Fallacy

WASHINGTON -- An old joke: A preacher, called to a new church, arrives the day of a funeral at which he must preside. Having never known the deceased, he asks the congregation for voluntary eulogies. A voice from a rear pew shouts, "His brother was even worse."What can be said on behalf of high school textbooks concerning marriage is that college texts are even worse. So say two reports from the Council on Families of the Institute for American Values.In "The Course of True Love: Marriage in High School Textbooks," Paul C. Vitz of New York University praises six high school texts for treating marriage respectfully, discouraging teen-age marriage and encouraging teen-age sexual abstinence.

The worst thing about the 20th anniversary re-release of "Star Wars" is all the news stories and reviews that begin with lame wordplay on "the force is with us" or "in a galaxy a long time ago, far far away." I include my own: Enough already with the schlock!The best thing about it is "Star Wars." Big, fast-moving, incredibly enjoyable, the movie remains a trip and a half, and any kid out there who hasn't seen it on the big screen ought to get to the nearest one and settle in for the experience.

WASHINGTON -- Opponents of the California Civil Rights Initiative hope that women will prove to be their ace in the hole. Women have the most to lose from the abolition of state preferences on race and gender grounds, they argue.But this debate has been clouded by so much false information that it is difficult for facts to get a fair hearing. Feminists and liberals have based their pro-affirmative action argument on demonstrably erroneous numbers, which are carefully and neatly refuted by Michael Lynch and Katherine Post in the summer issue of The Public Interest.

SO THIS IS HOW economic history restarts.A few months ago, the economic certainties were: death, taxes, the futility of central planning, the virtue of free trade and the eternity of "Hogan's Heroes" in syndication.Free trade may have required more faith, like Mrs. Clinton's explanation of how the Whitewater bills got lost inside her house. But if anyone still wondered whether free trade had been admitted to the canon of conventional wisdom, Ann Landers removed the doubts.Last September, "Annemarie in Philadelphia" wanted Ann to save U.S. jobs by asking everybody to boycott imports.

Washington. -- In his recent encyclical ''Evangelium Vitae'' (''The Gospel of Life''), Pope John Paul II expressed a profound compassion for women caught in the dilemma of unwanted pregnancy.Irresponsible and predatory men, economic and social pressures, fear and confusion can lead to situations in which, the pope writes, the weight of responsibility for depriving the unborn child of the right to life falls less heavily on a woman in grave psychological distress than on ''those who have directly or indirectly obliged her to have an abortion.

OPPONENTS OF the death penalty once argued that execution was unconstitutional because blacks were more likely to be hanged than whites for the same crimes.That turned out not to be true. The data showed the reverse in fact. Whites were somewhat more likely to be put to death than blacks for the same crimes.The anti-death penalty crowd then changed tactics. Well, they said, it isn't the race of the criminal that betrays the system's institutional racism, it is the race of the victim. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, among others, advanced the claim that when the victim of a murder was white and the perpetrator black, the death penalty was more likely to be meted out than if the victim and killer were both black.

Washington. -- President Clinton, having produced a radical response to the spurious crisis in health care, now produces a mild response to the lethal crisis in welfare.The crux of his welfare plan is the supposed two-year limit on benefits, after which recipients must find work or take subsidized private- or public-sector jobs. Such jobs are apt to be make-work and can be perpetual, so this looks a lot like welfare as we have known it. However, facts are slowly being faced, beginning with the Hemingway Fallacy about poverty.

Considering that Westminster Mayor W. Benjamin Brown has announced he is running for Carroll County commissioner, he comes off as courageous for condemning what he says are the county's low rates of property taxes and impact fees. Especially in an election year, most politicians consider it political suicide to even suggest the need for higher taxes and fees.But Mayor Brown's stance is not as brave it might appear. To raise the additional revenue, he advocates increasing impact fees -- charges tacked on to new construction, ostensibly to pay for schools and roads -- because most county residents think they won't have to pay them.

McGill University Professor Henry Mintzberg, perhaps the world's premier management thinker, hammered the last nails in strategic planning's coffin in his just-released book, "The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning."Of course, our mindless love affair with planning effectively ended a dozen years ago, when then-neophyte GE Chairman Jack Welch nixed his corporation's hyper-formalized planning system and most of the planners along with it.Still, Mintzberg's latest is so encyclopedic, so damning . . . and so final.

Washington. -- These are salad days for those conservatives whose philosophy is confirmed by, and whose agenda is advanced by, bad behavior of government.Recently, for example, the House of Representatives, home of the most entrenched portion of the political class, voted to continue spending taxpayers' dollars to subsidize, for large corporations and wealthy trade associations, the overseas marketing of fruit juice and candy bars, whiskey and prunes and many other profitable commodities.