Did conservatives forget about unintended consequences?
Florida is losing Shakespeare. Of course.
In Florida, teachers are going to cut back on their teaching of Shakespeare because of new state laws that crack down on the teaching of sexual content.
...some Florida school districts are shying away from Shakespeare, along with other classic and popular materials. They say they’re attempting to comply with new state law restricting books with and instruction about sexual content.
Hillsborough County became the latest to take this step, telling teachers they could assign excerpts of plays such as “Romeo and Juliet,” but not the full text.
“I think the rest of the nation — no, the world, is laughing us,” Gaither High teacher Joseph Cool said after learning of the directive. “Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd.
Conservatives, in fairness, say that's not what they meant! National Review:
But state education leaders are pushing back against the notion that the state law should prohibit schools from assigning Shakespeare’s plays. “The Florida Department of Education in no way believes Shakespeare should be removed from Florida classrooms,” spokeswoman Cassie Palelis told National Review, noting that eight works by Shakespeare are included in the B.E.S.T. standards as recommended readings.
But of course, it's not as simple as that. Florida recommends Shakespeare, but Shakespeare has sex and Florida is against that -- so much so that parents can sue school districts for violating the law. Educators, rather than risk getting sued or losing their jobs, are drawing their lines well clear of anything that could get them in trouble.
Of course they are!
But this kind of thing seems to be happening with some frequency these days. The anti-abortion laws in red states have had the -- predictable -- effect of making it more difficult for women to get abortions even when it's necessary to save their lives. And conservatives have responded that, no, obviously, anti-abortion laws aren't meant to end up killing mothers.
The pro-life counterargument calls this legal misinformation. The life-of-the-mother exception in, for instance, Texas’ abortion ban doesn’t require that the risk of death or “substantial impairment” be imminent or immediate; it just requires a doctor to certify that such a risk exists. So doctors and hospitals have the latitude to intervene earlier, not just wait for the threat to metastasize before they act. To the extent there is a problem here, in the real cases of women denied help, pro-lifers argue that it’s mostly a problem of medical professionals misreading the new laws, officials failing to clarify their meaning — and sometimes-irresponsible liberal media outlets misleading on what the law actually allows.
But it's clearly not so clear: A Texas judge just now -- more than a year after the state began its crackdown on abortions -- had to clarify that doctors can perform abortions for women whose lives are in danger. Doctors who didn't want to end up in court or lose their jobs naturally steered clear of the line!
Oh, and the Texas Attorney General's office is appealing that ruling.
A few years ago, in the pre-Trump era and a bit more optimistic about Republicans, I wrote a column about conservative insights that would serve liberals well.
They’re often better at recognizing the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, the attempt to fix a problem can sometimes end up creating new, unanticipated problems that also need solving. You can, for example, make the case that the federal government’s decision to seriously start fighting wildfires in the last century actually ended up making wildfires … worse. In Boulder, Colo., attempts to rein in that city’s runaway growth have driven housing prices skyward—ruining some of the grassroots charm activists there were trying to preserve.
Conservatives aren’t perfect at applying this principle—see the invasion of Iraq—and sometimes it becomes their excuse to do nothing, but liberals would probably benefit from applying this insight a little more consistently.
If I'm being charitable, I'd say that the banned Shakespeare and endangered women are unintended consequences of preferred Republican policies. If I'm cynical, I'd say those consequences are exactly what the right intended.
Oh, color me cynical.
Anyone familiar with the negative consequences of economic sanctions should have been able to anticipate the problems of de-risking and overcompliance in these cases.