“The landmark Dobbs case has consigned Roe and Casey to their rightful place on the ash heap of history. The Court repudiated its previous judicial fiats, which had arrogated the power to decide abortion policy for the whole country, thus restoring the American people’s democratic authority to deliberate and vote upon the issue.
Such a decision should have been 9-0, but, predictably, there were three dissenters. The dissent deserves our detailed attention because it reveals how pro-abortion jurisprudence relies on distortion, half-truths, falsehoods, fallacies, and even slurs.”
Over the last 40 years, I’ve explored why, notwithstanding the success of the civil rights movement, the subordinate status of African-Americans persists. Key to my thinking about this intractable problem has been the need to distinguish the role played by discrimination against black people from that played by counterproductive behavioral patterns among blacks.
This puts what is a very sensitive issue rather starkly. Many vocal advocates for racial equality have been loath to consider the possibility that problematic patterns of behavior could be an important factor contributing to our persisting disadvantaged status. Some observers on the right of American politics, meanwhile, take the position that discrimination against blacks is no longer an important determinant of unequal social outcomes. I have long tried to chart a middle course—acknowledging antiblack biases that should be remedied while insisting on addressing and reversing the patterns of behavior that impede black people from seizing newly opened opportunities to prosper. I still see this as the most sensible position.
These two positions can be recast as causal narratives. One is what I call the “bias narrative”: racism and white supremacy have done us wrong; we can’t get ahead until they relent; so we must continue urging the reform of white American society toward that end.
The other is what I call the “development narrative,” according to which it is essential to consider how a person comes to acquire those skills, traits, habits, and orientations that foster successful participation in American society. To the extent that African-American youngsters do not have the experiences, are not exposed to the influences, and do not benefit from the resources that foster and facilitate their human development, they fail to achieve their full human potential. This lack of development is what ultimately causes the persistent, stark racial disparities in income, wealth, education, family structure, and much else. (The charts and tables on this and the next several pages offer a glimpse of the magnitude of these disparities.)
In terms of prescribing intervention and remedy, these causal narratives point in very different directions. The bias narrative says that we need to have a “conversation” about race: white America must reform itself; racism must end; we need more of this or that, whatever the “this” or “that” is on the agenda of today’s race reformers. One hears this kind of talk, one reads these exhortations, in newspapers and other media every day.
The development narrative puts more onus on the responsibilities of African-Americans to develop our human potential. It is not satisfied with wishful thinking like: “If we could only double the budget for some social program, the homicide rate among young African-American men would be less atrocious.” Or, “If we can just get this police department investigated by the Department of Justice, then.…” The development narrative asks, Then what? Then it will be safe to walk on the south side of Chicago after midnight?
Meanwhile, the terms themselves—race and discrimination—are often bandied about without being rigorously defined. In a 2002 book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, I sketched a theory of race applicable to the social and historical circumstances of the U.S., speculated about why racial inequalities persist, and advanced a conceptual framework for thinking about social justice in matters of race.[1] Because there remains so much confusion in today’s public discussions about race and racial inequality, I need to revisit that framework. Bear with me. The relevance of this conceptual excursion will be clear soon enough.”
Police killing is not the work of vigilant warriors defending society at great personal cost, and sometimes going too far. It is the day-in, day-out petty tyranny of a taxpayer-funded bureaucratic lobby group. The difference is that, unlike other public sector unions, police unions have military-gra
How then does the Court argue the point? First, it articulates a sufficient condition for violations of Title VII:
If the employer intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee—put differently, if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer—a statutory violation has occurred. (p. 9)
Having established this condition, it proceeds by way of illustrative examples to show that any SOGI discrimination will inevitably meet this condition and thereby violate Title VII. Here are the two paradigmatic cases offered by the Court:
Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague. Put differently, the employer intentionally singles out an employee to fire based in part on the employee’s sex, and the affected employee’s sex is a but-for cause of his discharge. Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision. (pp. 9-10)
So here’s the reasoning in the first case. Both employees have the trait attracted-to-men. Only one is fired, and the reason he’s fired is because he’s a man. The other employee has exactly the same trait, but she keeps her job because she’s a woman. Ergo, the first employee was discriminated against based on hissex, which Title VII prohibits.
The problem with the example, though, is that it prejudicially describes the situation so as to deliver the conclusion that there was sex-based discrimination. Suppose we say that the relevant trait is not attracted-to-men but rather same-sex-attracted. Under that description, the biological sex of the employee turns out to be irrelevant: “changing the employee’s sex” would not have “yielded a different choice by the employer.” Presumably what the employer objects to is homosexuality as such, regardless of whether it’s male or female homosexuality. (I suppose there could be cases where an employer discriminates against male homosexuals but not female homosexuals, or vice versa, but obviously such cases aren’t in view here.)
Note in particular the reference to “the employer’s mind” in the excerpt above. What is the objectionable trait in the employer’s mind? Is it attraction to men? Or is it same-sex attraction? Clearly the two are not logically or conceptually equivalent. But the entire argument hangs on the first being the relevant trait rather than the second. Yet it’s most plausibly the second that serves as the basis for the discrimination. If that’s the case, the Court’s argument collapses.
The same analysis can be applied to the second example. In the decision of the employer, is the relevant trait identifies-as-male? Or is it identifies-as-other-than-birth-sex? If it’s the second, then there’s no discrimination based on sex, because “changing the employee’s sex” would not yield “a different choice by the employer.” Again we see that the example has been prejudicially constructed so as to ‘trigger’ the Court’s test for sex-based discrimination.
That’s not quite the end of the issue, however. Notice that the Court’s test asks whether “the employer intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee” (emphasis added). Gorsuch anticipates the kind of rebuttal I gave above and offers a response to it, namely, that an employer cannot determine whether an employee is homosexual or transgender without reference to the employee’s sex. Thus, for example, Frank can’t tell whether Andy is gay without knowing that Andy is male, and so Frank would have to “rely in part” on Andy’s sex in any decision to hire or fire him on the basis of Andy’s sexual orientation.
Here’s how Gorsuch tries to make the argument, again by way of example:
There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decisionmaking. Imagine an employer who has a policy of firing any employee known to be homosexual. The employer hosts an office holiday party and invites employees to bring their spouses. A model employee arrives and introduces a manager to Susan, the employee’s wife. Will that employee be fired? If the policy works as the employer intends, the answer depends entirely on whether the model employee is a man or a woman. To be sure, that employer’s ultimate goal might be to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. But to achieve that purpose the employer must, along the way, intentionally treat an employee worse based in part on that individual’s sex. (p. 11; italics original, bold added)
The point is clear: the employer’s decision to fire the “model employee” depends in part on his recognition that the employee is female. Thus, reasons the Court, the discrimination “relies in part” or “is based in part” on the employee’s sex. The employer is quite self-conscious about this. The employer knowingly (and thus intentionally) reaches his decision partly on the basis of the employee’s sex.
The flaw in this argument is that it conflates two distinct things:
discrimination on the basis of X
discrimination on the basis of Y, with reliance on X in the process
That one has to take X into account in order to discriminate on the basis of Y simply does not entail that one is thereby discriminating on the basis of X. It’s entirely possible to adopt a normative stance with respect to Y (favoring some Ys over other Ys) without adopting any normative stance with respect to X, even if one has to take X into account when determining Y.
To make things more concrete, consider this scenario. George owns a store that sells shoes for both men and women. He hires two people as store clerks, Andy and Barbara. Over time, George notices that some of his stock is going missing. Based on good evidence, he concludes that one of his two employees has been stealing items. As he further investigates, he discovers that all the stolen items are men’s shoes. Reasoning that a man would be far more likely to take men’s shoes than a woman, he concludes that Andy is the culprit and fires him.
Now clearly George’s decision “relied in part” on Andy’s sex. It was “based in part” on the fact that Andy is a man rather than a woman. Moreover, George’s reliance on that fact was quite intentional. But should we conclude that George is guilty of discrimination based on sex? Did George violate Title VII?
If you think so, I doubt anything else I could say would persuade you otherwise. The “reliance on sex” in George’s decision-making is clearly benign, yet it parallels the “reliance on sex” in Gorsuch’s hypothetical scenario above. What was the relevant trait or action in George’s decision to fire Andy? Was it male-shoe-stealing or was it simply shoe-stealing? What was George’s motivation for firing Andy? Did it involve any prejudice regarding Andy’s sex? The answers to these questions should be obvious.
Enough has been said, I trust, to demonstrate the fallacious nature of the argument at the heart of the Court’s opinion. Even granting what the Court claims about “the ordinary public meaning” of the Title VII statute, the notion that “discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex” is just flat-out confused. It’s a bad ruling that will have very harmful consequences (and not just for religious employers).
If you have the time and patience, I would encourage you to read all three opinions (the majority and the two dissents). Alito’s dissent is devastating; he completely dismantles Gorsuch’s arguments and lays bare the many problematic implications of the Court’s decision.
