those who are high in openness to experience—and are agreeable and conscientious—are interested in and involved with spirituality. About the same percentage of people who are agreeable and conscientious but low on openness tend to become involved with fundamentalist religious groups.
Openness appears to tune believers to the kind of faith they end up holding.
An important question is how these clustered traits might relate to choices in real life or at least to real life as it is modeled in the lab. In a study I conducted in 2005 at the Université Catholique of Louvain in Belgium with Isabelle Pichon, we asked Belgian participants how they would react in several situations in which they could choose to either offer help or not. Here is one scenario: you are trying to catch a train when you see a person whose suitcase flies open and from which the contents scatter. Do you stop to help? We assigned our subjects randomly to one of two conditions. In one, the person needing help was a friend, family member or colleague. In the other, the person requiring assistance was unknown. Our findings were intriguing: the more religious the participants, the more they expressed willingness to help the familiar individual but not the stranger. Spiritual subjects, however, did not distinguish between known and unknown people. They were equally willing to help in both cases.

We can make further distinctions among types of religiosity. In collaboration with my graduate student Joanna Blogowska, we replicated the suitcase scenario with Polish participants in a study published in 2011. We added a second study, in which we examined the willingness to help either a student in need or a feminist student in the same situation. It turned out that participants who were high on religious fundamentalism were not very willing to help unknown people or a feminist, an individual whom they perceived as threatening to their values. They did, however, frequently offer to help either a close acquaintance or a student in need. The participants who were high in fundamentalism assisted individuals in those latter two categories 66 percent of the time versus exactly half of the time for feminists and strangers. In other words, those viewed as outsiders were least likely to receive a helping hand from more conservative believers.

Genes and Environment

These clustered personality traits—and their corresponding behavior—suggest an underlying genetic component. To investigate this idea, researchers have contacted hundreds of pairs of twins to assess their religious beliefs at different points in time. These twin studies aimed to identify how each of the following variables helped to determine religiosity—the unique experiences of each twin, the shared environmental factors of family and environment, and finally, heritability.

What these studies conclude is that shared environment—namely a family’s approach to religion—plays a great role, especially during childhood and adolescence. After that, the picture shifts, the early environment becomes less potent, and a genetic influence emerges between the ages of 18 and 25 years.

Let us look a little more deeply at one of these twin surveys. In a 2005 study by Laura Koenig, then at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues, for example, the researchers analyzed reports on the religiosity of twins in adolescence compared with adulthood. The intent was to calculate the relative importance of genetic factors versus environmental influence at those two stages of life. The scientists used a statistical model to determine which factor is most important in adolescence versus adulthood. For adolescents, they learned that genetics—in other words, dispositions for certain personality traits—accounted for only 12 percent of their religious identity, and a shared upbringing contributed 56 percent to the outcome. (If you include a third category, which captures all the unique events that shape a twin’s life, these three numbers add up to 100.) Conversely, 44 percent of adults’ religiosity could be attributed to genetics, and 18 percent had to do with their environment.

All these data suggest that genetic influences help to explain why adults sometimes stray from the beliefs of their childhood. The more distance they get from the influences of their early years, the more idiosyncratic factors can hold sway over a person’s attitudes. In a way, we are born to be inclined toward religion or atheism. Does God call us? For some of us, the answer is yes: through our genes, parents, acquaintances and life events.

This is article was published in print as "Are We Born to Be Religious?"

Latin American History

Cinco de Mayo - the Basics

By Christopher Minster, About.com Guide

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Basic Guide to Cinco de Mayo:

Cinco de Mayo is probably the holiday most often celebrated that no one understands. What’s it all about? How is it celebrated? What does it mean to Mexicans? Here are the answers in a handy guide.

What is Cinco de Mayo?:

Literally "the Fifth of May," Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican Holiday celebrating the Battle of Puebla, which took place on May 5, 1862. In 1861, France sent a massive army to invade Mexico, as they wanted to collect on some war debts. The French army was much larger, better trained and equipped than the Mexicans struggling to defend the road to Mexico City. It rolled through Mexico until it reached Puebla, where the Mexicans made a valiant stand, and, against all logic, won a huge victory. It was short-lived, as the French army regrouped and continued; eventually taking Mexico City, but the euphoria of an unlikely victory against overwhelming odds is remembered every May fifth.

Isn’t it Mexico’s Independence Day?:

That's a common misconception. Mexico celebrates its independence on September 16, because it was on that day in 1810 that Father Miguel Hidalgo took to his pulpit in the village church of the town of Dolores and invited his flock to take up arms and join him in overthrowing Spanish tyranny. Independence Day is a very important holiday in Mexico and not to be confused with Cinco de Mayo.

How Big a Deal is Cinco de Mayo?:

Cinco de Mayo is a big deal in Puebla, where the famous battle took place but it really isn't as important as most people think. September 16, Independence Day, is a much more important holiday in Mexico. For some reason, Cinco de Mayo is celebrated more in the United States of America, by Mexicans and Americans alike, than it is in Mexico. One theory for why it is more popular in the USA is that at one time, it was celebrated in all of Mexico and by Mexicans living in former Mexican territories such as Texas and California. It was ignored in Mexico after a while but still celebrated north of the border, which never got out of the habit of remembering the famous battle.

How is Cinco de Mayo Celebrated?:

In Puebla and in many USA cities with large Mexican populations, there are parades, dancing and festivals. Traditional Mexican food is often served or sold. Mariachi bands fill town squares, and a lot of Dos Equis and Corona beers are served. It’s a fun holiday, really more about celebrating the Mexican way of life than about remembering a battle which happened 150 years ago. It is sometimes referred to as a “Mexican St. Patrick’s Day.” In the USA, schoolchildren do units on the holiday, decorate their classrooms and try their hand at cooking some basic Mexican foods. All over the world, Mexican restaurants bring in Mariachi bands and offer specials for what’s almost certain to be a packed house.

