Raspberry Worries that Black Marriage Past the Tipping Point

Longtime Washington Post columnist William Raspberry was at Centre College last night. In his public lecture he talked about the efforts he has made to promote strong homes to help children learn. He has started a program called Baby Steps in his home town of Okalona, MS, and he promotes the idea elsewhere. He did not elaborate in his talk on what he means by strong homes, so I asked him afterwards. In particular, I wondered what he thought about the extraordinarily low African-American marriage rate today.

Raspberry shared my concern that there is a crisis today in black marriages. In fact, he went further than I would. Raspberry fears that there are not enough African Americans in the younger generation who have made strong marriages like his. He says it appears that black America may have gone past the point of no return on establishing a strong marriage culture.

The two main points that he main in his public lecture were (1) we all partly agree with the positions we oppose, and (2) people who disagree with us are not necessarily knaves or fools. With that wisdom in mind, it would be proper humility, I suppose, to think that perhaps the black marriage pattern is not all that bad. Maybe, contrary to what I think, the low black marriage rate is not as bad for African Americans as a similar rate would be for other ethnic groups. And maybe, contrary to William Raspberry's fears, young African Americans have not gone past the tipping point, but will create a revival of marriage.

I wish that prominent African Americans who have made strong marriages would go on the stump to promote such a revival. I have applauded Bill Cosby for doing so in the past, for which he has taken much heat.

I think it would help if Bill Raspberry himself took a leading role in the movement.

Darwin Says " Marry, Marry, Marry Q.E.D."

When Darwin was 29 he had returned from his voyage on the Beagle. He wanted to get on with the ambitious career of natural science that he had set for himself. But first, he must answer a much bigger question than the origin of species: should he marry? Being of an analytic turn of mind, Darwin drew up a pro and con list. (I have highlighted a few choice considerations):

Marry

Children (if it Please God)
Constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one
Object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow
Home, & someone to take care of house
Charms of music and female chit-chat
These things good for one’s health—but terrible loss of time
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all—No, no, won’t do
Imagine living all one’s day solitary in smoky dirty London House
Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps
Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Great Marlboro Street, London

Not Marry

Freedom to go where one liked
Choice of Society and little of it
Conversation of clever men at clubs
Not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle
Expense and anxiety of children
Perhaps quarrelling
Loss of Time
Cannot read in the evenings
Fatness and idleness
Anxiety and responsibility
Less money for books etc.
If many children forced to gain one’s bread (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much)
Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool

Marry, Marry, Marry Q.E.D.

Darwin promptly married his cousin, Emma Wedgewood, and they had a long fruitful, and notably happy marriage.

This whole story is charming. "Better than a dog anyhow" may enter the family lexicon.

I was struck by two particular lines. The great London clubs, the successors to the coffee houses that I have written about often, were truly attractive for the conversation of clever men. They were not quite third places, because of their exclusive membership, but they did offer varied conversation of a large enough group of informed men. The downside for me, and other "clever men" today, is that the clubs did not include the conversation of clever women.

In contrast to the clubs, Darwin draws a picture of the ideal type of the home scene of a knowledge class man of the Victorian era: " a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps." We know that the Darwins did have much intelligent conversation at home, and that Charles Darwin respected Emma Darwin's opinion. He loved playing with his children, too. Darwin is a model for an engaged husband and father who sustained his prodigious schedule of work and thought.

Marry, Marry, Marry; Converse, Converse, Converse; Work, Work, Work. Q.E.D.

The College and the Coffee Shop

The New York Times has a story dear to my heart: "Rural Colleges Seek New Edge and Urbanize." They tell of rural colleges and universities adding urban amenities, including denser adjacent housing. Their aim is not just to serve students, but to turn the college town into "a small city in the country that is not reserved for only the young." Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, a partner in Centre's consortium, is featured. When I visited Hendrix I found the coffee house on the edge of campus. It is a fine one, but at that time it was the only thing like it anywhere near campus.

Danville, Kentucky, where I live, is a wonderful Norman Rockwellesque small town with a fine little college in it. It does not think of itself, though, as a college town. Town/gown relations have long been friendly and respectful, but not, I would say, intimate. The college had its life and amenities, and the town had a different set. Lately, though, the two have been moving together, in just the way envisioned in this article. The college moved its bookstore into an empty downtown department store. The college worked together with a local entrepreneur to build a new coffee house attached to the bookstore. This coffee house, the Hub, is named for the old department store. I spend hours in the Hub each day. I hold office hours there, and talk to students, colleagues, and friends and neighbors from town.

When my wife sent me this article, she entitled her message "Read it. Read it now." The dessert, she promised, is at the end. And indeed it was. The article ends with John Fry, president of Franklin & Marshall in lovely Lancaster, PA, describing the serendipitous ideal of liberal arts college life in the new kind of college town: “You’re in the coffee shop on a Saturday morning sipping a cup of coffee and you run into a professor, and two hours later you’ve had one of those transformative moments.”

Amen.

Republican Third Place?

In teaching a course about coffee houses, we went to lots of independent coffee houses, and a few chains. The independents were overwhelmingly – no, uniformly – left of center in their feel. The corporate ones were more politically neutral, but even Starbucks feels more Democratic than Republican. I have taken to asking people if they have ever been to a Republican coffee house. So far, no examples. It seems possible that there are some evangelical Christian coffee house ministries that might serve GOP lattes, but I haven't met one yet.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine what, exactly, a Republican "third place" would be like. I know about some redneck bars that have a right-wing stance, but I don't think they are really for party regulars and primary voters. And I suppose the average country club restaurant is more R than D. Still, it is hard to think of the kind of place where Republicans would normally go to hang out and talk about the world with strangers who gradually become acquaintances.

Any ideas?

Gay Fathers Should Breastfeed

Men can breastfeed. Manual stimulation, especially with a breast pump, can stimulate lactation. Men's milk is pretty much as good as women's milk. Breastfeeding builds a bond between mother and child – I think it should have a similar effect for father and child, in the absence of a mother.

Anyone see a downside?

Why Is Super Bowl Sunday a High Holy Day in the Civil Religion?

When I made my civil religion calendar last year the holiday of Super Bowl Commercial Sunday came before Rodent Shadow Day. Such have been the rapid advances in our civilization that in only one year the movable feast of the Super Bowl has gone beyond the day of the ground hog, and is heading toward Forced Romance Day.

Someday, perhaps, it can make it all the way to Fireworks Day on July fourth, a holiday clearly in need of revitalization.

But what is the Super Bowl for? The game is usually not interesting, the commercials have been pawed over before they are even shown, the half-time show is bloated beyond parody. The most memorable moment in recent Super Bowls concerned a “wardrobe malfunction.”

We make a big deal of the Super Bowl because we need what the great sociologist Emile Durkheim called a “collective effervescence.” Every social group, large and small, periodically needs a shared emotional experience to renew our bond with one another. The larger and more spread out the group, the more it needs a collective effervescence. 9/11 clearly was a genuine collective effervescence for the United States.

The Super Bowl is an attempt to manufacture an annual collective effervescence. It is successful in that in creates a common topic of conversation among, say, half the nation. And it does provide an excuse in the new year to get together with friends and do something social for the purpose of doing something social. In Kentucky we spend a week celebrating a two-minute horse race for the same purpose.

Despite being mostly scripted, though, the Super Bowl can work as a collective effervescence for two reasons peculiar to itself. First, there is an actual unscripted football game buried underneath, which carries the possibility of being interesting. And, because it is just a football game, people can get themselves worked up into ritual emotions, without actually caring about the outcome. Indeed, I think the point of spectator sports is to create a bond that is purely social because it is not, in the end, about anything that really matters. And the bond of sports watchers is not only among fans of the same team, but even with fans of opposing teams. The ritual of opposition creates a bond when the thing we are “fighting” about doesn’t really matter.

The Super Bowl, despite being mostly ridiculous, earns its place in our civil religion calendar.

HP Squared

The final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will be released this summer. Pre-orders are already setting records. No suprise there. The Gruntleds will order their copy and line up for the midnight release. Last time we started reading it on the way home, started again the next morning and read aloud all day, and finished it the next day. The kids then took turns re-reading it.

Here is the unexpected humor: Amazon.com is offering a pre-ordered copy, paired with another book, as they often do. And what are they pairing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with? A second copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!

Murray 3: Educate the Gifted to be Good … and Married

In the final installment of Charles Murray's Wall Street Journal series, Murray argues for special education for the gifted to be good guardians of society. It is not enough that the cognitive elite be smart or technically educated. "It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice," Murray writes: "They must know what it means to be good." Murray wants the gifted to get a double dose of history and philosophy, aimed at teaching them critical judgment. In an era critical of making judgments at all, this is a controversial thing to say.

I agree with Murray on this point entirely. Indeed, in a small way, this is the main point of my job.