June 15, 2020, was not a good day for the Supreme Court of the United States.
many pro-choice advocates, especially among the rank-and-file, have a more moderate view. They concede that abortion is (at least usually) morally wrong or bad, perhaps even seriously so — even if women are often not blameworthy for having them. And yet they still believe that abortion should be legal. I would venture to say that this is the most common pro-choice position.
Pro-lifers are often baffled by this combination of beliefs, but some moderate pro-choicers have an explanation at the ready: Abortion restrictions don’t work. Instead of lowering the rate of abortion, they simply replace safe abortions with roughly the same number of unsafe “back alley” abortions. If a law does not reduce the incidence of the problematic behavior that it targets, and it also has costs attached to it — such as creating unsafe conditions for women seeking the procedure, or imposing unfair burdens on women in a society that often treats them unjustly — then that law is unjustified, even if abortion is morally wrong or bad.
The logic of this argument is above reproach. But the factual assertion at its heart — that abortion restrictions don’t work — does not stand up to scrutiny.
“Democrats have actually shifted more over the past two decades on many key social and philosophical issues, trending relatively quickly toward liberal positions as Republicans have changed more slightly. And the totality of it shows that Democratic voters are actually more polarized than Republicans are.”
Love this post from my fb friend David Koyzis, whose book Political Visions and Illusions (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001HL0E0M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect…) I continuously recommend to students. It touches directly on the subject matter of my own research with Mike Lavender on a church/state phenomena we think America is currently experiencing; a concept we call “American Laicite” (the tendency in American political and social institutions to depart from either a strict separation model, where religion is excluded from public life or accommodationist model, where religion is indiscriminately included in public life, towards a selective accommodationist model where religion is included, and can avoid chastisement or penalties, so long as it accommodates itself to a higher creed driven by an alternate secular, humanist, or progressive worldview or sorts.
During last year’s presidential election campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a latecomer to the Democratic Party, positioned himself as a voice for the downtrodden against big moneyed interests, something that many Americans, especially the young, found deeply attractive. In so doing, Sanders drew on a deep tradition of social justice with biblical roots, as evidenced in his powerful address to Liberty University two years ago. Recognizing that “there is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little,” he laudably demonstrated his concern for the economically disadvantaged in our society. However, judging from his questioning last week of Russell Vought, the President’s nominee for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Sanders appears not to understand that there is no justice where religious liberty lacks protection.
At issue was a blog post Vought had written as an alumnus of Wheaton College, a Christian university near Chicago, in response to a controversy involving one of its faculty members. The offending passage was this: “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.” While it may sound harsh to a nonchristian, Vought was in no way suggesting that Muslims cannot be good citizens or should be treated severely by the governing authorities. He was simply reiterating what the vast majority of Christians have believed for two millennia: that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:7).
But this appears not to satisfy Sanders, who has shown himself in this respect to be a good student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the Genevan political philosopher who famously proposes an ostensibly tolerant civil religion at the end of Book IV of his Social Contract.
There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the State whoever does not believe them — it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.
The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.
Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must inevitably have some civil effect; and as soon as it has such an effect, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign even in the temporal sphere: thenceforce priests are the real masters, and kings only their ministers.
One needn’t dig too far beneath the surface to discern rather quickly that Rousseau’s offer of tolerance could scarcely be more intolerant. Anyone who believes that God has revealed himself in specific ways to specific people and that even the state derives its authority from God cannot be a good citizen of the republic.
“Over the past decade, pollsters charted something remarkable: Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35 percent.
Some observers predicted that this new secularism would ease cultural conflict, as the country settled into a near-consensus on issues such as gay marriage. After Barack Obama took office, a Center for American Progress report declared that “demographic change,” led by secular, tolerant young people, was “undermining the culture wars.” In 2015, the conservative writer David Brooks, noting Americans’ growing detachment from religious institutions, urged social conservatives to “put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations.”
Americans today are understandably confused about what it means to be a conservative. The Republican nominee, for example, doesn’t seem to be one. And the conservative movement seems to be as fractured as our republic. After this election cycle, conservatives are going to have rethink who they are and what they’re supposed to do.
Who will be there to lead the rethinking and realigning? Here’s a list of nine conservative factions or modes of thought around today. Consider this your beginner’s guide to understanding the rivals on the right and the issues that animate them. It goes without saying that this list isn’t complete, and you might identify with more than one group. That issue of identity has become bigger than ever over the past year. The advantage of living through startling and unprecedented events is that we conservatives have no choice but to reflect deeply once again about who we are.
1. Growth Conservatives
They are associated with the Wall Street Journal and the so-called big donors. They think the main reform America needs today is to cut taxes and trim regulations that constrain “job creators.” On one hand, they think that America is on “the road to serfdom.” On the other hand, they often think this is a privileged moment in which conservative reform—such as the passing of right-to-work laws—is most likely to succeed.
2. Reform Conservatives
These conservatives think that growth is indispensable and that it’s unreasonable to believe America could return to a time when global economic dominance and lack of birth dearth made possible unions, a mixture of high taxes and unrivaled productivity, and a secure system of entitlements. So they’re for prudent entitlement reform. They’re also for a tax policy that treats Americans not only as free individuals but also as, for example, struggling parents who deserve tax credits. In our pessimistic time, reform conservatives are also characterized by a confidence that nobody should ever bet against America, that we’re up to the challenges we face. Their intellectual leader is the think-tanker Yuval Levin, and they have the ears of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senator Marco Rubio.
Perhaps the #NeverTrump debate among evangelicals may in fact boil down to this: should evangelicals be more worried about the nation or the church, the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of this world? Let’s be clear, voting for Trump, however purely strategic it happens to be, will result in a pro-Trump label for evangelicals (that’s how it will be uncharitably spun). So, how detrimental, shameful, consequential, to the church or kingdom of Jesus Christ will that be? If they reason it won’t be all that detrimental for the cause of Christ and reputation of his church, then a strategic choice to defeat Hillary may be prudent though painful. But if they think that it will be highly detrimental, then they will reason that a Hillary defeat gains little compared to the “mark of Trump” the church will have to bear in the aftermath of the election. Whatever an evangelical does, it seems to me that too few of them are worried about the heavenly kingdom’s reputation and goals and are singularly focused instead on the kingdom of this world.
When people learn that I want to replace the welfare state with a universal basic income, or UBI, the response I almost always get goes something like this: “But people will just use it to live off the rest of us!” “People will waste their lives!” Or, as they would have put it in a bygone age, a guaranteed income will foster idleness and vice. I see it differently. I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a coming labor market unlike any in human history and that it represents our best hope to revitalize American civil society.
The great free-market economist Milton Friedman originated the idea of a guaranteed income just after World War II. An experiment using a bastardized version of his “negative income tax” was tried in the 1970s, with disappointing results. But as transfer payments continued to soar while the poverty rate remained stuck at more than 10% of the population, the appeal of a guaranteed income persisted: If you want to end poverty, just give people money. As of 2016, the UBI has become a live policy option. Finland is planning a pilot project for a UBI next year, and Switzerland is voting this weekend on a referendum to install a UBI.
Gordon College is still under attack for being an intentionally Christian college. For nearly two years, cultural elites in Massachusetts, led by The Boston Globe, have been waging a sustained campaign of accusation and coercion in an effort to force the college to abandon the self-consciously Christian identity expressed in its life and conduct statement.
Still the attacks continue. Most recently, a former Gordon philosophy professor, Lauren Barthold, has filed suit against Gordon alleging unlawful discrimination. Her complaint is signed by lawyers of the American Civil Liberties Union. The college denies her allegations, explaining that she was disciplined by her colleagues on the faculty not on a legally prohibited basis but because she wrote in a newspaper calling for outsiders to impose economic sanctions on the college. She encouraged others to pressure the college to abandon its Christian moral ideals.
The ACLU’s complaint does not contradict that account. And if recent history is any indication, the full facts will vindicate Gordon College once they surface. None of the accusations leveled against Gordon over the last two years has turned out to be true, except the charge that members of the Gordon College community choose to live biblically. Gordon has not discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. Indeed, Professor Barthold acknowledges the “many . . . LGBTQ-identified students who have found deep friendships, intellectual growth and spiritual support [at Gordon].”
So, this case is not about Gordon discriminating. This case is about Gordon’s right to be excellent in ways that other Massachusetts colleges and universities are not. The issue is whether Massachusetts courts will preserve the liberty of Gordon’s faculty, staff, and students to maintain an educational community that is unique in its moral commitments. On this point Gordon College can claim an unlikely ally. If the judges of Massachusetts read the writings of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then they will learn that Gordon College has the right to be differently excellent.
