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Can anyone explain to me how this proposal could be constitutional, and how it could be a good idea from a practical standpoint?

Thanks.

The only label any science textbook needs.

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This Washington Post story (annoying but free registration required) about a young gay man in a small Oklahoma town who "finds love where he least expects it" -- and that doesn't mean what you probably think it means -- is among the most heart-warming things I've read this year.

My colleague Stan Swofford had a story in today's N&R about the state of the criminal investigation of defunct housing nonprofit Project Homestead and its finances. Short version: It's about a year old and might last another three months.

For me, this story was deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra is reputed to have said. I spent the better part of three years covering PTL for the N&R, starting just weeks after Jim Bakker's resignation (which happened on my next-to-last day at my previous paper) and continuing through Bakker's indictment, trial and sentencing to the civil suit that disappeared a Big 8 accounting firm and left tens of thousands of PTL donors holding nothing but pixie dust.

The parallels are obvious: A charity, founded by a charismatic religious leader with political influence (fun fact: during Reagan's second term, then-V.P. George H.W. Bush sought Bakker's support for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination), veers off into error as donors' funds -- private money in the case of PTL; taxpayer money in Homestead's case -- are misspent. Finally, it all becomes public just months before the charity would have collapsed financially anyway because of the insatiable greed of its leader. The ensuing financial investigation goes on for many months before being resolved. The only real difference is that with Homestead, the dollar amounts had one or two fewer zeroes on the ends.

One of the more educational spectacles of Bakker's criminal trial was the sight of former PTL board members, some of them celebrities, called to testify that, in fact, they had no idea what Bakker was up to or how well or poorly money was being managed. These witnesses were, in effect, lectured by the prosecutors that it was their job to know.

I bring this up because this town has a lot of charitable nonprofits, and all (presumably) of these nonprofits have boards. If you're not on one, you probably know someone who is. How many of these board members understand their legal obligations, their fiduciary responsibilities? And of those who understand, how many actually are carrying them out? I'm not trying to scare off any current or would-be board members. But you need to understand what you're getting into.

If you're on a nonprofit board and you think you might not know everything you need to know, a good starting point is the BoardSource Web site. Educate yourself, and then hold your nonprofit's CEO accountable. A tax exemption is a public trust. It's up to you to see that it gets used accordingly, because if it turns out that your nonprofit's CEO is taking money or doing something else illegal, and you didn't know because you weren't asking the right questions and looking at the right paperwork, your subsequent conversations with government representatives are going to be extremely unpleasant.

It's the dark night of the soul here at The Lex Files -- literally. It's not quite 4:30 a.m. as I type this after having been rousted from my bed by kids and shoulder pain. And if you can't be honest with yourself at 4:30 in the morning, when can you? As the late, great Winston-Salem rock band The Right Profile put it in "God's Little Acre," at this time of night, you don't just see the truth, you see it double.

Which brings me to the double life of U.S. Rep. Edward Schrock, who, according to The Washington Post, has ended his efforts to win a third term in Congress after the Web site blogACTIVE claimed Aug. 19 that Schrock, whose district includes televangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University and nine military facilities, is gay.

Schrock is married, with kids. He has a 92% favorable rating from the Christian Coalition (or did; the page has been taken down), second only to House Speaker Dennis Hastert. He is a co-sponsor of the Federal Marriage Amendment and has voted against bills that would bar employment discrimination against gay people.

But he also, blogACTIVE claims, uses a gay personal-ads telephone service to meet male partners for sex. That's a double life to exceed that of Roger Dimmesdale, the minister and secret lover of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Now, I'm not against secrets, on a personal level (government's a different matter). They make us more interesting. Even the bad ones can make us better people, if they are mistakes internally acknowledged and learned from and if any harm they have caused to others can somehow be remedied.

But when a secret forces a person to live life as a massive betrayal of who he/she really is, not much good is going to come from it, for that person and those to whom he/she matters. Just ask Ed Schrock's wife and kids, who are undoubtedly undergoing some serious heartache right now whatever the family's ultimate fate might turn out to be. For that matter, just ask his constituents, who, if they really want a representative with a 92% rating from the Christian Coalition, are constitutionally entitled to one and no doubt would prefer one who lives the values he professes.

And yet, for all the damage such secrets do, there is something about our society that frequently forces us, to a greater or lesser degree, to keep them secret, to betray our very essence. This is not a completely bad thing; to the extent that society forces some simple decency onto otherwise irredeemable sociopaths, via deterrence or incarceration, we're all better off. But we pay an incalculable cost, in economic inefficiency and existential misery, for many of our secrets. For everyone who is utterly fulfilled in both professional and personal lives -- and most days, I'm blessed to count myself in this group -- there are many who will never achieve the condition because they fear the cost of doing what it would take to do so would be too high. They include the guy who denies his inner rock guitarist to run the family manufacturing concern, the woman who marries a man she doesn't quite love and has kids she doesn't quite adore, simply because she thinks that's expected of her and that she must do what is expected.

We say that in America you can be anything you want to be, and legally that's pretty much true. But there's an unwritten, unspoken web of strictures and expectations that limit many of us, and if most of these situations are nowhere near as spectacular as soon-to-be-former Congressman Ed Schrock's, they're every bit as painful.

From Will Baude (via Dan Drezner):

I remember being struck that if you took the various signs of "alcoholism" and replaced books and reading as appropriate, nearly all of them applied to me:

Are books a necessary part of your daily routine? Check. Do you become grumpy and irritable if your books are taken away from you? Check. If you begin reading, just a little bit, do you find it hard to stop? Check. Do you find yourself growing distant from friends who disapprove of your book habit? Big check. Do you find yourself needing more and more books to get the same "fix"? Check. When you meet a new person or enter a new room, do you instantly size up his bookshelf? Check. Does your book habit sometimes get in the way of leading a "normal" life? Check. (Think of the countless social engagements I have declined because I preferred to finish an addictive read.) Do you buy books to make yourself feel better when sad or lonely? Check. (Hence: some fifty books purchased in two months in England last fall; less than a dozen this summer).

The moral of the story is-- what exactly? Perhaps that "addiction," especially addiction to things other than ingested chemicals, is a badly-formed concept (consider gambling addiction, internet addiction, book addiction, religion addiction, sex addiction, exercise addiction, and begin to try to draw lines). Of course, [the] joke about water addiction reminds us that even ingested-chemical-addiction may not be a well-formed concept. And also that our ideas on these things are incredibly vulnerable to a status quo bias.

But anyway: What are YOUR addictions? Reading? Reality TV? Breeding rabbits? God forbid, blogging? Can you quit any time you want?

Oh, I've heard that before ...

The "safety gap" between sport-utility vehicles and passenger cars is widening:

The gap in safety between sport utility vehicles and passenger cars last year was the widest yet recorded, according to new federal traffic data.

People driving or riding in a sport utility vehicle in 2003 were nearly 11 percent more likely to die in an accident than people in cars, the figures show. The government began keeping detailed statistics on the safety of vehicle categories in 1994.

They're not, of course, as Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-seller "The Tipping Point," wrote earlier this year in The New Yorker:

The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade--the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator--has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan--a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame--are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.) But this desire for safety wasn't a rational calculation. It was a feeling.

I don't hate SUVs or even begrudge them to anyone else. But I spent several years in my 20s going out to fatal wrecks, and so I won't buy an SUV. (Won't buy a motorcycle, either.) Your mileage, of course, may vary.

So if you're not into off-roading, you don't need one to get to work in winter weather and you know SUVs aren't as safe as passenger cars, why would you buy one?