Tony Blair: An Appreciation

Tony Blair has announced that he will step down as Prime Minister in Britain. This was long expected. His support has sunk lower than President Bush's. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor to the Exchequer (finance minister) will likely succeed Blair as Prime Minister.

My closest British friends are leaders in the Liberal Democratic Party, the third party of British politics for which there is no American equivalent. I have done door-to-door canvassing -- "knocking up" in the wonderful British expression -- for the Lib Dems.

Nonetheless, I have always appreciated Tony Blair for bringing the great Labour Party, the counterpart of my Democratic Party, back to the center (that is, the centre). New Labour, as Blair calls it, broke the socialist stagnation into which Labour had fallen, and shook off the persistent Loony Left.

Reagan had an excellent counterpart in Thatcher. Bush One, the sequel to Reagan, was matched in many ways by Major, the sequel to Thatcher. Clinton and Blair were so well matched in their style, their approach to party leadership, and their finding a middle way between the left and right of the moment that it was eerie.

Then came the election of 2000, which broke the pattern. Blair and Bush don't match. Yes, Blair has been a strong war ally (leader, really) for Bush Two, but they do not match in any other way. If Gore had won the 2000 election (as I think he did in all but the crucial technical sense), then the balance would have been maintained. And with dour and wonky Al Gore in the White House, perhaps Tony Blair would have given way to dour and wonky Gordon Brown five years ago. Blair would have preserved his legacy, Labour would be in a stronger position than it is now, the balance between Mother Country and Eldest Child would have been maintained. Oh, and the United States and Britain would be leading the world in fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, instead of fighting alone in someone else's civil war in Iraq.

"Prom Babies" Feels Like an Urban Legend

"Dear Abby" ran an urgent fear story today about a "national trend" of teenage girls deliberately getting pregnant at their senior prom in order to avoid having to deal with college. The writer reported that her daughter's friends from the lacrosse team, some of whom had been accepted at several Ivy League schools, wanted to have "prom babies" because they just couldn't handle the stress of academic success. The writer thought this must be a national trend, because she heard a similar story in another state.

Neither Snopes.com nor the Urban Legends page at About.com has anything on this one. The story has all the earmarks of an urban legend, though. The story is third-hand to begin with (the mom overheard some girls talking about something they had heard other girls had actually done). Furthermore, Abby says she has never heard of it before either (and she surely hears some doozies daily), though she advises, of course, that having a prom baby would be a bad idea.

I will send this to the good folks at Snopes. I would welcome any intelligence on this matter.

Cheater-Chasing Shysters in Chicago

Chicago's "viagra triangle" promotes sleazy hook-ups. It is the natural place for the family law equivalent of ambulance chasers, the Fetman and Garland law firm, to place their billboard.

In any service business, law-status firms often resort to cheap sex in their ads to get noticed. The two women who run this firm have gone one step lower: get a divorce through us, and you can get cheap sex in real life.

Ironically, Corri Fetman, who dreamed up the ad, said she left her previous firm to set up her own because she experienced sexual harassment and a "demeaning environment." She invented their advertising campaign to "target business professionals who are informed about litigation and can appreciate the specialized, strategic services we offer."

The Faithful Inherit Society By Default

This is the conclusion of Philip Longman, a researcher at the New America Foundation. He wrote The Empty Cradle, about fertility decline across the world. In an excellent interview with Longman in Books and Culture, Brad Wilcox asked Longman what difference religious faith made in the future demography of the world. Longman argued that the people who do have larger families – enough kids to replace themselves, and then some – where much more likely to be religious.

One of Longman's most remarkable numbers is that the fertility gap between believers and nonbelievers in Europe is up to 15 or 20% now. Even in places where non-religious people are dominant in society today, they will have a harder time reproducing their power in the future because they are not reproducing in the most basic sense. Among the liberal educated elite, more than a third have no children or only one.

Fertility is indeed rising a little in Europe, and several European governments are pushing pronatalist policies for the first time in generations. Longman is skeptical that government programs can really nudge the birthrate much. He thinks the short-term financial advantages of no or few children will keep the birthrate down, especially for the educated. It is getting to the point where it takes a strong pronatalist family life – not public policy – to actually get people to bear the costs of kids. Religious people are most likely to value having a bunch of kids, despite the cost. And thus they inherit society, by degrees, and by default.

Evangelicals Adopting Foster Kids: Putting Their Care Where Their Mouths Are

There are half a million kids in foster care. More than 100,000 want to be adopted. Focus on the Family, Rick Warren, and other evangelical leaders are encouraging evangelical Christian families to see foster kids as, in effect, the orphans that the Bible instructs us to care for.

I think this is a great idea. We have had speakers in our family life class talk about the desperate state of foster care, and the truly life-saving help a good foster family – and even better, an adoptive family – can be to kids with no reliable families of their own.

There are, naturally, some people who object, and some who are just suspicious. Leaders of the movement are sensitive to the charge that evangelicals care about kids until they are born, so this is an effort to complete the pro-life agenda. I think the charge is mostly false, but even if it were true, adopting orphans is still a good thing to do. Foster agencies forbid corporal punishment, which many conservative religious families use. I can see the case that kids assigned to foster care have probably already had a bad experience with hitting at home, so corporal punishment would be worse for them than for other kids. Some are concerned that evangelical placement agencies would not work with homosexuals who wanted to be adoptive parents, but that is really about the agencies, not about the evangelical families. And to those who worry that Christian families would take their adopted kids to church – I can only hope so. Evangelicals invite everyone in their household to church – that is what makes them evangelical. Whether they can convince the kids is another matter, but any family might face that problem no matter how they came by their children.

An evangelical Christian movement to care for the orphans of our day seems to me a very good thing.

Derby Hats

Today is the high holy day of the civil religion of Kentucky, Derby Day. One of the many charming and goofy features of the day are over-the-top women's hats. This year Chrysler had a competition for Derby hats suitable to wear in a convertible -- such as the Chrysler Sebring. These are the three finalists. The three designers will go to the Derby, where the winner will get a Sebring. I like the middle one, myself, but the whole thing is so hugely silly that any of them on a real woman would be amusing. It does look aerodynamically impractical for a convertible going more than ten miles an hour, though.

Still, these relatively practical models are not a patch on the great icon of hilarious headgear for race day, Eliza Doolittle's rig at the Ascot Opening Day in "My Fair Lady."

For my part I enjoy the crowd shots as much as the race itself. Enjoy.

Up Next: Legal Incest

There is a serious debate, in this country and in Europe, about whether incest should remain illegal as it has from time immemorial. When the Supreme Court declared all state laws against sodomy an unconstitutional intrusion on a citizen's right to have consensual sex in the Lawrence case, alarmists claimed that bigamy, polygamy, incest, and bestiality would follow. The alarmists were right.

I have written about the coming polygamy crisis. Incest is next.

Of course, nothing is inevitable in social life. We could have a new social movement to restore a public standard of sexual morality. But the movement to make sex, even marriage, a matter of private choice is well advanced. The Supreme Court has pretty nearly dropped the last legal defense. It would be possible to amend the constitution to prohibit incest, but it would be horrible. Liberals would feel obliged to go way out on a libertarian limb, from which it would be difficult to come back. My reading of the present political moment is that the movement toward social conservatism has run out of steam for this generation, and is not likely to be renewed soon.

One of my favorite college professors caused a wonderful scene during a polite dinner with some visiting evaluators. He grew increasingly frustrated as he tried to get them to draw any practical judgments from their philosophy. Finally he rose, and in a carrying voice, demanded to know if they could offer some reason why he shouldn't have sex with sheep - though he put it a bit more graphically than that. Not, mind you, that he wished to do any such thing; rather, he wanted them to explain if their philosophy had any conception of what was good, of how people should live.

We are not quite to the "sex with sheep" stage in the debate over the complete privatization of sex, but we are only a step away.

Premarital Education Discounts Are a Good, Feasible Policy

About a third of married couples take part in premarital education or counseling. Married couples who get premarital education reduce their divorce risk by about a third, among many other benefits. Communities with Community Marriage Policies, in which the town's clergy agree to require all the couples they marry to get premarital counseling, have reduced their divorce rate by an average of 2%, or about 30,000 divorces prevented so far. Most religious marriage counseling is free, and there are free or inexpensive options in most communities. Better marriages and fewer divorces are in the public interest, so most public-minded groups and agencies are very supportive of premarital education.

States can encourage couples to get premarital education by reducing the wedding license fees. The five states that have such policies so far – Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee – give a discount of $20 to $50. This discount is as much a symbol of the state's commitment as it is a serious incentive to get premarital counseling, but it does have an effect.

