Unkatunk

Students "hook up" at Centre College, as they do at most other colleges. The term is deliberately ambiguous, covering all sorts of ill-advised physical intimacy from kissing to intercourse, usually while drunk.

Not all students hook up, though. Recently one of those who does not was describing a conversation among a group of students, in which they started listing all the people each had hooked up with. It became a game to see if they were all linked indirectly in this way. All of them were – except my student (and bully for her, I say).

I passed this on to my brother-in-law. He says this issue arose one day in his Cornell University dormitory, Risley Hall, where they made a giant hook-up map which connected all of the dormitory's residents – save my brother-in-law and his roommate. And bully for them, too. He says this conversation led the Cornell students to create a special term to describe how two people who have hooked up with the same third party are related to one another. The word they came up with is "unkatunk," which, as far as he can recall, was just a nonsense sound that appealed to them. And sure enough, the word appears on UrbanDictionary.com, with this definition:

unkatunk

defines the relationship in which you and someone you know have slept with the same person. kind of a variant on the transitive property of sexual multiplication.

a < -- sex -- > b
b <-- sex -- > c
a < -- unkatunk --> c

orig. Risley Hall, Cornell University

My surveys at Centre revealed that hooking up does not go all the way to intercourse as often as other people think it does. I expect the same is true at Cornell. Nonetheless, if, say, Facebook were to connect all the various hook ups it notes, I would guess that three quarters of the entire national college-going class are within six degrees of unkatunk of one another.

Should You Get Serious About Marriage in College?

A thoughtful woman in my family class posed this question in her journal for me:

In my experience, many of my girlfriends do not want to pursue “anything too serious” during college, in their words, “I am young, I don’t know where I’m going to be next year and I want to keep my options open.” The mutual feelings among college males about their uncertain future, and natural inclination to short-term sexual relationships, creates this liminal space as well. … It seems a career track is problematic for women all around when it comes to marriage and family. Aside from providing extra resources, it works against marriage in general. Although it can be overcome, it seems like the pursuit of a career almost always works as an antagonist to family and the pro-marriage ideas. This is the most frustrating realization I have come to in this course. Have I misconstrued it?

I don't think careers are antagonistic to marriage and family. Indeed, smart women need brain food and challenges, as smart men do. Family is great, but it is not all you will do in a long life. However, delaying marriage in favor of your career throughout your twenties does run a risk of making family impossible.

I would counsel an opposite strategy – you don't want to get too serious about careers now, because who knows what spouses and children the future will bring. Family first, then career, is the more likely strategy to let you "have it all."

New Hope for Second Marriages

My students come to the family class knowing one big scary fact about marriage: 50% of marriages in this country end in divorce. I am therefore always happy to help unpack that idea. The most encouraging fact I can give them in response is that most first marriages endure. Indeed, since they have managed, with only a couple of exceptions, to get beyond their teenage years without kids or marriage, and are likely to graduate from a good college and be employed, the odds for their marriages working out are quite good, indeed.

So how can we have a 50% divorce rate if most first marriages last? Because most second marriages don't, and the odds go down with each new iteration as you approach the Elizabeth Taylor/Jennifer Lopez asymptote. The divorce rate for first marriages is under 50%. The divorce rate for second marriages, though, is over half, closer to 60%.

Recently, though, I have read some good news about second marriages, too. Barry and Emily McCarthy, in Getting It Right This Time, report that second marriages which make it through the first two years successfully have the same divorce rate as first marriages. That is, most second marriages which make it past the first two years will endure.

At the Gruntled Center, we are strongly in favor of first marriages enduring and thriving. But we also believe that it is never too late for a happy ending. For those who are already divorced or in a second marriage, it is cause for celebration that you can get it right the second time. The McCarthys go into detail about how to have a healthy second marriage, and we are definitely all for healthy marriages. A healthy second prevents a sad third, a disastrous fourth, and the death spiral beyond that.

The divorce rate for first marriages is going down, for good reasons and bad. It is now a little below 50%. We may hope that if the opinion leaders of America come back to supporting marriage, we might get that rate below 40% in a decade or so. That would mean fewer people in the position to consider second marriages. But it would also be good to bring down the divorce rate of second marriages. It would be realistic, I think, to aim to get the second marriage divorce rate below 50% in this same coming decade.

How to Have a Traditional First Date

Last night I had a discussion with a number of students about dating. The common complaint of college students, at Centre College and elsewhere, is that it is impossible to date, that there is no structure to courtship. As Elizabeth Marquardt and Norval Glenn demonstrated, between "talking" and "joined at the hip" there are no intermediate steps. So we set out to do something about it. We came up with a rough protocol for a first date.

The first thing that all agreed on is that he has to take the initiative. This puts men in the position of being shot down (again and again). But the basic fact is that ultimately she does the deciding, so the first step in the dance of courtship has to come from him.

Here was the list we came up with from there. He should:

Make it clear that is it a date when he asks.
Ask nicely and confidently.
Give her sufficient time to prepare.
Have a plan.
Show up on time.
Plan something short and fun, which could be extended if things go well.
Offer the chivalrous courtesies – opening doors, waiting for her, etc.
Plan to pay. (This was a little contentious, but the consensus was that he should pay on the first date, even if she offers to share, because he picked the place and the plan.)
At the end of the evening, politely thank one another in words, and no more.

Two things struck me as important about this plan.

First, they were all supportive of the idea of having a standard protocol for a date, to cut through the debilitating ambiguity of the college "hook up/quasi-married" dating life.

Second, almost all of the ideas about what to do and not do on a date where about him. Even when I asked, "what is the woman's role in a date?" nearly all the answers concerned how she should respond to his initiative. The students thought she should be attentive and attractive, and go with the flow.

I think there is a further unsaid action that both of them are doing on a date, but much more so in her head: assessing the other as a potential mate. In this conversation, and in many other studies, men and women turned out to be different in how long a list they had of what they wanted and didn't want in a potential mate, and how early and automatically they applied it. Women are not passive on a date: they are constantly assessing. Indeed, most of the women will go directly from the date to a post-mortem assessment with their girlfriends. The men, on the other hand, are less likely to go in their minds all the way from first date to first child, much less rehash it with the guys later.

I think there is a crying need for some structures to courtship in college life. My hope is that discussions like this one can help start that revolution, which comes from the bottom up, from the students themselves. It is too late for in loco parentis at campuses like mine. But it is not too late for grownups to help young people pick their mates with more structure and deliberation.

I would very much welcome your comments and suggestions.

At-Home Mother vs. Housewife

Caitlin Flanagan, in her new book To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife, makes a useful distinction. She is not a housewife, but an at-home mother. The difference is that a "housewife," defined herself "primarily through her relationship to her house and her husband," while "an at-home mother feels little obligation to the house itself." This distinction is especially valuable for women who are wives and mothers, like their own mothers, but unlike their own mothers, have full-time careers even when their children are small.

I am grateful that, among the many forms of compatibility that my wife and I share, we have about an equal tolerance for clutter. We have had to adjust to one another's quirks in that regard – the symbol of which is that one side of our bed gets made each morning, but not the other. And we have hugely increased our mess threshold with each child. We have hopes that that will get better when everyone is grown.

As I think about this distinction, neither of us was an at-home spouse for very long, but both of us have seen our primary family obligations to be to the people – spouse and kids – and not to the house. We are blessed with a goodly place, but only essential work will get done on it until the last tuition is paid.

At-home mother is a workable status. A clean house is gravy.

Second Generation Polygamy Raises Girls to be Child Brides

The ongoing trial of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect that has been practicing polygamy for decades, shows what happens after polygamy gets established. The patriarchs of these extended clans raise girls for the purpose of giving them as teenage brides to other polygamist patriarchs. The girls are told it is their religious obligation to marry whoever their father picks, and be a dutiful wife and mother to him. Period.

Proponents of polygamy, like the ACLU, are imagining adults who are free to choose whatever domestic arrangement they like. First generation polygamy might even work that way. But after that, girls become a trading asset, passed from one polygamous clan to another. Even the young woman who testified in the trial, who was told by her father when she was 16 that he was marrying her off to "some Barlow boy" (he couldn't remember the name) the next day, was reluctant to testify. When asked to explain why to the mystified jurors, she said, "We were taught that we would go to hell" for speaking out. "After I got away from that religion, I still felt like I would be damned if I 'spoke out' because that's just how I was raised."

If ever there should be a feminist issue, fighting polygamy should be at the top of the list.

The "Wicked" Gospel of Judas

I went to see the musical "Wicked" last week with my daughters and one of their friends. It tells the backstory of the Oz witches, the good one and the wicked ones. I will not be spoiling the story to say that the title character turns out not to be so wicked, but misunderstood. She is the only one who understands the true nature of the magic of Oz and its wizard.

There has been a bit of a flap recently about the "Gospel of Judas," an ancient Gnostic text recently translated and made available to the public. It tells the backstory of Jesus' apostles, the good ones and the wicked one. I will not be spoiling the story to say that the title character turns out not to be so wicked, but misunderstood. He is the only one who understands the true nature of the gospel of Jesus and His God.

