There are many things that alienate me from the various groups to which I (nominally) belong. The starkest ones arise in the context of religion. I strive to be a Christian — usually falling fall short of what I understand to be Christianity's ideals. Yet I feel utterly alienated from vast segments of modern, American, public Christendom.

Take the issue of atheism. I can't find it in myself to be threatened or outraged at the existence of atheists — even aggressive, litigious, or obnoxious atheists, who grab headlines but strike me as a relatively small group. I can disagree, or even be annoyed by, some Establishment Clause lawsuits by atheists (just as I can be irritated by Christian legal positions in such matters), but I can't quite get to the point of incandescent rage.

So when a group of atheists filed suit over the presence of a cross at a 9/11 memorial, my reaction was not fury. I noted that my classmate David French was on the case and snarked mildly about the atheists' approach to the standing issue, but it didn't spike my blood pressure. Nor did it provoke rage from David, who is a religious-freedom advocate and as devout a Christian as you are likely to meet, but was also the law school classmate to whom we would appeal for the viewpoint of the hypothetical "reasonable person."

Alas, American Christendom — or what passes for Christendom — is not populated exclusively with people like David. It's an exercise for philosophers (or polemicists) whether it is even made up mostly of such people.

Rather, American Christendom is also made up of people like the visitors to Fox News' Facebook page who commented on the 9/11 cross lawsuit story.

It is made up of people like Hans Anderson, a student at MSU:

It is made up of people like Eileen Rourke:

It is made up of people like Sindy Clock:

It is made up of people like Raylene Ingmire, who no doubt spreads her views to her students at Clinton Middle School:

It is made up of people like Casey M. Jones:

It is made up of people like Michael Perri:

Surely there is a strong component of the GIF Theory here — people perceive using their Facebook accounts as semi-anonymous, even though (as the now-Google-famous people above are finding out) it isn't.

Even so, I find these people, and their ilk, much more threatening and infuriating than even the most vexatiously litigious atheists. I have friends and family members who are agnostic or atheist; many of them keep the spirit of Christ's words about love, compassion, and humility better than I do. Yet segments of our society are prepared to treat them in some contexts as second-class citizens. The self-described Christians above do not think that they will cast themselves outside of acceptable society by talking like that — and they are right. Rather, they are reacting to a sick culture that renders such commentary acceptable or even encouraged. Some [edited to add "some"] Conservative Christians complain that the culture reviles them, and perhaps some segments of it do. But everyone who tolerates this sort of invective — everyone who participates in a culture that signals that this rhetoric is acceptable — is hurting not just American culture but American Christianity.

It's a vicious cycle. To the extent we allow this sort of thing be the face of American Christianity, more people will choose another path — which will make such self-described Christians even more threatened and more prone to saying such things, and so on. Imagining American culture as a struggle between Christians and atheists may lead to short-term political gain for some Christians, but it spells stagnation and long-term spiritual decline.

Confidence based on knowledge and skill is effective in an advocate. Confidence premised on ignorance and bluster isn't really confidence at all — it's arrogance, and it's ineffectual and frankly embarrassing.

Just ask Florida attorney Joel Hirschhorn.

Attorney Hirschhorn apparently represents the proprietors of the site www.adamwins.com, some sort of sports betting enterprise. Apparently www.adamwins.com engages in some amount of telemarketing, and drew some highly unflattering comments at 800notes.com, a site that acts as a message board about unsolicited telemarketing, where consumers can browse and post based on company name or telephone number.

If Mr. Hirschhorn were a cautious type, he might have done a bit of due diligence and noted that other lawyers had previously sought to insulate their telemarketing clients from criticism on 800notes.com and got their ass handed to them by Paul Alan Levy at Public Citizen. That might have led Mr. Hirschhorn to educate himself about, for instance, the provisions of Section 230, which (broadly speaking) insulates people who run web sites from liability for the comments written by visitors. Such due diligence might have allowed Mr. Hirschhorn to navigate the treacherous shoals between confidence and arrogance.

Mr. Hirschhorn didn't. He opened right up with a bumptious legal threat to 800notes. When one of the principals of 800notes attempted — with vastly more courtesy than Mr. Hirschhorn had earned — to explain the relevant law to him and why they would prevail under it, he reacted with buffoonish old-man lecturing:

The last time I was told: If you sue us, we will fight back and win, the Florida Supreme Court disagreed with that arrogance and I actually won.
Nonetheless I appreciate your kind and cogent advice. I presume with your confident attitude you must have graduated at the bottom of your class from a third world law school. If I am wrong, I am certain you will correct me.