Alan Hawkins, a family studies professor at Brigham Young, has helpfully reviewed the benefits and costs of state policies encouraging premarital education. He concludes that such policies save money, are politically feasible, and, most importantly, that premarital education improves marriages and reduces the divorce rate.

In Kentucky marriage license fees run about $35. To offer a discount for premarital counseling that would make a difference, we would probably need to raise the initial fee. If the license fee were $50 and the discount were $25 – that is, 50% off for getting an education that will help your marriage – this program could make a difference at almost no new direct cost to the state.

Encouraging premarital education and counseling through a voluntary program and a modest discount from the state is a feasible, helpful, centrist approach to improving marriages – and thus improving public life.

The Perfect Pill?

British researchers are working on a pill that would increase women's sex drive and help them lose weight. I predict that a giant fortune could be made.

So far they are only using it on monkeys, which has led to rump-shaking.

Scary.

Less Committed Marriage

Sometimes economists can see the trees of marginal individual advantage, but miss the forest of the human costs that seeking individual advantage imposes on others. A case is point is a new study by Penn economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson reported in the New York Times. Wolfers and Stevenson report approvingly that weakening marriage means that individuals don't lose so much if their "investment" doesn't bring all the rewards they wanted. They report that no-fault divorce has produced less committed marriages. They also calculate that no-fault also makes it 6 percent less likely that a couple will have a child. Overall, marriage rates are down.

Wolfers and Stevenson, themselves an unmarried and (I believe) childless couple, do not see these developments as weakening society, but as strengthening individuals in getting what they want.

The Upper-Middle Class Have More Options Than Harvard

There is a fine piece in the New York Times about all the amazing smart kids desperate for Harvard who won't get in. The author, a Harvard alumnus and interviewer, does not lament that his kids are not determined to get into Harvard as he, a blue-collar kid, was at their age. For him, an elite college was the one way up. For his kids, who start out in the upper-middle class, they have many more options than he did -- because they know that there a many paths to success.

You Want the Book of Order to Be Your Essential Tenets? Be Careful What You Wish For.

Several presbyteries are considering overtures based on the idea that the standards in the Presbyterian Church (USA) Book of Order are "essential tenets of the Reformed faith," and therefore are binding on all candidates for ordination in the church. Such a declaration would help solve the problem of what, exactly, church officers are bound to when they pledge to be bound to the essential Reformed tenets. However, this solution would create an even bigger problem: it would also drag in the entire Book of Confessions as necessary standards for all church officers.

At the heart of this debate is the "fidelity and chastity" amendment to the Book of Order, G -6.0106b. It says:

Those who are called to this office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage of a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the Confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

I believe that what most proponents of a rule that "the Book of Order standards are essential tenets" want is contained in the first, "fidelity and chastity" sentence. However, what they have not fully reckoned with is that such a rule would also make the second sentence equally binding and universal.

Is any presbytery seriously ready to examine every potential officer of the church on "any practice the Confessions call sin?" Is any presbytery even ready to examine every potential officer on whether they have read and understood every practice the Confessions call sin? Is there any examination committee that is willing to have that same standard applied to itself?

Now, I have long argued that the Book of Confessions was a mistake. Adopting it meant that we have no confession, because we take none of them as a constitutional rule of the church. That is why we only fight over the Book of Order – it is the only really constitutional part of the constitution. The overture under discussion is part of that same shift to treating the BOO as the only really binding part of the constitution. The proposers of the overture, though, have not looked carefully enough at what is in the Book of Order. Declaring the BOO standards "essential tenets" will open more than a can of worms – more like a barrel.

Valuable New Federal Agency

A student reported this to me this week:

"I have a very close friend who after graduation is going into an AmeriCorpse job in Montana."

The Windsors Drop a Badly Needed Middle-Class Upgrade Due to Class Prejudice

Ok, I don't really care who the heir-apparent to the British throne marries. And I don't really know anything about Kate Middleton other than that she is quite pretty. Still, she was described as a sensible middle class girl with a good education. One can only hope that such a person might be able to elevate the tone of the aristocracy through a sensible marriage. But according the British press, the young couple broke up because young William and his friends thought her speech too middle class and her mother made too much of an effort.

Still, I wouldn't wish the horrible pursuit and exposure that marrying into a royal family imposes on any nice person. I don't wish it on the Windsors, either, but there isn't much they can do about it. But it is likely that William and Harry will each marry, and one of those young ladies will likely have to put up with being married to a king.

We can only hope that she has some starch, and can keep it intact.

Black Man in the Klan

Last night Centre College hosted a great convocation by Daryl Davis under the title above. Davis, a professional musician, got to know a number of leading klansmen in the course of writing a book about them. Some of these encounters were fights. But what he spoke of last night were some great triumphs. Davis interviewed a Grand Dragon (state leader) of one Klan group under the eye of an armed bodyguard. He listened respectfully, and the other guy treated Davis respectfully. Afterwards, Davis decided to keep in touch with the Grand Dragon, who becomes in the story a guy named Roger Kelly. The two men meet in one another's homes to eat and talk. Kelly and his friends go to hear Davis play. Davis goes to Klan rallies to hear Kelly, now an Imperial Wizard (national leader) preach.

After years of civil encounter, what Kelly described as the "cement" in which his racial views were embedded crumbled. He quit the Klan. He gave Davis his Imperial Wizard costume, complete with pointy hood and mask. Daryl Davis brought these items out on the stage at Centre College last night.

This was only one of Davis' powerful stories of civility, mutual respect, and redemption.

Daryl Davis showed the power of respectful civility across lines of conflict. That is good gruntling.

Kids From Religious Families Are Better Behaved

Sociologist John Bartkowski asked the parents and teachers of 16,000 kids how well behaved they were. They wanted to know which kids showed the best self-control, were most skilled in relating to other people, and had the best approach to learning. The verdict: if the whole family went to religious services regularly and talked about their faith, the kids were best behaved.

This makes sense to me. If the whole family shares a moral order together, and with a larger community, and regularly renews their commitment by what they do and what they talk about, the kids have a meaningful world to behave within. The researchers did not know why religious institutions had this effect more strongly than other organizations that involve whole families. I think it is because religious faith offers the widest vision of the meaningful order, but I would be interested in argument on this point.

In any case, though, sociology confirms what most religious people could show examples of. IF the whole family really practices their faith with the kids and without ambivalence, the kids will find it makes sense to relate well with other people, too.

What Does Work For Teen Abstinence?

A new study came out from Mathematica, commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services, testing the effects of sexual abstinence education courses aimed at middle schoolers. As previous studies have shown, abstinence-only curricula don't have an effect. One new element in this study: unlike previous studies, taking a "true love waits" pledge or the like had no effect, either.

Most of these programs in this study were targeted at high-risk populations, so the overall results are not representative of all kids. It is good news, therefore, that even in this high-risk population, half were still virgins late in high school.

One section of the study profiled the kids who were abstinent. Of the many factors that the original curricula included, such as improving knowledge of which contraceptives worked best, and what the risks of sexually transmitted diseases were, none made any difference in whether kids would actually avoid sex as teens. Only two factors were significant predictors of teen abstinence:
1) If the middle schoolers supported abstinence themselves; and
2) If their friends did, too.

This study could not take the question back one step further: why do some middle schoolers believe in abstinence, and why do they find friends who agree? I think the heart of the answer to that question is that those kids are more likely to have parents who clearly support waiting for sex, make a credible example in their own lives, protect the kids from some temptations, and know who their kids' friends are.

There is no magic bullet to assure teen abstinence, but there is much to give us hope – most especially, the fact that most kids are smart.

Durkheimian Antidotes to School Shootings

A week after the Virginia Tech shootings, I want to commend columnist Clarence Page for the most sensible response I have read. The conclusion of his April 18 column was

"What our schools need is more people who can serve as antibodies, watching out for troubled students and offering them help."

Social institutions are like organisms. This is the fundamental metaphor of the great sociologist Emile Durkheim's vision of society. In the case of schools, teachers have to be on the lookout for troubled students. The English teachers were on the job at Virginia Tech. The ball was dropped at the next stage, and the law prevented Cho's parents from being notified – something I wrote about last week.

Page also notes that students do tell teachers about scary students. They are even more likely, though, to go to trustworthy outsiders who are in the same "cultural zip code" as the students. Page promoted the idea of adult volunteers in the schools to be the antibodies to violence, to be the response system to distress.

Each of us sometimes runs across people who are sending out warning signals. It is our duty to them to notify the authorities, and an even greater duty to the social whole.

