What I think Principled Centrism Means

I was talking to my mother this morning, as I do every Saturday. We were having a friendly argument about the causes and solutions of social problems, as we do every Saturday. I was not satisfied with the solutions proposed by some leaders of our party, but definitely disagreed with the opposite solutions. Mom wanted to know what was in between. This led me to a helpful, spontaneous clarification.

Let me put this in a too-strong way at first in order to be clear:

A centrist wants to promote what is best for society, tolerate what is good enough, and prevent what is harmful.

Conservatives want to promote what is best for society, and prevent everything else.

Liberals want to promote all options (except the truly dangerous ones) as equally good.

If your first reaction to this is, “Who is to say what is best?” you are a probably a liberal.

If your first reaction to this is, “Why settle for mediocrity?” you are probably a conservative.

If this bell-curve picture of the social options seems reasonable to you, and you have no principled objection to making discriminating judgments – welcome to the Gruntled Center.

(Feeling centrist, but not gruntled? I will take that up tomorrow).

Diversity Means Same-Sex Marriage is Not Inevitable Everywhere

Maggie Gallagher, in the her article on gay marriage that I wrote about a few days ago, says that the most powerful argument advanced by the proponents of same-sex marriage is simply that it is inevitable. Canada recently became the fourth nation (after the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain) to legalize same-sex unions. Several states and cities have been doing the same. In the “blue” cities of America, this may seem to be an inevitable trend. My wife and I used to live in Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, one of the great gay and liberal centers in America. If we had only read the local press there, and only talked to our neighbors and people like them, the complete normalization of homosexual practice would have seemed the only rational outcome for the wheel of history. As a college professor I live in a blue enclave which believes the same thing.

However, I am a college professor in Kentucky. I live in a small blue enclave within a very red state. Which brings me to the point. Kentucky passed an amendment to our state constitution in 2004 which specified that marriage meant only the union of a man and a woman. It passed by a huge majority. And similar laws passed in seven other states then, in nearly all of them by large margins. Kentucky is not Washington, DC, and it sure isn’t Dupont Circle.

Let’s consider a parallel case to see where the same-sex marriage issue might go. The debate about gay marriage is recent as a national issue. The debate about gay ordination, however, has been wracking the mainline churches for a generation. The Presbyterian Church (USA), a pillar of the mainline and one of the most liberal denominations in the country, was first obliged to face the issue and make a decision in the 1970s. The liberal leadership of the church, coming off triumphs in fights to make the races equal and then the sexes equal in the church, expected a routine triumph. Instead, the church articulated a “definitive guidance” that, while people with homosexual orientation were welcome in the church, homosexual practice was a sin according to the Bible. Members who disagreed with this position were welcome to stay and argue the point, but they could not be ministers and elders of the church. This conclusion has been tested many times since then. To the surprise of many, the center has held. Despite bitter annual fights on the subject, the church has not changed its position because most members, elders, and ministers agree with it.

What does this have to do with same-sex marriage in America? In this great land of ours, we find all kinds of individuals, and all kinds of communities which vary across a wide spectrum of opinion. Vermont may pass a popular law allowing same-sex marriage. Kentucky will not, not anytime soon. This is what democracy yields. If you are actually in favor of diversity, it seems to me that you not only have to accept the diversity of the results of democratic decision-making, you should celebrate it.

The debate about same-sex marriage is not over. It has barely begun. The attempts to short-circuit the debate by judicial imposition is, as I have written, the wrong way to make a social revolution. As we enjoy the long, slow, sometimes ugly process of democratic debate and legislation, we should not expect that every jurisdiction will end up with the same result. And this is, from my centrist perspective, a good thing.

Learning to be Individuals: Self-Assertion for the Top Classes, Sucking It Up for the Bottom

An interesting new book, Adrie Kusserow’s, American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods, looks at the ways in which parents and preschools teach the kids of different classes to be “individuals.” She compares children in the upper-middle-class enclave of Manhattan’s Upper East Side with two Queens neighborhoods, one petty bourgeois and one working class. Families in both boroughs want their kids to be individuals, in the good old American way. But how they realize that individuality, and why, differs dramatically by class.

The kids from the bottom classes are taught what Kusserow calls “hard individualism” designed to toughen them up. Parents want their kids to be independent and self-sufficient – within a social hierarchy. Good kids obey their superiors, and show initiative and independence within their assigned role. Within the preschool world, kids compete to climb the ladder to status.

