Monday, 10 December 2012

Single People Should Get to Have Weddings, Too

By Millie Kerr

Or some other kind of party that involves gifts, toasts, and lots of friends

Back in 2003, Sex and the City identified a cruel reality about single life: There's no single-person's equivalent of a wedding—a time when people travel from afar to bring you gifts and toast your life decisions.

Carrie Bradshaw said, "If you are single after graduation, there isn't one occasion when people celebrate you" besides birthdays, which we all enjoy.

Despite a proliferation of single adults, little has changed since that episode aired nearly a decade ago: trips are not planned when we're promoted at work, nor crystal glassware gifted when we buy our first homes. It seems that milestone celebrations are still reserved for couples and families.

It shouldn't be that way, of course. NYU professor Eric Klinenberg wrote Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone to tell "the story of the biggest modern social change that we've yet to identify: the extraordinary rise of living alone." Marriage rates have reached a record low, and adults are generally marrying and having children later in life. As a result, single people can expect later (and fewer) unions. But societal traditions are lagging behind this shift.

In the 18th edition of her etiquette guide, Emily Post acknowledges that we're seeing "wide diversity in the family constellation" and touches upon the sensitivity of singlehood: "Some people still have trouble realizing that alone doesn't automatically mean lonely or searching for a mate." Post outlines protocols for occasions that celebrate single-parent families and same-sex couples but fails to include suggestions for people who are single and childless.

People Who Don't Have Kids: We Want Work-Life Balance, Too

When will barometers of celebration reflect the growing number of singletons?

I decided to pose that question to Hallmark, which seems to have a greeting card for every imaginable occasion. Jaci Twidwell, Hallmark's publicity manager, told me, "We don't have any new greeting cards specific to milestones in a single adult's life. But we do have cards for occasions that might be celebrated with a little more energy by a single person who doesn't have things like wedding anniversaries to celebrate. New Home, New Job or New Aunt would be examples."

This answer hints at an underlying judgment: commemorations of the individual are placeholders for more significant achievements in life. Our worth, it seems, is still measured by the people we marry and the children we bear, despite the fact that an increasing number of adults choose to live alone.

Travel giants feature themed vacations, but few incorporate trips for the solo traveler. Expedia offers romantic, adventure, gay, and green vacations, so I asked whether the company planned to tack on trips for the solitary tourist. A rep from the company responded, "Expedia doesn't have any data or anecdotal information to share with regards to single/solo travelers."

Still, there are some signs of hope. Smaller companies and those offering customizable products are more adept at courting single clients. Abercrombie and Kent caters to solitary travelers with "Solo Vacations," sending guided groups of globetrotters all over the world. Other outfitters, like New York City-based Absolute Travel, believe that "exploring the world on your own brings freedom, reflection, and flexibility".

Some entities exclusively serve single travelers. Singles Travel International matches roommates and, when possible, persuades lodgings to waive single traveler supplements. For 20 years, its affiliate, A Single Gourmet, has provided independent foodies the chance to dine with new friends.

Several cookbooks, including The Pleasure of Cooking for One and Serve Yourself, cater to solitary chefs, and a growing number of grocery stores offer portions for one. The Onion spoofed lonely diners with "Stouffers to Include Suicide Prevention Tips on Single Serve Microwaveable Meals." Whether zapping a Lean Cuisine or chopping veggies, adult singletons will invariably note an uptick in television shows featuring single professionals (The Mindy Project and New Girl) and modern family units (Modern Family, The New Normal, and Ben & Kate). Self-help books and love coaches are becoming more popular, too, as I explored in my last piece for The Sexes, "What I Learned from Hiring a Love Coach."

While it's clear that some companies are capitalizing on increasingly single demographics, singletons wanting to feel celebrated will have to initiate festivities themselves. You might take your cues fromParks & Recreation's Tom Haverford—who hits the spa on "Treat Yourself" Day—though his fête doesn't revolve around specific life achievements.

What about borrowing from coming-of-age traditions? As children, we receive gold stars for good behavior in school and celebrate increasing maturity with bar and bat mitzvahs, debutante balls, and graduation parties.

When I approached 30 as a single woman, I decided to host a quinceañera-themed party in San Antonio, which I aptly titled "La Quinceañera Doble." My parents, not having subsidized a wedding, offered to cover some of the expenses, and friends flew in from around the country. Although I felt a tad silly for organizing a destination birthday, the upshot was that my parents and I covered nearly all of the costs (which were nominal compared to a wedding), and no one suffered the indignity of having to wear matching chiffon gowns.

This article available online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/single-people-should-get-to-have-weddings-too/265689/

Middle class and pregnant at 21? There's absolutely nothing wrong with that!

By SOPHIE JONES

PUBLISHED: 16:26 EST, 28 November 2012 | UPDATED: 13:00 EST, 6 December 2012

The colour had drained from my mum’s face. She looked panicked, concerned. ‘What on earth’s the matter, Sophie?’ she asked, as I stood next to her tongue-tied, pale, apprehensive.

I believed the news I had to impart was joyful, but I knew that mum would take a different view and, as I struggled to speak, her anxiety grew.

‘Whatever’s happened Sophie? Are you ill?’ she asked, unnerved by my silence.

