culture

The State & Marriage

Calvin Freiburger 2008, blogosphere, California, culture, gay marriage, homosexuality, marriage, Obama
Boots & Sabers regular commenter Mr. Pelican Pants has a great explication of the case for traditional marriage on this post about Obama and Proposition 8 in California:
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1. No one has the “right” to marry anyone – straight, gay, whatever. Marriage is not a right afforded to anyone.
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2. The institution of marriage is a social tenet and institution to serve one, fundamental purpose: the perpetuation of the human race.
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3. Marriage, as a legal contract, is sanctioned by the states. Thus, the states should have the ability to decide who may and may not be allowed to be legally recognized as a married couple. Anyone is certainly free to “marry” anyone they want. Just don’t expect the state to officially recognize that marriage.
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4. Back to point #2 on pro-creation, while gay couples may certainly adopt a child, or use artificial insemination to create a child, the fact remains that, at a minimum, three people are needed to achieve this act of pro-creation. As a society, we believe that no more than two people should be needed.
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5. Marriage is not about hospital visits, health care benefits, or income tax breaks. Those are not rights, but rather legal side effects that have been created over time to maintain the traditional two-parent, man and woman, marriage. Thus, any gay couple claiming to be denied those rights is on very weak ground, as those are not rights, and as stated previous, marriage is not a right either.
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Finally, the problem with Obama’s argument is that a. he wants it both ways; and b. he is not properly describing the problem. The reason for the constitutional amendment, as it was here in Wisconsin, was not to “deny people from being with someone they care about”, but rather reaffirming the statutory guidelines for marriage, so a judge can not arbitrarily and unilaterally make a decision of what he/she believes was the intent of the Legislature when the Legislature crafted the statutory marriage language.
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The people of the state have their interests vested and represented in the appropriate state Legislature. Whether you agree or disagree with gay marriage, the majority of state residents, over a very lengthy period of time, believe that a marriage between one man and one woman is the most appropriate functioning unit to promote the family. Representatives in the Legislature have responded by crafting language that meets that long held belief.
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But where gray areas may exist in statute, is where many pro-gay marriage individuals make their challenges. Which then leaves a justice of the court in the position of trying to decide what the Legislature meant when those words were crafted.
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The constitutional amendment is appropriate, as there is generally no dispute or controversy as to what the Legislature intended. In addition, because it requires adoption by the people of the state in a referendum vote, the intent of the people is reaffirmed.
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The very process of constitutional ratification upholds the sanctity of a democratic society, one which may not be tinkered with by a single, activist justice who believe he/she is in a better position to decide the will of the people.

Entschuldigung? *

Calvin Freiburger America, assimilation, culture, English, Europe, German, hypocrisy, language, Obama
Barack Obama thinks it’s embarrassing that more Americans don’t speak the language of the nations they visit. People have rightly noticed that this is another case of Obama looking down upon the common folks, but there’s another question we should ask him: if you ought to speak the local language when you merely visit a country, what about when you want to live there? Surely the good Senator would apply this principle to English here. Or not.
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So as to show I won’t be embarrassing the Messiah anytime soon with insufficient multicultural credentials, I have a foreign-language message for him: Gehen Sie in der Hölle, Herr Obama.
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* The title is German for “Excuse Me?” As for the message, take a wild guess.

Quote of the Day

Calvin Freiburger culture, Europe, history, O'Sullivan, patriotism, quote
And our literature! – Oh, when will it breathe the spirit of our republican institutions? When will it be embued with the God-like aspiration of intellectual freedom – the elevating principle of equality? When will it assert its national independence, and speak the soul – the heart of the American people? Why cannot our literati comprehend the matchless sublimity of our position amongst the nations of the world – our high destiny – and cease bending the knee to foreign idolatry, false tastes, false doctrines, false principles? When will they be inspired by the magnificent scenery of our own world, imbibe the fresh enthusiasm of a new heaven and a new earth, and soar upon the expanded wings of truth and liberty? Is not nature as original – her truths as captivating – her aspects as various, as lovely, as grand – her Promethean fire as glowing in this, our Western hemisphere, as in that of the East? And above all, is not our private life as morally beautiful and good – is not our public life as politically right, as indicative of the brightest prospects of humanity, and therefore as inspiring of the highest conceptions? Why, then, do our authors aim at no higher degree of merit, than a successful imitation of English writers of celebrity?
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John L. O’Sullivan, November 1839

