"Twin Peaks" Revisited

The entertainment of Thanksgiving week was watching "Twin Peaks" again with daughter Endub, who was born just before the series ran on television years ago. We have now seen the whole first story arc -- Who killed Laura Palmer? The show really holds up well. The oddness, humor, and genuine creepiness still come through, even when you know how it turns out.

My recollection is that it got so silly in the second season that it was canceled for good cause. Nonetheless, I am looking forward to finishing the whole set, and then the prequel. And now I can share it with the next generation.

"The owls are not what they seem."

Averge Cost of an Easy Divorce: $50,000

Divorce360.com calculates it this way. The average American family, according the Census numbers, is married, has two children, makes between $50,000 to $74,999 a year and owns a home worth about $185,000 - though the home value varies enormously by location. This family would spend more than $50,000 on lawyers, counseling for themselves and the kids, and the many costs of selling the house and moving.

Contested divorces cost much more - easily twice the amount of an uncontested divorce.

And that depends on being able to sell the house. MSNBC reports, mostly on the basis of anecdotes but probably accurately, that divorces are down at the moment because unhappy couples can't afford to sell their houses or charge the other services they would need.

Gruntled Center Top 10

I have spent a happy Thanksgiving morning going through all my Gruntled Center posts since last Thanksgiving. I give you ten good ones, a mix of family, religion, centrism, and some funny stuff.

Enjoy.

Meritocracy Delivers: The Clintons and the Obamas

It Could Have Said, "Smart Parents Have Kids Young"

Gruntled Song of the Year

Bury the Hairy

Courtship is a Proper Model of the Dialectic

Cohabitation as Broken Window

President Obama Will Make Black Republicans Possible

Picketing Fences

A Centrist Sociological Imagination

My Welfare Reform Plan

Best Age to Marry for the Kids: Mid-Twenties

Sharon Jayson has an excellent article in USA Today about the debate over what is the best age to marry. The marriage age has been creeping up and averages the highest ever -- nearly 26 for women and 28 for men. Everyone agrees that you shouldn't marry as a teenager if you can help it, and most agree that you should start having kids by 30 if possible.

The division among the scholars in this debate is between Norval Glenn, who found that those who marry in their mid-twenties are happiest, and Andrew Cherlin, who argues that those who marry in their late 20s or early 30s are the most mature and settled.

I side with Glenn in this debate. I think having children is important to the great majority of married couples, and delaying trying to have kids into your 30s is dicier than most people know.

I was struck by another point in this debate, though: everyone in it assume that marriage should come before children. This is a debate among people on the upper side of the "marriage caste" divide. For those one the lower side, where single teen mothers are the norm, 40 is the ideal age for marriage, whereas 20 is the ideal age for motherhood. This is the further reason I side with Norval Glenn. He holds out for the crucial connection between marriage and parenthood. Separate them, and the social fabric unravels.

Georgia "Get Married, Stay Married" Campaign is Great

The Supreme Court of Georgia has started a billboard campaign urging parents to Get Married, Stay Married. Using private funds and donated billboard space, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears has led a broad-based campaign to fight crime through better marriages. She noted that 72 percent of incarcerated juveniles are from "fragmented" families and that 65 percent of Georgia's civil court dockets concern matters pertaining to children and families, outnumbering not only all other civil cases but also all felony and misdemeanor cases combined.

This is a great idea. There is much that can be done right now just by making the public argument for marriage. When African-American leaders like Chief Justice Sears speak out the power of the bully pulpit (or billboard) is focused where it is needed the most.

Privilege Exercise 2008

My "Social Structure" class again hosted the Privilege Exercise last night. Based on Peggy McIntosh's article "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," we formed the 100 students in a line, shoulder to shoulder, then asked them to respond to a seriess of questions. The questions were of the form "If you had more than 50 books in your house growing up, take a step forward" and "If you were ever stopped by the police because of your race, sex, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, take a step back." After 50 questions, the group was divided enough to see social stratification in a more literal sense than usual. We then broke up into four groups, based on our relative privilege, and talked about the experience. After about 20 minutes, we reconvened as a whole to talk about privilege, difference, and what to think about it.

