Category Archives: Culture and society

Where have all the good men gone? Blame Roe, for starters

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Richard Stith, a law professor just up the road from here at Valparaiso, has an excellent piece in the “Opinion” section of the latest First Things entitled “Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men” (subscription required until the November issue comes out). It’s an argument that may seem counter-intuitive to some, but it is, sadly, all too true. As Stith writes,

This summer, President Obama proclaimed again that we “need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn’t end at conception. In a sense, of course, he is absolutely right. But the problem is that, in another sense, he is completely wrong: Male responsibility really does end at conception. Men these days can choose only sex, not fatherhood; mothers alone determine whether children shall be allowed to exist. Legalized abortion was supposed to grant enormous personal freedom to women, but it has had the perverse result of freeing men and trapping women. . . .

“Abortion facilitates women’s heterosexual availability,” [radical feminist Catherine] MacKinnon pointed out: “In other words, under conditions of gender inequality [abortion] does not liberate women; it frees male sexual aggression. The availability of abortion removes the one remaining legitimized reason that women have had for refusing sex besides the headache.” Perhaps that is why, she observed, “the Playboy Foundation has supported abortion rights from day one.” In the end, MacKinnon pronounced, Roe‘s “right to privacy looks like an injury got up as a gift,” for “virtually every ounce of control that women won” from legalized abortion “has gone directly into the hands of men.” . . .

That would be why, as Stith notes, “64 percent of American women who abort feel pressured to do so by others. . . . American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children.” He continues,

Throughout human history, children have been the consequence of natural sexual relations between men and women. Both sexes knew they were equally responsible for their children, and society had somehow to facilitate their upbringing. Even the advent of birth control did not fundamentally change this dynamic, for all forms of contraception are fallible.

Elective abortion changes everything. Abortion absolutely prevents the birth of a child. A woman’s choice for or against abortion breaks the causal link between conception and birth. It matters little what or who caused conception or whether the male insisted on having unprotected intercourse. It is she alone who finally decides whether the child comes into the world. She is the responsible one. For the first time in history, the father and the doctor and the health-insurance actuary can point a finger at her as the person who allowed an inconvenient human being to come into the world.

The deepest tragedy may be that there is no way out. By granting to the pregnant woman an unrestrained choice over who may be born, we make her alone to blame for how she exercises her power. Nothing can alter the solidarity-shattering impact of the abortion option.

Dr. Stith spends the bulk of the article laying out the various ramifications of this reality, the various ways that it plays out. I would make only one correction to his argument: abortion empowers certain types of men, not all men. Specifically, it empowers the cads, the losers, the irresponsible, the promiscuous, the abusers, and those afraid of commitment. It empowers the worst in human impulses, and thus benefits guys who indulge those impulses, who want to take what they like without paying for it. Those who want to choose fatherhood, who want to take responsibility for their actions and choices, too often find themselves barred by the law from doing so.

We thus have a situation that favors “bad boys” over good people; we have a legal and social incentive to antisocial and irresponsible behavior. That’s a corrupting influence on our society, creating norms that skew young males away from responsibility and maturity, away from marriage and toward “playing the field.” In all seriousness, if young women want to know where all the good men are, one place to look is Roe, Doe, and their progeny; because of them, there are fewer good men than there ought to be.

 

To the list of Letterman’s sexist cruelties, add another

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Sarah Palin may have driven David Letterman to something of an apology, and she may have elected to accept his apology, but it doesn’t look like any of that changed his fundamental attitude much. In the middle of his (utterly predictable) Top 10 on “Mark Sanford’s Excuses,” the late-night host uncorked this beauty:

4. If you met my wife you’d be fleeing the country too.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, whatever mockery anyone wants to give Mark Sanford, he has it coming. I think Robert Stacy McCain’s (apparently fairly serious) suggestion that he deserves a case of .38-caliber lead poisoning is over the top, but within the confines of the law, whatever anybody can bring down on this man’s head is fine by me.