The Constitutional Right to Exclude
In its 2010 decision in the case Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the Supreme Court of the United States declared and upheld the right of a state university to discriminate against unwanted student groups by excluding them from campus life. The unwanted student groups in Martinez were (who else?) religious groups that require members to live according to moral truths.
Everyone knows that academia is predominantly liberal: Only 6.6% of professors in the social sciences are Republicans, according to a 2007 study. But what is life like for the pioneering conservatives who slip through the ivory tower’s gates? We decided to find out by interviewing 153 of them.
Many conservative professors said they felt socially isolated. A political scientist told us that he became a local pariah for defending the Iraq war in his New England college town, which he called “Cuba with bad weather.” One sociologist stated the problem well: “To say a strong conservative political opinion with conviction in an academic gathering is analogous to uttering an obscenity.” A prominent social scientist at a major research university spoke of the strain of concealing his political views from his colleagues—of “lying to people all the time.”
Some even said that bias had complicated their career advancement. A historian of Latin America told us that he suffered professionally after writing a dissertation on “middle-class white guys” when it was fashionable to focus on the “agency of subaltern peoples.” Though he doesn’t think the work branded him as a conservative, it certainly didn’t excite the intellectual interest of his peers.
A similarly retrograde literature professor sought advice from a colleague after struggling to land a tenure-track job. He was told that he had “a nice resume for 1940.” As Neil Gross has shown, liberal professors often believe that conservatives are closed-minded. If you got to choose your colleagues, would you hire someone you thought fit that description?
Yet the professors we spoke to were surprisingly sympathetic toward their liberal colleagues. “The majority always thinks it’s treating the minority well,” said the tormented social scientist mentioned above. “That’s a basic psychological trick we all play on ourselves.” Reflecting on bias in the peer-review process, a sociologist told us: “I don’t think there is conscious bad faith going on. I think when people read things they wish to politically sympathize with, it adds brightness points.”
Some professors suggested that there are compensating benefits to being out of place. For one, it’s easier to make innovative contributions. “I really do feel sorry for your absolutely conventional liberal scholar,” a political scientist told us. He imagined that it must be difficult to discover something new from “within the framework of their thinking.” Another made the point by posing a rhetorical question: “I mean, how many ways can you talk about inequality?” Other conservatives appreciated being held to a higher standard. “You can’t be lazy. You can’t—you’re not going to be cut any slack,” a philosopher said. “I think that’s a real advantage insofar as it makes the work better.”
That underlines an important point: Political bias expresses an intellectual orientation—one that inclines us to find some questions more important and some explanations more plausible. Because of this, none of us can rely on our fellow partisans to identify flaws in our thinking. Building an academic community with varied biases, then, is essential to the very health of the social sciences. Political uniformity makes it difficult to converge on the best approximation of the truth.
It’s true that in some happy cases social science is self-correcting. But it can take a very long time. Sociologists spent decades playing down the importance of two-parent households before finally admitting that family structure matters. As a conservative in the field told us: “Basically, sociology had to be dragged kicking and screaming until it recognized that broken families aren’t a good thing. It’s like, if you have to spend decades and millions of dollars in [National Science Foundation] grants to convince astronomers that the sun rises in the east.”
This study examines the gender pay gap using a unique data set of hundreds of thousands of Glassdoor salaries shared anonymously by employees online. Unlike most studies, we include detailed statistical controls for job titles and company names. We estimate the gender pay gap in five countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and France.
The gender pay gap is real, both in the U.S. and around the world. Men earn more than women on average in every country we examined, both before and after adding statistical controls for personal characteristics, job title, company, industry and other factors, designed to make an apples-to-apples comparison between workers.
Based on more than 505,000 salaries shared by full-time U.S. employees on Glassdoor, men earn 24.1 percent higher base pay than women on average. In other words, women earn about 76 cents per dollar men earn. However, comparing workers with similar age, education and years of experience shrinks that gap to 19.2 percent. Further, comparing workers with the same job title, employer and location, the gender pay gap in the U.S. falls to 5.4 percent (94.6 cents per dollar).
We find a similar pattern in all five countries we examined: a large overall or “unadjusted” gender pay gap, which shrinks to a smaller “adjusted” pay gap once statistical controls are added.
To drill down further into what’s causing the gender pay gap, we divide the overall gap into an “explained” part due to differences between workers, and an “unexplained” part due either to workplace discrimination—whether intentional or not—or unobserved worker characteristics. In all countries, most of the gender pay gap is explained. The “unexplained” part is only 33 percent in the U.S. and is less than half in every country.
The single biggest cause of the gender pay gap is occupation and industry sorting of men and women into jobs that pay differently throughout the economy. In the U.S., occupation and industry sorting explains 54 percent of the overall pay gap—by far the largest factor.
Workplace fairness and anti-discrimination remain important issues. But the data show that while overt forms of discrimination may be a partial cause of the gender pay gap, they are not likely themain cause. Instead, occupation and industry sorting of men and women into systematically different jobs is the main cause.
Research shows that employer policies that embrace salary transparency can help eliminate hard-to-justify gender pay gaps, and can play an important role in helping achieve balance in male-female pay in the workplace.
Read more about this study on the Glassdoor Economic Research blog.
Partisanship is up. Voting by independents, less so. Those and other insights come from a look at the primary-election voter pools of the two parties in the states that have held contests through March 15. The data also show that the Democratic electorate is substantially more female than male, whereas the GOP electorate shows more gender balance. Democratic comparisons are to 2008, the party’s last competitive primary season.
Anyone who pays even passing attention to American politics is familiar with the map (Figure 1) of the United States showing states in which a majority of voters favored President Obama (colored blue) and those where Romney garnered the most votes (in red). This map conveys three dominant messages: first, that states can be meaningfully described as either red or blue; second, that the West Coast, the upper Midwest, and the Northeast are solidly blue, and the rest of the country is mostly red; and third, that, geographically speaking, more of the country is red than blue.
Figure 1
Those concerned about how Romney lost in what appears to be a mostly red country should refer themselves to Figure 2, in which the states are distorted to reflect their populations. More populous states have more votes in the Electoral College than do sparsely populated states.
Figure 2
But a third map (Figure 3) showing the nation’s 3,035 counties in the same color scheme reveals that portraying states as either blue or red obscures much of what we might want to know about the states and the voters who inhabit them. On this map, we see that most of the blue states are in fact mostly red. The reality of vast expanses of red in some of the bluest of states should concern us if we truly care about self-governance.
Figure 3
The Fate of Self-Governance
With each passing election, rural and small town Americans have ever less influence on their state and national governments and ever declining control over the governance of their own communities. Their lives are increasingly controlled from distant state capitals and from the even more distant Washington, D.C., by politicians with little incentive to pay attention to their country cousins. To some extent, their disenfranchisement is the inevitable result of a century of urbanization and economic centralization. But the erosion of self-governance in rural America is also the result of a generally well intentioned but simplistic understanding of democracy and the associated elimination of institutional protections of local democratic governance.
Two ideas have been central to this effective disenfranchisement of rural America. First, that one person/one vote is an inviolable principle of democratic government under the United States Constitution. Second, that the winners of elections owe allegiance only to those who voted for them, no matter how close the margin of victory.
Consider the claim made by supporters of President Obama’s call for higher taxes on the wealthy in response to those wishing to preserve all of the tax rates enacted under President Bush. “The people have spoken. We won the election. You lost. Case closed.” Had Mitt Romney won the election, Republicans would have offered a similar response to opponents of spending cuts and entitlement reform.
For some, this glib argument is like spiking the ball in the end zone—an ill-mannered, in-your-face celebration of points scored in an ongoing contest. Notwithstanding the sometimes wildly fluctuating views of the electorate, as evidenced by pre- and post-election polls, elections have increasingly come to justify claims of total victory for the winner. The winner sees no need for compromise, making it the loser’s role to obstruct such triumphalism in every way possible, and hope to prevail in the next election. Little wonder that bipartisan solutions have become elusive, and that those willing to compromise are condemned by their partisan peers as unprincipled, and unworthy of public office.
Of course, anyone with even a cursory understanding of American politics understands that elections seldom, if ever, settle matters in dispute. What we learn when the people speak at the ballot box is that the electorate is often narrowly divided on the candidates and issues. President Obama’s 51.4 percent of the popular vote is considered a convincing victory. But the fact is that 48.6 percent of the voters (59,134,475 individuals) preferred someone else.
In the democratic selection of public officials, there is no practical alternative to election by simple majority, or even by plurality. Someone must fill each office, and that cannot be accomplished reliably with supermajority requirements. Representative bodies can, and occasionally do, require a supermajority for enactment of legislation. But, as a general rule, little is accomplished if more than a simple majority is required. (Witness the United States Senate, where the filibuster, as now employed, effectively requires a 3/5 supermajority and little is accomplished.)