Kids from the top classes learn “soft individualism” in which they express the feelings and creativity that come from their unique selves. Good kids show independence and initiative against any constraints on their imagination. Parents and teachers try hard not be exercise power over the children. Within the preschool world, all are equal and everyone is your friend.

Rich parents want kids to be flexible to take advantage of life’s opportunities;
Poor parents want kids to be flexible to bend with life’s limitations.

The irony of this education is that the curriculum of hard, competitive individualism aims to produce people who will fit in to a fixed structure, and rise within it by following the rules. The curriculum of the soft, egalitarian individualism, on the other hand, is the training for the “masters of the universe” who will sit on the top of the social structure and set the rules that others abide by.

Why Baptists Can Adapt to Same-Sex Marriage Laws Better Than Presbyterians Can

Nearly all Christian denominations, both evangelical and mainline, read the Bible as opposing homosexual practice. As a result, they do not perform same-sex marriages. Most denominations, though, have a separate debate about whether same-sex marriages should be allowed by the government. Here, the two groups differ. Evangelical denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, oppose legalizing same-sex marriages, whereas several mainline denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church (USA), support legal same-sex marriage or civil unions. This is not a hypocritical position: the church is a voluntary association whose members have chosen to live under Biblical rules, while the state is an involuntary association whose citizens must abide by the secular laws. The church can set itself a higher standard than the state can demand.

In the United States there is no established church, and therefore no dissenting sects in the classic European sense. All religious institutions are equally denominations, on a level playing field. Yet each denomination has a distinctive understanding of its role in relation to the larger culture. Some denominations are more churchly, some more sectarian, and which attitude toward the state and the culture it has usually reflects its pre-American heritage.

Baptist churches were born in Europe and New England as dissenting sects. In the South, the Southern Baptist Church is culturally dominant and in many counties is numerically a majority. Yet the Baptist churches tend to approach the state and the culture as a sect. A sect does not expect the World, and especially the government, to be godly – usually quite the opposite. The Southern Baptist Convention often has a strong message and rule for Baptists, and usually the same strong message for the state and for society at large. But if the state adopts a rule that the church does not accept, a sect always has the option of dissenting from the state and creating a separate counter-cultural enclave.

The Presbyterian Church, heirs of the established Church of Scotland and the culturally hegemonic Calvinist church of Geneva, tends to see itself as one of the stewards of society. The Presbyterian Church accepts the principle of the separation of church and state. Yet Presbyterians have been instrumental in developing many of the institutions of American society, especially the educational institutions. They did so not with the idea of Presbyterianizing everyone, but as a way of being good stewards of the gifts given to Presbyterians to use for the benefit of all. Mainline churches in general, and the Presbyterian Church in particular, are used to having their views, the laws, and the norms of society all correspond. While the mainline has not be identical with the Establishment for more than a generation, it is still disorienting to a churchy denomination to have its norms run counter to the laws.

Maggie Gallagher, in an excellent analysis of the arguments about same-sex marriage, notes that “If same-sex marriage is a right, … the capacity of schools and faith communities to transmit the marriage idea to the next generation will be sharply curtailed. People who believe that children need mothers and fathers will be treated like bigots in the public square.”

Baptists who oppose making same-sex marriage legal would nonetheless know what do to if and when it does become the law: they maintain their own counter-worldly rules within the church, and work to elect individuals who will change the law back. If that means that they are in tension with the world in the meantime, that is only to be expected; Baptists have been there many times before. Ironically it is the Presbyterians, who support civil unions and even a form of legal same-sex marriage, who are ambivalent and uncertain when they get their way in the law, but society treats them as bigots and hypocrites for having a different rule in the church. Stewards of society are not ideologically prepared to be in such high tension with the World.

Magical Motherhood for the Upper Middle Class

Poor teen mothers in the slums choose to have their babies now, and hope that someday they will marry – and while they are at it, have a good job, a house with a picket fence, and a personal unicorn. See these earlier blogs for the details. William Galston rightly calls this “magical thinking.” It is of a piece with other poor teens telling researchers that they plan to be doctors and lawyers – while flunking out of high school. Galston’s solution would be to provide some kind of middle class mentors to give the kind of guidance and reality check that middle class kids get at home.

