How New York City Views the World

I kid Fred Wilson, but I did see an element of the NYC-centered worldview in his comment,

A smartphone can get you a ride but a car can't get you a date.

I think it's safe to say that Mr. Wilson can afford a car that would be very helpful to his dating life, were he not happily married.

But heck, as removed from the singles scene as I am, maybe we are moving into an era where "Hey, babe, check out the productivity apps on my Galaxy" is an effective pickup line.

Movement Toward Gay Marriage and the Myth of Roe v. Wade

Although I rarely find Charles Krauthammer to make a meaningful contribution to a public discussion, and his column on the DOMA decision isn't really an exception, he is repeating some unimpressive arguments raised often enough that it may be worth attempting to push them back. Before I get to the current column, I'll travel back in time seven years to some of his prior musings on the subject. Back then, Krauthammer was pushing the anti-gay marriage canard that if you allow gay marriage it inevitably follows that you should legalize polygamy:

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

Right there, Krauthammer give us pretty much all the evidence we need that his thinking on this issue is weak, and that he doesn't understand the legal issues involved in the case. I don't want to assume to much, but I would hope that even Krauthammer would concede that to apply a similar argument to anti-miscegenation laws would be an "epic fail".

After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) the same race, and if, as advocates of interracial marriage insist, the race requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

I know that opponents of marriage equality argue vociferously that "allowing gay marriage is completely different from allowing interracial marriage", but the reason that comparison comes up is because of arguments like Krauthammer's. By his "logic", there is no distinction - if you don't allow discrimination in which of two, unmarried adults can get married, you cannot defend restricting the institution of marriage to two unmarried adults.

The response of many opponents of gay marriage is that being gay is not a protected category - it's not on the short list of factors that the state is supposed to scrupulously avoid using to discriminate between citizens - and thus the reasoning behind Loving does not extend to gay marriage. That because the discrimination is not based upon a protected class such as race, religion, national origin, color, (in their opinion) sex, or another such category, that the courts should not concern themselves with the question. Krauthammer does not appear to be working from the "protected category" argument, because "married vs. unmarried" isn't on that list.

The language of DOMA permitted the Supreme Court to resolve the case from a different angle - that Congress intruded into an area of law traditionally left to the states (domestic relations) in order to impose restrictions and disabilities on a class of people, and thus ultimately violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government. What frightens opponents of marriage equality is that the court all but said that there is not even a rational basis for opposing gay marriage - that should the issue be squarely raised. Given that the two leading arguments against gay marriage (and you'll forgive me if I missed a third)¹ are "tradition" and various forms of "gay sex is icky", it's not surprising that they are concerned that a future court might find there to be no rational basis for the continued state-level prohibition.

Perhaps Krauthammer accepts that the arguments against gay marriage are fundamentally weak. Perhaps, like many gay marriage opponents, he starts channeling Rick Santorum - never mind that the same "slippery slope" argument applies to anti-miscegenation laws (and were probably applied to that particular marriage equality argument in certain parts of the country). The slippery slope argument can be raised about any change, and its use is usually fallacious. In this particular instance, no surprise, it is fallacious.

We can start with this: When you have two unmarried individuals, the marriage contract is between them and them alone. If you then say, "We don't care if you're married already, you are free to marry an additional spouse," you risk infringing the rights of the existing spouse. And if you require that spouse's knowing consent to the new marriage - or should I say, all spouses - you're conceding a significant difference between the marriage of unmarried people and the marriage where one or more of the parties to the marriage is already married. Adding additional spouses is not, as Krauthammer blithely asserts an "individual choice" because the marriage already involves more than one individual. States have created bodies of law addressing the rights and duties of married couples, property division upon divorce, child custody upon separation or divorce, what property is part of the marital estate, pension and inheritance rights, access to health insurance benefits, taxes, housing laws, eligibility for social services.... When you add additional parties to the mix, every single one of those laws would need to be revisited and would become ridiculously complex.

There's a reason why the few nations that permit polygamy restrict that right to the male partner, and given him most of the rights within the marriage including in relation to assets and the children - because once you move toward an egalitarian arrangement it becomes extraordinarily difficult to create legal institutions around multi-partner marriages. In those cultures, the marriage is a constant that revolves around the man. Women can enter or leave the marriage. But if you attempt to create egalitarian multi-partner marriages you create a context in which the marriage can continue even after one or more partners leaves. You could end up with a marriage in which the original parties to the marriage are no longer involved, a 'divorce' that creates two or more new 'marriages' in its wake, and claims to custody or visitation from a wide assortment of moms and dads.

If you're not willing to directly address the weakness of the argument for proscribing gay marriage, perhaps it's not surprising that you've given even less thought to the weakness of the slippery slope argument you throw up as a shield. But whether or not you support polygamy, you cannot avoid the fact that there is a rational distinction between categorizing people as "married" versus "unmarried", and you cannot avoid acknowledging the complexity of rebuilding our nation's laws to accommodate marriages involving multiple parties.²

Krauthammer agrees that gay marriage poses no threat to "traditional marriage", so his argument really is one of fairness,

Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression?

That's a group choice, not, as he earlier posited, an individual choice. Here, Krauthammer is shifting the question from "is there a rational basis for the state to treat unmarried people differently from married people" to "If we allow gay marriage, is it unfair to people who want polygamous marriage." The "logic" here appears to be that it's better to be unfair to large numbers of people than it is to be unfair to smaller numbers of people, without regard to whether the distinction can be explained or justified - and that argument ultimately betrays the fact that Krauthammer's argument lacks a logical foundation. His argument boils down to, "It may be unfair to gay people to not allow them to marry, but allowing gay marriage would not end the unfairness to polygamists that they can't engage in multi-partner marriages, so we shouldn't do it.

As for gay marriage, I've come to a studied ambivalence. I think it is a mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy. On the other hand, I have gay friends and feel the pain of their inability to have the same level of social approbation and confirmation of their relationship with a loved one that I'm not about to go to anyone's barricade to deny them that. It is critical, however, that any such fundamental change in the very definition of marriage be enacted democratically and not (as in the disastrous case of abortion) by judicial fiat.

"...if only for reasons of pedagogy"? How... compelling. To me, that does not sound like an expression of "studied ambivalence" - it sounds like a preference for the status quo and the willingness to disregard the consequences of his policy preferences on any class of people who aren't Charles Krauthammer. As for the conclusion about judicial fiat... call it foreshadowing.