Both seem to me to be interesting explorations of possible alternative pasts. Neither is likely to shake my understanding of the nature of reality. Nor is either text likely to convince me of the intellectual's favorite fantasy – that the universe has a secret at its heart that only special people can know and understand.

And "Wicked" has better songs.

"Wicked" is Great With Teenagers

I took my two teenage daughters and one of their friends to Chicago this week to see "Wicked." This was fun in itself. The show, which concerns the early days of the good and wicked witches of Oz, is fine, and the production was well done.

I had an additional pleasure, though, in traveling with these young ladies. Having three teenage girls loudly and happily singing "Popular" and "Defying Gravity" and the rest of the soundtrack while wizzing (so to speak) through Indiana is a wonderful domestic pleasure.

They also make a great captive audience for puns; they groan so well.

Meth is Worse for Families

Today family therapist Kathy Miles talked to my family class about recent social problems that affect families. I knew that Kentucky, and other rural states, had a significant problem with methamphetamines. Every week has stories of a meth lab being busted in the small towns around here.

Miles told us that meth is worse than other drugs for families because the binges last longer – days instead of hours. When police raid a meth lab, they take a social worker with them, because they are likely to find kids who have been completely neglected for days. A common horrifying detail of these arrests are of the five year old who has been trying to take care of herself – and feed and change a baby. Miles said that all foster placements in eastern Kentucky are full, in part because the meth lab kids urgently need to be removed from their homes.

Every drug takes a toll on families, but this one seems particularly painful. It will be better for us all when this particular fad is over.

One-Flesh Union of Complementary Persons

So, what was the upshot of my couple of weeks with The Meaning of Marriage?

I have been convinced that the marriage makes two people one flesh. I pretty much thought that before, but taking this as a secure foundation for thinking about marriage – independent of whatever the state calls "marriage" – is a great help.

I also already thought that men and women are complementary as a group, though any particular couple works this out in a unique way.

Putting these together, marriage is a one-flesh union of complementary persons, prior to politics.

Right now, I don't really see how you could do that with more than one other person. I will keep thinking about it.


[This one is short and late in the day because I had a wonderful, family-building trip with my daughters to the big city to see "Wicked." A good time was had by all.]

Contraception and Abortion Create More Poor, Fatherless Kids

Sociologist Brad Wilcox, in his Meaning of Marriage essay, reviews the high hopes that some had in the 1960s and '70s that the Pill and easy abortion would mean that every child would be born into a secure home. If it was so easy to prevent births that the parents were not prepared for, this reasoning went, then responsible parents would only have children when they were married and financially ready.

It turns out, though, that there are lots of irresponsible parents. In facts, there are plenty of guys willing to make babies, then leave it up to the mother to decide to have all the children she wanted. After all, it was her choice. Contraception and abortion, and the culture of choice that came with them, shifted the balance in a relationship from the women who wanted to marry and raise kids with their husbands, to the men who might or might not follow through in marrying their pregnant girlfriends and raising the children they made.

The problem of fatherless children affects all classes, but is most common, and hurts the worst, among the poor. In fact, having children without husbands is the main way that women get and stay poor.

When responsible people free themselves from rules that would force them to act responsibly, they feel freer – and do the right thing anyway. However, the unintended consequence of removing the rules and restraints is that other people feel free, too – but often don't do the right thing anyway. Leaving the responsible people to help pick up the pieces.

"Naked, Fragile, Unenforceable Agreement"

That is what Katherine Shaw Spaht says marriage is fast becoming under the law. The law, she says in The Meaning of Marriage, is rapidly retreating from its traditional defense of marriage, to instead making it just another private agreement. The three traditional elements of the legal understanding of marriage – permanence, mutual fidelity, and sexual complementarity – are all being eroded, dropped, even treated as mere prejudice.

Spaht's solution was to help draft the covenant marriage law in Louisiana. This is a second category of legal marriage, more demanding than the usual civil contract, that couples may voluntarily choose. It requires more time and preparation going in to marriage, and, if necessary, getting out. It establishes in law higher standards of marriage, especially if children are involved. Ironically, it does so through the mechanism of a contract (despite the covenant language). Spaht is trying to turn the very tools that have been undermining marriage to marriage's defense. I honor the project of covenant marriage, and note that it has been hugely successful – among the five percent or so of Louisiana marriages which use it.

I do not think things are as far gone as Spaht does. Marriage is a much stronger institution in our culture than it is in our law. And marriage could not survive without cultural support, no matter what the law said. But she is surely right that the law's rapid retreat from marriage threatens to undermine cultural support in the medium run.

To stem that tide we need a strong defense of marriage in law as a permanent, mutually faithful, and sexually complementary relation. Which is what we are talking about in this blog every day.

Marriages Have Privacy Because Marriage is Public

Katherine Shaw Spaht, in her Meaning of Marriage essay on how law has been abandoning marriage, cites an important step down the slippery slope in one of Justice Thurgood Marshall's opinions. In the 1978 case Zablocki v. Redhail, Justice Marshall wrote, "it would make little sense to recognize a right of privacy with respect to other matters of family life and not with respect to the decision to enter the relationship that is the foundation of the family in our society" – the decision to marry. I normally agree with Justice Marshall, but in this instance I think he is exactly wrong.

Marriage transforms individuals and society because it is a public vow. We recognize marriage as a status apart from all others, as making two persons into one flesh, because it is a public promise by the couple and by society. That vow carries with it many grave responsibilities, most importantly to raise any children that the marriage might produce. Raising children well is a grave public duty.

We accept the privacy of what goes on in families more than in any other institution. Family privacy is not absolute; other institutions will intervene if family members are beating one another. But we grant the most leeway and place the most trust in families to do in private what they want because we believe that, ultimately and in the main, that private freedom will most enhance the public good.

Society has a great interest in marriage as a public act and public status because marriage is a shield behind which people have privacy. If the state treats marriage as just another private choice that individuals might make, society loses the public benefit of marriage, and marriages lose the trust that allows society to respect their privacy.

Will Republicans Ever Deliver to "Family Voters?"

The Reagan coalition was an "alliance of opposites" which joined the traditional big business base of the Republican Party with social libertarians and religious conservatives, all of whom wanted "smaller government." The conflict between the libertarians and the Christian conservatives was always the most obvious fault line in the party. The alliance, though, was enough to put Reagan and Bush I in office, and sweep the Republicans to power in Congress. Of the three legs of the Reagan Republican stool, big business, and the rich people who run them, got the most, libertarians got something, and family values conservatives got not much. Some defended the conservative credentials of the party, though, for achieving what could be done over Democratic and "liberal elite" opposition.

The second time around, the current President Bush held together that coalition. Republicans expanded their control of government, and have been in power long enough to effectively control the judiciary, too. Unlike his two Republican predecessors, George W. Bush really is an evangelical Christian from a red state. He has talked the talk for a long time, and now has the political muscle to make it so.

So, what have family values voters gotten for their quarter century of loyal support of the Republican Party? Almost nothing. Whenever there is a conflict between business interests and traditional family interests (as there is on almost every issue), the governing party has sided with business.

This is not just my conclusion. Lately, some heavy hitters among conservative Christian Republicans have been critical of the Bush administration on exactly these grounds. Alan Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Religion, Family, and Society, said "when the interests of big business and the interests of average families collide, the GOP almost always gives way to the interests of big business." Even more significant are the criticisms from Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, the research arm of Focus on the Family. He notes that "When you look at what the [presidential] discussion has been since 2004, marriage has been absent from the vocabulary."

One of the great achievements of both parties in the 1970s was to mobilize evangelicals to vote at all. In 1976, the "year of the evangelical," previously apolitical evangelical voters turned out for born-again Democrat Jimmy Carter to throw the Watergate rascals out. Four years later, evangelicals moved to their more natural home, the family-values-talking Republicans under Reagan.

It is hard to imagine evangelicals as a group deciding the reject all worldly politics. But it is easy to imagine a continuing erosion of evangelical voting, as they conclude that the Democrats are too opposed to their family values, and the Republicans, though they talk a good game, are too wedded to mammon to deliver for God. If Republicans won't actually produce traditional family laws under George W. Bush plus majorities in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, they probably never will.

Simulated Authenticity on Beale Street

I am in Memphis for a workshop, staying a block from Beale Street. There are crowds and music and lots of "Big Ass Cups of Beer." But Beale Street is no longer a commercial part of black Memphis, a vibrant row of honkytonks playing popular music. It is now a cleaned up, safe, three-block theme park which pays homage to black popular music and life of two generations ago. The clubs are named for B.B. King and W.C. Handy and, somewhat incongruously, Elvis Presley and Isaac Hayes. But the music is fossilized, or regular white rock of today. It is not bad, it is just bourgeoisified.

A symbol of what Beale Street is now is that one block south, looming over the backs of the blues clubs, is the new FedEx Forum, Memphis' downtown domed arena. FedEx and Beale Street represent different eras of culture, commerce, and race relations. Now, through the genius of capitalism (which I praise and do not slight), both are brought together to provide seemingly dangerous, but actually safe and clean, entertainment.

