Category Archives: Culture and society

Parading your ignorance and calling it “reality”

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or, The Irony of Ignorant Palin-Bashers Bashing Gov. Palin for Being IgnorantAs I noted yesterday, “echo-chamber types are once again pushing the canard that this is all because Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in teaching contraceptive use in schools”; today saw a particularly egregious example, courtesy(?) of Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson, who smugly declares,

This isn’t an argument for abortion, but one for reality—drop abstinence only, make contraceptives available and consider adoption, relying on grandparents, or single parenting until the child herself grows up.

OK, so if we’re making a parade about “an argument for . . . reality,” let’s consider what the reality actually is here, shall we?  Unfortunately for Carlson, if we do that, she doesn’t come off very well.First, she says, “drop abstinence only.”  One problem:

Abstinence-only education doesn’t actually exist. It’s a term used by critics of abstinence education rather than purveyors, who prefer, simply, abstinence education. The term “abstinence-only” attempts to create the perception that abstinence education is a narrow and unrealistic approach. While such loaded terms are to be expected of activists, the media usage of the term is regrettable.

In other words, Carlson’s beating a straw man, asking conservatives to drop something that we don’t advocate; she’s busy feeling smugly superior to people who do not in fact exist.  Good for her ego, bad for her argument, and worse for her understanding of what’s actually going on (which might be a trade she’s happy to take, for all I know).Second, as Mollie Ziegler Hemingway also points out, the smugly superior types like Carlson not only don’t know what abstinence education is, they don’t understand what it’s about.

The liberal caricature of abstinence education is of school marms rapping the knuckles of teens and telling them—day after day—not to have sex. In fact, a review of curricula for abstinence education programs shows surprisingly little about sex—and a lot about building self-esteem, understanding risky behavior, finding responsible partners, and growing a family.ReCapturing the Vision, one abstinence curriculum used for girls-only education, begins with a unit designed to help students see their bodies as beautiful and to accept themselves as they are. Other units teach them how to define their morals and values, resist negative influences, manage conflict and understand their emotions, and determine how to achieve personal, academic, professional, and financial goals. The final unit uses mock interviews, job searches, and résumé writing to help girls transition to adulthood.In other words, abstinence education isn’t only, or even primarily, about preventing teen pregnancy. It is about learning life skills, encouraging the formation of families, and taking responsibility for your behavior, which helps explain the cultural chasm between its supporters and those who saw Bristol Palin and screamed “hypocrisy!”

Third, when Carlson says we should “make contraceptives available,” she might be surprised to know that Gov. Palin agrees with her.  This isn’t speculation, either, as the governor is already on the record on this subject—and not in the way that her ignorant detractors assume from their bigoted stereotypes:

In a widely quoted 2006 survey she answered during her gubernatorial campaign, Palin said she supported abstinence-until-marriage programs. But weeks later, she proclaimed herself “pro-contraception” and said condoms ought to be discussed in schools alongside abstinence.“I’m pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues,” she said during a debate in Juneau. . . .Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella said the governor stands by her 2006 statement, supporting sex education that covers both abstinence and contraception.

The irony of the whole thing is, that position put her at odds with both the GOP platform and her running mate, which is why the Los Angeles Times titled its story on this “Palin appears to disagree with McCain on sex education”; but when the MSM decided it was more politically advantageous to stereotype Gov. Palin and beat her for something she doesn’t actually believe than to use what she does believe to try to drive a wedge between her and her running mate, the truth was conveniently forgotten.Fourth, the implicit assumption that since Bristol Palin got pregnant, she must have been taught about sex in a non-liberal-approved fashion is just that:  an assumption, and an unwarranted one, at that, as Hemingway points out.

No one bothered to find out what type of sex education, if any, Bristol had received and assumed her mother—despite on-the-record comments supportive of teaching both abstinence and contraception—opposed sex education.