One of the most interesting findings this year was that all students acknowledged that being a Centre College student itself is a privilege. They were there in part from their own hard work, and in part from the advantages that some -- but only some -- of the students started out with. The least-privilege group appreciated that they had to work harder to get to Centre than the most privileged group had (on the whole). They also knew, though, that compared to many people they grew up with, they were the very privileged. One of the students in the least-privileged group said that coming to Centre "wiped the slate clean"; thereafter, each of the students' position in the world would have more to do with their own achievement and less with their backgrounds.

Sometimes McIntosh's inventory is used to teach people that privilege creates an oppressive structure of domination that is very difficult to change. Centre students do come from quite a range of backgrounds, and they do see the differences in privilege and structural domination -- to a point. They focus more, though, on making the most of their opportunities, being grateful for whatever privileges they have, and looking to provide more for their own children and the society in general. This seems to me to be a healthy, realistic attitude toward privilege.

Faith-Based Initiatives Will Live On Under the Community-Organizer-in-Chief

One of the legacies of the Bush administration that President Obama will be happy to receive will be the faith-based and community initiatives.

Many secularists and liberals in the Democratic Party object to government working in partnership with religious institutions to solve social problems. Barack Obama, though, has welcomed faith-based initiatives as one good tool among many to address the worst ills of society. As a former community organizer, he knows that for the poorest and worst off, the churches are by far the most likely to stick to the task of helping. As a Gen Xer, he is more interested in results than rhetoric. Most importantly, as a Christian, he knows that God has the greatest power to change lives. I think that is why he was drawn to church in the first place, and how he became convinced to open his life to God. He tried hard to change people by his own will, by secular organization, and by government action. They all help, but they never do the whole job because they can never get down to the bottom of people's problems. Only God can.

I look forward to a new, less partisan, more diverse array of faith-based initiatives in the Obama administration. And if he can make that work, the new Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships program may be the enduring positive legacy of the Bush presidency.

Musties

Mrs. G. and I were talking about our younger days as Yuppies. We lived in a basement apartment in Dupont Circle in Washington, worked for the government, and hung out with other young professionals who we knew from work, church, and graduate school. We were among the few marrieds in our church group, and soon became the first parents in a world where babies usually meant a move to the suburbs. We enjoyed our time as Young Urban Professionals.

We were delighted, though, to move on from that phase of life when we moved to Danville, KY to join Centre College. We have a great life now, which I would not trade for any other.

But we are clearly no longer Yuppies. So what are we? I propose Middle-aged Small Town Intellectuals.

Musties.

Decency in Courtship Still Beats the New Jerkiness

Kay Hymowitz has another fine family essay in the current City Journal, Love in a Time of Darwinism. She gives a somewhat sympathetic account of the why some single men are deliberately being sex-obsessed, marriage-averse jerks. The problem, she says, is that women's expectations are so varied, and so changeable, that men have no standard courtship script that they can follow. Moreover, many nice guys have enough bad experiences with women who really want bad boys that they start acting like jerks, too.

Hymowitz says that the new incivility (to put it nicely) in men and women about dating and mating is due to a half-understood Darwinism. Sociobiologists have convinced enough people that men and women tend to seek different things in a mate -- beauty and sex, on the one had, money and protection, on the other -- that some of them act like adversaries in a game of mutual manipulation. This makes true marriage hard to come by, and makes courtship very disheartening.

Sociobiology is not wrong, but it is only half the story. The problem, Hymowitz writes, " is an uncompromising biological determinism that makes no room for human cultivation." We have developed civilization not to enact nature, but to perfect its shortcomings. Marriage is a great human achievement because it takes the biological foundation of men's and women's desires and synthesizes them into something higher. This is the true meaning of what Hegel has in mind as a "synthesis."

