God and man at Dartmouth, Part Deux

The controversy over Student Assembly President Noah Riner's sermon/speech at the Dartmouth convocation is covered at Inside Higher Ed, and is also the subject of a William F. Buckley column, an article at the website of the invaluable FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Higher Education), and two blogposts by Todd Zywicky at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Unfortunately, all these articles, except for the IHE one, continue (as I noted in my first post on the subject with regard to Peter Robinson's post at NRO's The Corner) to focus on the less controversial part of Riner's speech -- the passage invoking Jesus and his sacrifice as an example of "character" -- while barely alluding to the much longer passage in which he spoke of Jesus as humanity's redeemer ("He gave His life for our sin so that we wouldn't have to bear the penalty of the law; so we could see love") and as the solution to the problem of flawed character. To invoke Jesus as a role model is one thing; to invoke him as the pathway to salvation is quite another. As I noted, too, Riner was not merely speaking of his own personal perspective and experience; he consistently used the word "we." He was either proselytizing or assuming that he was speaking to an entirely Christian audience; either way, it's completely inappropriate at an event meant for the entire student body at a religiously diverse school.

I'm not saying that Riner should be officially penalized or disciplined for his talk. I do find it disturbing that, as his comments quoted by IHR suggest, he doesn't understand why his talk was objectionable. Said Riner, "My goals were to challenge and inspire students and specifically to make them think deeply about character. And for me, Jesus is a natural figure to bring up when talking about character." Fine, but he wasn't just talking about himself.

As one commenter at IHR pointed out:

Riner could have solved his problem with a very simple addition to his speech—acknowledging that Jesus was his personal icon, but that other students who come with different faiths, including agnostics and atheists, may have other role models. His purpose was to move students toward character development, not just acquisition of learning and/or power, but he failed to put himself in the position of those who do not share his personal beliefs and background. He “embarrassed himself” in the sense that one might expect a Dartmouth senior to be a bit more alert to such differences.

This, it seems to me, is a salient point that should not be omitted from the discussion.

Why not do a thought experiment and put the shoe on the other foot? Suppose Riner had been an atheist who used his address at convocation to declare that "we don't need the comforting illusion of God in our lives" and that true strength of character lies in behaving morally without divine guidance and without the hope of reward in an imaginary afterlife. Would Christians have been offended or not?

The Darwin debate, 1872

The debate over evolution and ID invariably brings to my mind a charming Russian poem by Alexei Tolstoy (novelist Leo's less talented but much saner and smarter, and unjustly forgotten, relative), "Epistle to M.N. Longinov on Darwinism" (1872). Tolstoy, a poet, writer and dramatist, was widely regarded as a retrograde in his day; in fact, while his political satire often skewered the left -- the socialists, the nihilists, the populists and other radicals -- he was far from being a reactionary and envisioned Russia evolving toward a more Western-style liberal society. Mikhail Longinov, a personal friend of Tolstoy's, was the chairman of Russia's Committee on Publishing (i.e. the official censorship board). Tolstoy wrote the poem after hearing about a proposed ban on Darwin's The Origin of Species, which apparently turned out to be a false rumor.

The poem is quite relevant to today's debate, and I've often wished there were a translation. Well, today, in a burst of inspiration, I translated it myself, in abbreviated form (the original has 22 stanzas, I kept only 10 [update: make that 11] -- omiting a parallel between Darwinian and Copernican theory, and the conclusion which points out that Russia is not isolated from the world and science will find its way in). Here goes. "Misha" is, of course, the nickname for Mikhail -- the Russian equivalent of "Mikey."

Is it true, what people tell me?
Everywhere, the news I'm getting:
Misha, it is said, considers
Darwin's system quite upsetting.

Come now, Misha, why get fretful?
You've no tail on your own arse,
So the origin of species
Shouldn't cause much of a fuss.

What's, in any case, your problem
With a gradual creation?
Do you think that in his methods
God from you should take dictation?

Why restrict how He can do things,
By what means and to what end?
I would say that such a viewpoint
Smells of heresy, my friend!

Truly, that's a poor example
You have set from your high place,
And I fear you might be labeled
As a man of little faith.

In the distant past, moreover,
Not much glory's there for man:
For a lump of clay's no better
Than some old orangutan.

Do you think, perhaps, that Darwin
Is for nihilists a banner?
What, good Lord, have they in common
In their message or their manner?

From the beasts to human level
Darwin does us elevate,
While the nihilists would have us
Sink into a beastly state.

Far from being Darwin's vanguard,
They confirm his basic facts,
And their brutish, wild behavior
Of regression often smacks.

Crude and ignorant and shameless,
Spiteful, puffed-up, condescending,
They themselves, I'd say, are backwards
Toward their ancestors descending.

For the acts of bratty rebels
Darwin needs no absolution.
Therefore, Misha, calm your anger,
Cease your foolish persecution!

By the way, nice description of the nihilists -- the far left of their day. Nothing new under the sun, is there.

Those who read Russian can find the original (and the rest of Tolstoy's brilliant satirical poetry) here.

With Enlightenment champions like these...

From the website of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an announcement of an upcoming event:

Saturday, October 8:"Rethinking Secularism in an Age of Belief"

A Symposium featuring Dwight McBride (African American Studies, Northwestern), Saba Mahmood (Anthropology, UC Berkeley), Gauri Viswanathan (English, Columbia University), and Michael Warner (English, Rutgers). Co-organized with the IPRH.

This event will address some of the most pressing issues of the current political landscape: the apparent global rise of fundamentalisms, the religious underpinnings of empire, and the neoconservative discourse of “moral values.” These phenomena have been interpreted by some as a sign of the “end of Enlightenment.” How should progressive intellectuals respond to this assessment? Should we celebrate the demise of Enlightenment and its normalizing narrative of secularization? Or should we be frightened by the prospect of a post-secular world? In the face of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, do we need more or less secularism?

I myself (see previous post) am concerned about the assault on reason and Enlightenment values (values that are as much a part of America's foundation as is its religious heritage). But "the religious underpinnings of empire"? (Translation: the war against terrorism and Islamofascism, and the attempt -- wise or not -- to make democratic development possible in the Middle East, is in reality an "onward, Christian soldiers" crusade in disguise.) George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden, in a macabre parody of moral equivalency? I despair.

The evolution wars are here again

The controversy over evolution and intelligent design is back in the news because of the Pennsylvania trial over a school board's decision to add critiques of evolution and the "alternative" theory of Intelligent Design to the curriculum.

Good posts on the subject by Roger Simon and Richard Bennett. See also this piece by William Saletan in Slate.com. And, for those who think that only secularist liberals and lefties want to keep ID out of science classrooms, read John Derbyshire, whom no one would dream of calling a secularist liberal. (Derbyshire's debate on ID with some of his own National Review colleagues can be be found here and here.)

I've had my share of the evolution/ID debate since writing about it back in August, and I find it rather depressing, because there are so many people -- many of them, broadly speaking, on my side of the political divide -- spouting so many inanities. Here's an example: a blogpost that excerpts my column, under the title, "If you can't compete you demand a monopoly." That's the main pro-ID meme in respectable conservative circles: those who don't want ID to be a part of the science curriculum or of mainstream scientific discussion are intolerant of debate -- or even "fascist," according to Bill O'Reilly. Funny how not long ago, the same Bill O'Reilly rightly slammed C-Span for wanting to "balance" an interview with Deborah Lipstadt, the historian who prevailed against Holocaust "revisionist" David Irving in a libel suit, by interviewing Irving as well, and commended Lipstadt for refusing to participate so as not to create the appearance of a legitimate debate on the issue. If we're going to teach the "debate" on evolution vs ID (which President Bush's own science adviser, John H. Marburger, has pointedly said is "not a scientific topic), then why not bring the "debate" over whether the Holocaust really happened to history classrooms? Why not teach astrology on a par with astronomy? Heck, nearly one-third of Americans, including 43% of those aged 25 to 29, believe in astrology, and we live in a democracy where we can't just let those arrogant scientific elites decide what our children will learn, right?

Then there's this intellectual gem from my former Detroit News colleague Tony Snow:

That said, ID does not qualify as science because it gives us nothing to test or measure. Science requires replicable tests involving measurable variables. ...
Evolutionary theory, like ID, isn't verifiable or testable. It's pure hypothesis -- like ID -- although very popular in the scientific community.