In the meantime, I will let my client make the decision. No lawyer I know worth his/her weight would ever guarantee a win (you just did) as I have learned in my 43 years of practicing law there are far too many variables.

What transforms this arrogance from run-of-the-mill posturing to transcendent fuckwittery is the fact that Mr. Hirschhorn — who has just delivered a condescending lecture about predicting victory — uses "www.acquitall.com" as a domain for his firm. See, that's arrogance, not confidence.

Paul Adam Levy — again, offering far more courtesy than was warranted — called Mr. Hirschhorn and attempted to educate him about the relevant law. Mr. Hirschhorn hung up on him. Such unprofessional petulance is, once again, the mark of arrogance rather than confidence. It's clear that Mr. Hirschhorn has no basis for confidence:

Hirschhorn bragged that he is not just a member but the founder of the First Amendment Lawyers Association, but acknowledged that he himself did not know anything about the law in this area; instead, he said, he hires others who know the law to help him.

Mr. Hirschhorn ought to talk to the subject-matter experts he hires before he issues legal threats, not afterwards. Otherwise, he will continue to make a fool of himself, as he has here.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Hirschhorn is so intransigent and unethical that he will go through with a baseless lawsuit against 800notes. If he does, he will get creamed. Merely by threatening to do so, he has guaranteed that — thanks to the Streisand Effect — thousands more people see and hear about the unflattering comments about his client than otherwise would have. Do you suppose he had sufficient competence to know that ahead of time? Do you suppose he advised his client that (1) the entity he proposed to threaten was known for standing up to threats, as a brief Google search would have shown, (2) the threats lacked a good-faith legal basis, as even a minimal amount of diligence in the relevant area of law would have shown, and (3) the almost certain outcome of making the threat would be to more widely publicize (possibly by many orders of magnitude) the allegedly defamatory statements?

Gosh, www.adamwins.com, you tell us. Did Mr. Hirschhorn advise you of those things?

If you like our Road to Popehat feature, then you'll like today's Waste Your Friday Afternoon Entry: Search of the Day, a site devoted to collecting bizarre and hilarious searches queries from some database somewhere.

My favorites so far are "why is my canadian not pooping" and "I want to have sex with my dog but she growls," both of which are stories unto themselves.

Spouse: You haven't been blogging much.
Me: I guess not.
Spouse: Are you depressed?
Me: What?
Spouse: Are you depressed? Are you taking your meds? Do you need to see the doctor?
Me: What brought that on?
Spouse: You don't blog when you are depressed.
Me: I am just fine.
Spouse: Then why aren't you blogging?
Me: I guess I am not inspired.
Spouse: Why don't you blog about this debt thing?
Me: You think blogging about the debt crisis would make me LESS depressed?
Spouse: Smartass Blog about something.
Me: Will I be left alone then?
Spouse: Maybe.

It's time for The Road to Popehat, the feature in which we throw open the hood, look at the traffic logs, check out what searches brought people to our shores, and breathe a sigh of relief at the realization that we are, by comparison, well-adjusted.

In this issue:

how to observe the human condition: Get a blog.

casey anthony trial whats [sic] wrong with tour justice system: It's the tragic apostrophe deficit.

what to say if cop asks if you have had anything to drink: I imagine this guy frantically typing this into his iPhone's Google app while the cop waits impatiently.

origami space shuttle launcher instructions: NASA is going to do whatever it can after budget cuts.

how to write a letter like an attorney in a nice way: You're unclear on the concept, I'm afraid.

if Batman and Spiderman fought who would win: D.C. Comics.

tool of the capitalist oppressors.: That reminds me. Where's our July check from the Koch brothers?

extreme solutions for kids calling my son fat: Oh, this will not end well.

(ken's law): I know you assume it's "shut up," but it's actually "douchebaggery is not a zero-sum game."

what kind of letter should I send my lawyer: The kind with a check, deadbeat.

the most terrible thing EVER: I'm gratified that this search brought this person here.

asshole lawyers: Guilty!

He looks like puberty-era Bobby Brady, if you ask me.  Or is it Danny from The Partridge Family?  I could never tell those shows apart. Anyway…

Jay Cohen (website cohendwilawyer.com, spam marketing consultant's IP address 122.154.140.69) left this comment:

In case you find yourself arrested for suspicion of driving while intoxicated, your future is immediately in jeopardy. Being convicted of DWI in Houston could cost you your career, your relationships, your driving privileges, your financial resources, and so much more.