Murray does not attend to another critical part of the education that I would have our cognitive elite receive: an education in the importance of making good marriages and working hard at raising their children. When students are educated about marriage at all, if we say anything good about marriage, it is about how they can benefit individually. Married people, we point out, are happier, healthier, and richer. This is all true. I teach these points myself.

The larger point that we should teach the cognitive elite is that it is hugely valuable to society if they marry well and raise children well. [No, I am not saying that each individual, in any class, must marry or must have children. I am talking about the social effect of the whole class.] The cognitive elite are part of the ruling class, and that class's actions have a disproportionate influence on what other people do. A married elite is more likely to be socially minded and careful. Smart people are more likely to marry other smart people than ever before, and their kids, if they have any, are quite likely to be smart, too.

The biggest reason to put marriage education in gifted education is that gifted women today are less likely than other women to have children. Women who can handle lots of education and demanding careers are the most likely to let that education and career-making consume their entire childbearing years. Our society has benefited in thousands of ways from opening all realms of school and work to smart women. One unexpected lead lining of this golden cloud, though, is that smart women are less likely to have children now than they were in past generations. And that is a great loss, to them and to society as a whole.

Murray 2: Vocational Education … AND Liberal Arts

The second of Charles Murray's recent Wall Street Journal series was entitled "What's Wrong With Vocational School? Too many Americans are going to college." This combines a feature of Murray's argument that I agree with the most, with one that I think is completely wrongheaded.

One of the most admirable parts of Charles Murray's argument about IQ, in The Bell Curve and in this series, is that all kinds of occupations are noble, and are good things for smart people to do. The main thrust of the Bell Curve was not really about the bottom of the IQ distribution, though that got the publicity (along with a minor part of the argument concerning race). His main point, though, was that our educational system had become very efficient in sorting nearly all high-IQ students toward a handful of occupations. A "cognitive elite" is being created that is getting narrower and more exclusive. Some high-paying professions, such as law and investing, are drawing a bigger share of smart people than their social utility deserves, impoverishing other fields; Murray favors engineering. America was worse off, he argues, in the days when smart people were held back from advanced education by sheer poverty and discrimination. But the silver lining of that dark cloud was that smart people were spread over more occupations.

Therefore, I agree with Charles Murray that vocational education is honorable. Vo-tech training is good schooling for a job. I would rather deal with people trained for their work than have them make it up – or even to have them try to guess how their liberal arts education can be applied to a technical problem. And for students who don't want, aren't ready for, or aren't up to a demanding liberal arts college curriculum, vocational education is an honorable and sensible alternative. It benefits them and society.

I teach at a demanding liberal arts college. We do not offer vocational education. Many students, probably most of them, think that the justification for college is to get a better job. This is wrong, and I tell them so early and often. They pick majors on the basis of jobs they hope it will connect to. Doubly wrong. At a liberal arts college, everyone "majors" in the liberal arts. The curriculum is not about this job skill or another. The point of a liberal arts education is to grow wiser and of better character. In some students, this aim is not realized, at least not at the time. But it works often enough, and shapes students over their whole lifetime, in a way that vocational education can't.

I agree with Charles Murray that work, and vocational training are honorable. But I also think that everyone could benefit from a broad education that helps them become wiser and of better character. Moreover, society needs a broad, wiser, and virtuous ruling class. Liberal arts education and vocational education are both needed in society and even in each person.

Murray 1: All Children Can Learn, Though Half are Below Average

Charles Murray continues the argument he and Richard Herrnstein advanced in The Bell Curve in an interesting three-part series in the Wall Street Journal last week. I will take up each of his three points in the next three posts.

Murray makes the point that half of all children are below average in IQ. This is true by definition. Yet laws such as the federal No Child Left Behind Act, or the Kentucky Education Reform Act, believe that all children can learn, and many at high levels. These two points do not logically conflict with one another. However, I think Murray is right that in practice Americans take comfort in the idea that just about all children can achieve at the same high level if we just try harder and/or pay more money for schools. This is not so.

Murray's argument rests on a bell curve distribution of "g," the general intelligence thought to underlie IQ. If our school curriculum is good enough to challenge the smartest students, then its hardest courses will be too hard for the weakest students. However, school achievement is not a simple reflection of underlying intelligence. Some students achieve below their ability. They might not be motivated to work hard. Or they might have so many obstacles in their environment, especially at home, that they can't concentrate on school as they ought. Still, if we got up to optimal conditions, there would be a limit to how much the kids at the bottom of the intelligence distribution could learn.

The gap between where we are now and where we should be comes from those environmental conditions. In my opinion, family dysfunction causes most of the educational problems that can be improved. Yes, there is much that can be done to make education better, especially in the worst urban schools. But the main reason that bad schools are bad is because the school has to spend so much energy on just getting the kids there regularly and getting them to do their work. And most of those problems, I believe, come from family dysfunctions.

Murray is right: half of all children will always be below average in school. And if we improve family functioning so that more kids can reach their intellectual potential, the bell curve will become more obvious.

All of which means, though, that we should improve family functioning. Because all children can learn, and many at high levels.

Chinese Divorce Crisis Over! (Sort of)

Last year the Chinese government reported an alarming spike in the divorce rate. The official divorce rate was reported as 2.76 per 1,000. This is still well below Western rates (the U.S. is about 4 per 1,000) but much higher than the Chinese divorce rate was just a few years ago.

The Chinese government has now admitted that they goofed, according to the official China Daily. They counted the number of divorced people, rather than the number of divorces.

The new official 2005 divorce rate for China is 1.3 per 1,000.

Temporary Marriage is Rational, But Wrong

Shi'ia Islam allows men to take temporary wives in addition to their permanent wives. Sunni Islam does not. The practice is old, based on the Shi'ite reading of Muhammad's own attempts to provide for widows. In a "mutaa," the religious term for temporary marriage, the man pays the woman up front, then pays her expenses for the duration of the marriage. The term can be as short as a night, or as long as he wants. He can end it whenever he wants to; she cannot end the marriage before the agreed-upon term without his permission.

Mutaa are "pleasure marriages" because they are not supposed to provide children. If the woman gets pregnant anyway, the man is supposed to support the child, but the religious courts in most places don't have the authority to enforce child support expectations.

Saddam Hussein had banned mutaa. Not only was he a Sunni Muslim, he was originally a secular nationalist. In Iraq today the Shi'ite majority is in power, and their distinctive practices, including temporary marriage, are back.

Temporary marriage was designed to protect widows in a society in which men would scorn widows (and divorced women) for virgins. Iraq today is producing many widows every day. The revival of mutaa is a rational solution to a serious problem. However, temporary marriage is so prone to abuse that it is not worth the cost to society. Temporary marriage takes advantage of women in trouble on terms that please men. As the Sunni critics say, temporary "marriage" is really a way of giving religious sanction to prostitution.

We probably can't stop the revival of temporary marriage in Shi'ite-dominated Iraq. That is their call, and not ours. But we can stay clear about why it is a long-term danger, even if it seems a rational solution to current problems.

Is the Montreat Presbyterian Church Leaving for Big Reasons, or Small?

Montreat Presbyterian Church voted 311 – 27 to ask to be dismissed from the Presbyterian Church (USA) to the more conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The conservative congregation had been upset with the denomination for some time for what it regarded as the denomination's drift away from the Bible and toward pluralism. Moderator Joan Gray met with them before the vote to attempt to answer their questions.

So far, this story has only been reported in The Presbyterian Layman, which reads the congregation's actions wholly in light of national Presbyterian issues. The congregation itself has not issued an announcement, and other news sources – the Presbyterian News Service, the Presbyterian Outlook, the secular press – have not covered the story yet. Others who have discussed the issue with me see this departure as part of a slow national schism driven by the General Assembly's adoption of the Peace, Unity, and Purity task force report.

I wonder, though, how much this particular congregation was moved by a local issue not mentioned in the Layman account: the decision to close the Presbyterian Historical Society office at Montreat. This has been a passionate grievance for many Southern Presbyterians. Surely the anger over the PHS closing has touched more people personally at Montreat Presbyterian Church than anywhere.

Until there is wider coverage of this vote, I can only speculate. But I urge those who see each congregation's departure as a symptom of a national schism to consider how much local issues also drive these votes.

The Scabies Spiritual

My #2 daughter, the wonderful Endub, has written a spiritual.
I thank her for sharing it with us.

The Scabies Spiritual

I'm so oppressed, and it itches really bad.
I'm not quite sure what I did to make God mad
But if I'm in the same boat as old Jobab
I guess I'll wait for Him right here
With my pottery and my scabs

CHORUS
Scabies, scabies
How I wish I'd been a stillborn baby
Maybe then I would not suffer as I do
Scabies, scabies
It shall surely drive me crazy
Let my skin fall off, Oh Lord,
And let the Sarcoptes scabiei leave me be

Job's only friends sat beside as he cried
He whined at them about how much he wished he'd die
But I have no one to refute me by my side
'cause my friends think I'm contagious
And both my goldfish died

CHORUS

I want to give God a piece of my mind
Ask him why he's treating me unkind
This really bites
I'm covered in mites
And I'd better get my camels when this is through
And yes, God, I'm talking to you.