Constitutional Controls on the Tyranny of the Majority
As political scientist Martin Diamond once observed, democracy is the least worst form of government yet designed by man. The designers of America’s democratic republic well understood the shortcomings of direct democracy, notably the risk of majoritarian tyranny. Among their constitutional protections against the tyranny of the majority was the creation of a federal system that recognized multiple majorities as legitimate law makers, majorities that would also moderate the selection of the president and the enactment of laws by Congress.
We know that the racial identity of the average American is changing, and with this demographic shift comes monumental political consequences. We already witnessed the effects of this in the 2008 presidential election, for example, when young and minority voters carried Barack Obama to victory. That year, it seemed, a switch flipped in favor of the Democratic party. And if voting preferences and turnout trends continue as they have been in the past seveal elections, America’s increasingly diverse electorate isn’t going to make it easy to flip this switch back.
That’s according to a comprehensive new report put together by the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Center for American Progress. In it, authors Ruy Teixeira, Rob Griffin, and William Frey simulate six possible scenarios based on past voting patterns and project a range of outcomes for the presidential election this year, and subsequent ones through 2032.
“If nothing changes, in terms of party strategies and party appeals, I think it’s a fair statement to say…that [demography] favors the Democrats,” Teixeira said at a panel discussion about the report this week. “What it means is that all else cannot remain equal, because I don’t really believe that the parties are going to remain static. Demography is not destiny in the sense that it pre-ordains certain kinds of outcomes. It pre-ordains certain kinds of shifts in strategy.”
Trends that help and hurt the Democrats
The electorate that voted for President Obama in 2012 looked significantly different from the one that elected George W. Bush for his first term at the beginning of the century. In 2012, the share of minorities among eligible voters was 29 percent, up from 23 percent in 2000 (above). If that doesn’t seem like a significant difference, consider this: In 2000, only eight states and the District of Columbia had higher than a 30 percent share of minority voters; In 2012, the number of such states grew to 17 (plus D.C.). With each election year, non-white political clout is strengthening, in some states more than others.
Okay, maybe conservatives are right to freak out about illiberal lefty militancy on college campuses.
Today’s students are indeed both more left wing and more openly hostile to free speech than earlier generations of collegians.
Don’t believe me? There are hard data to prove it.
For 50 years, researchers have surveyed incoming college freshmen about everything from their majors to their worldviews. On Thursday, the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles released the latest iteration of this survey, which included 141,189 full-time, first-year students attending about 200 public and private baccalaureate institutions around the country.
Very helpful episode of the “The Briefing” (Al Mohler) today on the current legal landscape (cases and rulings) regarding the ‘collision’ between religious liberty and ‘erotic’ liberty (his word). Basically, current cases indicate a significant narrowing of the ‘religious exemption’ and ‘ministerial exception” language. As you move away from the pulpit, religious organizations are losing their 1st amendment cover and ability to receive these waivers, exemptions, and exceptions to anti-discrimination laws and/or judicial decisions.
Is it rational for black men to fear they may be killed by police? The Washington Post has just released a new, groundbreaking study on police violence that may help answer that question. It investigates every fatal police shooting in the United States in 2015. You can see the data here.
Plenty of arresting details come out of this study. Those who followed the Tamir Rice case may be interested to know that realistic-looking toy guns were involved in fully 3 percent of the shootings. Almost 10 percent of victims were unarmed when they were killed, and a very disproportionate number of these were black. About a quarter of the suspects were fleeing when they were shot, while a quarter struggled with mental illness.
The headliner, though, is something we already knew: a lot of Americans get killed in police shootings. As of Christmas Eve, police in America had fatally shot 979 people across the United States. (The Guardian, with a similar study, puts the number over 1,000.)
That’s a lot, when you consider that multiple European countries can count on one hand the number of fatal police shootings each year. Every country is different, of course, in innumerable ways. Nevertheless, such enormous disparities should prompt some probing questions.
Since a self-described democratic socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is a major contender for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, and polls suggest one-third of American millennials and over 40 percent of self-described Democrats view socialism favorably, perhaps it’s time to be attentive to great nineteenth-century French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s highly critical opinion of socialism.
Most Americans who express positive opinions of socialism, I expect, have some type of European social democracy in mind. Generally speaking, that seems to be what Sanders proposed in his November 19 speech at Georgetown University, in which he defined what he means by democratic socialism.
Sanders made clear that he did not favor government control of the means of production à la Marxism-Leninism. Sanders also specified that he supported private businesses (as long as they don’t shift assets and jobs off-shore) and thinks innovation and entrepreneurship should be rewarded. Picking up on widespread and legitimate frustration with crony capitalism, Sanders underscored his opposition to bailouts and corporate welfare more generally.
Make no mistake, conservatism has protected and rationalized all sorts of injustices in history. Indeed, the total amount of human suffering that has resulted from a stubborn political and cultural conservatism has perhaps only been eclipsed by the enormous human suffering lying in the wake of radical revolutions marching to the left-wing drums of liberty, equality, fraternity, and scientific progress. Years ago, before a Harvard crowd of left-wing professors, fellow Marxist Eugene Genovese called his colleagues out on it in this scathing speech. In “The Question,” he asks, since right-wing (‘imperial’) injustices are routinely and rightfully castigated, when it comes to the atrocities committed on the left in the name of liberation, equality, and progress, “What did you know and when did you know it?”
Many of my old comrades and almost all of
those ostensibly independent radicals and
high-minded liberals remain unruffled. After
all, did we not often protest against some
outrage or other in the Soviet Union or China,
signing an indignant petition or open letter? I
know I did. And does not that change
everything? I am afraid not, but I have nothing
to offer as critique other than that which may
be found in Galatians 6:7
Perhaps knowledge of the record of imperialist
atrocities leads our liberal colleagues to
refuse to single us out by asking The Question.
But I am afraid not. After all, they never stop
asking southern whites about their crimes, real
and imagined, against blacks. And let’s face it:
all the combined crimes of white southerners, at least if we restrict ourselves to the period since emancipation, would be worth no more
than a footnote in a casebook that starred us.
A few years ago, there was a successful
effort to get the Organization of American
Historians (OAH) to condemn apartheid in
South Africa. In the OAH and other professional
associations, Professor Wilborne Washburne
resolutely opposed this politicization,
and attempted to expose its hypocrisy by
offering an amendment to condemn the “necklacing”
of black South Africans, including
children, by the militants of the African
National Congress. (For those who have
forgotten, “necklacing” was execution by
burning the victims alive.) The ANC subsequently
repudiated necklacing as not only
wrong but barbarous. The OAH has yet to
endorse that repudiation.
I laughed. Those bloody South African
whites did kill a lot of blacks and ought to
answer for it, but throughout their whole
history they probably never equaled the numbers
we put up in one of our more spirited
month’s work. I laughed even harder when our
liberal colleagues poured out their wrath on the
ghastly racists in South Africa while they
remained silent about the immeasurably greater
slaughters occasioned by the periodic ethnic
cleansing that was—and is—going on in black
Africa and every other part of the globe. The
New York Times recently announced that the
death toll in the latest round of ethnic cleansing
in Burundi has reached 150,000, with the fate
of a half million or so refugees in doubt. The
historical associations have not been heard
from. Nor should anyone expect that they will
be.
No one should be surprised that none of our
leading historical associations have thought it
intellectually challenging to devote sessions at
their enormous annual meetings to frank
discussions of the socialist debacle. We of the
left are regularly invited to give papers on just
about any subject except this one. We are not
asked to assess the achievements as well as the
disasters, the heroism as well as the crimes,
and the lessons we ourselves have learned from
a tragic experience. No one need be surprised
that we have never been called upon to explain
ourselves. The pezzonovanti of our profession
have more important things on their minds.
When they can take time away from their
primary concern (the distribution of jobs,
prizes, and other forms of patronage), they are
immersed in grave condemnations of the
appalling violations of human rights by Christopher
Columbus. I know that it is in bad taste
to laugh, but I laugh anyway. I would rather be
judged boorish than seen throwing up
Constitutional designs, democratic processes, legislative procedures, state politics, elections, the rule of law, we are told are too risky, too slow, and not even necessary to advance social movements and revolutions. Just use the courts. But why? Using the courts to create rights and make law is so outdated. With the ever expanding unilateral powers of the executive, this is a lot easier, cheaper, and quicker: bureaucratic fiat.
You might recall during the oral argument before the supreme court, Obama’s Attorney General tried to relieve the fears of Justice Alito. Alito was concerned if they ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, it would mean that they are making gays and lesbians out to be a protected class in the same way racial minorities and women are. This would mean that openly gay employees even at religious institutions would be protected (and the principle of religious freedom and/or separation of church and state could not be used by churches and their affiliates to justify their employment decisions). But the Attorney General reassured him. He said that he (as Attorney General with enforcement power over federal employment law) would not be using the decision in that way because “there is no federal law generally banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation” so “that’s [the states are] where those issues will have to be worked out.” Oh well, that changed Friday, not by congressional statute or court decision or 50 state laws. But by 3 unelected bureaucrats in the Labor Dept.