Hymowitz is a secular writer, but I think we can take her argument a further step. She quotes a pro-jerkiness dating coach who contends that “Nature doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings. It cares ONLY about reproductive success.” Let us leave aside the problem of anthropomorphizing Nature and attributing intentions to it. Nature may not care about hurting people's feelings -- but God does. And because we are made in the image of God, and so is everyone else, we have developed a capacity to care about other people's feelings, too. This is a great and high achievement. Courtship and marriage worthy of human beings is, of course, aimed at reproductive success, but as part of a decent human life, not as an alternative to one.

Centrist Solutions to the "Know Your Father" Problem

Continuing the discussion of biology and identity, the same helpful reader presses to the hard question:

In principle, under what circumstances is it "OK" or even "preferable" that a child be deprived of his biological father's identity? And going forward, should we compel the sharing of his identity in those circumstances anyway? Or perhaps we should just do our best to end those kinds of circumstances in the first place.

I think about half of who we are comes from our biological heritage. That is important for a person to know. And I am impressed with how very much adopted kids and donor kids want to know who their natural parents are. So, I would incline to have open adoption and donation.

But requiring it by law in all cases? That seems to be too much.

Perhaps a market solution -- you pay extra for secrecy? Or a judicial bypass -- you can keep it secret if you can convince a judge that you have a good reason? Let each state make its own rules democratically, knowing they would differ from one another?

If the law had a presumption of openness, with some rational possibility of an exception, seems to me to be a centrist solution.

Addendum: I was chided on the above answer as inadequate and not really principled (see the first comment below). I thus add this explication.

The principle that I am applying is that principles establish a general rule, to which there might, in principle, be exceptions. The principle that applies is that law should support the presumption that children should know who their parents are. But in a wild and varied world, situations might arise that no one, myself included, can predict that would produce a good reason for secrecy. Hard cases make bad law, so we should tailor the law to the general principle, not the hard case.

Thus I believe the best we can do is to provide a general structure of openness, with known, open, and legitimate means to create exceptions.

As I said at the outset of this discussion I don't think identity comes from any one or absolute source, including biology. Biology is always important to our bodies, of course, and is almost always important to our identities, but it is not of overriding importance; it is one factor among other, and the mix of factors differs from culture to culture and person to person.

Moreover, however you conceive of identity, I don't think you have a legal and universal "right" to identity.

Still-in-Love Outliers

Nifty new research shows that in some couples romantic love just keeps on going. In most marriages, the giddiness of earlier love becomes calmer and more rational after a year to a year and a half. Most married people love one another, just not in the same crazy-for-you way. Some couples, though are outliers. A team of researchers led by Bianca Acevedo of Stony Brook did brain scans of couples married decades and compared them with newlyweds. The same brain areas lit up.

The study is small and the interpretation of brain regions and emotions is just beginning, but the results are promising. And I must admit that my interest in this study is more than a little autobiographical (I write as Mrs. G. is sitting with me in our coffee house, our MacBooks back to back, romantically sharing one power cord). Still, I think it points to something important. Romance lives!

Integrating Identity Matters More to Girls

An interesting detail of our recent extended discussion of the identity issues of donor-conceived children is that most of the people who wrote to say that they urgently wanted to know their donor father were women. A student recently brought to class a review of identity research for adoptive kids by Harold Grotevant and colleagues from Family Relations in 2000. They make this observation (references removed):

Gender may add a layer of complexity to the development of adoptive identity. Although minimal gender differences have been found in identity formation in domains involving vocation, religion, and politics, identity development in relational domains (sex-roles, relationships) appears more complex for girls. Whereas boys seem to focus their exploration on aspects of identity having to do with school and work, girls tend to integrate aspirations and goals across more areas of life at the same time.

Biology is Real, But it is not Identity

The other day I made this comment, which one reader asked me, very reasonably, to explain:

" I don't think people have a right to know who their fathers are, even if nearly everyone does, in fact, know."