I think I may go to the Starbucks, which is not a simulated anything, but a genuine Starbucks.

"Gay Parent" Research Full of Holes

Maggie Gallagher's Meaning of Marriage essay points out that in all but one of the subfields of research on parenting, there is a growing scholarly consensus that kids benefit most when they are raised by their own married father and mother. The one genre of parenting research that says otherwise is the research on homosexual parents.

The big claim made about the homosexual parenting research is that kids do just fine when raised by homosexual parents and same-sex couples. However, Gallagher cites Steven Nock's comprehensive review of the literature, which concludes that "all of the articles I reviewed contained at least one fatal flaw of design or execution."

One big hole in the whole body of gay parenting studies is that none (or maybe one) uses a nationally representative sample – a norm in family studies otherwise. Another big hole is that most of the gay parenting studies have been done by psychologists looking at gender identity and self esteem – important questions, but not like the range of economic, medical, academic, criminal, attitudinal, and behavioral measures that social science routinely asks about families. The psychological studies have found that children of homosexual parents are no more likely to be homosexual themselves than are other kids. It is a long way from that finding, though, to a conclusion that children of homosexual parents are no different from other kids across the board.

Lately, the major policy concern has been about same-sex marriage. The "no difference in the kids" claim has been applied to this debate, too. Yet one of Nock's important findings was that the vast majority of the studies of homosexual parents have been about lesbian single mothers. It is not so surprising that the children of homosexual single mothers are not that different from the children of heterosexual single mothers. But that is a long way from showing that the children of same-sex couples turn out the same as the children of their own married parents.

Gallagher can not answer the big question – do children of same-sex couples turn out the same as children of their married parents? – because there is almost no research on same-sex couples raising kids over time. And obviously, since the possibility of same-sex marriage has only existed for a few years anywhere, there is no research on the effect of same-sex married couples on their kids.

Gallagher expects that when such research is done, children of their own married parents will still do better. She thinks this because two biological parents still invest more in their own kids than one parent and a step-parent. Moreover, men and women, as a rule, are different, and children generally benefit from having both kinds of parents. Those lesbians couples which have done the best in raising boys, which I wrote about earlier, went out of their way to involve men as role models in their sons' lives.

Few researchers expect that same-sex couples will turn out to be bad parents. But it is very premature to conclude that their kids turn out the same in all respects as children of married parents.

Faith Through Marriage

Seana Sugrue, in the Meaning of Marriage essay that I wrote about yesterday, also makes this interesting claim:

"the tenets of religious faith are primarily transmitted through conjugal society."

She brings this up to further her argument that if marriage comes to be defined and controlled by the state, not only will the family lose freedom, but religion will be undermined, too.

What interests me today, though, is the claim itself that faith is primarily transmitted through the family. I can see this for the rich way of life that is Catholicism, which Sugrue, an Ave Maria University professor, represents. I can see it being doubly true for Judaism. Islam works pretty well as a family-taught faith. And all the Eastern religions, as everyday religious practices, are primarily taught in families, since they are not really congregational religions at all.

The exception is Protestantism. Over time, all Protestant denominations tend to become family traditions. The everyday practice of the faith at home makes a huge difference in what the children will actually do and believe. And the family that prays together is more likely to stay together. But the more sectarian the Prots, the more the faith is transmitted in the church (or parachurch). Faiths which are based on adult converts are not primarily transmitted in conjugal society – not to the adults, and not very successfully to their children.

Now, this may be a weakness of Protestantism – something that some Catholics I know have always suspected about the "sects." On the other hand, Protestantism made the modern world, and fits into the modern world so well, because it is at heart an individually chosen or re-chosen faith. The priesthood of all believers undermines the religious significance of the family just as state control of marriage does. This creates a sociological weakness for Protestant culture, which is always in danger of dying off when it stops evangelizing. But the priesthood of all believers – not of all marriages of believers, or of all families of believers – is at the heart of the culture-shaping power of Protestantism to change lives.

Marriage is Not a Creation of the State (and We Should Keep it That Way)

Political scientist Seana Sugrue, in The Meaning of Marriage, starts with the ancient view that the family is pre-political. Marriage and childrearing are not creations of the state, but precede it. Marriage is not a contract created by the market, but precedes it. Having children, she argues, raises marriage above any possibility of being a mere contract to a sacred duty.

Sugrue has this wonderful sentence: "the sexual revolution is to the family what communism is to the market." In the case of the sexual revolution, the state was employed to dismantle the family in the name of greater individual control. Communism, on the other hand, used the state to dismantle the market in the name of greater social control. Both cases, though, ended up making the state more powerful over the institution it was "reforming." The sexual revolution did not just liberate individuals from the family – it left the state in control of defining the family.

Which is why Sugrue argues that establishing legal same-sex marriage would diminish liberty.

The Law is a Teacher

Yesterday I considered Robby George's argument that marriage is a unitive act of complementary persons. I agree with him. Other strategic minorities in industrial societies do not agree with him. They want the state to extend the definition of marriage to same-sex couples, and beyond that, to any close relation, whether it joins the same kind of persons, or could produce children, or is meant to be permanent, or has any limits on how many can play.

Given this deep disagreement about the nature of marriage, some reach for the sectarian solution – the state can call anything it wants a "marriage," but as for me and my house, we will stick with the traditional understanding. And the devil take the hindmost in the culture.

Churches, in contrast to sects, do not and cannot take that approach. George is a Roman Catholic, of the churchiest of churches. They know, as George writes in the essay in question, "the law is a teacher." Committed conservatives will stick to traditional marriage no matter what the law allows. Committed liberals will allow and experiment with every possible combination that nature and custom make possible. For the majority in the middle, though, what the law supports and allows does instruct our sense of right and wrong.

The Presbyterian Church is a middle polity, halfway between the centralized, authoritative, state-coordinated church, and the go-our-own-way, the-state-should-leave-us-alone sect. In this country, Presbyterian and Reformed churches have always supported the separation of church and state.

So what is a middle, Presbyterian position on marriage?

First, the church and state should agree on a minimal definition of marriage.

Second, the state should preserve citizens' freedom as much as it can without threatening social order. This means the state can prefer a good form of marriage, while allowing a good-enough form of union. As I have argued before, the social distinction between the good and the good enough is crucial to centrist thought.

Third, the church promotes marriage as the permanent union of one man and one woman in a mutually supportive life that is open to children. That is the best kind of marriage. Not everyone is called to marriage, but all can make a marriage of this kind if they are called to marry.

Fourth, the church supports the state in creating other kinds of civil unions which allow everyone to have someone they can legally bind to for support.

The law is a teacher. It should teach the kind of marriage that is best for society and for most citizens. But the law is also generous, and should tolerate other options if they do not threaten public order.

And that, pretty much, is the position of the Presbyterian Church (USA) today.

Marriage as a Unitive Act of Complementary Persons

We come now to the essay in The Meaning of Marriage of Robert George, co-editor of the book and one of the heavy hitters of Catholic natural law thinking today.

His argument is that men and women are complementary.
Marriage is a unitive act – an act that unites these two complementary persons, making two people into one flesh.
Marriage is a human good even if children do not result, but the act of marriage aims at procreation.
SO acts which unite people who are not complementary types and which could not be procreative are not marriages, whatever else they might be.

George, and Catholic natural law thinkers in general, would make an argument like this even if alternative theories of marriage were not on the table. Since, however, arguments for homosexual marriage are at issue now, he has to argue for an understanding of marriage that includes sterile men and women, but excludes same-sex couples.

The key claim for including sterile couples is that the marital act is "reproductive in type," even though "some other conditions in the agents may prevent procreation from occurring."

The key claim for excluding same-sex couples is that men and women are complementary types of persons, in a way that two men or two women are not.

I strongly believe that men and women as types of persons are designed to be complementary (those of delicate Darwinian sensibilities may substitute "have evolved" for "are designed").

I very much like the formulation that marriage makes two persons one flesh, and that the law does not make people married, but can only recognize one-flesh unions which have been made by other hands.

I do think that the aim, point, intent, designed purpose, and telos of marriage is children. Couples who cannot have children, but are open to them, are really married.

The place at which my Calvinist understanding balks is at the phrase "acts which are reproductive in type." This seems to me to be, to use an old Prot insult, Jesuitical casuistry – a too-neat distinction designed to get to a pre-ordained conclusion.

BUT I don't know what the right alternative is.

I have not written much about same-sex marriage, the issue of the day, because I am stuck on this point.

I would welcome your edifying responses.

Islam's Price for Living in the World: Letting Muslims Convert to Another Faith

The case of Abdul Rahman, the Afghani man threatened with execution for converting to Christianity, highlights one of the crucial distinctions between Islam and every other faith. Every faith has a triumphalist strain, a "we are right and all other must acknowledge it" doctrine. Thinking that we are right is necessary for any faith that believes in truth. But killing other people who disagree is beyond the line of civilization.