“The United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is illegal under federal law, setting the stage for litigation aimed at striking down such practices.
The commission’s ruling, issued this week, hinged on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex in employment settings. In a 3-to-2 vote along party lines, the commission concluded that while the act did not explicitly prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians, “an allegation of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is necessarily an allegation of sex discrimination.”
“If you look at our movement’s success, we are a lot better at litigating than we are at lobbying,” Mr. Almeida said. “We should take the E.E.O.C. decision and run with it by turning to the federal courts to win workplace protections in all 50 states.”
Get ready religious organizations. You are on the chopping block. Religious exemptions, religious freedom, separation of church and state, after all, are so 20th century.
the states of the old Confederacy have become a national scapegoat for the racism that underpinned the massacre. If only they would secede again, Lind and others suggest, the nation would largely be free from endemic prejudice, zealotry and racist violence.
Not even close. These crude regional stereotypes ignore the deep roots such social ills have in our shared national history and culture. If, somehow, the South became its own country, the Northeast would still be a hub of racially segregated housing and schooling, the West would still be a bastion of prejudicial laws that put immigrants and black residents behind bars at higher rates than their white neighbors and the Midwest would still be full of urban neighborhoods devastated by unemployment, poverty and crime. How our social problems manifest regionally is a matter of degree, not kind — they infect every region of the country.
In fact, many of the racial injustices we associate with the South are actually worse in the North.
The Supreme Court decision takes self-government out of Americans’ hands.
July 1, 2015
PHOTO BY MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
Despite what the newspaper headlines say, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v.Hodges did not “legalize” same-sex marriage. Itmandated same-sex marriage, something very different. States were previously free to recognize gay marriage, but now they are compelled to do so. From now on, it is illegal—unconstitutional—for any state not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Many tout Obergefell as a victory for civil rights, but it is anything but. By turning same-sex marriage into a constitutional “right,” the Supreme Court has denied the people of all 50 states the most important civil right of all—the right to govern themselves. A mere decade into the political deliberation on same-sex marriage, the Court has taken the issue away from the voters. According to the narrow 5–4 majority, there has already been more than enough “legislation, litigation, and debate,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy put it.
The damage to democracy is bad enough, but it is greatly compounded by the damage to American federalism. The federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate marriage, nor does it have a roving license to promote “dignity,” “autonomy,” or any of the other amorphous phrases contained in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion. If the Constitution granted anything like that kind of authority to the central government, the document would never have been ratified. In FederalistNo. 45, James Madison assured readers that, under the proposed Constitution, the states would remain sovereign over “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people” (emphasis added).
By jettisoning federalism, the Court has put other civil liberties at risk. When the definition of marriage was a matter of state policy, voters and politicians could balance competing interest—particularly the rights of religious organizations that adhere to the traditional definition of marriage—based on local preferences. That kind of balancing is scarcely possible in federal courts, which are, as Chief Justice Roberts pointed out in his dissent, “blunt instruments when it comes to creating rights” because “they do not have the flexibility of legislatures to address concerns of parties not before the court or to anticipate problems that may arise from the exercise of a new right.”
Consider the Court’s rationale in Obergefell. To arrive at its result, the Court held that the Constitution creates a “fundamental” right to same-sex marriage—and that that right is protected from state interference by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This holding is a variation of the doctrine known as “substantive due process,” a judicial technique used by federal courts to strike down state laws on policy grounds.
Fundamental rights are blunt instruments because they leave lawmakers very little room to accommodate practices inconsistent with such rights. In the new regime, courts will likely hold that states are prohibited from placing any burden on the right to same-sex marriage unless it furthers a compelling state interest. Indeed, Justice Kennedy’s opinion makes numerous references to Loving v. Virginia, the case that struck down bans on interracial marriage. Never mind that the opposite-sex nature of marriage spans all eras and all cultures, whereas the anti-miscegenation laws struck down in Loving are a relic of the relatively brief Jim Crow era; for the Court, both are expressions of rank prejudice. If traditional marriage has the same moral status as Jim Crow, then how can one compromise with its adherents?
It will not be long before the courts are asked to extend the logic of the1983 Supreme Court decision denying tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University because it did not admit applicants engaged in an interracial marriage or known to advocate interracial marriage or dating. The Court held that charitable status was not appropriate for institutions that violate a “fundamental national policy” such as racial equality. Marriage equality is now a fundamental right: how long before it is declared a “fundamental national policy” under the Bob Jones rationale?
During oral argument in Obergefell, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., conceded that colleges and universities that oppose same-sex marriage could lose their tax-exempt status. “It is going to be an issue,” he acknowledged. Justice Kennedy’s opinion offered little solace on this front: a single paragraph of a 28-page opinion, in which he promises merely that religious individuals and organizations “may continue to advocate” traditional marriage. But the First Amendment guarantees the right to the free exercise of religion, not merely the freedom to espouse a religious view. If traditional churches are required to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies and religious schools are required to countenance same-sex marriage, surely they are not enjoying free religious exercise.
Already, a movement is afoot to silence religious opponents of same-sex marriage. Just two days after the Court’s ruling, journalist Mark Oppenheimer took to the pages of Time to argue for the total abolition of tax-exempt status for religious institutions. The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, announced that it would no longer support theReligious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a federal statute designed to protect Americans against laws that “substantially burden” the free exercise of religion, for fear that RFRA will be “used as a sword to discriminate against women, gay and transgender people.” Liberal outlets such as the Think Progress website, calling the law an expression of “anti-gay backlash,” denounced Indiana’s recent attempt to enact its own version of RFRA.
Judges and bureaucrats will soon order states to remove any support, direct or indirect, for institutions that oppose gay marriage. This trend, of course, is already underway—witness the Catholic Church’s withdrawal from the adoption business in states where adoption agencies must place children with same-sex couples. But it’s one thing to be forced out of Massachusetts; now the Church must reconsider its adoption services throughout the U.S.
Litigation against photographers and caterers who refuse to facilitate same-sex weddings has also been going on for some time. BeforeObergefell, states had a chance to rein in these suits, or at least try to balance the conscience rights of religious Christians against the claims of aggrieved couples. But now that gay marriage is a “fundamental right,” that right must be upheld not only by the government but by also by private companies that operate any “public accommodation.” Depending on the state, public accommodations can include restaurants, stores, hospitals, gyms, barbershops, hotels, libraries, bookstores, concert halls, mortuaries, and trailer parks. Expect private advocacy groups to pressure government prosecutors to root out perceived anti-gay-marriage attitudes throughout the private sector.
The new constitutional right to same-sex marriage will also profoundly affect school curriculum. In 2008, a federal appeals court upheld a Lexington, Massachusetts school district’s decision to teach children as young as kindergarten age about same-sex marriage—despite parental objections based on religious beliefs—because “[g]iven that Massachusetts has recognized gay marriage under its state constitution, it is entirely rational for its schools to educate their students regarding that recognition.” Books like Heather Has Two Mommies and King and King will likely become required reading under state guidelines and the Common Core. Any dissent will be viewed as bigotry.
Other questions linger. Can school vouchers be used at schools affiliated with churches that oppose same-sex marriage? Can a state university employ a professor who opposes same-sex marriage?
It will take some time for the United States to digest the magnitude ofObergefell. Five unelected judges have imposed a still-controversial definition of marriage on the entire country. As first steps, Congress should strengthen RFRA and make it apply explicitly to religious beliefs concerning marriage. States that have not yet enacted their own versions of RFRA should do so as soon as possible. The religious liberty of the American people is at stake.
The question “should there be this law” and “must there be this law” is not a trivial game of semantics. It is foundational to whether we will be a republican styled polity or not. The constitution does not permit or require every law you like. Nor does it prohibit every law you hate. If you think courts must stipulate every law you like and prohibit every law you hate, then you are not suited for republican government. One may, for instance, believe strongly that states or even Congress should prohibit abortion, or redefine marriage, or provide universal healthcare, while acknowledging that the constitution doesn’t require them to do so. And questions of “should” are to be generally left to the elective branches for deliberation, not judges, in a republic.
Case in point:
Yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld Oklahoma’s method of execution. In the reasoning, Justice Breyer and Justice Scalia revealed a profound difference in how each understands the role of courts in politics and the interpretive philosophy to be used in deciding cases.
First, Justice Breyer’s view of the constitutionality of the death penalty has evolved, after 20 years of reviewing death penalty cases, such that he now believes that it is “highly likely” that the death penalty violates the 8th amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment (he points to accumulating evidence of wrongful convictions). Herein is Breyer’s judicial philosophy. The meaning of the 8th amendment (of the constitution itself) evolves (though the words haven’t changed, nor have the precedents on this matter). And if they do evolve, who gets to decide what the ‘new’ meaning will be? Judges, not the people voiced through elected representatives in states or Congress.