I teach middle class kids. They have a realistic understanding of the connection between school and careers, which they pursue diligently and well. They have a clear understanding of the value of marrying before having kids, and definite plans to do so, someday.

Some of the women I teach, though, show a different kind of magical thinking. They believe that they can finish college, then get professional training, get their careers well launched, start to look for a husband, get married, get their two careers coordinated, and then start to have children – all before their eggs get too old. This is the problem that Sylvia Ann Hewlett described so well in Creating a Life. The very high achieving women she studied had made a “creeping non-choice” which left them in their fifties with no children, or fewer than they wanted.

From the perspective of the teen mothers, the fifty-somethings who have just figured out the fertility cycle seem amazingly naïve and benighted in their thinking. They trusted in magic, too.

The most effective treatment of this kind of thinking is the one Hewlett recommends: ask these young women to describe what they want their families and work lives to be like at 45, then plan backwards to their current age. When they see what milestones need to be reached by when, and in what order, they are usually shaken, then moved to new action. I often get to see and share in the wonderful spectacle of smart people reordering their lives on the basis of true understanding and critical thinking.

Ultimately, the solution to magical thinking about work, marriage, and children at both ends of the social structure is the same: truth and critical thinking. And the sooner the better.

Doulas: A Good Centrist Family Idea

Doulas are “wise women of birth” who help pregnant women have a healthier and happier pregnancy, and then advise mothers through their baby’s infancy. High-end doulas work with upper middle class first-time moms for $1,000 per birth. A new movement has started among family helping agencies to employ doulas to assist the poorest and least-prepared mothers.

Centrists should, I think, support the idea of doulas at both ends of the economic spectrum. The high-end doulas are a market solution to the problem of professional-class women who have uprooted themselves from the experienced mothers of their own families. Subsidized doulas help the women and girls who need them most. Mothers benefit, children benefit, and the public benefits, including the long-term economic benefit of healthier babies and children.

A doula service can sensibly be found on both sides of the public/private divide. Government social service agencies could employ them just as readily as private family-support groups can. Tax money could be channeled through faith-based agencies for doulas without having to enter the minefield of church/state issues around contraception and birth control.

Every well-intentioned effort to help solve a problem can, of course, unintentionally create more of that problem. Nonetheless, I think providing help to inexperienced mothers who are already pregnant would not do much to add to the number of poor teens who get pregnant in the first place. It is also likely that a number of doulas, like the ones featured in Jodi Wilgoren’s recent New York Times story and the related PBS documentary, will be former poor teen moms themselves. Creating a doula service would give work to women who need it. Beyond the immediate help that they can give, women who learned the hard way about the difficulties of teen pregnancy may be the most effective counselors to teen mothers to keep them from having their second too-young pregnancy.

Elite Young Women Want Kids and Careers

Louise Story has an excellent piece in the New York Times this week, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.” Story, a recent Yale grad and now an MBA student at Columbia, surveyed and interviewed over 200 Yale women, with some comparable information from other elite colleges. Many of the women she interviewed planned to start serious careers, but to suspend them to be home with their children.

The story is interesting for its main finding that many elite college women are planning to be home with their kids. I am also interested in the framing of the story – that these young women do not find it to be a big deal that they plan to be leaders in society by being stay-at-home moms. On the other hand, some of the Boomer feminists interviewed for the story are shocked that these young women are, as they see it, so backwards. “They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. Cynthia E. Russett, on the other hand, a Yale professor from a pre-Boomer generation, says that, "The women today are, in effect, turning realistic."

As KC noted in the comment I responded to a couple of days ago, young women – Millennials, not Boomers or even Gen Xers – do put a high priority on arranging their lives to give the best of themselves to their children. For many, that means being full-time moms when their kids are little. I do not think that they are backward or ignorant of the ways in which “the personal is the political.” I believe, as Prof. Russett suggests, that they are being realistic. Unlike the pioneering women of Yale and places like it a generation ago, these high achieving women have read the research and can count the years from age 22 to the likely end of their childbearing years. They know that they can have it all IF they plan for marriage and children early.

The one important thing I thought was missing from Louise Story’s account is that she frames the choice these women face as either/or – either they have a career, or they have children. Yet life is long, long enough to do both. Women with degrees from Yale and other elite colleges could stay home with kids in their late twenties, all of their thirties, even into their forties, and still have a 25 or 30-year career. They won't lose their brains raising kids, and will gain an age of confidence, experience, and multi-tasking ability.

