LTE: Good on the Brits

Regarding "Britain votes to leave the EU" (Friday Front Page),  I believe that reasonable people everywhere can appreciate what the British have done with their "Brexit", and that small government types like myself can savor it.  The European Union is and always has been an over-reaching under-achiever that has only ever served the bureaucrats that run it.

The British have shown us all the way.  Is there perhaps a "Texit" in our future?

Pete Smith 

Cypress, TX

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http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/letters/article/Sunday-letters-Pension-troubles-Brexit-8324060.php

The Real Cause of Absentee Fathers

Regarding "Policies to get fathers involved will help children" (Friday Outlook A23), Robert Crosnoe says that "state of fatherhood in this country is abysmal", and provides the usual laundry list of public programs to help "absentee dads", including paid family leave and "parenting education programs."

Mr. Crosnoe creates the impression that dads are "absentee" regardless of marital status.  This simply is not true.  If the parents are married, fathers are just as engaged as mothers.  It is only when parents are not married that there is a high risk of absentee dads.

The simple fact of not being married happens because a) the parents never did marry, or b) got divorced.  Either way, our laws as currently written virtually ensure a high percentage of absentee dads because the mother will be granted full custody, automatically making the father a second class citizen in the raising of their children. 

If Mr. Crosnoe wants effective public policy regarding parenting, two things need to happen:

1) We need to take away the financial incentives for women to have children outside of marriage.

2) We need to grant fathers exactly the same custody rights as mothers.

These policies are fair, gender neutral, and ultimately benefit the people who really matter, our children.  They also don't require a dime of taxpayer funds to be thrown at yet more public programs.

Pete Smith

Cypress, TX

A Rapist Lurks On Every Corner Of Suburbia

Regarding "We must fix the culture that gives rise to rapists" (Sunday Outlook A34), to prove that this culture exists, Leonard Pitts cites statistics from a group known as RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), the most dubious of which claims that "only six in every thousand perpetrators of sexual assault end up in prison."

Let's start with the fact that on the front page of RAINN's own website, they insist that "Only three out of every 100 rapists will ever spend even a single day in prison", five times the rate cited by Pitts from the same source.  Clearly, RAINN and Pitts wish to create the impression that there are millions of rapists roaming the streets, but on their own terms, exactly how big would that number be?  According to Prisonpolicy.org, 169,000 convicts are currently in prison for rape, a bigger percentage of the prison population than for any violent crime but robbery.  Taking Pitts at his word about six out of 1000 being convicted, that would mean that for this sample alone, there's an additional 28,000,000 rapists wandering free.   

That number is clearly absurd, but it points to the interesting fashion in which advocates of a "rape culture" game the statistics.  Now they wish to add the new spin of "White Male Privilege" to the mix, resulting in a perfect storm of nonsense, seeing as how white males per capita commit far fewer rapes than black or Latino males.

There are usable statistics to cite to discuss the problem of rape.  Unfortunately, this article doesn't include any of them. 

Pete Smith

Cypress, TX

Chris Tomlinson had a cow, even thought we asked him not to

Regarding "Uber appears to be in the subprime auto business" (Thursday Daily Digital) Chris Tomlinson sees no good coming of the ride sharing company offering car loans to future drivers.  He cites an East coast professor who declares the loans are "predatory and are very much driven toward profiting off drivers.”

Does he mean like every other car loan, ever?

At least the rhetoric has been toned down.  In the on-line version yesterday in Chron.com, Tomlinson referred to "Predatory terms", "profiting off drivers", "payday-loan racket", "exploitative lending practices", "Ayn Rand-loving sociopaths", and those are by no means all of the pejorative terms used to describe Uber in this article.

And yet despite the multitude of declarative statements, both versions of the article are amazingly fact-free: no actual rotten loan terms inflicted by Uber on the unsuspecting poor, nor a single anecdote of an abused Uber driver, just the conspiratorial musings of Chris Tomlinson enabled by yet another East Coast elitist college professor hurling accusations from his Safe Space. 

We get it. Uber, bad. But any reasonable person who read the first five sentences of the article would at least contemplate the potential good of the proposition. To do otherwise is to deny the existence of hundreds of thousands of Uber drivers oblivious of their victim-hood. 

I recommend a do-over consisting of both sides of the argument. It's the least I can expect from the Chronicle business columnist. 

Pete Smith

Cypress, TX