Sociologist John Murray Cuddihy, in The Ordeal of Civility and, especially, No Offense, catalogues the ways in which Judaism, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism had to give up, or at least soft peddle, some doctrine that was too triumphalist for a mixed society. The Chosen People; the Great Commission to evangelize the Jews; No Salvation Outside the Church - each are still official teaching, but all have been put on the shelf so that we may live in peace with one another.

Islam teaches that everyone is really a Muslim, some just don't know it yet. Muslims are forbidden to convert to another faith. Muslim states are the hardest mission fields in the world because of this doctrine, harder even than the communist lands.

Every faith has had to give up on triumphalism in order to live in a civilized world. Islam will have to give this one up, sooner or later.

Sooner, at least in the state law of Afghanistan, would save Abdul Rahman from execution.

Beards are Back

According to the New York Times, beards are fashionable again. This seems to be a reaction to the metrosexual fad.

One of the perks of being a professor is that no one expects you to be fashionable, one way or the other.

I am just grateful that I don't have to shave.

The Scary Children of Goodridge

Jurisprudence professor Hadley Arkes writes in his Meaning of Marriage essay about the train of scary possibilities opened by the logic of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case that mandated legal gay marriage. The court said marriage law could not be based on procreation, or even on sexual relations. The emotional attachment of same-sex couples was enough of a foundation for marriage under the law.

Arkes points out that, since neither the possibility of children nor the practice of any sort of sex is included in the definition of marriage that the court has now imposed on Massachusetts, any pair or group claiming an emotional attachment could apply for a marriage license there. If they were denied, they could sue, citing the court's own decision to eliminate nearly all grounds of objection. Polygamy and the various grades of adult incest would all have a case that would be hard for that same court to deny.

Beyond that scary possibility, Arkes points out that all the laws and decisions that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, including Goodridge, open a new world of "orientations" to legal protection. The growing consensus that pedophilia is a deep-seated and almost untreatable condition creates the grounds for a lawyer for, say, the North American Man-Boy Love Association (yes, there really is such a thing, and no, they aren't kidding) to argue that their sexual orientation should be protected, too.

The slope is slippery, and the Pandora's box that we are carrying down it is already ajar.

Pro-Family Aristotelians

Law professor David Forte, in his brief piece in The Meaning of Marriage on the Framers' attitude to marriage, offers a helpful aside.

The American Revolution was made by practical Aristotelians, and therefore was pro-family. They saw the family as one of the seedbeds of virtue necessary to make worthy citizens of a republic.

The French Revolution, by contrast, was made by utopian Platonists, and therefore was anti-family. They saw the family as standing against the state, which alone has the capacity to educate citizens to virtue.

Marriage as the Firmest Firm

Jennifer Roback Morse, in the same essay in The Meaning of Marriage that I wrote about yesterday, goes through the argument that marriage is a contract. She makes the point that contracts are most suitable for short-term and arms-length relations.

The sexual revolution, she says, has had some disastrous consequences for marriages because it changed the theory of sexual contracts. Under a marriage theory, sex is reserved for the most permanent, most intimate relations. Under the sexual revolution theory, by contrast, sex became a want best satisfied on the spot market.

The most intriguing point she makes, I think, is that for the most intimate and long term economic relations, the market finds that even long-term contracts are not enough. For permanent economic relations, the market invented the "firm."

Marriage is not a short-term contract for sex. It is not even a long-term contract for childrearing and companionship. A marriage is a firm, the most permanent, multi-faceted firm possible. In an ordinary firm or partnership, if they can no longer provide their distinctive good or service profitably, they dissolve. In a marriage, though, if the original product no longer works, they keep the firm and change what the firm produces.

Marriage is the firmest firm.

No-fault Divorce Means a Bigger State

Jennifer Roback Morse, a researcher at the Hoover Institution, argues in a fine essay in The Meaning of Marriage that a libertarian society would not, in fact, want easy divorce. Marriage creates obligations which, if badly managed, create costs for society. Kids create obligations which, if badly managed, create enormous costs for society. Married people just handle both kinds of obligations, absorbing most of those costs and not externalizing them on society.

If free individuals never interacted with one another, then a libertarian state might be able to stay out of marriage and childrearing. Of course, no interaction would mean no kids, and soon enough no society. However, people do naturally couple and make kids. Marriage means they handle it, and the state doesn't have to. Not-marriage, or easy divorce, means that the state has to be involved more. Every step of the way in taking care of kids and disentangling their finances requires state intervention.

In principle, the state could leave women who had kids without husbands to sink or swim on their own. In practice, though, Morse rightly says this is politically infeasible. So the current unilateral divorce system leaves society with all the obligations of taking care of the wreckage, but none of the protections that would encourage the couple to deal with their obligations themselves.

"No fault" was supposed to make marriage better, by taking the conflict out of divorce. It was supposed to apply to cases where the divorce was not contested, where both husband and wife wanted out. Now, though, it has degenerated into legalized abandonment. And you and I get to pick up the pieces and pay for the mess.

Family Firms Build for the Future

Princeton historian Harold James makes the argument in his chapter of The Meaning of Marriage that family firms connect markets with the future. Corporations tend to be driven to short time horizons – at the worst, looking no further than shareholder returns in this quarter. Family firms, on the other hand, look for sustainable production and consumption for generations unborn.

There has been a long-running belief that family firms are a dying form of business. They may have been necessary to get capitalism started, the argument goes, but the greater rationality of the impersonal corporation will drive out family firms in a mature market. Yet this hope, like its cousin belief in secularization, keeps failing to come true. James reports that three quarters of the registered companies in the industrialized world are family firms, some of them very large.

Family firms go further toward solving the problem of trust than a corporation can. The family members are bound to one another in ways that mere coworkers rarely are. And customers can believe that a family firm can be trusted now, because they want to still have customers when the next generation takes over.

Even in the most impersonal and rationalized part of the world system, the strong bonds of marriage and family matter.

Religious Professors Give More to Students

Last Sunday's look at the "Spirituality and the Professoriate" survey revealed that the "highly spiritual" professors were mostly (70%) very religious professors.

This week, I want to take a look at the measures of what the spiritual professors do that affects students and their colleges or universities as a whole. The survey had six scales:

Positive outlook in work and life [what you might call the "gruntledness index"];
Focus on students' personal development;
Civic-minded values;
Diversity advocacy;
Student-centered pedagogy; and
Civic-minded practice.

In each scale, the high-spirituality professors outscored the low-spirituality professors. Most highly spiritual professors have a positive outlook (59%), whereas most low-spirituality professors (36%) don't. The average gap is 20%.

The biggest gap comes in the focus on students' personal development. 43% of the high-spirituality professors thought it very important to invest themselves in "developing students’ moral character, enhancing their self-understanding, helping them develop personal values, providing for their emotional development, facilitating their search for meaning and purpose in life, and enhancing their spiritual development."

How many low-spirituality professors were highly interested in students' personal development? 5%.

"She Don't Tell Me To"

Our local country stars, Montgomery Gentry, have a fascinating new love song. The characters in their songs are usually tough, conservative guys, unreconstructed men's men. In their latest outing, they start from a traditional masculine theme of independence and not taking orders, a point of pride that is particularly strong among Appalachian men in our region.

The narrator tells of his "goin' my own way attitude." The chorus begins:

Any other woman I know would have tried,
To control me and it would be over.

But, the whole song is about how this stubborn guy, with more than a little self-destruction in him, keeps doing decent things for her and because of her – picking flowers, coming home early, going to church -- "'cause she don't tell me to." This is a subtle step in the dance of courtship and marriage.

The key line, I think, is

An' she don't even know,
That she keeps me lookin' for the next right thing to do,
But she don't tell me to.

Is Gay Essentialism a Fad?

Don Browning and Elizabeth Marquardt's essay in The Meaning of Marriage offers some "liberal cautions on same-sex marriage."

In the discussion of sex, it is normal now for liberals to automatically translate that term into "gender." The prevailing liberal theory is that no feature of masculinity or femininity is rooted in the biology of men and women. Everything is a social construction.

Everything, that is, except sexual orientation. When it comes to sexual orientation, liberals become essentialists again. Advocates of homosexuality are increasingly drawn to the idea that sexual orientation is a biological fact, not a social construction (and certainly not a choice). Therefore, society must accommodate to all sexual orientations and "get used to it."

Browning and Marquardt point out that the logic of modernization is dissolving all claims of fixed relations and innate or essential qualities. Even the deepest and most ancient of essential differences, those between fathers and mothers in marriage, are subject to the acids of social constructivism. It may be premature to fix the flag of same-sex marriage to homosexual essentialism today; the same modernizing theory that all identities are just social constructions may sweep it away tomorrow.

Marriage as a Sacred Vow

[In the next set of posts, I will work through the essays in a rich new book, The Meaning of Marriage, edited by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain.] [Sorry for the delay - Blogger was down.]