That's another common pro-ID argument, often encountered in Internet forums and in my email ("has anyone actually seen one species evolve into another?"). Sadly, it demonstrates little but the scientific illiteracy of the people who make it. "Testable" and "verifiable" does not mean "proven beyond a reasonable doubt" or "backed by irrefutable evidence." It means that you set up an experiment in which evolutionary theory predicts a particular outcome. If the experiment fails, then evolutionary theory has failed the test. There is no "final proof" of evolution, but there is abundant evidence supporting evolutionary theory (indicating, for instance, that both humans and modern apes are related to primates who lived millions of years ago, or that modern-day birds are related to the dinosaurs), and none disproving it. ID is not a "scientific challenge"; it postulates simply that because science doesn't fully explain how various organisms evolved, there must have been a higher intelligence beyond material science at work.

Tony Snow again:

ID is useful largely because it punctures the myth of scientific invincibility, while providing a basis for promoting the cause of "hard" science. Sure, science involves trial and error. Scientists refine theories each day. But as they do, they help us grasp more clearly the wonders of the world and the universe.

Scientific inquiry and ID provide useful angles of approach to ultimate questions. Here's how to make both sides happy: Let science teachers tell kids that science is a matter of inspired guesswork, not of invincible decree. Eventually, new theories will arise to wipe away weaknesses and inconsistencies in today's scientific orthodoxy.

Sorry, but does the guy have any idea what he's talking about? Yes, of course science is not "invincible." No scientist worth his or her salt teaches that it is. While ID proponents imagine that the scientific establishment is locked into a rigid orthodoxy that brooks no challenge, the truth is that scientific hypotheses are constantly challenged, revised, and even disproved. For every scientist who is invested in the "orthodoxy," there's probably at least a dozen who would love nothing more than to revolutionize their field. But the status quo must be challenged through scientific inquiry, not through "inspired guesswork" or "I don't understand how it happened, therefore God must have done it" fuzzy logic.

(By the way, Snow's proposal that students ought to be taught to view science as "inspired guesswork" provides one good answer to the sneering question, "What are you monkey people so afraid of?" That's what. That way, folks, lies scientific illiteracy and abandonment of reason.)

The drive behind ID is not science; it's religion, and the perceived threat of science to religion. In his excellent New Republic article, "The Faith That Dares Not Speak Its Name" (subscriber only, but a PDF version is available here), evolutionary scientist Jerry Coyne quotes mathematician Wiliam Dembski, one of the much-vaunted "real scientists" who champion ID:

But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed.

Many people worry that an acceptance of naturalistic evolution erodes religious values and promotes a nihilistic world-view in which all morality is relative and life has no higher purpose or meaning: we're all animals, after all. I don't see why it has to work this way. Humans, whether by dint of evolution or creation, are capable of reason and have a sense of right and wrong; we should live accordingly. I myself don't care for militant atheism, and I don't think it's right to use science in its service. I myself am an agnostic who would like to believe that there are some transcendent things in our existence, and who does not regard the concept of the human soul as hopelessly outmoded. If I were religious, I don't think I would want to tie my faith to so shaky a foundation as ID. There are, in fact, many scientists who accept evolution and believe in God, and many religious people (and organizations) who believe that evolution is not incompatible with a belief in God or in any particular religion.

Last year, the National Center for Science Education unveiled a website for teachers called "Understanding Evolution." It features a section explaining that many religious groups, theologians, and scientists who hold religious beliefs endorse evolutionary theory -- obviously in an attempt to placate concerns that the teaching of evolution undercuts faith. ID proponents cried foul, complaining that the insidious evolutionists were "trying to unconstitutionally mix church and state," using taxpayer dollars to promote the correct (pro-evolution) religious viewpoint. That takes some chutzpah.

There was a time, not too long ago, when conservatives stood in defense of science and reason against politically correct attacks on science from radical feminists, Afrocentrists, environmental extremists, and post-modernists who rejected the concept of objective reality. I miss those days.

Update: Another good rebuttal to some standard anti-evolution arguments about the fossil record. Hat tip: Rand Simberg.

Update: And one more good post by Tom Smith at The Right Coast, another conservative and Christian who explains why Darwinian biology belongs in science classroom and "Intelligent Design" does not.

Partying with the Reasonoids

The Reason staff in Washington, DC gathered at Mackey's Pub tonight to celebrate the Reason blog, Hit & Run, being named one of the five winning political blogs in Playboy. I went down to DC for the event, held at Mackey's Pub. My only quibble: Why are so many events where you go for the purpose of talking to interesting people held at places where you have to yell to hold a conversation? Even so, a great time was had by all, with conversation topics ranging from the Roberts confirmation to the disillusionment of conservatives and libertarians who supported Bush (Bruce Bartlett of the National Center for Policy Analysis has an upcoming book about Bush's betrayal of the Reagan legacy) to the recent anti-war demonstration in Washington (the Cato Institute's Evan Pierre told me that he goes to demonstrations of all stripes -- pro-life, pro-choice, anti-war, and would gladly go to pro-war ones if they drew more than a handful of people -- just because he enjoys seeing Americans exercise their rights) to same-sex marriage to Ivy League mommy-trackers and more.

Some photos:



With Reason editor Julian Sanchez



With WNET talk show host Luke Thomas (EndofPolitcs.com)




With Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett





With Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt of Asymmetrical Information, and Reason's Nick Gillespie

(You can click on the photos to see the full-size version.)

Religious intolerance: the real thing

Lately, a lot of people on the right have been awfully quick to cry religious bigotry for no good reason. I'm at the point where I reach for the remote every time Bill O'Reilly fulminates against "secularists." So tonight when I heard him announce an upcoming segment about "religion under attack," I was prepared to roll my eyes. Until I saw the segment.

It seems some "civil liberties groups" are upset because FEMA is going to use taxpayer money to reimburse churches and other religious organizations for services (shelter, food, and other assistance) provided to survivors of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

According to The Washington Post:

FEMA officials said religious organizations would be eligible for payments only if they operated emergency shelters, food distribution centers or medical facilities at the request of state or local governments in the three states that have declared emergencies -- Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. In those cases, "a wide range of costs would be available for reimbursement, including labor costs incurred in excess of normal operations, rent for the facility and delivery of essential needs like food and water," FEMA spokesman Eugene Kinerney said in an e-mail.

Apparently, the "civil libertarians" believe that this violates the separation of church and state.

What next? Are we going to say that the police (taxpayer-funded, after all!) shouldn't be allowed to investigate a robbery at a church?

Yes, yes, I know there are differences. On tonight's O'Reilly Factor, Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State was talking about religious indoctrination and discrimination in church-run charitable programs. Fine. You show me a religious organization that was asked by the local government to run a shelter for Katrina survivors and either barred people of other faiths or subjected them to intrusive proselytizing -- as opposed to, say, merely handing out a Bible -- and I will agree that they shouldn't get a penny in reimbursements. But unless there is such evidence, why not treat religious groups the same as secular ones? (For that matter, why is there so little concern with discrimination and indoctrination practiced by programs based on secular ideologies -- for instance, taxpayer-funded domestic violence programs rooted in radical feminist viewpoints?)

There is indeed a point where secularism crosses over into hostility toward religion. For an example, see the recent brouahaha over the tiny church crosses on the Los Angeles County seal. This is another such case. On this occasion, the so-called civil libertarians are only giving the separation of chruch and state a bad name.

Poverty, race, Katrina, and demagoguery

The other day, speaking to the Congressional Black Caucus, New York congressman Charles Rangel referred to George Bush as "our Bull Connor."

Appearing on various talk shows (including Bill O'Reilly tonight), Rangel has claimed that he never meant to imply that Bush was a racist; he was simply saying that just as Bull Connor's brutality against peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 woke up America's conscience to the problem of racism, Katrina and the federal government's inadequate response to it would wake up America's conscience to the problem of poverty. Rangel has even said that he does not regard this as a racial issue, and that Katrina's real disgrace was the plight of the poor, black or white.

First of all, to get the obvious out of the way: Rangel's claim that to call someone a modern-day Bull Connor is not a charge of racism is plainly and simply laughable. If Rangel's goal was to draw attention to the problem of poverty, his demagogic race-baiting was precisely the wrong strategy.

But what about the problem itself? The disaster in New Orleans was, in fact, a stark reminder of the persistence of poverty in our midst. The standard left/liberal answer is to blame capitalism and conservatism, and to call for more social programs and more redistribution of wealth. The standard conservative and libertarian answer is to blame the "culture of poverty" with its intractable social problems, which sometimes translates all too easily into blaming the poor.

