U2 Guitarist’s House Plan Rejected by California Board

LOS ANGELES — Turning that Malibu dream house into reality is never easy, even when you are a world famous rock star.

The California Coastal Commission, which oversees development near the shoreline, this week rejected a plan from David Evans, better known as U2 guitarist the Edge, to build five mansions along a remote stretch of scenic Malibu coastline. The commission’s 8-to-4 vote capped four years of wrangling over the project, and the battle may now move to court.

“This is one of the most environmentally devastating projects that I’ve seen in the 38-year history of the Coastal Commission,” said Peter Douglas, the agency’s executive director.

While celebrity mansions are hardly new to Malibu, Mr. Evans’s building plans have been a source of particular controversy, which pitted environmental groups against each other.

The houses Mr. Evans envisioned boast state-of-the-art green building techniques: solar panels, rainwater catching systems and native plants.

But despite that, environmentalists particularly opposed the road that would have to be built just to access the homes, while some potential neighbors in this most exclusive of enclaves disliked the idea of five homes — each more than 7,000 square feet — marring their view of the cliffs.

Mr. Evans and the four other property owners mollified one conservancy group that had opposed the project with a donation of $1 million, an open space dedication and a trail easement that would allow hikers to pass through an area currently closed to the public.

“The property owners worked diligently to develop home designs that would meet some of the highest standards for sustainability,” Fiona Hutton, a spokeswoman for the property owners, said in a statement. She noted dozens of other homes of similar size in the area that the Coastal Commission had supported.

But Mr. Douglas said the lack of infrastructure greatly multiplied the environmental impact of any project at the site.

Ms. Hutton said the owners were now considering their options, including litigation. A judge would then rule on whether the commission’s decision amounted to an unconstitutional “taking” of the land, which legally can be developed.

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Efforts to Ban Circumcision Gain Traction in California

 

But last month, the group collected the more than 7,100 signatures needed to get a measure on the fall ballot that would make it illegal to snip the foreskin of a minor within city limits. Now a similar effort is under way in Santa Monica to get such a measure on the ballot for November 2012.

If the anticircumcision activists (they prefer the term “intactivists”) have their way, cities across the country may be voting on whether to criminalize a practice that is common in many American hospitals. Activists say the measures would protect children from an unnecessary medical procedure, calling it “male genital mutilation.”

“This is the furthest we’ve gotten, and it is a huge step for us,” said Matthew Hess, an activist based in San Diego who wrote both bills.

Mr. Hess has created similar legislation for states across the country, but those measures never had much traction. Now he is fielding calls from people who want to organize similar movements in their cities.

“This is a conversation we are long overdue to have in this country,” he said. “The end goal for us is making cutting boys’ foreskin a federal crime.”

Jewish groups see the ballot measures as a very real threat, likening them to bans on circumcision that existed in Soviet-era Russia and Eastern Europe and in ancient Roman and Greek times. The circumcision of males is an inviolable requirement of Jewish law that dates back to Abraham’s circumcision of himself in the Book of Genesis.

They say the proposed ban is an assault on religious freedom that could have a widespread impact all over the country. Beyond the biblical, there are emotional connections: checking for circumcision was one of the ways Jewish children could be culled from their peers by Nazis and the czar’s armies.

“People are shocked that it has reached this level because there has never been this kind of a direct assault on a Jewish practice here,” said Marc Stern, associate general counsel for the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group. “This is something that American Jews have always taken for granted — that something that was so contested elsewhere but here, we’re safe and we’re secure.”

Mr. Hess also writes an online comic book, “Foreskin Man,” with villains like “Monster Mohel.” On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement saying the comic employed “grotesque anti-Semitic imagery.”

Jena Troutman, the mother of two young boys who is promoting the ballot measure in Santa Monica, said she did not think of herself as a crusader against religion. Instead, she views her work as a chance to educate would-be parents against a procedure that “can really do serious damage to the child.”

“I am just a mom trying to save the little babies,” Ms. Troutman said. “I’d rather be on the beach, but nobody is talking about this, so I have to.”

Ms. Troutman has run the Web site wholebabyrevolution.com for two years, and she is fond of rattling off sayings like “Your baby is perfect, no snipping required.” Well versed in the stories of circumcisions gone awry, she said the recent death of a New York City toddler who was circumcised at a hospital convinced her that she should push for the ballot measure.

Ms. Troutman, who has worked as a lactation educator and a doula, said she often approached women on the beach to warn them about the dangers of circumcising, but she has declined to answer questions about her own children.

Although precise numbers are not known, several studies have indicated that circumcision rates have been declining in the United States for the past several years and now range from 30 percent to 50 percent of all male infants.

Many medical groups take a neutral approach, saying that the practice is not harmful and that there is not enough scientific evidence to conclude that it is necessary, and leave the decision to parents and their doctor. Several studies have linked circumcision with a reduction in the spread of H.I.V. Roughly half of the 694 baby boys born in the Santa Monica-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital in 2010 were circumcised before they left the hospital, officials there said.

Dr. David Baron, a family physician, certified mohel — someone who performs ritual circumcision — and former chief of staff at Santa Monica-U.C.L.A., said that he would not press any parent to circumcise a son but that he viewed the effort to ban the procedure as “ridiculous and dishonest.”

“To say it is mutilation is wrong from the get-go,” Dr. Baron said. “It is a perfectly valid decision to say that it is not what you want for your child. Any doctor who says it is needed is not being honest, but to say that it needs to be banned is shocking.”

If the ballot measure passed, it would certainly face legal challenges. But several legal experts said it was far from certain that it would be struck down in a court. Ms. Troutman said she considered putting religious exemptions in the measure, but then decided, “Why should only some babies be protected?”