Roger Scruton, a noted British cultural commentator, starts his analysis of marriage from sexual desire. He says our culture is debasing sexual desire into a game of physical sensation pursued for pleasure. Really, though, sexual desire is a desire for the other person. Further, men and women are so contrasting and complementary in their natures that something as strong as sexual desire is necessary to bridge the gap, to make us desire the Other person.

Desiring the other person who complements us opens the way to becoming a new kind of being, different and in some respects greater than we would otherwise be. But to become this new status, it is not enough to be joined merely physically, and it is not enough to be joined for a moment.

Marriage, in its inner nature, says Scruton, is a vow. It is not just a promise, and it is certainly not just a contract. Promises are for a time; contracts can be fulfilled. A vow, though, is an eternal change of status. This is why marriage is sacred in its internal meaning, because through marriage we participate in an eternal transformation.

Scruton is a famous curmudgeon in Britain, and in the manner of British curmudgeons, expects the worst from America culture. He knows he is arguing against the grain of elite opinion in our society, even if most people feel the sacred sense of marriage as he does. He expects that the courts will impose a different definition of marriage, under which "marriage" is whatever contract for sex individuals want to make. Moreover, he expects that once this elite opinion has been imposed in law, it will be imposed just as thoroughly by the thought police of political correctness.

I am not as pessimistic as Scruton (I am more gruntled). I am impressed, though, with his deeper reading of sexual desire and the vow of marriage. I also think he is right that we are on the verge of enshrining in our law a much shallower, more self-serving and hedonistic understanding of sex and marriage.

Which is why we need to have a clear and open discussion of the deep meaning of marriage, without thought police and political correctness.

Missing Pretty White Women

The news covers missing pretty white women obsessively. Anderson Cooper tries to answer for the news media about why this happens. He writes:

I've never, not even once, seen a story spiked because the victim was not attractive enough or the wrong race. But I've seen plenty of stories fall by the wayside, pushed down and out of the show, because a consensus develops that says, "You know, I don't think our viewers are very interested in this case." Is that racism or realism?

The most egregious case of missing pretty white woman syndrome is not the blonde in Aruba or the drowned wife in California, but Pvt. Jessica Lynch, captured in Iraq. A pretty, blue-eyed blonde in uniform, the Barbie soldier, didn't just get obsessive news coverage, she got a full-scale rescue mission, which almost killed the Iraqi doctors who were helping her.

What was not obsessively covered, what was barely mentioned, was that Spc. Shoshana Johnson was also captured that day. She fought back, was injured, and also later rescued. When she returned to the States, she was discharged on disability. She is solid and gracious in interviews, and defends Lynch from falsehoods that have been told about what she did and said.

Why isn't she famous, too? She's black, and not half as cute as Jessica Lynch.

Is that racism or realism? It's racism.

Could Women Thrive at Yale if They Could Respect Their Househusbands?

The current issue of the Yale alumni magazine explores how much having kids, or trying to have kids, contributes to the still-low numbers of tenured women at Yale. Yale (and Harvard and Princeton) famously give no advantage to their junior faculty when they come up for tenure – they still have to prove they are the best in the world. Getting a Ph.D. – now obligatory in the Ivies – and writing books and articles for tenure come at the same time as the baby-having window. Indeed, those fifteen years or so can completely obliterate the body's time to have kids.

Men do not have the same problem. Why? Because they have wives who take the lead with the little kids when their husbands are doing what it takes to get tenure in the Ivies. So why don't women find husbands who would act like those kinds of wives? The first reason is that such men are harder to come by. The more difficult reason is that, as a rule, women want to marry men who achieve at even higher levels than they do.

The most difficult reason, though, seems to be that it is just much harder for women to fully respect men who stay home and take care of the kids.

That is a deeper revolution than more childcare can solve.

How Big is the "Spiritual But Not Religious" Market?

A favorite social category that sophomores who have been through their first religion class use to describe themselves is "spiritual, but not religious." This is a hard category to pin down, especially since religion and spirituality are almost identical except for what they imply about your connection to a religious institution.

Recently the Higher Education Research Institute complete a massive survey (40,000+ respondents) on “Spirituality and the Professoriate.” If any group would be interested in adopting such a nuanced identity, it would be professors. So, what did the survey find?

The study defined the highly spiritual professors this way:
Seeking out opportunities to grow spiritually,
considering oneself a spiritual person, and
having an interest in integrating spirituality into one’s life.

By this standard, 43% scored high, 15% low.

They then asked how many professors considered themselves religious. Not surprisingly, more than two thirds of the highly spiritual professors also considered themselves highly religious.

Only 13% of the highly spiritual professors said they were not at all religious.

13% of 43% = 5.5% of all professors consider themselves "spiritual, but not religious."

Five and a half percent ain't zero, but it sure doesn't look like a sign that "religionless spirituality" is the next big thing, even among this unusually irreligious group.

Dubai Ports World is no Worse Than The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company

Having a Dubai firm run our ports is not less foreign or dangerous that having a London firm run out ports. The objection to Dubai Ports World was entirely that the ultimate owners were Arabs who wore Arab dress. That is racism.

If we don't distinguish between good Arabs and bad Arabs (and the thousand shades of indifferent Arabs), we will make our relations with all Arabs worse. This will come back to bite us right away.

For example, Mohammed Taheriazar, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student who tried to run over a group of fellow students did so because all Americans are enemies of Allah. We think he is deranged because he does not distinguish between Americans who are enemies of whichever terrorist faction he identifies with, and ordinary beer-swilling American students who had not given his cause a second thought.

If we are really interested in peace around the world, we should be looking for people in every country and nationality who we can work with. When every nation knows some "good Americans" and we know some "good (fill in the people)" in every nation, the world will be safer and more stable.

The Opposite of Generativity, Take Two

My query the other day about what is the opposite of the "culture of generativity" brought several interesting responses. Annie at Ambivablog noted that in Erik Erikson's schema, where the idea of generativity as a life stage, the opposition that he names is "stagnation/self-absorption." This gets the opposition right, from one perspective, but does not get the positive spin that I was looking for. Annie suggests "self-realization," which I think is about right.

Tom Strong, on the other hand, thinks that is still too condescending. He suggests "culture of fairness" as the right opposite to the culture of generativity. I will grant him that this notion is more positive – but I don't think it is really matched up with its alleged opposite. Strong's definition is that:

if you dig for the core value here, that's what you're going to find - whether the issue is abortion, or euthanasia, or gay marriage. It's about respecting other people's right and ability to make the best choices for themselves.

No, I just don't see it. Strong is arguing for respecting other people's individual choices. The idea of a culture of generativity, though, is that the society as a whole makes and cherishes life, especially in the form of children. Such a culture has all kinds of room for individuals who make other choices. But if the culture passes the tipping point from generativity to the other thing, it will die. No matter how well the remaining selves realize themselves.

Church Burnings Hit Close to Home

Today's topic is a little off my normal beat. Yesterday three students were arrested for setting fires at nine churches in Alabama. Two of them are students at Birmingham Southern College, and the third had been before transferring to the University of Alabama. I don't know these guys personally, but I could.

Birmingham Southern College is the opposite number to Centre College, where I teach. Both are classic small liberal arts colleges. Both are church-related, Methodist in the case of BSC, Presbyterian in Centre's circumstance. Both are part of the Associated Colleges of the South, an association of the premier liberal arts colleges of the South. I don't know these guys, but I easily could – I have students just like them.

The early accounts say that all three are pranksters and aspiring actors. They were almost certainly drunk when they set the first fires – the official condemnation by the Birmingham Southern president implies as much. An unnamed witness quoted in all the news reports, no doubt a friend of theirs, said the fires were "a joke that got out of hand."

How do we make sense of this? When the story first broke, the reaction of the press and most attentive middle-aged people was that these fires were racially motivated. Church destruction near Birmingham naturally suggests white racists, possibly in hoods, burning black churches. But the story couldn't play that way – the churches were mostly white Baptist congregations out in the country.

Now that the culprits have been caught, the story may unfold a different way: reckless rich kids with no respect for faith arrogantly destroy working-class people's treasures. They were caught through the records of the new SUV tires of one of the three, a doctor's kid who had taken the other two for a night of deer shooting. We don't have a statement from the miscreants themselves yet, so it is too early to tell, but this is my best guess about what happened.

The condemnation by the college's president and the head of security tried an alternate theory: kid's today are worse than they used to be. "We increasingly see," President Pollick and Chief Youngblood wrote, "young adults throughout our nation incapable of distinguishing between healthy and destructive conduct." Now, collecting young people, especially young men, who engage in destructive conduct is something that colleges have specialized in since the dawn of the university. I don't think things are any worse now than they ever were in that regard.

I am a silver-lining seeker. Here is the silver lining I see in this story. The headline on this story today is not "Methodist College Students Burn Baptist Churches." To even write it seems a silly idea. And that is a blessing to count.

The Opposite of Generativity

The President criticizes the "culture of death." This is a cousin of pro-lifers calling their opponents pro-abortion or even pro-death. It has not spawned a full answer, though, in the way that "pro-choice" is the alternative value promoted by the proponents of legal abortion.