I agree that more socialism is not the answer, and that poverty in America is largely a self-perpetuating culture. There are millions of immigrants who come to the U.S. every year with nothing, and manage in a fairly short amount of time to work their way into the middle-class -- because they have social support networks and a culture that values education and hard work. (Many of those immigrants are black, whether from the Caribbean or from Africa, which further undercuts the theory that poverty is due to institutional racism.) But in discussing the culture of poverty, we should be very, very careful to avoid bashing the poor themselves. Most of us, if born into the same circumstances, would have likely ended up trapped in the same patterns of self-defeating behavior. Bourgeois virtues are not acquired at birth. Yes, there are people who manage to overcome multiple social handicaps and break the cultural habits of their environment. But that takes some unusual qualities -- an extrordinary level of energy, determination, and self-sufficiency.

Some excellent thoughts from Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt, here and here.

Would it be worthwhile, perhaps, to take a closer look at the factors that determine upward mobility in individuals and families -- both among the U.S.-born poor, and among immigrants?

What about the men? (2)

Amidst all these discussions of Future Desperate Housewives of the Ivy League, there's another story that's finally getting some notice: while some women are mommy-tracking themselves while still in college, many men aren't in college, period.

USA Today reports:

Currently, 135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men. That gender imbalance will widen in the coming years, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Education.

Glenn Reynolds discusses the issue here. (See also an interesting thread at Ann Althouse.)

This is not really a new story: Women were already graduating from college in higher numbers than men in 1992, when the American Association of Unviersity Women (AAUW) raised a false alarm about girls being "shortchanged" by gender bias. But in recent years the imbalance has been getting worse. For more on this ongoing debate and the data, see my 2001 article in Reason, Where the Boys Are. See also University of Alaska psychologist Judith Kleinfeld's excellent paper, The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception.

Why is this hapenning? And is it a problem? One common explanation is that men are off doing lucrative things that don't require a college diploma -- launching Internet start-ups, for instance, or getting jobs in the blue-collar trades. (But how many of these men really do well? Plumbers and welders may make good money, but a lot of men in the trades face chronic job insecurity and low income. As USA Today points out, "The unemployment rate for young men ages 20-24 is 10.1%, twice the national rate".) There are also more men in the armed services. Clearly a college diploma is not the only path to a good life. But there is a lot of evidence that many of the "missing men" are in trouble. By the way, if you look at the statistics, it's clear that the college gender gap is most pronounced among African-Americans (for some years now, black females in college have outnumbered black men about 2:1) and low-income people.

In addition to gender differences in enrollment, men seem to fare worse once they do get to college. According to federal statistics, of the men who entered college in 1996, only 28% graduated in 4 years or less, compared to 38% of the women; the six-year graduation rate was over 58% for women but only 52% for the men.

That brings us back to the "why." Some observers, such as Kleinfeld, say that a big part of the problem is that young men today tend to be less motivated and less focused than their female peers. (Father absence may be one factor in this.) Others see gender bias in the education system. Says Reynolds:

There seems little doubt that universities have become less male-friendly in recent decades, to the point of being downright unfriendly in many cases. The kind of statements that are routinely made about males and masculinity in classrooms and hallways would get professors fired if they were made about blacks, gays, or many other groups. Sexual-harassment policies start with the presumption that men are guilty, and inherently depraved. And colleges now come at the tail-end of an educational system that is (compared to previous decades) anti-male from kindergarten on, meaning many males probably just want to get out as soon as they can.

Some of the people I interviewed for my Reason article expressed the same view. Bret Burkholder, a counselor at Pierce College in Puyallup, Washington, who also works with younger boys as a baseball coach, told me, "If you listen to 10- or 11-year-old boys, you will hear that school is not a very happy place for them. It's a place where they're consistently made to feel stupid, where girls can walk around in T-shirts that say 'Girls rule, boys drool,' but if a boy makes a negative comment about girls he'll have the book thrown at him."

There is some evidence to back this up. Here are some data from a 1990 survey of high school students conducted for the AAUW, and spun as evidence of girls' precariously low self-esteem. When asked, "Who do teachers think are smarter, boys or girls?", 69% of boys and 81% of girls said "girls." 81% of boys and 89% of girls thought teachers complimented girls more often, while about 90% of both boys and girls said that teachers punished boys more often. On the question, "Who do teachers like to be around?," 73% of boys and 80% of girls said, "Girls." (See Kleinfeld's study, Table 16, for these data.) On the other hand, it is also worth nothing that when the children are asked about their own experiences, boys are only slightly less likely than girls to say that teachers listen to them, that they often get called on and encouraged, and that discipline and grading at their school are fair. I think it's quite an exaggeration to claim, as some do, that males have become "the second sex" in the educational system as a whole. I find male victimism to be as off-putting as the female variety.

One more point to ponder: While conservatives commonly point to political correctness and "feminization" as factors that discourage male involvement in the educational system, few pay attention to the effects of the traditionally masculine jock culture that holds learning in contempt as a "girlie" thing.

The bottom line? This is an issue that needs to be looked into. For years, academic organizations (not just feminist ones but mainstream ones such as the Association of American Colleges) have been trumpeting reports about an alleged "chilly climate" for women on campus. Maybe it's time to pay a little attention to the guys? Glenn Reynolds suggests congressional hearings. I have my doubts about the efficacy of such ventures, but if no one else gets moving, it could be, at least, a start.

What about the men? (1)

As a follow-up to its controversial front-page story on Ivy Leaguers opting for the "mommy track," the New York Times ran this editorial notebook item by Nicholas Kulish, a young man who is worried that the women of his generation may be taking a "U-Turn" toward more traditional roles, forcing men into a more narrow breadwinner role as well. He mentions a friend who "left the nonprofit sector for a big corporation so his wife could stop working when she had their first baby." Kulish ends his essay with a not entirely humorous appeal to young women: "On behalf of American men, young and open-minded, I beg you to reconsider. I thought we had a deal."

I'm surprised that, as far as I can tell, no conservative blogs have picked up on this items for an "I told you so": It's a favorite theme of neo-traditionalists like Danielle Crittenden (What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us) and Maggie Gallagher that the feminist revolution has actually liberated men to be selfish pigs who shun their masculine duty to provide for their wives and kids, and that women who want to embrace a traditional feminine lifestyle often find that the men in their lives are unsupportive of their choice and reluctant to take on the sole burden of breadwinning. Instead, it falls to a left-wing blogger, Lakshmi Chaudry of AlterNet, to take him to task:

[H]is position ends up sounding patronizing and selfish: "Just because you want to stay home and play Mommy, I ain't supporting you and the brats."

As I said before, raising kids is hard work -- work that gets little recognition from society or it seems young "open-minded" men like Kulish. Men of his generation may have been "brought up to accept and even embrace equality between the sexes," but thus far there is little proof that it extends to housework. Yes, men do more than two decades ago, but women still carry the greater part of the domestic burden, whether or not they stay at home. ... Guess no one told Nicholas about the "second shift."

The same theme is echoed by two Times letter-writers:

We did have a deal - you guys broke it!

These young Yale women grew up watching their mothers do both jobs, since most of us working women still do most of the work at home.

And:

One very logical reason some women shrink from combining work and motherhood is that men do not share the work equally at home, leading to an exhausting and unfair double shift for their wives.

Time-use studies have shown that while men have made a little progress in doing more child care, women still do just about all the housework.

It's time for men to acknowledge that they are a big part of the work-life balance problem for women.

Is there a partial truth here? Sure. Just as there are women who want to have it both ways (equal opportunity in the workplace and the unequal privilege of being able to leave the workforce), there are men who want to have it both ways: that is, they want a wife who will relieve them of the sole burden of breadwinning, and do most of the housework.

But it's a very, very partial truth.

First, none of the women in the Times article mentioned the "second shift" as a factor. Those would-be mommy-trackers who mentioned their mothers spoke of respect for their mothers' roles as full-time homemakers, and of their conviction, based on personal experience, that traditional arrangements worked best. Others emphasized that they wanted to be the primary influence in their children's lives. The same was true of the women interviewed by Peggy Orenstein for Flux, the book I mentioned in my post yesterday. Some of the women she profiled had given up their careers despite having husbands who were fully engaged on the home front, and were in fact willing to be the stay-at-home parent. Male lack of participation in "the second shift" did not seem to be nearly as important a factor in their decisions as their own beliefs about female identity, work/family options as a female choice, and family as their turf.