I paused, took a breath then said quietly, my eyes lowered, afraid to meet her gaze: ‘No mum, I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh Sophie, you’re not!’ she cried, and in that instant it was as if all the hopes and dreams she had cherished for me — her bright, newly-graduated, only daughter — had been destroyed.

Young love: Sophie Jones and husband Ben are looking forward to becoming parents

The fact is mum was shocked because I am just 21, and middle-class girls like me from solid, loving homes do not get pregnant at such an early age.

Mothers as young as me are more often than not those who left school at 16; those without with prospect of fulfilling careers; those who have decided their sole route to fulfillment is through procreation.

So mum was shocked. All she saw was a wealth of wasted opportunities; a costly education frittered.

Mum’s initial reaction has been echoed by my friends and hers. It seems incidental that I am not a feckless teenager who fell pregnant after a one-night stand. On the contrary, I had been with Ben, 22, for five years. He’s now my husband and the only man I’ve ever loved and the first man with whom I’ve had a relationship.

WHO KNEW?

The average age of women giving birth in England and Wales is 29.5 — a year older than it was a decade ago - 29.5 in 2010 compared with 28.5 in 2000.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics, revealed women are also giving birth to their first child later on - aged 27.8 last year compared to 26.5 in 2000

It is also, apparently, beside the point that we both want our baby desperately; that we intend to be responsible parents and that Ben — a graduate trainee with an aircraft company who gained a distinction in his master’s degree — intends to work his socks off so we can afford a mortgage.

Our peers judge us harshly. I graduated this year with an upper second in history from Newcastle University and disapproving friends believe it is more important that I forge ahead with a career than be confined to the house looking after a baby.

One even whispered: ‘Are you actually going to keep it?’ Her reaction shocked and saddened me. My pregnancy was a surprise, but I had no thought of ending it because it happened slightly earlier than planned.

For I consider raising a child to be a positive privilege and the most important job of all. The irony is, if I had been born into my grandmother’s, or even my mother’s, generation, my news would have been celebrated.

When my mum became pregnant with me, her third child, at the grand old age of 35 — six years after the birth of the younger of my two brothers — my grandma Peggy was horrified. ‘Oh Sarah!’ she wailed. ‘Whatever have you done?’

Furious: Even though Sophie and Ben are married, their friends and family do not approve of the pregnancy

Although mum was happily married — as she still is — to my dad Gary, Grandma Peggy felt she was simply too old to be pregnant. Women of granny’s generation expected to do their child-bearing in their 20s. Leaving it later was considered risky, ill-judged; even slightly indecorous.

Yet today the tables have been turned — and, it seems, in becoming pregnant too early I have breached an unwritten social rule.

So I find myself in a kind of limbo. At my ante-natal class the other mums-to-be are all in their 30s. And when I go to work — I have extended my university vacation job and have a part-time post in a café — I’m aware that I’m in a world remote from my friends who are pursuing their challenging post-graduate careers.

For although in my grandmother’s era, women of her social class had children while they were still in their physical prime, today it seems de rigueur for intelligent women to defer motherhood until their fertility is in perilous decline.

Indeed, last month, a survey revealed that female graduates are not likely to start a family until they are 35, while women who do not go to university become mothers, on average, a decade earlier.

The older mums are taking a risk: women of 35 are six times more likely to have problems conceiving than those ten years younger, according to a study by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

So those who choose to give their careers precedence are gambling with their fertility: if they leave it too late they may not be able to have babies at all.

The Royal College survey issued sobering facts about deferring parenthood: women in their 30s and 40s are far more likely to suffer complications such as pre-eclampsia, ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage or still-birth.

Childhood sweethearts: Sophie and Ben have been together for five years but the baby wasn't planned

Yet so many women persist in postponing motherhood in the mistaken belief that they have as much control over nature as they do over their careers.

So why do women who embark on motherhood at the most propitious time — when they are young and healthy — attract censure?

Opinion is consistent: only irresponsible single girls living on benefits have babies at my age.
But I do not fit the stereotype. I was raised by loving parents in a traditional nuclear family. My mum and dad, both 55, are teachers. My brothers Jonathan, 28, and Stephen, 27 — both of them single and childless — are a web designer and a chemist.

The difference between my siblings and me is that I was fortunate enough to find the partner with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life when I was just 16.

Ben and I went to school together on the Isle of Man where we were raised. He was in the year above me, and a year after he began his degree at Newcastle University, I joined him to study for my degree.

Everyone said it wouldn’t last. But as our peers leapt in and out of relationships, we stayed steadfastly together. And I fail to understand why it is considered more likely that a couple in their late 20s or 30s will forge an enduring relationship than two people of our age.

Ben and I were on holiday in Dubai when I discovered I was pregnant in May this year. It was a surprise — we had planned to start a family later — but we were overjoyed. We considered ourselves fortunate.

'The stark face remains: women in their 20s are physically better suited to child-bearing than older ones.'

From the outset, however, we were worried about the reaction of our friends and family.

I envisaged my parents’ disappointment that I had not even embarked on a career when pregnancy interrupted my plans.

I’d hoped to join the police service and no doubt will still do so when the time is right; it’s just that, for me, raising my family will take precedence.

