Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

By Jonathan Zimmerman

In 1907 Mark Twain published a scathing attack on Christian Science, which held that all illness lay in the mind. In his trademark satirical style, Twain congratulated the religion for providing “life-long immunity from imagination-manufactured disease.”

The other kinds of disease were real, Twain insisted, and their victims required medicine – not prayer – to get better. But Twain also condemned the growing movement to prosecute faith healers and parents for withholding medical care from children who died.

A century later, we know much more about what makes people sick and well. As Twain understood, though, we still need to balance the protection of children with the religious liberty of their parents. And that’s why we should retain narrowly crafted laws exempting parents from child-abuse charges if they resist medical care for religious reasons.

Such laws are under fire again in the wake of the recent death of Brandon Schaible, an 8-month-old boy in suburban Philadelphia who succumbed to pneumonia after his parents did not take him to a doctor. The parents had already been convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of another son, who also died of pneumonia in 2009. They had been sentenced to ten years’ probation and ordered to seek medical care if their other children got sick.

But here’s the kicker: Pennsylvania already has a medical exemption law, as do 43 other states. Most of these measures exempt parents from prosecution only if a child isn’t seriously harmed. And even when the laws protect parents from criminal charges, they often allow courts to require medical care or to remove kids from parental custody.

That’s what happened to the Schaibles, whose seven other children were placed in foster care after Brandon died. The parents are being held without bail pending a hearing next week.

So why have exemption laws at all? Because they honor religious freedom, even for people whose ideas seem odd or abhorrent to many of us. That’s one of the greatest achievements of American history, and it’s much more recent than we often realize.

Consider the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose children were taunted, beaten, and expelled for refusing to salute the flag in public schools. The Supreme Court upheld laws requiring the salute in 1940 but reversed itself three years later, providing a ringing affirmation of religious liberty.

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” the Court declared, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

So if you can’t force kids to say a prayer, can you require them to receive blood transfusions? The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in those, either. Yet in 1962, a New Jersey court upheld the conviction of a Witness couple who had stopped doctors from giving their deceased son a transfusion that would have saved his life.

The couple cited a state law that parents could not be prevented from treating their children’s illnesses “in accordance with [their] religious tenets.” The court acknowledged the parents’ “personal freedoms” to practice their faith, but concluded that “protection of a child’s welfare” trumped them in this case.

And that’s exactly why we should keep religious exemption laws, which force us to keep both of these goals in mind. I wouldn’t want to live in a country where religious believers could harm their kids with impunity. But I also wouldn’t want to require every parent to provide the same kind of care, no matter what they believed.

That brings us back to Mark Twain, who understood how easy – and dangerous – it was for the government to run roughshod over faith. After the first edition of his book on Christian Science came out, he received several letters arguing for legal restrictions on its practitioners. “It is a burning shame that the law should allow them to trust their helpless little children in their deadly hands,” the correspondents said.

To Twain, though, that was like saying that every father wants “the very best” treatment for his child, “but it is a burning shame that the law does not require him to come to me to ask what kind of healer I will allow him to call.”

And the law, Twain reminded us, “is merely a multiplied ‘me.’” Even as we take steps to protect children of different faiths, we should also be wary of imposing a single single standard of medicine on their parents. Religious freedom isn’t absolute, and never should be. But it’s still the best idea America has come up with so far.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in suburban Philadelphia. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press).

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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

By Andrew Lam

                                                   Tankman

There came a startling moment when everything shifted. A man carrying two plastic bags, one in each hand, stood directly in the path of a column of armored tanks, effectively preventing them from proceeding down the avenue toward Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

The day before, on June 4, 1989, hundreds of pro-democracy students and workers had been gunned down in and near the square. The image of “Tank Man,” as he’s now called, stays indelibly in the mind. Some have said his name is Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student, whereabouts unknown. There is speculation that he either was executed or is living in exile in Taiwan. Whoever he is, wherever he is now, dead or alive, it is certain that for a brief moment he managed to stop the machines with just his body. This unknown rebel, unarmed, stood up against the awesome power of the state and, as the world watched, gained something priceless in return: He liberated his body from the collective, from being subservient to the ideological machine, and opened the floodgates to a next world.

Although direct political confrontation failed, a new sideways rebellion began in the cultural and economic sphere, one that has succeeded. If Mao launched the cultural revolution in 1966 to be rid of “liberal bourgeois” and to continue the revolutionary class struggle, the bourgeois liberals have struck back. The real cultural revolution, stoked by individual desires and ambitions, is happening now. “The level of societal openness and individual freedom now enjoyed by the people in China was unthinkable to the protesters at the Tiananmen Square,” says Ling-chi Wang, professor emeritus of Asian American Studies at Berkeley.

