Christian Support for Gay Rights

I used to wonder why Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam were attractive to many people in the US and why people in China and Korea were attracted to Christianity. My hypothesis is that when we grow up in a particular religion we see how many of the people profess their faith at the place of worship, but don't live it in their lives. We see people using religious functions to show off their new clothes and use religious rites of passage as a way to compete to see who can throw the most extravagant party. We also learn that some of the religious leaders aren't as perfect as we thought and we learn about cases of financial frauds and sexual abuse among clergy and many people are turned off by that.

But when we get to know an 'exotic' religion, we tend to learn about it more abstractly. We learn about the ideals, the principles, the definitions of good behavior, etc. Long distance, we see other religions in their best light, we don't see the actual practice of it by imperfect human beings.

In any case, yesterday, I read an opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News entitled, "Prevo is wasting resources fighting gays". Geneva Walters wrote:

I am a heterosexual, conservative, Christian woman and am not threatened by two men or women who love each other and wish to live together and live an openly gay lifestyle. Furthermore, I am horrified at the thought that they would be denied fundamental civil rights based on their sexuality. . .

Then she lists her Christian bona fides

I believe in a triune God, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. I believe that God created the earth and man in 6 days and rested on the 7th. (However, I do believe that dinosaurs did, in fact, roam the earth, a very long, long, time ago.) I believe in the deity of Christ Jesus, that He was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified on a cross, died, and rose again on the third day. I believe that He ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of God the Father, Almighty.

Then her conservative bona fides:

As far as the term "Conservative" goes, I wait patiently each week for Ann Coulter's column, I am a staunch defender of the rights of the unborn, and the only problem I have with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan is that we didn't go in sooner.

When I first read it, I was quite surprised, but pleased. But the more I thought about it, the more puzzled I became. The letter was written in a very reasonable and rational tone. How could someone like that be an Ann Coulter fan? Was this really some liberal posing as a conservative?

I could just post my suspicions, but I really didn't have enough to go on and I could be totally wrong. And I wouldn't want to raise doubts about what, on the surface, was the kind of conservative we need more of.

I would also note that sometimes people write of an opposing political persuasion, "Why do you only concentrate on issues on our side? You never talk about problems that you guys have." On the one hand that's a valid point. But on the other hand, why should conservatives give liberals free fodder and vice versa? Each side should get the dirt on the other side and they have no obligation to serve up juicy stories about their own heroes. But on the other hand, a balanced source of information ought to give praise when it is due and criticism when it is due. If this article in the Daily News is a fake, wouldn't it be better if a progressive blog said so first?

I don't think there are any easy answers to those questions. If my side is wrong, I should acknowledge that. If I find a story about people I support which may tarnish them, but ultimately isn't a big deal, why should I post it? And I might not post something about people I don't support if it's only outcome would be to hurt them personally. It's not easy to figure this all out, and I reserve the right to make mistakes.

In this case, I emailed my questions to the author of the piece. And she responded in a way that put my questions to rest. (I did tell her I was a blogger and that I wouldn't put up anything from her if she didn't want me to, but that if she said OK, she didn't have approval rights. She had no problem with that and said ok.)

Essentially she said, "Hey look, people aren't black or white. Just cause someone has certain characteristics doesn't mean she's a certain 'type' and that you can predict everything else about her."

It's so easy to place someone in a box because they hold a certain viewpoint and not allow them to express their opinion on an issue by issue basis. As long as America is content with a two party political system, we will continue to place people on one side or the other. We don't bother to try and understand them, it's just easier to dismiss them as Liberal or Conservative. It's silly to me, it's like we're all lining up for a game of Red Rover. While I may be pro-life, I'm quite liberal when it comes to environmental issues. Believe it or not, I have a few gay friends that are pro-life and a bit "Hawkish" when it comes to national defense.

I believe it. She goes on:

There were really two issues that were weighing heavy on my conscience. One of course was the issue of gay rights. I have several gay friends and colleagues and have been given an opportunity to interact with them and seek to understand what they are really fighting for. I don't pretend to understand all of the aspects to the gay rights movement, after all, I'm not gay. I just refuse to deny them their basic rights or allow other Christians to speak for me on this issue. The response I have received has been overwhelmingly positive and much of that response has been from Christians who have basically said "thank you for saying what I've been feeling for a long time." It's also worth pointing out that not all Christians are from the "main-stream evangelical" or "fundamentalist" background which is pervasive with legalistic rule following. I am a product of the Christian Reformed faith and differ on many points with fundamentalists (Baptists).