Rabbi Yehuda Lebovics, an Orthodox mohel based in Los Angeles who says he has performed some 20,000 circumcisions over several decades, said he often had to soothe nervous mothers.

“I am now doing the sons of the boys I did 30 years ago,” Rabbi Lebovics said. “So I turn to the new mother and ask, ‘Do you have any complaints in the way it turned out?’?”

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Pitzer College in California Adds Major in Secularism

Starting this fall, Pitzer College, a small liberal arts institution in Southern California, will inaugurate a department of secular studies. Professors from other departments, including history, philosophy, religion, science and sociology, will teach courses like “God, Darwin and Design in America,” “Anxiety in the Age of Reason” and “Bible as Literature.”

The department was proposed by Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion, who describes himself as “culturally Jewish, but agnostic-atheist on questions of deep mystery.” Over the years he grew increasingly intrigued by the growth of secularism in the United States and around the world. He studied and taught in Denmark, one of the world’s most secular countries, and has written several books about atheism.

Studying nonbelief is as valid as studying belief, Mr. Zuckerman said, and the new major will make that very clear.

“It’s not about arguing ‘Is there a God or not?’?” Mr. Zuckerman said. “There are hundreds of millions of people who are nonreligious. I want to know who they are, what they believe, why they are nonreligious. You have some countries where huge percentages of people — Czechs, Scandinavians — now call themselves atheists. Canada is experiencing a huge wave of secularization. This is happening very rapidly.

“It has not been studied,” he added.

The percentage of American adults who say they have no religion has doubled in 20 years, to 15 percent, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, released in 2008. The survey was conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, which houses the Institute for the Study of Secularism, Society and Culture but does not have a distinct major in secular studies.

Barry A. Kosmin, the director of the institute, said Pitzer College would be the first to have such a major. The institute hosted a conference for academics in California a few years ago on how to develop courses on secularism, which Mr. Zuckerman attended.

Initially, Mr. Zuckerman said he found some skepticism on campus about a secular studies major.

“I had to convince them that this is not an antireligion degree, any more than a religion department exists to bash nonbelievers,” he said.

Pitzer, founded in 1963, is known as a liberal college that emphasizes community service and environmentalism, and its students receive an inordinate number of Fulbright fellowships for study abroad. It is one of the seven Claremont Colleges, neighboring campuses where students may take courses at institutions other than their own.

On April 28, Pitzer faculty members on the College Council voted unanimously to approve the secular studies major, subject to review in four years.

Laura Skandera Trombley, the president of Pitzer, said in an interview, “It’s a serious area of scholarly endeavor, and Pitzer College has a tradition of doing really exciting, cutting-edge intellectual work, so this really fits into the ethos of the college.”

Mr. Zuckerman said he immediately heard from three students interested in the major. One of them was Kiley Lawrence, a freshman from Mission Hills, Kan., and a pre-med student at Scripps College, one of the seven Claremont Colleges.

Ms. Lawrence attended an Episcopal school through eighth grade and was well versed in the Bible, but she said she became a skeptic early on. Now she plans to declare a double major in biophysics and secular studies, because, she said, “each enhances the other.”

Ms. Lawrence, 19, said, “I feel as though I’m being included in something really exciting and innovative, and perhaps even historic.”

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California Is Owed Millions of Dollars by State Employees

LOS ANGELES — When the State of California began handing out i.o.u.’s in 2009 because of a cash shortage, taxpayers were predictably aghast. But few knew at the time that even as pay-you-later notes kept going out, state agencies were also doling out millions of dollars in interest-free loans in the form of salary and travel advances to employees without collecting repayment.

Now, with the state budget facing a devastating $26.5 billion deficit, Gov. Jerry Brown is demanding that agencies immediately stop the practice and determine how much money employees with unpaid loans owe the state.

The state controller began investigating the practice two years ago and has issued several audits about the practice. In 2009, for example, an audit found that 11 agencies had more than $13 million in outstanding loans. In many cases, the agencies had not collected on the loans at all.

“The situation reinforces the worst stereotype of ineffective and inefficient government,” Mr. Brown said in a statement with the executive order issued Wednesday. He said he was ordering all state agencies to “immediately investigate the backlog of uncollected debts and find every penny owed to taxpayers.”

The executive order comes as Mr. Brown is struggling to get his own budget approved by the Legislature. He has repeatedly said that he wants to go to the voters to have tax extensions approved, but so far has been unable to secure needed support from a handful of Republicans.

At the same time, Mr. Brown remains eager to show that he is aggressively cutting down on waste. So far this year, he has issued executive orders cutting the state’s vehicle fleet and state employee cellphones as well as banning the dispersal of promotional items like key chains.

Under state law, employees are able to receive hardship advances from their paychecks and for work travel from an agency’s discretionary fund. But many agencies had not been following state regulations by taking the money out of the employees’ paychecks. After three years, the money cannot be collected without an employee’s consent.

“The state’s poor debt collection and accounting practices are fleecing public coffers at a time when vital public programs are being decimated by unprecedented budget cuts,” the state controller, John Chiang, said in a statement Wednesday.

Administration officials expect that there are millions more dollars in unpaid loans that have not been accounted for. So far, the state does not know how much of the money is from salary advances that should have been repaid and how much is travel expenses that were not accounted for.

Other money owed to the state has also gone unpaid. For example, in an audit of the California Highway Patrol, state officials found that the agency had not collected money from people who were convicted of drunken driving and obligated to repay the state for the investigation.

Each of the audited agencies has now promised to stiffen its accounting procedures and turn over any delinquent accounts to the controller’s office so that the money can be collected and repaid to the state’s general fund.