A Loyalist Thought About "Missional Polity"

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has an important task force working on a new "form of government" document. They are guided by the idea that the church has a “missional polity.” The idea is that the church does not have a mission, but that its very essence is mission. The church is part of God's mission to engage the world.

I can almost grasp what it means to say that being is doing -- that the church is what it does. This is akin to my colleagues who talk about "doing theology," a concept (a metaphor, really) that I can almost grasp. I could be convinced to embrace the idea, I think, with more understanding.

But the sociological insight about the church that most of my work has been based on is that the loyalists at the center of the church are loyal to the institution as it actually is. They like the specific congregation they go to, the familiar ways that their presbytery works, and (most of the time) the lumbering steps and counter-steps of the General Assembly. The first mission that the loyalist is committed to is making sure that the actual church is still there tomorrow to do whatever other work it does. For loyalists, the church is an institution with a mission, even if in some larger sense it "is" a mission.

Virtual Infidelity

The MSNBC survey on infidelity that I wrote about yesterday has a companion piece on people who have affairs in virtual worlds, especially Second Life. The opening story is about a torrid lesbian romance between two avatars of people who in real life are married to someone else. More interesting, one of the "lesbians" is the avatar of a man, and perhaps the other one is, too. The man behind one of the characters thinks it isn't really cheating because, while he is in love with the other character, the sex is not real. This brings us back to yesterday's pie chart -- men don't mind the straying love as much as the straying sex. The odds are good, though, that the Second Life player's real wife would resent the love (if she knew about it) even is the sex isn't physically consumated in the material plane.

Very dangerous stuff, affairs. Even the virtual ones are real.

Men Hate Sexual Cheating, Women Hate Emotional Cheating

MSNBC is reporting an interesting survey of infidelity. I can't tell if this is a scientific survey, but its main findings are consistent with scientific surveys. They have a nifty graphic, shown here, that starkly demonstrates the difference between most men and women over just what is wrong with infidelity:

Amend FERPA – Tell Parents if Their Kid is Sick

One good thing that might come of the Virginia Tech tragedy is the momentum to amend the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to let the family in on some crucial information that schools are now obliged to keep private. If a college student like shooter Seung Cho is deemed by the college psychologists to be seriously mentally ill, even a "danger to himself and others," the university is forbidden by federal law to tell his parents. This should change.

Maybe nothing could have been done to keep Seung Cho from hurting someone. His parents, who appear to be quiet immigrants with a limited command of English, have said nothing publicly, so it is hard to even guess what they might have been able to do. Still, parents are more likely to be able to reach a disturbed kid than a university that is hamstrung by bureaucratic regulations. Teachers and students did bring Cho to the attention of university mental health authorities, and they did what they could. But the university could not compel Cho to seek help. And they were forbidden from contacting his parents, the people most likely to get their son into care and out of the way of harming others.

Yeah, sure, there will be some cases in which the parents are the cause of the kid's mental problems. Notifying them might make it worse. So give the college mental health folks the discretion to decide when the family should be notified. But Congress should not prejudge that parents should never be notified that their kids need help. Privacy should not prevent help when it is most needed.

Liviu Librescu, Heroic Professor

A heroic moment within the Virginia Tech tragedy was the way in which Prof. Liviu Librescu held the door shut against the killer so his students could escape out the window. Librescu was killed by a shot through the door, but his class was saved.

Prof. Librescu had survived the Nazis in Romania during the Second World War, and then the communists who succeeded them. Ironically, he was killed, in effect, by the libertarians in his adopted land of the free.

Among the 30 people murdered in Norris Hall, five were professors. None abandoned their posts. At least one, Liviu Librescu, sacrificed all for his students. As a professor myself and a member of the academic community, I honor them.

The First Virginia Tech Murders Would Have Shut Down a College to Grieve

The tragedy at Virginia Tech is unfolding as I write. The first incident seemed to involve a girlfriend and her RA being shot by an irate boyfriend. Then, two hours later, another sixty or so students were shot in a classroom building, about 30 of whom died. I don't want to second guess the administration on what they should have done to stop the classroom shooting rampage.

I am surprised, though, that a murder of two students was not reason to stop classes and bring everyone together to tell the facts and console the many grieving. I am sure that that is what would happen at Centre. Perhaps Virginia Tech is so large and anonymous that it does not shut down when one or two of their number are murdered.

Twice as Many Cuban Immigrants are Secular as Mexican Immigrants

About 14% of Cuban immigrants report that they are not religious, compared to 7% of immigrants from Mexico.

The general story in the New York Times argues that America makes people more materialistic. This is likely to be true. Still, that doesn't explain why the Cubans and Mexicans would respond to the new environment so differently.

Two ideas seem likely to me. First, Cubans are less religious to begin with, from decades of socialism. Second, Cuban immigrants are more likely to be middle class to begin with than Mexicans, and therefore start further on the road to irreligion. I incline to the latter view.

Peeps

Danny and Clara are my four-year-old nephew and niece.


"Danny, why did Clara eat only the heads off all her Peeps?"
"Maybe they were looking at her."

Choose Responsibility: License 18 – 20-Year-Old Drinkers

John McCardell was president of Middlebury College. He dealt with quite a bit of binge drinking and stupid drinking by underage students. Because drinking was both widespread and illegal for most students, the college was in the worst-of-both-worlds bind. They could not successfully prevent all youth drinking, but only drive it more or less underground. And they could not legally teach students how to drink responsibly.

When McCardell retired as president, he decided to do something about it. He has created an organization, Choose Responsibility, to teach and license 18, 19, and 20 year olds to drink alcohol.

I think Choose Responsibility has a great idea, and I support it wholeheartedly.

I am a teetotaler. I will have a sip of champagne in a toast if my mom asks me to, but that is about it. I don't care for alcohol, and am Irish enough not to want to develop a taste for it. I don't think alcohol is immoral – Jesus made wine, so it can't be all bad – but I don't want to have it in my life.

Nonetheless, most of the people I know and respect do drink alcohol in moderation. Most students will try alcohol in college. Most young people will drink as a rite of passage as well as a social good in its own right.

What I worry about is binge drinking and drinking to get drunk. This is a problem on my campus, and just about every campus in America. For the non-collegiate young adults, drunken drinking is probably an even bigger problem, with fewer institutional controls.

I want those students who do drink to learn how to do it in moderation. I think the best resource that an educational institution has to achieve any goal with students is to teach about it. Moreover, I think that the faculty are, on the whole, an excellent source of examples of how to drink responsibly and moderately. Colleges miss a vital teachable moment when we do not teach students how to drink the right way.

The initial debate has been tangled up with the drunk driving debate, which is not really relevant. Student drunkenness is still a problem even if they don't drive. Leaving students to pick up their alcohol education in the gutter makes no more sense than leaving them to learn to drive covertly and by trial-and-error.

At this moment, the Choose Responsibility movement seems quixotic, but it is a good idea. Its time will come, and soon.

HPV Vaccine is a Centrist Issue

I have two teenage daughters. This summer, they will get the Human Papillomavirus vaccine. They are good girls, and I expect they will stay that way. Still, I don't know what will happen in the future, including the whole sexual history of their future (and now entirely hypothetical) husbands. The idea that there is a vaccine to prevent cancer and other lesser horribles seems like a wholly good thing to me. I am as grateful for the existence of the HPV vaccine as I am for the polio vaccine. If they ever invent a male version of the HPV vaccine, my son will get it, too.

So why is this an issue? Some people want to make the vaccine mandatory. Others opposed giving it at all. That is exactly the situation that begs for a centrist solution.

The argument for making it mandatory is the same as the argument for other mandatory vaccinations. This is a contagious disease that we can prevent, so let's prevent it. The vaccination cost is much smaller than the treatment cost. The whole society would be better off if we could wipe out this virus by giving it no hosts to live in.

I do think it would a good thing if all people who could benefit from the vaccine get vaccinated. I will leave it to the doctors to specify that population. Right now the CDC is saying girls and women from 11 to 26 should be vaccinated. I am not sure why they set that upper bound, but I will assume there is a good medical reason.

The argument against using the vaccine at all is that making sex safer encourages extramarital sex. This negative argument is advanced by pro-family Christians, but it is based on fear – if kids fear sex, they won't have any. I am a pro-family Christian, but I am against fear mongering. As I have argued before, fighting the culture of fear is the gruntled centrist issue. I try to dissuade people from extra-marital sex because it isn't good for their marriages and for the culture of marriage – not because it might kill them. We should try to prevent disease even if the people who get it in some way deserve it. Moreover, the sex diseases can easily spread to people who really don't deserve it.