For a guy who wants us to see him as "ambivelent" on the subject of gay marriage, Krauthammer seems to have little conflict - beyond that one-time nod to the pain suffered by his "gay friends", but all of his arguments come down on the other side. For example, he imagines that gay marriage will lead to a "war on religion", picturing a religious college that is sued for denying a married, gay couple the opportunity to live in married student housing. Never mind that the school could avoid being a casualty of this imagined war simply by refusing federal money - a notion that I guess Krauthammer finds far more disturbing than discrimination against gay couples. Krauthammer complains, "It will be sued everywhere in the country if it’s declared to be a constitutional right, because it would imply that anybody who opposes it does it only out of bigotry, for no other reason". Given that the only other reasons for opposing gay marriage that Krauthammer has acknowledged are "pedagogy" and that "allowing gay marriage would be unfair to polygamists"... I suppose he makes a valid point. To assume that all marriage opponents are anti-gay bigots can be said to be making the mistake of attributing to malice something that at times will be better explained by ignorance.

Krauthammer's ambivelence is cast further into doubt by his recent column on the subject. Krauthammer proposes that there are only two possible grounds for holding DOMA to be unconstitutional, federalism and leaving the institution of marriage to the states, and equal protection. Krauthammer sees the two justifications as irreconcilable, and thus that it's inevitable that the Supreme Court will rule that all states must allow gay marriage. I'm not sure whether I should take that to mean that Krauthammer is implicitly conceding that there's no rational basis for laws prohibiting gay marriage, or if he's unable to fathom why the court does not find "reasons of pedagogy" to be an adequate basis for discrimination.

From a technical standpoint, Krauthammer is conflating a decision holding that the federal government cannot arbitrarily curb the rights of a group of people with an emphasis on interstate recognition of marriage, with state legislation that is entirely intrastate in nature. Krauthammer complains about equal protection,

In states with same-sex marriage, Washington must give the same federal benefits to gay couples as to straight couples because to do otherwise is to discriminate against the gay couples. After all, they are equally married in their states. For Washington to discriminate against them is to deny them equal protection of the laws. Such discrimination is nothing more than irrational animus — and therefore constitutionally inadmissible.

Except the Supreme Court was commenting not on state laws for or against gay marriage, but on a federal law that targeted married gay couples and stripped them of a basic legal protection - to have their lawful marriages respected by other states. As the Court put it, "The Act’s demonstrated purpose is to ensure that if any State decides to recognize same-sex marriages, those unions will be treated as second-class marriages for purposes of federal law." There's nothing inherent in the Windsor decision that removes from a state the right to forbid same sex marriages within its borders - but that state will no longer have a federal statute that it can point to as a justification for disregarding the validity of gay marriages lawfully entered in other states.

In other words, Krauthammer's argument only holds if he believes that there are no better arguments for opposing gay marriage than those proposed by the defenders of DOMA. I'm not sure if I should take this as an implicit abandonment of his notion that gay marriage can be forbidden "for reasons of pedagogy", but it's safe to infer that he does not expect the Supreme Court to find a law premised upon his position to have a rational basis.

As Krauthammer sees it, the problem with this decision is that it paves the way for a future decision that will require all states to permit gay marriage.

Which is exactly where the majority’s [equal protection] rationale leads — nationalizing gay marriage, the way Roe nationalized abortion. This is certainly why David Boies, the lead attorney in the companion Proposition 8 case, was so jubilant when he came out onto the courthouse steps after the ruling. He understood immediately that once the court finds it unconstitutional to discriminate between gay and straight couples, nationalizing gay marriage is just one step away.

I know there's a "conventional wisdom" that holds that but for the opinion in Roe v. Wade we would have had a national debate that would have led toward reproductive freedom across the country, and that the reason we have a continued debate over abortion rights is because the Supreme Court cut that debate short. The only problem with that argument is, well, everything. Roe v. Wade is controversial because it's at the center of the abortion rights debate, but despite decades of controversy and opprobrium it was, is, and remains consistent with public opinion. To the extent that Roe foreclosed part of a debate, it was not the part that would lead toward the expansion of reproductive freedoms for women, it was the effort to restrict and outlaw abortion procedures. Scott Lemieux argues,

In general, the comparison of abortion politics before and after Roe v. Wade is most consistent with the expectations held by skeptics of judicial exceptionalism. Clearly, the legitimation hypothesis is not applicable in the abortion case. The court’s intervention certainly did not resolve the abortion issue in any meaningful sense, and the public certainly did not accept the court’s verdict as the final word on the issue. On the other hand, there is also little evidence that the court’s action would have produced more countermobilization than a similar policy enacted by Congress or state legislatures. The pro-life movement was a powerful force before Roe, and the decision did not demonstrably change either the tone of abortion discourse or the distribution of public opinion on the issue. There is no evidence, specifically or generally, that policy-making by the courts is thought of as inherently illegitimate by the public. It should be re-emphasized that these empirical findings do not mean that there was no countermobilization against Roe.... Certainly, abortion politics are more salient at the level of presidential politics in 2003 than they were in 1972 when George McGovern declined to take a position on the issue. The comparison of abortion politics before and after Roe, however, compels the strong inference that it is the nationalization of abortion politics represented by Roe, and not the legalization of [abortion], that is the key variable in explaining this shift. Hypothetically, had Congress passed (and been constitutionally able) to pass legislation with similar policy content, there can be little question that abortion would have become a more salient issue in presidential politics as well.

Lemieux's argument, as exemplified by his reference to McGovern, is also consistent with the fact that it was not until the Reagan era, and its effort to turn the religious right into a permanent Republican voting bloc, that being "pro-life" became a litmus test in the Republican Party.

Krauthammer is not demonstrating concern that this theoretical cut-off of debate predicated by decisions like Roe or Windsor will prevent the development of abortion rights and gay marriage as national legal rights. For example, if he's truly concerned about federalism, why didn't he blow a gasket about DOMA, a law that allowed state legislatures to avoid trying to create laws and policies consistent with their own constitutions and the U.S. Constitution. What meaningful debate did we have in the decade after the passage of DOMA?