Second, men are doing a lot more than they're given credit for. See, for instance, this interesting report:

A new study proves for the first time that men actually do a bigger share of household chores than their wives admit. Shedding new light on the decades-old
battle between men and women over housework, the study of 265 married couples with children, published this month in the Journal of Marriage and Family, shows that wives estimate, when asked, that their husbands do 33% of the housework. But when researchers tracked men's actual housework time, they found husbands were shouldering 39% of the chore load.

No, that's not equal, but that's a far cry from "women are doing all the work."

While the "second shift" is a real problem, I think it was always somewhat overblown. In the book that gave this problem a name, The Second Shift (1989), sociologist Arlie Hochschild claimed on the basis of her survey of 120 couples that when paid work and housework are combined, women in two-earner households put in an extra 15 hours a week compared to men. A number of time-use studies from the same time period found the difference to be closer to 1 hour. (I could not find these data online but they are summarized in the 1997 book, Time for Life, by sociologists John Robinson and Jeffrey Godbey. Godbey and Robinson report that in 1995, on average, women spent 15.9 hours a week on housework and men, 9.5 hours; but that includes women who do not work outside the home. Incidentally, those figures are a very dramatic change from 1965, when the respective hours for women and men were 26.9 and 4.7.)

I believe there is a strong tendency among feminists to (1) downplay male contributions at home and (2) with a few exceptions, to disregard the tendency of many women -- even professional women -- to regard housekeeping and particularly children as their turf. Here's something I wrote in 2000 about a symposium called “Changing Nature of Work and Family Life: A Focus on Men,” sponsored by the Cornell University Institute for Women and Work:

[A]s family issues consultant Dana Friedman conceded on the panel, many women inhibit male involvement by protecting their turf, sending the signal that men can’t do anything right at home and setting themselves up as “gatekeepers” of the father-child relationship.

In fact, a degree of such “female chauvinism” was in evidence at the event itself. When Friedman mentioned a poll in which 60 percent of fathers said they shared equally in child-rearing, laughter rippled through the room — turning to gleeful guffaws when she added that only 19 percent of mothers agree.

Maybe men exaggerate, but isn’t it possible that women aren’t totally objective judges, either? Then, moderator Francine Moccio said she wanted to speak up in favor of “maternal gatekeeping.” Twenty years ago, her husband was supposed to pick up the kids from a party — and simply forgot. “So,” she summed up, “they do need to be trained.” Again, there was roaring laughter.

I wondered if the women were expressing their frustration over men’s failure to share equally in the domestic realm or taking pleasure in their presumed superiority in that realm. Can one imagine men today gloating similarly over a woman’s incompetence in some traditionally male sphere? Maybe the panel illuminated some of the barriers to men’s involvement in family life in ways the organizers never intended.

Five years later, here we go again, still blaming it all on men.

Ivy League mommy wars

My Boston Globe column today deals with those female Ivy League students who, the New York Times tells us, are already planning at the tender age of 20 to someday ditch their careers and become full-time moms.

The flaws in the article and the study on which it was based have been detailed by Slate.com's Jack Shafer here and here. Meanwhile, a bit of conservative gloating can be found on the blog of the Independent Women's Forum, the Inkwell, and there are interesting discussions at Crooked Timber and Ann Althouse.

One thing that strikes me is how nasty and personal these debates consistently get, with charges flying back and forth of putting down either working mothers or stay-at-home mothers. To some extent, I suspect that this is inevitable, because of the way the debate is framed. If a mother who stays home to raise her children is performing an important service, the implication is that a mother who works outside the home -- especially if she could afford not to -- is a selfish failing her children and probably society as well. (And yes, this expectation still falls on mothers, not fathers.) If a two-earner family can do a fine a job of raising children, the implication is that a stay-at-home mom is a slacker with an expensive hobby.

These assumptions are evident in some of the discussions of the Times story. At Crooked Timber, sociologist Kieran Healy's suggestion that these women are "free-riders" who "plan to take the upside of the revolution in women’s participation in elite education, but ... are tacitly aware that they don’t have to expose themselves to any of the risk if they don’t want to" sparked cries of misogyny and disrespect for mothering. Meanwhile, at the IWF's Inkwell, Charlotte Hays reposts a reader email that I found infuriating. M.K. writes:

"What I found most outrageous [about the New York Times piece] was this quote: ’It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?’ said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard ...

"In response I wrote the following on my blog: ’What is it with these numskulls? [sic] How about a generation of happy, well-adjusted children who know their mothers chose them over a career? For goodness sake, college isn’t just about getting a job, it’s about expanding your horizons. ... The disdain these people have for stay-at-home moms is palpable.’ I find it horrifying that they actually think they can dictate what a worthy career choice may be. ... And doesn’t her statement also suggest that because Harvard ‘made space’ for women that women really aren’t as good as men? Or are the women who want to be men the only ones that count?

I agree, of course, that it's up to each woman or man what to do with their Harvard or Yale education, though I don't see where McGrath Lewis's comment suggests that women aren't as good at men. (Harvard and Yale had to "make space" for them because they were once barred from these schools by sexist discrimination, M.K., not because women aren't good enough.) But while M.K., echoed by Hays, complains of disdain for stay-at-home mothers, her own disdain and intolerance toward working mothers is equally palpable and noxious. Obviously, children whose mothers pursue careers can't, in her view, be happy or well-adjusted. And then there's that gem at the end: women who plan to pursue careers are "women who want to be men." Great. I thought we'd gotten past this kind of mindset some 40 years ago, but obviously not.

I don't disdain "stay-at-home moms" (though I do wish we could talk like adults and call them "mothers"). I do think, however, that many of the feminist critiques of full-time motherhood and homemaking as an occupation were (gasp!) valid. I don't think long-term economic dependency on one's spouse is a good thing, and not just because the marriage could end in divorce. I don't think it's a good idea to have no serious pursuits outside the family -- a job, study, or a substantial commitment to volunteer work -- for an extended period of time, and to have an identity based solely on personal relations with people you love (spouse and children). I believe, along with Freud, that love and work are two basic human needs; and while in many ways child-rearing is certainly "work," it is still primarily love. I think it's important to maintain a core of self separate from intimate relationships, to remain engaged in "doing" and not just "being" (many proponents of stay-at-home motherhood say outright that the most important aspect of a mother's "job" is simply "being there" for the children). And this isn't necessarily about "fulfilling jobs" in the conventional sense of the word. While researching my book, Ceasefire, I found studies showing that even working-class women in low-paying clerical jobs often found a sense of pride and competence in their work.

(I will add that I don't understand why a woman who wants to work for a few years and then stay home with her children would go to law school or business school, as some of the women profiled in the Times article apparently plan to do. If expanding your horizon is what you're after, what's wrong with a liberal arts degree?)

Mind you, I think that parents who put their careers ahead of their children's well-being deserve criticism. But as long as this stigma falls almost exclusively on women, many women will continue to bristle at all this family-values talk as a cover for sexism.

Where I part company with the majority of feminists is their failure to recognize the sexism toward men that is also inherent in these debates -- sexism on the part of not only the culture, but women themselves. The general assumption is that it's women who have the options (not just the ability to drop their careers completely, but also the choice to work part-time or to take a few years off). Many women, at least in the affluent segments of society, hold the belief that they are entitled to be supported by a man if they choose to withdraw from the labor force (sometimes not even to raise children). This female sense of entitlement is every bit as sexist, and every bit as unjust, as the traditional male's belief that he is entitled to be king of the castle because he works hard to provide for the family, or that it's beneath him to do "women's work" at home.

For many men, working for their families is a sacrifice. There are men who give up the fulfilling but low-paying work they love so that their wives can stay home or cut down on work. Yet much of the feminist critique of traditional sex roles remains mired in a simplistic view of women as victims and men as oppressors. This was evident, by the way, on the Crooked Timber discussion thread. For instance, mythago, a feminist blogger, writes in the comments section:

[I]t’s interesting that none of these young women consider choosing a man who will share the work of rearing children, or perhaps even a stay-at-home dad. I wonder how much of that is cultural (“Gosh, I never thought of that!”) and how much is some kind of deep belief that if you start demanding fairness and participation by a potential husband, you’ll never find one.

Of course, it couldn't possibly be because many of these young women see family as their turf, or limited workforce participation as their entitlement. Never mind the Times story; consider the 2001 book Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World, by bona fide feminist Peggy Orenstein. From my review in Reason:

"Men may have to do more, but women also have to let them," writes Orenstein, who interviewed over 200 women while writing Flux. Most women, she concludes, hold on to maternal control, both out of fear of being labeled a bad mother and out of reluctance to relinquish power. Even career-oriented young women who talk the good talk about shared parenting often quickly reveal that they don't expect and don't really want men to be equal partners in child rearing.