Military Divorces Up Due to Deployment

One further casualty of the Iraq war: according to the Army, from 2003 when the war began to the following year, more than 3,000 soldiers got divorced, a 78% increase in one year.

War has always been hard on marriages. As the military has gotten more married, the armed forces have of necessity become more involved in supporting marriages in order to retain volunteer soldiers. This makes the war's toll on military marriages a more significant problem for the armed forces. No one, to my knowledge, has calculated the effect of divorce on re-enlistment, but it surely can't be good.

The military's family support apparatus gets bigger, and more necessary, year by year. The Iraq war is the biggest test that the military family system has faced in the all-volunteer era. The fall-out will continue for years to come.

Married with Children … and a Rifle

Yesterday I noted that the All-Volunteer Force has obliged our armed services to be much more family friendly. Betty Alt gives us two statistics that show the sea-change in the family structure of the military.

At the end of the Second World War, 1/3 of the members of the armed forces were married. This is a large increase over pre-war numbers. These 1945 numbers include those iconic rushed marriages of G.I.s about the shipped off – which led to a huge divorce spike in 1947.

Today, 2/3 of the members of the armed forces are married. Moreover, 60% have dependents, though not all the dependents depend on married soldiers.

In the past, the military prohibited, discouraged, or scared off family men. Now, the military way of life is attractive to men, and women, with families.

The Volunteer Military is a Pro-Family Military

I have been reading Betty Alt's Following the Flag: Marriage and the Modern Military this week. She makes a point that I could have figured out, but never thought of: the volunteer military has to support families, or the soldiers and sailors and airmen will leave.

There have always been wives, even children, following soldiers from post to post. They were, at best, tolerated, but never welcomed, especially for enlisted men. What changed the military's attitude toward families was the advent of the All Volunteer Force in 1973. For most of the history of the American military, the force was very small. Only officers would marry, and then only with permission. There weren't that many families to accommodate, and, except for a few lifers, they needn't be accommodated for long. Even in major wars – the Civil War, WWI and WWII – many men were drafted, but whatever accommodations were made to families, and especially by families, were temporary. The massive build-up was followed by a massive demobilization.

When we ended the draft after the Vietnam War, though, we had a superpower's need for a large, permanent armed force all around the world. The military had to make a fundamental change in the way it viewed families. In order to recruit and keep good volunteers, their families needed to be more than tolerated. Permanent base housing was built, a school system was created, medical benefits for families were increased. In time, with more female soldiers (now about 13% of the armed services), these benefits were extended to that new species, the military husband. Childcare services were created for working moms who were married to soldiers, or were soldiers themselves.

The military has been clumsy in adapting to families. And it is in the nature of war that families are separated, and mothers and fathers get wounded or killed. I, for one, think that mothers of small children should not be soldiers, though I would stop just short of making this a law. Still, the armed services have done a remarkable job in only one generation in changing their long custom and adapting to military families. There is more that could be done, of course, but in this area, as in many others, the military actually leads the way in practically accommodating new social formations.

49 Up

The latest installment in the "7 Up" series has come out on DVD. "7 Up" was meant as a one-off when Granada Television profiled a group of 7 year olds in Britain in 1964. The kids were drawn from different classes, and the first show was fairly heavy handed in its socialist critique of the British class structure.

Then they did a follow up at 14. And another at 21. The class critique began to fall away, while the stories of the people came to the fore. By 28 most had married and started to have kids. 35 had a strong theme of parents dying, and the next generation stepping up to full responsibility. Some were divorcing, too. The subjects themselves began to be so famous for being in this series that their resentment of the disruption of their lives starts to come into the documentary as a theme.

"42 Up" seemed to me a turning point. Up to this point, the story was mainly about fulfilling youthful promise – including the opportunities and limits that their initial class position created. Their stories at 42, though, were more about realization. A few still had major turning points coming. The happiest part of that episode was that the nicest guy befriended the most troubled guy, and helped him get on his feet. The nicest guy also got married just before the 42-year-old revisit by the camera crew.

At 49, quite a few are grandparents, especially those who started in the working class. Michael Apted, the director, asks most of them about the effect of class on their lives. He agrees with the general consensus that they have transcended class, or at least the old class structure. The former East Enders had moved out, succeeded by Asian and Caribbean families who changed all the landmarks of the old working-class citadel.

The theme that I noticed this time was that those who stayed married were notably better off than the others, especially financially. Several of them, notably Tony, clearly teetered on the brink of divorce in earlier episodes. Some had divorced, and went on to make second marriages or partnerships that were pretty good. But the losses to divorce run through the whole story. At 49, a good moment for stock-taking, marriage mattered as much as class in how their lives were turning out.

I think the "7 Up" series is the greatest sociological documentary ever made. In Roger Ebert's interview with Michael Apted on the DVD, Apted, who will be about 70 when the time for "56 Up" comes around, worries that he will die long before all the participants do, or before they all refuse to participate any more. I am a few years younger than the subjects of these films, so I have always found them personally helpful as a glimpse into my own future. I hope, with Apted, that someone will carry the project out to its conclusion – to "98 Up."

Most Women Not Living With Husbands – Congratulations, Healthy Widows!

A new Census Bureau study shows that slightly under half of women are now living with husbands. Some see this as further as proof that women don't need marriage, that it is a minority lifestyle and will fade in the future.

Phooey.

Three fourths of women marry. More than half are still married. The 9 percent who are widows can't be read as "anti-marriage." Most of the 11% who are divorced remain pro-marriage – just not to their exes. And many of the unmarried quarter are younger women who hope to marry.

Moreover, most men are married, and continue to benefit from it.

Many women delay marriage, but still cohabit and have children. This is especially true of children of divorce, who want a good marriage so badly that they will mark time cohabiting until they are sure.

I think that when the word starts to get out that cohabiting prevents good marriages more than it helps secure them, the marriage rate will go back up. And I believe the divorce rate can continue to go down, especially as panicy young marrieds absorb the wisdom that they can ride out the rough spots, just as all previous generations have.

This study is the low moment of the curve, not the wave of the future.

ADDENDUM: Michael Medved reports that the New York Times story is even more flawed than I thought. They included all girls 15 - 19 in the total. This hugely inflates the number of females who are living without husbands, but does not, as they claim, mean that most women are living without husbands. My 17- and 18-year-old daughters are living without husbands, and a very good thing, too. I want them to marry someday, but not any time soon. Shame on the Times for such distorted -- if not deliberately devious - reporting.

Baptists Fire a Teacher for Being a Woman

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas gave Sheri Klouda a Ph.D., hired her to teach Hebrew, and then fired her for being a woman.

The seminary based its decision on its reading of I Timothy 2:12, "But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence" (King James version). They normally forbid women to teach men in theology or biblical languages, though women may teach men in other subjects.

I think Southwestern Seminary has a perfect right to tailor their hiring rules to their reading of Scripture. My objection is not on feminist or equal protection grounds, or anything like that. They are a free school in a free country, and can follow their conscience in reading Scripture.

I think they have made an incorrect decision, on two grounds. First, on a narrow reading of the verse in question, I can see how they might justify excluding a woman from teaching theology. But Hebrew? If they let women teach music, I think they should let them teach languages. Both can be used for teaching theology, but so can they be used for many other purposes. I don't see why biblical languages are included in the ban.

Second, I think they err in reading this verse as applying to professors. I believe this verse and its neighbors are meant to apply in the home, so I don't even think it rules out women ministers. But even if you think I Timothy rules out women as pastors, as Southern Baptists normally do, I don't think that prohibition carries over to professors. Teaching is not simply proclaiming the word or proselytizing the faith. Southwestern is open to many kinds of Christians, and teaches Hebrew and theology and many other subjects to men and women who want to understand the Bible and the Christian faith for all kinds of reasons.

I think Southwestern Seminary has erred in firing Sheri Klouda, and erred in a way that will bring as much strife within the church as it will draw outside criticism.

Tagged

I was tagged by fellow blogger Dennis Hancock to come up with five odd facts about me.

1. In college, I knew the combination to the college's safe.

2. I once performed P.D.Q. Bach music at Lincoln Center in New York. We even made a record, the Liebeslieder Polkas, of the same renowned fictitious composer's work.

3. Despite teaching a coffee class, I only have one cup a day.

4. I am the richest man in the world (3 kids @ GNP of North America = oodles)

5. I drive barefoot.

Coffee House Debate is a Minority Calling

This morning our seminar on Cafés and Public Life met in our local coffee house to talk about whether public life needs coffee houses (or something like them), and whether most people need public life of the kinds that coffee house debate provides.