And in truth, once mum realised how happy we were, her apprehension dissipated. Both she and dad were thrilled with the idea of becoming grandparents in their mid-50s. They will be young and active enough to revel in their new role.

They are also being wonderfully supportive: while Ben and I save for a home of our own, we shall live with them in the rural cottage where I was brought up — and there can be no better start than for a child to be raised in a small community, surrounded by a loving extended family.

Of course, as young parents we are bucking every trend. More and more women are opting to have children late in life, and 27,000 babies were born to mothers over the age of 40 last year; almost three times the figure for 1989.

Women today, of course, have careers, and I would not want to revert to my granny’s era when they could not combine a profession with motherhood.

But although we now have equality in the workplace, our bodies have not adapted at a similar pace. The stark fact remains: women in their 20s are physically better suited to child-bearing than older ones.

What I’m hoping, then, is that we recognise this and remove the stigma that persists in attaching itself even to responsible young parents like Ben and I.

Meanwhile, we are looking forward with excitement to January when our baby is born. I may not — yet — have a career as a police officer to look forward to, but I still feel, in my role as mum-to-be, I am preparing for the very best job in the world.

Saturday, 8 December 2012

What Is Marriage?

A defence of man-woman marriage combining the precision of scientists with the clarity of good journalists makes for essential reading.

What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense | By Sherif Girgis, Ryan T Anderson and Robert P George | Encounter Books, December 2012 | Paperback: 152 pages (also in Kindle)
ISBN: 1594036225

American gay rights activist and radio host Michaelangelo Signorile recently wrote triumphantly of what lies around the corner for a country that just re-elected its “First Gay President” -- as a Newsweek cover last year dubbed Obama. Claiming an early victory for his movement in the Huffington Post Signorile proclaimed that “[n]o longer will politicians -- or anyone -- be able to credibly claim to be supportive of gays, and to love and honor their supposed gay friends and family, while still being opposed to basic and fundamental rights like marriage”. Like many other same-sex marriage advocates, Signorile believes the re-election of Barack Obama is a harbinger of nationwide same-sex marriage legislation.

Few can deny that the movement is on the march. At the time of the election four states moved in favour of same-sex marriage and other states are quickly gathering momentum on the issue. Disturbingly, the thought embedded in Signorile’s spiel is that even polite disagreement and opposition to the claims of same-sex marriage advocates amounts to wholesale bigotry and intolerance. Heterosexual marriage supporters vehemently deny this, but many people now think that principled opposition to same-sex marriage is a delusion.

One reason why supporters of traditional marriage are losing elections is that they are losing the war for intellectual credibility. They are too often mired in facile arguments about “tradition”, Bible passages, and bleeding heart litanies about children. Supporters of gay marriage have succeeded in ridiculing these fumbling attempts at a rationale as ignorant and homophobic.

So a robust intellectual defence of the traditional view of marriage by a group of authors which includes Princeton law professor Robert P George is a welcome addition to the debate. Labelled by the New York Times as “America’s most influential conservative Christian thinker”, George, a convert from the ranks of the Democrats, is responsible for the interdenominational manifesto The Manhattan Declarationsigned by a number of Christian leaders in support of traditional marriage, sanctity of life and religious liberty. Sherif Girgis is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Princeton and a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. Ryan T. Anderson, who is William E. Simon Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and editor ofthe Witherspoon Institute's journal Public Discourse, is a Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a Ph.D. candidate in political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Altogether a formidable team.

In 2010 they published a controversial article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, putting forward a philosophical defence for the conjugal view of marriage. It gained many responses from all sides of the debate and has proved so successful that they have expanded it into a book to further flesh out their claims and answer their opponents.

The authors start by contrasting, with precision, the “conjugal” and the “revisionist” views of marriage. The conjugal view presupposes an exclusive union between a man and a woman that is bodily and mental and distinguishes itself by its comprehensiveness, while, revisionists claim that marriage is just two (no more, for the moment) people committing to romantically love and care for each other for as long as they see fit.

Monday, 26 November 2012

November 11, 2012

Young Blood and Good News: A Report from the Sex Wars in Princeton, NJ

By Robert Oscar Lopez

I was fully expecting that the Love and Fidelity Network would cancel its fifth annual conference in Princeton because of Hurricane Sandy. Registration was slated to begin on November 2, 2012. I was scheduled to present my work alongside Mark Regnerus and Ana Samuel the next day, on November 3.

On October 29, "the largest Atlantic tropical storm on record" made landfall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, only 100 miles away from Princeton. There were tens of millions of people without power, and the mayor of New York was considering canceling the city's annual marathon.

"Are you sure this conference is going to happen?" I kept asking the organizers of the Love and Fidelity Network. Yes, yes, they assured.

On the drive from Newark to Princeton I witnessed the miles-long queues for gas and toppled electrical poles looking like fallen dominoes. The helplessness of man against forces of nature left me pensive. The weekend was looking to be a sparsely attended and perhaps discombobulated affair.

The event turned out to be quite the opposite, and a dose of good news in otherwise depressing times.

The Love and Fidelity Network is an intercollegiate organization dedicated to promoting sexual integrity and strengthening the institution of marriage.