There's lots in that paragraph.

1. She has gay friends and so she's had a source of information on this topic that is different from the church. Besides some Christian churches are taking stances in favor of gay rights.
   
   
2. She's trying to take back the label Christian, or at least not let one group claim to be the only true Christians and the only people who can speak as Christians. I had to go look up Christian Reformed and I'm still not sure I got it right. I did find this on Religionfacts:

   "Presbyterian
   Presbyterian and Reformed churches share a common origin in the 16th-century Swiss Reformation and the teachings of John Calvin."

   They aren't listed in many comparisons of Protestant groups such as this page at ReligiousTolerance, on Divisions within Protestant Christianity. (Beware, I found one point that seemed to be in serious error. Their chart says that Conservative Christians favor "Special rights for heterosexuals; e.g. marriage" which would seem a rather major error.)
   
   My point here was to try to figure out whether her religious background would have any credibility at all with Fundamentalists. I have no idea.
   
   

I'm also glad to hear about the positive response she got to the piece. But all groups can be nasty when one of their own speaks out like this publicly. So day two might not be as positive. But I guess it depends on where, actually, the Reformed Christians fit in the liberal - conservative continuum. Finally, she wrote:

The second issue was the homeless. It breaks my heart to see these folks on street corners and living in our parks. We could do so much more for them. It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I saw the correlation between these two issues.

Steven, I grew up in a Christian home and can honestly never remember discussing the "gay" issue. I never saw my parents attempt to address this issue on behalf of the church. Instead, I remember my parents, and the other members of the church, taking over our kitchen on Sunday afternoons to make sandwiches for the Brother Francis Shelter. This was the image of the Christian faith that I grew up with, not the finger wagging and shallow platitudes that are handed down from the pulpit in many modern churches

So, from what I can tell, she's a genuine Christian and she's conservative on the issue that Christian conservatives made pivotal - abortion. And conservative Christians are getting more concerned about the environment.

So, it appears that this was the real thing. A believing Christian who doesn't want the Jerry Prevos speaking on behalf of all Christians. She sounds a lot more like my vision of what a Christian sounds like.

I've been trying to tell some of my progressive buddies that we shouldn't look at all the 'conservative Christians' as a monolith. Just as we aren't all the same. And if we talk to each other with respect and decency, they are more likely to approach us when the time is right. Geneva, thanks for standing up for your convictions - both the ones I agree with and the ones I question. You still need to explain Ann Coulter to me, but it sounds like we can have that discussion.

Ride To Bird Creek

Sometimes it's easy to get stuck in town, especially when you try to use the bike instead of the car. But this evening we decided to take a 'short trip to Alaska,' so we drove out of Anchorage down to Bird Creek. And here is where the rain had been hiding. But soon there was a faint rainbow over the mudflats.







It had been threatening to rain all day, but the sun managed to find the holes in the clouds most of the time. But down here it let loose. There's a hint of a rainbow in this picture of Turnagain Arm.




Here's a picture of the mudflats.




To make more sense out of the previous picture, here it is with the mountains to give it some context.



Mudflats at the mouth of birdcreek, with a run of salmon coming in.









There's a street off the Seward Highway at Bird Creek with this street sign. Problem is, the jay

is named after the German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller who discovered them in 1741 (Evans 1986).(wikipedia
(from Wikipedia)

On the one hand you could say just leave it. But it has nothing to do with the stars, it's about Georg Wilhelm Steller. If you leave it, people will see it and think it should be spelled this way.







It smelled pretty bad here as there was a fair amount of rotting salmon waiting for the gulls to clean them up.







Now we're on the boardwalk at Potter Marsh.

We saw the swans as we drove along the Marsh. The belted kingfisher (sorry, but real birders will recognize it from this shot) was there briefly. The bald eagle's been there all summer at a next. I took this through someone's spotting scope.

It really wasn't this dark, but my choice was to make the foreground dark or wipe out the sky.

And the Lucky Winner Is . . .