A right is a serious thing. It is not just a wish. Moreover, I think that anything the state acknowledges as a right it must try to guarantee to the limits of its power.

I cannot think of a compelling state interest in ensuring that every citizen knows the identity of his or her biological father. That is what a right to know who your father is would entail. In particular, I cannot think of a state interest that would use the state's power to compel unwilling sperm donors to reveal their identities.

If the state, for some reason, knew the identity of your biological father and was withholding it, I agree that it is hard to think of why they should withhold it from you. That is not the same, though, as the state having an obligation to help you find out.

If not knowing who their biological fathers are causes donor-created children sufficient anxiety that they can convince the legislature to require all future donors to reveal their identity, that would seem to me to be a fair working of democracy. Future donors could then make a free choice to donate under those rules. Such a law, though, would not be reason enough to require past donors, who were assured of privacy under normal contract law, to be compelled to reveal their identities now.

I believe that many adopted and donor-produced children suffer real anxiety from not knowing much about their biological parents. It is such a problem that it might be worthwhile to require open adoption and open donation in the future. A more centrist, and likely, solution would be to create structures and incentives to help connect such children and parents. For example, it might be worth it to create registries of parents and children seeking one another, with a third party making the connections. It might even be worth it to create a government bureaucracy to seek out parents and children separated by adoption or donation secrecy, and ask them on behalf of the other party to reveal themselves. This could even be organized on a fee-for-service basis.

The larger issue is whether biological heritage is really the same as "identity" in the first place. As adoption has proven for centuries, social parents - the people who actually raise children - are real parents. They have a real and shaping effect on the identity of their children. I think this is even more true of donor-produced children, especially when raised by one of their natural parents. The fact that some - maybe most - children not raised by their natural parents are very curious about their natural parents does not mean that that knowledge is actually essential to the children's identity.

Civil Unions Offers 90% of the Loaf. Take It.

Most Americans oppose same-sex marriage. Most Americans support civil unions.

More than half the states have passed bans on same-sex marriage, most putting it right in the state constitution. Several of those states still offer civil unions.

Civil unions are popular -- especially with heterosexual couples. Same-sex marriage is rarely used even in those places where it is legal. A few states would legalize same-sex marriage through the legislature, not the court. More power to them, I say, and bless the great diversity of jurisdictions that these united States afford.

Civil unions deliver 90% of what the proponents of same-sex marriage want. For people who want to win, it is not just half-a-loaf, it is nearly the whole meal. The rest is mostly drama and symbolism.

President Obama, the supposed "most liberal member of the Senate" supports civil unions and opposes same-sex marriage. I am with "No-drama Obama." Take civil unions, declare victory, and let's get on with life.

Is Anti-Graffiti Graffiti, Graffiti?

From Failblog:


see more pwn and owned pictures

A Post-Feminist Generation Takes the "Gender Gap" Facts Well

I have been teaching Warren Farrell's Why Men Earn More this week. He debunks the myth that women earn less than men because of discrimination. He concludes, in fact, that "while men still earn more for different work, women now earn more for the same work." The book is written as a self-help book for women. He shows 25 things that lead to higher pay that men are more likely to do, that women could do. He also notes the main reason for the gender gap in pay is that women are more likely to choose family and a more balanced life than working for more pay, whereas men are more likely to support their families by working for that higher pay.

My students, to their great credit, took this study calmly, assessing his empirical support. I mentioned that when and where I went to college -- I am Swarthmore '82 -- there would have been protests for even raising the idea that the gender pay gap has more to do with women's choices than men's oppressiveness. They were puzzled by the idea of protests against ideas, and one bravely asked why anyone would do that.

It is somewhat like the generational differences in reading the meaning of the presidential election. The network we were watching had the Baby Boomer commentators talk at length about the racial significance of Obama's victory. They then asked one of the 30-something experts, who said, somewhat diffidently, that to people of his generation, Senator Obama was primarily a leader, to be measured against other leaders, rather than a symbol in a giant racial drama.