The members are a deeply religious and formal group on the whole. I was the only one seen in denim slacks the entire weekend.

In Princeton gathered a tiny cadre of professors -- the few right-of-center academics left in America still willing to embrace socially conservative opinions in public, rather than simply evade leftist calumny by hiding behind the "libertarian" label. At a breakout session for faculty, the tininess of our numbers was sobering. Had not the contingent from a Mormon university come, we would have been fewer than ten -- and of these, Mark Regnerus, one Ivy League assistant professor (who will remain nameless), a Dominican priest, and I were the only scholars from Generation X.

But then there were the students. Wholesome, clean-shaven, and modestly dressed, they came from a few dozen campuses across the country, as close as Princeton and as far as Stanford. They were by and large from the nation's elite schools. Chatting with them at breakfast and fielding their questions during plenaries, I saw that they had rigorously cared for their minds and bodies, staying physically fit and good-looking without being vain, delving into philosophical intricacies without being pompous.

And these were all students who'd trekked through the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy to trumpet chastity and build alliances for the sanctity of traditional marriage. Even on Friday night, for a speech from Patrick Fagan of the Family Research Council, in what is traditionally a low-traffic time slot for academic conferences (the first night of registration), the students appeared in hearty numbers, filling an auditorium of McCosh Hall.

What struck me was the students' earnestness and faith. I almost regret that other conservatives could not have been there to absorb their energy, for there was no clue in the voices of these student organizers that "the culture is lost," "our decline is irreversible," or "the end of marriage is inevitable" -- in other words, all the powerless and pessimistic mantras that right-wingers throw out just before they decide to call themselves "moderate" and shut up for the rest of their careers in public life.

These students are fighters. I got the sense that even if Mark Regnerus and Robert George told them to hold back and surrender, they would not. They explain the fallen state of their campuses, ranging from Georgetown to Harvard, in eloquent terms. They have mastered logos by choosing highly qualified scholars as mentors. They have mastered ethos by staying true to their faith against all odds. And most importantly, they have mastered pathos by seeing the sexual alienation of their peers with compassion.

Probably no generation is more aware than those in college now of the bitter fruit of the Sexual Revolution. At a Saturday evening panel we heard from Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown students talking about their difficult struggles to stop "Sex Week" events, approved or even encouraged by administrators and faculty, involving the celebration of hedonism and how-to workshops with sex toys in Ivy League classrooms.

Think of how time has changed our sexual landscape. The Baby Boomers had the opportunity to treat puerile and smutty shenanigans with thrilled naïveté, thinking such transgressions were transformative.

My generation, Generation X, was jaded and blasé about oversexed liberalism; it was, for better or worse, the way things were, and we figured there was little point in trying to fight it. We had no Tim Tebow.

This latest wave of college students includes an encouraging number who hold quite a different attitude from the prior generations. Surrounded by a hook-up culture so rampant that its spiritual decrepitude is undeniable, they can harbor no illusions about unmoored sex being transformative, benign, or simply "the way things are." They have a thirst for reform born of the firsthand witness they have borne to their peers' pains: the date rapes, loneliness, infirmity, eating disorders, self-abuse, and general destruction inherent in erotic meaninglessness.

When I was at Yale in the late 1980s, it was unthinkable to countermand what our professors told us. For all the complaints about current college students feeling too entitled to things, emboldened by Rate My Professor, and willing to undermine their teachers' authority, there is one tremendous upside: they aren't drinking radical Kool-Aid. Growing up with the internet has made them more skeptical of slogans. It has also made it easier for them to break out of the seeming firewall that leftist academics had around classrooms in bygone decades.

I sat with students from Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania, California, and Ohio, and they told me of their struggles. They are not allowing academics to trample their faith anymore. They are arming themselves with research where they can get it, even scheduling extracurricular reading groups and study sessions so they can master the rhetoric they need to vindicate chastity and deflect bogus "pro-gay" or "anti-misogyny" red herrings from the left.

My panel was on Saturday afternoon. Having to lecture before such a large audience, I felt strange. It was my first time speaking with perfect honesty about the strange peaks and troughs of my life. Mostly I discussed my research into the cultural history of same-sex eroticism.

Naturally, I worried about snickers and judgment from the twenty-year-olds sitting in the audience. I got none of that type of hostility. Instead, they asked me heartfelt questions, such as:

How do I speak about sexual integrity with friends who call themselves gay without making them feel that I'm rejecting them?

I have several friends that people call gay because they have effeminate gestures. It seems the gay community encourages them to enter the gay lifestyle simply because they assume from their mannerisms that they are gay. What do you have to say about that?

What do I do? I have to minister to students who were conceived through in vitro and raised by a lesbian couple. What should I expect when the topic of sexual integrity arises?

I realized by the end of Saturday afternoon that this was a group of students who get it. They weren't going to be fooled by feminist or gay rights rhetoric into justifications of extramarital promiscuity or abortion. They are certainly not bullies, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, for leftist critics to paint them as bigots. They go to the core of language and ask existential questions.

Rather than accept passively the notion of equal rights for gays, they ask, "What does it mean to be gay?" and "Who defined it that way?"

Rather than be cowed with "cases of rape or incest" scenarios in discussions about abortion, they speak holistically about creating social spaces where men are held to high standards and women keep each other from dangerous situations in the first place.