(As Hemingway further notes, even if the assumption were correct, “it is empirically laughable to judge the effectiveness or utility of abstinence education based on one teen pregnancy”; but folks like Carlson who are pushing an agenda don’t care about inconvenient truths like that.)Finally, Carlson asserts that people should “consider adoption, relying on grandparents, or single parenting” rather than allowing/encouraging teens to marry.  Her sweeping unfounded assumption here is almost too grandiose and simplistic to answer; this doesn’t qualify as an “argument for reality” because it shows no effort to understand what the reality is.  To wit, who says people don’t do all those things?  No evidence I’ve seen, certainly; and in the case of the Palin family, it’s been crystal-clear ever since the news broke that family support, not just from grandparents but also from great-grandparents and others, was very much a part of the plan for the care and support of little Tripp and his parents.  (As for her suggestion that single parenting is a better option than marriage, I can only conclude two things:  one, Margaret Carlson has never studied the issue in any meaningful way; and two, she probably wasn’t a single mother as a teen.)Taken all in all, I can only conclude that Carlson’s column on the Palins would be a good deal better if she actually had a clue what she’s talking about.  It’s a pity that the media we have now don’t care enough about such things to enforce them.

The real meaning of the evangelical response to Bristol Palin

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I really didn’t want to write about the news of Bristol Palin’s broken engagement, which I found saddening and disheartening.  In analyzing it, I had two main reactions.  First, that this story is basically about a teenage girl who’s done some unwise things and made some bad decisions, both of which are pretty common at that age.  (I was going to write, “that age at which we tend to think we’re much wiser and more mature than we really are”—but as far as I can tell, that describes every age.)  If you’re honest, you’d have to admit that you did some really dumb things at 17.  For my part, at that age, I didn’t do much of anything besides go to school, go home, read, and go to church on Sundays—I didn’t hardly have the opportunity to do dumb stuff—but I did.  “Teenage girl does something foolish, pays consequences” is an afterschool special or a Very Special Episode; as “news,” it’s strictly dog-bites-man.  The only thing that makes this “newsworthy” is who Bristol Palin’s mother is.Second, am I the only one who read the piece in the AP and thought, “Wow, Levi Johnston’s sister is a real witch”?  It might not be fair, but I definitely got the vibe that she was jealous of Bristol, glad that Levi dumped her (since it also read to me like he was the dumper and she was the dumpee), and gleeful at the opportunity to shred her reputation in the national media.As far as national media reaction, though, I really didn’t want to go there.  As long as it was just confirmed PDS cases like Bonnie Erbe, I could let it slide; after all, the folks at National Review dispatched her quite handily.  (For those who might not know, PDS stands for “Palin Derangement Syndrome,” the official diagnosis for anyone whose rational processes go into violent spasms any time the word “Palin” is mentioned or a moose becomes visible on the horizon; for some reason the alternative name “Palin Madness Syndrome” never caught on.)  I didn’t see the benefit in giving Ms. Erbe’s commentary the unearned dignity of being treated seriously.  Granted, the fact that she and other echo-chamber types are once again pushing the canard that this is all because Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in teaching contraceptive use in schools (when in fact she explicitly supports doing so, though she does believe that sex education should encourage abstinence) deserved a response—but if I’d posted about that by itself, as I’ve been meaning to do, I could and would have done so perfectly easily without mentioning Bristol Palin.And then I ran across Jon Swift’s post, and I couldn’t let that one pass.Swift, a self-described “reasonable conservative,” asks the question, “Why is Bristol Palin different from Murphy Brown?” and comes up with the conclusion, “She is different because she is a conservative”—a conclusion which he then proceeds to argue and extend at tedious and tendentious length.His argument, to put it politely, is full of holes and rests on a number of unexamined assumptions; he gives a few examples of cases where conservative commentators had non-identical reactions to superficially similar situations and then concludes (without further evidence) that this is because of the political views of the people in question.  (Since one of his examples rests on the assumption that “Mary Cheney is a good conservative woman who will no doubt teach her children that they shouldn’t become lesbians like their mother,” this is particularly dubious.)  He then launches into what he apparently considers to be biting satire on Christian conservatives, writing,

We should have the courage of our convictions and not play the liberal game of moral equivalency. Instead of trying to explain away Bristol’s pregnancy we should be defending it, holding her up as an example of the difference between liberal teenage unwed mothers and conservative teenage unwed mothers. Because just as it is true that, as Richard Nixon once said, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” when a good Christian conservative has a child out of wedlock, that means it’s not immoral.