The low-drama, fact-based reaction of my post-feminist students, women and men, to the realities of sex and gender differences is a heartening measure of progress.

A Puzzle in Racial Intermarriage

Racial intermarriage is rising. The more educated people are the more likely they are to marry across racial lines. Blacks and White are the least likely to marry out of their group, but the numbers of those who do grow year by year. Hispanics (treated as the equivalent of a racial group) and Asian Americans are much more likely to marry out. Whites overwhelmingly marry whites (well above 90%), in part because there are so many more whites than all other groups combined that the great majority of potential partners for white men and women are also white. African Americans are also overwhelmingly (90%+) likely to marry within the group. Hispanics and Asian Americans, by contrast, show much more variation in intermarriage by education.

Moreover, women usually marry men who are more educated than they are. Intermarried couples involving a white partner (the most-studied kind of pairing) usually involves a white woman and a non-white man. In those couples, she typically marries a man more educated than she is.

A student recently brought to class an interesting study from a decade ago by Zhenchao Qian (in Demography, May 1997). His focus was on the overall pattern of racial intermarriage that I describe above, and how that changed from 1980 to 1990 (it got more so). I was struck, though, by this interesting anomaly. For Hispanics, intermarriage goes up significantly as education increases (following the usual pattern). For Asian Americans, though, intermarriage goes down as education increases. This pattern holds for men and women, though to different degrees.

Thus, for Hispanics the intermarriage rates in 1990 were:
Men, less than high school: 24%; college-plus: 36%
Women, less than high school: 22%; college-plus: 38%

For Asian Americans, though, the opposite pattern holds.
Men, less than high school: 100% (very small group; h.s. grads = 79%); college-plus: 48%
Women, less than high school: 86%; college-plus: 67%

Zhenchao Qian does not analyze this anomaly much. And we should not miss the important fact that most Asian American women at all educational levels marry out, as do a majority of Asian American men at the college level and below.

I think what is going on here is that most highly educated people are in a minority in their racial group. They have a more limited pool of similar mates than others in their race do, so are somewhat more likely to look outside the group. Among Asian Americans, though, being highly educated is the norm. Most of the other Asian Americans that highly educated Asian Americans meet are also likely to be highly educated. Sharing both characteristics makes marriage more likely, as well as easier, on the whole.

She Wants to Know Who Her Donor Father Is. No.

A women in British Columbia is suing under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that she has a right to know who her sperm-donor father is. She claims she is entitled to valuable health information, since all she has been told is that her father was a healthy medical student with type A blood. I can see that other physical health information, such as a family history of heart attack, cancer, or genetic disease, should also be passed on to her, if it had been collected in the first place.

The BC woman is also claiming that she suffers from psychological distress from not knowing who her father is. I agree that this is a real problem. Elizabeth Marquardt is studying this very subject, and I look forward to the publication of her research.

Nonetheless, when the donation was made and accepted, the rule was that that was the end of it. You can debate whether that should be the rule in the future, or whether sperm donor or mother should have accepted those terms. But they did. So to this questing woman I say "No." You can try to change the rules for other people in the future. But there is a larger principle of being able to trust the rule of law that trumps even your psychological distress.

In sperm-donor court, I would be a hanging judge.

Middle-borns Follow Peers More

A student recently brought up an interesting Human Nature article by Catherine Salmon comparing middle-born children with firsts and lasts. She found that middle-born college students were less oriented toward family, and more oriented toward peers.

This small study suggests a partial solution to a puzzle in birth-order studies. I follow Frank Sulloway's argument that birth order has a big effect. He argues that siblings are in a Darwinian competition for parental attention. First-borns get first choice, and they usually choose to be parent-oriented. The middles get next choice, which might be to pick up a secondary parental interest, or another niche not occupied by the first. Last-borns are "born to rebel" because by their turn all the good parentlike niches have been taken; they are open to experience and are most likely to try new things.