But his wife? This is a woman who has been betrayed at the deepest possible level by the one person on earth who was most responsible to be on her side, and has been dealt unfathomable public humiliation by that man for the sake of his own selfishness and gratification—she doesn’t deserve this . . . this . . . I’m trying to think of a word that pastors are supposed to use that’s bad enough to describe this, and I’m not coming up with one. What, by all that is holy, gave Letterman and his writers the idea that it’s acceptable, let alone funny, to beat a woman when she’s down like that? What are we going to get next, a crack about the joy of clubbing baby seals?

Once again, if Letterman weren’t such a narcissistic solipsist, he’d be ashamed of himself. What a poor excuse for a human being.

Thought on the true nature and purpose of the conscience

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As I’ve noted before, “conscience” is a problematic word in our culture—not because it’s a hard concept to understand, but because we find it a hard one to accept. We don’t want our conscience to be something that pokes at us and makes us face the fact when we’re doing something wrong; we tend to want to do what we want to do, and we want to believe that if we can convince ourselves we feel good about doing what we want to do, then it must be OK.

As such, what a lot of folks in this world end up doing is essentially turning their conscience off—refusing to pay attention to its promptings, finding ways to dismiss it, teaching themselves to feel good (at least on the surface) about doing what they want to do, and then calling that good feeling their conscience. That way, they can tell themselves (and whoever else might happen to come around) that their conscience is clear about their actions.

Unfortunately, if we really want to, it’s not all that hard to get ourselves to the point where we’re standing proudly defiant of the will of God in the absolute (if self-generated) conviction that we’re obeying his will; and to the casual observer, it can be difficult to distinguish such stands from true acts of conscience. After all, Martin Luther launched the Reformation, in part, with an appeal to conscience, refusing to bow to the power of the Roman church because “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe”; these days, there are a lot of folks running around who want to be little Luthers, condemning the church for its teachings and declaring, “Here I stand.” Some are very convincing.

What too many people lack, though, is the central point of Luther’s statement: “My conscience is captive to the word of God”; this is the foundation for everything else. If your conscience is captive to the word of God, if your focus is on obeying God even when it’s the last thing you want to do, if you’ve been training and strengthening your conscience in faithful study of the Scriptures and in prayer—as Luther had—then yes, to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. If not, then you may very well be going against conscience and not even know it.

The key point is that conscience is not self-generated, because we aren’t the arbiters of reality—no, not even of “our own” reality, because there’s no such thing; whether we like it or not, our reality is the same as everyone else’s. The purpose of conscience isn’t to give us the perception of moral reality that suits our preferences, but rather to help us perceive moral reality as it is—to tell us what truly is right and wrong, not to confirm us in our own ideas and wishes on the subject.

This isn’t something we always want (which is why any person who truly functions as the conscience of an organization is going to be intensely unpopular at times), but it’s something we need, and badly, because we aren’t pure; we’re sullied by sin in all its various forms, and that distorts and occludes our judgment. As much as we may want to be the highest authority in our lives, we just aren’t qualified for the job—and it’s not so much what we don’t know that gets us into trouble (significant though that often is) as what we do know that ain’t so; it’s especially those things that we convince ourselves we know, not because of the available evidence, but because we desperately want to believe them. Those are the areas where we most need correction—and the areas in which we’re least willing to accept it; the role of conscience is precisely to convict and correct us at the points where we least want it, to inflict discomfort in order to prevent greater pain.

 

(Derived from “God’s Grace, Our Counterfeit”)

The most irritating political meme of our time

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has to be “take back our country.” It drove me nuts when I heard it ad nauseam from liberals over the past eight years, and it’s continuing to drive me nuts now that I’m hearing it from conservatives. Not to go all Woody Guthrie on everyone, but this sort of language logically implies that the country has been improperly “taken” by those who have no right to it, that it’s “ours” not “theirs” and we have the right to “take it back” from whoever isn’t “us”—and this is just bunk. It’s all of a piece, attitude-wise, with the folks in Colorado a few years ago who were trying to change the law to allocate the state’s Electoral College delegates proportionally rather than on a winner-take-all basis, supposedly because “their votes hadn’t counted” in 2004 because Bush won the state’s delegates. Yes, their votes counted; they lost. That’s how the system works.