Though the events took place the weekend before an election day, there was no campaigning or sloganeering. These young folks are girding themselves for the long fight, not a quick battle.

Much to their credit, these college students are also arming themselves with the humanities -- something that my generation of rightists neglected. Many are majoring in literature, religion, classics, or music, rather than the usual conservative strongholds of economics, government, and social sciences. As they grow and develop their careers, they will be well-poised to transform right-wing think-tanks like Heritage and Cato. From there, it may be possible that, in later decades, they take back Hollywood and academia and save us all. Here is to hoping.

As a Protestant, I was impressed by the Catholic predominance but embarrassed, too. There was a time when Protestants were vocal leaders in socially conservative causes. Now Catholics seem willing to fight where many evangelicals have liberalized or gone into hiding. It might be, in the end, that Catholicism's massive infrastructure created enough nooks for conservative counterrevolutionaries to set up headquarters. It would be ironic, then, if this generation of organizers saves the United States by saving sex from cultural rot. If they can turn back the trend of degradation, perhaps one day Americans will have the Vatican to thank for the fact that there is a functional America at all.

Wednesday, 21 November 2012

The Wisdom of Upholding Tradition

There is a reason why conjugal unions have been distinguished from all others since antiquity.

By SHERIF GIRGIS, RYAN T. ANDERSON and ROBERT P. GEORGE

The U.S. Supreme Court decides next week whether to hear challenges to laws defining marriage as the conjugal union of a man and a woman. It does so after two different electoral outcomes. In May, North Carolinians voted to amend their state constitution to protect the conjugal definition of marriage, a definition that 41 states retain. But on Nov. 6, voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington state endorsed a revisionist view of marriage as the union of any two adults.

How should the Supreme Court decide? How should voters?

We can't move one inch toward an answer simply by appealing to equality. Every marriage policy draws lines, leaving out some types of relationships. Equality forbids arbitrary line-drawing. But we cannot know which lines are arbitrary without answering two questions: What is marriage, and why does it matter for policy?

The conjugal and revisionist views are two rival answers; neither is morally neutral. Each is supported by some religious and secular worldviews but rejected by others. Nothing in the Constitution bans or favors either. The Supreme Court therefore has no basis to impose either view of marriage. So voters must decide: Which view is right?

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As we argue in our book "What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense," marriage is a uniquely comprehensive union. It involves a union of hearts and minds; but also—and distinctively—a bodily union made possible by sexual-reproductive complementarity. Hence marriage is inherently extended and enriched by procreation and family life and objectively calls for similarly all-encompassing commitment, permanent and exclusive.

In short, marriage unites a man and woman holistically—emotionally and bodily, in acts of conjugal love and in the children such love brings forth—for the whole of life.

These insights require no particular theology. Ancient thinkers untouched by Judaism or Christianity—including Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Musonius Rufus, Xenophanes and Plutarch—also distinguished conjugal unions from all others. Nor did animus against any group produce this conclusion, which arose everywhere quite apart from debates about same-sex unions. The conjugal view best fits our social practices and judgments about what marriage is.

After all, if two men can marry, or two women, then what sets marriage apart from other bonds must be emotional intensity or priority. But nothing about emotional union requires it to be permanent. Or limited to two. Or sexual, much less sexually exclusive. Or inherently oriented to family life and shaped by its demands. Yet as most people see, bonds that lack these features aren't marriages.

Far from being "slippery slope" predictions, these points show that the revisionist view gets marriage wrong: It conflates marriage and companionship, an obviously broader category. That conflation has consequences. Marriage law shapes behavior by promoting a vision of what marriage is and requires. Redefinition will deepen the social distortion of marriage—and consequent harms—begun by policies such as "no-fault" divorce. As marital norms make less sense, adherence to them erodes.

Conservative scaremongering? No. Same-sex marriage activist Victoria Brownworth, like other candid revisionists, says that redefinition "almost certainly will weaken the institution of marriage," and she welcomes that result.

Yet weakening marital norms will hurt children and spouses, especially the poorest. Rewriting the parenting ideal will also undermine in our mores and practice the special value of biological mothers and fathers. By marking support for the conjugal view as bigotry, it will curb freedoms of religion and conscience. Redefinition will do all this in the name of a basic error about what marriage is.

Some bonds remain unrecognized, and some people unmarried, under any marriage policy. If simply sharing a home creates certain needs, we can and should meet them outside civil marriage.

Moreover, if we reject the revisionist's bare equation of marriage with companionship—and the equation of marriage licenses with all-purpose personal approval—we'll see that conjugal marriage laws deprive no one of companionship or its joys, and mark no one as less worthy of fulfillment. (Indeed, using marriage law to express social inclusion might further marginalize whoever remains single.)

True compassion means extending authentic community to everyone, especially the marginalized, while using marriage law for the social goal that it serves best: to ensure that children know the committed love of the mother and father whose union brought them into being. Indeed, only that goal justifies regulating such intimate bonds in the first place.