Krauthammer's selective focus on court decisions that lead toward gay marriage, and his (at best) disinterest in state and federal legislation and ballot initiatives that attempt to impede or prevent movement toward gay marriage, suggests that his opposition is to the expansion of rights and not to the means by which those rights are expanded or protected. In this specific case it seems less that Krauthammer's actual objection is to the fact that the Supreme court intervened, and is more to the fact that he is unable to articulate a single reason why the Court's decision was incorrect.
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1. A third argument might be, "If gay marriage is allowed, the result will be to weaken the traditional institution of marriage." The primary problem with that argument is that there's no evidence to support it, not even from jurisdictions that permit gay marriage. If you don't care whether your argument is supported by evidence, you could as easily argue that gay marriage will bring on a Martian invasion. Either way, in the absence of evidence you're blowing smoke.

2. Krauthammer claimed, "This line of argument makes gay activists furious" - no, Charles, this is what "furious" looks like; odds are that was people pointing and laughing.

Mrs. Carter?

Very traditional, and all but....

Beyonce has wisely chosen the day following her Super Bowl triumph to announce world tour dates for 2013, with UK dates in April and May. So far, so expected, but there is one surprise. She's called the tour "The Mrs. Carter Show", a reference to her 2008 marriage to Jay Z (aka Shawn Knowles-Carter; Jay Z is rumoured to have taken on Beyonce's surname 'Knowles' in 2009).

Why doesn't she just call herself Beyonce-Z?

If You Want to Have an Affair, Get Divorced First

I have some sympathy for the "It should be about competence, not marital fidelity" argument, when applied to somebody like General Petraeus, band if people choose to elect a President who has "made mistakes in his marriage" they have no business acting shocked when he makes more "mistakes". I have sympathy for the idea that one of the leading reasons that sexual behaviors put people at risk of blackmail is because of the fear of public disclosure.

But here's the thing: Even if there were no public stigma or shame in having an affair, it would remain grounds for divorce. And thus there would remain an incentive to keep the affair secret and, consequently, the possibility of blackmail would also remain.

So... hit divorce court first, then it's "dating", nobody cares, and you can keep your job.

Yet Another Weak Argument Against Gay Marriage

Doug Mainwaring, "co-founder of the National Capital Tea Party Patriots", has decided that he doesn't support gay marriage. For some reason, the Washington Post decided that this was a sufficiently newsworthy development that Mainwaring should be given space to publish an editorial explaining his views. And thus we find one of the weakest arguments against gay marriage that I have seen presented in a major publication.

Mainwaring opens by describing an anti-gay marriage petition in Maryland, and describes how some proponents of gay marriage were surprised to see people they knew signing a petition in opposition. He then recites,

While only 56,650 certified signatures were necessary to get the measure on the ballot, more than 160,000 signatures were collected and delivered to the Maryland Secretary of State.

There are what? Close to 6 million people in Maryland? Why is Mainwaring's reaction tot the "160,000" figure, "Why are there so many," instead of "Why are there so few?" Mainwaring proceeds to give a breakdown by party alignment of the people who signed and, although noting that a majority were Republican, proclaiming, "It’s not just Republicans who object to this legislation. This is a common, mainstream concern."

Later, Mainwaring makes the implicit admission that his argument is weak: "A signature on a petition actually says very little". If it says so little, why is Mainwaring opening with an argument he implicitly concedes to be a house of cards?

What is Mainwaring actually trying to argue? That if support for or opposition to an issue breaks down along partisan lines we can dismiss it as "uncommon" or "outside of the mainstream"? If so, he's probably the only Tea Party leader in the nation who holds that position. Would we have found him arguing at his Tea Party meetings over the past few years, "Opposition to the President's agenda is breaking down along partisan lines, so we can only conclude that the opponents are unprincipled partisans whose positions should not be considered"?

Mainwaring complains that advocates of gay marriage should have pushed for something less than full marriage equality. Why? Because in 2010 it appeared that the push might backfire, and prevent the passage of any form of bill establishing marriage rights for gay couples. He insists that the argument remains correct, even though history proved it wrong with the passage of a marriage equality law.

Mainwaring argues,

I am certain that the vast majority are others who, like me, simply view “marriage” as an immutable term that can only apply to heterosexuals.

If it needs to be said, that is not a logical argument. Mainwaring could as easily argue on behalf of people who believe that the word "gay" should only apply to feelings of "happiness". More than that, his argument is self-refuting. If the petition he is supporting were merely to keep things exactly as they are, with full marriage rights given to gay couples but substituting a different term for "marriage", he might plausibly be able to argue that people were concerned only about the word "marriage". But he's supporting an initiative that is intended to strip gay couples of any right to marry - he would have to be obtuse to believe that most people supporting the initiative care only about semantics.

Mainwaring continues,

It’s undeniable that, from age to age, marriage has been humanity’s greatest success and source of prosperity, crossing all cultures and religions. We shouldn’t mess with it.

Dare I say, even without straying from the sphere of heterosexuality, over the course of human history we have "messed with" the concept of marriage in a considerable number of ways? "From King Solomon's 700 wives and 300 concubines, to the eleven or so wives of Muhammad, to the 27 wives of Joseph Smith, the same basic concept of marriage has crossed all cultures and religions...." Or, "When Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin, he was supporting a tradition of marriage that dates back to Isaac and Jacob."

Similarly, would Mainwaring have applied the same argument to anti-miscegenation laws? If not, why not, and if so, how is it that making dramatic changes to the number of wives you can legally have, the age at which you can marry, or the race of your prospective spouse don't constitute "messing with" marriage in any meaningful sense? For that matter, would Mainwaring see a law permitting polygamy, permitting marriage to children and first cousins, allowing fathers to compel their daughters to marry designated husbands, or re-implementing anti-miscegenation laws as no big deal, because they're consistent with most of human and religious history?

More to the point, declaring that marriage is "marriage has been humanity’s greatest success" does not make it so. Insisting that it is "humanity’s greatest... source of prosperity" does not make it so. (By way of example, I personally would have a lot more money in the bank had I remained single).

Just as the concept of marriage has evolved over time while remaining viable, even within religions, there's no reason to believe that its further evolution through legal gay marriage will have any material impact on other married couples. Having examined every bit of evidence I can find, I feel quite comfortable asserting that gay marriages have absolutely no impact on my marriage - none at all. They are irrelevant to my marriage. What magical power does Mainwaring believe gay marriages hold that will weaken my marriage and others like it, and why haven't we seen the impact of that dark magic in any state or nation that permits gay marriage?