Bonsai-Jay from San Antonio, Texas. He was the 123,456th visitor. I asked if he could send a picture and he sent this bonzai ficus. I'm totally in awe of his bonsai prowess. It's a good thing all he can see of my yard are close up pictures of flowers and not the rest.



He writes:

My name is Bonsai-Jay. I live in San Antonio, Texas. I stop by you blog at least 3 or 4 times a week. As my screen name suggests, I am a Bonsai Enthusiast [and I work as] an Information Systems Administrator. I used to live in Alaska back in 1980-82. Anchorage most of the time. I worked/lived in Whitter one summer break from college. Gee those were the days.

Here's his sitemeter visitor profile. I'm posting this with his permission, in part to show the 123,456 was from San Antonio and also because I think everyone should be aware of what tracks they leave behind at websites they visit. In the interest of transparency, I've always left my sitemeter open to anyone to poke around. Just click on the number - the one below the word Sitemeter in the lower part of the right column. (Not the 123,456 near the top. A couple people saw that and thought they'd won, until they looked a little closer.)

I'm now working on a prize. I'll let you know what he gets after he's received it. He's given me some ideas.


Norma Jean from Michigan was 123,457 - a first time visitor to the site.

Marge, also from Michigan, checked to see if she was the winner, not sure exactly what number she was. Someone from Topeka, Kansas was 123,454. And someone from Houston was 123,455. Texas, not Alaska.

I'm not exactly sure what Jody from Mississippi's number was. She wrote:

I was born in Alaska in the early sixties. My father was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force base. We lived there for a few years when I was small until my father was sent to his next assignment (Vietnam). I love Anchorage and all things Alaskan. My husband and I flew to Anchorage several years ago and visited Anchorage and Juneau and went salmon fishing. It was a wonderful trip.

I read several Alaskan blogs and the Alaskan Daily News every day. Your state is fascinating. I appreciate the work and effort you put into your posts. They are always interesting.

It's nice to hear from people who have been to the blog. There are a couple of other regulars who stop by who might like to send an email like the person from Volin, South Dakota, or the person from rcn.com in DC (you were 123,458!), or the person from Liege with Linux. Come out from behind the curtain and say hello. Or not.

Again, thanks to everyone who has visited and moved the counter up, now already closing in on 124,000 as I write this. The numbers really aren't that important, but knowing that people do read the blog does keep me much more careful about what I say and how I say it.

[Update:  Click here for a picture of the prizes. ]

Spam Blog?

I got the following email today:

Hello, Your blog at: http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=30897652 Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn't belong to you, you don't have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won't be affected. We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577 Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts. Sincerely, The Blogger Team P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=30897652

[The above copied as an html table and on my computer the right side is cut off. But I think you can get the gist without have to read every word so I don't think it is worth the time to fix it.]

Of course I was suspicious that this was just a phishing scam. In fact, a google bot had been by twice today looking up phishing scam on my blog. But I figured I could follow the link and see where it took me. If it was phishing, it was far more sophisticated and grammatically correct than most I get.

That led me to this page:

It looked to be a real blogger site, it didn't ask for any information, it already had my email, so I've sent it in.

So, if I disappear, this is why. Hopefully their systems work and I won't disappear. But I do now have to put in word verification to post on my own blog.

Julie & Julia is a Blogging Movie

I almost didn't go. Listening to Julia Child on television was like listening to fingernails on the blackboard for me. Fortunately, Meryl Streep's version of Julia Child didn't quite capture her voice.

I thought it was going to be a movie about cooking, but it was really (you know I almost never say what things are 'really' because I know we each take our own meaning from things, but in this case it really - tongue firmly in cheek -) is about blogging. This is the first mainstream Hollywood movie that I recall that is about a blogger blogging from the beginning to the end. (OK, I know people will suggest three or four others. Sleepless in Seattle [You've Got Mail, thanks SCWG] was about AOL mail. And email has played a role in a lot of movies. But blogging being a central activity?)

I did know about the blog, and I even visited it a couple of times, but I didn't think the movie would spend as much time on her blogging as it did on her cooking. And it resonated here - especially when her husband told her she was way more wrapped up in the blog and than in him. J and I both laughed. That kind of laugh where hers means 'gotcha' and mine means 'guilty.'