Our conclusions: Yes to the first, No to the second.

Habermas argues that society needs a robust public sphere in which the public critically debates the issues of the day. This creates public opinion, the necessary counterweight to the state and the corporations. Otherwise, public opinion is corrupted into propaganda and advertising.

Not everyone, though, wants to think critically about the Big Picture, about the structure of society and the relations of power. As several students said (possibly autobiographically) it is easier and more comfortable to live in a bubble, not worrying about the structures that shape ordinary life.

Those who promote a robust public life often imply that democracy itself is imperiled if the masses don't participate in public debate. As I read the history of attempts to achieve sustained mass participatory democracy, though, this is a utopian quest, and an overstated fear.

For the good of society, it is a good thing that a strategic minority critically debate the issues of the day. They stand over against the interests of powerful institutions – and often support them, albeit knowingly and critically.

For the good of people who want coffee house debate, it is a good thing that there are coffee houses and other third places.

I think, though, that coffee house debate and leadership in public opinion will always be a minority taste and a minority calling.

Coffee Houses vs. Salons

The English coffee house of the 17th and 18th century had its counterpart in the cafés of the continental nations. Jürgen Habermas, though, makes the case that, as far as creating a public sphere for critical debate goes, the real counterpart of the coffee house was the French salon.

The coffee house was public, admitting all kinds. The coffee house was rough, smoky, competitive, and its menu had the "hogo of sirreverence." Few women went there. The salon was private, held in a house, admission by invitation only. Women were not only admitted, they controlled the invitations and the setting.

The advantage of the salon in creating a distinctive public sphere was that it included women and men. The advantage of the coffee house was that included a broader range of classes than any invitation-only group would have in that era.

Now, of course, coffee houses include both sexes and a fairly wide class range. The task is to create critical debate among so varied a group.

Coffee Houses vs. Bars as Gardens of Sedition

When coffee houses take off, the ruling power usually tries to suppress them because they breed sedition. The caliph made such an attempt in Egypt, as did most of the European kings. These attempts all failed, typically because powerful people were already so addicted to coffee and enamored of the coffee house that they nullified the banning order at the outset. To be sure, kings and caliphs found other ways to get coffee houses under control, especially by using spies. But the tension remained.

Kings do not seem to have the same problem with pubs and taverns. Muslim rulers, of course, do not quite have this problem, as alcohol-based public houses were forbidden anyway (though they could still be found). When coffee reached Europe, by contrast, alcohol vendors were well established. On most of the continent, the "cafés" were co-opted into mostly alcohol-serving restaurants, which also served coffee. It was only in the English-speaking lands that coffee houses developed as full-blown alternatives to pubs. There the political contrast was drawn in clearer relief. When Charles II tried to suppress the English coffee houses as hot-beds of sedition, he promoted the good old English pubs as places where people drank without talking about affairs of state that were none of their business.

This history suggests to me an interesting contrast:

Coffee houses pose few dangers to the individual, but some danger to the state; bars pose few dangers to the state, but some danger to the individual.

In fact, a Machiavellian ruler might see bars as a useful tool to keep the population politically quiescent. A sports bar would be the perfect tool of a modern-day "bread and circuses" campaign.

If you want to organize a rally against the war, go to a coffee house. If you want to get people to call in against the coach, go to a bar.

The Hogo of Sirreverence

In the 17th century, when coffee came to England, it was attacked by the traditional ale- and beer-men and women because it tasted terrible and stank. It is true that, in those days, coffee was made in a smelly way. The beans were hand roasted very unevenly, and the grounds were left in the coffee for a long time, often ending up in the cup itself. The many pamphlets against coffee said it looked and tasted like soot, or mud, or worse. Indeed, some said it had the "hogo" (haute gout, that is, scent) of "sirreverence." Sirreverence was a euphemism derived from the apologetic way a servant would describe excrement – "save your reverence."

Markman Ellis, who presents this wonderful expression in The Coffee-House: A Cultural History, says that there was a market in those early days of the modern cosmopolitan market for bitter, astringent, tough tastes and smells. The coffee house, which reeked of coffee and tobacco, served that market. This hogo of sirreverence was another part of the reason that the early coffee houses were overwhelmingly male environments.

Modern coffee houses mostly sell sweet, milk-heavy coffee drinks. But they have within them those who want the bitterness of coffee as it comes from the bean. I have been a mocha drinker since the beginning of the specialty coffee boom, but reflection on how little coffee there is in a large mocha has led me to switch this week, at least halfway. Cappuccino, anyone?

Coffee House Talk Favors Masculine Acquaintances

[I am in the middle of my Cafés and Public Life class, so I thought I would share some thoughts on cafés and coffee houses this week.]

Coffee houses as classic third places – neither home, nor work – where strangers can become acquaintances. Coffee houses promote a kind of sociability through which people from different walks of life can talk about public issues. The regulars in a coffee house may talk often about all manner of things. But the norm for that kind of sociability is that it stays in the coffee house, unless two people make an unusual effort to develop the relationship deeper.

In other words, coffee house comrades can remain at the same friendly acquaintance level for a long time – years, even. I have had a number of coffee house buddies over the years whose last names I never learned, or could recall. This did not diminish the quality of the relationship.

I think this kind of stable friendly acquaintanceship is more typical of men's than women's conversation partners. Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term "third place," writes fondly of the group of retired men with whom he regularly gets together to "settle all the problems of the world." I have known many a men's coffee talk group, especially "old goats clubs" of retired men, that did just that sort of thing. They knew one another's opinions on public issues, but they did not know the details of one another's lives very well. The women's kaffeeklatch, in my experience, is quite different. There, the main subject of conversation is one another's lives and families. If a group of women talked regularly over coffee, but never got personal, I expect that most of them would think there was something wrong with the group.

The golden age coffee houses of the 17th and 18th centuries were overwhelmingly male environments. Today's coffee house is much more mixed. Still, I think the distinctive form of sociability of the coffee house as third places favors a more masculine than feminine conversational style.

King at the Mason Temple

Martin Luther King's famous last speech, the prescient "I have been to the mountain top" oration given the night before he was assassinated, was delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis. I had long wondered why a Baptist minister would be speaking in a Masonic temple. But, as I discovered when I started teaching about American religion, the Mason Temple is not connected with the Masons, the sometimes anti-Christian secret society. Rather, it is the central edifice of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), founded by Rev. C.H. Mason.

COGIC is the largest black Pentecostal denomination in the United States. It might be the largest black denomination of any kind in this country. Sometimes they claim a membership of 5.5 million, which would make it a top-ten American denomination of any kind. However, that number is probably a highly optimistic estimate. Still, it is pretty big. There are more black Baptists in this country, but they are divided into several principal denominations, including King's own, the Progressive National Baptists.

In 1968, when King spoke at the Mason Temple, what was most important about the venue that night was not that it was Pentecostal, but that it was black controlled. Ministers of many denominations worked together for the larger cause of civil rights. Since the 1960s, though, Pentecostalism has boomed. My rough estimate (and it is rough, given the available numbers) is that there were probably more people in either of the two largest black Baptist denominations (both called National Baptist) at that time than there were COGIC members. Since then, though, Pentecostal growth rates worldwide have outstripped even the respectable growth rates of all kinds of theologically conservative Baptists. Pentecostal denominations, including COGIC, are only now starting to get the recognition that their numbers have long suggested.

In yet another, less expected way, King was prescient that night in Memphis. When he was speaking to the future of race relations in America, he was also, indirectly, speaking in a vital house of the future of black Protestantism.

The First American Coffee House Began in a Bookstore

In the 1670s, in Boston, before Paris even had a coffee house.

Marriage is the complementary union of a man and a woman to make and raise children

I made this claim yesterday. It has occasioned some misunderstanding, so let me elaborate.

One misunderstanding is that when I say that marriage entails submission and sacrifice, I am contending that homosexual couples are selfish. I did not mean to suggest that homosexual couples are incapable of submission or sacrifice; I am sure that that happens in many actual homosexual couples. My thought is that the complementarity of man and woman entails (mutual) submission, in a way that the similarity of a same-sex couple does not. Likewise, parenthood entails self-sacrifice, and parenthood is entailed in the social institution of marriage. Some actual marriages don't have children, and some homosexual couples do, and no doubt there are many exemplary marriages and parents contained in those groups. I am talking about is the social ideal, not your relationship or mine.

Another misunderstanding is that when I say that the social purpose of marriage includes children, I am condemning childless marriages. Again, I am talking about the social ideal, the reason that society depends on marriage. All actual marriages, mine included, deviate from this ideal. I do think that marriage as an institution entails children. Children are why complementary couples take the step to become a permanent, faithful, one-flesh unit – that is, become married. Some actual couples do not have children. Society, and the institution of marriage, can live with that. However, if all children were produced without marriage, society would disintegrate. And if no marriages produced children, society would end.

