The Most Successful Lies of All Time - # 1

That's not # 1 as in "this is the absolute most successful lie ever". It's # 1 in the Most Successful Lies series. This series has the unfortunate potential to run indefinitely, so I've decided against ranking.

The successful lie I want to talk about today involves the infamous McDonald's coffee case. You probably remember it, even if you weren't born or weren't old enough to understand what was going on when it happened. And if you DO remember it (or heard about it later), you're probably rolling your eyes about now and remembering how some lady CLEANED UP when a jury awarded her millions of dollars 'cause she spilled her coffee in her lap while she was driving and it was--surprise, surprise--hot.

Please understand that I speak with the highest degree of professionalism, both as a writer and as an attorney, when I say: NUH UH!

Didn't happen like that.

What do I mean? A lot of things, and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail because I've already listed the most critical points here: That McDonald's Coffee Thing is Still Bugging Me

Just a few points, though, in passing:

• She didn't get millions of dollars;
• She wasn't driving;
• She had third degree burns over 16% of her body;
• She'd offered to settle for $20,000

If you want to see the really good stuff, you'll have to read that other post, but before we move on to the politics of lying, let me leave you with this question: Can you really put a price tag on skin grafts to your genital area?

That's what I thought.

Now, it's not unusual for mainstream news outlets to get the details wrong when reporting on a court case. There are a lot of technicalities involved, and sometimes the finer points are lost. Sometimes the outcome is reported correctly, but the reporter didn't fully understand the reasoning behind the outcome. Sometimes a word means something entirely different in the courtroom than it means in everyday parlance.

None of that happened in this case. The misinformation about the McDonald's coffee case--misinformation that made such an impression that it's still being mentioned today in support of tort reform and as evidence of our "lawsuit happy" society--was absorbed directly from the misinformation machine that is the insurance lobby. It was perhaps one of that industry's greatest accomplishments that a case in which a woman received fair compensation ($640,000, not millions) for serious injuries (3rd degree burns over 16% of her body, including her genital area) sustained through the fault of a large corporation (McDonald's admitted at trial that it knew that there was a burn risk in serving food at more than 140 degrees, but that it had nonetheless chosen to serve coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees, knowing that liquid at that temperature could not safely be consumed) stands today in the minds of most Americans as a ridiculous abuse of the system.

This Isn't My Post

A few days ago, I read a post on the CapitaL eLs blog asking whether Ron Paul would get "zapped by the WOD third rail". I thought it was a great question, because I think that in today's culture political candidates face a very real problem with tough issues. A complex answer doesn't make a good sound bite, and a thirty-second sound bite pulled from a three minute answer is likely to be misleading and perhaps damaging to the overall cause. So what's a candidate to do?

That's the issue I was expecting the post to confront, and it did--briefly. But the bulk of the post was about the wisdom and ethics of the war on drugs itself, and that seemed out of place to me. If we were going to discuss the possibility that a political candidate in the United States could honestly discuss the real complexities of the issue and perhaps venture to point out--even tentatively--that the war on drugs isn't really working, then the last thing we needed was to allow any distractors in that discussion that might evoke emotional responses just like the ones that made this such a touchy issue for politicians.

At least, that was my take. The author of the original post suggested (fairly, I think), that I'd mentally written an entirely different post by the same name. He said he'd be interested in reading it, and the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that he was right, and that I'd mentally constructed an entire post based on what I THOUGHT a post with his title would say, or should say. So here it is:

Ladies and gentlemen, we've got problems. We've got a monster national debt, a huge percentage of home loans are in foreclosure, our prisons are overflowing, quite a few foreign governments...um...well...hate our guts, we're engaged in a war that most Americans don't support. News flash: No one is going to fix that in four years. If we elect a guy who says he's going to, he's a liar--and we've seen how well that works out. If we elect a guy who tells the truth...oh, but that couldn't happen, could it?

I don't think it could. And here's why. It's very easy to yell, "Be tough on crime!" and that's a concept that people can easily take hold of and nod in agreement--maybe even applaud. That's four words. The truth is that our prisons are overflowing, and building more is a serious economic investment. The truth is that for some classes of crimes, prison does more to increase the rate of recidivism than it does to prevent crime. The truth is that our justice system has been increasingly shown to have convicted, imprisoned and even killed innocent men over the past few decades--and the only reason it goes back only that far is that we don't have the evidence or incentive necessary to look at the rest. I've only just begun...and yet I've far exceeded the amount of time a candidate has to make an effective point. He's tough on crime or he's not. Period. There's no space in an election year to say, "Not all crime is created equal, and neither are all criminals." There's no leeway to ask hard questions like, "Do we spend millions of dollars building new prisons, or do we let people out LONG before the end of their sentences?" TOUGH ON CRIME: Yes or No.