In the same way, my vote counted last November, and on the national level, my side lost. The idea that this somehow means that “my country” has been “taken” from me and that I have the right to “take it back” is pure tripe of the most arrogant and self-righteous kind. Yes, we need to do a better job of articulating conservative principles—which means, in part, to pick candidates who can do so, preferably because they actually believe in those principles—but we have no standing to claim any sort of entitlement to victory. Quite the contrary. Learn to lose gracefully, people, and take to heart the lessons of defeat—of which the most important is humility; not only does that make the process of coming back to win the next time shorter and smoother, it makes us better people in the process.

Support citizen government; support Sarah Palin

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It’s no secret, of course, that I’m a supporter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Even if I weren’t, though—even if I were one of the Beltway types pulling for Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush, let’s say—I would be angry at the way in which Gov. Palin’s opponents in Alaska have chosen to use an onslaught of ludicrous, frivolous “ethics complaints” to try to bring her down by bankrupting her with legal fees. (It’s not just me calling these complaints frivolous; the head of the committee responsible for addressing them, a Murkowski appointee who owes the governor nothing, has dismissed them all with that judgment, and has been musing in recent weeks about ways to make complainants pay for their complaints.) So far, not one of these complaints has passed even the first smell test, yet her enemies will stop at nothing to try to grind her down and bury her with legal debt defending herself for such actions as wearing a warm coat when she showed up for the start of the Iron Dog snowmobile race.

Unlike so many of our professional politicians, Gov. Palin is not a rich member of our nation’s elite class, and she doesn’t have a trust fund or a private fortune to use to pay her lawyer; she’s a blue-collar woman with a blue-collar husband. As such, she started a legal defense fund to cover her legal bills, but her ankle-biting opponents have driven her bills up over a half-million dollars, so she has a long way to go. As such, my colleagues over atConservatives4Palin have launched a webathon, running through June 22, to help retire as much of her legal debt as possible.

I understand that these are tough economic times, and in general, I tend to be one who’s skeptical of donating money to politicians or parties, so I understand that point of view; but if you’re in a position to help, I encourage you to do so—whether you’re a supporter of Gov. Palin or not.

That might seem to be a strange thing to say, but hear me out. I firmly believe that one of the reasons why the political elite has tried so hard to marginalize and destroy this woman—elitists on the Right as well as on the Left—is that she’s not one of them; she’s not from the elite class, she didn’t rise through any of our political machines, and so she’s not beholden to them and they have no leverage on her. Our monoclonal political class likes its grip on power; sure, they have their ideological differences that reflect the differences in beliefs that exist in the rest of the country, but their deepest loyalty is to their class, their deepest commitment to business as usual. They are not truly representative in any meaningful sense.

If we want to change that, we need to elect people—liberals as well as conservatives—from outside that class, people who truly are a part of we, the people rather than “we, the Beltway.” Gov. Palin isn’t just a conservative politician, she’s a complete outsider to the Beltway, someone who came from a normal (if somewhat uncommon) American family, upbringing, and life. As such, she’s a test case for this: can any politician who is truly of the people, by the people, for the people long endure?

I don’t expect many liberals to support her, much less vote for her, because like anyone else, in general, liberals should vote for people who share their political principles, and she doesn’t; but I do think that liberals should be pulling for her to succeed, to thrive, to win re-election in 2010 and the GOP nomination in 2012, even if they then want her to lose in November. Why? Because if she succeeds, if she triumphs, she will show other potential citizen candidates that it can be done, and it can be endured, and it’s worth doing; if she succeeds, she will be followed, she will be emulated, and we will see others—in both parties—walking the trail she blazed. If Republican and Democratic voters are going to reclaim our parties for the principles in which they’re supposed to believe, it’s going to require candidates who are beholden to us rather than to the structures of those parties—and if that’s going to happen in our generation, it has to begin here, with Sarah Palin. We cannot let her be snuffed out if we want to see anyone else who isn’t machine-approved (and machine-stamped) run for anything much above dogcatcher.