Odds & Ends

Calvin Freiburger culture, Duncan Hunter, Fox News, Fred Thompson, free speech, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, liberalism, O'Reilly, rap, Steyn
Good cultural news? Debbie Schlussel points to a possible shift away from rap music, in the form of decreasing sales. I’d have to see more than this to be persuaded that an actual movement away from this garbage is taking place, but we can hope.
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Fred Thompson entered the No-Spin Zone tonight. Bill O’Reilly treated him well, and he came off well. Can we dispense with the “Fox is out to get me” hooey now?
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Mark Steyn takes on the thought police and Canadian Islamic Congress here.
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Duncan Hunter is staying in the race, and unfortunately, it sounds like he’s going into meltdown mode. Congressman: YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BE THE NOMINEE.
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The 20 most annoying liberals? Indeed.

Cultural Crusader

Calvin Freiburger 2008, abortion, conservatism, culture, gay marriage, homosexuality, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, pro-life
Yesterday, Mitt Romney delivered a powerful speech in front of Massachusetts Citizens for Life:
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It is an honor to receive this award.
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I recognize that it is awarded for where I am on life, not for where I have been.
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I respect the fact that you arrived at this place of principle a long time ago.
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And I appreciate the fact that you are inclined to honor someone who arrived here only a few years ago.
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I am evidence that your work, that your relentless campaign to promote the sanctity of human life, bears fruit.
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I follow a long line of converts — George Herbert Walker Bush, Henry Hyde, Ronald Reagan. Each of them has made meaningful contributions to this cause.
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It is instructive to see the double standard at work here. When a pro-life figure changes to pro-choice, it hardly gets a mention. But when someone becomes pro-life, the pundits go into high dudgeon.
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And so, I am humbled and grateful to be welcomed so warmly and openly tonight.
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And as many of you know, you were always welcome in my office when I was Governor.
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Together we worked arm in arm. And I can promise you this — that will be the case again when I am President.
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I am often asked how I, as a conservative Republican, could have been elected in Massachusetts. I tell them that there were three things that helped account for my improbable victory.
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First, the state was in a fiscal crisis. A meltdown, of sorts. Beacon Hill couldn’t get budgets done on time. Another big tax hike looked like it was on the way. I promised to balance the budget without raising taxes. And, as you know, together with the legislature, that’s what I did. We eliminated a $3 billion shortfall. And by the time I left, my surpluses had replenished the rainy-day fund to over $2 billion.
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Second, we were in a jobs crisis. Massachusetts was losing jobs every month. People were afraid. I went to work to bring jobs back to our state. From the end of the recession, we added 60,000 new jobs. And, we finally got our economic development act together — it was in large measure responsible for the economic growth that we continue to experience even today.
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And third, I think that values also played a role in my campaign success. My opponent said she would sign a bill for gay marriage. I said that I would oppose gay marriage and civil unions. My opponent favored bilingual education. I did not. I said that to be successful in America, our kids need to speak the language of America. And as you will surely recall, my opponent wanted to lower the age of consent for an abortion from 18 to 16 — and I did not.
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And so, social conservatives, many of them Democrats and Independents, joined fiscal conservatives to elect a Republican.
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That being said, I had no inkling that I would find myself in the center of the battlefield on virtually every social issue of our time.
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The first battle came when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, by a one vote majority, found a right to same sex marriage in our constitution. I’m sure that John Adams would be surprised.
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The Court said that traditional marriage as we have known it, “is rooted in persistent prejudices” and “works a deep and scarring hardship … for no rational reason.”
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No rational reason? How about children? Isn’t marriage about the development and nurturing of children? And isn’t a child’s development enhanced by access to both genders, by having both a mother and a father?
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I believe that the Court erred because it focused on adults and adult rights.
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They should have focused on the rights of children. The ideal setting for the raising of a child is a home with a loving mother and father.
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Many of you joined the effort to stop, to block or to slow down this unprecedented Court decision. We took every step we could conceive of, within the law.
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First, we pushed for a stay — denied.
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Then, we fought for an amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman — lost the vote in the legislature by only 2 votes.
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We upheld the 1913 law that prohibited out of state gay couples from marrying here, thus preventing Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage.
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And in the final analysis, we went to work to secure a vote of the citizens, a battle that took us to court, with a win. And now we are just one step away from putting it on the ballot.
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The issue now is whether a single vote majority of the Court will be allowed to trump the voice of the people in a democracy. If it is, then John Adams would truly be astonished.