The truth of the matter is, even if one concedes that he’s caught Kathryn Jean Lopez and Lisa Schiffren in the hypocrisy of which he accuses them—which I do not grant, but for the sake of argument—that doesn’t prove anything.  It doesn’t prove, first, that their hypocrisy is ideological at its root, nor second, that they would be representative of most conservatives in that respect.The first is, contra Swift’s evident assumption, something which does in fact have to be proven, since political persuasion is not the only difference between, say, Bristol Palin and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, and he doesn’t bother to examine Lopez’ and Schiffren’s arguments to see what they’re actually saying—he simply summarizes their positions and moves on to the ad hominem part.  The second rests on yet another assumption on Swift’s part, that evangelical attitudes toward teen pregnancy and unwed motherhood are still as hostile as old stereotypes make them out to be—and here’s where his argument fails altogether, because that’s simply no longer the case.I’m reluctant to give props to David Frum, who looks more like a giant wooden horse every time I see his byline, but he did a much better job than Swift on this issue in an article he wrote six months ago for Canada’s National Post.  He opened his piece in a manner Swift would no doubt approve—”Whoever imagined that we would see a Republican convention rapturously applaud an unwed teen mother?”—but then went on to actually think about what that really meant, and what it really tells us:

That moment confirmed a dramatic evolution in American politics: the transformation of the pro-life movement from an unambiguously conservative force into something more complex. . . .The pro-life movement has come to terms with the sexual revolution. So long as unwed parenthood is considered disgraceful, many unwed mothers will choose abortion to escape disgrace. And so, step by step, the pro-life movement has evolved to an accepting—even welcoming—attitude toward pregnancy outside marriage.

As I wrote about Frum’s article at the time, though I think “welcoming” is an overstatement,

Frum has captured and crystallized something of which I was aware—in my own attitudes and approach to ministry, no less than in the lives of others—but which I hadn’t consciously thought about. Put simply, when pro-life concerns cross with the concern for other issues, the tie goes to the baby.

The truth is, Frum is (if you’ll excuse the pun) dead right on this subject.  Sure, time was that conservative Christians in this country stigmatized teen pregnancy and disapproved of it as hard as we could; and then folks started pointing out that we weren’t really discouraging teenagers from getting pregnant—all we were doing was driving them into the ungentle hands of the abortion industry.  Collectively, we took a look at ourselves and realized that the critics were right; and over time, we by and large decided that we could live with teenage pregnancy and teen single motherhood—just don’t kill the baby.That’s the message on which most evangelicals in America have settled, when it comes to kids like Bristol Palin:  just don’t kill the baby, and we’ll do what we can to support you and help you out.  Why else have we started crisis pregnancy centers all over the place?  We didn’t have a utopian choice here, we had the choice of two evils; we stared it dead in the face, thought about it for a while, and picked the lesser one.  This is the bargain we made, and I believe it’s done more to reduce the abortion rate in this country than any government policy, even as it’s boosted the rate of illegitimacy.  Frum quotes the statistics:

As the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has diminished, the United States has seen both a huge increase in the proportion of babies born out of wedlock—now reaching almost 37%—and a striking decline in the incidence of abortions. In 1981, 29.3 abortions were carried out for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the United States. By 2005, that rate had tumbled to 19.1 per 1,000 women.