How Can I Host a Cinco de Mayo Party?:

It’s easy to host a Cinco de Mayo party! Making basic Mexican food like salsa and burritos is not too complicated, add some decorations and mix some Margaritas and you’re good to go. Look at the links listed below for recipes, decorations and more valuable Cinco de Mayo information from About.com’s team of writers!

Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with About.com!

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How I Left My Evangelical Christian Faith

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Valerie Tarico

How I Left My Evangelical Christian Faith

Lots of people have successfully left their religious faith behind. Here's what the path out looks like.

April 25, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: Kurt-Rune Bergset

 

I am what you might call a slow learner. I managed to make it all the way through high school, despite an eating disorder I couldn’t pray away, and all the way through college, despite a suicidal depression triggered by the same eating disorder, and almost all the way through grad school before I finally gave up on my religion and god. 

By contrast, my friend Geoff figured things out in the second grade. One day a nun at his Catholic school tried to pour holy water on the one Black kid in the school to exorcise the devil because he kept getting in fights. But Geoff thought to himself: It’s not Satan, it’s because all the other kids pick on him. Today Geoff is a psychologist working for Seattle Children’s Hospital –which is, ironically, the same place that did in the last shreds of my Evangelical beliefs.

I can’t recall the name of the small person who severed the final strands of my faith. There's just a vague image of soft brown hair and trusting brown eyes. I was 26, in the last stage of my PhD program, which required a year-long internship at the University of Washington. In one of my rotations, the one at Children’s Hospital, interns provided mental health consultation for families of patients on the medical wards. He was two, and in the first phase of treatment for a spinal cord tumor that would leave him paraplegic even if the nightmare course of chemotherapy were successful. I don’t know how long he survived.
Maybe it was his eyes, or his inability to comprehend why he couldn’t walk anymore, or why people who looked kind kept hurting him. Maybe it was the unbearable tenderness of his parents, who simply wanted to take their child home and love him rather than watch him suffer inexplicable months of “treatment” for a long shot at extending his life. But something inside me broke.

For years I had been patching my Christian faith together, as I like to say, with duct tape and bailing wire. My beliefs had become more and more idiosyncratic as I tried to hold together the lot of moral and rational contradictions that make up born-again, Bible-believing Christianity. Now, finally, after two decades of warping my feelings, perceptions and intellect to defend the absolute goodness of the Christian God, I got mad. I said to the god in my head, "I’m not making excuses for you anymore. I quit." And just like that, God was gone. All that was left was the frame of tape and wire: empty excuses, rationalizations and songs of worship that sounded oddly flat.

I tell you these two stories because they illustrate two extremes of leaving faith. On the one hand you have Geoff, whose parents were casual believers and whose skepticism kicked in early. On the other hand you have me, who took things to the brink of suicide because, as I thought, if I couldn’t pray away bulimia and depression then I was a failure in God's eyes. There are many paths into religion and many paths out.

The Damage Done

Most freethinkers were religious at one point in their lives. Whether you need a recovery process to move beyond that -- and how intensive that recovery process will be -- depends on what you believed, how deeply you believed it, and how much of your social support depended on fellow believers. ExChristian.net hosts forums that give people a chance to talk about their exodus from faith with support from fellow travelers. As often as not, loneliness is one of the hardest parts of the process. A believer can go anywhere in the world and find a ready-made community of fellow Christians. But a former believer can find himself or herself alone at the dinner table surrounded by family members but harboring a dark secret that would trigger rejection and judgment -- if they only knew.

Ministers who lose their faith often face the worst isolation, which is why Richard Dawkins and other have launched the Clergy Project to support those who are in transition. My friend Rich Lyons is a member of the project. He had to leave his home in Texas and excavate old radio skills he hadn’t used in over a decade in order to start life over in Seattle. Questioning cost him not only his livelihood, but also his wife, access to his beloved daughter, and his small-town reputation as a decent person. Rich now produces a podcast series called Living After Faith – his way of offering a helping hand to other exiles from Christian fundamentalism.

Getting out of the church can be a complicated process -- but it's easy compared to getting the church out of you. A while back, I wrote an article titled "Getting God’s Self-appointed Messengers Out of Your Head." I talked about a concept psychologists call “introjects.” When you are a toddler, your mobility outpaces your good sense. Left to their own devices, many toddlers would play in traffic -- without even being told to. Caregivers have to provide constant external supervision. One of the ways that a toddler becomes capable of greater autonomy is that the voices of those external supervisors get internalized. The toddler brain develops what we call an introjected parent -- an internal model that can say, "Don’t follow that ball into the street," even if the real-world mother or father isn’t there. We create virtual, introjected parents (and teachers and preachers), so that even if all of those authority figures disappear we will still know how to function. But at some point having your parents along in your head is a disadvantage -- say, for example, when somebody really hot has just undone the top button on your shirt.

I think of recovery from religion like peeling layers off of an onion. Dissenting intellectually from teachings or doctrines you learned as an adult is like peeling off one of the outer layers. But if you keep going, you find scripts that got laid down earlier—attitudes, emotional conditioning, ideas you were taught before you had the capacity to question them. And some of these are tremendously harmful from a psychological standpoint.

I once was speaking to a group of Hindus who wanted to understand evangelical Christianity, because rampant proselytizing was dividing their villages and splitting families down the middle. After the talk, a woman named Mohini came up to me. She asked, “Is what you told us really true -- that Christians believe children are born evil?” I explained again the doctrine of original sin. She was horrified. She said, “When babies are born into Hindu families, we whisper to them: 'You are perfect. You are a spark of the divine.'”

Last week, I was working alongside my friend Al, who is a carpenter and used to belong to a Christian commune. I asked him, “If you were talking to a group of college students about recovery from religion, what would you tell them? What would you most want them to know?” He said: “Tell them they are OK just the way they are." Getting rid of the sense that you were born deeply, unacceptably flawed can be a lifetime endeavor.