"I say I'm pissed off that the men aren't thinking about [balancing work and family], but the truth is, I don't imagine my husband...thinking about working part-time," admits a medical student. "I think of it as being my choice."

These semi-traditional expectations shape women's decisions long before they start shopping for maternity clothes. Many choose careers with lower pay (and often less prestige) but more flexibility. They also seek mates who are "husband material" in the most unreconstructed sense. One young woman interviewed by Orenstein rejects her devoted boyfriend in part, she sheepishly admits, because of his "limited earning potential" as an art director. Abbey, a sales rep for a comic book publisher, is strongly attached to her identity as a professional woman, yet deep down she wants the option of not working when she has kids -- an option she is nearly certain she won't exercise.

I have my disagreements with Orenstein, but she's a feminist who "gets it," and voices like hers are largely absent from the discussion today. Instead, we have feminists like mythago, who has this observation to make on the fact that upper-middle-class men now generally seek to marry women with elite degrees: "There’s far more status to having shut down a wife who had other options." Is that really the feminist view of marriage in 2005? Men marry women in the hope of "shutting them down"?

By the way, I don't think the Times article and the study it featured is that much of a cause for feminist alarm. The flaws in the study aside, what did it really find? Some 30% of women said they planned to work part-time while their children were young, and another 30% said they were going to stop working for a period of time. (That means the single largest group, 40% , were women who planned to continue working full-time after having children.) Most of them said that a quality education was important because it would enable them to maintain part-time employment or to return to the workforce after taking time off. That doesn't sound to me like a bunch of women who are flocking back to domesticity. I believe that modern motherhood is more complicated than either conservatives or feminists think.

That said -- there are real issues and real conflicts here. I will quote, once again, from my 2001 review of Peggy Orenstein's book:

Orenstein makes a strong case that the crazy quilt of old and new norms often leaves women painfully conflicted and guilt-ridden, and contributes to marital tensions. While she wants businesses to make it easier for both sexes to lead balanced lives, she stresses that "there are decisions we [women] can make more consciously ... consequences we can understand more fully as we assemble the pieces of our professional and personal dreams."

Amen to that.

Scholarship and pederasty: an update

The other day, I wrote about a controversy surrounding Haworth Press's decision to drop a book, Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, after the far-right website WorldNetDaily raised a ruckus about an essay in the book which argued that sexual relationships between adult men and adolescent boys should not be viewed as harmful or wrong.

An article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education examines the brouhaha. (Thanks to author David Glenn for the tip; unfortunately I'm not sure the link will work for non-subscribers.)

Some excerpts:

Last Wednesday, two days after WorldNetDaily's condemnation, the press announced that it had canceled the book. Kathryn Rutz, Haworth's vice president for editorial development, said in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that five of the press's top officials had made the decision.

The press received approximately 20 messages of complaint in the two days after the WorldNetDaily attack, Ms. Rutz said. She added, however, that "it is likely that this would have come up later in the production process, even without the input of outside correspondents."

The decision to cancel was not easy, Ms. Rutz said. "There was vigorous discussion, to be sure," she said. "Issues on the table included freedom of speech, consequences of negative publicity, personal objections to the subject matter, and resistance to what might appear to be caving in to a particular group with its own right-wing agenda."

.......

In 1998 Mr. Rind and two colleagues published an article in the Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association, in which they reviewed 59 previously published studies of college students who had been victims of child sexual abuse. In their analysis, Mr. Rind and his colleagues found that not all of the students had suffered lasting psychological harm, and that 42 percent of the male students retrospectively viewed their sexual experiences with adults as "positive."

The paper came under immediate and heavy criticism from other scholars of sexual abuse. Among other things, scholars objected that studies of college students were not the best way to capture the full range of experiences of abused children. The following summer, after a campaign by talk-radio hosts, the paper was denounced in unanimous resolutions by both houses of the U.S. Congress.

....

Other critics of Mr. Rind's work have pointed to a 1995 essay of his published in Paidika, an obscure, explicitly pro-pedophilic journal. In that article, Mr. Rind called for the abolition of age-of-consent laws. One condemnation of that essay appeared in Haworth's own Journal of Child Sexual Abuse in 2002.

I remember the outcry over Rind's 1998 article. Some of the hysteria was over the top, particularly the congressional resolution (there are plenty of other articles in academic journals that express fairly outrageous viewpoints without incurring the same kind of condemnation). However, as some scholars quoted by Glenn point out, the issue is not just the conclusion (shared by many other researchers) that many victims of child sexual abuse make it to adulthood with no enduring trauma; it's that Rind and his co-authors seemed to cross the line from research into advocacy. The Paidika essay, of which I was previously unaware, makes it clear that Rind (an adjunct psychology instructor at Temple University) crossed that line a long time ago.

One contributor to the canceled volume, Amy Richlin, a professor of classics at the University of California at Los Angeles, was quoted in the Chronicle as saying of Haworth Press, "If they're going to allow themselves to be held hostage to the radical right, then they should get out of the publishing business." So now, being against the normalization of man/boy sex marks you as a member of the radical right? I would estimate that on this issue, some 99% of the public would agree with WND. And why give ammunition to enemies of gay rights who are always using the specter of pedophile acceptance as a scare tactic?

What kind of libertarian are you, anyway?

In a comment on my thread on the O'Reilly-Donahue deathmatch, rishi gajria says:

What surprises me the most however is Andrew Sullivan's (I came via his website) assertion that you are a liberatarian. I have yet to get a sense of that in your posts.

Andrew, who very kindly mentioned my blog at andrewsullivan.com, does call me a libertarian. And I do have libertarian affiliations, with Reason magazine and with the Cato Institute. It's a label that fits me better than "conservative" or "liberal." But what do labels mean, anyway? Here's what I say in the intro to my website:

One of my goals in my writing is to cut through left/right stereotypes and focus
on the issues from an independent perspective. My politics can be described as libertarian/conservative -- leaning more libertarian on some issues and more conservative on others.

I am a strong believer in individual rights and limited government. I believe in judging people as individuals, not on the basis of membership in a group. I believe that reality trumps ideology, left or right. I believe Western democracy, flawed through it is, is worth defending. Perhaps most important, I believe that it should
be possible for honest and intelligent people to disagree on political issues and respect each other.

What does this mean with regard to specific political issues? I believe that generally, more markets and less government interference is good, though I'm willing to be persuaded by evidence that this is not so in specific cases. (I still believe that the failure to reform Social Security and to move toward partial privatization is going to bite us in the butt someday, perhaps sooner rather than later.) I believe in a safety net, but I also think that government programs have a way of degenerating all too easily into morale- and responsibility-sapping entitlements. I dislike corporate welfare as much as any other kind. I believe the government should stay out of adult men and women's consensual sexual relationships, reading and viewing choices, and end-of-life care decisions. I oppose race and sex discrimination even when it comes in the guise of "affirmative action," and attempts to regulate speech in the academy in the name of protecting "the oppressed." I dislike right-moralism about sex and left-wing moralism about greed (though I don't think that either unbridled sexuality or unbridled greed is a good thing). I don't believe that the government should impose religious values on citizens, or offiically favor religion over irreligion. I think this principle should also extend to secular left-wing religions such as "Earth first" environmentalism or radical feminism.

As for foreign policy: unlike many libertarians, I was a strong proponent of U.S. military strength during the Cold War, and today I strongly believe in the importance of the War on Terror. I think the Islamofascists are not a movement with legitimate grievances but the enemy of modern democracy and civilization. As for the war in Iraq: I have very mixed feelings about it. I believe we were drawn into the war through misinformation; I think it has been badly conducted, and has been a true disaster in some respects (the credible reports of torture condoned by superiors are particularly distressing). But I cannot, in good faith, say at this point that it was wrong to topple one of the most brutal entrenched dictatorships in the Middle East, and create at least the possibility of a democracy (however imperfect by our standards). I think we must hold the administration accountable for the conduct of this war, and I would like to see an exit strategy that would allow us to withdraw without letting Iraq fall into the terrorists' hands. But I reject many of the arguments of the antiwar movement -- for instance, that freedom cannot be exported by means of war. (Tell that to the Germans and the Japanese. Or to African-Americans.)