Just as compassion for those attracted to the same sex doesn't require redefining marriage, neither does preserving the conjugal view mean blaming them for its erosion. What separated the various goods that conjugal marriage joins—sex, commitment, family life—was a sexual revolution among opposite-sex partners, with harmful rises in extramarital sex and nonmarital childbearing, pornography and easy divorce.

Only when sex and marriage were seen mainly as means to emotional satisfaction and expression did a more thorough and explicit redefinition of marriage become thinkable—for the first time in human history. The current debate just confronts us with the choice to entrench these trends—or to begin reversing them.

That debate certainly isn't about legalizing (or criminalizing) anything. In all 50 states, two men or women may have a wedding and share a life. Their employers and religious communities may recognize their unions. At issue here is whether government will effectively coerce other actors in the public square to do the same.

Also at issue is government expansion. Marital norms serve children, spouses, and hence our whole economy, especially the poor. Family breakdown thrusts the state into roles for which it is ill-suited: provider and discipliner to the orphaned and neglected, and arbiter of custody and paternity disputes.

For all these reasons, conservatives would be ill-advised to abandon support for conjugal marriage even if it hadn't won more support than Mitt Romney in every state where marriage was on the ballot.

They certainly shouldn't be duped into surrender by the circular argument that they've already lost. The ash-heap of history is filled with "inevitabilities." Conservatives—triumphant against once-unstoppable social tides like Marxism—should know this best. "History" has no mind. The future isn't fixed. It's chosen. The Supreme Court should let the people choose; and we should choose marriage, conjugal marriage.

Mr. Girgis is a Yale law student and doctoral student in philosophy at Princeton. Mr. Anderson is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. George is professor of jurisprudence at Princeton and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Their book, "What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense," will be published in December by Encounter Books.

Friday, 9 November 2012

The Victims’ Revolution

In a new book a gay writer pens a powerful indictment of identity studies as dogmatic cults.

The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind | By Bruce Bawer | New York: Broadside, 2012 | Hardback, 400 pages | $25.99 (Also available in Kindle)
ISBN: 0061807370

The ideologues have transformed the academy—and, to a remarkable extent, driven out the enemy. They’ve taken over the shop and remade it in their image. And there’s no easy route back. After all, there’s nothing more entrenched than a tenured professor. ~ Ch 7: Is There Hope?

As the value of university education in the Western world continues to rise—as enrolment rates have grown and tuition fees have climbed— institutions of higher learning have changed. They have, of course, changed physically and financially—gotten bigger, grown richer—but they have also changed in fundamental ways, ways involving methodology, curricula, and most especially epistemology, that field of knowledge concerned with the very nature of knowledge, including how it is divided by discipline. Such changes are, for the most part, however, insider secrets. Like democratic governments, the images and reputations of universities continue to foster raw, even romantic idealism, emphasizing broad, philosophical generalities rather than administrative or pedagogical specifics. Universities, many still believe, are places of free thought and unreserved intellectual excitement. They are the ivy-filigreed sanctuaries where the greatest works and ideas of humankind are traded like sports cards, where, at any moment, a roaming professor—like a tweedy Socrates—will deliver an impromptu lecture alfresco, where minds are laid open to the stars.

Whether higher learning was ever quite like this is, of course, up for debate. Universities are noble institutions, at least they’re supposed to be, and like any noble institution—be it a church, police force, or nonprofit organization—their flaws are held as evidence of something much more insidious than human imperfection. Where there are people, there are politics, and, as Henry Kissinger (or Wallace Sayre, or Woodrow Wilson) is reputed to have once said, “academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” The venerable Yale English professor Harold Bloom, who began teaching in the mid-fifties, is on the record as saying that “[t]he ‘good old days,’ in fact, were not so good: universities, in my youth, were staffed mostly by an assemblage of know-nothing bigots, academic impostors, inchoate rhapsodes, and time-serving trimmers […].” It goes back further than this, of course; the English poet Thomas De Quincey and Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard offer similar indictments of academic quality in the nineteenth century, for example.

Whatever the case may have been in the past, there is growing alarm in the present day—from both sides of the traditional political spectrum, though most often from the right—over the state of the arts and sciences (but especially the arts) on university campuses. The warning: individual thought and the journey-centred orienteering central to the humanities have been predisposed by ideological chauvinism. Aesthetic and intellectual merit has been subordinated to radical activist agendas, whereby students become disciples rather than thinkers, and grades become the flails of a sectarian winnowing. Jonah Goldberg’s Tyranny of Clichés looks, for example, at how conservatism is approached by some researchers as evidence of inferior cognition. Susan Cain’s Quiet considers how introversion—in many respects the yardstick for sensitivity and deep thought—is treated in Harvard Business School as a social maladjustment. Emphasis on and cultivation of an extroverted alpha-complex, she argues, may even be partly responsible for the thinking and practices that led to the 2008 financial meltdown.

Criticism has also come from within, though Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Stanley Fish have been sounding different alarms for decades. Quite often, these tocsins are issued from the relative safety of retirement; in an editorial for the Canadian National Post in 2008, Ian Hunter, emeritus professor of the University of Western Ontario, referred to universities as “intellectual daycares,” places where minds are coddled and not challenged, groomed to seek constant validation rather than constructive evaluation.