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By the way, we all learned that the phrase “slippery slope” describes a very real phenomenon. The implications of the marriage decision quickly went well beyond adult marriage. Efforts were made to change birth certificates by removing “mother” and “father” and replacing them with “parent A” and “parent B.” I said no to that. And parents of a child in 2nd grade were told that their son is required to listen to the reading of a book called the “King and the King,” about a prince who marries a prince. The school’s rationale was since gay marriage was legal, there was nothing wrong with such a policy.
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And then another slide along the slippery slope. The Catholic Church was forced to end its adoption service, which was crucial in helping the state find homes for some of our most difficult to place children. Why? Because the Church favors placements in homes with a mother and a father. Now, even religious freedom was being trumped by the new-found right of gay marriage. I immediately drafted and introduced legislation to grant religious liberty protection, but the legislature would not take it up.
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I have taken this message to Washington, explaining the far-reaching implications of gay marriage and the need to support a federal marriage amendment. I testified before Congress. I wrote to every US Senator. Unfortunately, several senators from my own party voted against the marriage amendment.
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The fight is not over.
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In the midst of that battle, another arose. It involved cloning and embryo farming for purposes of research. I studied the subject in great depth. I have high hopes for stem cell research. But for me, a bright moral line is crossed when we create new life for the sole purpose of experimentation and destruction.
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That’s why I fought to keep cloning and embryo farming illegal.
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It was during this battle on cloning and embryo farming that I began to focus a good deal more of my thinking on abortion.
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When I first ran for office, I considered whether this should be a personal decision or whether it should be a societal and government decision. I concluded that I would support the law as it was in place — effectively, a pro-choice position.
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And I was wrong.
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The Roe v. Wade mentality has so cheapened the value of human life that rational people saw human life as mere research material to be used, then destroyed. The slippery slope could soon lead to racks and racks of living human embryos, Brave New World-like, awaiting termination.
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What some see as a mere clump of cells is actually a human life. Human life has identity. Human life has the capacity to love and be loved. Human life has a profound dignity, undiminished by age or infirmity.
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And so I publicly acknowledged my error, and joined with you to promote the sanctity of human life.
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And my words were matched with my actions. As you know, every time I faced a decision as governor that related to human life, I came down on the side of the sanctity of life.
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I fought to ban cloning.
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I fought to ban embryo farming.
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I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation.
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I fought for abstinence education in our schools.
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And I vetoed a so-called emergency contraception bill that gave young girls drugs without prescription, drugs that could be abortive and not just contraceptive.
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That is my record on life as your governor.
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It was fought against long odds. You know, you go up against those same odds every day. I always appreciated the strong support I received from you, the pro-life community, for these actions.
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But not everyone agrees with me. You can’t be a pro-life governor in a pro-choice state without considering that there are heartfelt and thoughtful arguments on both sides of the question. And I certainly believe in treating all people with respect and tolerance. It is our job to persuade our fellow citizens of our position.
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The problem is there are some people who believe that their views must be imposed on everyone. More and more, the vehicle for this imposition is the courts. Slowly but surely, the courts have taken it upon themselves to be the final arbiters of our lives. They forget that the most fundamental right in a democracy is the right to participate in your own governance.
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Make no mistake: abortion and same-sex marriage are not rights to be discovered in the Constitution.
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I think Chief Justice John Roberts put it best at his confirmation hearing, when he described the role of a judge. Chief Justice Roberts said, “Judges and Justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them…and I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”
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Now that’s the type of Justice that I would appoint to the court.
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On the tenth anniversary of Roe v Wade, Ronald Reagan observed that the Court’s decision had not yet settled the abortion debate. It had become “a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation.”
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More than thirty years later, that is still the case. Numerous court decisions have not settled this question, but have further divided the nation. And Roe v. Wade continues to work its destructive logic throughout our society.
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This cannot continue.
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At the heart of American democracy is the principle that the most fundamental decisions should ultimately be decided by the people themselves.
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We are a decent people who have a commitment to the worth and dignity of every person, ingrained in our hearts and etched in our national purpose.
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So these are the challenges that face the next President: strengthening our country and our families, protecting marriage and human life and preserving for our children the true blessings of liberty.
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These are noble purposes, worthy of a great people.