So, what does all this make me? A libertarian? A classical liberal? A libertarian-conservative? A maverick? I'm not sure. To tell the truth, I haven't yet found a label I'd be fully comfortable wearing. And maybe that's just as well, because to me, ideas matter far more than labels.

10 years of Xena: from an unabashed fan

It's the 10th anniversary of Xena: Warrior Princess. My article, What We Owe Xena, appeared last week in Salon.com. (If you have trouble accessing the content as a non-subscriber -- Salon requires you to watch an ad -- you can also read it here.)

I suppose I could have prefaced this with a disclaimer like "A little frivolity to cap the weekend," or "we all have our guilty pleasures." (In linking the article, ms. musings calls yours truly "an unabashed fan," and Tim Cavanaugh at Hit & Run an "out-of-the closet Xenaholic.") But I have no apologies. It was a great show -- campy, yes, but also smart, funny, well-written, well-acted, feminist in the best sense of the word (women on Xena were simply human, no better or worse than men, and the show never beat the viewer over the head with a female-empowerment message), and at times capable of greater depth and complexity than critical favorites like, say, The West Wing.

In related news, Xena is No. 12 on Boston.com's list of Top 50 sci-fi shows (a definition that obviously includes fantasy as well as sci-fi). A few of my other favorites rank high as well: The Outer Limits, No. 13; Sliders, No. 10; The Twilight Zone, No. 7; Stargate SG-1, No. 6 (though I lost interest after the first three seasons); and the original Star Trek, for which I have a quaint affection, No. 1. No Prisoner or Farscape, though, which is a shame. But nice to see Xena get her due.

Scholarship, pederasty and moral panic

Over on Reason's Hit & Run blog (where I myself have posted occasionally), my friend Julian Sanchez writes:

WorldNetDaily is crowing about having pressured a publisher to drop a book on same-sex relationships in ancient Greece and Rome with this hysterical reaction to, as far as I can tell, nothing more than the abstract of this chapter. …. WND apparently regarded the chapter in question as propaganda for pedophiles because it suggested that hybrid lover/mentor relationships between ancient Greek adults and adolescents might not have been horrifically scarring to the latter.

Julian believes that WND is whipping up hysteria about child sex abuse in order to suppress legitimate discussion (and throw red meat to its base). I don't particularly like publishers being intimidated into dropping books, even objectionable books. I also think WND is a right-wing hack site of the worst kind (the "makes Ann Coulter look like George Will" kind). And I agree that there's been too much hysteria in our culture about child sexual abuse, often with disastrous consequences (from the sex-abuse witch-hunts of the 1980s to teachers being afraid to hug a crying child). But, having read the abstract of the controversial chapter, penned by Dr. Bruce Rind, I have to say that it makes me rather queasy. Here it is:

Pederasty, or sexual relations between men and adolescent boys, is condemned in our society as an unqualified evil that maims and destroys. In ancient Greece, samurai Japan, and numerous other cultures, pederasty was seen as the noblest of human relations, conducive if not essential to nurturing the adolescent's successful intellectual and physical maturation.

Current psychological and psychiatric theorizing have pronounced and promoted the former view, while ignoring the vast array of cross-cultural data related to the latter view. Mental health opinion has also ignored a wealth of cross-species data with important parallels. Instead, this opinion is based on feminist models of rape and incest, which are backed up by clinical research on child sexual abuse.

The current article examines empirical rather than clinical data on pederasty, and supplements this with cross-cultural and cross-species perspectives. The empirical data show that pederasty is not only not predestined to injure, but can benefit the adolescent when practiced according to the ancient Greek form. Cross-cultural and cross-species data show the extensiveness of pederasty in the natural world, as well as its functional rather than pathological nature in these societies and species.

An evolutionary model that synthesizes the empirical, cross-cultural, and cross-species data is proposed as an alternative to the highly inadequate feminist and psychiatric models. The animal data suggest that the seeds for pederasty were planted at the dawn of humanity. The human data suggest that pederasty came to serve a mentoring function.

For me at least, the summary sets off certain alarm bells. I have no problem with an objective examination of man/boy relationships in ancient Greece, and I'm not saying that any such examination has to be accompanied by self-righteous hand-wringing and tongue-clucking. (A good summary of available information on the subject can be found at Wikipedia. From some of the things I've read, the reality was often less idyllic than the ideal; it's also worth noting that in some societies that encouraged mentoring pederastic relationships -- notably Sparta and Samurai Japan -- they were a way of inducting the younger partner into an extremely militaristic, hierarchical male culture.) However, as outlined here, the article sounds like advocacy more than scholarship. (What are "cross-species data" doing in an essay on ancient Greece and Rome, anyway?)

You really don't need to be a right-wing moralist to have misgivings about attempts to normalize sexual relations between adult men and underage boys. And I do think that Haworth Press (the publisher) used poor judgment in approving this particular essay, as outlined, for inclusion in the book.

Julian Sanchez points out that in many societies, sex between adult men and young girls was condoned too, as long as it was legalized in marriage. Quite true; but today, in civilized societies, such marriages are rightly viewed as exploitative. This shouldn't be a gay vs straight issue: I doubt that an essay drawing on the history of marriages between adult men and nubile girls to argue that adult male/adolscent girl sex needn't be damaging would find a very welcoming reception. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that such literature be suppressed by the government, or even by intimidation from morally outraged mobs. But better editorial judgment, it seems to me, is in order.

Comments policy

Yesterday, I disabled word verification for comments after a couple of people complained that they weren't able to post even after typing in the letters. After my last post was hit with four spam comments within two minutes of going up, I decided to turn word verification back on. Sorry for the incovenience, everyone, but I'd rather not spend a lot of time deleting spam.

O'Reilly vs Donahue: The Deathmatch

So did anyone see this clash of the titans (originally broadcast on The O'Reilly Factor on September 21, then interrupted by breaking news and re-broadcast on September 22)? O'Reilly invited Donahue to talk about his support for Cindy Sheehan and his opposition to the war in Iraq.

I have my issues with Bill O'Reilly. But on this occasion, I think he wiped the floor with Donahue.

Take their discussion of Sheehan:

DONAHUE: And FOX is in the business of saying that this woman is somehow saying un-American things. Hyperbole.

O'REILLY: No, no, no, no.

DONAHUE: Listen to what she's saying.

O'REILLY: Nobody said she said anything un-American. We say that her positions are radical. And they are radical.

DONAHUE: Let me tell you what's radical. What's radical is to send more Americans to die in this war, which is a monumental blunder...

O'REILLY: All right.

So Donahue completely evades the issue of what Cindy Sheehan actually stands for (and why it's a seriously bad idea for the anti-war movement to make her its spokeswoman).

Then there's this:

DONAHUE: You want to stay the course, don't you? You don't...

O'REILLY: Look, here's what I want to do. I want to give the Iraqis a chance to train their army so they can defeat these people who are trying to turn it into a terrorist
state.

DONAHUE: Bill...

O'REILLY: That's what I want to do.

DONAHUE: Bill...

O'REILLY: Go.

DONAHUE: Iraq was not a terrorist state.

O'REILLY: Oh, no.

(CROSSTALK)

DONAHUE: I hope I don't patronize you for thinking that.

O'REILLY: He was a swell guy. He was...

DONAHUE: Saddam — Saddam was a bastard. But he was our bastard.

O'REILLY: He wasn't anybody's...

DONAHUE: Donald Rumsfeld shook his hand in the '80s.

I have big issues with how the war in Iraq was sold to the public and how it was conducted, but I think O'Reilly is right: an immediate withdrawal from Iraq would virtually guarantee that it would turn into a murderous terrorist state, with terrible consequences both for Iraqis and for the rest of the world. Whether Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a terrorist state is not very relevant to this question (my own take on this: terrorist, yes; implicated in the September 11 attacks, almost certainly not). Whether Saddam was "our bastard" at one point is even more irrelevant (yes, we sided with Iraq in its war with Iran, but the United States' role in arming Saddam in the 1970s and 1980s was negligible compared to Russia and France). Donahue is clearly evading the question.

Then, Donahue resorts to the Michael Moore-ish low blow of "you wouldn't send your children to this war." (Has anyone told Donahue, Moore, et al. that parents in America do not "send their children to war" -- people enlist voluntarily?) O'Reilly, it turns out, has something to parry with: "My nephew just enlisted in the Army. You don't know what the hell you're talking about." There follows some ridiculous macho bluster by O'Reilly ("Yes, and he's a patriot, so don't denigrate his service or I'll boot you right off the set"), but on the basic point, O'Reilly's got Donahue pretty good:

O'REILLY: Don't tell me I wouldn't send my kids.