Now, it seems to me likely that some of those young women wouldn’t have gotten pregnant at all if there were still the old stigma attached to unwed motherhood and illegitimacy; it also seems to me likely that for far more of them, that stigma wouldn’t have been enough to keep them from having sex, but only to send them running to the nearest abortionist to keep anyone from finding out they’d gotten pregnant.  I can’t prove that scientifically, to be sure, but that’s what my experience suggests to me, and many of my colleagues in ministry would say the same.I don’t remember exactly how many weddings I’ve done (it’s not a huge number), but I remember how many couples I’ve married who were virgins on their wedding night:  one.  Is this a good thing?  No.  Is it reality?  Yes.  Will it be changing any time soon?  No.  And if we’re going to make any headway against it, is it going to be through a return to older tactics?  Will we accomplish anything by trying to scare teens away from sex and making examples of girls who get pregnant?  No.  No, we’re not—it isn’t going to happen.Our culture is sex-saturated, we’re flooded with erotic stimuli, and there’s a powerful cultural push toward sexual activity—combined, alas, with other trends that are pushing the average marriage age later and later—and we aren’t going to be able to shovel our way out of this flood by making a negative case.  There is nothing to be gained by making a pariah and a target out of girls like Bristol Palin, and whatever you may think about evangelical Christians, we’re smart enough to see that.  We need to keep working on rolling back this tide, but we aren’t going to do it that way; we’re working on other approaches (including the abstinence-education programs Gov. Palin has been unfairly derided for supporting), but they’re going to take time.  And in the meantime, we have to live in this culture as it really is, not as we wish it were, and to do the best we can with what we have.What’s the difference between Bristol Palin and Murphy Brown?  Twenty years.  Twenty years’ bitter experience of the law of unintended consequences, that’s all.Update:  Welcome to folks coming over from The Point and C4P—I hope you take the time to have a look around.  Those of you from C4P might be particularly interested in today’s post responding specifically to Margaret Carlson.

Another addition to the blogroll

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As someone who started posting on Sarah Palin a couple months before her nomination helped the MSM see that the deepest desire of their collective heart was to slander libel her to within an inch of their lives, I’ve been pleased to see the rise of various grassroots networks dedicated to her support.  I tend to be a late adopter on such things (it took a long time for friends to talk me into joining Facebook), but I’ve jumped in and joined one of them, the Read My Lipstick Network, and their blogroll is now in the sidebar.  (I must confess it seems a little strange to me, not being the type to wear lipstick, but American politics is in something of an odd phase these days anyway.)  For those who are into politics (which isn’t everyone who drops in here, I know), there are some good blogs in there, and I encourage you to check them out.

Sarah Palin and Whittaker Chambers: politics by pedigree

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If the always-astute Thomas Sowell is right—and I believe he is—then that’s really what the irrational negative reaction to Sarah Palin in some quarters last fall came down to.  It explains the fact that many liberals thought her wonderful (even though they would never vote for her because they agree with her on almost nothing), while a number of prominent conservatives came down with the reaction even though they agree with her on almost everything.  It also, I think (though Dr. Sowell doesn’t go this direction), explains why many of those same conservatives came out for Barack Obama over against John McCain:  because if Gov. Palin is “not one of us,” as Eleanor Roosevelt said of “slouching, overweight and disheveled” Whittaker Chambers, while the “trim, erect and impeccably dressed” Ivy League New Dealer Alger Hiss was, it’s also true that Sen. McCain isn’t “one of them” either, while Barack Obama most certainly is, on almost all the same scores.  (Sen. McCain actually fares worse in that respect than Gov. Palin does; neither of them is overweight, but posture and fashion are only problems for him.)  Never mind that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, or that Barack Obama had no discernible record of accomplishment in actual governance:  to the intelligentsia, each man qualified as “one of us,” and at a visceral level, that’s the qualification that they really believe matters.We are not as far removed from the class system of our British forebears as we like to think; we’ve just changed the terms, is all.HT:  Conservatives4Palin