Still, HPV, though very widespread, is not quite as contagious as, say, the polio virus. If some people opted out it would be a loss, but it wouldn't defeat the purpose of mass vaccination. They might opt out on moral grounds, or on sheer civil liberty grounds, both of which, I think, a free society should accommodate whenever possible.

So where does this leave us? I favor state-mandated vaccination of all girls, with the state paying the bill for poor people. If some people want to opt out, they should be permitted to. The rest of us can try to persuade them not to – as I am trying to do now – but that is a freedom that a free country can allow. Besides, a few years later, those "opted out" girls can make their own decision to get vaccinated if they want to.

What Should Classy Women Do With Don Imus, Woolly-Headed Fool?

One of my favorite interlocutors asked me a pointed question this morning:

"Am I the only one wondering why on earth Rutgers University or its coaches would be willing to have their women basketball players give Don Imus an audience, be in the same room with him or participate in his repentance-and-redemption dog and pony show?

I think that they should issue a terse statement that Mr. Imus is not welcome on their campus.

It’s like some fundamental law has been forgotten in all the media drama. Nobody is so important that they get to call a group of young women 'nappy headed ho’s' and then get to be in the same room with them."

I agree entirely with the main point here: no one is so important that they deserve an audience with people they have insulted.

I also have thought Don Imus was a fool throughout his career. I don't understand what his audience is. At least Rush Limbaugh has "dittoheads" who agree with his views. The "shock jock" audience, on the other hand, seems to listen for nothing more than that something shocking be said, whether they agree with it or not. It is no surprise to me that he said something shockingly stupid about the Rutgers women's basketball team. He says something shockingly stupid every day. That is his job.

If I were the president of Rutgers I would have blasted Imus and asked other responsible persons in the university to publicly help make him and all his works unwelcome at Rutgers.

Still, I am glad that coach Vivian Stringer and the young ladies who play for her responded to Imus as they did. They were so classy that they raised the tone of sports discussion in general, if only for a moment.

Which brings us to the question of why and whether the team should meet with Imus. If I were the coach, I would not meet with Imus, and I certainly wouldn't go to his studio. On the other hand, the women of the team seem to be considerate young ladies. They don't want to just leave Imus in the gutter, precisely because he is in the gutter. They are giving him a chance to redeem himself. Given the mealy-mouthed apologies that he has given already, I think he will probably make it worse.

Nonetheless, I think the Lady Scarlet Knights continue to show class. I look forward to their return to the tournament next year.

Emotional Moodreading Drug For Men

Women are better at reading emotions from other people's facial expressions than men are. A new study suggests that oxytocin, the sociability-inducing hormone that women get by the bucketload from childbirth, boosts mood-reading. Researchers in Zurich found that men could also read moods from faces much better after they were sprayed with synthetic oxytocin -- but only for a short time.

So, gentlemen, if you ever find yourself caught in an "if you really loved me you'd read my mind" loop, carry a discrete supply of oxytocin in a nasal sprayer and give yourself an edge. Think of it as leveling the playing field.

Who knows, maybe someday they will put the stuff in the water supply, like fluoride, to improve social life.

R.I.P Johnny Hart: He Put the A.D. in B.C.

Johnny Hart, the cartoonist who drew the "Wizard of Id" and "B.C." comic strips, died over the weekend. As the most explicitly Christian major cartoonist, it was appropriate that he died at the drawing board on Easter weekend.

I have thought it happily peculiar that the pre-historic cartoon called "B.C." was the one most likely to talk about Christ. In recent years Hart even added a character named "Anno Domini" to make ingenuously Christian observations to the cavemen and cavewomen who populated the strip.

Thank you, Johnny Hart, for adding to the wonderful weirdness of life.

A Joyous Easter to You All!

The Scariest Family Idea: Marriage is Just for the Rich

As the marriage rate reaches disastrous lows among some poor subgroups in America, a scary idea has been developing: marriage is just for the rich. In neighborhoods where babies are common but husbands are not, a wedding is something women hope for, the way they hope to win the lottery.

This kind of thinking misses the powerful effect of marriage as a cause of being middle class, not just as an effect of being born there. People who finish high school and stay married have a slim chance of ending up poor, not matter where they started out in the class structure.

The overall divorce has been going down, led by a decline in the divorce rate among college graduates. College graduates know the newest information about family life – including the knowledge that marriage is good for women and for men, that married people live longer, are happier, and end of richer. College graduates are doing less cohabiting for a similar reason. Things are looking up for marriage from the middle of the social structure upward.

Putting these two ideas together, I see this message: smart poor people get an education and a marriage. The people with the most education, no matter how poor they started out, are already getting the message. The next step is to preach this good news to the poor: you can be married, and it will go well with you and your children.

Isn’t There Something Wrong With the Triply Wed?

The New York Times has a long story by Mireya Navarro that has been causing a stir among marriage supporters. “A Double Standard for the Triply Wed” asks two important questions. The first is the question in the title: are women who have been married three times or more judged more harshly than men in a similar circumstance – the current Mrs. Giuliani, for example, compared to her husband, presidential candidate Rudy.

This is a fair question. I think women usually are judged more harshly for their sexual history than men are. I disagree with this double standard. If anything, I think that men should be judged more harshly for cutting and running as a way of life, because they still have more options afterwards than the women they leave behind. This question is not so hard, really. There are few public defenders of the sexual double standard now.

The second question raised by this article, though, is of a different order. Constance Ahrons, author of The Good Divorce and cited as a divorce expert in the article, says that the multiply-married face the judgment that “’Something must be wrong with you.”’ We haven’t gotten over that for second and third marriages.” It is not so surprising that Ahrons, who decided not to remarry after her second divorce but just cohabit with whatever partner she might have, would oppose judgment. Indeed, I think half the reason that the sexual double standard has few defenders today is not so much because the double standard is unjust, but because many people are afraid to voice a judgment at all.

Avoiding judgment is impossible and self-contradictory. Claiming that we ought to avoid judging is a judgment. Being against judgment is, I think, more of a tactic to avoid thinking a problem through than it is a compassionate response to the people with the problem.

I think people who have married, divorced, and remarried several times do have a problem. The thrice-wed make up only about 3 percent of the population, so it is not a huge problem. And that 3 percent includes remarried widows and widowers – not the same issue morally at all.

In any given case there may be a series of good reasons explaining multiple remarriages. As a group, though, I think it is reasonable to suspect that, yes, there is something wrong with the triply-wed. The main thing that I think is likely to be wrong is that they have the wrong idea of what marriage is. We should help them, and help everyone better understand what marriage is. Helping requires judgment.

Making Nerd Culture Pay: Google vs. Viacom

My growing research interest is in the family life of the knowledge class, the class that makes its living from the control of knowledge. Google is a central knowledge class tool. Google, the company, is also a model of knowledge class culture. It has found a way to make money – gigantic vaults of money – out of distributing other people's knowledge. Google was recently rated the best place to work in America. It is the current epitome of nerd culture.

Google bought YouTube, and with it bought a copyright suit for all the TV shows that its many users upload and download without paying the producers of the TV shows. Shows like Viacom's "The Daily Show" – which led Viacom to file the biggest copyright suit ever. According to Clive Thompson's interesting article in New York magazine, Viacom and Google will probably settle for a pile of money, after rattling intellectual sabers about copyright freedom.

The interesting part of the conflict for me is the core Google idea that all information should be available to anyone – they just sort it. Yet my first reaction tells me that I fall in the middle between corporate culture and knowledge class culture. It seems obvious to me that if Viacom pays a bundle to make TV shows, then millions of people see the show without paying Viacom or even watching its advertiser's ads, then Viacom will not have enough money to make new shows in the future. This is an argument I had with Napster-using students before the courts drove a stake through the old piratey Napster's heart.

In the end, these two corporations will settle it the good corporate way: with money. In the larger cultural struggle between the knowledge class and the corporate class, though, I think the rising knowledge class needs to develop a more sophisticated theory of knowledge production. The Google/Napster/teen pirate theory is all about consumption: the corporations have already made the knowledge, and already made their profit from it, so now it belongs to the people, man. An exclusive focus on consumption, without any thought to production, is a perennial failing of the soft-headed left. Now, though, the knowledge class is in a real position of power, and therefore of responsibility. The distributors of knowledge have to be concerned about how knowledge will be produced tomorrow. This concern is both high-minded and self-interested, driven by both the love of truth and their interest in having something to distribute tomorrow.

I don't have the answer yet, but it helps to have the right question: what should the knowledge class theory of knowledge production be?

No Klimt for the Married

The New York Times has a light piece by Joyce Wadler on people being turned off by their dates' weird home decorating. One of the examples she found was from a guy who was interested in a woman until he saw that she still had a poster of Gustave Klimt's "The Kiss," as well as a poster of Robert Doisneau's famous French photograph from the '50s of a couple kissing. He acknowledged that they were romantic, but “It’s romantic when you’re 16. At some point you need to outgrow it.”