As such, I’ll say it again: liberals who would like to see the Democratic Party break free of the corruptocrats who run it have just as much vested in Gov. Palin as conservatives who would like to see the GOP break free of the domination of its own trough-swilling pigs, and just as much reason to help her overcome this challenge. If you can, please give, so that this abuse of Alaska’s ethics laws will cease, and Gov. Palin can be on about the business for which she was elected.

 

Sarah Palin talks policy

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Two good interviews for Gov. Palin today, with Matt Lauer this morning and Wolf Blitzer this evening; they did want to talk about David Letterman’s vile behavior as well (Blitzer only briefly, Lauer at greater length), but beyond that she got substantial time to talk about the progress on the Alaskan natural-gas pipeline, the state of American politics, and the political future. Both Lauer and Blitzer did their jobs very well, I think, conducting interviews that were respectful without merely being puffballs, and Gov. Palin did well in answering their questions and making her points.

 

Keep the pressure on CBS/Letterman

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It appears that CBS and David Letterman have been feeling some heat for the latter’s vile comments about Willow Palin, since he felt the need to offer a mealy-mouthed half-baked pseudo-“apology” that amounted to “Oops, I meant to make vile comments about Bristol Palin.” Sorry, not buying it, and not buying that that makes it all OK even if I believed him. I think R. A. Mansour summed up my thoughts well in her updates on this post:

We are fighting this because if we let this slide then we are saying that the Palins are fair game for everything. If their 14-year-old daughter is not off limits, then nothing is. If this heartless jerk can get away with this, then what next? Can we expect jokes about little Piper? When is enough enough?

I would be disgusted by this if it were anyone’s daughter.

Are you upset by this? Then make your voices heard. . . .

Call CBS at 212-975-3247. Melt their phones.

Call every women’s organization you can think of. Call every sexual assault victims organization you can think of. Call every child protection advocacy group you can think of. Call every teen pregnancy organization you can think. Get a comment from all of them. Ask them if they have anything to say about David Letterman’s jokes about the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl. Ask them if they think it was alright that David Letterman declared that his joke was really about Gov. Palin’s 18-year-old daughter. Does it make it alright that he was mocking an 18-year-old mother? And if they have no comment, ask them why. Ask them what makes the Palins any different from any other family.

Don’t stand for this. Do you want ordinary citizen politicians? Well, the Palins are ordinary people. They got into politics for the right reasons. They wanted to serve. And this is how they are treated. If you want more people to get into politics for the right reasons, then you had better defend this family—otherwise what other family would put themselves out there when this is how they know they will be treated?

As she goes on to note, it’s also a good idea to put pressure on CBS’ advertisers, and Sebastian Gray at HillBuzz has excellent advice on how to do so productively.

Update: HillBuzz suggests M&M Mars, Olive Garden, and Kellogg’s, with specific strategies for each as well as another general strategy post; and here’s another good list of advertisers to target, courtesy of Judy Silver at The New Agenda:

Aveeno (owned by Johnson & Johnson)
Canon
Charmin (owned by Proctor & Gamble)
Citibank
Downy (also owned by P&G)
Hellman’s
Lexus (owned by Toyota)
Nissan
Rogaine

Is it worth pushing these companies? Gray says yes, that if we’re persistent, we will see results:

CBS is in real trouble right now. Katie Couric just clocked the lowest ratings for a news broadcast on American television in HISTORY. Ad revenues are down everywhere, and once a month when Dr. Utopia gets on the TV and commandeers primetime for one of his ego trip national addresses, the networks lose tens of millions of dollars.

CBS cannot afford to lose M&M Mars or any two other large advertisers. If you direct all of your firepower at three big players like this, all selling products to families, and you heed my advice above, SOMETHING will happen before a month is out. You just have to put a little Al Sharpton in your life, be persistent, and write, write, write.