DONAHUE: Loud doesn't mean right.

O'REILLY: My nephew just enlisted. You don't know what you're talking about.

DONAHUE: All right. You — your nephew is not your kid. You are...

O'REILLY: He's my blood.

So O'Reilly's nephew his not his "kid." (Why does anti-war rhetoric consistently infantilize our fighting men and women?) But the fact remains that O'Reilly has someone very closely related to him serving (or about to serve) in Iraq, and this particular rhetorical stunt won't work.

In the end, O'Reilly hits the right note. He acknowledges that this was an "optional war" and possibly "a tactical error," a war badly conducted to boot. But he also stresses that if we leave, we abandon Iraq to the terrorists. And in respose to this, Donahue has nothing to offer but his own brand of bluster and references to Halliburton stock.

Winner: O'Reilly.

God and man at Dartmouth

In recent years, there's been a lot of talk on the right about secularist intolerance toward Christians, and particularly toward Christian images and speech in public places. I agree that such a problem exists; in fact, I've written about it myself. But I also think there has been a lot of specious conservative whining on this issue (as I have previously argued, the complaint of "religious bigotry" is the right-wing version of politically correct victimology).

On National Review Online's The Corner today, Peter Robinson posts an item titled "'Tolerance' at Dartmouth," which at first glance does smack of secularist intolerance. It has to do with a brouhaha surrounding one Noah Riner, a senior at Dartmouth College and the president of the College's Student Assembly.

According to Robinson:

This past Tuesday at Convocation, the formal event marking the beginning of the Dartmouth academic year, Riner gave a speech on the importance of character. In the course of this speech Riner mentioned--brace yourself--Jesus. An excerpt:

Character has a lot to do with sacrifice, laying our personal interests down for something bigger. The best example of this is Jesus. In the Garden of Gethsemane, just hours before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed, "Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done." He knew the right thing to do. He knew the cost would be agonizing torture and death. He did it anyway. That's character.

The result of these remarks? Young Mr. Riner has spent the balance of this week finding himself roundly (and pompously) denounced. A vice president of the Student Assembly resigned, calling Riner's remarks "reprehensible." A petition protesting Riner's remarks was circulated. And The Dartmouth, one of the student newspapers, editorialized against him.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?

So I checked out the link supplied by Robinson, to a post on a website called The Dartblog. The author of the post, a conservative and a self-styled "athiest" (sic), says he did not find Riner's speech offensive and that the hullabaloo about it is ridiculous and intolerant. He quotes the same passage as Robinson, and expresses surprise that Riner's dectractors characterized this as a "fire and brimstone speech" likely to make freshmen feel unwelcome.

Then I clicked on the link to the actual speech, and read this passage that follows the one quoted above:

Jesus is a good example of character, but He's also much more than that. He is the solution to flawed people like corrupt Dartmouth alums, looters, and me.

It's so easy to focus on the defects of others and ignore my own. But I need saving as much as they do.

Jesus' message of redemption is simple. People are imperfect, and there are consequences for our actions. He gave His life for our sin so that we wouldn't have to bear the penalty of the law; so we could see love. The problem is me; the solution is God's love: Jesus on the cross, for us.

In the words of Bono:

[I]f only we could be a bit more like Him, the world would be transformed. …When I look at the Cross of Christ, what I see up there is all my s--- and everybody else's. So I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this man? And was He who He said He was, or was He just a religious nut? And there it is, and that's the question.

Now that's a bit different, isn't it? (The reference to corrupt Dartmouth alums has to do with an earlier part of Riner's speech in which he said that a Dartmouth education in and of itself was not a sufficient condition for being a good person, and cited the examples of three alumni who had committed, respectively, espionage for the Soviet Union, murder, and sexual assault.) Okay, so maybe it's not "fire and brimstone," as guest columnist and fellow student Brian Martin editorialized in The Dartmouth. But Martin was certainly correct when he wrote that Riner had chosen to "turn Convocation into a religious pulpit" and an occasion to proselytize, and that this was neither appropriate nor respectful to the freshmen.

Note that Riner did not merely invoke Jesus as his own personal solution. His message was quite clear: Jesus is the only solution for everyone.

Did Riner's come-to-Jesus speech violate the Establishment clause? No, certainly not, since Dartmouth is a private college. Did officials and students at a multifaith school have a right to consider it inappropriate and offensive? You betcha. (Of course, I think it would have been equally inappropriate for a student body president to use a convocation to proselytize for any other belief system or cause, be it feminism, vegetarianism, opposition to abortion, or righteous outrage against the war in Iraq. And I do wonder if most of the liberal secularists who were appalled by Riner's sermon would agree with that.)

And by the way, folks, if we're going to talk about character ... isn't it, well, a tad disingeuous to complain about intolerant liberal secularists who object to a speech that merely mentions Jesus, and quoting only the non-objectionable parts of the speech?

Word games

Neal, Neal, Neal.

I like Neal Boortz. And I'm generally not on the same political wavelength as MediaMatters.org. But here I am looking at a recent spat between them, and I'm thinking Boortz is wrong and MediaMatters is right.

On September 19, Boortz was involved in the following exchange on Hannity & Colmes:

COLMES: So they should not have -- are you in favor of tax cuts? You want to have more tax cuts at a time -- you want to cut the state taxes at a time when they're still struggling to pay for it and help the rich? Is that what you want to do?

SEAN HANNITY (co-host): Absolutely.

BOORTZ: As much -- as much as it disturbs the followers of Karl Marx, yes, I want the death tax over with.

COLMES: I'm a Marxist now, I see. OK.

BOORTZ: As a matter of fact, Alan, glad you mentioned that. I want it all gone, OK?

MediaMatters then ran an item titled, "Boortz referred to estate tax proponents as 'followers of Karl Marx.'"

Boortz thinks this is unfair:

Not that it really matters to Media Matters, but here we have them cold engaging in a bit of rhetorical dishonesty. I most certainly did not say that those who supported the death tax were followers of Karl Marx. What I did allude to was the fact that followers of Karl Marx would also support the death tax and that Marxists would most certainly be upset if the death tax were to be repealed. Evidently the difference between the two statements is just a bit much for the brilliant progressives at Media Matters to absorb.

Sorry, but the "rhetorical dishonesty" here is Boortz's.

His statement on the show certainly implied that the repeal of the "death tax" would be mainly upsetting to Marxists. By singling them out, Boortz was rhetorically lumping all proponents of the estate tax together with Marxists.

Let's put the shoe on the other foot. Suppose a liberal who was being interviewed on a TV show was asked by a conservative host if he believed there should be affirmative action favoring minorities in college admissions. Suppose he replied, "As much as it disturbs the Ku Klux Klan, I think we need affirmative action." Would conservatives cry foul and accuse him of equating affirmative action opponents of the Ku Klux Klan? Sure they would, and rightly so.

Fascists, Marxists, libs, racists ... can we have a little less name-calling all around, please?

And speaking of Mother Earth...

In my previous post about the gender politics of hurricanes, I mentioned some feminist professors' suggestion that "feminist" thinking on natural disasters involves reverence for "mother earth."

That brings me to an intriguing question.

Natural disasters (and unnatural ones as well, such as the September 11 terrorist attacks) are often followed by a lot of religious soul-searching, with people wondering how a good, merciful, all-powerful God could allow such terrible things to happen. (Not so much post-Katrina, perhaps because everyone was too busy pointing fingers at human culprits to blame God.)

The question is: how come the radical environmentalists -- the ones for whom environementalism is not merely a commitment to securing a livable environment for human beings, but a nature religion -- never ask these kinds of questions? Why doesn't the "nature good, humans bad" crowd ever wonder how a good, benevolent, harmonious Nature can allow tens of thousands of her children to die horrible deaths? Think about it: if Mother Earth were really a mother, she'd have to be hauled in for child abuse.

Of course, some on the left root for destruction. As Vanity Fair's James Wolcott opined in a now-infamous post about a year ago:

I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong--Mother Nature's fist of fury, Gaia's stern rebuke. Considering the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our own. ... So there's something disappointing when a hurricane doesn't make landfall, or peters out into a puny Category One.

(This post, by the way, is now prefaced by Wolcott's snarky invitation to "right-wing bloggers" -- which presumably includes everyone who doesn't subscribe to his own brand of bien-pensant leftism -- to go ahead and use this post as his "gift to them." Thanks, Mr. Wolcott.)