Lately Maggie Gallagher and others have been using the phrase "culture of generativity." This phrase has been especially useful in the discussion of the abysmally low birth rates in Europe and Japan.

Which has me wondering: what is the opposite of the culture of generativity?

I think it must be the culture of consumption. This is in line with economist Gary Becker's view that children should be viewed as "consumer durable goods" like washing machines, which adults might choose to own if it gives them utility.

Is that that right opposition? I welcome your comments.

Rage Makes You Unhappy

The family study of the moment is by sociologists Brad Wilcox and Steven Nock. In “What's Love Got to do With It? Equality, Equity, Commitment and Women’s Marital Quality,” in the current Social Forces, they found that most married women are happiest when their husbands are emotionally engaged in the marriage. This was true regardless of whether the division of labor at home or in income was equal or not. This finding also held whether the wives described themselves as traditional or progressive.

A secondary finding was that self-described progressive wives are less happy than traditional wives, no matter what the arrangement of work and household chores. The Slate article commenting on this study, by Meghan O'Rourke, is entitled "Desperate Feminist Wives: Why wanting equality makes women unhappy." In the discussion of this article at the Family Scholars Blog, on the other hand, one respondent argued that "conservatives are happier because their circle of concern extends no farther than themselves."

A good marriage makes most people happy. If you enjoy a happy marriage, this does not mean that you are selfish. Happy marriages enable all kinds of people, left, right and center, to do good things in the world. I think "progressives" are less likely to feel happy even in a good marriage because they think they ought to feel outraged.

But the pleasure of righteous indignation comes at a cost: rage makes you unhappy.

The Bonfire of the Assets

Married people accumulate wealth. Married men, especially married fathers, work harder and save more. Waite and Gallagher, in The Case for Marriage, report that marriage is like a 12% annuity. Each year spent unmarried in adulthood decreases your likely total wealth by 3.5%. Married people build wealth better that singles or cohabiters.

Widows and divorced people lose wealth over time. Divorced men stop working harder, as a rule, once they get divorced. Divorced women are likely to end up with 1/3 less wealth than they would have if they had remained married.

Most American families show an upward trajectory in wealth, in class, and in status. Pick just about any American family: if they have even three generations of solid marriages and at least as much education as their predecessors, the youngest generation will be wealthier.

Divorce stops that upward trajectory. Divorce usually means running two households on the same income that used to support one. Moreover, assets are typically lost, split, even destroyed along with the marriage. In the typical case, he will live less well than he did before, materially and socially. She will make a household with the kids that has much less income per capita than they had before, and is not likely to generate wealth for a long time, if ever. If the family started out working class, they are likely to end up poor. This is most of what the "feminization of poverty" means.

If the mom has kids without any marriage at all, the downward financial spiral is likely to begin at day one, before there are any assets to burn.

Look at any extended family tree, and compare the branches. The one with the most enduring marriages is likely to be the richest.

A Minister's Conscience and the Church's Rules

Jane Spahr has been trying to get thrown out of the Presbyterian ministry for decades. She was ordained as minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the large, mainline edition of the Presbyterians, more than 30 years ago. Along the way, though, she decided to divorce her husband and take up with a woman, while keeping her status as a Presbyterian minister. The church, meanwhile, clarified its traditional position that the Bible says homosexual practice is a sin. Since Presbyterian ministers take a vow to be guided by the Bible, as well as by the rules of the church, Spahr might have resigned from the ministry in 1978, when this "definitive guidance" on church doctrine was first made.

Jane Spahr, however, decided to be a "lesbian evangelist" in the church – informally at first, but these days as her official job. She has been trying to provoke discipline ever since. In 1992 the church courts decided that she could not take a new job as a pastor of a Presbyterian congregation because she did not accept the church's rules. However, that court also said that, since she had been ordained before the rule was officially stated, her ordination was grandfathered in. She now works for an organization called That All May Freely Serve, which exists to overturn the Presbyterian Church's understanding of what the Bible says about homosexual practice.

Since being turned down for a pastorate, Spahr has been trying to provoke prosecution by performing same-sex "marriages." These ceremonies are not recognized by either church or state. Spahr even went to Canada to try to perform a legal same-sex marriage, but it turned out she had failed to get a license to perform weddings in Canada, so they didn't count, either. The Presbyterian Church has had several constitutional amendments on whether ministers could perform same-sex weddings, and each time majorities of church voters from across the country have said no.

Spahr, who says she has performed hundreds of same-sex weddings over the past thirty years, was tried in her own presbytery of Redwoods in California last week. On March 3rd the presbytery's judicial commission (church court) acquitted Spahr.

Here is the really important part: the church court agreed that Jane Spahr had violated church law for ministers. However, they ruled, 6 to 1, that she was “acting within her right of conscience in performing marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples.” The court declared that the church's constitution offers a "definition, not a direction.” This line of reasoning threatens to dissolve the whole denomination. As the presbytery's attorney, Stephen Taber, put it, "You have a situation where any minister anywhere can claim, 'My conscience tells me I can sleep with 16-year-old girl outside my marriage vows,' and who's to question his conscience?"

Now the stakes have been raised to a higher level. The issue in the inevitable appeal of the verdict is no longer what Jane Spahr did, but what the presbytery's judicial commission did. If a presbytery can decide that the church's constitution doesn't apply to its ordained ministers if the don't want it to, then we have a constitutional crisis.

The silver lining of this mess is that the Presbyterian Church at the highest level may make clear that the whole church makes its constitutional rules, not six judges in California. In that sense, this case is much like the disastrous ruling by a handful of California judges that "In God We Trust" is an unconstitutional motto.

I think it likely that the higher church courts will reject this decision by the presbytery's judicial commission. And on that day, Jane Spahr will finally get her wish – to be a martyr. At that point, she can become a minister of the gay-friendly United Church of Christ – something she could have done decades ago.

More on this story as it unfolds.

The Constitutional Right to Pets

It is always both fun and kind of depressing to test people's knowledge of Important Stuff versus pop culture. The latest is a study that compared how many people could name all five First Amendment freedoms with how many could name all five members of the cartoon Simpson family. The result (muffled drum roll, please):

First Amendment: .001%
Simpsons: 22%.

The most fun and mysterious part of this study was that a fifth of those surveyed thought that the first amendment protected their right to have pets.

This clearly betrays ignorance of the Constitution. It is not the First Amendment that protects our right to pets, but the Second. After all, what would be the use of having a right to bear arms, if you did not also have a right to the rest of the bear?

Too Rich to Live

European fertility is collapsing. No country in Western Europe has enough babies to sustain its population. For stability, a population needs 2.1 children per fertile women. France and Ireland are doing well to reach fertility rates of 1.7. Britain and Sweden at least make it to 1.5 – a rate that cuts the population in half in less than three generations. Austria and Italy have sunk to 1.3, which should halve their population in a generation or so.

The United States, as in many things, is halfway between Europe and the global South in vitality measures. Our birthrate as a whole has gone back up to almost replacement level, at 2.06. Yet within the United States, several states have European-like rates of no marriage and no kids -- California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and, especially, Massachusetts.

Maggie Gallagher reports these figures, from demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, in her February 28 syndicated column. She notes a correlation between the places that don't produce enough babies and the leaders in legalizing same-sex marriage.

I noticed a different correlation. The places without enough babies – to which we can add Japan (fertility rate: 1.32) – are also the richest places on earth. The low fertility states in America are also the richest ones. As I noted in "Should We Skip Kids in Order to Get Rich?" economists have already noticed that you will probably end up richer if you don't have kids. These demographic numbers suggest that rich nations are, in effect, making the same calculation.

Whoever dies with the most toys, still dies. Whichever nation has the most toys but the fewest kids, dies from the earth.

Boys Will Beat Boys

The New York Times has a popular story by Katy Butler on a new study of sibling violence. All siblings push and shove sometimes, but in 14% of the cases studied they found repeated beatings, usually by a big brother. David Finkelhor and John Caffaro, co-authors of "Sibling Abuse Trauma," found that sibling abuse was most common when disengaged parents headed large families composed entirely of closely spaced boys.

Siblings compete for parental attention, and first-borns often feel entitled to more attention than their little brothers and sisters. When the parents are not paying much attention anyway, the competition would be even fiercer.

This study put me in mind of another fascinating finding about families composed entirely of boys: the youngest boys are much more likely to be gay. No one really knows why this is so, but speculation centers on a conflict between the mother's female hormones and her sons' male hormones, with the mother's hormones getting stronger with each boy baby in her womb. In a series of studies, Ray Blanchard and colleagues found that each additional older brother increases the odds of homosexuality by approximately 33%.

The new study on sibling abuse did not address the siblings' sexual orientation. Putting the two pieces of research together, though, suggests a bad scenario: in a big family of boys, with no parents paying attention, the eldest beats on the little brother, especially if the young one is more effeminate. Scary and sad.

The Power is Yours (3 of 3)

[This is concluding section of guest blogger Megblum's post on meliorism.]