A third misunderstanding is that I am ignoring love as the basis of marriage. I do think that the deepest love among human beings is found between parents and their children, and between husbands and wives. Marriage, though, adds to that love a permanent institution that changes husband and wife into one flesh. This relationship, unique in all social life, has deep consequences for their material lives, as well. Sometimes the feelings of love fluctuate, especially between the husband and wife. The marriage does not need to end, though, if love is at low ebb; rather, the institution of marriage is there to protect the couple from their changing emotions, and especially to protect their children from rash emotional actions that their parents might feel like making.

Why Would Civil Unions Harm Marriage?

I am in favor of civil unions, as I argued two days ago. I favor them despite the fact that I think they will contribute to undermining marriage. I have been asked by some respondents to explain why I think civil unions would harm marriage at all.

Some argue that if I am free to marry, what difference does it make if other people conduct their relations differently? I believe that we should tolerate many different ways of conducting our relationships. But this is not because they don't affect mine.

Marriage is a social institution. It works because society as a whole believes in it, and supports marriage as such. My marriage is not just made by my wife and me, but by the whole society. Marriage is one of the most powerful of social institutions because it has huge social support.

If marriage were treated as just another private contract (as it is in increasing danger of descending to), fewer marriages would be formed, more marriages would fail, and each marriage would be more tenuous because less taken for granted.

Marriage is the complementary union of a man and a woman to make and raise children. This is the social model for marriage, around which all actual marriages are arranged.

Civil unions are, I think, a species of intense friendship between people of the same type. A civil union is designed to benefit the couple. Children may be brought into the union, but they are secondary.

If some people pursue unions with their opposite sex partners to benefit just themselves, with only a secondary consideration for children, this undermines marriage. Not just that marriage, but marriage as an institution.

It is natural in an individualistic culture such as ours to recast social institutions to benefit me, rather than forcing me to discipline and sacrifice myself for others. Even without children, marriage entails the discipline of submission – mutual submission. With children, to that submission must be added self-sacrifice. It is hard for us to sustain this high standard of marriage anyway. We only make the task harder when we add a competing marriage-like relationship that does not entail the same kind of self-sacrifice, and may not even require self-submission.

Married Homosexuals Can Stay That Way

Children do better if their parents stay married. Sometimes a married parent discovers or decides that he or she (more likely he) has a primarily homosexual orientation. Obviously, we are not talking here about people who have an exclusively homosexual orientation, or they wouldn't have gotten married and had kids in the first place. Rather, we are talking about the dilemma of those who feel torn between their love and duty toward their spouse and children, on the one hand, and their newly estimated sexual orientation.

A pastor recently told me of a discussion in his church about homosexuality. The talk was stopped dead by the stories told by two women whose ex-husbands discovered that they were gay. In this pastor's mind, that case settled the issue: gay men can't be married to women, so they should be free to divorce their wives and, if they want to, marry other men. And the same would go for married lesbians.

I think, though, that these sad cases do not settle the issue at all. There are many married men and women with a homosexual orientation, who nonetheless remain effective and contented spouses and parents. This situation is not ideal, but it is good enough. Michele Wolkomir's studies of effective ex-gay ministries found that the men in these groups (her study did not include lesbians) were not trying to change their orientation. Rather, they were getting all kinds of help in disciplining their actions because they loved their wives and children.

I am not saying that married parents who discern their own homosexual desires must stay married, and I am certainly not saying they should be forbidden to divorce. Rather, I have noted that there are success stories and supportive resources for men (and women, though I know this less well) who wish to stay married.

There is a peculiar tendency on the liberal side of the aisle to regard sexual identity as a mere social construction, a "gender," – whereas sexual orientation is imperious biological identity that we must always bow to. This is odd, if not upside down. At the least, I think it would be safer to think of both sex/gender and sexual orientation/preference as composed by both nature and nurture. Personally I think of both of them as 50/50 propositions.

When married parents discern a homosexual orientation in themselves, they are not obliged to drop everything and respond. Married parents have other identities, orientation, preferences, and duties that call at least as forcefully.

Why Civil Unions?

My post of January 5, 2007, " A Free Society Can Accommodate a Homosexual Minority," generated a rich set of comments. One thread asked the important question, why civil unions? Why not same-sex marriage? My answer is a bit different for civil society and for the church.

For both kinds of society, I believe that marriage as an institution is designed to unite the equal and complementary halves of the human species, a man and a woman, to make and rear children. Individual men and women, and individual marriages, approximate this ideal more or less fully. If they do not fully realize the ideal, they are not any lesser morally or ethically. Individual variation is normal and can have many benefits. The social norm of marriage sets a form of what is usually good for society as a whole, a norm around which all the actual marriages vary. A healthy society can tolerate quite a bit of variation, as long as the core is robust.

A free society ought to tolerate quite a bit of variation, for the sake of freedom. Too much variation, and too much freedom, can, of course, destroy society. That is always a risk. But we should err on the side of freedom wherever possible.

I think that our free civil society in the United States should support the social norm of marriage as a man and a woman united to make and rear children. This norm has ample support in our law, history, practice, and popular custom. Indeed, most people think it is the foundational institution of our whole society; I agree.

Some people, for one reason or another, cannot or do not wish to achieve that norm. I believe that our society is free and robust enough to accommodate many of those variations. Celibate people, married couples who cannot have children, even married couples who choose not to have children in the interests of a different social good are all good forms under the umbrella of our traditional standard of marriage. Single parents of many kinds, cohabiting couples, and cohabiting parents are good-enough forms of family life.

I do not see under our Constitution why same-sex couples, with and without children, are not good-enough approximation of marriages to be allowed under our civil law.

I think the term "marriage" means the equal and complementary forms of man and woman. A same-sex couple cannot, therefore, be married. This is the overwhelming sense of our tradition and our popular opinion about what "marriage" means. However, a civil union would give same-sex couples a good-enough legal status that was as close to marriage as the nature of their relationship allows. The countries with the most experience with homosexual civil unions, the Scandinavians, have found that most people – gay and straight -- can accept this approximation. Opinion surveys in the United States suggest that most people could accept a similar accommodation, especially in the younger generations.

I do not think homosexual couples would ever form civil unions at the same rate that straight couples marry. I think same-sex unions would have a higher break-up rate than marriages, in part because same-sex unions are much less likely to have children. Nonetheless, I believe a free society should offer the option to homosexual citizens who desire it. The effects on society of this accommodation would not be large.

The situation in the church is a little different, because, as I have argued earlier, I believe that the Bible does hold that same-sex sexual relations are sinful. I do not see how the church can condone an intentionally sexual relationship between persons of the same sex, even if such a relationship is likely to curb more or worse sins. I believe that the furthest that the church can go down this road is to tolerate same-sex relationships among those who are trying to avoid sex, even though we all sometimes lapse.

I do not relish reaching this conclusion, but I can see no other way around what appears to me to be the clear word and intention of Scripture, and the reality of desiring people in a fallen world.

I further think that the church can support same-sex civil unions, without asking the civil society to make any judgments about the sexual practices therein. The church itself, though, must make judgments about the sexual practices of those very same unions when they involve church members and officers. The church can, without inconsistency, recognize that the standards of the Constitution are not as demanding as those of the Bible. All citizens are entitled to the protection of the Constitution from the state, while all church members are entitled to choose to put themselves under the more stringent rule of the Bible in the church.

Thus, I support same-sex civil unions, but not same-sex marriage.

Starting the Year With a Bang

I like to start the new year with a bang. This past week's series on a centrist Christian approach to homosexual practice has certainly done that. I am still working through the comments -- I will give a more thoughtful overview tomorrow.

One point has struck me, though: we do not have a good name for a category of moral acts which are discretely tolerated, or formally overlooked, if the actors are making a good faith effort to wrestle with the dilemma. And yet, I think, in dealing with real people, we make such allowances all the time. There is no good way to build this kind of toleration into an ethical principle, because it really is a species of practical judgment in a particular case. Because we have to rely on many actors to make correct practical judgments in cases like this, the issue cannot be settled at the level of ethics.

The Presbyterian Position is Already a Viable Centrist Position - Almost

The upshot of the argument that I have been making over the past week is nearly identical to what the Presbyterian Church (USA) already teaches and promotes.

The church says that homosexuals are welcome in all offices of the church, and should be protected in civil society.

The church teaches that in God's plan for human beings the gift of sex is only properly expressed in marriage (of a man and a woman). Celibacy is a good though difficult discipline. We all have impulses to sex outside of marriage, including homosexual acts, but they are not part of God's plan for us. We should try to control them, and ask for help to do so. We should repent of our lapses. This applies to everyone, regardless of act or orientation.