Then, of course, the kicker:

Full disclosure: I am gay.

Was that supposed to be an appeal to authority - "I am gay, and so my argument must be presumed to be carefully considered and selfless"? My reaction to the disclosure is less charitable: Had Mainwaring believed his argument to hold water, he would have allowed it to stand on its own. His declaration of his homosexuality is irrelevant - it does not make his argument any stronger or weaker - so if he believes he has made his case why present it as if it's some sort of trump card?

Same-sex relationships are different from heterosexual relationships, and gay men and lesbians need to accept that and design their own tradition.

I found a video of Mainwaring explaining the logic behind that assertion:

Okay, that wasn't actually Mainwaring, but his implied "square pegs and round holes' argument is right at the kindergarten level. When (if ever) can we expect more from Mainwaring than platitudes?

A few years ago, I was on the other side of the fence on this topic. But the more I read, thought, investigated and attempted to defend my position, the more I realized that I couldn’t.

I can't say that I'm surprised that Mainwaring had difficulty defending his former position, given his demonstrated inability to articulate a logical defense of his present position. I would like to read Mainwaring's old arguments, if they're available anywhere, because I suspect that I would find considerable amusement in an argument he made in earnest that's weaker than the one he presents in his current opinion piece.

Divorce... So Different Than it Used to Be

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial about divorce that brought to mind, of all things, an Air Supply song.

Growing up, my brother and I were often left to our own devices, members of the giant flock of migrant latchkey kids in the 1970s and '80s. Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers' houses during the week to their fathers' apartments every other weekend....

"Whatever happens, we're never going to get divorced." Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born.

Or, as Air Supply put it,

They lived in a world that was cold and uncaring,
They swore they would change it with loving and sharing.
They'll never live like their parents have done,
Their innocence shone like the sun....

WSJ:

After nine years, my husband and I had become wretched, passive-aggressive roommates. I had given up trying to do anything in the kitchen and had not washed a dish in a year. My husband had not been able to "find time" to read the book I had written. We rarely spoke, except about logistics. We hadn't slept in the same room for at least two years, a side effect of the nighttime musical bed routine that parents of so many young children play in semiconsciousness for years on end....

But then, one evening, I found myself where I vowed I'd never be: miserable, in tears, telling my husband that we were like siblings who couldn't stand each other rather than a couple, and listening as my husband said he felt as though we had never really been a couple and regretted that we hadn't split up a decade earlier.

Air Supply:

Who are these strangers who used to be lovers,
Now they've got nothing to say to each other.
Too far apart to discuss their mistakes,
They file for divorce and it breaks their American hearts....

WSJ:

That was four years ago. Even now, I still wonder every day if there was something that I—we—could have done differently. Like many of my cohort, the circumstances of my upbringing led me to believe that I had made exactly the right choices by doing everything differently from my parents.

Air Supply:

Now that it's over they'll each go on living,
Never forgetting but somehow forgiving.

WSJ:

We may not make it in marriage, but we still want to make it as parents. In the '70s, only nine states permitted joint custody. Today, every state has adopted it.... Joint custody also reduces family strife.... Many of us have ended up inflicting pain on our children, which we did everything to avoid.

But we have not had our parents' divorces either. We can only hope that in this, we have done it differently in the right way.

Air Supply:

They'll care for their children protect them with pride,
And that's how their dream will survive in American hearts....

Here's the thing: The WSJ is claiming that it's describing something new about divorce, relevant to Gen X (born 1965 - 1980). The Air Supply song was recorded in 1980, is about a couple who married in 1969 and is thus about their parents. It may feel like there's something new to the story, but the actual differences seem to be in the details. The song (still a bit maudlin) is the same.

Let me give you a tip if you find yourself sleeping in a different bed than your spouse for two years and struggling to think of anything you could do differently to salvage your relationship. If marriage counseling seems like too big a step, you could try sharing a bed. And don't blame your lack of intimacy on the kids - yes, they get in the way, but where there's a will....

Paradox? What Paradox?

Ross Douthat finds a paradox where none exists:

We’ve known for a while that America has a marriage gap: college graduates divorce infrequently and bear few children out of wedlock, while in the rest of the country unwed parenthood and family breakdown are becoming a new normal. This gap has been one of the paradoxes of the culture war: highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.

The explanation is pretty obvious, isn't it? People who do a good job managing their lives and relationships want the government to trust individual choices and keep out of their relationships. People who don't, or who by virtue of culture believe that to be the role of others, are more apt to see a need for state imposed controls on relationships, who you may have them with, when and under what circumstances they may end, etc.

Big Love and FLDS

Within one of the countless articles on Roman Polanski, I came across a criticism of Hollywood not taking child sex abuse seriously, by Professor Marci Hamilton:

First, as I discussed in a prior column, we had Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson producing HBO's "Big Love," which merely winks at the sexual degradation of girls in the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints enclaves, but never shows the system in an accurate light that would reveal its true, abhorrent nature. If the pretty fictions were stripped away, the show would be unrelentingly bleak and horrifying: a portrait of a male-dominated society that is inherently inimical to women's rights, progress, and power.

The author in that prior column argues,

Under the "Big Love" scenario, the community needs a three-women-to-one-man ratio. That's distorted enough in comparison to male-female birth rates. In reality, though, many polygamous arrangements involve more than three wives per each man, so more boys have to be discarded.

The distortion of the male-female balance also leads the husbands to seek younger and younger women. The result is that too many girls face abuse: When a girl is secretly "married" before the age of consent, which happens all too often, the marriage's "consummation" is more accurately described as statutory rape.

In other words, polygamy rests, inevitably, on child abuse and neglect.

She takes on a John Tierney column that spoke of polygamy in favorable terms.

Tierney also argues that "[p]olygamy isn't necessarily worse than the current American alternative: serial monogamy." But that's bunk: Divorced couples do not routinely discard their male children on the streets to increase the odds of the father getting the women, or girls, that he wants. And while a divorce may result in one ex-partner (almost always the ex-wife) receiving public assistance, at least the marriage wasn't initially predicated on anyone's receiving public assistance, as the many illegal relationships within many polygamous marriages must be.