Triggers for Leaving

Like my own experience at Children’s Hospital, many former believers experience some kind of acute trigger. Religion has an immune system made up of promises, threats and behavioral scripts that keep belief from crumbling under pressure from outside information. In Bible-believing Christianity, that immune reaction includes disparagement of rationality: “Thinking themselves wise they became fools” (Romans 1:22) or “The fool has said in his heart there is no God” (Psalms 14:1). The Bible is full of threats against the faithless, from the story of Noah’s flood to the tortures promised in Revelation. Rules for believers prohibit emotional attachments to outsiders: “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness and what communion hath light with darkness” (2 Cor 6:14).

When the religion’s immune system is working, it can seem like nothing gets through. A motivated believer will fend off any amount of linear reasoning or evidence. Backed into a corner he or she will simply insist, “I just know.” I picture some of my own family members surrounded by a polished wall of smooth steel—impervious, with no foot or handhold.

And yet, over time, life creates little windows of opening. Sometimes the trigger is unignorable hypocrisies or cruelty by church members. Sometimes it is a life crisis—a divorce, natural disaster, injury or loss of a loved one. Sometimes new social connections open up new ideas. Sometimes the accumulation of contradictory information reaches a tipping point. Bible-believing Christians, those who see the Bible as the perfect word of God, would be horrified to know how often loss of faith is triggered by someone deciding to read the good book and discovering the long litany of slavery, incest, misogyny, genocide, or scientific absurdities there.

Stages of Recovery 

When the walls of faith start crumbling, people often go through a process that I think of as roughly four phases based on the dominant emotions of each stage:

1. Denial and fear. When religion has provided the structure to your life, doubt can be terrifying—especially if you’ve been taught that doubt is a sign of spiritual weakness or comes straight from the devil. In this phase, many believers redouble their efforts to shore up their faith. They may pray desperately for God to take away the doubts. Increased Bible-reading is common. So is missionary work: if you can convince others God is real, then surely it must be true. Psychologist Marlene Winell specializes in recovery from religion. For this phase of recovery, she offers clients two bits of advice that she sums up as “Get real” and “Get a grip”:

Be honest with yourself about whether your religion is working for you. Let go of trying to force it to make sense....Don’t panic. The fear you feel is part of the indoctrination. All those messages about what will happen to you if you leave the religion are a self-serving part of the religion. If you calm down, you’ll be just fine. Many people have been through this.

2. Uncertainty and guilt. At some point, doubt gains the upper hand. But that doesn’t mean the transition is over. When those final threads of my own faith broke, I kept my thoughts to myself. I didn’t believe in God anymore, so I told myself, but I didn’t want to drag anyone else to hell with me. A friend described this phase as “I don’t believe in Hell. Does that mean I’m going there?” It would take several years and several therapists after my Children’s Hospital rotation before I risked asking my brother Dan how he managed to hold onto our childhood beliefs. (I found out his beliefs were as long gone as mine.)

My book, Trusting Doubt, is particularly valuable in this phase because it digs into core evangelical teachings, showing how they can’t possibly be true. Information is powerful in helping to purge those last lingering shreds of doubt and the guilt that goes with them. Learn about yourself, the world around you and the history of your religion. Former Mormon Garrett Amini says his parents called books and articles that were critical of his religion “spiritual pornography.” Evangelicals don’t use this term, but the concept is probably familiar to anyone who has ever been a part of a sect that has to constantly fend off reality. So, read widely: evolutionary biology, analysis of sacred texts, psychology of religion, physics. Listen with open ears. The truth will set you free.

3. Loss, grief and anger. Once there’s no going back, it’s not unusual to feel bereft, spiritually, socially, intellectually and emotionally. The loss is real, even if Jesus is not. Religion offers clarity, identity, purpose, community, a channel for joy, a structure around which to sculpt the week and the calendar year. That is a lot to lose -- even if your parents or spouse don’t kick you out. Grieving is important. So is anger. Anger is an activating emotion, it gives you the guts to say what is real—to yourself and to others, and to make hard changes.

Christians often are taught that anger is bad, and many people will encourage you to shutter it during the recovery process. It can feel risky, too big or too out of control. But the reality is that each of our emotions has a purpose, and sometimes we need to express anger so we can learn how to take care of ourselves without it. Learning to express anger in a way that is appropriate and modulated takes practice.

When you get stuck in either grief or anger, it's time to get help. Marlene Winell's book, Leaving the Fold, has great self-help exercises for fundamentalists in recovery. But sometimes self-help isn’t enough. Winell offers long-distance phone consultations and RecoveringfromReligion.org is creating a referral list of mental health professionals who are able to work with clients in recovery.

4. Emergence, curiosity, affirmation. The very first ex-Christian Web site I ran across  -- now almost 10 years ago -- was called losingmyreligion.com. Its archive still exists, headed by the same banner it had then -- a picture of a dead fish and an inscription that says: "Stay home Sundays, save 10 percent." Just beneath the banner is this poem:

Awake
 
I woke up to an empty room

No more angels watching over me.
No more demons to be held at bay
by the invocation of
an Anglicized version
of a Hellenized version
of a Hebrew name

I woke up to an empty room:

Just a room. Four walls, ceiling, floor.
Just a room. Nothing more.

I woke up to an empty room
and embraced the solid air.

I woke up to an empty room and knew myself

awake.
 
What Comes Next?

In those wonderful interludes when you find yourself awake, the dominant emotions shift from focusing on who you were to focusing on who and what you want to be. Which values and habits from your religion do you want to keep? What do you want to call yourself? What new discoveries most excite your curiosity? What matters – really matters to you?

As a movement, atheism—freethought—secularism is just becoming strong enough to move beyond a defensive posture and beginning to ask these questions. Are there secular moral absolutes? Dare we talk about secular spiritual community? How do we build ritual, holidays and music back into our communal lives? Absent religion, how can we together express wonder and joy?
Joseph Campbell had this to say:

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive….”

That is the quest of a lifetime.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

SALON

Thursday, Apr 26, 2012 07:30 AM EDT

The myth of the “morning-after abortion pill”

There's a reason why people mistake emergency contraception and abortion: The right intentionally confuses the two

By Irin Carmon



  

 (Credit: Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)
 

It started around February, when Republicans were still eager to talk about contraception. The Obama administration, or so Mitt Romney charged in Colorado, was forcing religious institutions to provide “morning-after pills –in other words abortive pills — and the like, at no cost.”