The one point not yet clarified is whether it is better to try to curb those impulses within a committed relationship, or whether that is already too much of a structure of temptation. The church has already accepted this kind of unmarried but committed relationship as a good-enough starting point for opposite-sex couples. The issue now is whether it will do so for same-sex couples.

SO,

IF conservatives in the church were willing to accept the idea that two people of the same sex in a committed relationship is not ideal, but good enough;

AND

IF liberals in the church were willing to accept that idea that homosexual acts are something to repent of,

THEN

The church could have both its people and its standards, and achieve peace, unity, and as much purity as this fallen world allows. On this issue, anyway.

If I Were A Figment of Your Imagination, I Would Be Better Looking

(My answer to my son's friendly claim that I was a product of his mind).

(This drew a wonderful scrunch-face from Mrs. Gruntled.)

A Free Society Can Accommodate a Homosexual Minority

I think everyone should have someone to share a life with – or at least the civil burdens and benefits thereof. What I would really like is a "Ruth and Naomi Law." Each person could designate one other person for all those civil purposes that you need to share with others – to make medical decisions, to visit you in the hospital, to inherit your stuff. For married people that designated Other would be your spouse. Unmarried people, though, could designate one person, too. As far as the law was concerned, this need not be a marriage-like relationship; the state would be quite uninterested in whether sex was involved. Such a law would also allow same-sex couples to share most of the civil burdens and benefits that married people share, though the status would be broader than either marriage or domestic partner unions.

It is more likely, though, that our governments would adopt civil unions, a much narrower "marriage-lite" status. This would accomplish nearly all of what proponents of gay marriage want.

I think a free society should offer civil unions to homosexual citizens who want them. Following the experience of the Scandinavian countries with civil unions, I don't think there would be a big rush to them once the first excitement died down. Denmark, which has the longest experience with civil unions, has seen only about a tenth of one percent of their population take advantage of the opportunity. Some people want gay marriage or the nearest approximation, but the numbers are not large – or stable. Even some of the most celebrated same-sex unions in this country, such as the test-case couples who won the right to marry in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, have already split up.

Moreover, in countries with civil unions, more heterosexual couples use them than homosexual. Why they don't just go ahead and get married is somewhat mysterious. Still, I think they can also be accommodated in a free society.

Robby George has mounted a powerful natural law argument that the law should only recognize marriage of a man and a woman because "the law is a teacher." The law, he argues, should not only reflect social conditions, it should shape them. I can almost go with him here, but I think the line that he draws between legal marriage of a sterile heterosexual couple and an illegal union of two homosexuals is just too fine, or two dependent on extra-constitutional metaphysics, to really fly in America.

Some think that civil unions will undermine marriage. I think this is true. I do not think, though, that they would undermine marriage very much – not nearly as much, for example, as no-fault divorce laws have. Even so, I agree that there is some injustice in married people enjoying some benefits that homosexuals cannot enjoy. Righting this injustice by offering the civil union status is worth some erosion of marriage – especially since, in practice, not very many homosexual couples are likely to actually make use of it.

The Presbyterian Church, and other mainline churches, have long supported civil rights for homosexuals, including civil unions. There is no contradiction in saying, as nearly all such churches do, that homosexual practice is a sin and cannot be approved in the church, yet at the same time supporting homosexual civil rights. The church has one constitution, and civil society has another, more limited constitution. The church follows its own law in church matters, such as whom it will ordain and whom it will join together in marriage. The church also witnesses to society, and supports a broad accommodation of all kinds of freedoms for citizens under the civil laws.

Civil unions of same-sex couples could form a good-enough institution in society and, with more caveats, in the church. And good enough is good enough.

The Church Can Live with Homosexual Sinners the Way it Lives With Other Kinds of Sinners

Here, I think, we come to a centrist position that has been missing in the polarized debate. Let me start with the common ground the mainline denominations already have. Homosexual orientation is not a sin. Homosexual practice is not a bar to membership in the church. On this both sides in the mainline church debate agree.

The Bible says homosexual practice is a sin. On this the conservatives are right. But some conservatives go way overboard in saying that it is among the worst of sins.

I think homosexuality is a sin like divorce, not a sin like sacrificing children to idols. The Bible strongly condemns divorce, and Jesus does so most of all. The Presbyterian Church had a significant debate about how to deal with the biblical condemnation of divorce, and changed its position in the middle of the last century. Divorce is no longer a bar to being a minister or elder.

The church did not change its teaching that divorce is a sin. Each divorce is a tragedy, to be regretted and repented of. But sometimes, the church concluded, it is the least-bad option available to a person or a couple. They are enjoined to repent, and sin no more. They may even remarry in the church, and serve in all its offices.

By making this pastoral accommodation to divorce, the church is not saying that divorce is a private matter, or just another lifestyle choice that is as good as any other. Some people may even be born with very difficult personalities, but I have never heard the argument that such people have a natural inclination to divorce, and therefore ought to act on their inclination.

I believe the church could accommodate homosexual practice in the same way that it has accommodated divorce, without abandoning its standards.

The church should promote and develop ways to help people work around their inclination to homosexual practice, just as the church promotes and develops many pastoral strategies to help people work around their inclination to divorce. The successful ministries that help people deal with their homosexual inclinations don't try to change peoples' orientations so much as help them to work around their inclinations successfully. This is much the way Alcoholics Anonymous helps alcoholics change their behavior, rather than trying to remake their whole orientation.

The church recognizes, though, that sometimes divorce is the least-bad alternative when a couple's attempt to practice marriage has failed. The church even goes so far as to sanction remarriages after divorce, in the hopes of helping to mend the broken. If all involved acknowledge that the best practice would be chastity and fidelity within the first marriage, the church can live with a good-enough second best of chastity and fidelity within a second marriage. In the same way, I believe, if all involved acknowledge that the best practice would be no homosexual practice, the church can live with a good-enough second best of chastity and fidelity within a marriage-like committed union.

It may appear that I am recommending a huge change in the church's position with this last point, but I am not really. The issue for the church has not been what precise sexual acts anyone is up to. In fact, the church really does not want to know the details of your sex life (and I certainly don't want to know). Instead, what the church has been concerned about all along is to have the biblical standards acknowledged as real standards. This means that we try to live within them, repent of lapses, and heartily endeavor to mend our ways. This is true of all sin, not just the sexual ones.

The issue is not whether the church can live with sinners, homosexual or otherwise. Everyone is a sinner. The whole church is made of sinners, including all of the church's officers. As a gay Unitarian minister I know put it, "The Bible has hundreds of passages against heterosexual sin, and six against homosexual sin. You wrestle with your hundreds, and I will wrestle with my six."

Let me take this argument out of the realm of the hypothetical. What I am arguing for is already the standard of most mainline Protestant denominations, including my own. The only part that has not been clarified is the last point – whether two homosexuals living together in a committed relationship can be good enough if they acknowledge that they should try to restrain their sexual practice. The acknowledgement of the church's standard, and repentance when we slip, is all that the church has asked of its officers.

This is a common ground we can reach.

A Small Minority Are Born With Homosexual Orientation

I have read the classic sociological and biological studies, and met enough gays and lesbians, to be convinced that there is some kind of physical basis for a homosexual orientation in some people.

Kinsey came up with the famous estimate that about 10% of the population is exclusively homosexual. More recent studies, especially that by Laumann and the Chicago team, give a more accurate picture: 3% of the population (2 – 4% of men, and 1 – 3% of women) are exclusively homosexual. 3% of the U.S. population is about 9 million people. That is a small percentage, but a sizable number of individuals. They are concentrated in cities, where Kinsey did his work, which is why he inadvertently over-estimated the homosexual percentage in the total population.

There have been tantalizing studies that have found biological correlates of homosexual orientation, but no one knows why some people have it. There also seem to be more biological correlations for gay men than for lesbians. For example, boys born at the end of a sequence of brothers are much more likely to be homosexual; the same is not true for girls in a sequence of sisters. I am not a biologist, I just read their studies. It seems to me that there is probably not a "gay gene." There may well be something important in the sequence of prenatal hormone washes that babies get in the womb which has a great deal to do with how our brains are oriented. In the vast majority of people, brain orientation matches the rest of our anatomy. In a small percentage of people, though, the correlation comes out differently.

I am also persuaded by the homosexual friends, colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances that I have had over the years that some people are "born that way." From the coming-out narratives that I know, this seems to be more true of men than women. In general, men tend to be more polarized in all kinds of characteristics, whereas women are more likely to be distributed across a spectrum. Women are more likely to switch orientations than men; there does not seem to be a male equivalent of the "hasbian."