Why Mainline Church Leaders are Ambivalent About Promoting Marriage, Part I

Of all the institutions which could promote marriage, religious institutions are, I believe, in the best position to do the most good. Yet the leadership of mainline churches has not been in the forefront of the marriage movement. There are several reasons for this, including a fear of hurting single parents and a fear of prejudging the question of homosexual marriage. I will return to these issues in future posts.

My research on the Presbyterian Church (USA), one of the pillars of the mainline, struck me as revealing another powerful motive for being quiet about promoting marriage: church leaders are much more likely to be divorced.

When future Presbyterian ministers are in seminary their theology falls in a bell curve from conservative to liberal, with most calling themselves some kind of moderate or centrist. And seminarians all across the theological spectrum are equally likely to be married.

In later years, though, there is a dramatic shift, which suggests a strong connection between marriage and a more conservative position. In my book on strengthening the loyalist center of the church, Leading from the Center, I found this remarkable pattern:

“One of the most striking differences among Presbyterian ministers that develop after seminary is the ratio of married to divorced people in different groups. Among theological conservatives, there are 89 married ministers for every divorced one; for those in the center the ratio is 16 to one; for liberals, there are 7.7 married people for each divorced person. An extraordinary extension of this pattern is that for ministers in church agencies or judicatories (that is, presbyteries, synods, or General-Assembly-level bodies), the married-to-divorced ratio is 2.2 to one.”

The church bureaucracy is much more likely to be filled with divorced people. Indeed, I know of a number of cases of ministers who left their congregation following their own divorces, and ended up in church bureaucracy seemingly by default.

There is, I think, a complex relationship between marriage and theology, not all of which I understand now. It does seem clear to me, though, that a church leadership which is full of divorced people, and thus also of the colleagues and friends of divorced people, will be more ambivalent about promoting marriage.

Do Gen Xers Want Mom Home More Than Boomers Do?

In a comment on “Good News from New Orleans,” KC wrote:

I ask that you address the Millennium generation's divergence from feminist protocol of the 70's, 80's and 90's. It is my observation that many people in my generation, despite our youth, desire to work in the "real world" for a limited period of time. Eventually, many of us, women in particular, want to return to the home, with multiple children and live the life of an at-home mom. Some of us, myself included, would prefer the option of working from home (God bless the freedom of broadband technology), but most importantly to be at home. Thoughts...

I don’t have the data to answer your excellent question about the Millennial generation. I did take stab at asking about Gen X vs. the Baby Boomers, though. The General Social Survey, the annual survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, had a special module in 1996 (when the oldest Millennials were only 15) on relationships. The respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement:

It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.

I compared core Boomers, who were 40 to 50 years old that year, with core Gen Xers, who were 20 to 30 then. Comparing men to women within each group shows that while most member of each generation take a liberal (disagreeing) position on this question, the Xers tended to be more liberal than Boomers. 2/3rds of the Boomers disagreed with the statement, whereas 3/4ths of the Xers disagreed. Men and women answered about the same way, though the women were more likely to disagree strongly. Comparing married and not married people in each generation yields a similar result – the younger generation is a bit more liberal on this question.

I will look for data on the next generation.

Children and Marriage Go Together – Really.

Kathryn Edin, whose fine new book, Promises I Can Keep I wrote about earlier, was part of a panel on “Overcoming Barriers to Stable Marriage” at the Brookings Institution recently. In her Brookings testimony, Edin said:

“This is probably a profound cultural change[:] marriage and child-bearing among low-income men and women, white, black, and Hispanic, are no longer seen as decisions that necessarily go together. Here there are comparative ethnographic studies with middle class 20-somethings. And middle class 20-somethings almost never even consider having children outside of marriage. It's not that they're especially moral, they just literally can't imagine being able to sustain it, given all of the other things that fill their lives and make their lives so rich.”

Sociologists have a long-running debate about whether the basic family unit is mother-child, to which father is later added, or husband-wife, which then naturally produces children. I think nearly all human practices are a rich tangle of nature and nurture. As a rule of thumb, I assume those factors will be in a 50/50 mix. I incline to the view that the mother-child unit is what nature starts with in building families. The father-mother-child molecule is, I think, a great cultural achievement – perhaps the greatest single achievement of human culture. The couple-child family is so deeply embedded in all kinds of human civilizations that it seems natural. It has achieved “cultural hegemony” in Antonio Gramsci’s phrase – it is hard for us to even imagine an alternative.