Abstinence Education a Failure? Not So Fast

Calvin Freiburger culture, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Medved, morality, public schools, sex, sex ed, studies
Social lefties are giddy that a new study is making the rounds which purports to show precisely that, but dig a little deeper, and that conclusion becomes premature. For one thing, the study only looked at four such programs. For another, the report itself includes this caveat:
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“Targeting youth at young ages may not be sufficient. Most Title V, Section 510 abstinence education programs are implemented in upper elementary and middle schools and most are completed before youth enter high school. The findings from this study provide no evidence that abstinence programs implemented at these grades reduce sexual activity of youth during their high school years. However, the findings provide no information on the effects programs might have if they were implemented in high school or began at earlier ages but continued through high school.
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“Peer support for abstinence erodes during adolescence. Peer support for abstinence is a significant predictor of later sexual activity. Although the four abstinence programs had at most a small impact on this measure in the short term and no impact in the long term, this finding suggests that promoting support for abstinence among peer networks should be an important feature of future abstinence programs.”
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It’s obvious that any meaningful effort would have to be “comprehensive” (to use a word the Left loves so much). I would also add that, for the best effect, abstinence education in schools would have to be part of a broader societal effort to take back the culture: reemphasize parenting, condemning sexual saturation in the media, reaffirming that sex has consequences by fighting abortion & free distribution of birth control, not electing moral degenerates President…Meanwhile, Michael Medved has some good insights on sex education & federal funding here.