I have to take seriously the challenge that Judith Harris raises in The Nurture Assumption that birth order does not have a big effect because kids are more peer-oriented than parent-oriented anyway.

Both Sulloway and Harris have empirical support for their positions, especially Sulloway's massive historical studies. The way I had reconciled their contradictory findings is to say that parents have a strong direct effect on children when they are little, which varies by birth order. Peers have a stronger influence during adolescence. Parents get the last word, though, because they have an indirect influence on which peers their children hang out with -- an effect that varies by birth order.

Salmon's finding adds another piece to the puzzle. If middle-borns show a stronger peer orientation, this would mitigate the parent effects that Sulloway found, and bolster the peer effects that Harris found -- for some kids.

Red Sex, Blue Sex, Middle Sex

The New Yorker has an excellent article by Margaret Talbot on "Red Sex, Blue Sex." She starts with the puzzling fact that evangelical teenagers talk the best game about saving sex for marriage, but actually have premarital sex and premarital babies at higher rates than kids in other groups do.

Part of this problem is that many people talk the talk of evangelicalism in general, but don't walk the walk. Evangelical teens who are the most religious and the most embedded in strong church families and strong religious communities really do have lower teen sex rates.

In many communities, though, especially in the small-town South, born-again talk is just conventional. Kids with conventional premarital sex lives -- that is, they have some premarital sex -- will also talk the conventional anti-premarital sex talk, especially to grownups. This doesn't prove that evangelicals are especially hypocritical, but rather that most people are conventional. It is like people in "tolerant" communities actually being very intolerant of people unlike them (such as evangelicals). Most people are conventional. Most communities have some conventions that conflict with one another. Therefore there will necessarily be a group of inadvertent hypocrites who follow one convention at one point, and another convention at another.

The "blue sex" group is also interesting. Blue states have lower teen pregnancy and divorce rates than red states. The key seems to be the later average age of marriage in blue states. This reflects the fact that people in blue states have, on average, more education, which delays marriage. Later marriage doesn't delay sex much, but it does delay marriage. And some people who delay marriage arrange whatever sex they have to produce fewer non-marital babies - enough to significantly improve statewide averages. The risk of later marriage, though, is infertility or, worse, unhappy never-married life.

The most interesting group to me were the kids who did successfully avoid teen pregnancy and too-early marriage, without utterly avoiding or condemning sex. Mark Regnerus, the sociologist whose work on religion and teen life is the heart of Talbot's article, found that the most successful middle way was practiced by teenagers who had big plans for their lives that they actually followed. Those who had high ambitious and had mastered the basic bourgeois skill of deferring gratification were the most likely to avoid teen pregnancy -- and avoid addictions and reckless accidents. They lived carefully because they had bigger things they wanted to do with their lives.

Going beyond what Talbot and Regnerus show, I think I see in these plan-ahead kids a more proportionate sense of the importance of sex. Some kinds of religious conservatives treat sex as bad. This position is not nearly as common as it used to be -- it seems to exist more in liberal fears about "fire and brimstone" preaching than in the actual sexual attitudes of evangelical Christians. More common, though, is to find religious arguments for marital sex as a unique and transcendentally wonderful form of intimacy. You should save sex for your spouse because no one else deserves something so wonderful. This seems to me to elevate sex beyond what it can really deliver. On the liberal side, there are still some sensualists who treat sexual passion as the door to Deep Truth, but they are about as common as fire-and-brimstone preachers. More common are liberals, secular and otherwise, who treat sex as a fun game - so why not play it with whoever is good at it? This, too, seems to me an erroneous estimation, too shallow rather than too deep.

The middle sex view is neither too transcendent nor too flippant. The middle group that Regnerus points to see sex as a good thing that is best done in marriage, but is not bad in relationships that might lead to marriage.