The War on Drugs is definitely one of those issues--complex, multi-faceted, troublesome. There's no easy answer. If a candidate says there is, he is either a liar or a fool. And yet, if a candidate says there isn't, we won't hear the rest of his message and we won't elect him. That seems to limit us to only two possibilities: elect a liar or elect a fool.

Can't Rape the Willin'

That's a phrase I heard a time or two when I was practicing criminal defense law, always from a certain kind of man who thought he was more clever than he really was and tended to have illusions about his desirability to women. I was more than a little surprised to hear the same sort of sentiment voiced by a woman--and a woman judge, at that.

Pennsylvania law defines rape, in relevant part, this way:

A person commits a felony of the first degree when he or she engages in sexual intercourse with a complainant:

1. By forcible compulsion
2. By threat of forcible compulsion that would prevent resistance by a person of reasonable resolution...

In simple terms, by force or threat of force.

Earlier this month, Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Teresa Carr Deni dismissed all sex and assault charges against a man accused of coercing sex from a woman at gunpoint. A few of his friends joined in as well.

At the preliminary hearing, the Judge's job isn't to make determinations of fact, and that's not what Judge Deni did. Rather, she made a determination that even if the woman's account was accurate, the crime the men committed wasn't rape. The reason? The victim was a prostitute. As such, the judge apparently reasoned, the woman had consented to sex. The men's only crime was failing to pay her. In a legal twist worthy of David Lynch, the judge ordered the defendant held on armed robbery charges for theft of services.

Of course, had the defendant PAID for the services, he'd have been committing a crime as well...

Now, it appears (because, of course, there are only a few people who actually know exactly what happened) that the woman did agree to some kind of sexual encounter for a price. But then something happened to change the agreement. The something was that the defendant produced a GUN.

I don't know about you all, but I get a little nervous when I'm in an abandoned building with someone and he produces a gun. Well, I've actually never experienced that precise scenario, but I feel pretty confident in assuming that it would leave me feeling less than amorous. It might even leave me feeling like I needed to get the heck out of there, and whatever business deal we might previously have negotiated was OFF.

The judge's reasoning was that the woman had consented and not gotten paid. That, in her book, looked like robbery. There's an odd kind of logic to it, until you stop and think about the limits of consent. Because what this judge has effectively ruled is that consent, once given, CANNOT BE WITHDRAWN.

Sit up and take notice, moms and dads of high school and college girls, because the legal ruling here wasn't based--at least, not on paper--on the fact that this woman was a prostitute. It was based on the fact that she'd consented. And, it seems, that consent was indelible in the judge's mind. She'd made her bargain. She wasn't allowed to get cold feet. She wasn't allowed to rethink what she was doing. She wasn't allowed to withdraw her consent--not even when the gentleman in question pointed a gun at her.

That's not a precedent I want young women in this country to have to live with...no matter how they make their livings.

Birth Control for Middle Schoolers? I Think We're Missing the Point

There's been a lot of buzz over the past few days about a middle school in Maine that plans to make birth control available to 11-14 year old students without parental consent or notification. Newspapers and blogs and discussion groups across the country and beyond are debating whether or not middle-schoolers should have access to birth control. The recurrent arguments between the "they're going to do it anyway" crowd and the "giving them birth control only encourages them" crowd are in full swing...and absolutely everybody seems to have missed the point.

My daughter is in the sixth grade. Her middle school can't give her a dose of Motrin when she has a headache unless I run up to the school and not only sign a consent, but provide the medication. They can't let her use her prescribed inhaler with her name and her doctor's name printed on the label unless BOTH her doctor and I sign authorizations. And as much of a hassle as those things sometimes seem like, there's a good reason for all of those checks.

What if, for instance, my daughter was allergic to Motrin? At what age should she be expected to know and take responsibility for that, and to learn all of its alternative forms and names and related drugs, so that she would recognize that she couldn't take Ibuprofin if she'd had an allergic reaction to Motrin? It's my job, at least at this stage of the game, to know those things. It's my job to look out for side effects and allergic reactions, too, and to make sure that prescribing doctors and pharmacists are aware of anything else she might be taking so that we're not mixing drugs that shouldn't be mixed.