If you can fake that, you’ve got it made

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Isn’t that what they say about sincerity?  When it comes to getting on in the world, it’s a true statement, with one big “if”:  it’s only true as long as nobody catches you faking it.  Get caught, all bets are off.Unfortunately for Alex Rodriguez, he’s been caught faking it a few too many times by now for anyone to believe much of anything he says.  It’s been revealed that he tested positive for steroids in ’03, and he’s trying to control the damage by admitting the positive test and spinning the circumstances—but why should anybody buy the line?  After all, this is a guy who . . . well, I’ll let veteran Tacoma News-Tribune sportswriter Larry LaRue tell the story:

One day in the visiting clubhouse in Cleveland, Alex called me over to his locker. His grandmother had died a day earlier, and he wanted to tell me how hard losing her had been. He had been close to her, he said, and was devastated by her loss.Alex told me all this without showing emotion. I thought he might be trying not to, so I nodded and listened.“The funeral is Sunday,” he said.“Are you going?” I asked.Alex looked genuinely surprised.“No,” he said. After a pause, he told me he’d had a long talk with Lou Piniella, who’d asked him to play through the pain.It occurred to me that day that Rodriguez might not be feeling anguish so much as wanting me to know he was—and to write about it. I didn’t, in part because I thought it sent too mixed a message and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.I still do, but it has gotten harder.Alex Rodriguez never said a spontaneous thing to the media. Ever. On one level, that could be seen as caution. But over the years around Alex, it became apparent he was that way with teammates, coaches, everyone. . . .I don’t know anyone who believes they’ve seen an honest emotion from Alex. When I watched his confessional interview with Peter Gammons and thought we might finally hear him level with the world.Until he said he wasn’t sure what he’d taken, only that it was banned.Alex took something for three years without knowing exactly what it was? Impossible. Alex didn’t get dressed without thinking of the impact he wanted to make with his attire. He never spoke to the press without knowing precisely what message he wanted to deliver.And the steroid cocktail he is alleged to have consumed is not something he could have purchased over the counter at GNC—part of it can’t even legally be sold in this country.What Alex did Monday was confess to as little as possible. He never said the word ‘illegal.’. Only ‘banned.’ He never said he’d injected anything, or been on a program.Alex Rodriguez taking injections without knowing what was in the syringe or how would impact his body? . . .When you think you’re just a bit smarter than anyone who interviews you, things get said that are too easily checked. Alex’s grandmother story, for instance. I talked to then-manager Piniella a bit later in the evening, and asked if he’d counseled his young shortstop about the death in the family.“I didn’t know about it,” he said. “Alex hasn’t told me.”Now, Alex wants the world to know he’s sorry. That whatever it was he took in Texas because of the pressure he felt after signing that contract, he stopped taking when he went to New York—where apparently, there was no pressure.At least this time, he left Piniella out of it.

The thing about trust—and it’s something our president should remember; sure, he’s the golden boy who can do no wrong, but so was A-Rod, once upon a time—is that once you lose it, once people decide they can’t trust you not to spin them, it’s extremely difficult to get it back.

Redefining evil for convenience

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Here’s Judea Pearl, UCLA professor of computer science and father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, on “the normalization of evil”:

Somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of “resistance,” has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words “war on terror” cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism—the ideological license to elevate one’s grievances above the norms of civilized society—was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable “tactical” considerations. . . .The clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel.” Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices. . . .When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas—the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains—to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.