It was, of course, a lie. Romney was conflating two different pills: emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which prevents a pregnancy; and chemical abortion, or mifepristone, which ends a pregnancy of up to seven weeks’ gestation and isn’t covered under the new guidelines. Since both pills were marketed in the U.S. around the same time, even some pro-choicers have gotten confused. But Colorado happens to be the epicenter of people confusing them on purpose. It’s the birthplace of the Personhood movement and home to Focus on the Family, both of which have strategically called emergency contraception “abortion” on the scientifically unproven basis that they could block a fertilized egg from implanting.
There are a host of ironies here. Obama has earned the renewed support of reproductive-rights advocates by requiring health insurers to cover contraception, but the Center for Reproductive Rights is still taking him to court – with oral hearings being held this week before a New York federal court -– for overruling the FDA’s recommendation to lift the prescription requirement on emergency contraception for women under 17. That litigation has been winding its way through the system for over a decade, throughout the Bush-era politicization of the FDA, eventually resulting in a federal judge concluding that “the FDA repeatedly and unreasonably delayed issuing a decision on [the emergency contraception pill] Plan B for suspect reasons.” The FDA was ordered to explain why Plan B shouldn’t be available over the counter for girls 13 and up. When the Obama administration overruled the FDA’s recommendation to make it over the counter, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman suggested the Center for Reproductive Rights reopen its case.
“It seems to me that what we’re going through is a rerun of what happened before,” Korman remarked, referring to politics trumping the recommendations of medical professionals.

The Obama administration’s unspoken but unmistakable fear was of an election-cycle attack line that Michele Bachmann would use anyway: That teenage girls would be able to get Plan B from “the grocery store aisles next to bubble gum and next to M&Ms.” That was, in fact, an echo of the language President Obama himself used to invoke a highly unsupported bogeyman: that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, … buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.”

But there is another twist, so far mostly overlooked: Emergency contraception won’t be covered by insurance for everyone, since it’s available over-the-counter for those who can show I.D. proving that they’re 17 or older. They’ll still have to fork over around $50 a pop. But as long as girls 16 and younger need a prescription for the morning-after pill and they have insurance, it will be fully covered — effectively free. The same goes for women older than 17 who decide to jump through the hoops of getting a prescription, either for over-the-counter Plan B or the prescription-only generic and Ella versions.
As much as pro-choice advocates want to lift the barriers that make emergency contraception hard to get — because it’s more effective the faster you use it — one of those barriers, the prescription requirement, also mitigates another, the high cost. Said Adam Sonfield, a senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, of this catch-22, “It presents a tradeoff between cost and access.”
– – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – –
Part of the reason people get confused about emergency contraception and abortion is because lots of people are confused about the basic biology of pregnancy: specifically, that it doesn’t necessarily happen instantaneously and that sperm can live in the body for several days, during which time a woman can ovulate and an egg can potentially be fertilized and implant. Regular use of hormonal contraception prevents ovulation and the chance for fertilization; emergency contraception essentially works the same way except that it’s taken after sex, by which point ovulation may have already happened. But according to recent studies, there is no evidence that taking emergency contraception after ovulation and fertilization will stop the egg from implanting.

But the misinformation and misunderstanding have created a contradictory public health picture when it comes to emergency contraception. In some ways, it’s become more accessible. In 2010, the U.S. approved a longer-acting French variant of Plan B, known as Ella, and there are scattered experiments in convenient delivery, from a birth-control vending machine at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania to a new bike messenger service in London, both of which caused minor news sensations. The annual “Back Up Your Birth Control” campaign has been promoting the line “EC=BC,” emphasizing that emergency contraception is birth control, not abortion — just in case that is a barrier for women who are considering taking it. And the Center for Reproductive Rights’ petition did manage to lower the age restriction from 18 to 17.

But there are more disturbing suggestions that misinformation is triumphing. A recent Boston Medical Center study found that many pharmacists were still often misinformed about the age requirement and were even more likely to wrongly refuse emergency contraception to 17-year-olds in low-income neighborhoods, where the rate of unintended pregnancy is higher. In Honduras, the Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of emergency contraception, which means women who use it could be jailed. Personhood initiatives, which oppose the morning-after pill, have so far failed in Colorado, Mississippi and Oklahoma, but they’ve introduced false doubts by providing even more opportunities for pundits and candidates to say “the morning-after abortion pill.”

It’s a problem that dates back decades: When, throughout the ’90s, the U.S. considered approving a French chemical abortion pill known as RU-486, it was widely called the “morning-after abortion pill,” including, often, in the New York Times. The distinction wasn’t pressed by the pro-choice community itself.  “At the time, the prevailing medical wisdom was that there is a continuum rather than a bright line between EC and mifepristone,” said Gloria Feldt, who was president of Planned Parenthood at the time, with the benefit providing more options for women who did not wish to be pregnant. “It was also assumed that a formulation of mifepristone would eventually be made for use as a true ‘morning-after’ pill.” The widespread belief, she recalled, was that a chemical abortion pill would “solve all the abortion debate problems and guarantee privacy.”
Another problem was that although doctors and non-professionals had been giving women high dosages of regular birth control pills for decades as a form of emergency contraception, the science of exactly how emergency contraception worked remained unclear. The medical definition of pregnancy remains “implantation of a fertilized egg,” but let’s say you believe, as the Catholic Church does, that fertilization itself creates a human life. Anti-choice advocates obsess over what would happen if a woman who took emergency contraception did happen to ovulate anyway and an egg potentially was fertilized, which is enough reason for some of them to call postcoital contraception “abortion.” They have claimed that hormonal contraception makes the lining of the endometrium inhospitable to a fertilized egg, constituting “murder.” Even the official packaging for Plan B, the single-step version of emergency contraception, suggests that “in addition” to blocking ovulation and fertilization, “it may inhibit implantation (by altering the endometrium).”

