Amid the scramble to pronounce over the goings-on in empty lots near obscure churches there has been an important element of confusion, and no small dose of hypocrisy. First, let’s consider the confusion. The primary reason to oppose the inflammatory Koran burnings is that they are fundamentally crude and disrespectful acts, meant to demean and humiliate others. Our system of free expression allows such depravity, but it also permits the natural response to it: moral suasion and public denunciation. Our first and best defense against mean-spirited acts such as the burning of texts, sacred and otherwise, is to shame the would-be perpetrators. The vulgarians have been “called out” and subjected to our justifiable scorn—so far the system has worked.

Confusion began when people who should have known better focused on a different argument for not defiling the Koran—the fear of reprisal. This argument, first raised by General Petraeus, and subsequently by the Defense Secretary and the President of the United States, correctly notes that inflammatory acts such as the Koran burning will likely incite an angry response among Muslims, and that it will be abused to incite reckless people to attack out troops. However, the reason to give due respect to minority religious beliefs is not the fear that they might attack us if we do not; it is rather that a decent respect for others calls for certain minimum standards of conduct—such as not burning the texts that they hold sacred. It is not from fear that we should act with dignity, it is rather that we should do so because we are a decent and civilized people. Claiming otherwise leaves us open to the endless choler and irresponsibility of the lunatic fringe.

No sooner had the president pronounced on the dangers posed to our troops by the Koran burning than Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf opined that to not build the “Ground Zero Mosque” would lead to adverse public opinion in the “Muslim world” and that our “national security” now depends on discourse about the mosque. No sooner had the minister thought better of his folly than several other fringe preachers picked up the torch and threatened their own Koran burnings. By noting the threat to our troops, General Petraeus and the President raised the false expectation that they could prevent all such ugliness, but in the current environment there will be no shortage of fools willing and ready to pose before a camera as they burn a copy of the Koran. Moral suasion and good sense will not stop all of them, but we can make it clear that we do not share their twisted vision. Our public discourse needs to be united in its contempt for the fringes, rather than allowing itself to be taken hostage by them. 

The second theme that has emerged during the recent brouhaha has been the hypocrisy of those who, while correctly insisting on respect for the sensibilities of Muslims, have treated similar sensibilities of Christians with contempt. Recall the controversy stirred by ugly works of hatred against Christianity that were thinly veiled as art. “Piss Christ” by Andres Serrano, purporting to be a photograph of a crucifix suspended in the “artist’s” own urine, or “Holy Virgin Mary” by Chris Ofili, complete with elephant dung and other signs of disrespect for a cherished Christian icon. Those works enjoyed not only the forbearance of the authorities, but actually received subsidies, either directly in the case of the Serrano work, or indirectly by being displayed in publicly funded galleries. While Serrano and Ofili were denounced by some, their acts of disrespect were embraced by others as “valuable perspectives” on Christianity. Well, followers of the “Prince of Peace” were angered, but no one’s safety was ever at much risk from angry Christians thirsty for retribution. In that case, respect for the sensibilities of others was not enough to ostracize those who defiled Christian symbols. When some of the same people speak against the affront of burning the Koran they make clear that it is not respect for others that motivates them, but fear of retribution. For shame.

As long as our fellow citizens are willing to respect those of us who do not share their creed, even when we refuse to ever convert, as long as they are willing to respect our civil rights, we should respect their freedom of conscience, rather than belittling it. Our basic decency, rather than a cringing fear of the wrath of the Muslim world, is the best defense against the lunatic fringe.


John B. Londregan is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

 Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Charlotte didn’t go to college looking for booze or hook ups. Yet, like most of her peers, she found herself drawn into it—and who could blame her? Culture influences conduct. Students want to be—and want to appear to be—normal. So it is hardly surprising that many will be swayed by whatever happens to be regarded as the norm.

Like the fictional “DuPont,” Princeton, where we teach, is a wonderful university; but like other colleges and universities there is a dark side to its social life. Our students are bright, enthusiastic, and eager to learn. Most did not come to college bent on boozing and hooking up. Many feel deeply ambivalent about these aspects of campus life. Yet, they find little support on campus for the “alternative lifestyle” of living by traditional moral virtues.

More than a few freshmen of both sexes arrive believing that romantic relationships are properly oriented toward marriage and that sex belongs in marriage, not outside it. They do not want hook ups; instead, they aspire to what an earlier generation would have called courtship. How hospitable are colleges and universities to these students?