Finally, let us consider how we can embrace meliorism in our lives. In theory, the easiest part of the solution should be simply accepting the belief that human action can improve the course of the world. However, our outlooks are not as simply modified as our choice of breakfast cereal; rather, we must be convinced of a viewpoint’s validity. If we can, at least for the moment, accept the premise that melioristic beliefs are legitimate, we can explore some potential ways to use our newfound faith in human abilities. Once we accept this premise, there are three steps to using meliorism: identifying a problem, organizing, and taking action.

Consider your interests, talents, and concerns in choosing your focus. Perhaps you are concerned about the course of our government, worry about the plight of the needy in your community, or simply wish to improve the lives of those around you. This problem may take an unconventional form: in the movie "Clueless," Beverly Hills princess Cher Horowitz stretched herself with her earth-changing charity work addressing a problem that is all too often ignored in our society: the plight of the unpopular. In the tradition of the great social innovators, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Cher took time out of her busy schedule of shopping, parties, and looking adorable to make over a clumsy, flannel-clad new student. We, like Cher, can almost certainly find an issue that concerns us and address the problem.

The next step in pursuing improvement in the world is organizing. Anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Though one person can have an impact, the efforts of a concerned group can be much greater than the sum of their individual efforts. This organizing can take place within the framework of an existing group, such as the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, or a political campaign, or alternatively, may consist of gathering a new and distinct group of people.

The final step is both the simplest and the hardest: taking action. It is at this point that we must, as the endless barrage of Nike ads urge us to “Just do it.” This action need not be complicated. A November 2005 article in People magazine reported on the story of Delonzo Yurcek, a seventeen-year-old former foster child from Kalamazoo, Michigan who was adopted at age eight. Delonzo remembered the embarrassment of arriving at school each year without paper and pencils, and didn’t want other foster children to suffer the same fate. So he, his siblings, and his adoptive parents organized a group called Backpacks for Kids to give foster children who might otherwise go without backpacks filled with school supplies. They raised money with garage sales and Kool-Aid stands, and in their first year alone, they were able to give backpacks to three hundred kids. Delonzo’s simple generosity reflects this solution: he saw a problem, got together a group, and took action.

Now that we know the reasons we do not accept meliorism, the problems of rejecting this outlook, and finally, have looked at how we can embrace meliorism, we can begin to step out into the world with fresh eyes. Our actions can have a positive impact on the world, but only when we act. So the next time you face some problem in society, do something about. As Captain Planet said “the power is yours.”

The Power is Yours (2 of 3)

[Today we continue with Megblum's essay on meliorism.]

Next, let’s consider the problems of rejecting meliorism. Because some degree of meliorism is essential for the furtherance of a democratic society, we can easily lose sight of our democratic ideals. At its most basic level, political participation is an expression of meliorism, an act of faith in the idea that our actions can affect the course of our city, state, or country for the better. According to political science professors George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, and Robert L. Lineberry, one of the primary factors motivating people to vote is a high sense of political efficacy, the belief that they can effect their government. This is a quintessentially melioristic belief, in that it is a belief in the ability of people to effect a positive change in the world. When potential voter’s senses of political efficacy decline, voter turnout plummets, and democracy suffers.

Perhaps the most obvious effect of the rejection of meliorism is the loss of all the good that can come of meliorism in action. Charitable and humanitarian action is, at its heart, motivated by a desire to make a change for the better in the world. In 1966, the World Health Organization set for itself a lofty and ambitious goal: worldwide eradication of the deadly disease smallpox, according to 1998 PBS report. Though a vaccine had been developed over a hundred years before, smallpox continued to kill millions of people every year in forty-four countries, including some of the world’s poorest nations. The Smallpox Elimination Project, an offshoot of the WHO, went to work and slowly but surely saw country after country report their final case of smallpox. The group was so successful that in 1979, a global commission declared that the dreaded disease had been eradicated. If the men and women who worked for eradication had not believed they could make a difference, countless lives would have been lost and smallpox would still terrorize the globe.

[To be concluded tomorrow]

The Power is Yours (1 of 3)

[This week we welcome guest blogger Megblum, eldest Gruntled child. A veteran of Kentucky's forensics (speech) leagues, her senior oratory was so appropriate for The Gruntled Center that I will serialize it over the next three days. Enjoy.]

As a child, I was fascinated by the mid-nineties cartoon "Captain Planet." Five children, from different cultures, continents, and contexts, each endowed with a special power, would come together to fight the evils of global corporations and pollution. When the children touched rings, they could summon Captain Planet, a sort of baby blue Super-Man figure, who would summarily destroy whichever evil polluting tyrant was threatening the global ecosystem that week, usually a vaguely pig-like character with a helpfully descriptive name, like Looten Plunder or Sly Sludge. The good captain would helpfully encourage the children to become eco-crusaders at the end of each of episode, with the cheerful motto: “the power is yours!”

What Captain Planet was perhaps unconsciously advocating was meliorism, an ideological view point in between the traditional extremes of optimism and pessimism. Webster’s defines meliorism as “the belief that the world tends to become better and that man can aid its betterment.” Meliorism rejects the idea that the world is either inevitably slipping down the drain or on a perpetual upswing. Instead, it offers up the idea that, through our action, we can make the world a better place. It is time for us to embrace a melioristic outlook on the world. Today, we will look at the reasons we do not accept meliorism, the problems of rejecting this outlook, and finally we will look at how we can embrace meliorism in our lives.

First, let us examine why we reject meliorism. Because we live in a mass society, it is hard for us to believe that our actions as individuals can have an effect on the millions of people that live even in just our country. Eighteenth-century British statesmen and social theorist Edmund Burke offered the idea that we, as people, learn to love the small groups we exist within, which he termed “little platoons” because within these limited spheres we feel that we can have a significant effect. However, it is difficult for us to believe that, once we step outside our little platoons, we can have an effect in a truly global society.

The logical outcome of our inability to believe that our actions can have an impact is a crisis of motivation. Imagine, for example, you are walking down the street and you see a piece of litter on the side of the road. It would be easy to say that since you cannot possibly pick up all the candy wrappers and fast-food bags in the world, it doesn’t really matter if you pick up this particular piece of trash. If it doesn’t matter whether you pick up this particular piece of litter, why do it? This kind of thinking is self-defeating, because it rests on the false binary that, in order for a melioristic action to be worthwhile, it must solve a problem. However, virtually all major change occurs through small, incremental steps, rather than through decisive, conclusive actions. If an action can have an effect, however small, it can be worthwhile. Imagine what could happen if each of us in this room picked up just one dirty Coke can a day, every day for a year. We would not clean up the streets of the world, but we could make a difference in our own communities, and that would be something.

[To be continued ...]

An Ideology That Justifies Breaking Things

Young men in groups like to break things. Most are restrained by decency and their moms to not do it very often, and not with other people's stuff. But they still want to. They are always in the market for an ideology that would make it a good thing to go out and break other people's things. If they think they are protecting something precious – family, country, faith – you can get up a mob of angry young men in an instant. They will march down a handy street and break windows, burn cars, and beat up anyone remotely connected to The Enemy.

Which brings us to the Cartoon Riots. All over the world we have had Muslim mobs, mostly young men, rioting, burning, breaking, beating. All things Danish, previously among the least offensive objects in the world, are targets for destruction. Guys who sold Danish flags made money selling them to the mob, so they could be burned.

It is safe to say that 99% of the rioters had never seen the cartoons. They just heard that a Danish newspaper had printed some cartoons that made fun of the prophet Mohammad. In this country that would lead to angry letters to the editor of the paper. I have seen the cartoons. If the paper had run them without any indication that they were supposed to represent the prophet Mohammad, you would never know. They look like ordinary depictions of bomb-throwing Arabs that you can see in any Western paper in any given week. If they had said that they represent some guy named Mohammad, not THE Mohammad, sensitive people, Muslim and otherwise, would have tut-tutted and turned the page.

The guys who are making the cartoon riots wanted to have a riot. You can find guys like that in every market and bar and lounging place in the world. Different mobs have different triggers, but none of them require much to set them off.

Today's Teen Anecdote: Nationalism and Pokemon

Megblum, the eldest of the Gruntled children, will be our guest blogger next week. I wanted to share a happy home scene from her life as a high school senior.

Friday night. She wants to go to the dance with her friends. But she is taking an online course in European history with a paper due today. She comes to me to say "All I want to say is 'Congress of Vienna; Peace of Paris; Difference? Nationalism.'" But she thought she should write a bit more than that. So she was at the computer surrounded by books, typing away, when three of the boys arrived. They understood her priorities, so they prepared to wait. They got out the Pokemon cards of their boyhood, settled around Megblum's feet, and played Pokemon as of old as she typed.

When she was finished, they all went to the dance and had a fine time.

Warms the cockles of a dad's heart.

In Sweden, All Romance is Teen Romance

Deborah Tannen, in I Only Say This Because I Love You, tells the story of a Swedish couple talking with their daughter about how she should and should not spend time with her boyfriend. The daughter wants to have an adult romance with her boyfriend. Her mom wants their meetings to be like a play date among children. Tannen tells this story as an illustration of the clash of parental and teenage frameworks for the same activity.