On a post written a year ago, a post that tangentially deals with traffic law but has nothing to do with drunk driving.  Mr. Cohen, your comment was not germane, and it was unwanted.

On a personal note, in case you find yourself accused of spamming, your future is immediately in jeopardy. Being caught spamming at Popehat could cost you your career, your relationships, your law practice, your internet marketing strategy, and the chance I'll find your face shot and mock it.

It has jealous high school girls, stalking, threats, an utterly insane Texas cheerleader mom, hickeys on breasts, did I mention cheerleaders?, and one of the harshest smackdowns ever delivered to an attorney not named Rakofsky.  So I think that it is the best opinion ever written.  Absolutely I do.

But don't take my word for it.  You be the judge.

Via Walter Olson.

There isn't any point in trying to paint the lily here so … I can think of no better way to while away your afternoon than with this collection of Deez Nuts jokes.

H/T Joe Garden

[Scene One]

AT MEDIATION

MEDIATOR: Ken, I like to run mediations with the parties face-to-face, so they can express their feelings. That's what I want to do today.

KEN: That will end badly. I know my client. I've been to mediation with him before. A face-to-face confrontation will harden hearts and tank the mediation — especially in this case, especially with the attitude on the other side. I strongly prefer a shuttle diplomacy approach where we are in separate rooms and you go from one side to the other. Face-to-face time will end badly.

MEDIATOR: Well, Ken, I've been doing this for a while, and I know what I am doing, so that's the way we're going to do it. This is all about letting the parties express their feelings and get things off their chests.

[SCENE TWO]

MEDIATOR: Well, here we are. Let's start with the plaintiffs. Plaintiff, what do you feel about this case?

PLAINTIFF'S COUNSEL: [Very mildly snarky and only semi-forceful exposition of his position]

KEN'S CLIENT: [erupts in outrage] [shouts in two languages] [spittle, red face, clenched fists] [storms out] [leaves mediation]

PLAINTIFF'S COUNSEL: [smirks] [didn't want to be there in the first place]

[SCENE THREE]

MEDIATOR: Well, Ken, that was very disappointing. I didn't expect that would happen. I heard you, but maybe I wasn't listening to you or feeling you.

KEN: Did you get your law degree in a box of wind chimes and dreamcatchers?

END

The furor of the totmomocalypse is dying down as almost everybody looks for the next imperiled cute white child or sexually threatening suspect. And yet . . . there are other shoes to drop. There always are.

At trial, the government offered evidence that somebody used the Anthony computer to search for "chloroform" 84 times. That was perhaps the prosecution's strongest piece of evidence (if not its only piece of evidence) that Casey Anthony committed a premeditated act of murder.

As it turns out, the figure was bogus, based on the software error. The real number was one. The prosecution knew it was bogus, and concealed it:

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office had used the software to validate its finding that Ms. Anthony had searched for information about chloroform 84 times, a conclusion that Mr. Bradley says turned out to be wrong. Mr. Bradley said he immediately alerted a prosecutor, Linda Drane Burdick, and Sgt. Kevin Stenger of the Sheriff’s Office in late June through e-mail and by telephone to tell them of his new findings. Mr. Bradley said he conducted a second analysis after discovering discrepancies that were never brought to his attention by prosecutors or the police.

Mr. Bradley’s findings were not presented to the jury and the record was never corrected, he said. Prosecutors are required to reveal all information that is exculpatory to the defense.

“I gave the police everything they needed to present a new report,” Mr. Bradley said. “I did the work myself and copied out the entire database in a spreadsheet to make sure there was no issue of accessibility to the data.”

Mr. Bradley, chief executive of Siquest, a Canadian company, said he even volunteered to fly to Orlando at his own expense to show them the findings.

If Mr. Bradley is telling the truth — if he did discover that the "84 searches" claim was false, and notified the prosecution that the actual number was one — then the prosecution committed grave misconduct. First, it committed misconduct by not disclosing that exculpatory fact to the defense. Second, it committed misconduct by not correcting the mistaken testimony on its own initiative. A prosecutor's failure to correct known false testimony is a due process violation.

What do you suppose that Nancy Grace, who has a judicially-recognized habit of suppressing exculpatory evidence, will say to that? I'm not sure — but it will involve a snarl, I bet.