Second, we have Scalia’s judicial philosophy: “Capital punishment presents moral questions that philosophers, theologians, and statesmen have grappled with for millennia. The Framers of our Constitution disagreed bitterly on the matter. For that reason, they handled it the same way they handled many other controversial issues: they left it to the People to decide. By arrogating to himself the power to overturn that decision, Justice Breyer does not just reject the death penalty, he rejects the Enlightenment.”
How should we respond to the ruling by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage? What’s next?
These are the question that we asked the following contributors—male and female, gay and straight, Christian and Jewish, Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox—to answer in this First Things symposium. –Ed.
This week the nation reels over the murder of praying Christians in an historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. At the same time, one of the issues hurting many is the Confederate Battle Flag flying at full-mast from the South Carolina Capitol grounds even in the aftermath of this racist act of violence on innocent people. This raises the question of what we as Christians ought to think about the Confederate Battle Flag, given the fact that many of us are from the South.
The flag of my home state of Mississippi contains the Confederate Battle Flag as part of it, and I’m deeply conflicted about that. The flag represents home for me. I love Christ, church, and family more than Mississippi, but that’s about it. Even so, that battle flag makes me wince—even though I’m the descendant of Confederate veterans.
Some would say that the Confederate Battle Flag is simply about heritage, not about hate. Singer Brad Paisley sang that his wearing a Confederate flag on his shirt was just meant to say that he was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan. Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped, “Little known fact: Jefferson Davis—HUGE Skynyrd fan.”
Defenders of the flag would point out that the United States flag is itself tied up with ugly questions of history. Washington and Jefferson, after all, supported chattel slavery too. The difference is, though, that the United States overcame its sinful support of this wicked system (though tragically late in the game). The Confederate States of America was not simply about limited government and local autonomy; the Confederate States of America was constitutionally committed to the continuation, with protections of law, to a great evil. The moral enormity of the slavery question is one still viscerally felt today, especially by the descendants of those who were enslaved and persecuted.
The gospel speaks to this. The idea of a human being attempting to “own” another human being is abhorrent in a Christian view of humanity. That should hardly need to be said these days, though it does, given the modern-day slavery enterprises of human trafficking all over the world. In the Scriptures, humanity is given dominion over the creation. We are not given dominion over our fellow image-bearing human beings (Gen. 1:27-30). The southern system of chattel slavery was built off of the things the Scripture condemns as wicked: “man-stealing” (1 Tim. 1:10), the theft of another’s labor (Jas. 5:1-6), the breaking up of families, and on and on.
In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the biblically ridiculous “curse of Ham” concept, for instance). In so doing, this form of southern folk religion was outside of the global and historic teachings of the Christian church. The abolitionists were right—and they were right not because they were on the right side of history but because they were on the right side of God.
Even beyond that, though, the Flag has taken on yet another contextual meaning in the years since. The Confederate Battle Flag was the emblem of Jim Crow defiance to the civil rights movement, of the Dixiecrat opposition to integration, and of the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils of our all too recent, all too awful history.
White Christians ought to think about what that flag says to our African-American brothers and sisters in Christ, especially in the aftermath of yet another act of white supremacist terrorism against them. The gospel frees us from scrapping for our “heritage” at the expense of others. As those in Christ, this descendant of Confederate veterans has more in common with a Nigerian Christian than I do with a non-Christian white Mississippian who knows the right use of “y’all” and how to make sweet tea.
None of us is free from a sketchy background, and none of our backgrounds is wholly evil. The blood of Jesus has ransomed us all “from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet. 1:18), whether your forefathers were Yankees, rebels, Vikings, or whatever. We can give gratitude for where we’ve come from, without perpetuating symbols of pretend superiority over others.
The Apostle Paul says that we should not prize our freedom to the point of destroying those for whom Christ died. We should instead “pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (Rom. 14:19). The Confederate Battle Flag may mean many things, but with those things it represents a defiance against abolition and against civil rights. The symbol was used to enslave the little brothers and sisters of Jesus, to bomb little girls in church buildings, to terrorize preachers of the gospel and their families with burning crosses on front lawns by night.
That sort of symbolism is out of step with the justice of Jesus Christ. The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire. White Christians, let’s listen to our African-American brothers and sisters. Let’s care not just about our own history, but also about our shared history with them. In Christ, we were slaves in Egypt—and as part of the Body of Christ we were all slaves too in Mississippi. Let’s watch our hearts, pray for wisdom, work for justice, love our neighbors. Let’s take down that flag.
From me:
It’s time to talk about this. I would ask Christians to set aside political and cultural lenses as best they can and prayerfully consider what 1 Cor. 8 may suggest to us about a Christian’s support for the adoption of the Confederate Flag as an official symbol of his/her state. Notice in this passage that Paul is not concerned with who is right or wrong about eating meat that had been sacrificed to pagan idols (he actually says that those who say there is nothing wrong with it are technically right, that the offended party is being too sensitive). Nevertheless, what overrides his concern? Peace, love, edification in the church. He says that Christians are free to eat that meat. They actually have very good reasons for doing so (it’s not really possessed, since meat is from God and there is only one God anyways, not matter what pagans believe). But if eating meat, which is morally neutral (so to speak) is offensive to the brothers, foments hate, distracts from worship, causes division, impedes edification, then we should refrain from doing so in the presence of the weaker or more scrupulous brothers.
I believe that the principle at play in 1 Cor. 8 applies to Christian support for official adoption of the Confederate Flag for their state’s symbol. No matter what a Christian may or may not feel about what the flag truly represents, it is not a hill worth dying on since it clearly causes division, pain, tension, offense among God’s people where there is neither Jew nor Greek.
But what about Christian liberty? Aren’t we free, without a clear command from God, to believe and support what we want politically? Well, this is a matter of Christian liberty, to be sure. Christians are free to believe what they want about the meaning of the Confederate Flag. That will vary from believer to believer. For some, it will be a nothing more that pure hate, rebellion, and racism. For others, it will be a valiant attempt to maintain something of true republican government. But this is beside the point. Indeed, the same was true about eating meat sacrificed to idols in 1 Cor. 8. It too was a matter of Christian liberty, and yet Paul advised them to use that Christian liberty for the harmony and peace of the church, not to have their rights vindicated. Maybe letting this go, conceding ground for the sake of peace/love, is what having the mind of Christ is like. After all, Paul told us: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,a who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,b being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). Basically, Paul asks us, on issues where there is no clear command from God, to be driven by love and the unity/edification of the church, not personal pride. Because where there are people placing personal pride above brotherly love, there is bound to be sin. How serious is he about this? Read for yourself: For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 11 So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12 When you sin against them in this way [flaunting your liberty/rightness] and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. 13 Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.”
When Americans debate which feature of our contemporary life will look most morally scandalous in hindsight, the answers usually break down along left-right lines. But there’s increasing agreement across ideological lines — uniting conservative evangelicals and civil rights leaders, the Koch brothers and Eric Holder — that our prison system has become a particularly obvious moral stain.
is a strategic move in the modern state’s drive to assume direct control over the reproduction of the population, bypassing our interpersonal encounters. This is not about natural justice, but the desire on the part of biopolitical tyranny to destroy marriage and the family as the most fundamental mediating social institution.
Heterosexual exchange and reproduction has always been the very “grammar” of social relating as such. The abandonment of this grammar would thus imply a society no longer primarily constituted by extended kinship, but rather by state control and merely monetary exchange and reproduction.
For the individual, the experience of a natural-cultural unity is most fundamentally felt in the sense that her natural birth is from an interpersonal (and so “cultural”) act of loving encounter – even if this be but a one-night stand. This provides a sense that one’s very biological roots are suffused with an interpersonal narrative. Again, to lose this “grammar” would be to compromise our deepest sense of humanity, and risk a further handing over of power to market and state tyrannies supported by myths both of pure human nature and technocratic artifice.
It is for this reason that practices of surrogate motherhood and sperm-donation (as distinct from the artificial assistance of a personal sexual union) should be rejected. For the biopolitical rupture which they invite is revealed by the irresolvable impasse to which they give rise. Increasingly, children resulting from anonymous artificial insemination are rightly demanding to know who their natural parents are, for they know that, in part, we indeed are our biology. But this request is in principle intolerable for donors who gave their sperm or wombs on the understanding that this was an anonymous donation for public benefit.
The recipe for psychological confusion, family division and social conflict involved here is all too evident and cannot be averted. In this instance we have sleep-walked into the legalisation of practices whose logic and implications have never been seriously debated.