It is not ideology or collective yearning that asserts itself in the Middle Kingdom, but the physical self coming to full consciousness. The civilization known for Confucian morals, Taoist mysticism, acupuncture, tai chi, martial arts — radically different ways of looking at the self in relationship with the cosmos — has wholeheartedly embraced Western culture and mores. “Economic and educational opportunities, readily available telecommunications and the Internet have made the people of China highly mobile, and quite well informed,” says Wang, but also “more individual-centered and therefore, less committed to traditional extended family and Confucian social ethics.” Ancestral worship, though allowed under communism, is on the wane as many now flock to the temple of the body. The We of the old traditional world of clanship, of self defined by proper behavior and relationships within the collective, is ceding to the Me of the new generation, one defined by sex.

Premarital sex is now widely practiced. In a 2007 poll by Renmin University of China, more than half the Chinese surveyed in ten provinces found premarital sex acceptable. Only 12.8 percent said it was immoral. In a Beijing study conducted by Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they had sexual relations before marriage, compared with just 15.5 percent in 1989, the year of the massacre. And the Internet, to which 200 million now have access in China (according to PC World), has flung open the bedroom door. While the government cracks down on online political dissent, the new socialism allows for a great deal of personal expression.

                                 Liu Wei, It Looks Like a Landscape

Women bloggers are becoming famous for discussing their sex lives online. One even taped the sounds of her lovemaking, and managed to crash the host server when too many tried to listen at the same time. The biggest celebrity sex scandal in the last few years on the Internet (what now is called Sexy Photo Gate) features Edison Chen, a young Hong Kong hip-hop artist and actor. In some 1,300 explicit photos, Chen, a heartthrob featured in People magazine’s 2006 “Sexiest Man Alive” issue, is seen having sex with over a half dozen Chinese starlets. So far, over 30 million page views of the images have caused Chinese authorities to wonder about the effectiveness of the firewall.

Along with sexual freedom is the celebration of the self. The proliferation of spas, sports clubs, fashion magazines and shows, beauty products, massages, dance clubs, love hotels, talk shows about sex, underground porn, and obsession with athletes and movie and pop stars all speak to the glorification of the body — in stark contrast to the cold war era, when having too big a mirror in one’s home or even wearing makeup in public could be deemed antirevolutionary. Most telling is the growth of the cosmetic surgery industry. In recent years, more than 10,000 clinics have opened. The number of surgeries for straighter noses, double eyelids, and breast augmentation would suggest that a fair number of Chinese with disposable incomes are rushing for extreme makeovers.

           Body Painting Exhibition in Shanghai

This new self — fit, augmented, overtly sexual, and on display — contrasts dramatically with Chinese body images of the past. “The ancient Confucian tradition was criticized for its contempt for physical activity and respect for the intellect,” notes Susan Brownell, author of Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China. “‘Those who work with their brains rule, those who work with their brawn are ruled,’ a saying from Mencius, has been used for a century to illustrate the traditional Confucian aversion to physical exercise, including sports.”

In ancient Rome and Greece, the naked body was sculpted to perfection and generally glorified. During the Renaissance, the human form was rendered not only anatomically correct but profound in refined drawings and paintings. In China, though, the body was kept hidden until the dawn of the 20th century. To be sure, there were erotic images in ancient China, but they were created during the Taoist-dominated eras as manuals to educate young married couples. Far more typical were the paintings that depict upper-class men and women perched on carved wooden chairs, their hands hidden in the sleeves of beautiful brocades, their faces stoic, inexpressive, like peg dolls. To project a cold, outward face was akin to moral rectitude.

“The human body in traditional China was not seen as having its own intrinsic physical glory,” says China scholar Mark Elvin, author of Changing Stories in the Chinese World. Beauty was not dependent on sexual characteristics and attributes, he says, but on artifice and ornamentation — a painted face, silk brocade, the jade bracelet that dangles from the wrist — or alteration such as the painful and crippling binding of feet.

Contacts with the West changed all that. The presence of the pale-skinned, blue-eyed gwai lo, “foreign devil,” forced a new kind of self-awareness on the East. Take the beautiful cheongsam, a body-hugging piece worn by Chinese women. Developed in cosmopolitan Shanghai around 1900, it originated from its opposite, the qipao — a baggy and loose-fitting dress once meant to deemphasize and conceal the wearer’s figure, that was transformed in the final years of China’s last dynasty to reveal curves, waist, bosom, and a lot more skin.