I think she both overstates and understates her case. Yes, Big Love is set in a world in which, outside the auspices of its version of FLDS, polygamy is depicted as somehow viable and consensual - what the author describes as "syrupy speculations about how polygamy might be just fine in some possible world". That's the world of entertainment. The show does show some of the dark side of polygamous sects - the casting off of boys, the involuntary marriage of girls, the prophet's control over the lives of the people within the sect, banishment, excommunication, the separation of parent and child, the sect's control of the police departments that supposedly enforce laws on their compounds, violence, tax fraud.... but the focus is on the syrupy world of the main characters who live upper middle class lives outside of the compound. But even with all of that, the show only hints at the darkness.

In fairness to HBO and the show's producers, it's not just their show that diminishes the abusive elements of FLDS-type sects. The 2008 raid on an FLDS compound in Texas, for example, (which in fairness followed an anonymous report of abuse that appears to have been phony) had any number of people demanding the return of the children to their mothers on any number of grounds, none of which involved a good strong look at the abusive environment into which those children were returned. For example, law professor David Bernstein argued,

In the previous thread, some commenters seem to assert that the CPS may take all of the FLDS's children away because (a) there has been documented abuse of children at other FLDS communities; and/or (b) the "culture" of the FLDS is inherently abusive, as it encourages early marriage and leaves its children inherently isolated by homeschooling them and not exposing them to social events, television, and the like. The latter criterion, at least, would place Amish and some of the more insular ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in jeopardy.

Take a look at some of the literature by former FLDS members, such as Lost Boy. You'll find out about a system of indoctrination and control, and how Rulon Jeffs (Warren's father) pulled the sect away from the secular world, eventually banning not only virtually all television programming, but children's literature (really, pretty much any literature that wasn't FLDS material), imposing sometimes bizarre dress codes and the trademark FLDS hairstyle for women, and how he created a school, run by his son Warren, where children were taught very little conventional educational material, but in which some were reportedly sexually abused by headmaster Warren Jeffs. The FLDS aren't the Amish.

Moreover, the emphasis within the community is on "keeping sweet". Prior to Rulon Jeff's becoming "prophet", young girls were allowed to express some preference in terms of who they married, albeit one attributed to messages delivered to them through prayer. But if you didn't "keep sweet", meaning capitulate to the church and male authority, you could find yourself married off to just about anybody. Call it consensual if you will, but when the prophet tells a teenage girl (or adult woman) "this is your new husband", and he gets to force himself on her, that sounds to me like rape, and not (just or even necessarily) of the statutory sort. (According to the author of Lost Boy, Warren Jeff's nephew Brent, some of the men in the community very much enjoyed that moment.) If you were married and had children but didn't "keep sweet" you could find yourself sent away, separated from your children. Oh, and having the prophet marry you off is a "blessing" - have you guessed yet? If you're keeping sweet, you don't reject a blessing.

On the other side of things, teenage boys could be sent away for not "keeping sweet", in some circumstances to other compounds where it was intended that they learn to capitulate. Girls could become "poofers" - being simultaneously sent away and married off to a man they had never met, with no way of knowing if or when they would see their parents or siblings again. For others, whether for not "keeping sweet" or for being too much of a potential challenge to the prophet, banishment follows - they become the lost boys, separated from their families, without any real world knowledge, and with few other than each other to turn to for support.¹ They come out of a culture of dependence, a world where control is kept in no small part by not letting people think independently - giving people little input into even the mundane decisions of everyday life - which not only leaves them unprepared for the outside world but, as Brent Jeffs describes, can at times inspire a longing to return to that world where you don't have to make decisions.

Brent Jeffs explains how his father came to leave the church. One of Brent's older brothers, who had married, had a baby die of SIDS. Their father allowed him to come home and held a funeral. Brent's father was called in by the prophet, his own father, and was told that for "harboring gentiles" he had a choice: He was to be stripped of his wives, and that his wives and children would be assigned to other husbands, and he could be on probation inside the church, or he could leave the church but his wives would still be assigned to other husbands. Do you think the wedding nights following reassignment would be consensual in any meaningful sense of the word? Does this still, to Professor Bernstein, sound like it could be an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community?

I don't think there can be any doubt that the polygamous sect depicted in Big Love is styled after the FLDS sect headed by Rulon Jeffs (who seems to be the model for the prophet in the show, Roman Grant) and Warren Jeffs (who seems to be the inspiration for the closeted homosexual, patricidal son, Alby, who hungers to take over the role of prophet). So when Professor Hamilton speaks of "the 'Big Love' scenario, the community needs a three-women-to-one-man ratio", she should consider the importance of that number to the FLDS. Under the teachings of that sect, a man must have not less than three lives in order to become the god of his own world after he dies. (No, I'm not making that up.) If a young man does not keep sufficiently sweet, and does not devote himself sufficiently (in the sometimes arbitrary eyes of the prophet) to the church, he won't be promoted through the priesthood, and he won't be awarded the wives he needs to become a god. (Really, I'm not making that up.)² Yes, that number does create the imbalances Professor Hamilton describes, but it's a real-world imbalance, not one confined to an HBO drama.

Watch a movie like Osama³, and consider the Taliban. Take away the burkas and public executions, and for a young woman how much distance is there between life under a Warren Jeffs-style prophet and life under the Taliban?
__________

1. Alcohol and drug abuse appear to be enormous problems for the "lost boys".

2. And fossils? They're not proof of the age of the world, or of past life on Earth, but are parts of other, failed worlds that were recycled to make our world. No, I'm not making that, up, either. FLDS "science" makes those "evolution is just a theory" stickers seem downright scientific.

3. The "Osama" of the film is a young girl, not Osama bin Laden.

Wait, You Mean... Losing a Parent is a Bad Thing?

It's all so confusing. First, relying upon the best social data he can muster, David Brooks tells us,

[Sonia Sotomayor's] father died when she was 9, leaving one such gap [in her relationships]. (It is amazing how many people who suffer parental loss between the ages of 9 and 13 go on to become astounding high achievers.)

(Usual challenge: Okay, David... how many?) But then Michael Gerson insists,

[T]he fatherless are some of the most disadvantaged, betrayed people in our society, prone to delinquency, poverty and academic failure.