Wal-Mart Confidential

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Charles Platt, a former senior writer for Wired, went to work at a Wal-Mart in Flagstaff, Arizona and wrote about it for the New York Post.  He has some interesting things to say about his experience:

My starting wage was so low (around $7 per hour), a modest increment still didn’t leave me with enough to live on comfortably, but when I looked at the alternatives, many of them were worse. Coworkers assured me that the nearest Target paid its hourly full-timers less than Wal-Mart, while fast-food franchises were at the bottom of everyone’s list.I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn’t pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?In fact, the deal at Wal-Mart is better than at many other employers. The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour, while the mean hourly wage for retail sales associates in department stores generally is $8.67. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. Also every Wal-Mart employee gets a 10% store discount, while an additional 4% of wages go into profit-sharing and 401(k) plans. . . .You have to wonder, then, why the store has such a terrible reputation, and I have to tell you that so far as I can determine, trade unions have done most of the mudslinging. Web sites that serve as a source for negative stories are often affiliated with unions. Walmartwatch.com, for instance, is partnered with the Service Employees International Union; Wakeupwalmart.com is entirely owned by United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. For years, now, they’ve campaigned against Wal-Mart, for reasons that may have more to do with money than compassion for the working poor. If more than one million Wal-Mart employees in the United States could be induced to join a union, by my calculation they’d be compelled to pay more than half-billion dollars each year in dues.Anti-growth activists are the other primary source of anti-Wal-Mart sentiment. In the town where I worked, I was told that activists even opposed a new Barnes & Noble because it was “too big.” If they’re offended by a large bookstore, you can imagine how they feel about a discount retailer.The argument, of course, is that smaller enterprises cannot compete. My outlook on this is hardcore: I think that many of the “mom-and-pop” stores so beloved by activists don’t deserve to remain in business. . . .Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s. Wal-Mart is not the enemy. It’s the best friend we could ask for.

This is Obama’s America

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When the abortionist didn’t show up in time, a Florida baby was thrown out with the trash.After all, what can you expect when we have a president who can call a baby a punishment?  This is what he voted for.I can’t even bear to copy this—just go read it.  Other links are here, on R. S. McCain’s blog; and as Jared Wilson rightly says,

If you’re pro-choice or a pro-lifer who’s not all that concerned about a pro-choice culture and this disturbs you, why?The only difference between this incident and what happens in all abortions is that the baby is usually killed inside the womb. They just didn’t do it in a timely fashion this time.Either way, a baby is killed and thrown away like garbage.Stories like this and the advances in pre-natal technology are catching up with the abortion industry. One of these days we will wake up to how barbaric abortion is. We’ll suddenly realize how uncivilized we really are.

A thought or two in response to Culture11

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There’s been a fair bit of chatter recently in certain conservative circles about the demise of the website Culture11. I have to be honest, I read this with a certain amount of bemusement, since (as Mencken might have put it) I must confess I never knew Lord Jones was alive to begin with; I’m not sure if that makes me un-hip, or what—but then, as a mainline pastor in small-town north-central Indiana, I’m probably un-hip by definition anyway, so I’m not too worried.In any case, I’ll confess that what strikes me about the conversation over the demise of this website is all the heavy breathing over the word “conservative.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to get all bent out of shape over the use of labels; they’re useful shorthand. I’m perfectly content to be called a conservative, because in this context, that’s the label generally used for people who believe what I believe; if “liberal” still carried its classical meaning, I’d be perfectly content to be called that, too. It saves lengthy explanations, and that’s useful.
The conversation over Culture11, though, has a different quality, with lots of talk about the “alternative right,” what it means to be a “true conservative,” the deriding of “neocon echo chambers” and the like.  What I see here, besides infighting and back-stabbing, is a concern for the label as such, and an almost Jacobin impulse to ideological purity—manifested, since the guillotine isn’t actually an option, by loud declarations of excommunication of the heretics.  I see, quite frankly, a great deal of narrowness of perspective, marked by chronological snobbery (“that’s so 2001-04”) and snobbery of provenance (if it comes from Person X, or Group X—such as “the 2nd and 3rd generation neocons who rule the roost on FOX,” who are “bereft of all discernible signs of culture”—then it must be bad), and a vast ugliness of attitude.  There’s precious little grace shown here toward those with whom people disagree, only the attitude that “if you aren’t my definition of conservative, then you’re the enemy just like everyone else.”Now, granted, none of these folks know me from a hole in the ground (I think I commented on Joe Carter’s blog once or twice, but that’s about it), so my reaction to this spat doesn’t really matter any; but I know what I’d say to these folks if I could, or to anyone else who finds themselves arguing in this sort of spirit.Grow up. Search for truth as best you can, come to the best conclusions you can reach, and don’t worry about who else holds them, or whether they’re sufficiently contemporary, or any of that junk. That kind of thing is, to be blunt, juvenile.  Argue your positions with respect for those who disagree, and with openness to learn from them—and remember that politics and culture are pragmatic arenas, and that to get anything done, you have to build alliances and forge coalitions; hyper-puritanism leads finally to self-isolation, and the only door out of that trap is the abandonment of all the principles for which you fought in the first place.  Don’t pronounce anathemas on those who agree with you on most things—that, too, is juvenile; find common ground, and work with them.  Remember, you too are imperfect; that’s why we all need grace.