Damn, she worked a full time job, took the subway home, shopped for dinner, cooked one, two, or three of Julia Child's recipes, blogged, and started over again the next day. Ahh, to be young again.

Bloggers out there, go see this movie - with your spouse or significant other. Eat before you go though.

Sometime Soon

[UPDATE August 23, 2009: There was a winner who got to the site at 6:04pm tonight. He's identified himself and when I get permissions, I'll announce more. We also have to figure out an appropriate prize. Thanks to all who have moved the numbers up.]

Visitor number 123,456 will visit this site. It could be you. I have a prize for you if you are that visitor. But you have to identify yourself. The sitemeter number is in the right hand column after "About Me" and before "Labels." I can't tell your email address, so you'll have to email me to claim your prize.

If the 123,456th visitor isn't identifiable, the closest (to 123,456) identifiable visitor will win. So even if your close, keep track of your number and
email me.

What's the prize? Depends on who you are and where you are. You'll have to tell me a little about yourself so I can figure out something from here you might like.

Oh yes, the last time, some people said they tried to win by coming back to the site over and over. But as I understand it, sitemeter doesn't record you if you come back from the same isp within a short time period. I'm not trying to boost hits, just to note a milestone of sorts.

See more at the top of the right column.

Phoebe Greenough and Breaking Ground at Out North

We went to Out North last night to see dancers. The blurb said

Breaking Ground sprung up during a dinner conversation between Becky, Therese and I. [It hurts to write that on my blog - it should be "between Becky, Therese and me." Maybe I'll explain why in another post one day. In the meantime you can go to the link to find out why.] Our goal was to find a way to bring together artists and dancers in the community and give them the opportunity to produce and try out new ideas...

We knew that things might be a little crowded because of all the cars parked on the street and we were early even. I'd read that there would be about 10 five minute pieces by different people. So, the cars might just be those of all the performers.

There was also an art exhibit in the gallery, so we looked around.



While I wasn't excited about everything, there were some pieces - and parts of pieces - that felt good on my eyes.


When we went into the theater it was packed and we got seats way in back. Good strategy - lots of local performers means lots of friends and family who come to see them. Enough to fill up a small theater.

"Breaking Ground" means doing new stuff, so I was expecting to see something new. Maybe it meant new for the dancers rather than for Anchorage or for dancing. At least that went through my mind for the first couple of dancers. This caused me to think about how one should evaluate dancing, especially ground breaking dancing. (One could debate whether we should evaluate at all, but that too is a different post. I would note that someone this week mentioned a workshop she attended on non-violent communication which has as a main starting point, getting rid of judgmental language. When I read the book, I'll do more on that.)

Picture taking was specifically banned during the performances so you get after-dance pictures here. In any case, as I watched the dancing, I thought about what would be 'good' in this case. Some of the dancers were pretty young and this is Anchorage, not New York City. I came up with two factors - was the dancing 'good' and was it 'new'? What's good dancing? For me, the dancer is dancing, not performing. The dancer is moving naturally, is not thinking ('ok, now step to the left and ready for the next leap"), but just flows naturally. The body has to be able to move right to the music. I forget where I am and just enjoy.

What's 'new'? Not being a dance expert who keeps up with the latest trends, I guess I can only judge what's new for me. And it seems to me that while there are an infinite number of moves human bodies can probably combine into a piece, coming up with something that no dancer has ever done before (and should do) is probably not easy.

So I was ready to settle for 'good' and not worry about 'new'. I liked 'ChitChat' by Michelle "Shimmy Shoes" Steffens because it broke from what I'd call the ice skating routine type dancing to music of the first pieces. She started out seated, tying her shoes, then tapped while sitting, got up and tapped around. The only music was her shoes until she got the audience involved in a routine of foot tapping, finger snapping, more tapping, and two claps. It was different and it involved the audience actively in the dance. I liked it. J wasn't moved by it though. And she knows a lot more about dancing than I do.



But things changed radically when Krista Katalenich and Felix Bambury Webbe took the stage. Forget all the criteria - you know good dancing when you see it. They were there and I just enjoyed how they moved alone and then came together and then alone. It worked. They were somewhere else with the music, not on stage in front of an audience. We got to talk to them a bit afterward. They live in Fairbanks. Felix, who's from Cuba, has been there for two years and teaches Afro-Cuban (I think that's what he said) dancing. Krista is a student at UAF and at Felix's dance school.