I can almost imagine a debate between Gerson and Brooks over whether having your parent die is better for you than divorce, or whether divorcing parents should also aim for the "age 9 through 13" sweet spot. Fortunately I am able to stop myself.

Gerson's imagining "the good old days" when people engaged in "courtship", married for life, and raised kids in intact marriages. I suspect, though, he would be just as happy with the other "good old days" when marriages were arranged and divorces were available only to the wealthy and influential.

While it's interesting to see the overlap in "thinking" style between Brooks (with his "hasty generalization") and Gerson (with his trust in a shallow conventional wisdom that suits his argument), life isn't that simple. Many children of divorce (or whose parents never marry) do "just fine, thank you very much," and don't need Gerson's condescension. Some kids of divorced parents, for economic reasons, end up living in a less safe, higher crime neighborhood, attending more dangerous, lower quality schools, and having less supervision after school. For others, the roots of bad behavior may lie in what comes before a parent pulls them out of a drunken, drug-addicted or violent household. Some unfortunate kids experience both. Yet Gerson can't see past the parents' break-up.

When possible, I do think that kids are better off being raised in a healthy two-parent household. When that's not possible, either because the household is physically or psychologically dangerous, kids are better off when the non-custodial parent pays adequate, timely child support.

Shifting subjects a bit, Gerson tells us that

the average age at which people marry has grown later; it is now about 26 for women, 28 for men.

He later contends,

Divorce rates trend downward until leveling off in the early 20s. But people who marry after 27 tend to have less happy marriages - perhaps because partners are set in their ways or have unrealistically high standards. The marital sweet spot seems to be in the early to mid-20s.

So... everything would be better if we could just convince the average guy to marry one year earlier? Seriously, do you think that the statistics for divorce based on age at the time of marriage might be skewed by second (and subsequent) marriages, that are well-documented to have higher rates of divorce?

Teen marriage is generally a bad idea, with much higher rates of divorce. Romeo and Juliet were, in fact, young fools.

I realize Gerson's trying to be amusing, but his quip highlights how he yearns for the "Ozzie and Harriet" version of the good old days, whether or not it actually existed, as opposed to what occurred through much of human history. Juliet had been promised to another man. She was getting married, even if not to Romeo.

In an alternate version of Romeo and Juliet, they hate each other but their parents decide that their marriage will be a useful way to mend the rift between the families and bring together their wealth, power and influence, and so it is done. As they live in Fourteenth Century Italy, divorce is not an option. But Romeo doesn't mind so much because marriage to Juliet is his duty... and, consistent with his station in life, he has a mistress or two on the side. And the children turn out okay because, as their parents remain married, they have a consistent caregiver in the form of their... nurse. Ah, the good old days.

Exercising Freedoms Responsibly

I wish Ross Douthat had taken the time to watch Idiocracy before writing his latest column, a pointless ramble about the sustainability of love and marriage. It might have given him a different perspective on this observation about the authors of the essays that inspired his column:

Their complaints about this world’s romance deficit are substantially overstated, obviously - and shot through with a dash of self-justification. (Tsing Loh had an affair; Nehring recently became an unwed mother.) But both do put their finger on a post-sexual revolution paradox - namely, that the same overclass that was once most invested in erotic experimentation ended up building the sturdiest walls against the passions it unleashed.

I was only able to read one of the essays Douthat references, Sandra Tsing Loh's Let's Call the Whole Thing Off. But with due respect to Douthat's recognition of the essay as self-justifying, I think he missed the larger point. My father has the opinion that marriages tend to continue, even if one or both partners are unhappy, until one of them finds somebody else. Then that person seeks a divorce. It's a simple point that, in my observation, largely rings true. Tsoh admits that she had a comfortable, stable marriage, so why divorce?

Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage.

She fell in love with somebody else, and chose not to surrender that passion in favor of returning to a marriage that she believed (probably correctly) would never inspire a similar level of passion. That's part of the normal progression of relationships. Perhaps the issue is that Tsoh, who doesn't "generally even enjoy men", had never before experienced "falling in love", but if she wants to live the rest of her life with a similar level of passion she must eschew long-term relationships and marriage (or at least monogamous relationships and marriage), as over time the happy, giddy, "I just fell in love", "I never want to be apart from you" moments, will inevitably change and evolve into something else.

Tsoh also describes a friend of hers, married to a husband who is a gourmet cook, remarkably neat and organized, a good carpenter, and a fitness freak. She describes her friend as also consdering divorce:

“Ian won’t have sex with me,” Rachel says flatly. “He has not touched my body in two years. He says it’s because I’ve gained weight.” Again, we stoutly protest, but she goes on. “And he thinks I’m a bad mother—he says I’m sloppy and inattentive.”

The list of violations unfurls. Last week, Rachel mistakenly gave the wrong medication to the dog, a mistake Ian would never make. She also forgot to deglaze the saucepan and missed the window to book the family’s Seattle flights on Expedia, whose chiming bargains Ian meticulously tracks.

I don't doubt that Ian has managed to present his wife with a list of complaints that make her unattractive to him. But it's all window dressing. I would bet good money that, like Tsoh, the reason Ian is finding so much fault in a stable marriage is that he's having an affair. Care to guess how long ago the affair started, or at least when it got serious?

Douthat appears quite uncomfortable with any departure from traditional, or should I say "Ozzie and Harriet", gender roles:

So which is the real America? Is it Tsing Loh’s dystopia, where everyone “works” grimly on their relationships, and post-feminist husbands happily cook saffron-infused porcini risotto but rarely practice seduction on their wives? Or is it tabloid country: The land of Jon minus Kate, and governors who vanish to “hike the Appalachian Trail” — not to mention gossip-column fixtures like Britney Spears (rumored last week to be contemplating her third marriage in six years) and the mistress-parading Mel Gibson?

Perhaps Douthat doesn't eat at many restaurants, but the world of the gourmet kitchen has long been dominated by men. A speculative explanation in which Douthat would probably find comfort is that women have traditionally learned to cook in order to feed their families, while men have had the opportunity to be self-indulgent, to approach cooking as art instead of sustenance. But whatever the reason, Douthat seems to find fault with the fact that a documentary filmmaker who spends most of his time at home between assignments, and who loves to cook, in fact cooks for his "chronically overworked" lawyer wife. In Douthat's "pre-feminist" world, would she (a) quit her job so she could "properly care for her family," (b) order a lot of prepared foods, take-out and delivery, or serve up frozen dinners, or (c) somehow find an extra four hours per day so she could be home to cook breakfast and dinner, and package up box lunches for the kids?