Except that we now know it doesn’t, even if you walk down the path of remote maybes, which requires you to believe that a zygote, which may not implant for unknowable reasons, has the same rights as a living woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant. As Princeton’s Kelly Cleland pointed out recently, “The science has evolved considerably in the last 13 years. Newer evidence, published since the Plan B label was approved, provides compelling evidence that levonorgestrel EC (LNG EC) works before ovulation, but not after.” The International Consortium for Emergency Contraception and the International Federation of Gynecology & Obstetrics also note that two new studies have shown conclusively that if a woman has ovulated and an egg has been fertilized, it’s too late for emergency contraception to work. They recommended that the language on the product labeling be changed.

Of course, scientific evidence has rarely had much place in this debate. In the meantime, even the most non-ideological news sources keep making the mistake alongside the ideologues. Last week, a furor erupted after the Associated Press reported that “Women seeking to take emergency contraception like the so-called ‘morning after’ pill would have to do so in the presence of a doctor under a bill before the Alabama legislature.” That is, until Erin Gloria Ryan from Jezebel read the actual bill and saw that it was, in fact, a law meant to limit chemical abortion, not emergency contraception. (A spokesperson for the AP said a correction was being prepared). “The confusion over this issue is probably one of the reasons emergency contraception hasn’t had as positive an impact as hoped when it comes to lowering the abortion rate,” wrote Amanda Marcotte at RH Reality Check. “If women think it is some kind of abortion-ish thing, they probably think taking it is a big deal, instead of thinking of it more like taking the pill, since it’s basically the same thing.”

But talk about moved goalposts. If ’90s-era advocates had hoped that the ability to end a pregnancy in the safety of your home with RU-486 — the actual abortion pill, not the morning-after one — would defuse the abortion debate, their more recent counterparts hoped to take it to the next technological level by providing “tele-med” abortions. They would involve doctors seeing a woman over webcam with a nurse practitioner physically present, helping women in remote areas with ever-dwindling options for safe abortions to access them. But four states have already passed requirements meant to undercut these options by forcing a doctor’s presence, and the bill the Associated Press misreported was aiming to add Alabama to the list. All in all, there have been fewer gamechangers, and more cases of one step forward, two steps back.

Irin Carmon is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @irincarmon or email her at icarmon@salon.com. More Irin Carmon.

msn

Extra

The perils of privatizing government

By Karen Aho

MSN Money

A Tennessee city's decision to let a home burn because of an unpaid fee illustrates one of the debates of this election season: How much should government do?

By now, you've probably heard the story about the Tennessee man whose house was allowed to burn down because he hadn't paid a $75 fire-protection fee.

The heart-rending image -- firefighters standing by as a family's home is reduced to ashes and four pets die -- became instant fodder for a fierce election-year debate over what the government should and shouldn't be doing with public dollars.

With the midterm elections looming and Tea Party candidates stumping for drastic cuts in government spending, their foes held out the Tennessee fire as a glaring example of the perils of privatization.

"This is essentially the same as denying someone essential medical care because he doesn't have insurance," economist Paul Krugman blogged for The New York Times. "So the question is, do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens?"

On the other side, most of the logic went this way: If the firefighters had saved the home anyway, who'd ever pay the fee again?

"I know that if I opted out of the program before, I would be more likely to opt-in now," Jonah Goldberg wrote on National Review Online.

It's not as if people aren't aware of the potential problems of privatization. After 9/11, the nation decided airport security couldn't be left in the hands of poorly paid private screeners. The high cost -- in dollars and human life -- of outsourcing operations to contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan has been painfully clear for years.

But as the recession drags on and governments sink deeper into the red, it's easy to be swept up in the call for government to do less. That's until a picture of what that might look like emerges: public firefighters, in uniform and with hoses in hand, doing nothing.

The public-private debate

Privatization, broadly defined as any transfer of a government service to a private company, is used at every level of government and often with positive results. It can involve work contracted out but paid with city dollars, or fees paid by the users of, say, a service or a roadway.

In the Tennessee fire, a city department responded to the call. But the home was outside the city, where residents were required to pay a fee for service -- akin to a privatized model.

Privatization is almost as old as cities themselves. The ancient Greeks and Romans raised funds by auctioning off the right to serve the public for a profit. Privatization in the U.S. is nothing new either, but it had been largely abandoned by the mid-20th century in favor of a growing public sector.

"In the 19th century, New York City used to experiment with privatizing street cleanup. It was always cheaper to privatize, but the streets didn't get clean," says Elliott D. Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University and the author of "You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization." "Finally, by the 1890s, they had thrown up their hands."

The history of fire protection is similar. "In the 19th century, cities used to burn down with private fire companies," Sclar says, so they went public.

The basic concept -- protecting the common good by protecting each individual -- has been applied to schools, libraries, fire and police service, trash collection, transportation, infrastructure, health care, social services and more. The success of these services is credited with laying the foundation for a prosperous American middle class with an innovative industrial base.

But as the backlash against "big government" grew in the 1970s and '80s, privatization re-emerged. By 2007, half of all local governments said they had considered privatizing some services, with nearly 90% citing cost-cutting as the reason, according to the International City/County Management Association.

Name a public service today, and somewhere a private CEO is running it: prisons, schools, parks, trash collection, welfare centers, mass transit.

Proponents say the profit motive inspires companies to innovate, streamline and cut costs. The Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, says privatization typically reduces costs between 5% and 20%.

A good chunk of those savings comes in the form of reduced labor costs. Today, 30% of public-sector workers are unionized, typically receiving pensions, good health benefits and better-than-average pay. Just 7% of the private sector is unionized. (Public-sector unions also tend to support Democrats -- another reason privatization is a big issue for the largely Republican Tea Party movement.)

"Oftentimes it's about breaking unions," says Dean Baker, a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive Washington, D.C., think tank. "Insofar as you can get a lower-cost work force, you can get savings."