The last piece was eleven dancers swinging to Swingset by Jourrasic 5. It was an ambitious piece with couples dancing, splitting, regrouping, moving here and there across the stage, and with choreographer and dancer Rick Ruiz lip-synching.
You really should go to the video. The cool thing is that what they did on stage was way better than what happens in the video. Rick is in the picture with the other 'director' of the piece - Dorthy Fredenberg. The group will be performing at the State Fair and there's something else coming up in Anchorage, but I forgot what. Maybe Rick will tell us in a comment. Below he's telling us how the idea for the choreography came to him.



The group is called Swingset Hooligans.

Blog Spammers

'Kevin' sends spam comments from Taiwan in Chinese regularly - they are filled with links to commercial sites. As soon as I get them - I get comments by email - I go to the post and delete them. Most of Kevin's comments are on old posts, that most readers won't ever see, and if I weren't getting email copies, I wouldn't notice either.

I guess that people are paid to go to blogs and post comments. I'm assuming they haven't found a way to by-pass the captcha coding, so they have to do it by hand. It's like a bee that regularly flies into your house and you have to shoo it away.

This week I got some new spammers. 'Britney' sent about six comments all with links to payday loan sites. 'Suzi' showed up yesterday with a similar modus operandi. There's a short and vaguely relevant comment that is applicable to most any blog post

Blogs are so interactive where we get lots of informative on any topics...... nice job keep it up !!

and then below her signature there's a link to some commercial site. Just now it was to "buy term papers."

I've checked blogger forums and it appears you can't block individual ip addresses. You either block everyone or take them down after the fact.

If anyone reading this knows how I can block these, let me know.

Hatchery Salmon, Farmed Salmon, and Wild Salmon

I was taken aback today when I read this in a letter from a JC in the Autumn 2009 edition of USC Trojan Family Magazine (As I write this, the link still has the Summer 2009 edition as the latest one):

Thank you for explaining that "wild caught" Alaska salmon are really farmed! I was "tricked" by advertising!

I hadn't read the original article in the Summer edition so I went to see what had been written that elicited this response. In an article called "Consider the Oyster" I found the passage that sparked the comment above:

He also retains mixed feelings about hatcheries, which are far more common than people realize. About half of Alaska’s “wild” salmon come from hatcheries, he says.

Fish from hatcheries do not breed with wild fish. But they do compete with them for food. And hatcheries can produce lots and lots of hungry salmon.

Ironically, the very fish that were supposed to save wild salmon runs may be contributing to their demise.

“They could be constantly facing this competition against these hatchery fish,” Hedgecock says. “Maybe they’d have a better chance of surviving if they didn’t have to compete.”

He would prefer to see more emphasis on the harder approach to conservation: fixing and protecting the salmon’s native habitat.

To use a drinking-water analogy, hatcheries are like an extra shot of chlorine: easy, fast and cheaper for a city than making sure it has great water to start with.

“By the time you get to a hatchery, you’re desperate,” Hedgecock says.

Is it true that half the Alaska salmon are hatchery salmon? The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) website has a link to a PDF file of the Alaska Salmon Enhancement Program 2008 Annual Report.

In the abstract is says:

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game oversees and regulates all state and private sector salmon enhancement and rehabilitation projects. Protection of Alaska’s natural salmon stocks requires stringent permitting processes. Geneticists, pathologists, and biologists review all projects prior to the issuance of a permit to operate a salmon ranching facility, transfer eggs or fish, or release any fish into Alaska waters. Pathology, genetic, coded wire tag, and otolith processing laboratories are maintained to provide both diagnostic information to Alaska Department of Fish and Game fishery managers, and inseason and technical expertise to the private sector.

Hatchery operators collected over 1.6 billion salmon eggs and released over 1.4 billion juvenile fish. An estimated 60 million adult salmon of hatchery origin returned. The preliminary total statewide commercial salmon harvest was 146 million fish. There were approximately 133 million salmon harvested in the common property commercial fishery, and an estimated 45 million, or 34%, were produced by the Alaska salmon enhancement program. Enhanced salmon provided an estimated $110 million or 29% of the exvessel value of the statewide common property commercial harvest. The ocean ranching program employs hundreds of Alaskans in seasonal and fulltime jobs. It is considered the largest agricultural industry in Alaska. [emphasis added]

34% is not quite "almost half" but it is a big chunk.