Which raises the question: what is romantic art for married people? You could have any theme at all, of course. There is no reason that married people's art need be about marriage. We have a poster of Steichen's photograph of the Flatiron Building in the mist in our bedroom – which, I admit, we have had since college. Time, I suppose, for an upgrade.

Still, I think it would be perfectly appropriate, even romantic, for married people to have wedding art in their homes. One of my favorites is shown above, of the bride in the Victorian registry office. Can anyone identify it? I can find the image, but not the painter. Ironically, this one was recently the subject of controversy. The Liverpool Registry Office decided it might be politically incorrect to have this on the wall when homosexual couples came by, so they took it down.

Wade Horn, My Favorite Member of the Bush Administration, Is Stepping Down

Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary at the Administration for Children and Families of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced today that he is stepping down. He was the president of the National Fatherhood Initiative before joining the government. Horn has been a moderate and sensible proponent of marriage and fatherhood for years. Too bad.

Married Religious Parents Can Close the Gap for Black and Latino Kids

As everyone knows, there is a big gap in school achievement between white kids, on the one hand, and black and Latino kids, on the other. A new study, though, shows that black and Latino kids who live with their married parents in very religious homes close that gap.

William Jeynes, an education professor at the University of California Long Beach, is about to release a study based on the NELS, the National Educational Longitudinal Survey. Specifically, Jeynes compared white students from all kinds of family structures with black and Latino kids who were highly religious and lived with their own married parents. When Jeynes compared these groups, controlling for social class, the white/non-white gap in math and reading virtually disappeared. The science gap remained significant, though it was much smaller.

According to the Christian Post, Jeynes will present his findings to the National Press Club on April 3rd. I expect to see more of this story after that.

"300" Is Hilarious

The movie "300" is beautiful, has great fight scenes, and is completely over the top. The best part is the punchline: the Greeks are fighting the Persians to battle "tyranny and mysticism." Xerxes the god-king represents mysticism? The Spartan pagans, who show their own temple to be corrupt, are the defenders of clear-eyed rational faith? Wow.

The whole episode is enhanced by fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran – which surely would have condemned Xerxes to death as the worst kind of idolater – blasted the film as an attack on Iranian culture.

You Have to Choose How to Raise Your Kids, Even If You Don't Want To

Sociologist Annette Lareau studies how the different home lives of middle class and working class kids gives an advantage to the middle class kids in school, in dealing with other professionals, and in later life. The middle class parents are more likely to engage in "concerted cultivation" of their children's lives. Parents help kids fill every minute with structured activities, which all work in concert in the larger project of cultivating the child's talents. Working class parents, by contrast, are more likely to give their kids much more control of their free time to promote what Lareau calls their "natural growth." From the middle class perspective, the working class kids grow up with stunted potential. From the working class perspective, the middle class kids grow up with no childhoods.

When parents today are faced with the question of how much they should try to structure their children's time, they (we) often think back to our own childhoods. In most cases, parents today grew up with less structured lives than most middle class children today do. Mrs. G. and I are tempted to not schedule our kids so that they can have a life and do what they want. As I reflect on the difference between my early adolescence and my son's, though, some crucial differences emerge. Sure, I watched lots of stupid cartoons. But there were not enough TV options, and no computer options, to keep me from reading or playing outside all the time. My son, on the other hand, could play "World of Warcraft" 24/7. That is, in fact, his plan for the summer. If we choose no structure at all for his time, the choice will be made for us by the "new media."

Even if you don't want to structure every moment of your child's life, not to choose is to make a choice. The culture will rush in to fill the vacuum.

Even natural growth requires concerted cultivation.

Baby Puts Up With Disco

"Baby Loves Disco" sponsors parties at disco clubs for parents and toddlers. It is real dance music, in a darkened club, with real booze for the parents. The kids wander around and play. Some effort is made to make the experience safer for kids – blankets are put over the debris on the dance floor, the higher dance platforms are roped off, and adults are supposed to keep their drinks at least a yard above the floor.

Adults who liked to party before kids like it because they can keep on dancin'. Those who Look With Alarm at any event where kids might get hurt have a plenty to be alarmed about. Personally, none of this kind of partying is my cup of tea. Still, I don't want to encourage the culture of fear by simply opposing Baby Loves Disco because it might hurt kids. Everything might hurt kids. In fact, I think some kids will certainly get hurt – they will fall off something, get stepped on, find someone's beer, get cut by something left by previous ravers, etc., etc. This will be bad. But kids can get hurt sharing most adult venues.

What struck me about the news account of Baby Loves Disco was that there was no evidence that the babies actually loved disco. Sure, little kids love to dance. But the appeal of loud thumping dance music in a darkened club for adults is the offer of sex and danger – two things little kids don't need, or like.

Should "Baby Loves Disco" be allowed? Sure. It's a free country. Do I think anyone should do it? No.

Get a babysitter.

Why Are Right-Wing Comics So Secular?

This one is off the cuff. I write it to clear my head, and I invite comments.

Standup comedy is overwhelmingly liberal-to-anarchist as a field (I was going to say "discipline," but that seems the wrong word). Still, there are some comics and humorous commentators of a right-of-center position who have been successful. Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter come to mind.

The puzzle for me, though, is that most conservatives are religious, but most of the conservative humorists I can think of are not. The humorists tend be adopt a libertarian persona, usually angry. They are as likely to attack religious leaders as the more common leftist comics are. Even when they are formally pro-family, they tend to be more libertarian than cultural-conservative, more Milton Friedman than James Dobson.

Perhaps cultural conservatism, as a position, can be a passion because it is serious, not funny. When Stephen Colbert parodies cultural conservatism, it is funny because the character "Stephen Colbert" sees nothing to laugh about. When Bill O'Reilly does the same material straight, however, it is rarely deliberately funny.

There is such a thing as religious humor, but it tends to be gentle and apolitical. Political humor, on the other hand, is rarely pro-religious, even if it is anti-anti-religious – attacking the excesses of the ACLU in restricting hymn singing by school choirs, for example.

It should be possible to have a funny Pat Buchanan. I just can't think of any.

Any help from the great reading world?

By Age 3, Professional Kids Have a Larger Vocabulary Than Welfare Parents

Betty Hart and Todd Risley have been studying language development in infants and toddlers for a quarter century. They have been doing this not simply for academic reasons, but to find the real causes of the advantage that higher class kids have over poor kids. Their main finding is that, in general, the higher the class of the family, the more they talk to their babies. And their amount of talk– not their social class or income or race -- predicted their children’s intellectual accomplishments.

The most graphic example of what difference this makes is the finding I have used as the title of this post.

All families talk some to get on with the necessary business of life. What is added in talkative families is talk that describes the world, expresses emotions, tries out ideas. Every family has an average level of talkativeness, starting from this baseline of necessary business. The average family in Hart and Risley's study said something 400 times an hour, with the group ranging from 200 to 600 utterances an hour. This means that the average 3 year old has heard 8 million words; the children of silent families hear only half of that, while the toddlers of the talkers have already heard 12 million words. By three, kids learn to talk at their family's average level, and stop there.

Hart and Risley are quick to point out that there are enormous variations in how much parents talk to their children. There are talkative welfare parents and silent professionals. In particular, the classes in the middle of this range, the working class and lower white collar families, show a huge range in how talkative they are.

So talk to your babies. About anything.

Murder Hits Close to Home

You may have seen the story of Chiara Levin, a beautiful and accomplished young woman who was murdered in Boston over the weekend. She was the daughter of a colleague. I have known her for years. She appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not the intended target of the shooter.

This is a tragedy for the family, and has cast a pall over our little town.

My only larger concern is that it is the kind of story that some of the cable reporters might get obsessive over. If they play it as "beautiful white girl killed by black gangbangers," the Nancy Grace-type ghouls will latch on to it. I already disliked that kind of reporting in cases where I didn't know the people. The thought they they might hound my friends out of pretended concern is angering.

Not as gruntled as usual today.

Hug your young people.

Will King Charles III Be an Anglican?

Elizabeth II, the Queen of Great Britain, is not only an Anglican, she is the nominal head of the Church of England. One of the titles that she still bears, inherited, ironically, from Henry VIII, is "Defender of the Faith" – ironic because the title was bestowed by the pope, before they had their little falling out.

Prince Charles, the heir apparent, has said that he will change that title to "Defender of Faiths." So, will Charles be head of the Church of England when he is king? Will he defend all faiths, while keeping his own the established church of England?