Whether it is a private institution such as Yale or a public one such as the University of Delaware, the truth is that things begin going badly for them right off the bat. Princeton is all-too-typical. As part of the freshman orientation program, students are required to attend an event entitled “Sex on a Saturday Night.” It consists of a series of skits ostensibly designed to discourage “date rape.” For years, critics have contended that the play, which features vulgarity and suggestive conduct, does nothing to serve this laudable goal; rather, it reinforces the campus culture of sexual permissiveness, primarily by shaping students’ expectations to include sexual license as normal.

And then there is “Sex Jeopardy” (officially “Safer Sex Jeopardy”), an event that Princeton freshmen are “strongly encouraged” by the University to attend. Modeled on the long running television game show, this activity invites students to show off their knowledge of such topics as anal intercourse, flavored condoms, dental dams, sex toys, and sado-masochism. As described by one female student, Sex Jeopardy is “suffused with sexual bravado and conveys the strong impression that only someone with hang ups would have a moral problem with hook ups.”

Colleges and universities across the country sponsor countless events and programs such as these that, however well-intentioned, tend to reinforce libertine attitudes towards sexuality and relationships and to marginalize and even stigmatize traditional ideas about virtue, decency, and moral integrity. Just think about “Sex Week” at Yale, which these days scarcely raises eyebrows.

What can be done?

Most universities have established non-academic centers of various kinds that provide educational, social, and counseling support. Princeton is again typical. We have the Women’s Center, the International Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Center, and the Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding. Whether or not one agrees with the ideological bent of some of these centers, at least they represent the University’s effort to meet what are perceived as the needs of certain segments of our student body.

Moreover, university health centers and residential advising programs typically provide assistance on body-image and eating disorders, binge drinking and alcohol abuse, and sexual health and sexual harassment.

Conspicuously absent, however, are centers or programs offering meaningful support for students who desire to live chastely. “Sexual health” offices do not supply the need because staff members see their roles, not as promoting self-discipline and high moral standards, but as providing “non-judgmental” advice about how to have sex while avoiding pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and infections.

So while universities are willing to speak out on the dangers of alcohol abuse, eating disorders, and date-rape, they sometimes treat as privileged—in practice, if not in theory—the moral view that any sexual conduct someone happens to desire is good, healthy, and acceptable, so long as it is consensual and “safe” from the risks of pregnancy and disease.

But this is not fair to students who see things differently. Nor is it fair to students, especially women, who experience pressure to make themselves sexually available as the price of being treated as normal and feeling accepted. Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist formerly at the UCLA Health Center and an important writer on the collegiate hook up culture, notes the widespread phenomenon of young women who abuse alcohol to overcome their reluctance to behave promiscuously. Our own students tell us that the link between binge-drinking and the hook-up culture reported by Dr. Grossman is all-too-real. Can we not all agree that this is a tragedy?

To help to come to terms with these problems, some thoughtful and concerned students at Princeton and other universities have proposed the establishment of centers on campus to support students who seek to lead lives of moral integrity and decency. We are sure that alumni and friends would step forward with financial support to make such “Love and Fidelity Centers” possible. A single generous alumni donor could make an enormous difference at his or her alma mater by contributing a sum far smaller than what would be required to establish an endowed chair or renovate a building.

Some universities, including Princeton, have student-run societies for students who oppose the hook up culture and wish to support each other in resisting it. The emergence of these societies is encouraging, but they are only part of the solution. Students are strapped for time and don’t have the experience or professional skills to provide the level of guidance and support that their peers need when it comes to important questions of sexuality and morality. Universities know this—that’s why at Princeton, for example, in addition to the student gay Pride Alliance, the Queer Graduate Caucus, LGBT Task Force, and the LGBT Staff and Faculty Group, there is the University’s LGBT Center, with a full-time paid University staff member committed to LGBT support and activities. For the same reasons, there needs to be university support for students who want to live and conduct their relationships honorably in the face of the hook-up culture.

The needed centers would serve three functions: First, they would sponsor intellectual events featuring scholars from the social sciences, philosophy, psychiatry, medicine, art, religion, history, and literature. Some of these events would no doubt be co-sponsored by LGBT centers and other units that would enable students to consider competing points of view on matters of sexual morality, marriage, and romantic relationships. Second, they would provide alternative social venues and special events for those like-minded in their commitment to chastity and those who simply seek a night out without the pressures of sexual expectations. This is by no means a foreign idea, as LGBT centers provide similar services for students whom they seek to serve. Third, centers would support students in their efforts to conduct their lives in line with their beliefs and to live up to the standards of morality they set for themselves. They would provide literature, sympathetic ears, and appropriate referrals.