However, as Edin notes, one American subculture has broken the cultural hegemony which connects children with marriage. The genie is out of the bottle. A generation of poor women – most especially African-American women – assumes kids, but only hopes for marriage. Realistically, though, few of them will achieve their dreams unless they change their ideas about marriage.

My point here is a different one, though. Some people look at the fact that one subculture has broken the link between children and marriage, and conclude that the whole culture should break that link. Since marriage is not naturally connected with childbearing, this argument goes, we should stop trying to impose a connection. Marriage is a personal lifestyle choice; having kids is a different personal lifestyle choice. Now that we are free from the unnatural hegemony of the idea that marriage and kids go together, freedom demands that we prevent the culture from imposing a connection between the two.

This is, I think, absolutely the wrong conclusion to draw. When we see that some part of the culture is not really required by nature but is, in some sense, socially constructed, that does not mean we should stop constructing it. On the contrary, the construction of a culture is a great human achievement. What we need is not a new naturalism, which only accepts what our (quite limited) animal nature imposes. Instead, we need a new, clear-eyed commitment to rebuilding civilization precisely because some social structures need to be socially constructed.

And the greatest of the socially constructed social structures, I submit, is marriage.

I had to share this

(From a twenty-something former student)

I enjoyed your blog tremendously; you are the oldest blogger I ever
knew in person.

Potty Parity is a Good Centrist Idea

Public facilities that handle crowds should have more women’s toilets than men’s. This is not fair, but it is just.

Well-known class action lawyer John Banzhaff III made the case for “potty parity” in 1990. Since then, 20 states and many cities have adopted ordinances that require anywhere from a 60/40 split of women’s to men’s toilets, to a 2:1 ratio. This past summer New York City passed the Women’s Restroom Equity Act requiring twice as many women’s toilets in arenas, bars, concert halls, convention halls, motion picture theatres, public dance halls, stadiums, and theatres.

Why is this necessary? Because women take longer in the restroom. They take longer because they have more clothes to manage. They take longer because they are more likely to have kids to manage. They take longer because they Just Do. Everyone would be better off if women did not have to wait longer to get into a restroom. This is pretty much a win-win rule.

So who is against it?

Critics on the left say that the law should be sex-blind, treating men and women exactly the same. Any different treatment, they say, even those that benefit women, reinforce stereotypes that women are weaker and in need of help. This reminds me of a lawyer I once heard of who argued that if the town had a dog leash license, the equal protection clause of the Constitution required that there also be a cat leash license. But this is a silly argument: recognizing real differences is sensible, not sexist. Equity does not require strict equality.

Critics on the right say this is an absurd example of overreaching and over-regulating by the “nanny state.” But this ignores the fact that the state has already shaped public facilities in a hundred ways to insure health, safety, and equal access. You would have to have a very strong stomach for mob panics and crowded collapses to be willing to let a big sports stadium or concert arena be built without any regulation at all.

Potty parity is a common-sense compromise that recognizes that men and women have different bodies and that they have different cultural customs and responsibilities.

Good News from New Orleans: The Crowds Weren’t Murderous, After All

Disasters usually bring people together. That made the reports of looting, rape, murder, and even attacks on rescuers after Hurricane Katrina so distressing – and so sociologically unlikely.

Turns out the good news is that the bad news was wrong. Christopher Shea reports that the worst stories – rapes in the Superdome, gunshots at a helicopter, carjackings in Baton Rouge by refugees – cannot be substantiated. The many murderers of the Big Easy took a holiday. Even the looting was largely people taking necessities.

Many have pointed out and lamented the racial difference in some news coverage – white people “found food,” black people “looted.” This is bad news about racial consciousness. But it can also be read, underneath, as good news about community. Most people in this dangerous disaster took care of themselves and those around them. They held themselves together, and went and found what they needed. I am confident that when the fuller story of Katrina is told, there will be many more stories of people sharing with the strangers around them and taking care of the weakest than there will be tales of depredation.