Noted constitutional scholar and Republican primary candidate Herman Cain is doin' what they do in Republican primaries — moving to the right. Specifically, he's giving shoutouts to the folks who are concerned that Muslims are going to impose Sharia Law on us and burquatize our supermodels and cut the hands off our investment bankers and stuff. Asked about a protest over a mosque in Tennessee, he cheerfully went full crazy, articulating a theory under which the mere existence of another faith in the community is a violation of the freedom of religion of adherents of other faiths:

In an exchange on “Fox News Sunday,” the Republican presidential contender said that he sided with some in a town near Nashville who were trying to prevent Muslims from worshiping in their community.

“Our Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state,” he said. “Islam combines church and state. They’re using the church part of our First Amendment to infuse their morals in that community, and the people of that community do not like it. They disagree with it.”

Asked by host Chris Wallace if any community could ban a mosque if it wanted to, Cain said: “They have a right to do that.”

If this sounds familiar, it ought to be: it's basically a variation on the speech is tyranny! theme we encounter occasionally — the notion that other people exercising their First Amendment rights thereby infringe upon the rights of those who disagree with them.

Cain is pandering. That's barely news — it's what primary contestants do. He's pandering to a particularly silly wing of his party: the view that Sharia Law threatens to take over our legal processes is extremely unserious nonsense. But here's the funny part: he can't even pander competently. In the course of pandering to the OMG SHARIA LAW wing of his party, he explicitly articulates a concept that is anathema to it: the idea that the constitution provides for the separation of church and state (not to mention the idea that it's wrong for a group to use a church to "infuse" their morals in a community).

Not that anyone from the Sharia-panicking wing will call him on it.

To many people, a good criminal justice system is one that produces the result that reinforces their prejudices and expectations, often based on what they've heard from people like Nancy Grace.

Therefore it's hardly surprising that something like this exists: a Facebook "Petition to Retry Casey Anthony." It's possible that it was originally started as satire, or for the lulz. It's even possible that some of the posts and arguments on it are Swiftian. But many supporting it are perfectly sincere and perfectly totalitarian, viewing criminal justice as a sort of high-stakes American Idol. Read it, if you can stomach it, and see the angry, shouting mob. Only mere chance, and the rule of law, stand between you and that mob. The mob sees itself as patriotic — its members wave flags on the Fourth of July and have appropriate decals and magnets on their cars and stands for the National Anthem. But the mob rejects the concepts at the heart of America — indeed, the concepts at the heart of Western Civilization — in favor of the raging, incoherent I want.

Read it also for curious notions of federal jurisdiction, the Dual Sovereign Doctrine, double jeopardy (which, we are told, does not apply when the defendant did not previously offer a defense she offered for the first time at trial), and civilization. Read it, consider that these people sometimes vote, and reconsider whether it's really so ridiculous for people like me to advocate minimum possible government control over citizens.

Via Radley Balko.

I like to monitor whether and when people are saying terrible, terrible things about us here at Popehat. In the past, I've done this in Google Reader by having one of my feeds be a Google Blog Search entry for link:http://www.popehat.com/. For years this worked perfectly, and seemed to capture most, if not all, posts linking to us. In the last few months, however, it's started to return multiple hits on posts that don't link to us, but have us on our blog roll. Yet it doesn't return hits to all blogs that have us on their blogroll, nor all posts from such blogs. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

Any insights or explanations?

Imagine this scenario:

You're arrested and charged with possession of child pornography. You're stunned. What the hell did you have in your possession that could possibly be child pornography? Could the state be misrepresenting the nature of innocent pictures of your kids at the beach? Could someone have planted materials on your hard drive, using your unsecured wi-fi network? There's only one way to find out — thank God for your due process right to a vigorous defense. You and your attorney demand to inspect the evidence — to see the alleged child porn so that you can be ready to challenge the government's proof at trial, and even have a defense expert review it to counter the government's expert, who may be flat wrong in identifying the materials as child pornography.

Not so fast, says the state. Merely possessing child pornography is a crime. Moreover, every time anyone looks at these pictures, the children in them are re-victimized. Therefore, we can't allow you to examine the materials to prepare your defense. You'll just have to see them for the first time at trial, like the jury. Don't worry — we're the state, you can trust our judgment when we accuse people of crimes.

Fortunately, that scenario does not illustrate the actual law. In real life, the accused has the right to review the evidence against him. But how you feel about that scenario can help to determine whether you lean liberal or libertarian — whether you are suspicious of state power in all instances, or whether you trust the state and look to its firm hand when it comes to hot-button issues, like OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

We've been conditioned by the culture to expect that "liberal" and "supportive of due process and fundamental fairness to all people accused of crimes" go hand-in-hand. It's a lie.