What strikes me about this story, though is that the Swedish mom can’t contrast casual dating with the marriage narrative, because Sweden doesn’t have a marriage narrative anymore. In the way that has become normal these days in Sweden, the parents are not married. Their daughter is 14 and her boyfriend is 17.

The mother and her boyfriend hung out, had sex, had kids, moved in together, all of which was supported by the state. If they broke up, little in their lives would change materially or socially. There was no marriage that they entered into on purpose and before the world that made them one flesh, and there would be no divorce to sever that tie.

The daughter wants to do the same thing. The parents can't say "wait until you are ready for marriage," or even "wait until you can support a family," because there is no normal marriage narrative either way, and there is a normal state support narrative either way.

In Sweden, without marriage teen romance and adult mating are becoming the same.

Weird Names and the Fantasy of Uniqueness

Recently I wrote about the odd given name "Chasity." This brought a response from SQ that "I'm sure Chasity is uniquification of Chastity." I think "uniquification" is exactly right. These parents believe that it is possible to give their child a unique name. Moreover, they think it would be a good thing for their child to have a unique name.

Years ago the British sociologist Basil Bernstein studied the speaking styles of working class and middle class Londoners. He noticed that they were likely to use different ways of speaking, which he called the restricted code and the elaborated code, respectively. The restricted code is best used when all the people in the conversation know one another and have many shared understandings. Sentences tend to be concrete and specific. The elaborated code, on the other hand, is more abstract and general, filling in points that might be obscure to people not in the speaker's immediate circle.

Bernstein thought that working class speakers used a restricted code most of the time, even when talking to strangers, because most of their social life was spent with people they knew talking about things they all knew. Middle class people, on the other hand, often used the elaborated code even with their intimates. Each code is an effective way of speaking in the right circumstances, and each can be mysterious or cumbersome in the wrong circumstances.

I think working class parents are much more likely to try to give their children unique names than middle class people are. If you think primarily in terms of your social circle, then it is easy to imagine coming up with a unique name. You are also likely to refer to people only by their first names in your group of regulars, so one fancy name would do. I think this is why rappers often go by one name.

If, on the other hand, you think that your child will live in unknown places in the great world, then you are more likely to see how unlikely it is that you can come up with a unique name. Your family name is more likely to be part of how you are known and referred to.

I think the middle class also avoids uniquification of their children's names because weird names and, especially, weird spellings (or, in the case of Chasity, misspellings) of common names is itself a sign of lower class origins.

In a middle class world, William is a dignified, if formal name, as ordinary as a kitchen clock. Weeyum, [which I hope I made up] on the other hand, suggests parents who were thinking more about yelling the name in the neighborhood than how it would appear on school and job applications.

Do Students Email Professors Too Much?

In a widely circulated New York Times article this week, reporter Jonathan Glater notes:

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

He quotes professors at big universities -- Syracuse, William and Mary, Georgetown, UC Davis, MIT -- who are distressed that students turn to them for information, directions, and advice. The Times, not surprisingly, found a way to make this a story about fear – the fear that professors have of offending the students who will be evaluating them.

I am glad to report that the professors quoted in the story who are from small teaching colleges saw these informal email communications as a teaching opportunity. An Amherst professor saw it as feedback about blind spots in his course, while a Pomona teacher took it as a chance to teach etiquette and power relations in communication.

What this story says to me is that this generation of students relate to their professors in the same close and informal way that they relate to their parents. Many people have noted that the current Millennial generation of young people have close relations with their parents – much closer than was the norm for the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers who are now their professors. Students today do write emails at all hours asking and telling things that the "never trust anyone over 30" generation would not have dreamed of sending to their teachers. I do not think that this means students today are pushy consumers.

Students today are trusting children. We teachers should honor, serve, and teach to that trust.

Daddy's Girls vs. Mama's Boys

Emily King and Kelli McGrath at the Family Class Blog have raised the interesting possibility that children oriented toward their opposite-sex parent might better learn to speak the "genderlect," to use Deborah Tannen's term, of that sex. Being bilingual in the speech habits of both sexes should be an advantage if you can keep the difference straight, though it could easily become a source of confusion if you don't. The general drift of the class's comments, though, has been that these two conditions are not really symmetrical, even if they would carry linguistic advantages. "Mama's boy" is a term of abuse in a way that "daddy's girl" is not.

So here is the question: do daddy's girls talk like daddy, and do mama's boys talk like mama? I don't think there is any real science on this, because the terms themselves are not that precise. Here is my first guess, though. Daddy's girls are allowed to be more feminine in that role, because they are under the understanding protection of their fathers. Mama's boys, on the other hand, are not more masculine in that role, because they are not protecting their mothers, since they are still kids. So mama's boys may indeed learn to talk in a feminine way – looking at who they are speaking to, listening to the words said and to the emotions not said, trying to be equal to the person they are talking to, rather than one-up. All of which would stand them in good stead in friendships with women – but may work against them in courtship. This may work well for gay men, but create real conflicts for hets.

On the other hand, my eldest daughter says "All the best girls are daddy's girls." I don't think this is a scientific statement, either, but I ain't fighting it.

"Only to My Girlfriends"

Deborah Tannen talks about talk. In a series of books on gender differences in speech, she has come back to the ways in which women use talk to establish connection, similarity, and equality with other people – especially with other women. Women often use what Tannen calls "troubles talk" as the common currency of social relations, sharing common difficulties inflicted by the world, work, children, and, especially, men. The point of sharing troubles is to bring connection. The usual response of other women is to bring sympathy – "you poor thing" – and empathy – "I know just how you feel."

Men, on the other hand, like to joke, banter, and argue about the world, politics, women, and the old standby, sports, as the common currency of social interaction. They are more reluctant to talk about their troubles. When they do so, they are usually looking for a way to solve their problems. From other men this kind of troubles talk normally elicits advice – "here's what you wanna do."

The contrasting styles of men and women are ripe for miscommunication. She tells him her troubles often, and he doesn't know why. He tries to offer helpful advice, and she gets mad. He finally tells her his troubles after much prodding, and she doesn't even try to help solve them. This can be an endless cycle of misunderstanding.

For men, having trouble in your love life is a secret. Telling it to others puts you one-down to them in status. You only reveal such secrets to the most select company, and only if the situation is dire. For women, having trouble in your love life is normal, since men as so inconsiderate and incomprehensible. Sharing those troubles is a gift that you give to other women, to establish connection. A big romantic secret is a big gift that you can generously share with your friends. It makes you the queen-for-a-day of the group, and establishes a bond among those in the know against all outsiders.

Presidential historians recently rated the top ten presidential scandals of all time for the University of Louisville. Bill Clinton's sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky ranked #10. (This seems high to me; I think history will drop all sex scandals down below military and corruption scandals, but that is a male-type argument for another day).

Why did the Lewinsky scandal break? Bill Clinton, the married father who was President of the United States was nonetheless carrying on an affair in the White House with an intern his daughter's age. Not only was this wrong, it was insanely risky. He kept it utterly secret, even, it appears, from his best friends. He, in the way of men, assumed that she would see the danger the same way, and mention it to no one. He asked her, "You haven't told anyone about us, have you?" And what was Monica's fateful answer?

"Only to my girlfriends."

Ambivalence Kills

Recently I proposed the idea that the besetting vice of centrists is complacency. Annie at Ambivablog offered a thoughtful response to this idea and other "Musings on Moderation." She suggests that the vice of centrists is indecision – "seeing too much on all sides, becoming so snarled in subtlety and complexity that you can't factor all your insights quickly enough into a vector for action." I think she has a point – and Lord knows centrists have more than one vice.

The title of this blog is a phrase I live by.

Some have suggested to me that decisiveness is another word for rigidity and even simple-mindedness. The world, they say, is not black and white, but shades of gray. The more appropriate attitude is ambiguity, if not ambivalence.

I disagree. I am all for subtlety and nuance. I'm a Calvinist – I know that all people are likely to think we understand more, and more justly, than we really do. But action requires judgment, choice, decision. When we are ambivalent, we still have to act. Acting ambivalently makes us more likely to screw it up, to do conflicting things, to fail to think through the consequences of our actions. Worse, our ambivalent actions make it impossible for other people to act reasonably in response to us, since our actions are not done for a clear reason in the first place.

I was asked in church this morning why mainline churches, like ours, keep declining. I blurted out, only somewhat flippantly, that we lose our kids because we don't know what we believe. On reflection, this still holds up pretty well. Most people in mainline churches personally accept the traditional faith of the church. But they also believe that tolerance and pluralism are even higher virtues than orthodoxy. So they are ambivalent about what The Church believes, even if they are not torn about what they themselves believe. And this ambivalence makes it very difficult for a church to teach its own children what it thinks is right, nor to invite others to join the faith. That way lies death, and we have forty years of decline to show for it.

Picture a squirrel in the road, its head flickering back and forth at the two opposite curbs, uncertain which way to run, while a car is rushing toward it.

Ambivalence kills.