The Church of England is in deep trouble. Though most English people are members, very few attend. The Anglican communion worldwide is fighting with itself. The Archbishop of Canterbury can't get the U.S. Episcopal Church to play nicely with all the other churches in the touchy worldwide organization.

Perhaps the accession of King Charles III (or George VII, or whatever he picks) will lead to the best thing that could happen to the Church of England: disestablishment. Christianity as a whole is in deep trouble in Britain, and no one thing will help much. But the Anglican Church might be free to evangelize and grow, if it were freed from the responsibility of being the praying arm of what has become a secular establishment, presiding over a diverse society.

I don't know what Charles Windsor's actual faith is. He has not been the stolid churchwoman that his mother is. He has invested his political capital in defending traditional architecture, rather than traditional religion. His sons, likewise, have not suggested that church is the core institution in their lives.

Someday, Elizabeth II will not be queen, hard though that is to imagine. Odds are that her son will succeed her. And sometime after that may come a day when the Church of England is one church among many, the British monarch is just another member of that church, or even another denomination, and the Anglican communion is a loose association of denominations – led from Nairobi.

Paracleats Beat Preemptive Strikers

Kim, a wonderful former student of mine now enjoying Yale Divinity School, reports that the Divvies' intramural soccer team, the Paracleats, had a good season. Their big win of the season was over the International Relations graduate student team, the Preemptive Strikers.

As an old Divvy, my heart is warmed by the pun and the victory.

Women Gaze Directly, But Talk Indirectly; Men Talk Directly, But Gaze Indirectly

This is another insight from teaching Deborah Tannen's work on gender differences in communication, while appreciating the deep symmetry between men's and women's ways of doing things. Tannen does not say the title line of this post directly. We thought it up in class discussion, putting together different elements of her work and our own experience.

In speech, men concentrate on the message, the content of what is being said. They do not need to look at someone to hear what he or she is saying. Indeed, sometimes looking at someone while they speak is a distraction from concentrating on what they say. Women, on the other hand, read the metamessage as well as the message – the tone of voice, body language, and subtle expressions that go along with what is being said. This is why it is essential for women to look at the person you are talking to. Otherwise, you would miss half of what was being communicated.

The women in the class often report that it drives them nuts when the men in their lives won't look at them when the women are speaking. Men do not report a similar problem; when two men talk to one another, they normally look anywhere but directly into one another's eyes. To do so either means the personal communication is extraordinarily intimate – or a challenge.

The men in the class often report that it drives them nuts when the women in their lives won't say directly what they mean. Women do not report a similar problem; when two women talk to one another, they normally speak any way but directly telling one another what to do. To do so means the personal communication is extraordinarily intimate (as in a family) – or a challenge.

Knowing these characteristic differences in communication lets us appreciate the ingenious complementarity of human life. And when these differences in communication style get in the way of actually communicating, we have another ingenious human skill to work around the problem: meta-communicating about how we are communicating. And, if necessary, we can both look at, and speak to, one another directly while meta-communicating.

Boys Play Sports to Win, Girls Play for Fun: Boys Date for Fun, Girls Date to Win

This is an insight that comes from teaching the sociobiology of mate selection (through David Buss) and gender differences in communication (through Deborah Tannen) at the same time. Of course there are many individual exceptions. What is interesting to me is the symmetry of the broad trend.

When boys pick teams for sports, the captains (who are usually the best players) take turns picking the best remaining players, until everyone is picked and the teams are about even. This makes for the most competitive game. If a dispute arises in the game, boys find a quick way to settle it, so they can get back to the game. They play sports to win.

Girls find this way of picking teams horrifying. When I put the question of picking teams to mixed groups, the girls overwhelming say that they would pick their friends, regardless of how that would affect the outcome of the game. They would find it hard to play at all against their friends. If a dispute arises in the game, it can take a long time to resolve because everyone's loyalty comes into play. Often, if the dispute can't be resolved, the game ends. They play to have fun within their social relationships.

When it comes to dating, boys tend to see each date as an end in itself, a fun thing to do with a girl you enjoy. They can play an endless series of dates without asking themselves "where is this relationship going?" They date for fun. Girls, and especially women, often ask themselves "could I marry this guy?" on the first date. They reassess, endlessly, with their girlfriends, at each subsequent step in the relationship. If they can't see the relationship ever leading to marriage, they are likely to end it and move on. They date to win.

One of Tannen's great strengths is that she sees the value of men's and women's different ways of understanding and communicating. A good society needs both. A good life is balanced by the symmetry of men's and women's complementary tendencies. And we can all have a smoother life when we understand the worldview and motives of our complements.

Lost World

We visited alma mater back in the blue Northeast this week, returning child #1 to school after spring break. We met with one of our honored old teachers. Mrs. G. and I reminded him that he has said in an interview that country music seemed to be about a lost world, in which people married, raised kids, went to church, worked hard, honored America, and grew old together. Given a chance to talk about it, we offered that we lived in that world in small-town Kentucky. Our daughter, who is having a wonderful time and learning a great deal, nonetheless feels the loss of ideological diversity compared to her high school. She said she is used to having Republicans to argue with; now she is at a school where even the head of College Republicans is a Democrat. The political argument there is intra-left, as for example when the five different homosexual organizations fought over how sexually explicit the "coming out day" chalk drawings should be.

I have learned to like country music since moving here, in part because it includes the stories of people over 25, especially the great majority of people who marry and have kids. Small towns are not really conservative - they have the range of views that we find in the country as a whole, as the letters to the editor section of the local paper can attest.

Swarthmore, and academic world in general, are not a lost world, so much as an artificial world, a bubble even within their own counties. Danville, and the thousands of small towns like it, are not a lost world – they are the regular world. And much as I love alma mater, and always will, I am glad to be home.

How the Greeks Pick Their Leaders

This is the second part of Taylor's account of how gender differences show up in fraternities and sororities – at least in the two she knows best.

"Working off of my last entry about the differences between sororities and fraternities, I wanted to talk about the differences in voting and how indicative it is of the gender of the members.
In [my sorority], the saying is, “the office selects the officer.” What that means is that you don’t run for any position in the sorority. Your fellow sisters nominate you for the position and then we vote (no one can see what anyone else’s vote is). That way, the members of our chapter can see who has what talents, instead of the person themselves choosing what office they think is best. Also, no one is expected to talk about voting or “slating” (as we call it) until the actual voting session takes place. That means no one should be walking around saying, “So and so should be president and so and so should be rush chair.” It works out well for us but it’s easy to see that it is a feminine way of doing things. We completely avoid any conflict because voting is never spoken of until one night of the year. Disagreement is discouraged – if anyone has a problem with an officer getting an office they have 24 hours to voice their concerns but it has to be a major problem, like the woman has been caught doing drugs or something equally bad. So, we effectively avoid any conflict in the entire situation. It seems like this is the most feminine way to go about voting that could ever be imagined. No one's feelings get hurt, no one knows what anyone else really wants, everyone is encouraged to accept and be happy about the officers. It’s very peaceful and reasonable. Of course, it has its problems. Mainly because women will avoid conflict with the person they are upset with but they will talk about that person behind their back. So, if one woman thinks another woman should not have an office then the secretive talking begins. It’s very typical of women and really displays well how we act around each other.
With [my boyfriend's] fraternity, voting is not at all similar. Whoever wants an office runs for it. They decide they want to be president, the write a speech, they (and the other candidates) give it and then they vote. It’s very direct, the conflict is in the open. The competition is obvious and the voting is open. Everyone can see how everyone else votes. It’s masculine because they have the competition out in the open, they don’t try to avoid conflict at all. I’m sure there are arguments during the process but they don’t last very long and in the end, people are happy with who gets what."

How Fraternities and Sororities Git-R-Done

[While Centre is on spring break, I will draw upon some excellent observations made by students in my family life class. Enjoy.]

Centre College is blessed with a number of single-sex organizations, living experiments in gender differences of all kinds. My student Taylor developed some interesting observations on how power is distributed through the offices of Greek organizations. In both kinds of organizations, when the officers work as expected, the whole organization really does function. I will quote from Taylor's edited observations on offices and officers today. Tomorrow I will share some of her findings on Greek elections.

"We talked in class about the differences between fraternity and sorority officer hierarchies and I thought that the differences were really striking. Because not only are the men's officers more hierarchical, their offices aren't taken as seriously.

In my sorority, each person is slated into a position that suits her personality and she is expected to perform her tasks to the best of her ability. For example, I am the Secretary and that means at any sorority function I have to take attendance and if people don't come, I deal with the repercussions. So, I go to all of the meetings and keep up with people. I take my job really seriously and so do all of the other officers. If anyone has a question about attendance, they come to me. If I have a question about rush, I ask the rush chair. If I have a question about an event, I ask the events chair. It's more like everyone really knows their areas and we ask each other and work together. The only person that has any true upper-hand is the president.