If we have to take all of that into account in order to ensure that it's safe to give a kid Tylenol, how do the politics of adolescent sex suddenly make it safe to prescribe them hormone-altering drugs with multiple known side-effects without parental knowledge? What if we have a family history of blood clots or stroke or any of the many things that make hormonal birth control dangerous? Is the average 7th grader conversant enough in that information to provide the prescribing doctor with adequate information? And what if she begins to have symptoms and side effects? Is she ready to be wholly responsible for making her own judgment about when medical follow-up is required? She'd better be, because if there's no parental notification and she chooses not to tell her parents, then no one is going to be keeping an eye on her for those warning signs. If she complains about cramps in her legs, no adult will be able to make the connection and tell her she'd better get in touch with the doctor.

If she's having more headaches than usual...well, then what? Because if a child suddenly starts having serious headaches on a regular basis, you take her to the doctor, right? But what happens when you get there? You're asked...the parent, not the child...to complete a list of current medications. You do it, unwittingly leaving off the most important piece of information. Does the child speak up? We can hope, but she might not understand that there's a probable connection, and if she's gone this far to obtain the prescription and use it without letting you know, odds seem to be against her cheerfully adding it to the medications list in the doctor's office.

And the debate rages on--should adolescents have access to birth control? Are they really having sex at that age? Will they be more likely to have sex if we give them birth control? Isn't birth control at 12 better than pregnancy at 12? Aren't we sending the wrong message if we give them birth control? The soundbites fly, and the real issue never rises to the surface. Like every other parent in America, I have concerns and opinions about all of those issues. But none of them have the first thing to do with this issue.

11-year-old children need their parents involved in their medical care. Period. We need to check their temperatures and give them Ibuprofin when they need it, talk with their doctors, understand how their prescription drugs interact, make sure they drink enough fluids when they have the flu...and we sure as hell need to know when they're taking hormone-altering drugs that can have serious short and long-term side-effects.

Race? What Race? Everybody Looks the Same to Me...

A recent discussion thread on Blog Catalog asked the question "Do you care about racism?" The answer to that one was easy, but the next question gave me pause: Do you think about it on a daily basis?

I don't. Answering the question was easy; determining whether or not my answer was the right one was a little more complex.

Racism is beyond me. Maybe that's not a good thing for a grown-up of above average intelligence with a degree in political science and a law degree to admit, but I just can't get my mind around it. So much so that I tend to forget about it except when I'm confronted with it, and when I am, my first reaction is disbelief.

When my daughter, who was born in 1996, first heard about Martin Luther King, Jr., she had a lot of questions. I tried, in six-year-old terms, to explain what he'd done. I lost her fast, though. I mentioned that black people were once prohibited from eating in restaurants with white people and she laughed out loud. She was so struck by the absurdity of it that she started making up what she thought were similar laws: People who wear yellow can't drive cars! People with brown hair can't go to the gas station!

In one sense, I was purely delighted to have raised a child who couldn't comprehend that anyone would ever have distinguished people based on race. As far as I could see, she had it exactly right--the color of a person's skin is exactly as relevant to his suitability to enter a restaurant as the color of a person's shirt is to his ability to drive. In another, I was nagged by that cautionary line about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it. That was five years ago, and I'm no closer to the right answer.

How do we ignore race without ignoring racism? The world is full of good people who work hard to eradicate racism, and they've accomplished some amazing things--but they've also kept the issue of race in the public eye, made it something that we can't forget about. And that's a conundrum, because while we can't forget about racism, we should absolutely forget about race. Or at least, that's my view--maybe those who actively fight racism every day would disagree.
It just seems to me that making decisions based on race is most likely to end when people don't even register race unless there's some reason for it.

A few years back, I worked a table at an event on a college campus for my former employer. The event took place in the field house, and it was packed--there were probably 700-800 people in the building. At some point, the man working the table with me said to me, "I think you're the only white person in this room." A quick scan of the crowd indicated that he was probably right, but I'd been there for about three hours and I hadn't noticed. Unless I'm missing something, that's where we should all be headed. I wasn't making a political statement. It wasn't just that I didn't care about the racial breakdown of the room. I'd simply looked at each person I'd encountered as an individual person and not even registered that I was the only causasian among 7 or 8 hundred blacks and latinos--any more than I might have registered that I was the only person with a brown clip in my hair or the only one wearing a sweatshirt.

So what is that? It seems to me that when we live in a world where everyone is as oblivious to race as I was that day--as I think I am every day--then we'll live in a world that is automatically without racism. Am I ignoring racism, or have I risen above it? Or do they amount to the same thing in practical effect?