In fact, as I watched the interviews with trapped people from the Superdome and the convention center, from the many highway overpasses and isolated attics, I kept hearing family stories. Again and again they would interview a seemingly able-bodied person. I first wondered, “why are these people still there?” Were they stupid, clueless, or terminally feckless? The reporters’ questions sometimes seemed to carry the same assumptions. Yet as I listened to their stories, the most common refrain was, “I stayed to care for a vulnerable member of my family.” The mother with diabetes, the grandmother in a wheelchair, the sick babies, the uncle who needed dialysis.

At the time, these stories of sick relatives were told to show the desperate bad news of people who needed immediate rescue. But they are also part of a larger, better story: people who could have saved themselves put themselves in harm’s way to try to protect their needy kin and neighbors. The picture of the dead old woman in the wheelchair is very sad. But she, at least, had someone who pushed her from her home in the flood path to higher ground, where she had a better chance of survival. That wheelchair pusher could have walked him or herself right out of the city in the same time and with half the effort.

A few people did horrible things during the Hurricane – the nursing home owners who abandoned their charges to drown while they fled is the worst thing I have heard. But most did not. Most of the stories coming from New Orleans are of decent, even heroic people trying to save themselves and others.

Deliberate Childlessness: The Anti-Natalist (Mini-) Movement

My fellow Kentuckian, President Al Mohler of Southern Baptist Seminary, has created a stir by criticizing deliberate childlessness among fertile married couples. This is no more an organized movement than is the kind of natalism David Brooks talked about (see my post of yesterday). Still, not having children makes sense to a small but strategic group.

Some people think we are still faced with a population explosion. The industrialized countries have solved that problem in a big way. Some people don’t like kids. This is fair enough in a free country, though hard for me as a doting dad to empathize with.

I am concerned with another group, who think that they are not mature enough to have children. Probably more men feel this way than women. Children of divorce, as Judith Wallerstein has show, are especially likely to fear that they themselves may never be mature enough to have kids. This is sad. Worse, it means that a significant number of people are writing themselves off too soon.

Really, almost no one is ready to raise children when their first child is born. Marriage, and the willingness to do whatever it takes for your kids, transforms unprepared men and women into parents. This is also more true of men than women.

Why should centrists care about this as a policy matter? Why should I care if other people don’t think they should have children? A groundless fear that deprives one couple of the blessing of children is sad. A groundless fear that deprives the country of millions of fellow citizens, workers, taxpayers, and community makers creates an avoidable social weakness.

SO, reassuring those who are ambivalent about having children is a social benefit.

What does this have to do with Mohler’s “deliberately childless?” His criticism is drawn with a broad brush. He doesn’t distinguish between those who are afraid to have children, and those who are the real target of Mohler’s criticism: couples who are too selfish and materialistic to have kids. Yet most of them, I think, are ambivalent, too. You would have to be a cyborg libertarian to make the cold, Gary Becker-like calculation that kids are just an unattractive investment. Most of the deliberately childless have really slipped in to the “creeping non-choice” of waiting too long to decide to have children. The creeping non-choice will have to be the subject of another post (in the meantime, see Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Creating a Life).

The Coming Natalist Movement

Americans don’t have enough kids to keep the population up.

We are blessed with immigrants, who both add instant population when they move here, and have more kids than the average American. But that seems to be a phenomenon of one generation. The United States, like all the other industrialized nations, has too few kids per native-born mother – under the replacement level of 2.1 kids (on average) per mother.

In the past there have been “natalist” movements in countries that thought their population was shrinking or not growing fast enough. Columnist David Brooks has talked about a natalist movement in this country, but he really just means that some Americans want to have a bunch of kids and live in places that are safe, cheap, and family-friendly. This is not so much a movement as a name for one smallish subsection of Americans, mostly quite religious people who are moving away from the big cities.

Demographer Ben Wattenberg has been lamenting the “birth dearth” for nearly two decades. He is critical, though, of government-run natalist movements, like those in Europe, where the birthrates and immigration rates are even lower than here. Italy, for example, has a fertility rate of 1.2 children per woman, whereas the U.S. is a bit under 2.

I agree that a government-run natalist movement would probably not work in this country. In fact, since many people believe that we have too many people, not too few, it would be politically disastrous to the administration which officially tried to encourage people to have more kids.

The American way to do just about anything, though, is for the movement to begin with the people, not the government. Some conservative religious groups already support family life as a blessed vocation. So far, though, I have not found an organized politically based natalist movement.