Take the scenario above. It's remarkably close to an actual case that inspired this revolting and insipid Gawker post by Brian Moylan about the criminal case against Marc Gilbert in Washington State. Gilbert stands accused by the state of terrible crimes:

Marc Gilbert is accused of sexually assaulting young boys and videotaping the abuse.

It's undisputed that the videotapes are material evidence relating to the crimes, and apparently the state wants to use them to prosecute Gilbert. The Washington media — and Brian Moylan at Gawker — are outraged that this means that Gilbert, who is representing himself, is allowed to view the videotapes — outraged that the matter does not end like the scenario above, with the accused denied access to the evidence For The Children. Quoth Moylan:

See, Gilbert is acting as his own lawyer in the trial, so as his defense attorney, he needs to be able to review all the evidence in the case. Since the evidence in this case is footage of him allegedly raping boys, then he gets to review that evidence to his heart's content. And since his access to this evidence will only go on for the duration of the trial, you can expect this thing to drag on for as long as Gilbert can make it. This is how justice gets served.

(Emphasis added, government-fluffing douchebaggery in original.)

The government — like the rabble of commenters at Gawker — view it as a "loophole" that a person accused of a terrible crime is entitled to review the evidence against him:

The prosecutor and the sheriff say the results of the legal loophole are sickening in this case, but say the state Supreme Court has ruled in Gilbert's favor.

"Make no mistake — I don't like it," said Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor. "But it is not my choice whether to do it or not to do it. There's no question that I don't like it. There's no question that this makes me grind my teeth."

"We don't like it. We don't want to do it, but we have to follow the law. The fix here is to change the law," said Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist.

Lindquist isn't just blowing smoke. This is exactly the sort of scenario that the state uses to expand its power and reduce the rights of individuals accused of crime — the sort of scenario that makes citizens swallow the premise that hey, maybe it's fine if the state can accuse people of crimes based on secret unreviewable evidence.

The media is frequently described as having a "liberal bias." Gawker is described as having one. For some meanings of "liberal," that's true — but only if we accept that "liberal" involves Nancy-Grace-style, law-and-order, hostile-to-rights-of-the-accused drivel.

Edited to add: It's even worse at True Crime Reports.

Edited to add: Here's an exchange I had with a commenter at TCR. Are both of us being sarcastic? I can only hope.

Yesterday I talked about how the Colorado Department of Public Health knows, in creepy-abusive-spouse detail, what is best for your kids. Sometimes the government realizes all by itself that it is a better parent than you are. But other times the government has this epiphany as a result from prodding from its partners in academia.

Take, for instance, Harvard. Harvard has long been a source of Deep Thinkers with Important Ideas about government's role in society, leading to examples of well-thought-out government intervention like the Vietnam War. We've discussed the sort of insight that comes out of Harvard before.

Today, courtesy of the redoubtable Walter Olson, I saw a new instance inflaming the news media and blogosphere today: two Harvard researchers have written a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association called "State Intervention in Life-Threatening Obesity" suggesting that obese children should, in some instances, be removed from their parents by the state for the good of the children. The Harvard folk are David S. Ludwig and Lindsey Murtagh (hat tip to Future of Capitalism for those links).

My first instinct, like that of Walter, is outrage and contempt and all the other pulse-elevating feelings on the I-must-blog-about-this spectrum. My second instinct, though, is to ask this: exactly what are these Harvard researchers advocating?

I knew in advance not to expect to learn much from the news media. Like legal reporting, science reporting is so inadequate that it is the butt of jokes in comics — at least the sort of comics read by the sort of people who care about the quality of science reporting.

My expectation was not thwarted. The reporting on the article was vague and ambiguous and failed either (1) to educate me about the exact scope of the custody-meddling that Ludwig and Murtagh are advocating, and (2) to convince me that this wasn't the sort of OMG MAD SCIENCE! reporting that the comics linked above lampoon.

JAMA does not provide full text of its articles online. I was therefore thwarted in my attempt to figure out whether Ludwig and Murtagh are respectable clinicians or nasty totalitarians or something in between. I was ready to write about this anyway. Then I thought how can I complain about lousy science reporting while perpetrating it myself? So I bit the bullet and paid $30 to download the JAMA article. I comfort myself that (1) JAMA is, in general, a good cause, (2) this isn't the stupidest thing I will have spent money on this week, and (3) the Popehat promise is that we read things like JAMA so you don't have to.