Cutting costs by driving down wages

Like many public agencies, Jackson County, Ore., considered the bottom line when it tried to reopen its 15 library branches, shuttered after a loss of federal funds in 2007. While negotiating with the county workers union, it put management of the libraries out for bid.

Library Systems & Services, the only private company to bid, won the contract with a bid that cut costs by about 40% over what the union had proposed. With library hours reduced, the company rehired 70 of the 110 laid-off library members, at their same salaries but with reduced benefits, says Amy Blossom, the manager of the Ashland branch.

An analysis by the Oregon State Library found that while overall library staffing in Jackson was reduced by 36%, the number of librarians was reduced by 52% and the number of those with advanced degrees -- common for the position -- by 57%.

This net result -- lowered compensation overall and fewer benefits -- is typical with privatization, according to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a union.

"It's certainly been one of the factors in the growing inequality" between rich and poor that led to the recession, Baker says. "You get rid of those jobs, you put more downward pressure on the wages of other jobs."

Critics also say there's no guarantee that work will be done less expensively, or better, with privatization. In fact, the accounting books at private companies often remain closed. Jackson County, while happy with Library Systems & Services, has no idea exactly how the company is spending tax dollars. (The company declined to comment for this story.)

That veil of secrecy can be costly. Consider the case of New York City's hiring of computer consultant Science Applications International for a project called CityTime. After more than a decade, there's no end in sight, and the New York Daily News reported recently that more than 400 consultants on the project have billed the city an average of $400,000 a year. The city's controller is looking into why a project that was supposed to cost $68 million has cost more than $700 million, the newspaper reports.

Asked to comment for this story, Science Applications provided written statement saying: "CityTime is working now for 73,000 employees with a 99.9 percent accuracy rate and SAIC is eager to have the system up and running in the remaining agencies once those agencies give us the green light. We believe CityTime brings a great value and savings to New York City taxpayers and we are pleased to help ensure its completion."

Ironically, the project was for equipment to prevent time-clock abuses by city employees.

Privatization "is a very mixed bag. Just because something is done in the private sector doesn't mean it's done more cheaply," says Baker, particularly once you factor in "highly paid executives."

"A government that's incompetent to deliver a service is not going to be any more competent to monitor a contractor," Sclar adds.

Get rid of government?

Even when privatizing services does save money, the question remains: How far do we want to go?

Privatization purists say taxpayer dollars should never help pay for programs that would not turn a profit in the private sector or where there's a private alternative. Some Tea Party candidates have gone as far as calling for privatization of Social Security and Medicare, the nation's biggest social programs.

Take Amtrak. Experts think half of its routes would be profitable if run by private companies, says Chris Edwards, an economist and the editor of Downsizing the Federal Government, an online guide of the libertarian Cato Institute. The routes that wouldn't be profitable -- largely in rural areas and outside the Northeast -- "don't make any sense and shouldn't be run," he says.

"I don't think anything should be off limits," he says. He'd like to see the Federal Aviation Administration -- essentially the police of the skies -- privatized, along with airports. The media and federal accounting office could monitor operations, but ultimately customers would drive performance.

If Dulles International Airport in the Washington, D.C., area hired a lousy security company, passengers would be more likely to use nearby Reagan National Airport instead, Edwards says.

Another area ripe for privatization: highways and toll lanes, something that's already being done in some areas. Let private companies raise capital and charge fees, and if you can't pay, slum it on the public pavement.

Life in second class

But how much of this would the public stand for?

Sure, we'll accept first class in the skies. In fact, bizarre pricing gaps among travelers make flying affordable for the average Joes in the sardine cabin (see "The secrets behind crazy air-travel prices").

But should there be two classes of airport security, two classes of fire protection, two classes of public safety? And what happens when those paying to drive on private roads get tired of paying a gas tax to support public roads? It can be annoying to pay both, Edwards concedes.

When Sclar, whose work takes him around the globe, lectures on privatization, he shows slides of what he calls "the transportation of the rich in São Paulo, Brazil, and the United States."

The first slide shows a helicopter, the safe mode of transport in Brazil, where public services have been heavily privatized and public areas are often unsafe. The second shows a New York City taxi -- a very democratic mode of transportation.

"When you don't have good municipal services, societies break down," Sclar says. "The social costs of that can be enormous over time."

So when do you let it burn?

The Tennessee fire has helped put the high-level debate into perspective.

When city officials ordered the firefighters of South Fulton, Tenn., not to put out Gene Cranick's fire, their reasons made good business sense: If you provide a service for free, no one will pay.

But was it the right decision for a community?

As Cranick mourned his losses, strangers across the country called him a freeloader, an ingrate and a jerk. Firefighters from other departments said that the South Fulton officers should be ashamed of themselves. After the fire, one of Cranick's relatives went to the fire station and reportedly assaulted the chief.

Even privatization proponents hedged. "The Obion County fire seems a clear example of government failure, not market failure," wrote Thomas Firey for the Cato Institute. "It's not difficult to imagine what a private fire service would do in an event like the Obion fire: It likely would extinguish the blaze and then send the homeowner a bill."

On the National Review Online, writer David Foster suggested this right business decision may not have been the moral one. Others said the fire was not a good example of privatization anyway: When the subsidized city department entered the market, it unfairly blocked out competitors.

But even in an entirely free market, the question would remain: When your neighbor's home is burning, do you have a responsibility to help, or do you let it burn for a lack of a fee?

Or perhaps, if you're not paid up, we just assume you're not really a neighbor. That's what one poster at The Agonist seems to suggest, blaming Cranick for not having just paid the fee and adding, "Jeebus people, step up and be part of the community already."

The Perils of Police Privatization

FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin

Reflections on police privatization

by Dennis O'Leary

Across the Nation, budget-conscious communities explore the privatization of governmental operations as a way to contain costs while continuing to provide citizens with traditional municipal services. Some services, such as garbage collection, are routinely provided both as private functions and as functions of the government. Increasingly, however, communities are beginning to privatize services that were once exclusively within the realm of the public sector. Examples include food preparation in public schools, collection of delinquent parking violation penalties, and even vouchers for public education.