Tom Wolfe’s “Dupont University” is in fact every campus. Colleges and universities need to open their eyes, and then their minds and hearts, to the needs of students who struggle to lead chaste lives despite their immersion in the culture of promiscuity that Wolfe so vividly describes. Which institution of higher learning will be the one bold—and compassionate—enough to lead the way?

Resources:

Princeton University’s Anscombe Society

The Love and Fidelity Network

“Collegiate Sex-Ed” by Ryan T. Anderson, Public Discourse

“Struggling Alone” by Ryan T. Anderson, First Things

Robert P. George and John B. Londregan are professors in Princeton’s Department of Politics. A version of this article originally appeared in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Yet one often hears arguments in favor of abortion. A colleague once asserted that most people are both pro-life and pro-choice. To the extent that he is correct, most people have not thought carefully about abortion. How seriously would we take someone who claimed to be against dumping toxic waste into drinking water, but who opposed legislation to prohibit it? What would we think of a person who thought torture was morally abhorrent, but who supported the “sacred” right of police interrogators to freely choose whether to resort to it? And what of the person opposed to murder, who thought that legislation against it was an undesirable interference in a matter that ought to be left to the consciences of potential killers?

But one takes a similarly absurd stance by proudly displaying compassion for the unfolding human wonder that is a developing fetus while at the same time sanctimoniously asserting that the decision to end that life is a private matter of conscience that should be left to the mother. Curiously, when it is suggested that the state has a duty to intervene, the woman carrying the child is referred to by abortion advocates as the mother, but the developing fetus is described as “it” rather than as “him” or “her” (and feminists take note, it’s usually a “her”: girls are more likely to be aborted than boys). Yet if the woman carrying a fetus is a mother, then isn’t there also a child? Of course there is, and if we are serious about protecting her or him we need to do more than declare our compassion. We must be as ready to restrict the choice of parents to kill their offspring as we are to restrict the choice of an irritated government to kill hostile members of the press, or members of ethnic minorities, or the elderly, or the infirm.

When I argue in favor of life, abortion advocates often ask me, with some astonishment, whether I am Catholic. I am not, though I was raised in that faith. They seem to assume that opposition to abortion can only come from religious faith, and that there are no compelling secular arguments for life. In this they are getting confused about the contrapositive. While it is certainly true that the great religious traditions are united in opposing abortion, so that being pro-abortion places one outside those traditions, religious grounds are not the only ones for opposing abortion.

My principal objection, that abortion ends a human life, is perfectly consistent with my secular point of view. It is a comment on the anti-religious tone one encounters that abortion advocates assume opposition must stem from religion. Curiously, when one argues for the value of human life in other contexts, such as opposing summary execution of political opponents by authoritarian or totalitarian governments, or disapproving of state sponsored racial discrimination, nobody asks about one’s religion—even though the great religious traditions are clearly against such violations of human rights, and religious leaders play prominent roles in opposing political executions and racial discrimination. But in these contexts it is considered natural and obvious that a basic respect for human beings leads one to oppose murder by government, and to deplore racial discrimination. That abortion advocates are not able to make the same connection between opposition to abortion and secular morality bespeaks their loss of moral direction.

During the 1830’s John C. Calhoun was an unapologetic advocate of slavery. He argued that slavery was necessary to sustain a lifestyle of leisure and dignity for “deserving people” such as himself. And indeed the end of slavery did impinge on the lifestyles of people such as Calhoun. He evidently did not understand Abraham Lincoln’s assertion that just as he would not be a slave, so too he would not be a master. Of course, if abortion had been “safe,” legal, and available in the late 18th century, slavery advocates would probably not have had Lincoln to contend with, as his mother was born out of wedlock. If abortion had been as available, and as readily excused, at the end of the eighteenth century as it is at the beginning of the twenty-first, it is very likely that Lincoln’s maternal grandparents would have opted to abort his mother.

In any event, we can imagine what Lincoln would have thought of Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s sorry argument that it would be wrong to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision because so many people had planned their lives and careers around it, by which he meant that abortion facilitates a lifestyle. This is scant progress from Calhoun’s argument in favor of slavery on essentially the same grounds. Yes, it is true that banning abortion would impinge on the lifestyle choices of men and women who are willing neither to become parents, nor to exercise even the modicum of self control needed to eliminate the possibility by means short of abortion. When abortion advocates mawkishly present abortion as the key to emancipation, they essentially argue that sexual indulgence is worth killing one’s children for. I suspect that John C. Calhoun would have agreed. Abraham Lincoln, who knew a thing or two about freedom and emancipation, would be outraged.