Saving Marriage

Calvin Freiburger Blankenhorn, culture, gay marriage, marriage, society, Weekly Standard
An important piece by David Blankenhorn from the latest Weekly Standard:
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Defining Marriage Down Is No Way to Save It
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Does permitting same-sex marriage weaken marriage as a social institution? Or does extending to gay and lesbian couples the right to marry have little or no effect on marriage overall? Scholars and commentators have expended much effort trying in vain to wring proof of causation from the data–all the while ignoring the meaning of some simple correlations that the numbers do indubitably show.
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Much of the disagreement among scholars centers on how to interpret trends in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Stanley Kurtz has argued, in this magazine and elsewhere, that the adoption of gay marriage or same-sex civil unions in those countries has significantly weakened customary marriage, already eroded by easy divorce and stigma-free cohabitation.
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William Eskridge, a Yale Law School professor, and Darren R. Spedale, an attorney, beg to differ. In Gay Marriage: For Better or for Worse?, a book-length reply to Kurtz, they insist that Kurtz does not prove that gay marriage is causing anything in those nations; that Nordic marriage overall appears to be healthier than Kurtz allows; and that even if marriage is declining in that part of the world, “the question remains whether that phenomenon is a lamentable development.”
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Eskridge and Spedale want it both ways. For them, there is no proof that marriage has weakened, but if there were it wouldn’t be a problem. For people who care about marriage, this perspective inspires no confidence. Eskridge and Spedale do score one important point, however. Neither Kurtz nor anyone else can scientifically prove that allowing gay marriage causes the institution of marriage to get weaker. Correlation does not imply causation. The relation between two correlated phenomena may be causal, or it may be random, or it may reflect some deeper cause producing both. Even if you could show that every last person in North Carolina eats barbecue, you would not have established that eating barbecue is a result of taking up residence in North Carolina.
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When it comes to the health of marriage as an institution and the legal status of same-sex unions, there is much to be gained from giving up the search for causation and studying some recurring patterns in the data, as I did for my book The Future of Marriage. It turns out that certain clusters of beliefs about and attitudes toward marriage consistently correlate with certain institutional arrangements. The correlations crop up in a large number of countries and recur in data drawn from different surveys of opinion.
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Take the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), a collaborative effort of universities in over 40 countries. It interviewed about 50,000 adults in 35 countries in 2002. What is useful for our purposes is that respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with six statements that directly relate to marriage as an institution:
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1. Married people are generally happier than unmarried people.
2. People who want children ought to get married.
3. One parent can bring up a child as well as two parents together.
4. It is all right for a couple to live together without intending to get married.
5. Divorce is usually the best solution when a couple can’t seem to work out their marriage problems.
6. The main purpose of marriage these days is to have children.
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Let’s stipulate that for statements one, two, and six, an “agree” answer indicates support for traditional marriage as an authoritative institution. Similarly, for statements three, four, and five, let’s stipulate that agreement indicates a lack of support, or less support, for traditional marriage. –
Then divide the countries surveyed into four categories: those that permit same-sex marriage; those that permit same-sex civil unions (but not same-sex marriage); those in which some regions permit same-sex marriage; and those that do not legally recognize same-sex unions.
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The correlations are strong. Support for marriage is by far the weakest in countries with same-sex marriage. The countries with marriage-like civil unions show significantly more support for marriage. The two countries with only regional recognition of gay marriage (Australia and the United States) do better still on these support-for-marriage measurements, and those without either gay marriage or marriage-like civil unions do best of all.
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In some instances, the differences are quite large. For example, people in nations with gay marriage are less than half as likely as people in nations without gay unions to say that married people are happier. Perhaps most important, they are significantly less likely to say that people who want children ought to get married (38 percent vs. 60 percent). They are also significantly more likely to say that cohabiting without intending to marry is all right (83 percent vs. 50 percent), and are somewhat more likely to say that divorce is usually the best solution to marital problems. Respondents in the countries with gay marriage are significantly more likely than those in Australia and the United States to say that divorce is usually the best solution.
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A similar exercise using data from a different survey yields similar results. The World Values Survey, based in Stockholm, Sweden, periodically interviews nationally representative samples of the publics of some 80 countries on six continents–over 100,000 people in all–on a range of issues. It contains three statements directly related to marriage as an institution:
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1. A child needs a home with both a father and a mother to grow up happily.
2. It is all right for a woman to want a child but not a stable relationship with a man.
3. Marriage is an outdated institution.
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Again grouping the countries according to the legal status of same-sex unions, the data from the 1999-2001 wave of interviews yield a clear pattern. Support for marriage as an institution is weakest in those countries with same-sex marriage. Countries with same-sex civil unions show more support, and countries with regional recognition show still more. By significant margins, support for marriage is highest in countries that extend no legal recognition to same-sex unions.
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So what of it? Granted that these correlations may or may not reflect causation, what exactly can be said about the fact that certain values and attitudes and legal arrangements tend to cluster?