According to Bruce Bawer and the American experience, it all went wrong sometime in the nineteen-sixties. It was then that the civil rights movement—the goal of which, he says, “could not have been more consistent with America’s founding ideals”—became a kind of reverse Pandora’s Box, radiating spirits of hope, equality, and goodwill, but carrying among them a single, destructive value. Multiculturalism, he argues, emerged to subordinate the identities and liberties of individuals to those of groups, and to balkanize the sense of unity upon which nationalism, liberalism, and academic freedom are all premised. Like a toxin, multiculturalism went on to poison the ideals of the civil rights movement, entrenching the grievances of minority groups and validating them as legitimate cultural values. When being oppressed became a matter of identity— essentially something to be celebrated rather than overcome—the victims’ revolution had begun. As Bawer writes,

[t]he ideas that have increasingly dominated American universities since the sixties have followed the graduates of those institutions out into the larger society. The results are all around us, from workplaces where an innocuous statement can brand one as a bigot and destroy one’s career to election campaigns in which legitimate criticism of a black or female candidate can be discounted as “racist” or “sexist” on its merits. Yet those ideas themselves, and the form in which they are presented in thousands of classrooms around the United States, remain an almost complete mystery to a great many otherwise well-informed and responsible citizens.

From Women’s Studies through Black Studies, Queer Studies through Chicano (or Latino) Studies to Cultural Studies in general, The Victims’ Revolution follows each from the earliest ripples of activism to the overwhelming victimological vogues they have in many places become.

Bawer, an English PhD who is openly gay and argued for cooperative coexistence in his book A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society, has a unique and patient perspective on the issues he raises. He does not, for example, reject the legitimacy of identity-based studies in general, recognizing a place in History, Anthropology, Literature, and other, established disciplines for studies of various group, subcultures, and populations. What he denounces in The Victims’ Revolution is the grotesque state of affairs in which identity studies truly exist in various Arts departments and as their own disciplines—as dogmatic cults of Marxist and progressivist extremism, jargon-parroting and victim-breeding, for whom even the faculty of reason is often dismissed as a tool of heterosexual white patriarchy.

In some cases, as with Women’s Studies and Black Studies, pre-existing academic inroads were commandeered by radical activists; in the case of Queer Studies, they were completely appropriated (“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant”). Whatever the name of the program, however, each seems eerily compatible with the other, defined mutually by the intersectionality that allows constituents to pluralize and at times prioritize different aspects of their victimhood. It is something we have all heard parodied, but which remains central and earnest to identity-studies castes—the gay white man has nothing on the fat disabled black transgendered woman. In many of the academic conferences Bawer describes, participants who do not fully fit the victimological mold apologize or express guilt for their more conventional traits—being white or straight, for example. One does not begin to understand how perverse it all is, however, until, at a Disability Studies conference, a speaker suggests that abortion is genocide, but only because abortion can be used to kill unborn disabled people.

The author’s patience is the stuff of legend; no matter how egregious the evidence he uncovers, he stolidly continues to attend the conferences, cite the canonical texts, and report the activities of those under his surveillance. He does not, in other words, descend into the indignant screed for which conservative social critics are often caricatured, no matter how justifiable it might become. Instead, he continues to serve as a messenger of the damned, from reporting that Queer Studies pioneer Judith Butler declined a reward in 2010 from a German gay organization which she accused of ‘Islamophobia,’ to relaying the victimological inventories proclaimed by participants at a Fat Studies conference the same year (including one who described herself as a “‘self-identified queer, fat, vegan, feminist professor’ and whose topic is ‘inclusionism’—meaning the rejection of allisms from looksism to ableism”).

The formality and professionalism of The Victims’ Revolution makes it one of the most powerful indictments yet published on its subject. Bawer is no TV talking head or right-wing radio firebrand. He is a poet, an essayist, a literary critic, and a translator who cherishes the arts and humanities, and who understands what is happening—indeed, what has already happened—to their institutional study. His message is nevertheless hopeful and as respectful as possible given his position; for the most part, he pities the people he observes, particularly the students, who come to university seeking an education, and who emerge worse than if they had never attended at all. Bawer can be debated, but not refuted. While it can be argued that ‘Theory’ (as Bawer and many others have narrowly defined it) has also provided arts scholarship with some extremely stimulating avenues—particularly as regards subjectivity—there is simply no defending the particular personalities, ‘scholarship,’ and other excesses Bawer identifies. In this sense, the book works like a dog whistle—those who can’t hear its message are part of the problem.

Harley J. Sims is a writer and independent scholar living near Halifax, Nova Scotia. He can be reached on his website at www.harleyjsims.webs.com. He originally reviewed The Victims’ Revolution in the Good Reading Guide.

Millions of Lonely People: The Tragic Legacy of the Left's War on Families

By MELANIE PHILLIPS

PUBLISHED: 20:03 EST, 4 November 2012 | UPDATED: 20:03 EST, 4 November 2012

Britain appears to be turning into a disunited kingdom of solitary and lonely people.

Recent figures have shown that ever-increasing numbers of middle-aged men and women are living alone.

According to the Office of National Statistics, almost 2.5 million people aged between 45 and 64 have their own home but no spouse, partner or children to live with them. Since the mid-Nineties, their number has grown by more than 50 per cent.