To be clear, Milbank’s position is that our societies in the West have alreadysevered reproduction from biological necessity, thus undermining the purpose of marriage and family. Defining marriage as something same-sex couples can do moves the issue farther down the road, and can only result in the state assuming the power to manipulate family life. If “family” is whatever we say it is — the Nominalist Family, say — then there is nothing natural about it. If there are no natural realities made manifest in a family, and family is merely the manifestation of human will and desire, then there is no reason why the state cannot have carte blanche to regulate it. This, as I understand it, is Milbank’s point.
I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’
Once he got thinking, Swift could see that the issue stretches well beyond the fact that some families can afford private schooling, nannies, tutors, and houses in good suburbs. Functional family interactions—from going to the cricket to reading bedtime stories—form a largely unseen but palpable fault line between families. The consequence is a gap in social mobility and equality that can last for generations.
So, what to do?
According to Swift, from a purely instrumental position the answer is straightforward.
‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’
But the philosophers had to concede that you can’t simply abolish the family, because it’s necessary to human flourishing. Nevertheless, they consider ways the state should step in to control family parenting decisions for the sake of the common good. More:
For Swift and Brighouse, our society is curiously stuck in a time warp of proprietorial rights: if you biologically produce a child you own it.
‘We think that although in practice it makes sense to parent your biological offspring, that is not the same as saying that in virtue of having produced the child the biological parent has the right to parent.’
Then, does the child have a right to be parented by her biological parents? Swift has a ready answer.
‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’
From this realisation arises another twist: two is not the only number.
‘Nothing in our theory assumes two parents: there might be two, there might be three, and there might be four,’ says Swift.
It’s here that the traditional notions of what constitutes the family come apart. A necessary product of the Swift and Brighouse analytical defence is the calling into question of some rigid definitions.
‘Politicians love to talk about family values, but meanwhile the family is in flux and so we wanted to go back to philosophical basics to work out what are families for and what’s so great about them and then we can start to figure out whether it matters whether you have two parents or three or one, or whether they’re heterosexual etcetera.’
For traditionalists, though, Swift provides a small concession.
‘We do want to defend the family against complete fragmentation and dissolution,’ he says. ‘If you start to think about a child having 10 parents, then that’s looking like a committee rearing a child; there aren’t any parents there at all.’
Well, that’s mighty big of him. Read the whole thing. This is important. Right, we’re going to hear from people who say, “Oh, these guys are just philosophers talking about abstractions, you can’t take them seriously.” Don’t you believe it. Ideas have consequences. These men are onto something important. They deny that there is a link between biology and parenthood. That’s something we can accept, to a limited degree; adoptive parents are often much better at fulfilling the emotional role of parents than the biological parents of the child. But that truth does not obviate the general fact that there is a powerful link between biology, parenthood, and the family.
In order to justify biotech reproduction outside the womb, in order to justify surrogacy, and in order to justify same-sex marriage, that natural connection had to be denied. It is the nominalist position: there is nothing natural inherent in the structure of nature; it’s only matter, upon which we can impose our will.
What this amounts to is philosophers saying, as these men do, that biological parents to not possess the right to parent their own offspring. If it is not a right, it is a privilege conferred by the state, and if it is a privilege conferred by the state, the state can modify it boundlessly, even withdraw it, for the sake of the state’s interests.
This is precisely what Peter Leithart calls “biopolitical tyranny”. You read that, and you think, “Oh, more Chicken Little alarmism,” and dismiss it because the implications are radical. And it’s true that proposals like those of the professors are highly unlikely to be realized anytime soon. But those proposals do follow logically from clear premisses. People — most people — are not thinking through these things clearly. A prominent Catholic physician said to me recently that the public has no idea how serious some of the medical-ethical questions barreling down the tracks toward us are. He said that he even has trouble making people sympathetic to his point of view grasp the seriousness of the situation.
This comes from a world in which the masses have come to believe that “truth” is whatever they think it is. Words lose their meaning. I think of the many arguments I have had over the years, both as a practicing Catholic and as a former Catholic, with Catholics, about Catholicism. The arguments were impossible to resolve, because for these people, the word “Catholicism” had no meaning outside the radically individualist one they gave it. They were Catholic because they chose to identify as Catholic, and it did not matter whether or not they believed anything that the Catholic Church teaches. Catholicism is incoherent, then, not because it makes no sense, but because these people, and this culture, has made an epistemological judgment that says “Catholicism” means whatever the individual wants it to mean. Under those conditions, Catholicism will eventually evaporate.
Same thing with words and concepts like marriage and family. When words and concepts have no fixed meaning, we have chaos. This radical freedom can only end in slavery, in tyranny. We are, as Milbank wrote, sleep-walking into a dystopic future. We do not understand the stakes, and the news media, the unacknowledged legislators of the 21st century world, is ideologically committed to keeping them from us. For those with eyes to see, the truth is bare.
We were told that it’s nobody else’s business (though civil marriage by definition is society’s business). We were told that you can believe whatever you want about marriage, it won’t impact you. We were told that redefining marriage wont’ change they way anyone has to live, worship, be schooled, parent, etc. I sometimes wonder if anyone really every believed any of that anyways. Alas, it’s the same old song and dance. Elite cultural hegemony, even when it is in its infancy, even when it comes dressed in libertarian garb (you know, live and let live), even when it paves its way to the top with cries of tolerance and love and acceptance, can’t resist the temptation to impose its creed upon others.
“…only a few years ago, when the legalization of same-sex marriage didn’t appear so inevitable, gay-marriage advocates eagerly assured a skeptical public that scenarios like those above would never happen. Typical was since-retired California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald M. George, who wrote in the 2008 decision legalizing gay marriage in that state: “Affording same-sex couples the opportunity to obtain the designation of marriage will not impinge upon the religious freedom of any religious organization, official, or any other person.” [Now that’s funny right there!]
The victors have dropped their conciliatory stance.”
Great [Lutheran] satire, but a sad truth is embedded. The greatest cause of inequality, of social (even ‘white privilege’), is differences in family structure (and yet though the it is the dominant factor it is the factor most ignored by so many on the left).
Some may define egalitarianism as “belief in the equality of all people, especially in political, social, or economic life,” but a more precise definition for the contemporary parlance would be “belief that every person should have equal access to every opportunity in every circumstance imaginable.” To provide such a society for our children, to build them a shining egalitarian city on a level playing field, one major progress-impeding super villain needs defeating.
Even more so than the misogynistic Christian church or the anti-gay GOP, the chief enemy of egalitarianism is nature. Historic Christianity only makes it hard for women to be pastors, but nature makes it hard for women to be soldiers, firefighters, lumberjacks, and anything else that requires masculine levels of upper body strength. Republicans may pass laws letting bakers deny service for gay weddings, but nature imposes laws denying two pairs of ovaries the power to procreate. But the greatest way that nature breeds inequality is by filling us with the desire to love the children that have resulted from our breeding.
Not all parents are equally adept at loving their children, as anyone who’s ever observed a crowded McDonald’s play place knows. And when those with superior nurturing skills unleash them on their offspring, the results are horrific, producing children with higher levels of happiness, education, and achievement than their contemporaries. One might argue that the solution to this problem is to encourage bad parents to work harder at loving their children, but such a heartless, radical notion can’t be taken any more seriously than the suggestion that a woman who can’t pass a physical fitness test should increase her bench-press regimen like other women have done instead of putting people at risk. Rather, the best way to achieve an egalitarian society is for those who can shoot the highest to quit showing off and start aiming lower.
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Just as we should be willing to die of smoke inhalation to prevent a lady firefighter from feeling bad about not being able to carry us on her back, we should also be willing to abandon our children in order to make kids who have already been abandoned feel less socially ostracized.
It is apparently required these days that when we refer to the notion that the nuclear family is ideal, we must put quotes around the word ideal so as not to offend, even to implicitly cast doubt upon the entire notion itself. In terms of the overwhelming evidence regarding child well-being, putting quotes around “ideal” when it comes to the nuclear family is like putting quotes around “ideal” when it comes to meals containing fruits and vegetables. It’s just an old fad, a silly backwards notion that there could be anything like a “ideal” family structure, we are told. As long as there is love, family structure doesn’t matter. Even if there is (in terms of actual facts), we don’t want to make other family structures feel bad. Likewise, we should start telling children at school that there is no “ideal” meal, there is only your kind of meal (fruits/vegetables) and my kind of meal (big macs). Even if there is an ideal meal (in terms of actual nutrition facts), it’s best not to recognize it as such. McDonald’s might get its feelings hurt. It doesn’t matter what the meal is, as long as the meal is loved and as long as you love the meal. Would Ms. Obama go for that line of reasoning?
Less than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. This is a marked change from 1960, when 73% of children fit this description, and 1980, when 61% did, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of recently-released American Community Survey (ACS) and Decennial Census data.
Rapid changes in American family structure have altered the image of who’s gathering for the holidays. While the old “ideal” involved couples marrying young, then starting a family, and staying married till “death do they part”, the family has become more complex, and less “traditional”.