Recently, the Borough of Sussex, New Jersey, experimented with privatizing another service traditionally administered only by the public sector--the police department. In doing so, this small municipality of 2,500 residents became what may be the first modern American community to privatize its municipal law enforcement.

As the Sussex County Prosecutor, I witnessed firsthand the borough's experiment with private policing. Its experiences, both positive and negative, offer valuable lessons to community and law enforcement leaders around the Nation.

THE SUSSEX EXPERIMENT

The Borough

Like many small communities in the Northeast, Sussex Borough has experienced a general economic decline during the past several decades. Founded before the advent of automobiles, its Main Street district offers very limited parking. As a result, people in the surrounding areas do the majority of their shopping at suburban malls rather than at local stores. Many merchants have found it difficult to survive this "Main Street syndrome," and the resulting vacant storefronts have proven to be something of a blight on the area. In addition, two once-fashionable hotels in the borough have degenerated into rooming houses that have, on occasion, attracted a criminal element.

Because Sussex Borough is a small, fully developed municipality, little opportunity exists to expand its tax base. In fact, during the past several years, the borough has experienced a decline in real-estate-based tax assessments that has brought the community to the brink of insolvency.

Disbanding the Police Department

For a number of years, the borough's governing body strongly considered closing the police department. Even though the four-member force patrolled only on a part-time basis and possessed almost no modern equipment, the borough found it increasingly difficult to afford.

The issue was, of course, a highly political one. Many residents feared that without a regular police presence, the criminal element in the Main Street area would overtake the business district. However, in early 1992, in the wake of a drug scandal that culminated in the indictment of the chief and another department officer, the borough's law enforcement operations were taken over by the Sussex County Prosecutor's Office for a period of several months.

With assistance from the county sheriff, we were able to provide borough residents with a law enforcement presence that they had heretofore not known. This was due, in large part, to the expanded personnel and resources available.

Still, because my statutory mission does not include providing local police coverage, I informed the borough's political leaders that the long-term issue of police coverage would be up to them. For primarily economic reasons, the borough elected to abolish the police department and to rely upon the State police for law enforcement services.

However, it soon became readily apparent that due to limited resources and slow response times, this option would not represent a satisfactory permanent solution. The criminal element in the Main Street district and lawless flavor of the area posed enough of a problem that the residents demanded that the mayor and council enhance police protection within the borough.

Choosing Private Security

Having disbanded its police force for lack of funding, the borough now faced an impasse. Residents sought a more constant uniformed presence than the State police could provide. At the same time, political leaders considered a police department an expense the municipality could no longer afford.

The borough's leaders devised a unique response to this dilemma. They developed a plan to hire a private security company to provide a more constant uniformed presence within the borough. Specifications were drafted, a bid was submitted by a private security company, and a contract was signed between the firm and the borough.

While the security company's initial mission simply was to supplement the State police, it soon became clear that its true mission was to function as a fully independent municipal police department. From the outset, my office received reports of motor vehicles being stopped, summonses being issued, and persons being detained and arrested.

My concern was heightened when reports surfaced that the security guards had mishandled several incidents. In one case, they returned a knife to an individual suspected of assault. Information also came to light revealing that a number of the guards had minor criminal records, primarily for assault.

Partly for these reasons, the borough's experiment in private policing turned out to be a fairly short one. An injunction was obtained by the New Jersey attorney general's office on the basis that the Sussex Borough could not create a private police department without complying with existing State statutes relating to the creation of a police force. While this effectively resolved the issue as it related to Sussex Borough, the privatization of police services is an idea that undoubtedly will be studied closely by other communities in the future. As the residents of Sussex Borough learned, police privatization is a complex issue with a number of compelling arguments both for it and against it.

PRIVATIZATION OF POLICE SERVICES

Not surprisingly, the Sussex experiment with privatization generated a great deal of interest from representatives of two distinct segments of government. Administrators of small municipal governments experiencing financial difficulties similar to those of Sussex Borough saw the experiment as an opportunity to save considerable sums of money without denying citizens a needed service. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Police Benevolent Association and many law enforcement unions saw the Sussex experiment as a direct threat to their livelihood. While both sides professed their concerns in terms of good government and effective law enforcement, money clearly represented an underlying issue.

I personally opposed the action undertaken by Sussex Borough. However, my concern stemmed not so much from the concept itself as it did from the lack of safeguards provided in terms of accountability and qualifications.

Accountability

The statutes in New Jersey authorizing municipalities to provide police services are similar to those in other States. Once a police department is established, it operates more or less autonomously from the municipality's administration. The chain of command does not go through the mayor and political structure of the municipality, but rather directly to the county prosecutor and the attorney general, and ultimately to the courts. This arrangement was designed to "depoliticize" the administration of law enforcement, a laudable and desirable goal.

The arrangement established in Sussex Borough completely circumvented this delicate balance. The private security company directly reported, and was technically responsible, only to the entity that awarded its contract. History is replete with instances in which police departments were used for dubious purposes by political bosses. This is not to say such a situation developed, or would have developed, in Sussex Borough. However, were such arrangements duplicated in other municipalities, the potential for corruption and abuse certainly would grow accordingly.

Qualifications

As county prosecutor, I was concerned also with the issue of qualifications. As in every State, an entire statutory framework exists in New Jersey relating to hiring qualifications for municipal police officers. Candidates undergo psychiatric testing prior to being offered employment, as well as intensive training on dealing with people in difficult situations, criminal law (including search and seizure), physical fitness, marksmanship, and various other matters relating to law enforcement work.

The training received by the private security guards was limited at best. In fact, the only real training the guards received focused on the use of guns. By contrast, firearms training generally represents a relatively minor component of the instruction provided to public sector law enforcement officers.

It is reasonable to assume that municipalities offering positions of authority, which include the carrying of a firearm, at relatively low salaries, will attract a wide spectrum of applicants. Some will be attracted to the job out of a sense of public commitment. Others will be motivated by other, less desirable factors.