I thought I knew the difference between hatchery fish and farmed fish, but I decided to check on that too.

From Long Live the Kings:

Declines in wild populations gave rise to hatcheries in the Northwest beginning more than 100 years ago. Built primarily to produce fish for harvest, hatcheries compensate for freshwater habitat loss by increasing the survival of salmon through the early stages of their life cycle, and by receiving returning adults. Hatcheries now provide 70 percent of the salmon caught in Puget Sound—but they have also been identified as a contributor to the decline of wild populations. Comprehensive hatchery reform, however, aims to revolutionize how hatcheries are managed so they can help recover threatened and endangered wild populations and support sustainable fisheries. [emphasis added]

Farmed salmon are the livestock of the salmon world. Like hatchery fish, they are born and spend the early stages of their life cycle in human hands. While hatchery fish are then released to spend the majority of their life in the wild, farmed salmon are fed and matured into adults in large saltwater enclosures, usually along marine shorelines, before being harvested as food. The rapid growth in the farmed salmon industry in the last two decades has raised new questions about the environmental, social, and economic effects of salmon farms.

So, JC is wrong when she says 'wild caught' salmon are farmed. Alaska salmon are not farm salmon as we all knew.

But 34% of the (presumably 2007) Alaska salmon harvest were hatchery fish. The State website adds the term "ocean ranching." The USC article says that hatchery salmon don't breed with wild salmon - which suggests to me hatchery salmon are not truly wild salmon, even if they have a wild experience for part of their lives. And they compete with wild salmon for food. And the USC article further suggests that the survival odds of wild salmon would be greater if there were not hatchery salmon. But what about the survival rate of Alaska fisherman? And big fishing companies? Is it ok to cause the extinction of wild salmon species so humans can eat? My initial reaction would be - perhaps if that was the only thing that prevented humans from starving. But humans have other options. The salmon don't.

I have a different sense of the meaning of the words 'wild Alaskan Salmon" now. There's a 1/3 chance they are hatchery fish. And those hatchery fish may be endangering wild salmon in the competition for the food.

50th Anniversary of Muddling Through by Lindblom

I've been putting up pictures instead of writing about things like Mayor Sullivan's veto of the ordinance to add gays and lesbians et al to the Anchorage anti-discrimination ordinance or about health care. It's not because I haven't been thinking about both, but I have been waiting to say something that adds to the discussion.

We got up at 5 am today to get DZ to the airport, so my head isn't totally clear (well, that implies that it would be otherwise and I don't want to give any false impressions), so let me offer one short perspective on the health care issue.

Back in 1959 - I guess that makes this the 50th Anniversary - Professor Charles Lindblom of Yale published an article that is still in the reading lists of public administration, public policy, and political science students. It was titled, "The Science of Muddling Through". (The link will only get you the first page at JStor. If you have access to a university library system, you ought to be able to get it all free. If not, check with your local library to see if they can get it for you. Alaskans should be able to get it through SLED.)

In this article, Lindblom argued that the traditional way of thinking about policy - rationally setting up a goal and then a plan to reach that goal - was nice theoretically, but that Congress didn't work that way.

Instead, changes were made incrementally, because Congress was made up of a 100 Senators and 400 and something Congress members who all had a vote, didn't agree on much, and had local constituents to please. Therefore, if you wanted people to agree on the goal, nothing would ever be accomplished.

But, he said, they could and do agree on the means through which each committee member can fulfill their individual goals.

He called the first method - the one in the academic journals - The Rational Comprehensive method, or Root method. Root, because you started all the way from the roots to build something completely new.

He called his model,

"I propose in this paper to clarfiy and formalize the second method, much neglected in the literature. This might be described as the method of successive limited comparisons." (p. 199*)

He also called this the Branch method, because you aren't going all the way back to the roots. You work from the existing system and just do some work with the branches.

[Double click to enlarge]

So, basically, he's saying that (and I'm reducing his points to fewer ones, so the numbers don't match the ones in the chart.)