Alone: The number of Britons aged 45 and up who live in single-household is increasing

This disturbing trend was always entirely predictable as one of the baleful effects of family breakdown. For the age group that is so over-represented in these dismal figures is the post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation — those who grew up in the Swinging Sixties and proceeded to throw over the traditional family.

Far worse than the damage the boomers did to themselves, however, has been the damage done to the links between the generations.

For if a parent disappears from his or her children’s lives, those children are far less likely to want to look after that parent when he or she becomes old and frail.

Struggle: Both parents and children in fragmented families suffer

Nor will children want to look after a step-parent who, even if not actively resented, will not command the same bonds of love and duty as someone’s natural father or mother.

Calamitous

This breaking of the bonds between the generations is absolutely calamitous. For beyond the tragic abandonment of people to lonely lives, there can be no community without a strong sense of duty and commitment to other people and the need to look after them.

What this society has increasingly thrown overboard is nothing less than the idea of kinship, where people are knitted together by the sense they belong to each other.

Instead, our post-religious, post-modern, post-moral society prizes above all else independence, which is seen as essential to fulfilling one’s potential without any constraints or interference by anyone else.

This fact more than anything else helps explain the rise and rise of cohabitation, and the reason why so many now prefer it to marriage.

The key point about marriage is that it is not a partnership or a relationship but a union in which two people bind themselves to each other for ever in solemn obligation. By contrast, those who choose to cohabit regard their relationship as a partnership of independent individuals — in which they reserve for themselves the right to opt out, with no binding obligation on either side.

Whatever they think the word ‘commitment’ may mean, the fact is they are not prepared to make that leap of faith and love that binds them in a permanent tie of obligation to another person. Who can be surprised, therefore, that cohabitations break up far more frequently than do marriages? For cohabitants have written themselves a get-out clause from the start.

Nor is it surprising that a principal reason why cohabitations collapse is the arrival of a baby. For a child demands unconditional obligation to another human being. And that’s what cohabitants don’t want.

Cohabitation and family breakdown are the results of the great onslaught on marriage and the traditional family that has taken place over the past four decades and more.

No ties: Broken homes where a parent leaves will leave children unwilling to take care of the 'abandoning' parent when he/she grows older, increasing the burden on health services Left-wing ideologues wanted to smash western society by eroding all the moral authority and constraints on which it was based, and replace it with a brave new world in which individuals would make up all the rules to suit themselves.

The results of that social experiment are now being seen.

A devastating study published last week revealed that, by the time they are 15, little more than half of British children are still living with both their natural parents. That means nearly half of 15-year-olds are not.

What an ocean of misery is contained within that one bleak and shocking statistic. For we know only too well what the fragmentation of the family does to children.

They do worse at school and are less likely to get a job, are more prone to drugs, teenage pregnancy and crime, suffer more from depression and other mental disorders and are more vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.

Worse still, they go on disproportionately to replicate in their adult lives the very same disordered or broken family patterns that did them so much damage.

For in fractured families, where one spouse has betrayed or abandoned another and where partners may come and go, the children grow up without any understanding of what it takes to overcome difficulties in a relationship, or what things such as trust, loyalty — and yes, real love — actually mean.

Instead, wary of commitment for fear of getting hurt, they set the bar for what they want out of a relationship impossibly high — too high for it to work. Yet now nearly half of all 15-year-olds are caught up in this social disaster.

This is the terrible legacy of all those who set out to destroy the traditional family — and all those others who haven’t had the bottle to do anything about it.

From easier divorce to the abolition of laws covering illegitimacy; from the promotion of unmarried motherhood to the feminist demonisation of men; from the doctrine of non-judgmentalism, which gave a free pass to the abandonment of children, to the loading of the tax and welfare dice against marriage and in favour of lone parenthood — the wrecking ball of the Left has succeeded in smashing the traditional family to bits.

Promises: Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron wants to give tax benefits to married couples

As a result, it is well on the way to becoming upheld by only a minority.

The cost is simply incalculable.

Shattered

Loneliness is becoming endemic. Ties of kinship are fracturing, resulting in more and more people being abandoned when they grow old and frail.

They will increasingly turn to the State to take care of them. More and more houses will also have to be built to accommodate people who once would have lived in families but are now living alone.

The financial costs of picking up the pieces of all these abandoned or shattered lives is enormous. No society can afford this — nor survive such social atomisation.

The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, well understands all this. He has said the Government will make preventing the breakdown of family life the key yardstick to measure the success of social programmes for the poor.

His personal commitment to preventing family breakdown is beyond question. But the same cannot be said of the Government of which he is part. The Prime Minister promised to incentivise marriage in the tax system. Yet we are still waiting for him to do so.

And does anyone really believe a politician so terrified of being called names by the Left would ever stop the benefits system from providing financial incentives to unmarried parents?

Will he arrest the explosion of cohabitation, which has put rocket fuel under the number of fatherless children?

Reversing the tide of family breakdown requires heroic political courage and a gimlet-eyed focus on the need to defend Britain against the culture war that has been waged against it. Alas, our ruling elite is either on the wrong side of that culture war or has surrendered to it. The great tragedy is Britain will feel a far lonelier place as a result.

UT Austin Anscombe Society