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Here’s an analogy. Find some teenagers who smoke, and you can confidently predict that they are more likely to drink than their nonsmoking peers. Why? Because teen smoking and drinking tend to hang together. What’s more, teens who engage in either of these activities are also more likely than nonsmokers or nondrinkers to engage in other risky behaviors, such as skipping school, getting insufficient sleep, and forming friendships with peers who get into trouble.
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Because these behaviors correlate and tend to reinforce one another, it is virtually impossible for the researcher to pull out any one from the cluster and determine that it alone is causing or is likely to cause some personal or (even harder to measure) social result. All that can be said for sure is that these things go together. To the degree possible, parents hope that their children can avoid all of them, the entire syndrome–drinking, smoking, skipping school, missing sleep, and making friends with other children who get into trouble–in part because each of them increases exposure to the others.
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It’s the same with marriage. Certain trends in values and attitudes tend to cluster with each other and with certain trends in behavior. A rise in unwed childbearing goes hand in hand with a weakening of the belief that people who want to have children should get married. High divorce rates are encountered where the belief in marital permanence is low. More one-parent homes are found where the belief that children need both a father and a mother is weaker. A rise in nonmarital cohabitation is linked at least partly to the belief that marriage as an institution is outmoded. The legal endorsement of gay marriage occurs where the belief prevails that marriage itself should be redefined as a private personal relationship. And all of these marriage-weakening attitudes and behaviors are linked. Around the world, the surveys show, these things go together.
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Eskridge and Spedale are right. We cannot demonstrate statistically what exactly causes what, or what is likely to have what consequences in the future. But we do see in country after country that these phenomena form a pattern that recurs. They are mutually reinforcing. Socially, an advance for any of them is likely to be an advance for all of them. An individual who tends to accept any one or two of them probably accepts the others as well. And as a political and strategic matter, anyone who is fighting for any one of them should–almost certainly already does–support all of them, since a victory for any of them clearly coincides with the advance of the others. Which is why, for example, people who have devoted much of their professional lives to attacking marriage as an institution almost always favor gay marriage. These things do go together.
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Inevitably, the pattern discernible in the statistics is borne out in the statements of the activists. Many of those who most vigorously champion same-sex marriage say that they do so precisely in the hope of dethroning once and for all the traditional “conjugal institution.”
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That phrase comes from Judith Stacey, professor of sociology at New York University and a major expert witness testifying in courts and elsewhere for gay marriage. She views the fight for same-sex marriage as the “vanguard site” for rebuilding family forms. The author of journal articles like “Good Riddance to ‘The Family,'” she argues forthrightly that “if we begin to value the meaning and quality of intimate bonds over their customary forms, there are few limits to the kinds of marriage and kinship patterns people might wish to devise.”
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Similarly, David L. Chambers, a law professor at the University of Michigan widely published on family issues, favors gay marriage for itself but also because it would likely “make society receptive to the further evolution of the law.” What kind of evolution? He writes, “If the deeply entrenched paradigm we are challenging is the romantically linked man-woman couple, we should respect the similar claims made against the hegemony of the two-person unit and against the romantic foundations of marriage.”
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Examples could be multiplied–the recently deceased Ellen Willis, professor of journalism at NYU and head of its Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism, expressed the hope that gay marriage would “introduce an implicit revolt against the institution into its very heart, further promoting the democratization and secularization of personal and sexual life”–but they can only illustrate the point already established by the large-scale international comparisons: Empirically speaking, gay marriage goes along with the erosion, not the shoring up, of the institution of marriage.
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These facts have two implications. First, to the degree that it makes any sense to oppose gay marriage, it makes sense only if one also opposes with equal clarity and intensity the other main trends pushing our society toward postinstitutional marriage. After all, the big idea is not to stop gay marriage. The big idea is to stop the erosion of society’s most pro-child institution. Gay marriage is only one facet of the larger threat to the institution.
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Similarly, it’s time to recognize that the beliefs about marriage that correlate with the push for gay marriage do not exist in splendid isolation, unrelated to marriage’s overall institutional prospects. Nor do those values have anything to do with strengthening the institution, notwithstanding the much-publicized but undocumented claims to the contrary from those making the “conservative case” for gay marriage.
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Instead, the deep logic of same-sex marriage is clearly consistent with what scholars call deinstitutionalization–the overturning or weakening of all of the customary forms of marriage, and the dramatic shrinking of marriage’s public meaning and institutional authority. Does deinstitutionalization necessarily require gay marriage? Apparently not. For decades heterosexuals have been doing a fine job on that front all by themselves. But gay marriage clearly presupposes and reinforces deinstitutionalization.
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By itself, the “conservative case” for gay marriage might be attractive. It would be gratifying to extend the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples–if gay marriage and marriage renewal somehow fit together. But they do not. As individuals and as a society, we can strive to maintain and strengthen marriage as a primary social institution and society’s best welfare plan for children (some would say for men and women too). Or we can strive to implement same-sex marriage. But unless we are prepared to tear down with one hand what we are building up with the other, we cannot do both.