More mysteriously, there does seem to be a correlation between homosexual orientation and certain character traits and skills. Here we are way out on a scientific limb. In my experience, lesbians tend to be tougher-minded and more competitive than other women. Gay men, famously, tend to be more musically and aesthetically talented than the average man. The queer eye is different than the straight guy's eye. I have no idea why this would be so, and maybe I have been misled by stereotypes.

However, and this is a very big however, biological orientation does not settle the moral question. Just because you are born with an inclination to do something does not mean that you should. As a biologist once pointed out to me, if you are born with the breast cancer gene, that does not mean you should start smoking to make sure it expresses itself. We all have all kinds of orientations and inclinations. Some are good and some are not. Our individual morality, and our social ethics, are concerned with which of our inclinations we should develop habits to promote, and which we should develop habits to control. To take an important example, people as a whole, and nearly all individuals, have strong sexual desires. If we acted on every sexual desire we ever had, the result would be bad for us individually and bad for society. We create all kinds of social institutions to channel our strong sexual desires into socially useful practices, because they can so easily become destructive.

Most people have a natural heterosexual orientation. Some people have a natural homosexual orientation. Neither group should simply act on their orientation. How we should regulate our sexual orientation is one of the most important things that we have social institutions for.

The Bible Says Homosexual Practice is Sinful

The biblical argument has two parts. First, there are the clear condemnations of homosexual practice. Second is the clear message that heterosexual marriage is the only proper place for sex. Nothing in the Bible suggests acceptance of homosexual practice as well. It is important to say at the outset that the Bible talks about homosexual practice, not homosexual orientation or "homosexuality," a concept only invented in modern times.

Genesis 19 and Judges 19 – Sodom and Gomorrah and the parallel story about the rape of the Levite – clearly show homosexual rape of guests as a horrible thing. The rape, and the gross mistreatment of guests, are reason enough to condemn the bad people in these stories. But I also think that the fact that a homosexual rape was the outrage that the bad people committed is in the story to show that they were as bad as they could possibly be. This is evidence of the Bible's condemnation of homosexual acts, though not proof-positive that it is condemned in all cases.

Leviticus 18:22 in the King James Version states: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." Leviticus 20:13 is similar. Some say this is only meant to condemn pagan temple prostitution. A similar reading applies to Deuteronomy 23:17, 1 Kings 14:24, 15:12 & 22:46 and 2 Kings 23:7. I read these as I do the Sodom and Gomorrah story: they are not definitive law for Christians against homosexual sex; on the other hand, they say to me that the Bible writers and readers took it for granted that homosexual practice was disgusting, especially for men.

Some of the purity rules of the Old Testament were set aside in the New. The condemnation of homosexual practice, on the other hand, was renewed in the New Testament. 1Corithians 6:9-10 says that the makokoi and the arsenokoitai are unrighteous. The King James version translates these terms as "effeminate" and "abusers of themselves with mankind." The latter sentiment is repeated in 1 Timothy 1. I don't know what exactly was meant by these terms, and I don't think anyone else can offer a definitive interpretation. The words are too rare, and the possible range of meanings is too wide. Clearly, though, both are bad, and they have something to do with gay acts.

The major text on this subject in the whole Christian Bible is Romans 1:26-27:
"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet."
I agree with Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary and a Presbyterian minister, that this is the text that can't really be interpreted away.

The positive side of the Bible's message about sex is that sex within marriage is good, especially for making, with God's help, the great gift of children. This is the vision that is reiterated from Adam and Eve onward.

Some things that the Bible condemns in some places, it seems to allow in others. The passages about women keeping silent in churches had to be weighed against those talking about women prophesying and praying in order to get the total biblical picture. This was why the Presbyterian Church, and many other Protestant denominations, came to accept women's ordination after a long interpretive argument. The same goes for divorce, which I think is the interpretive problem that most resembles the homosexual question. Divorce is condemned all the time, but tolerated under certain conditions. I do not see any parallel texts in the Bible even tolerating homosexual practice.

I therefore follow the teaching of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and nearly every other Christian body on earth: homosexual practice is a sin.

BUT, and this is a very important point, we all commit sins. We are all habitual sinners. Being sinners does not prevent us from being officers of the church, or good citizens, and it is certainly no obstacle to being a church member. That is a point for another blog post.

A Centrist Christian Approach to the Homosexual Issue

This week I will give you my considered judgment on an issue that vexes Christians: what to think about homosexuality and homosexual practice, in the church and in society. I have thought, studied, and written about this question quite a bit, in this blog and elsewhere. Now I want to lay out a few conclusions, both to clear my head and to invite your comment. Here are my four main conclusions:

The Bible says homosexual practice is sinful.

A small minority of people are born with a homosexual orientation.

The Church can live with homosexual sinners the way it lives with other kinds of sinners.

A free society can accommodate a homosexual minority through approximations of majority institutions.

These four points will be the subject of the next four blogs. I will elaborate what I mean by these conclusions, and why I came to them, during the rest of the week.

Let me say one more word of introduction, though. The problem of homosexual practice is a real problem for anyone who believes the Bible and who believes in a free society. Those who favor wholesale approbation of homosexuality in all its forms and social consequences run up against a stone wall of abhorrence in Scripture. Those who favor wholesale condemnation of homosexuality in all its forms and social consequences run up against the mercy of God for all sinners and the presumption of toleration for all kinds of people in a free society. Hence, Christian centrists must wrestle with the question.

Over the River and Through the Woods

... to Grandmother's house we go.

May you all have a joyous Christmas.

See you in the new year -- I have a big series planned, starting January first.

The Anna Karenina Problem: Why There Are So Few Happy TV Marriages

Recently one of my most faithful readers, Edith OSB, asked " I've pondered what it would take to have a TV show with a happily married family who goes to Church each week - the data support the link with stable marriages - and I don't think it's going to happen." Earlier this year I lamented the dearth of good marriages on television, and nominated the DuBoises of "Medium" as the best TV marriage. In response to Edith OSB's specific question, a clear case of a church-going family were the Camdens of "Seventh Heaven," in which the father was pastor of the church. They had a wonderful marriage.

The problem with television as a place for happy marriages is that happy families are not dramatic enough for a domestic show. The Camdens illustrate this perfectly: while the marriage was strong and the children were well-raised, the writers put the children, and later the father, in increasingly contrived scrapes in order to keep the plot going.

Tolstoy famously begins Anna Karenina with this claim: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I long puzzled over that. It seemed to me that happy families were truly free to do anything they want to. It was the unhappy families, locked in dysfunctional rituals of addiction and miscommunication, that seemed much like one another. The mystery of Tolstoy's meaning was cleared up for me by, of all things, Jared Diamond's excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel. He cites the "Anna Karenina Principle" not in relation to marriage and family life, but as the rule governing which kinds of animals can be domesticated. The problem, Diamond explains, is that for an animal to be domesticated, it requires a list of characteristics, each of which is necessary, and none sufficient by itself. A relative handful of animals have all the qualities on the list, while many animals have most, but not quite all. This is why horses could be domesticated, but zebras cannot.

Happy families are alike in that they have the whole list of characteristics in the right balance. They are bounded but flexible, firm but adaptive. Happy families don’t have big, tv-friendly dramas based on miscommunication or self-destruction for the very same reasons that they are happy families in the first place.

The better role for happy families on television is to support the work of the family members. The DuBois marriage is secondary to her crime solving (and, secondarily, to his engineering work, of which we see little). The Huxtables of the legendary "Cosby" show had their work as doctor and lawyer to attend to, which their quite functional marriage and family life supported. The Bartletts of "West Wing" had the minor business of the presidency in the foreground to attend to – and even then they neglected their children. I wish we could have seen President Santos' family adapt to the White House, though I expect the writers would have felt obliged to mess them up, too.

Shows that foreground dramatic work, like cop shows, routinely show the job shredding the family. Shows that foreground the family, as most sit-coms do, usually make the family dysfunctional. "Gilmore Girls," one of the Gruntled family's favorite shows, is running on the rocks in its final season as it tries to turn its highly functional single-mom family into a pair of competent marriages. This is more of a problem in television world than in real life.

What I want is a show that foregrounds the work, but with a continuous backstage life of a happy, supportive family.

I'm the Person of the Year! (No, I'm Not)

Time magazine has named you (all of you/us) Persons of the Year. They reason that digital democracy, such as YouTube, MySpace, and your humble blog, have made ordinary content providers the biggest influencers of events this year.

I think they copped out. The problem arose because the leader of the World's Only Superpower was clearly not leading events, but mostly running from them. But he is so powerful that he makes it hard for anyone else to be as consequential. We are now all waiting for a leader to emerge in the United States.

My nominee for Person of the Year: Hu Jintao, head of the Chinese government, for allowing capitalism to develop in the People's Republic of China – which I think will eventually lead to democracy, though of a peculiar form – and for once again not conquering Taiwan, even though there is not much we could do about it in our current embarrassed condition.