Along with the colonial-era concept of the body as an object of admiration came a more insidious metaphor perpetuated by Westerners: the “sick man of East Asia.” It was reinforced by caricatures of the frail, opium-addicted Chinese man with a long pigtail. Chinese defenselessness carved a deep wound in the collective psyche. Not surprisingly, the Boxer Rebellion, a peasant-based uprising in 1899-1901 against foreign influence, had at its heart the belief that the body can achieve invincibility. The rebels were practitioners of martial arts, which they believed could help turn their bodies into armor, impervious to bullets. That the rebellion failed and the bullets did pierce their flesh did not extinguish this collective longing for inviolability. The theme of Chinese martial arts as the antidote to Western conquerors’ firepower continues to inform and inspire many martial arts films, novels, and comic books.

                                            Mao's Red Guards

Under Mao, the body was once more inducted to represent the nation. In propaganda posters that have become collectors’ items, workers are depicted as strong and square-jawed; athletes are lithe and agile. Sports became synonymous with modernity. A strong body was reflective of national strength and was seen as necessary for unity. The self was in service to a larger cause, and everyone moved together wearing Mao jackets — a sea of blue and gray. The body, subdued by ideology, was not yet free.

Freedom arrived in the late 1980s, and its symbol was that singular image of “Tank Man” engaging in a brazen and courageous act of self-expression. Once unleashed, though, freedom created a ripple effect (more like a wave) that surged through the culture and threatened to wash away hundreds of years of social mores — the piety of Confucianism, the humiliation of Western imperialism, the righteousness of communism under Mao, all variants of a single unifying characteristic: shame.

“Lead the people with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously,” Confucius said in his Analects. Shame, in other words, binds the tongue and inhibits behavior. Those who seek to change the old world order, on the other hand, learn to be shameless. Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, noted that artists who seek to change the conversation of the culture refuse “their elders’ sense of where speech and silence belong, they do not so much erase the categories as redraw the lines.”

Ang Lee’s movie Lust, Caution is a good example of this realignment. In it Tony Leung, a merciless Japanese informant in World War II Shanghai, begins his relationship with Tang Wei, a nationalist, by whipping and raping her. She, in turn, uses her body to get at him. Theirs is a carnal dance toward the gates of hell. Sex is as much the story’s forward arc as the movie’s assassination plot. Some movie critics have cattily renamed the movie Caution: Lust! but that is the warning that Ang Lee’s movie propounds. Both insider and outsider, an émigré from Taiwan to the United States, Lee has a vision that encompasses the Far East and the Wild West, the sacred and profane. He reimagines the past with his movies; he shows copulating bodies to the masses and at the same time warns them against unchecked passions. On top of it all, he spurs the conversation in China about obscenity and about what is and isn’t proper behavior.

Consider, too, the controversial body art showcased in Shanghai in 2005, in which traditional brush paintings were drawn on naked models. Images of mountains and rivers, of peonies and songbirds, suddenly migrated from the familiar old canvas onto a moving one made of human skin. Most compelling was the female model who had a blue cheongsam with white crested wave motif painted on her body. She is both beautifully clothed and astonishingly naked — and a literal transfiguration of the past.

Indeed, that old sea of green and gray Mao jackets has been rapidly transformed into a field of a hundred thousand flowers blooming, and China is going through a cultural renaissance.

                          Bar Scene in Beijing

In the age of globalization, the more rigid the politics, the more mellifluously culture can serve as counterpoint, forcing change. Protesters in Tiananmen Square may have failed in their direct confrontation with the state, but in their wake rises a culture all at once playful, shameless, and disruptive of the past — and the effect is that the nation, unclothed at last, is losing not only its inhibition but also its tongue.

Please note: This essay, reposted on the occasion of the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, is excerpted from East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, (Heyday 2010),

Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and his latest, Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees struggling to rebuild their lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)

The idea of giving cash directly to the poor, rather than donating to non-profits which provide services, is anathema to most Americans.

A principal reason for this is the way in which we as a society view panhandlers, who have unfortunately come to personify those who are in desperate and immediate need of financial assistance.

Not only has giving cash to those asking for it become frowned upon out of a fear that such money will be spent to support substance addictions, but the very act of panhandling has been criminalized across America. (Of 234 cities surveyed, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty found 53 percent had criminalized public begging.)