Centrists should seriously consider a movement with this modest goal: all stable married couples should think about having three kids. Each couple has different circumstances, of course, and not all couples can have all the children they want. But for the last generation the norm in the stable middle class has been that one or two kids was the responsible limit. The facts have changed: consider three.

The natural home for such a movement would be among conservatives, and therefore in the Republican Party. I think, in response to this natural inclination, that liberals and Democrats should take the lead in a new natalist movement. Supporting a more generous standard of how many kids we can afford is, after all, a liberal thing to do.

The Most Encouraging Family Statistic I Know

3/4ths of unhappy marriages will get happier if they just stick it out.

Every marriage goes through rough spots. Whenever you survey a bunch of married people, some fraction of them will report that they are unhappy in their marriage. You might think that that would be enough to predict divorce. You might even think that unhappiness is enough to justify divorce (though I don’t). The good news, though, is, as Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher report in The Case for Marriage, that three quarters of couples who say they are unhappy in their marriage now, will say that they are very happy in their marriage five years later – IF they hold on and work it out.

Still, the rough patches can be pretty rough when you are living in them. Some marriages are “high conflict” – the couple fights often, sometimes violently. BUT these are a small minority of marriages, and are only a third of marriages that end in divorce. Most divorces – about 2/3rds – come from low conflict marriages. They don’t hit each other, they don’t even fight all the time, they are just unhappy. They imagine that if they were apart, if they could somehow start over again, they might get happier.

SO let’s put these two statistics together:

2/3rds of divorces come from low conflict, merely unhappy marriages.
3/4ths of merely unhappy marriages will be very happy if they just stick together.
2/3 times 3/4 = 1/2.
Half of what? Half of the unhappy marriages that end in divorce would get happy if they just stuck it out another five years.

People who hate and hit each other will still divorce – and some probably should.
People who love and cherish each other won’t divorce – and society and their children thank them for it.
The large center of married people who are unhappy at one time can take heart – just hold on, keep working at it, and the great majority of you will see it work out just fine in the end.

Massachusetts Gay Marriage: the Wrong Way and the Right Way

In May 2004,the Massachusetts Supreme Court made gay marriage the law of the land. By a handful of votes, the court undid centuries of law and custom. In fact, anticipating this possible ruling, the state legislature had voted two months before for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. This is exactly the kind of judicial activism that mobilizes conservative and moderate voters. When conservatives say that arrogant elites from the coastal cities are imposing their views on everyone else, this is what they are talking about. I believe that this issue tipped the 2004 election from a close race to a Republican walk. Deciding major social issues through the courts is wrong 99% of the time. Debating social issues is what we have legislatures for. This includes the inevitable compromise and “sausage making” that legislatures must do, and often must do behind closed doors.

Now the Massachusetts legislature has voted again on a moderate constitutional amendment, which would ban same-sex marriage, but create very similar civil unions. To the surprise of many, the amendment failed, 157 to 39. Part of the failure was because conservatives voted against it as too much of a compromise. They are working an amendment for the 2008 ballot, which would ban same-sex marriages with no civil union softener. The main reason the amendment failed this time, I think, is because the moderate center of the legislature didn’t have the stomach for the ban. They think marriage really is about a man and a woman uniting for life, especially to raise their children. But they also think that letting the small number of homosexuals who want to marry wont really hurt the commonwealth of Massachusetts. The great majority of people can still marry and live in the usual way even if a few do it another way.

Now, this is not the way it will play in all states, or even in most states. If, for example, the Kentucky legislature were forced to vote on a constitutional amendment to keep prohibiting gay marriage, I am sure it would pass, and would be a popular measure in the state. The fifty nifty states are different from one another, and a good thing, too. Moreover, public opinion, even in the most extreme states, changes over time. Massachusetts was very hot about gay marriage when it was first imposed by the court, but the ardor is cooling. I think it likely that, when it comes time to certify the proposed total ban over the next few years, there may not be enough votes in the legislature to even get the amendment on the ballot. Time and democratic competition will tell.

I believe that we are all better off when these changes are debated, compromised, and enacted in the legislature, not in the court.