The lady on the Women's Studies List who thinks that the feminine principle is sadly out of balance in our world isn't quite as eloquent as Mr. Wolcott, but she does think that "perhaps in its own way nature is trying to balance itself through the hurricane." Sweet.

Tell me how this brand of hateful religious zealotry is different from the right-wing kind which holds that hurricanes are God's punishment for assorted human sins?

Hurricanes and feminism?

No, this is not a joke (at least, not an intentional one). Hurricanes and feminism. If you thought the racial politics of Katrina were absurd, wait till you see the gender spin.

In the days after the disaster, there was a rather animated discussion of Hurricane Katrina on the Women's Studies List, an email forum/subscription list for women's studies professors and instructors. There, along with standard rhetoric about racism and the awfulness of Bush ("The silver lining is that the Bush administration is completely under fire right now"), there was a lot talk about how to analyze the tragedy in class as a feminist issue.

Funny, I thought that hurricanes and natural disasters in general are pretty gender-neutral (at least now that hurricanes are given both male and female names). But no: "Please," wrote one professor, "let us recognize that the most vulnerable people that were impacted by this disaster were women, such as the disabled, the mothers with infants, the elderly woman in her wheelchair who was left to die, while her rotting corpse was covered over in a white sheet." I will concede that due to high rates of single motherhood in poor urban neighborhoods, there were undboutedly more women in New Orleans who were sole caretakers of small children. But disability is now a female condition? Elderly men in wheelchairs didn't die?

If there was a "women's issue" here, it was the fact that in the lawless atmosphere that followed the flood, women in general were almost certainly more vulnerable to crime and to sex crimes in particular (though men were probably under greater pressure to act as protectors of women and children; and there are media accounts of female perpetrators of violence, as well). But interestingly, the women's studies list discussion glossed over that, since to condemn violence and lawlessness would be racially un-PC, and women's studies is rigidly bound by the leftist orthodoxy of identity politics of all kinds. (For a great analysis of the topic, see Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies by former Women's Studies professors Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge.) The same prof whose comment is cited above went on to say, "And, with regards to GENDER, please let's not forget how black MEN and BOYS were cast in a most familiar trope of criminality through images of 'looting' and 'lawlessness.'"

Others on the list speculated that the federal government ignored Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco's plea for help because, heck, she's just a woman (though Blanco failed the sisterhood test for being so insensitive as to criticize the people who didn't evacuate and for endorsing a shoot-to-kill policy on looters). Then there was this observation:

Another aspect of the disaster that could be construed as a feminist issue is the ridiculous misuse of our country's resources and tax-dollars which have been poured into a pointless war by a male dominated "war-mongering" government. On a spiritual level the feminine principle has been thrown seriously out of balance by a government which never had any intention of nurturing, protecting, or supporting its own people.

War is male, nurturing is female; gotta love the clichés. (Condoleeza Rice, of course, is not a "real woman" on this list.)

Someone also brought up a class discussion of "ecofeminism," "Mother Earth," and "the Goddess."

So, in asking students to think how urban planning, development, and responses to natural disasters would be conceived differently if we viewed our planet as a living Terra Madre (Mother Earth), they began to add a different dimension to feminist analysis of this tragedy.

Many imagined that everything, from saving the wetlands of New Orleans, to placing emphasis on redesigning a city for safety with housing and levees that were built to guard against the wrath of hurricanes, would have been in place.

...

It has also allowed us to "think globally" in terms of the global warming that will increase the frequency of hurricanes like Katrina and the ways in which even Nature enters into the realm of politics...

Bet you didn't know that building levees to guard against hurricanes required particularly feminist thinking.

Luckily, unlike the race-baiting of the Al Sharptons and the Randall Robinsons, the rhetoric of the feminist wing of the looney left rarely seeps into the mainstream, largely staying confined to the nutty professors and their students. Sadly, however, this is a stark example of feminism marginalizing itself. Is there any wonder that most young women in college today regard it as an "F-word"?

The politics of Katrina

"May you live in interesting times," says the old Chinese curse. Well, I'm starting to blog in interesting times, freshly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

For some people, the Katrina debacle has been the tipping point in going over to the anti-Bush camp. My reaction, strangely, has been almost the opposite. By the way, I did not vote for Bush in the last election, and my readers may recall I have been highly critical of Republicans on a number of issues, from anti-gay bigotry to Terri Schiavo. But the post-Katrina combination of hysteria and glee from the Bush-haters has been so revolting, it's pushing me in the other direction. (For examples see the links here and here; see also this thread and this one, where a poster inquires, "Louisiana voted for Bush, twice. Is Katrina a form of divine retribution?") When it was widely believed there were 10,000 dead in New Orleans alone, some people could think of nothing better than to gloat that Chimpy BusHitler had been taken down a peg. How compassionate. Yes, Bush deserves plenty of criticism, for everything from the cronyism and cluelessness at FEMA to an initially nonchalant response to the disaster (strumming the guitar while New Orleans drowned) to that amazingly stupid comment about Trent Lott's house rising from the rubble. And yes, I know that to some extent the buck stops with the president. But a lot of the charges leveled at Bush have been so absurdly unfair that it only makes me more sympathetic.

And no, I'm not excusing the weaselly and sometimes downright dishonest attempts of some pro-Bush spinners to push off all responsibility on state and local officials (including the claim, which made its way to Fox News Special Report with Brit Hume, that New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin only ordered a mandatory evacuation after Bush "pleaded" with him to do so). But why is it any better for so many the left to pin all the blame on Bush and dismiss all talk of the responsibility (or lack thereof) of the state and local authorities as so much pro-Bush spin? Read this Knight-Ridder investigative report and tell me that the primary blame lies in Washington. Everyone was clueless. Everyone was shamefully unprepared. Perhaps the most amazing revelation in this story is this:

Though several government agencies were certain by 6 p.m. on Monday that New Orleans' levee system had given way, no official screamed for urgent help when daylight hours might still have permitted a rescue effort.

By that time, water had been pouring from the damaged 17th Street Canal for perhaps as long as 15 hours. A National Guard Bureau timeline places the breach at 3 a.m. Monday and an Army Corps of Engineers official said a civilian phoned him about the problem at 5 a.m., saying he had heard about it from a state policeman.

But officials sounded no alarm until Tuesday morning, after the city had been flooding for at least 24 hours.

I'm sure someone, somewhere will come up with an explanation of how that's Bush's fault, too.

By the way, in case you haven't heard, Bush cutting funding for flood control projects in Louisiana was not the problem. And neither was global warming.

To all this, add the stoking of racial divisions with the charge that federal aid to the victims in New Orleans was slow because they were black (thank you, Harry Shearer at the Huffington Post, for putting that to rest with a post about Katrina's neglected white victims). The race-baiting reached its nadir when two Air America hosts, appearing on MSNBC's "The Situation with Tucker Carlson", refused to condemn the Rev. Louis Farrakhan's demented suggestion that white people had deliberately blown up the levees in New Orleans in order to flood the black neighborhoods. (Chuck D.: "You cannot blame people for coming up with conspiracy theories when they look on television and see that the government is four days late in saving people that are supposed its citizens." Rachel Maddow: "Conspiracy theories don‘t necessarily help but you have to understand where they come from. They come from people feeling like this disaster had a real racial component. I mean it was a majority black city that was absolutely abandoned by the country where people went through stuff they never should have gone through.")

Add to that the bizarre charge that complaints about looting in New Orleans were "racist" -- a pretty racist claim it itself, since it implies that looting is a "black thing." (And please, let's drop the B.S. about how the looters were just desperate people in need of food and other basic necessities. Yes, some people broke into stores to get basic necessities. But see this account by a British tourists who says that "looters ... tried to sell the stranded guests [at his hotel] mobile phones, radios and clothes.") Add to this cries of "ethnic cleansing against starved, tired, half dead black Americans" when the military arrived in New Orleans on September 2 for the rescue, evacuation and crime control.

Sure, some on the right have made stupid and callous statement in Katrina's aftermath (see Sen. Rick Santorum blaming the victims who didn't evacuate even though many didn't have the means, or American Spectator editor George Neumayr blaming rap music and affirmative action, or the Hoover Institution's Victor Davis Hanson claiming that the Katrina response hadn't been a miserable failure after all). But on the whole, the Hate Week on the left has been far worse. The left on Katrina has been much like the right on Terri Schiavo: hysterical, paranoid, shrill, hate-filled, and not exactly reality-based.

It's enough to make me want to be on the other side.