Which is why, when Google’s Director of Giving, Jacquelline Fuller, told a superior that she wanted to funnel millions of dollars of cash directly into the hands of the world’s poorest people, he responded, “You must be smoking crack.”

But this is precisely what GiveDirectly, a non-profit based in the U.S., has been doing for some time in Kenya: finding poor villagers and transferring donations directly to them via a cellphone. And the data shows that it’s working.

So much so that Google has donated $2.5 million, and Facebook Co-Founder, Chris Hughes, now sits on the board of GiveDirectly and has been aggressively pitching the idea of direct giving to venture capitalists and those with money to give.

The idea of directly donating cash electronically to the world’s poorest people has been around since at least 2008. Per Forbes:

Paul Niehaus, an assistant professor of economics at UC San Diego and a board member of GiveDirect, came up with the idea of transferring money to poor people’s cell phones back in 2008. He was working with the Indian government to limit corruption and saw how the government there transferred money to people’s phones. “I realized I could do that myself,” Niehaus told me. He told the gathering in San Francisco that most of the money that’s donated to help poor people goes to international development organizations, not poor people directly. GiveDirectly’s giving has had “big impacts on nutrition, education, land and livestock” and “hasn’t been shown to increase how much people drink,” Niehaus emphasized. “A typical poor person is poor not because he is irresponsible, but because he was born in Africa.”

GiveDirectly finds poor households – typically people who live in mud huts with thatched roofs – and uses a system called M-Pesa, run by Vodafone , to transfer money to their cell phones. Transaction fees eat up a mere 3 cents per donated dollar. Niehaus says plenty of recipients use the money to upgrade their homes by adding a metal roof.

Now, giving cash cannot solve every problem. However, doing so directly can dramatically help the world’s poorest people, who routinely must weigh unspeakable financial choices: Shelter or clothes? Food or education for my children?

Direct giving, as a concept, is a burgeoning one – and one that research shows is working in sub-Saharan Africa.

Perhaps the idea of direct giving in the United States is one that should be receiving more public attention. And by direct giving, I don’t necessarily mean giving to panhandlers. I mean this: if there was a way, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, to give direct donations to people left homeless rather than to the Red Cross, would you prefer the former?

If there was a reputable non-profit capable of identifying Americans in direct need of financial assistance, would you choose to give directly to them as opposed to a service organization?

It’s a question worth considering.

Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG

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By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)

From 1999-2010, the total U.S. prison population rose 18 percent, an increase largely reflected by the "drug war" and stringent sentencing guidelines, such as three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences.

However, total private prison populations exploded fivefold during this same time period, with federal private prison populations rising by 784 percent (as seen in the chart below complied by The Sentencing Project):

This stark rise in private prison populations is partially due to increased contracts granted at the state and federal levels to behemoth prison companies such as Correction Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group. These companies claim - against available data - that they can run corrections facilities at lower costs.

However, whether such companies can save governments money is not the central issue. What's at issue here is the corrupt, immoral dynamic that fuels such contracts: the concept of treating inmates as commodities that must be grown for profit.

Take, for example, the offer CCA made in 2012 to 48 states:

We'll purchase and manage your jails, and in return you [the state] must promise to keep the jails at least 90 percent full.

Such contracts provide incentives for local law enforcement to increase incarceration rates, rather than decrease them. In some instances, private prisons are grown not because crime increases, but because police harvest criminals as though they are a crop that must be stocked on the local shelves.

Additionally, for-profit prison companies engage in intense lobbying efforts that have been tied to many of our nation's most stringent sentencing guidelines, and lobby hard against the decriminalization of things such as marijuana.

The financial motive to engage in such lobbying was clearly detailed in CCA's 2010 Annual Report (as prepared by The Sentencing Project):

Such financial incentives to stock corrections facilities naturally leads to widespread corruption. Evidence of such corruption surfaced when two Pennsylvania judges were found guilty of selling juveniles to private detention facilities for millions of dollars. The "kids for cash" scandal, in which innocent children who should not have been locked up were sold for set amounts to the detention facilities, is shocking and harrowing.

However, even more shocking and harrowing is the fact that we have allowed free market pursuits to infiltrate our system of justice, making such scandals possible. When prisoners become products, we no longer have a justice system. We have an illicit marketplace. We have a corral.

America has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. And the private prison industry is a central driving force behind this. Add to this the staggering number of African-Americans locked up, and the private prison industry has essentially created a modern-day slave trade.

A trade that should never have been allowed to enter our criminal justice system in the first place.

Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG

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