Parents Believe in Sex Differences

One reader of the Gruntled Center replied offline with something that I often hear from parents:

“I don't see how you can seriously believe that there aren't innate sex differences. Having been raised in the "environment" outlook, and living though the 'achieving my potential in a male-dominated profession' and then getting into real living and important work, i.e., family and motherhood, including raising children of both sexes, I feel that I have solid empirical evidence to underpin my conclusion that of course there are basic differences between the sexes, and that IMHO, most of the propaganda I was fed is unscientific rubbish.”

My wife and I attended one of the great centers of egalitarian (men and women are really the same) feminism, Swarthmore College. At that time “politically incorrect” was still a joke that the Left told about itself. In fact, as I recall, most of the jokes about being politically incorrect turned on acting men acting masculine and women acting feminine (“I let him hold the door for me – and I liked it! Oh, no, politically incorrect!”). Along with most of our classmates, we were strongly committed to the view that gender differences were due to socialization, and that we were going to raise our children differently.

Well, after trying to interest the girls in trucks as much as dolls, and having to restrain the boy from pulling himself out of the stroller to chase a backhoe in preference to social play, we have come to the conclusion that most parents of my acquaintance have, as well: boys and girls are born different.

Having once been of the school that said gender differences were 1% nature and 99% nurture, I am now trying to hold the line at 50/50.

“Only Marry a Good Man” vs. “The Power of the Vow”

There is an excellent new ethnography of family life: Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. Edin and Kefalas spent several years as participant-observers with poor single mothers in the most blighted neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, NJ. They found that poor women thought kids were essential, but marriage was a luxury. They wanted to have children, and thought it made most sense to have them before they were 25. Marriage is a dream for the future, like a steady job, a car, and a house with a picket fence. They didn’t want to marry a man until they had lived with him for some years, raised several children together, and tested whether he would be faithful and (in a very modest way) a provider. The women Edin and Kefalas got to know thought that they should wait to marry until they were about 40. Before that, men were just too wild and unreliable.

This is fascinating in itself, and helps people (like me) with bourgeois expectations of marriage, children, and work, make some sense of the “through the looking-glass” world of poor single mothers.

BUT, the marriage movement turns on a critical, opposing point: it is marriage and fatherhood which makes men become responsible and self-sacrificing grownups. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, in The Case for Marriage, call this “the power of the Vow.” If women give men all the advantages of marriage – sex, kids, room and board, companionship, comfort, etc., etc. – without requiring any of the responsibilities, then of course many men will never grow up, or even stay. Even the poorest women, with the most uncertain marriage prospects, would be better off waiting for sex and children until after their boyfriends demonstrated some real capacity to be husbands, fathers, protectors, and providers. Planning to be a single mother and hoping to someday marry may seem like a lower risk strategy, but it just multiplies the family disaster of poor fatherless families.

Sex vs. Gender

Men and women are different in deep biological ways which endure.
Male and Female are sexes.

OR

Men and women are different in shallow cultural ways which change readily.
Masculine and Feminine are genders.

“Sex vs. gender” is a good shorthand for this deep debate.

Most people through most cultures and eras thought and still think men and women are different sexes.

A small but strategic minority in developed societies in the past generation thought and still think that men and women are different genders.

The gender view has been dominant among the educated elite in developed societies for a generation. The gender view dominated in part because it had superior arguments and evidence, and in part because the people who promoted the gender view had enough political power to bring grief to those who argued against it. The gender view was, for a time and in a class, politically correct.

A new generation of thinkers is rising to challenge the gender view and promote the sex view. The arguments and research of the sex view have been good and getting better. The arguments and research of the gender view are more tired and strained than they used to be.

Where does this leave the gruntled center? Whichever view you think is ultimately true, we can agree that men and women, as a group, tend to think, value, and act in somewhat different ways in our society.

Beyond this center lie two unacceptable extremes.

There are some people who argue that men and women are so deeply and permanently different that they are practically different species. This idea contradicts the theory that most people have that human beings have essentially the same kind of human nature.

There are some people who argue that men and women are really the same now in the way they think, talk, value social relations, value competition, approach marriage, go about raising children, and in every other way. They argue that the differences that we think we see are really due to a sexist ideology in our heads. This idea contradicts the experience that most people have, especially the experience of married parents.

So, for the foreseeable future, men and women – and boys and girls – are and will be different. Our everyday interactions and our public policy should accept this as a fact and work with it, not deny it or try to socially engineer it away.