A modest proposal on the definition of marriage

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I offer this with two notes.  First, this isn’t a “modest proposal” in the satirical sense, along the lines of Jonathan Swift; I am serious.  Second, this isn’t my own idea; I ran across it some years ago and no longer remember who came up with it.  That said, here is the proposal.I would be willing to support same-sex marriage given two conditions:
the abolition of no-fault divorce and the recriminalization of adultery.Those who argue that it’s absurd for heterosexuals to oppose redefining marriage to include homosexual couples on grounds of the sanctity of marriage while tolerating divorce for non-biblical reasons have a point; where they go wrong, in my judgment (and, I believe, on the biblical standard) is in arguing for combining the two.  The best course, I think, would be to hold the line on the definition of marriage while reversing the no-fault revolution—but I don’t expect that to happen.  (To tell the truth, I don’t expect to see my own proposal realized either, but we’ll get to that.)  As a realistic matter, politics is a matter of tradeoffs (except for short periods), and you have to give something to get something.  Given that, I think that no-fault divorce and the lifting of formal societal sanction on sleeping around have done more damage to the institution of marriage than would inclusion of same-sex couples in that institution, and so I think the tradeoff would be, on the whole, beneficial.Including the recriminalization of adultery in this deal would also ensure that those homosexuals who supported it were actually serious about marriage.  There are those who argue that the true agenda behind the push for same-sex marriage is the desire to bring down the institution of marriage, or at the least render it irrelevant; and I’m quite sure there are those for whom that’s true.  I’m also sure there are those for whom it isn’t.  The willingness to advocate and enter into legal marriage on grounds that would make that marriage much more consequential (and the violation of it much more consequential) would draw a clear and unambiguous contrast between the two groups.As noted, I would be very surprised to see this proposal enacted, since there are a lot more heterosexuals who would be inconvenienced by it than there are homosexuals whom it would benefit.   I suspect for instance that most liberal heterosexuals, if these were the only terms on which they could win marital status for same-sex couples, would refuse.  Their attitude, I think, would likely mirror that of New England environmentalists who are eager to see species in other parts of the country added to the threatened and endangered lists, but much less eager when it’s a species like the New England cottontail; easy to stand on your principles, after all, when it only inconveniences other people.I also suspect that many conservatives would dislike my proposed deal.  Part of that is that many would disagree with my arguments for it; just because I believe that it would, on the whole, strengthen the institution of marriage doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with me, or that I’m necessarily right.  Part of it too is that, given the divorce rate among evangelicals and fundamentalists, you have to figure that even many conservative Christians would balk at reversing the no-fault revolution.I don’t know how prominent people of homosexual inclination would react if this modest proposal were ever seriously debated; I suspect some, at least, would advocate for it with a certain sardonic humor, pleased to see the onus put on heterosexual America for once.  I do think, though, that if people were forced to discuss it seriously, the conversation would be both enlightening and entertaining; and who knows?  We might even learn something.