1. The root method assumes that first you agree on goals, then design the means to meet those goals. But the branch method says that the means (policies to achieve goals) and ends (the goals) are intertwined and can't be easily separated and articulated that way. (1 and 2 in the chart)

2. The test of a good policy isn't whether it meets the objectives (since they were never agreed on) but whether there is agreement on the policy. (3 on his chart) One of his 1959 examples was that the agreement in Congress to extend old age insurance

. . .stems from liberal desires to strengthen the welfare programs of the Federal Government and from conservative desires to reduce union demands for private pension plans. (p. 202)

A different example of agreeing on the means (but not goals) might be a Senate committee agreeing to support a new ship for the Navy. One senator wants to have parts for the ship built in his state. Another will vote for it if it includes the Navy giving wetlands it owns for conservation. Another wants minority businesses to get at least 10% of the contracts. A couple actually think the ship is needed for national defense. And perhaps another will vote for it if the son of a particular constituent gets into the Naval Academy. They all have different goals, but they agree on the means (the ship) to their separate goals.

3. While the Root ideal is for comprehensive examination of the new policy, the Branch reality is acceptance of the basic existing system and just reviewing the additional incremental changes. This is the "successive limited comparisons" notion.
Complete analysis is not humanly possible and so simplification needs to be achieved.

First, it is achieved through limitation of policy comparisons to those policies that differ in relatively small degree from policies presently in effect. . .(p. 203)
The second method of simplification of analysis is the practice of ignoring important possible consequences of possible polices, as well as the values attached to the neglected consequences. (p. 204)

Lindblom recognized that ignoring the consequences may sound shocking but argues that in fact it may lead to better policy than "through futile attempts to achieve a comprehensiveness beyond human capacity." (p 204)

4. The root model relies on theory while the branch method reduces the reliance on theory through successive comparisons. Lindblom argues that our knowledge in the social sciences is, at best, limited. We can make practical comparisons of the consequences of incremental policy changes - we can look at how some past programs worked or didn't, for example - without necessarily having a strong theory.


A lot has happened in 50 years, including increasingly sophisticated policy analysis techniques. Furthermore, there are some assumptions in Lindblom's model here that I have problems with. As a descriptive model - describing what is actually happening - I think he did a good job. Adopting it prescriptively - saying this was a good way to go - was probably under[over]-ambitious. And Lindblom himself got tired of people not getting past this early piece of his and seeing that he'd done more than that in later years.

I'd note that as a doctoral student I took an intensive -week class on the policy making process with Professor Lindblom. He did acknowledge that individual policy makers may use a more rational comprehensive model in their individual strategies to achieve their own goals. But when power is dispersed, the agreement on goals becomes very difficult.

He, at that time, tended to believe that while it wasn't perfect, it was as good as we can get. I agree that having representatives of a cross section of the US population making decisions is definitely better than trusting a single decision maker to make the best decisions for us all. But I also think there are better ways than we have for funding and communicating with our elected officials. One of the problems I had then and have now, is that a major goal of members of Congress is to get re-elected. This means they are always in search of money and thus they are always in debt to large donors and key supporters.


I started this intending to use it to comment on Obama's health care proposals. I'm not sure it tells us a lot beyond the fact that Obama's health care program is hardly a minor incremental change and that makes it much harder to get through. People can legitimately question whether it will work. They won't be making minor moves toward some new program. It will be big time. On the other hand, incremental changes on something that works so poorly for so many and costs so much isn't good policy either.

People who are getting good health care now, fear changes will hurt them. So they don't agree with Obama's goals. People who don't like Obama may oppose anything he proposes to make him look bad. And if Obama moves toward normal incremental changes, he'll lose his base which expects him to go for the gold.

But politics today are not what they were 50 years ago when Lindblom wrote the piece. We'll just have to see if Obama writes a new page in the policy making literature.

[Yeah, I know, this is a lame ending. I got up early and I can't pull it together. So if you've read this far, you'll will have to mull on it yourself - is Lindblom still relevant? If so, what can Obama do at this point? If not, what's different now?]

* I had trouble getting the article through JStor. While it shows the first page on Google, trying to get it through the library didn't work. Probably the librarian can make it work, but I have a copy of Shafritz and Hyde's Classics of Public Administration and the article is in there. So the page numbers come from there, not the original.