I was concerned that the JAMA article might be beyond my little political-science-major brain. I should not have worried. "State Intervention in Life-Threatening Obesity" is a puff piece suitable for a popular magazine or newspaper and largely free of substance. With footnotes, it's two two-column magazine pages long. It does little but set up the existence of childhood obesity in America, discuss in brief some of the health risks of such obesity, note that existing law generally allows some state intervention in parenting choices when a child's health is at risk, and opine quite generally that in some extreme cases custodial interference by the state may be warranted. This is as specific as it gets:

In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable from a legal standpoint because of imminent health risks and the parents’ chronic failure to address medical problems. Indeed, it may be unethical to subject such children to an invasive and irreversible procedure without first considering foster care. Nevertheless, state intervention would clearly not be desirable or practical, and probably not be legally justifiable,
for most of the approximately 2 million children in the United States with a BMI at or beyond the 99th percentile. Moreover, the quality of foster care varies
greatly; removal from the home does not guarantee improved physical health, and substantial psychosocial morbidity may ensue. Thus, the decision to pursue this option must be guided by carefully defined criteria such as those proposed by Varness et al, with less intrusive methods used whenever possible.

In short, Ludwig and Murtagh seem to be doing little more than attempting to "start a conversation" about when obese children should be removed from their parents by the state. For specific diagnostic criteria, they punt to an article in Pediatrics called Childhood Obesity and Medical Neglect; that article is available fully online through the link. That article is fairly cautious:

In our opinion, 3 conditions must be met to justify state intervention, that is, a high likelihood of serious imminent harm, a reasonable likelihood that coercive state intervention will result in effective treatment, and the absence of alternative options to address the problem. In the case of childhood obesity, it is not the mere presence or degree of obesity but rather the presence of comorbid conditions that is critical for the determination of serious
imminent harm. All 3 criteria are met only in very limited cases, that is, the subset of obese children who have very serious comorbid conditions and for whom all alternative options have been exhausted. In these limited cases, a trial of removal from the home to protect the child may be indicated.

The linked Pediatrics article gives some examples of types of health risks.

Supporters of this research could reasonably argue that this standard is not really different from what courts and child authorities would apply if children were facing a risk other than obesity. In short, to the extent that media coverage of this article suggests that Harvard researchers say that the government should take your kids away if they are fat, that coverage is woefully deficient.

But that doesn't let Ludwig and Murtagh off the hook.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating; the proof of the regulatory scheme is in its drafting and implementation. There are good reasons to be highly suspicious of any social movement — driven by medical professionals or not — to encourage interference with parental custody.

The medical community is an increasingly popular vector for social agendas and state control of the individual. Norms about government control start narrow in theory — like "in the most extreme cases, some morbidly obese children facing imminent serious health consequences might be taken from their parents' homes if those parents refuse to address the health problems." In practice, though, the norms get broadened and twisted to justify social, political, and religious agendas, to increase government fiefdoms, and to wage cultural wars. The norms are implemented not by the knowledgeable professionals who envisioned them, but by bureaucrats of mixed capacity and motives under regrettable conditions. The result, amongst actual people, is inevitable: norms permitting limited state intervention into the lives of citizens are capriciously and maliciously applied, usually in a disproportionate fashion against the unpopular or the powerless. Moreover, when the state trains and equips to exercise power upon some justification, it tends to see that justification whether or not it exists. In our society, the natural and probable result of normalizing state custodial interference of extremely obese kids is not sparing application; the natural and probable result is abuse and misapplication.

Ludwig and Murtagh may well take the Beckian stance that they are "just asking questions" — simply raising the topic for greater discussion, not advocating any hasty broadening of state power over citizens' children. I interpret their brief column as exactly that — an attempt to start the discussion and lend JAMA's credibility to the proposition that forcible removal of obese children is supported by medical academia at the highest level. But the state always thirsts for such power, and is always too eager to get academic support for seizing it. Sooner or later, Ludwig and Murtagh will be cited in some local bureaucrat's application to take a child from his or her parents. Will that child meet the narrow diagnostic criteria that Ludwig and Murtagh have in mind? Perhaps — and perhaps not. The strong possibility that those footnote-referenced diagnostic criteria will be neither understood nor met is, I submit, a factor that Ludwig and Murtagh have not weighed adequately. They have started the dialogue, but distant, barely-supervised and poorly-restrained state officials will finish it for them. Ludwig and Murtagh might also have suggested that parents could buy vicious attack dogs to scare their fat children away from the refrigerator; though the dogs could be trained, in theory, to do so in a safe and appropriate manner, the natural and probable result is blood on the floor.