Via Wessel and Liebermann (Seattle antiquarian and rare booksellers) comes the tale of how the CPSIA is resulting in a crackdown on old books. The long and short of the story is that because of the broadly sweeping (read: oceanic) terms of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the government is now authorized to force booksellers and libraries to dispose of books — some of which may have been on shelves for the last century or more — if they test positively for containing lead in their inks.

I understand that they’re trying to make the world safe from lead poisoning, but I think it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. These books represent not just literary development for our children; they represent centuries worth of work, of authors’ lives and dreams and hard work. And even if they didn’t, they’d still be works of art and part of our history. Are we really going to let the idea that ravenous, bibliophagic infants may have a small chance of ingesting a tiny amount of lead into their systems lead us to burn or otherwise destroy 200+ years of children’s literature? What about books that had small runs, books that were never reprinted?

It’s just ridiculous. I’m not even sure I support the act at all (it crack downs on independent artists and craftspeople as well, and has slammed Etsy down already with a wave of legal headache), but even if I could buy into the idea that we need to protect ourselves from all the wicked chemicals of the earth, it seems like vast overkill to have this enacted retroactively.

After all, how much damage have these books actually caused? Don’t you think we’d have heard about it if this were a major cause of lead poisoning? If any harm had come from them, wouldn’t they have been pulled from the shelves long ago?

It just all feels like some bizarre back-door entry to Farenheit 451…

All this anti-homeschooling rot is depressing me. And it’s not just about the dissolution of educational freedoms, it’s also an example of religious oppression. “All sides agree the children have thrived with home school,” but “[the mother's] lessons also have a religious slant, which the judge said was the root of the problem.” Mainstream science has an atheistic slant (although it is entirely unnecessary). How is it the right of the courts, or the government, to dictate a child’s education?

Before you start blaming our new president for this trend on the basis of supposed socialist tendencies, consider that Obama has remained relatively silent on the issue of homeschooling, except in his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” where he acknowledges that the decision to homeschool should be left up to families, and should be honored.

Of course, this situation is more complicated than just The Courts vs. The Family: it is the father, during divorce proceedings, who is objecting to the children’s homeschooling. And I’m not saying that he should not have a say in his children’s education — but the judge should rule on the basis of what is best for the children, not on the basis of perceived religious slant. If the father wants them to be taught something else, he should homeschool the kids himself when he has them (if he has joint custody), or hire a tutor if he can’t do it. If the kids are really testing “two years above their grade levels,” then it seems clear that that is a system which is working better than the public schools would.

To those, in positions of authority, who are remaking educational policies in this country: flight from religious persecution is how this country got started in the first place. Now, with a failing economy, an overseas war, and a low-level civil war raging over the issue of abortion, we have enough challenges here already. We don’t need a Handicapper General.

Yes, I’m pro-life. It’s probably the issue that I feel most strongly about, in fact. But I didn’t vote on that basis at all. Why?

Because the current law is in place because of Roe v. Wade, which has been going strong for almost 40 years, and which was a fight in the first place. In order to reverse that decision, we’d have to legally overpower a very loud and very active group of people. While we’ve had a supposedly pro-life president in the White House for eight years, he hasn’t done squat to reverse it, and I’m not sure McCain would either. (And in the meantime, Bush has sent our citizens off to die in a foreign country without clearly giving us a reason, plan, or goal at all.) The problem with reversing abortion as a legal decision is that it’s really a problem of social attitude; if we do make it illegal (which, I agree, it ought to be), we will still have women performing dangerous abortions at home with coat hangers or Lysol, and they’ll continue to do an enormous amount of damage.

We should be educating people: about sexual activity (not just how to be abstinent) and how to prevent unwanted pregnancy; about exactly what abortion is, how it works and what the implications are socially, personally, emotionally, philosophically. Fighting the uphill battle against a law that was made mostly so that people would stop breaking the law and performing their own abortions may be a waste of energy in the end; who knows how it would actually affect the numbers of abortions performed in this country?

What we do need are people who are willing to provide support for pregnant mothers and to expedite the ease of adoption, so that mothers who feel that they are unable to raise children can have alternatives to abortion. We need support groups, charities, and foundations for mothers who keep their children but have no financial or personal assistance from the fathers of the children or from their own families; we need places where safe and free day care could be offered so that single women can work and be mothers, and not have to choose whether they or their children will be able to eat on any given day. And we desperately need changing attitudes about how we view sex so that women will not feel so overwhelmed with shame over having becoming pregnant. In “Mere Christianity,” C. S. Lewis states:

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig, who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.

Lewis is scripturally supported in this: in all four Gospels, for all that Jesus preached about how we should behave and treat each other, he said little or nothing about our sexual behavior (save to condemn divorce because he stated that it would force a woman to adultery), and is recorded to have spent quite a bit of time in the company of prostitutes. So can we please get over it already and tackle the large problems at hand?

For all the many, many things that are wrong with the pro-choice movement, they seem to have found the correct tools at their disposal: vocal organizations such as Vox exist in colleges and other organizations countrywide, and Planned Parenthood centers are in most major cities. Meanwhile the pro-life movement claims abstinence-only sexual education activists who are almost certainly causing more harm to their own cause than good. And of course we can’t organize into a cohesive force; who wants to be associated with violent and scary fundamentalists who assault and kill doctors and bomb abortion clinics? We’re desperate for our voices to be heard over this din, but the answer isn’t civil war, it’s citizenship in action. If we want every child to have a life, we need to be prepared to provide for those lives, with health care and education and safe homes. So what are we waiting for?