I would also add that it’s worth calling out CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves on this one. By way of comparison, here’s his statement on Don Imus after Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos”:

From the outset, I believe all of us have been deeply upset and revulsed by the statements that were made on our air about the young women who represented Rutgers University in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship with such class, energy and talent. While we have already made our disappointment and outrage clear, I would like to take the opportunity to offer my personal apologies to the Rutgers team, its impressive Coach, and the entire Athletic Department and Administration of Rutgers University. CBS has nothing but the highest regard for that establishment and its students, and we are sorry that offense was given in such a brutal and insensitive manner.

I would also like to extend an apology to everyone beyond Rutgers. Those who have spoken with us the last few days represent people of goodwill from all segments of our society—all races, economic groups, men and women alike. In our meetings with concerned groups, there has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision, as have the many emails, phone calls and personal discussions we have had with our colleagues across the CBS Corporation and our many other constituencies.

And here’s what Moonves has had to say about Letterman’s significantly more vile attack on the Palin family:

*sound of crickets chirping*

Apparently, the head of CBS doesn’t care when “offense [is] given in such a brutal and insensitive manner” to conservative women, or worry about “the effect language like this has on our young people” when the purpose of that language is to hurt a Republican. This sort of hypocrisy is simply not tolerable; call him on it. Contact his office, but also do everything you can to make it clear that Moonves is a hypocrite and a chauvinist fraud.

On this one, we know where the real feminists are standing: liberal or not, they’re standing with the Palins; they understand that “sexism isn’t selective, and misogyny isn’t something that only applies to certain women.” May all of us rise up and say “Enough!”—whether you care about the Palins or not, for your own sake, and the sake of your daughters. For the sake of my daughters. Enough is enough.

Update: Kudos to NOW, which issued a great statement on this. They’re clearly trying to use this as a lever on conservatives, but more power to them:

NOW hopes that all the conservatives who are fired up about sexism in the media lately will join us in calling out sexism when it is directed at women who aren’t professed conservatives.

I’ll second that, and give them credit for putting principle over party, and for being smart enough to do so in a way that really advances that principle. What NOW has done here is the sort of move that could really make a positive difference in political conversation in this country, as I think the response at Hot Air from Allahpundit and Ed Morrissey shows, and they deserve applause for that.

David Letterman is despicable

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In case you didn’t see it, we have here a case of a 62-year-old white guy, on national television, making crude, cruel sexual comments about a 14-year-old girl and calling them jokes. How is this possible? Well, only because said 14-year-old girl is the daughter of Sarah Palin, and therefore the OSM doesn’t consider her to be fully human, let alone a “real woman.”

I appreciate the statements on this from her parents (posted on Facebook, but not, apparently, on the SarahPAC website):

“Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.”

—Todd Palin

“Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter): ‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl are not only disgusting, but they remind us Hollywood has a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands—that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.'”

—Governor Sarah Palin

This should not be a liberal/conservative issue (as Tommy Christopher has said well)—the divide here should be between people who think it’s appropriate to make crude sexual comments about women, particularly in public and particularly underage girls, and those who recognize that such things are sick and wrong and do not constitute appropriate public discourse. Don Imus got fired for less; in a just world, David Letterman would receive the same fate. Please contact the higher-ups at CBS and Letterman’s advertisers (Joseph Russo has posted the list) and tell them Letterman’s behavior is unacceptable and intolerable.

The Gnosticism of sexual sin

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In a recent ESPN Magazine article on Donald Sterling, the Clippers owner is quoted as saying—under oath, in a court of law—”When you pay a woman for sex, you are not together with her.  You’re paying her for a few moments to use her body for sex. Is it clear? Is it clear?”

That’s a stunning statement, for a number of reasons.  Most obviously, it’s stunning in its sheer crassness (something which, as Peter Keating shows at length in the piece, is completely characteristic of the man).  More than that, though, it’s stunning for what it reveals about his attitude toward sex—an attitude which I think is characteristic of far more people than just him.  In point of fact, while he puts it far more crassly than most people would, I believe the essentially Gnostic view he reveals here is in fact the default view in our culture.