Americans are delaying marriage, and more may be foregoing the institution altogether. At the same time, the share of children born outside of marriage now stands at 41%, up from just 5% in 1960. While debate continues as to whether divorce rates have been rising or falling in recent decades, it’s clear that in the longer term, the share of people who have been previously married is rising, as is remarriage.
According to our analysis, today 15% of children are living with two parents who are in a remarriage. It is difficult to accurately identify step-children in the ACS data, so we don’t know for sure if these kids are from another union, or were born within the remarriage. However, data from another Census source — the 2013 Current Population Survey (CPS) — indicates that 6% of all children are living with a step-parent.
One of the largest shifts in family structure is this: 34% of children today are living with an unmarried parent—up from just 9% in 1960, and 19% in 1980. In most cases, these unmarried parents are single. However, a small share of all children—4%–are living with two cohabiting parents, according to CPS data. Because of concerns about the quality of the new 2013 ACS data on same-sex marriage, we do not separate out the very small number of children whose parents are identified as in this type of union, but instead fold them into this “single parent” category, as well.
The remaining 5% of children are not living with either parent. In most of these cases, they are living with a grandparent—a phenomenon that has become much more prevalent since the recent economic recession.
A couple new government reports have focused on the well-being of children in the United States. The first one focused on adverse family experiences1 and discovered that those “children living with neither of their parents are 2.7 times as likely as those living with both biological parents, and more than twice as likely as children living with one biological parent, to have had at least one adverse experience such as those shown in the figure below.”
What’s worse is that children “living with one parent are fifteen times as likely to have had four or more adverse experiences as those living with two biological parents, and for children in nonparental care that number rises to thirty.” It is important to point out that “researchers did not control for household income or other demographic factors, and that the reported adverse experiences, apart from financial deprivation, include those that occurred at any time in the child’s life. That means, for instance, that the many adverse experiences of children in foster care may have preceded (and led to) their being placed in foster care, or that the violence or drug use of one biological parent could have led to the child living exclusively with the other biological parent…Nevertheless, the figures are a striking illustration of how children in the care of both biological parents are most likely to escape adverse experiences.”
The second report provides a snapshot of children’s health in the United States and its relation to family structure. Overall, those in nuclear families (i.e. children “living with two parents who are married to one another and are each biological or adoptive parents to all children in the family”) fared better than those in other family structures. Children in nuclear families wereleast likely to be in “good,” “fair,” or “poor” health as opposed to “very good” or “excellent” health.
Data on chronic conditions and behavioral issues produced similar findings. “Although some confounding factors were controlled for…the researchers emphasize that since they simply measured family structure and child outcomes at a single point in time, their findings still cannot be used to make conclusions about causality. Prior research, they note, suggests that the arrow may go both ways…And obviously, family structure is one among many factors that matter for children’s health. In the CDC data, lower socioeconomic status (conditions of poverty or near-poverty, or parental educational attainment of no more than a high school diploma) was associated with worse health outcomes for children in every type of family, and sometimes it essentially drowned out the association between family structure and health. On the other hand, family structure and stability are associated with children’s health in many parts of the developing world, where access to health care is limited and where single-parent families are actually less likely than nuclear families to be socioeconomically disadvantaged. Teasing out all the determinants of children’s health will take more research than is currently available, but at this stage, family background seems in many cases to be one significant factor.”
Interview with Katy Faust, raised by a monogamous lesbian couple, but defender of traditional marriage. Why? Children have rights too. The right to benefit (as the social science evidence shows) from being raised by their natural biological parents. Mothers can’t father. Fathers can’t mother. Love isn’t enough.
Interesting point from a few legal scholars concerning International laws regarding same-sex marriage:
Former Legal Advisor to the US State Department and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh headlined a star-studded team of scholars in an amicus brief urging the Court to join the “emerging global consensus” for same-sex marriage. Their argument amounted to a more sophisticated version of “everyone is doing it, so get with the times.”
There is no “emerging global consensus” for same-sex marriage. In fact, same-sex marriage in any form has been adopted by only 17 of the 193 member states of the United Nations—a mere 8.8 percent. In their brief, Koh and company stretch that number to twenty by counting Wales, Scotland, and England as separate nations, and by counting Finland, which has legislation in the works, but no final law.
All of the rest—176 sovereign nations— retain the understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. That is, taking the 193 member states of the United Nations as the reference point, over ten times as many countries disallow same-sex marriage as allow it. Additionally, more nations have constitutional provisions defining marriage as the union of a husband and a wife—47, as of last month—than have recognized any form of same-sex union. Many other countries have adopted legal protections of same-sex unions that stop short of changing the definition of marriage.
Moreover, rejection of same-sex marriage is not the result of mere animus and intolerance: 95 of the 176 states allowing only traditional marriage have decriminalized homosexual conduct. Eighty-eight have affirmatively extendedconstitutional and/or legislative protections to LGBT individuals, including prohibiting discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation, considering hate crimes based on sexual orientation as an aggravating circumstance, prohibiting incitement to hatred based on sexual orientation, and constitutionally prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The countries that have refused to redefine marriage are a far cry from the “anti-models” that the Koh amicus brief puts forward. Rather, they are constitutional democracies that share our values of individual freedom.
Only One National or International Court in the World has Mandated Same-Sex Marriage
Twelve national and international tribunals in eleven countries have explicitly upheld male-female marriage as consistent with human rights. These include some of the jurisdictions with the earliest and strongest LGBT protections in the world. These are hardly backwoods courts or bastions of bigotry.
In fact, the list of the twelve tribunals in two foreign organizations and nine nations that have upheld male-female marriage against claims of discrimination reads like a Who’s Who of progressive, liberty-loving democracies: theEuropeanCourt of Human Rights, the UN’s Human Rights Committee, and national courts in Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Finland, Italy (both theConstitutional Court and the Court of Cassation), Ireland, Chile, and Colombia. Even though these bodies and countries have strong and deep support for LGBT rights (and a few have legislatures that have gone on to legalize same-sex marriage), the courts have rejected claims that same-sex marriage should be judicially established as a fundamental or constitutional right. Amazingly, the Koh amici cite only two of these decisions.
In truth, the Islamic State’s (ISIS’s) religious nature is banal because it is so obviously true. The Islamic State is difficult to comprehend only for secularists who believe religion is an aberration in the modern world. It isn’t: they are. Ignoring the religious nature of jihadists is the simple arrogance of those who dismiss as “false consciousness” the sincere devotion of the faithful. I read Graeme’s piece and felt like Captain Renault being shocked—shocked!—to find gambling going on in Rick’s Cafe. You’re only shocked if you’ve been deluding yourself for a decade.
But the religious nature of the Islamic State—and of jihadist terrorism generally—feeds into some disturbing chatter I’ve heard among conservative friends and colleagues. People rarely say it publicly, but in private conversations and emails among friends, I’ve heard more mutterings about the problems with “Islam,” about how the Islamic State proves Islam is not a “religion of peace.” I heard someone wonder when we were going to recognize the threat from “them” and start tracking Muslims in America to protect ourselves from their plots.
We are right to dismiss the White House’s pablum as vacuous nonsense. But rejecting one idea does not mean we have to affirm its opposite. It is false that jihadism has nothing to do with Islam; but that does not mean that Islam is nothing but jihadism. The tiresome, politically-correct cliche about the vast majority of Muslims not being terrorists….is true.
…jihadist religious claims are certainly relevant. Success in war depends on knowing your enemy. Social scientists who dismiss the religious claims of jihadists, treating religion as epiphenomenal to some other “real” cause, betray a materialist, secularist bias and do not help us understand our enemy. The secularist view—that jihadism is the product of frustrated rational actors lashing out at their disempowerment in corrupt, poor, repressive societies left behind by globalizing modernity—is true but incomplete, the shallow understanding of secular modernity unable to come to grips with the enduring power of religious identities.
Religion powerfully intermixes with politics in all societies in the world, including the United States—whether it is the religion of Christianity or the religion of Enlightenment secularism.
ENLARGE
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Make no mistake, conservatism has protected and rationalized all sorts of injustices in history. Indeed, the total amount of human suffering that has resulted from a stubborn political and cultural conservatism has perhaps only been eclipsed by the enormous human suffering lying in the wake of radical revolutions marching to the left-wing drums of liberty, equality, fraternity, and scientific progress. Years ago, before a Harvard crowd of left-wing professors, fellow Marxist Eugene Genovese called his colleagues out on it in this scathing speech. In “The Question,” he asks, since right-wing (‘imperial’) injustices are routinely and rightfully castigated, when it comes to the atrocities committed on the left in the name of liberation, equality, and progress, “What did you know and when did you know it?”
Rapid changes in American family structure have altered the image of who’s gathering for the holidays. While the old “ideal” involved couples marrying young, then starting a family, and staying married till “death do they part”, the family has become more complex, and less “traditional”.
thereformedmind 