Douthat pontificates,

As Nehring observes, our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect. The difficult scramble up the meritocratic ladder tends to discourage wild passions and death-defying flings. For bright young overachievers, there’s often a definite tameness to the way that collegiate “safe sex” segues into the upwardly-mobile security of “companionate marriages” - or, if you’re feeling more cynical, “consumption partnerships.”

Or it could be something else, entirely. It could be that people who exercise their freedoms responsibly believe that the state has no place peering through their bedroom windows and telling them, "Your sex partner is the wrong gender. No, sorry, anything but the missionary position is 'gross indecency.'" It could be that people who intentionally postpone marriage and child rearing until they're stable in their careers don't believe the government should be restricting their access to birth control, or that Douthat's brand of moral opprobrium is appropriate should they experience an unwanted pregnancy and have to choose how to proceed. Although in what is becoming his trademark, Douthat declines to follow through with any conclusions - his editorial suggests that he disapproves of single parenthood, but he can't bring himself to say that single mothers "should get married". In fact, he seems to be internalizing the stereotypes presented in Idiocracy - an "overclass" (his word) of austere yuppies forever postponing children until the "right time" versus a population that, I guess, Douthat would describe as the underclass.

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.

I get that latter part - Douthat believes that the poor and uneducated should breed less often. But what am I supposed to make of the former part? "Meritocrats" should marry earlier? Have children outside of marriage? Have more affairs? Engage in more premarital sex? Douthat's usually short on specifics but come on. That's a contention he needs to explain. And how would any of that be consistent with the "pre-feminist" world for which he pines?

Douthat seems to be suggesting that there is a world of people who act responsibly, don't need others to tell them how to behave, and don't like it when the government or moralistic preachers start trying to regulate or criminalize their available choices. He also is suggesting that there's another population - "Americans, particularly those of modest means" who don't exercise sufficient caution or seek appropriate levels of stability "in their romantic entanglements." He doesn't find it obvious that politicians and religious leaders who lack self-control are often the vanguard of those who argue for more meddling in private romantic relationships, or that many of their "incautious" followers (and, for that matter, Douthat) don't understand why people restrain themselves out of anything less than the threat of prison or eternal damnation.

Dennis Prager's Conservative Man's Guide to Sex

Remember how, a while back, Ann Coulter would rant about how married couples have better sex lives than singles. And you couldn't help but wonder, "How would she know?" Dennis Prager has thoughtfully provided us with the answers: Married women have a better work ethic. (At least if they want to stay married.)

It seems almost gratuitous to make fun of Prager, not that it's going to stop me. He's apparently in the grip of a bizarre form of the whore-madonna complex for which the only cure is his demand that madonna "put out". According to Prager, here's how women think:

A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think men's natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a woman's nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.

Here's how men react:

A man whose wife frequently denies him sex will first be hurt, then sad, then angry, then quiet. And most men will never tell their wives why they have become quiet and distant. They are afraid to tell their wives. They are often made to feel ashamed of their male sexual nature, and they are humiliated (indeed emasculated) by feeling that they are reduced to having to beg for sex.

Prager admits that there are rare occasions when a husband "should not initiate sex", although the exceptions to his "24/7" policy aren't enumerated. But make no mistake, as much as the husband may be writhing in undisclosed self-doubt if his wife doesn't put out all the time, it's the woman's job to clearly communicate those times when the husband shouldn't ask for sex ("women should not expect men to read their minds"). I'm thinking Prager might forgive a wife's lack of accommodation at times of severe illness although, on the other hand, if she's already in bed....

Seriously, rather than writing columns lecturing women that, even though it's not in their nature to like sex very much, and certainly not very often, they should accede to their husband's sexual demands on almost all occasions he could have written a column lamenting to men, "Women don't like sex very much, perhaps not at all, so don't let your feelings get hurt when they say 'no'." Sure, people would still make fun of him, but maybe not quite as much. But at least it would be honest.

What sort of marriage does Prager envision, where a wife is to "give her body to" her husband as she acts "happy no matter what [her] mood", all the while keeping secret the fact that he isn't sexually attractive to her? For all of his whining about how women allow themselves to be "governed by feelings and moods", implying that men are rational beings, why not simply encourage men to be rational, accept their women for what they are, and build a marriage premised on mutual respect? Under Prager's logic, isn't it men who are being irrational, becoming angry, distant, ashamed, and unfaithful because they aren't willing to learn or accept basic "facts" about female sexuality?

This is where it gets interesting. When madonna doesn't "put out", the Pragers of the world feel justified in seeking out that other type of woman. Except Prager's already told us that there's really only one type of woman - there's no evil vixen of "the kind you don't take home to mother" who actually likes sex. According to Prager's columns, sex for women is always a quid pro quo. They don't get a great deal of pleasure from it, so they need to get something else. When Prager warns wives,

To ask that [your husband] also regularly deny himself sex with the one woman in the world with whom he is permitted sex is asking far too much. Deny him enough times and he may try to fill this need with another woman.

What type of woman is he suggesting would "fill his need"? Prager's attentions always turn to the material:

What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.

Or maybe she would tell him, "Honey, you hate your job. Let's work on your résumé, and help you find a new one where you won't be so miserable."

What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can - indeed, ought to - refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?

I almost wish there were a webcast of this, as I would like to know how much anger, fear, frustration, even rage at God explodes out of Prager as he cries, "Why?" But there you have it. Women benefit from men going to work and providing them with material stability, geegaws and doodads. And a woman's equivalent responsibility in marriage is to willingly "give her body to him" pretty much any time he asks. If only women worked for a living, maybe then they would understand....

In the rest of life, not just in marital sex, it is almost always a poor idea to allow feelings or mood to determine one’s behavior. Far wiser is to use behavior to shape one’s feelings. Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier. Act loving and you will feel more loving....

Okay, Dennis, if that's truly what you believe, how about trying this at home: "Act like you're getting lots of sex from your wife." Don't blame her when you feel dissatisfied in the marriage, feel insecure, or start picking up hookers.