Calling Out Donald Wildmon (Not for the Last Time)

I want sensible religious leaders of other faiths to condemn the violent, radical, and just extreme actions and pronouncements of their fringe elements. This entails that I do the same thing with the Christian extremists. Which brings us to Don Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, and his latest silliness about television.

On the CBS show "Two and a Half Men," Charlie Sheen plays an irresponsible womanizer who writes and sings jingles. On a recent show Sheen's character altered familiar Christmas carols to celebrate what he hoped would be an imminent sexual encounter. To Wildmon and AFA, this means that Sheen, Hollywood, and CBS are mocking Christ, Christians, and Christmas.

Let us regain some perspective here. Charlie Sheen is an actor. He does not write the show. He did not invent the character. He did not create the premise of the show. Moreover, his character is not supposed to be admirable or a role model – the whole point is that he is a skunk. And the point of the songs was to celebrate the skunk's hope of sex. They were not about Christ, Christians, or even Christmas. Don, get a grip.

Wildmon recently slammed Rosie O'Donnell (and CBS again) for saying on "The View"'s 9/11 anniversary show, "Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state. We're a democracy here." I say O'Donnell is mostly right, though the issue is more the violence of radicals than their connection to the state.

I am not saying that Don Wildmon and the American Family Association represent violent, extreme, or even very radical Christianity. I think Wildmon represents fusspot Christianity. And representing Christ, Christians, and Christmas as fusspots truly invites mockery.

Best News of the Week: Breast Cancer Drops Dramatically

Down 15% in one year with the end of hormone treatment for menopause.

Endub's Wonderful Mustard Seed

Endub (Junior Gruntled #2) is the family artist, and a fine one, in her father's opinion. She was commissioned to make a picture for our congregation's stewardship campaign. They loved it, and plastered the church with it. The stewardship committee loved it so much, they sent it to the national denomination's women's group. They, in turn, loved it so much, they put it on the cover of their magazine.

The artist being worthy of her hire, she got paid for her work. She is a social action Christian, so she turned some of her earnings into a gift of a sheep through Heifer, International. She gave portions of the sheep in the names of her friends. Thus, her friends are getting Christmas presents in the form of "a sheep's eyeball was given in your name." Other body parts have been singled out for a charitable offering. She has an impish grin when thinking up such things.

I think this is something church needs more of: charitable service to others with wit.

One Vote for DC – a Centrist Position

The District of Columbia is an anomaly in our federal legislature. The residents of the capital have a delegate (currently Eleanor Holmes Norton) who can vote in committee, but not in the full House. D.C. has no senators, though Jessie Jackson sometimes proclaims himself "shadow senator."

Republicans have long resisted giving D.C. representation, because it is overwhelmingly Democratic. Rep. Norton floated an interesting compromise in the last session, partnering with Republican Rep. Tom Davis, to give D.C. a vote in the House, and to give Utah, the most Republican state, another representative. The idea died, but the cause remains.

I used to live in the District of Columbia before we were providentially allowed to move to Kentucky. I like D.C., but it is a very difficult place to raise children. Still, I think all Americans should be represented in the Congress. On the other hand, I think the call for statehood for Washington – a popular slogan among District politicians – is all wrong. The District of Columbia is not a state. It is a city, though a very peculiar one.

So this seems a reasonable compromise. The people of the Washington should be represented in the House of Representatives. No balancing deal should be required; what's right is right. But statehood is out of the question. So, rather than create another anomaly – a Representative without Senators – I have a further idea. Shrink the District of Columbia to the Mall and its immediate environs – the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the White House, and basically the blocks touching them. I would be inclined to throw in the Pentagon, across the river, and Arlington Cemetery. But that would be it. The residential part of Washington would then become the second city of Maryland.

There is an obvious obstacle to this plan: Maryland doesn't want Washington. So the federal government should solve the problem the way it solves most problems – by throwing money at it. Congress should pay Maryland to take Washington. Eleanor Holmes Norton would become another Maryland congresswoman. And the D.C. anomaly would be solved.

Veblen Effect Tuition

Most people want to pay the lowest price that will deliver the goods. Sometimes, though, you want to be sure you get the very best quality goods. There are a dozens of ways to measure quality. One of the easiest, though most treacherous, is price. For some goods, more people will flock to it if it costs more, even if it costs much more than competitors. This is called the Veblen Effect, after Theory of the Leisure Class author Thorstein Veblen.

College education is worth paying more to get the best. And the best education does cost more than the more mediocre kinds. Some colleges cost more because they spend more to educate.

Some colleges, though, charge more just so other people will think that they are as good as the most expensive. They may even be that good, but don't, for strict cost reasons, actually need to charge that much. Still, the market is a harsh mistress. The New York Times reports today that Ursinus College, for example, raised its prices to keep up with the competition – and as a result, applications went up considerably.

I am happy to report that Centre College still offers "a New England education at Southern prices."

The Biggest Parenting and Spirituality Issue at ParentsConnect

ParentsConnect.com is a website for parents to give advice to one another. It is sponsored by Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. The conversation is very wholesome, friendly, and more diverse religiously and ethnically than you might anticipate. It is also overwhelmingly by and for moms, as anyone who reads parenting advice would expect.

Since our main issue at the Gruntled Center is faith and family, I looked at the Spiritual Matters section; as a sociologist I was especially drawn to the Family Faith Practices heading. Each section consists of discussion threads started by a parent, and runs as long as the readers have something they want to say. I was interested in what the longest thread would be of parents' concerns in raising religious kids. And the winner is:

"When soccer takes over family faith practices."

The conversation among the moms is sensible and sincere. Some have found no-Sunday leagues. One Jewish mom doesn't have that option; her kids do play regularly on the Sabbath, but she draws the line at the High Holy Days. One particularly determined family reported that if their kids missed a service due to a game, they listened to a recording (podcast?) of the service on the way home.

As this topic makes clear, the ParentsConnect parents are mostly middle class. As a rule, they seem to be married, earnest, and flexible. They are good people to turn to for advice – the writers are like the readers, with a little more experience and an interesting idea or two. It is strangely charming to join in the conversation of people busily engaged in the happy and hectic business of raising children, something they clearly love.

ParentsConnect parents are not every parent. They are, though, the kind of families that give you hope for a new generation of carefully raised children.

More Moms Staying Home in Baby's First Year

New research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that over the past decade, there has been an 8% drop overall in job-holding by mothers of infants. Working new moms are still a majority, but just barely: 51% of infant's mothers work outside the home.

The higher the husband's income and the mother's education, the more likely the mom is to stay home. But across the board, mothers of newborns are more likely to stay home than they used to be. Those in the middle of the income range – the 40th to 80th percentile – were particularly likely to stop jobs and interrupt careers to be with babies.

There was also a drop for mothers of toddlers and preschoolers, but it was not as large as the drop for new moms.

Perhaps we could see a social norm that mothers would get, and take, a year's leave from their jobs with each child. That is a centrist position that might be feasible, especially as mothers are already voting with their feet – and their forgone paychecks -- in this direction.

A Picky Point About the Presbyterian Panel Report

The Presbyterian Panel is an ongoing survey of the church conducted by the PC (USA) Research Services office. It is, I think, the best denominational research tool in the country. Three times a year they survey a representative group of members, elders, pastors, and other ministers about issues before the church. Before the General Assembly this year the Panel were surveyed about the major item before the GA, the report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church – the PUP report about which I have written much.

I was involved in that study. Research Services did a heroic job getting the data ready for analysis in time to be useful for the General Assembly. We were just about to start the analysis when the Stated Clerk, the Assembly's highest official, asked that no analysis of the Panel data be published before the Assembly met. He feared that such last-minute information could not be digested in time to be properly considered by the Assembly.

The Stated Clerk, Cliff Kirkpatrick, is a friend and someone I respect. He wrote a generous forward to Leading from the Center. I disagree with his decision not to report the Panel results before the Assembly. But I respect that he made a principled decision.

The Presbyterian Layman, the scourge of the denominational leadership, has reported that Kirkpatrick tried to suppress the Panel report because he didn't like what it would say.

It is true that most Presbyterians do not want to trade the church's purity for peace. They want the constitution as it is to be followed, and don't want local bodies to be making up their own lists of essential tenets of the faith. And most members, elders, and pastors (though not, surprisingly, a majority of specialized, non-pastoral ministers) agree that "a church that is not clear about what it believes is not worth belonging to." The Layman believes these results represent a rejection of the PUP report. I don't, but that is a matter for another day.

But here is the important point I want to clarify: Cliff Kirkpatrick did not withhold the Panel data because he had seen the analysis and didn't like it. No analysis of the Panel data had been done by anyone before the Assembly – you can take that from the horse's mouth. The Stated Clerk decided as a matter of policy that whatever it was the Panel might reveal, it would come too late to really help the Assembly's deliberations.