With men, it's way different. My boyfriend is the Secretary for his fraternity. Not only does he not have to go to anything, no one else is held responsible for not going to something. Occasionally, there will be one big event at which all the members must be in attendance and if they're not there then [her boyfriend] has to fine them but most of the time they don't pay. And the other officers don't take their jobs seriously at all. The only person who is truly accountable for anything in the whole fraternity is the president. It's really unnerving to me because I don't know how they get anything accomplished.

Anyway, I guess the point is that the sororities and fraternities are organized differently. For us, the president does have a slightly elevated position but everyone else in an office knows that they have a specialty and are expected to perform at that task. Since women in leadership tend to want to avoid making hierarchies, it makes sense. It's a very level playing field where no officer feels less important. We rule very much by consensus and no one makes any decisions without the input of the other sisters. But for men, the president literally holds all the power. He, of course, has been voted into that position and so everyone recognizes his power but none of the officers wield the same authority that he does. They never make group decisions and rarely even have meetings to talk about decisions. But, the president makes all the decisions and somehow things get accomplished."

A thoughtful female correspondent, after reading the above, wrote:


The sorority offices call for results AND getting the results within relationships. That's why sororities are real preparation for chick power. In school settings, you can feel the women who have done that Greek thing making things move. (Would actually be a darned good scientific study: relative sorority participation of women in various education positions.)

Yale Divinity Ash Wednesday is OK

Students at Yale Divinity School read the Ten Commandments, and repented of breaking them. Then they burned the paper to ash. They read the Ten Amendments – that is, the Bill of Rights – and repented of breaking them, and burned them to Ash, too. The Divinity students then put the ashes on their foreheads.

This sounds like the kind of street theater that gives novel liturgy (and leftist politics) a bad name. But the more I think about it, the more I think this is was a well-done act. The students did not blame others, but repented of their own sins and complicity in sins. They wore the sign of their repentance.

Some people have, of course, fussed about the Ash Wednesday ceremony. As I read their criticisms, though, I think they miss the distinction between protest and repentance. This was not a protest. It was an act of contrition.

Squirmishes

Deborah Tannen writes about how boys "fight for friendship." Annelise, a student in my family class, applying this insight to the young children she works with at a preschool, has come up with a wonderful word for these solidarity-making fights. An excerpt from her journal:

I have noticed this fighting phenomenon with boys. They are always picking fights and their first reaction to someone who has said or done something they didn’t like is to shove them. Working with kids, I have to break up these little squirmishes all the time. The fights, however, do not damage the boys’ relationship. One boy might get mad at another and push or hit him, but no matter how upset the boys are at the time (sometimes everyone starts crying), they will soon go back to playing together. When I say soon, I mean it might be seconds and no longer than a couple of minutes. Girls, on the other hand, only fight if they are mad enough to stay mad.

Chinese Communists Impose Private Property, Sowing Seeds of Their Own Destruction

There was a wonderful New Yorker cartoon a few years ago when the Soviet Union fell. It showed the devil in his office, speaking into his intercom. The caption read, “Miss Jones, find Joe Stalin. Tell him communism is dead.” The devil has, appropriately, a devilish grin.

We could bring that cartoon out again today, changing only the name of the sufferer. Karl Marx said that private property is the fundamental idea, the fundamental exploitation, on which capitalism rests. The owners expropriate the value created by the workers as the capitalists’ private property in exchange for mere wages. Ironically, though, the workers cherish the sanctity of “private property,” because they hope to have some someday. The very people who are most exploited, Marx said, preserve the stability of the system that exploits them by venerating its central dogma. BUT, says Marx, the capitalists sow the seeds of their own destruction this way. The workers become united in their misery. It only takes a genius to show them the truth of their condition – like Karl Marx, thought Karl Marx, or Stalin, thought Stalin, or Mao, thought Mao – to rally the people to overthrow capitalism. Communism does not merely take property from the owners for the workers. It takes the idea of property from the capitalists and gives it to the state, um, that is, er, the people. The foundation of communist dogma is the abolition of private property.

The Chinese Communist Party used all the muscle of tyranny to force through its captive legislator a law restoring private property, over the opposition of the remaining communists in the People’s Republic.

“Miss Jones, find Mao Zedong. Tell him communism is dead.”

“Girls Gone Wild” for the New York Times Set

The New York Times magazine has a titillating article about the “cuddle puddle” at Stuyvesant High School. Stuyvesant is one of the hardest and most competitive magnet schools in one of the hardest and most competitive cities. They draw kids from all over New York, including children of former hippies and aging avant-gardists. It is a tough crowd to shock. Within the school’s 3000 students, a handful engage in show-off hook-ups with anyone and everyone within the group.

The one sociological fact in this extended anecdote comes from the first teen sex survey done by the National Center for Health Statistics. That survey revealed that 11% of teen girls had experimented with some kind of same-sex physical encounter. This is the same percentage of women 15 to 44 who have had similar encounters. The Times reads this as a trend of increasing same-sex experimentation – or even of rising non-heterosexuality – among teenagers. It is probably true that more girls are experimenting sexually with other girls than was true a generation to two ago, especially in liberal enclaves. Still, on the face of it, if all of a group shows the same percentage of some behavior as one subset, then it could just as well mean that all the action is taking place in the subset. In this case, if 11% of teen girls kiss girls, and that percentage doesn’t rise when all women up to age 44 are included, then we could reasonably guess that all the experimentation happened in the teen years. This is probably too strong a conclusion, but it does seem reasonable that single young women experiment sexually with other women, but few mature women do. And this experimentation does not translate into large percentages of permanent homosexuality: the national lesbian rate seems to be steady at about 2%.

The stars of the cuddle puddle show are pretty girls who kiss each other in public and talk endlessly about sex – until they find a serious boyfriend. They have found a way to be famous within a school of high achievers, and shock their parents, and get an admiring profile in the nation’s leading newspaper. Which is more than the spring-break boob-flashers at Panama City of the more proletarian Girls Gone Wild could manage.

Separate Bedrooms for the Rich

Another reason our houses are getting enormous and our rich neighborhoods sprawl: the new fad among those who can afford it is to build a second master bedroom, so husband and wife don’t have to share a bed. This seems to be due to snoring men and restless women, more than anything else. According to the New York Times, most custom-built homes – which, almost by definition, are for the upper middle class and richer – will have dual master bedrooms or “owner’s bedrooms” by 2015.

This story has been much commented upon in the marriage-related blogosphere. Most have commented on the effect of dual bedrooms on sex. This seems to me a not very important part of the story, especially since the consensus seems to be that it has little effect on the couple’s sex life. More interesting, I think, is the fact that the writers have noted snoring as the main cause of the separation, but they are reluctant to spell out who is doing the snoring. The particulars make it clear that it is noisy men being sent away by easily disturbed women.

What strikes me the most about this story, though, is that the class implications are invisible. As is often the case with Times lifestyle pieces, this story about the minor travails of the upper middle class has been presented as if this were a widespread trend among all Americans.

“I Be Concubining”

This one is so awful it needs no comment.

Ricky Lackey was before a judge in Cincinnati for theft. The case was settled. In the course of the trial, though, the judge was unsettled. The judge asked Lackey, who is 25, if he had any children. This amazing dialogue ensued:

Lackey: "None, but I have six on the way."
Judge [puzzled]: "Are you marrying a woman with six children?"
Lackey: "No,I be concubining."

Six different women are expecting Lackey’s children in the summer and fall.

Lackey, who was in court for stealing about $3,000 by defrauding a bank, claims that he is a record producer who is about to sign a multimillion-dollar deal.

As Lackey left the courtroom, a group of teenage girls, there for a different case, spotted him. One of them swooned “Oh, there’s Ricky Lackey!”

Lackey, eyeing the likely mother of his nth child, said “Fans.”

DePauw Gives Foolish Sorority the Boot

Following up on my post of February 26th about Delta Zeta's decision to throw out all their members at DePauw except the pretty thin ones, the president of DePauw cut off ties with the sorority because “We at DePauw believe that the values of our university and those of the national Delta Zeta sorority are incompatible.”

The sorority, in an indirect admission that they had screwed up royally, announced that they were cutting off communication with news organizations.

Small Presbyteries Would be Beautiful

The March 12 issue of the Presbyterian Outlook has an updated version of an old proposal to move (back) to much smaller presbyteries. Philip Butin, president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, had published a version of this “big idea” more than a decade ago in the Outlook. In light of the ongoing crisis of middle governing bodies, he presents an updated version.