Therefore, to ensure the integrity of any municipal law enforcement force, a psychological screening process is not only desirable but essential. However, this is only a first step. Training in areas such as search and seizure must keep personnel abreast of constant changes in the law. Even with intensive training, police officers, as well as attorneys and judges, make periodic mistakes in these areas.

The security guards in Sussex Borough received no training in these areas. The security firm explained this deficiency by claiming that, as private citizens, the guards were not bound to comply with the fourth, fifth, or sixth amendments (rights of defendants).

I vigorously disagree. While private citizens are not obliged to afford such rights to other private citizens, a convincing argument could be made that the security guards did not act merely as private citizens. They were, after all, duly hired agents of a municipality.

Nonetheless, the guards were seriously unprepared for their responsibilities. In short, the hiring of a private security finn in lieu of a municipal police department not only circumvented a longstanding statutory framework, it also constituted a giant step backward in terms of law enforcement professionalism.

CAN PRIVATIZATION WORK?

Is it possible to have a professional, qualified, responsible police department that operates fully within the private sector? As I have indicated, my objections to the Sussex Borough experiment centered on qualifications and accountability. Both areas could be addressed adequately by simply amending laws and regulations to provide accountability along a similar chain of command as those of public police agencies. In addition, legislatures could mandate that in order to win a bid for municipal policing, private security companies must meet the same screening and training criteria as public police departments.

Could private security someday replace public policing? There seems to be a national trend among legislatures to grant greater police powers to private security. It is conceivable that the legal obstacles to private security firms assuming "public" policing powers could be overcome. In fact, from a legal perspective, this transition could be accomplished with little difficulty.

Whether municipalities embrace the concept depends on a number of factors. Communities should consider these factors carefully before embarking on the road to privatization.

CONSIDERATIONS

Like many private waste removal companies, large security firms could supply police coverage for several contiguous municipalities, and thereby affect economies of scale. Such an arrangement not only would keep costs down but also would provide greater promotional opportunities for law enforcement officers, because they would be working for a larger enterprise. In addition, the degree of professionalism theoretically would improve over small police departments that possess limited training resources and equipment.

The financial savings to municipalities could be dramatic. In the short-lived Sussex experiment, the borough realized a savings of over 50 percent. While I suspect that a portion of this amount resulted from a "loss leader" by the security firm in its effort to win the borough's initial bid, I believe that a practical savings of 25 to 30 percent could be realistic for many jurisdictions.

Clearly, however, such arrangements would not be without considerable drawbacks. The large amount of money private security companies would have to invest to hire and train qualified personnel would be reflected in any realistic bid. Further, while competition may serve to keep costs to municipalities down initially, once a security company becomes entrenched in a particular area, its proximity to nearby jurisdictions would allow it a distinct advantage to underbid other firms. The resulting monopoly could significantly erode any long-term savings that the municipalities anticipate.

Aside from costs, however, other important considerations remain. Under private security agreements, municipalities would possess considerably less control over their police force than afforded by the traditional public policing model. While public police departments enjoy some degree of autonomy, police chiefs often are appointed by municipal governing bodies. These bodies generally review and approve police budgets, as well.

But, more subtle "controls" also forge a link between a municipality and its police department. In many communities, for example, when the police department promotes a patrol officer to sergeant, a ceremony takes place before the town council meeting. Generally, despite periodic "rocky moments," a warm and friendly relationship exists between the governing body and the police department of a small town.

Municipalities that enter into private security arrangements suddenly would find themselves dealing with corporate America. The warm and friendly relationship as it once existed between local government and the police force would change forever. Because large private security firms could conceivably hire employees from anywhere and relocate them, municipal government officials and citizens may find themselves no longer dealing with police officers who are also friends, and in some cases, relatives. While this certainly could be seen on one level as a positive outcome, the fact remains that small town residents appreciate being afforded certain informal courtesies by their police department. They enjoy being known by name and feel secure being protected by members of their own community. To a large degree, the "personal touch" afforded by local public departments would become a casualty of police privatization.

Further, in the interest of efficiency and scheduling, private security guards in large firms might be assigned from municipality to municipality. This would allow little opportunity for guards to develop allegiance to any one community, let alone to individual residents or municipal officials. The unique advantages of local police coverage--intervening when an otherwise well-behaved youth becomes associated with the wrong crowd, checking on elderly residents, noticing a suspicious new person in town--would be missing.

In the final analysis, it may be these intangibles that form the basis for debate in municipalities considering the privatization issue. Communities must decide whether forsaking these intangibles is worth any monetary savings realized by privatizing the police function.

In the interest of accuracy, however, communities should keep the issue of police privatization in perspective. Private policing does not represent a radical new concept. Indeed, the idea of government-administered, or public, law enforcement is of relatively recent origin--occurring in most parts of the world within the past 100 years. Prior to the advent of public policing, groups of citizens wishing law enforcement protection organized it privately, without direct government intervention. During the formative years of the American frontier, citizen posses and private railroad guards provided essential law enforcement services. In many ways, the privatization of policing simply represents a new take on an American tradition.

CONCLUSION

Is it legally possible to create a private police department? Probably. But, more important questions remain. Would such an arrangement work? And would the savings be worth the effort? The Sussex Borough experiment may have been too brief to fully answer these questions. But, they will undoubtedly be asked by economically challenged communities around the Nation.

Although private policing may offer significant initial cost benefits to small municipalities, the savings would probably diminish as large security firms formed regional monopolies. Municipalities then may find that they lost far more than they gained.

Because many of the functions that local police departments perform relate to providing services to their communities in addition to mere code enforcement, ill-planned privatization could bring about unanticipated change. Communities should consider carefully the effects of all these changes when weighing the benefits of private, versus public, policing.

Mr. Dennis O'Leary serves as the Sussex County Prosecutor in Newton, New Jersey.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Federal Bureau of Investigation

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

Bibliography for: "Reflections on police privatization"

Dennis O'Leary "Reflections on police privatization". FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,The. FindArticles.com. 16 Nov, 2011.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Federal Bureau of Investigation

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group