Consider this in the light of a defense I’ve seen offered more than once of pornography, at least in the soft-core form:  “What’s obscene about a pretty girl taking off her clothes?” I will admit to having some sympathy with the way James P. Hogan framed this in his novel Giant’s Star:

[Victor Hunt] emerged from the kitchen and walked through into the living room, wondering how a world that accepted as normal the nightly spectacle of people discussing their constipation, hemorrhoids, dandruff, and indigestion in front of an audience of a million strangers could possibly find something obscene in the sight of pretty girls taking their clothes off.  “There’s now’t so strange as folk,” his grandmother from Yorkshire would have said, he thought to himself.

That, however, says more about the casual obscenity of much of our advertising than it does about pornography; both objectify the human body, if in different ways and for different reasons.  This defense is rooted in a complete misunderstanding of the issue.  It’s not that there’s anything obscene about the human body; far from it.  The human body is a beautiful thing, one of the most beautiful of God’s creations.  However, a human body is not merely a thing, but rather is an integral part of something even more beautiful:  a human being.  The obscenity is not in the naked body; the obscenity is in the treatment of a human being as merely a naked body, as just an object of desire to be used for one’s gratification rather than as a full person to be respected and honored.

The appeal to this, I think, is that an object can be whatever one wants to imagine it to be; it’s conformable to one’s desires.  Real human beings have wills and desires, integrity and dignity, of their own, and frequently are not conformable to one’s desires.  Real human beings have minds and ideas of their own; objects don’t.  In pornography, human bodies are effectively made available for the wish-fulfillment of others, ready to be used whenever they’re accessed by whomever would use them; they never say “no,” because they’re never sleepy, achy, sick, in a bad mood, or just plain unwilling.

If we understood the spiritual consequences of this, we would take it far more seriously than most people do; but most of us don’t, because we’ve bought the line that our bodies are separate from our spirits, and that most of what we do with our bodies doesn’t really matter spiritually because they’re temporary—they aren’t the real person, and we’re going to leave them behind when we die anyway.  They’re just not that important.  That’s how you get the idea that Donald Sterling expressed, that you can rent out someone’s body for sex and just be using their body, “not together with her” (or him)—which is not only the idea behind his caddish behavior, but is also in its essence the idea behind pornography.

Even people who consider themselves Christians fall into this thinking, and use it to justify departures from biblical sexual morality; the argument that God doesn’t really mean what the Bible says about premarital sex, or homosexuality, or adultery, or whatever, always seems to rest in the end on the presumption that what we do with our bodies really isn’t all that important, and so God can’t really care about it all that much.  That stuff in Scripture must have been a cultural thing, or must have been put in there for some other reason, because God can’t have a good enough reason to tell us not to do what we want to do.  (It’s rather funny, when you stop to think about it, how we never question why such matters shouldn’t be important to God when we obviously think they’re worth fighting over.)

The truth is, though, that our bodies aren’t merely containers for our spirits, but are intimately connected:  we are our bodies just as much as our spirits, and everything that we do with one and everything that affects one affects the other.  When we treat our bodies and the bodies of others as merely things to be used and deployed for our pleasure, it debases us and it debases the people we use.  We can’t do that without consequences.  We need to treat people as people and respect them accordingly, even if they don’t fully respect themselves.

 

Clearing out the links drawer

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Here are a few things I’ve been meaning to get around to posting on (for quite a while—I think I ran across all of these back in March) that just aren’t likely to get their own posts at this point; so I’ll toss them out for your interest, and if I ever do get around to putting up a longer post on any of them, well, the duplication won’t hurt anything.

Beryllium 10 and climate
The science in this is not immediately transparent to the non-specialist, but it’s interesting evidence that climate change is far more about what the sun does than about CO2.

A Dozen Sayings of Jesus That Will Change the World—If Christians Ever Believe Them
Dan Edelen’s always challenging—sometimes problematically so; this is a post that ought to make Christians in this country uncomfortable.

Generational Disconnect
Chaille Brindley has put his finger on a real need in the American church.

Anatomy of an Internet Joke
I think this post by James Wallace Harris fits very well with Brindley’s comments.