If we had small presbyteries of 12 to 20 congregations, just about all of the cadres could have an ongoing, organic church life together. The pastors could readily know one another and meet more often than at presbytery meetings. The elders active beyond the congregation could get to know another, too, and take the lead in regional projects that should be lay led.

Butin proposes something like remaking the current presbyteries into the new synods. I have thought about that before. I think, though, that synods have almost no function anymore. They should probably be laid down. There is one model of synod, though, that we might revive: the state synod. Sometimes, the church needs to speak to the state in an organized way, just as it needs to speak to the national government in an organized way. A state synod could be a very modest organization. The ongoing tasks that might be dealt with at the synod level could be what remains of our church camps and our campus ministry.

I think presbytery size these days is driven more by the economics of funding full-time executive presbyters than it is by the organic right-sizing of church units. I am a big fan of EPs/GPs. I think they are the backbone of church order. If I had my druthers, only presbytery executives and stated clerks would have an advisory vote at the General Assembly. Smaller presbyteries could rarely afford a full-time executive or stated clerk. These duties would have to be attached to a particular congregation or two. So be it.

An organic presbytery would be a viable unit of church governance. We would not sink to congregationalism, as we are now threatening to do. But we could move past the sense of crisis and doom that stalks the middle governing bodies now.

Ethno-telephony

John Shelton Reed, the dean of Southern sociologists, has done many studies mapping the cultural South. One of the ingenious investigations that he and his students undertook involved looking at phonebooks from all over the South and its edges, to calculate ratios of business names. The central comparison they made was of businesses with “Dixie” in the name versus those with “American” in the name. They also did comparison studies with those terms and “Southern.” Mapping these ratios from all over did clearly identify a core of Dixie, a broader South, and the border regions, such as central Kentucky, where the South blends into the North.

One of Reed’s former students, Kenneth Myers, has computerized the idea behind this research, and coupled it with a massive database. The result is a tool for what he calls “ethno-telephony,” www.mapanything.net. The demo version is just a fun parlor game, while the full-scale service is a wonderful research tool for commerce and politics as well as more academic questions.

Go ahead and try it. I suggest starting with the “red vs. blue” option, inserting the terms “Yankee vs. Dixie.”

Paternity Leave Helps Kids

The British are ahead of us in taking paternity leave for newborns, so we look to them for studies of what difference paternity leave might make. Their Equal Opportunities Commission has just released reports based on a long-term study of the “millennial cohort,” those babies born in 2000 and 2001. This week’s study examined how the kids were doing at three years old. Most children did not have developmental problems. However, the kids were more likely to have developmental problems if their fathers were not involved in their care from the earliest ages. Specifically, child development problems were associated with:

Failing to use the employer’s flexible working options compared with using them;

Allowing the mother to do all the home based childcare instead of sharing;

Taking only annual or sick leave around the time of the birth compared with a mixture of paternity and annual leave; or

Taking no leave around the time of the birth.

The report is not specific on what the developmental problems are or how much father’s early involvement can reduce the risk.

Now is the first time since the beginning of the industrial era when we have enough men and women taking leave from work to care for newborns to really see the comparative effects – comparing both leave-takers and not, and comparing men and women. Britain now has mandatory paternity leave pay, though it was not in place at the time that these children were born. One of the major findings of the study was that professional and managerial class men were twice as likely to take paternity leave as blue-collar men. The paternity leave pay plan was created, in part, to close this gap.

In a sense, this is just one more thing for parents to worry about, one more weapon in the culture of fear. It is important to remember, therefore, that most kids do not have developmental problems. Still, I think it is encouraging to know that if fathers can be more involved in caring for their kids from Day One, the kids will truly benefit.

Is “Waiting on the World to Change” Centrist?

John Mayer is a very intelligent songwriter. I was disappointed when I first heard “Waiting on the World to Change.” The title seems to counsel fatalism, or at least passivity. The song argues

“It's not that we don't care,
We just know that the fight ain't fair
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change”

I was very interested, therefore, in this morning’s interview with Mayer on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” Mayer contended that telling young people, his generation, what to do is ineffective. “Kids don't even like being talked to like kids anymore.” Therefore his task is to present an idea.

I can go with him halfway, but only halfway. The hectoring tone favored by baby boomer protest songs does seem annoying, if not presumptuous. Still, I think Mayer’s argument, and his song, would be stronger if he presented his idea of what ought to be done about the problem he names. Even couched in layers of “this is just my opinion, I am not telling you what to do,” it seems lame to me to declare that something “ain’t fair” but just leave it at that.

Still, Mayer is good. As he sees it, his job is to “get the ball to the ten yard line.” So I will say that I think, in my opinion (of course), that listeners who agree with him should pick up the ball.

500th post

Yesterday's post was #500 of The Gruntled Center. According to the Statcounter, the blog has had over 100,000 readings in that time.

Thank you all.

Marriage is Not Only for the Rich

Every year the Census Bureau reports that married couples with children at home make up a minority of households. Every year most of the press draws the wrong conclusion. They write articles with headlines like "Marriage disappears as married parent households fall below 25%." This is not the right inference at all. Married couples with children at home make up a minority of households because we are a rich country. Many single people can afford to maintain a separate household. My widowed mother maintains her own household, many of my colleagues have an empty-nest household, and each year Centre College sends out hundreds of students who will maintain households by themselves or with roommates. Yet all of them were, are, or are likely to be in married-couple-with-children households at some point. That is still the case for most people.

What is new in this year's version of the story is the claim that marriage is becoming something only rich and educated people can afford or even want. This is a false idea, and a dangerous one. Yes, there are more people having children without marriage, and there are more couples living together before they marry. But most people still aspire to marry and raise their own children together, in all classes. And most of them will.

Marriage is still normative – it is what most people want and think is good. Marriage is still normal – it is what most people will do, and most of them will have children.

Married-couple-with-children is still the normal household pattern, the pattern that most Americans will enjoy at the appropriate point in their lifecycle.

Obama as Joshua

Barak Obama just gave a great speech at the voting rights march commemoration in Selma, AL. It is 40 years since Dr. King gave his Moses speech, where he saw the promised land, but would not reach it. Obama, under the explicit direction of his pastor's father, himself a weighty church leader, said it was his duty as a member of the "Joshua generation" to go forward into the promised land. The greatest generation, Obama said – many of whom were in the room – had done 90% of the work of the civil rights revolution. It was up to his generation to do the last tenth.

Sen. Obama gave an excellent answer to the question "are you really black like us?" His grandfather was houseboy to the British colonial masters in Africa, but the American civil rights movement led him to dream dreams. His son, Barak Obama, Sr., came to America to study as a result. He married a Midwestern descendant of slave owners because of the civil rights dream. The fruit of that union is Barak Obama, Jr., U. S. Senator and presidential candidate.

Obama talked about jobs and health care, as any Democrat would. He also talked specifically about the scourge of absent fathers, the bane of the black community, which he knows well from his personal experience.

Forty years after Moses, the Joshua generation of African-Americans is poised to take their full place in the promised land. Barak Obama is the leading contender for the role of Joshua.

Herpes Dating

One in four women is infected with genital herpes, and nearly one in five men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is a staggering rate. Herpes is far from the worst sexually transmitted disease in its effects, but it is annoying. Worse, it is morally very embarrassing, a constant reminder that you did something foolish.

Most people who have genital herpes don't want to give it to anyone else, which is to their credit. But they still want to "date" and most still want to marry. With infection rates this high, a rational solution has emerged in large cities around the country: herpes-only dating sites. These herpes clubs are often as much support networks as they are matchmakers.

I feel for people with herpes. As a Calvinist, I know we all do foolish things all the time, myself included. None of us is in a position to look down on others. Moreover, I think that restricting your mate selection to people you cannot infect is a decent thing to do for society. Herpes dating and support groups are an ethical thing to do for the world, considering…

Still, it is hard enough to find the right mate without eliminating 75% or 80% of the potential pool. The fact that our country needs herpes dating sites is further proof that keeping sex only in marriage is the most realistic morality for individuals, and especially for society.

Cherokee Racism

The Cherokee Nation voted to eject descendents of slaves owned by Cherokees from membership in their nation. By a 3/4ths vote, only "blood" members of the tribe can be part of the nation.

Counting membership in Indian "nations" is one of the last remaining acts of blood racism recognized by U.S. law. They are the last remnant of the 19th century pseudo-science of race which worked so much havoc in every other area of American life. There are many irrationalities in the treatment of native American tribes in our law. I think it is time to put this one to rest.