As one bright and attractive woman in her 50s ruefully said to me, “Had I known this while I was married, he would never have divorced me.”

I can almost imagine the conversation:

Woman: "I am so upset. My husband was cheating on me, sleeping with prostitutes, and now we're divorced."

Prager: "If he was sleeping with prostitutes, he obviously wasn't getting enough sex at home."

Woman: "Well, he would come home from work late, reeking of alcohol, lipstick on his collar. It was a real turn-off. Not to mention I was concerned about sexually transmitted disease.

Prager: "He went to work, and you still didn't reward him with sex on demand? It's the same thing, you know. We all have jobs we hate, but we gotta do 'em. He goes to work every day for the pay and, when you think about it, he's merely asking you to do pretty much the same thing. By rejecting him for sex you're making him feel ashamed and emasculated, and the only way he can recover from that is by getting sex somewhere else. Since women don't like sex very much, are you really surprised he sometimes had to pay for it?"

Woman: "Had I known this while I was married, he would never have divorced me."

Prager: "I told my ex-wives the same thing, and boy are they sorry now."

And there you have it - everything Prager knows about sex. Don't you feel silly now, that you were afraid to ask?

The Importance of Marriage

In today's Washington Post, William Rasberry instructs us of a growing disconnect between marriage and motherhood for poor mothers.

Unlike earlier generations, they don't look to marriage to give their children "a name" or for economic stability; they see it as a crowning achievement -- something to look forward to after they have their children, decent jobs and a house of their own. To marry earlier, they insist, is to leave themselves prey to the controlling and abusive men who are available to them in their inner-city Philadelphia and Camden, N.J., neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, Maggie Gallagher has produced an analysis of recent research on family structure and delinquency that concludes that -- after controlling for race, income and education -- boys who grow up without fathers are several times more likely to end up in jail. Earlier studies, says Gallagher, who is president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, show that children raised outside marriage are more prone to poverty, substance abuse, school failure, delinquency and adult crime.

Wait a second... I thought Maggie Gallagher was a staunch opponent of marriage. Oops - I guess that's only gay marriage.

Seriously, though, Gallagher is an ideologue who rails against gay marriage, single parent households and abortion rights, with a consistent subtext that there should be a diminishment of the wall between church and state. She is sufficiently reliable in her opinion that she was commissioned by the Bush Administration to write brochures on the subject of marriage, but sufficiently unreliable in her candor that she "forgot" to tell her readership of the arrangement when subsequently editorializing in favor of Bush Administration policies. You don't need to be told which positions Maggie holds or what conclusions her organization advances - if it didn't support her position, she wouldn't be talking about it.

The description reminded me of a rather unpersuasive interview I heard on NPR a few weeks ago, with author Peggy Drexler. While Drexler was asserting that her recent book, "Raising Boys Without Men", was intended only to show that single mothers and gay couples didn't have to fret about the absence of a male presence in their household, her arguments have widely been viewed as anti-male. She argued in effect that most of the supposedly deleterious effects of single parent households are tied to other factors, and that single mothers who lived in decent neighborhoods with stable incomes were producing sons who fared no worse, and sometimes better, than those from "traditional" families.

What I found unpersuasive about this was her methodology (interviews with the boys and their mothers over a period of years), which seemed designed to screen out both opposing viewpoints and unstable families (which are likely to drop out of a longitudinal study). She frequently referred to her findings as following a scientific methodology, but never used the magical words "peer reviewed" in relation to her more controversial findings. Which is not to say that there aren't many single parent households and gay households raising fine children, or "traditional" households which aren't - it's just to say that she seemed to be letting her ideology drive her research and her conclusions. Which I guess makes her Maggie Gallagher's counterpart, save for the fact that Drexler at least performs research.

So I was not particularly suprprised when I Googled Gallagher's organization the "Institute for Marriage and Public Policy" and found that the report mentioned in the Raspberry column was apparently prepared to rebut Drexler:

Can Married Parents Reduce Crime? 9/21/05
Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy says, "Results like these are a reality check for people such as Peggy Drexler ("Raising Boys Without Men") who argue that it is only poverty, and not father absence, that hurts children. Boys are hardwired to grow into men. But they are not hardwired to grow into good family men. That’s a job for mothers and fathers working together."

Well, there's a scientific assertion.... You can download the report (in PDF format) from Gallagher's site.

The report isn't actually a study - it's a survey of studies. And it doesn't actually conclude that "after controlling for race, income and education ... boys who grow up without fathers are several times more likely to end up in jail" - it states, "recent research strongly suggests both that young adults and teens raised in single-parent homes are more likely to commit crimes, and that communities with high rates of family fragmentation (especially unwed childbearing) suffer higher crime rates as a result". Raspberry should have checked his source.

Lest you believe that Gallagher's advocacy for government intervention in the family is premised in her concern for poverty, her writings will quickly set you straight:

We expect our governments, local, state and federal, to respond to our citizens' needs, all of them, even those too poor or too stupid to get out of the way of a Category 5 hurricane.

Given Gallagher's position that it is a matter for contempt and derision to suggest that government should help the poor, her advocacy for government policies relating to marriage can safely be presumed to be about something other than a concern for poverty.

Wedding Rings

A wedding ring story from mythago, and her comment on John Scalzi's wedding ring story (to which she links), brought to mind another....

A friend of mine was getting married, and was emphatic that he was not going to wear a wedding ring. Perhaps needless to say, he endured some teasing on the subject from his friends.

The minister who was to preside over the ceremony approached him and inquired if this was in fact the case. My friend affirmed that it was. "I see," the minister responded. "In all my years as a minister, I have only had one other man who didn't wear a wedding ring after the ceremony. He worked with industrial machinery, and if a wedding ring were caught in a machine it might rip his finger off." The minister then excused himself to attend to other duties.

"See?," my friend asked, "The minister says it's okay if I don't wear a ring."

(I doubt that I need to explain that my friend does not work with industrial machinery, for you to figure out that the minister probably intended a different message.)

Epilogue: He now wears a wedding band.

Anniversary

Happy Anniversary, Honey. It's been a great year.

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday, Laura.

And the World Didn't End....

Congratulations to the lucky couples.

Elopement

What started out as a sunny getaway in Costa Rica turned into something much more exciting....



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