Abortion Colors Our Views on the Whole Panoply of Human Issues

Discussion of abortion tends to assume that the issue is a static one, with society’s attitudes about the sanctity of life remaining unaffected by decisions about how to deal with abortion. This is a flawed assumption. Four decades ago when the then-governor of California Ronald Reagan signed legislation legalizing abortion, he believed, incorrectly, that doctors would be very reluctant to apply the law, and that in most cases they would refuse to perform abortions. Even if his conjecture had been born out, his decision to sign the law was wrong—and to his credit, Ronald Reagan eventually recognized that his signature had been a mistake.

What actually happened was that the law turned abortion into commerce. Far from being a little used option, abortion became a multi-billion dollar industry, with thousands of people depending upon it for their livelihoods. Today, protests in front of abortion clinics are forbidden by the courts on the ground that they impede commerce! Forty years ago it was unthinkable that euthanasia (also known as murder) might be used by doctors instead of treating moribund patients, let alone those with difficult-to-treat diseases whose prospects were poor. Not so today! In an environment in which third-trimester abortion is legal, and in which there is vocal political advocacy, backed up by the courts, for partial-birth abortion, infanticide and euthanasia are no longer universally considered to be beyond the pale. Over a third of a century of legal support for abortion has desensitized public opinion and left people more brutal.

The 35 years since Roe v. Wade have left millions of men and women with the psychological scars of having aborted their children. This is an additional terrible price to pay for the violence done by abortion. It is also a factor in the public discourse. Millions of people have been co-opted in by the abortion lobby in the most chilling way. By becoming accomplices to abortion they are now caught in a dilemma. If they recognize that abortion stops a human heart, then they are forced to reconcile themselves with the terrible act to which they have been party. Of course, the painful repentance this entails is the first step toward reconciliation. But it is a difficult step, and many people prefer the anesthesia offered by their awkward arguments in favor of abortion to a painful awakening to what abortion has done in their lives. For those of us who seek to protect life, these psychological realities are a challenge. Because abortion is a matter of life and death the debate has taken on a strongly adversarial tone. Yet the strident tone of the debate can itself help to further entrench abortion apologists in their refusal to face up to the cruelty of the killing they advocate. We need to continually remind ourselves to reserve compassion for people who have had abortions, even as we deplore what they have done, and more importantly, what will continue to be done if we fail to change the law.

The atrocity of partial-birth abortion is an extreme at which many people who are otherwise blind to the evil of abortion still balk. One’s instinctive empathy for a small helpless child comes into play when this egregious outrage is described, and abortion advocates seek to minimize the vivid details. Yet some extremists are even willing to treat the child who becomes the target of partial-birth abortion as an object with no feelings to be considered, placing their ideology ahead of the most basic empathy. There is precedent for this. When one reads accounts of Nazi Germany it is the capacity of Nazi fanatics to commit atrocities even against the most helpless people, including children, the disabled, and the elderly that is most disturbing. They placed their twisted ideology that told them that the people they were killing were subhuman ahead of their instinctive sense of protectiveness and empathy toward the weak and the helpless. This is the same suppression of human empathy, decency, and kindness by an ideology that we encounter in the ghoulish fanatics who support partial-birth abortion.

Moving Forward

While gazing into crystal balls is always dangerous, the dynamic impact of abortion on society means it is unlikely that the status quo will remain in place. Society might continue on its present course, with an increasingly casual legal attitude towards even partial-birth abortion. It is easy to forget that before the Second World War the eugenics movement had deep roots throughout the world, including the United States. The stark horror of Nazi eugenics conferred an entire generation with a lifetime immunity against the appeal of eugenics. But today’s adults do not have the vivid memory of the Nazis, and like buried toxic waste contaminating an aquifer, eugenics arguments are seeping back into the public discourse.

In the Netherlands, “physician assisted suicide” is legal. While it is still the exception rather than the rule, we can expect that the Dutch government, which pays for medical care, is not completely oblivious to the fact that killing very sick people entails less expenditure than caring for them. Just as doctors responded once abortion became legal commerce, so too the medical establishment is likely to respond to the new financial incentives surrounding euthanasia. Once respect for the dignity of human life has been eroded by abortion becoming a banal everyday evil, resistance to euthanasia will weaken.

In the U.S. it will be insurance companies that will feel the incentives to reduce outlays on care by killing expensive patients. Expect that in the U.S. euthanasia will initially be reserved for the terminally ill, but in the style of former President Clinton, insurance companies and unscrupulous doctors will quickly note that it all depends on what your definition of “terminal” is. The destructive effects on society are potentially very far reaching. By the time the tail end of the baby boom generation become elderly they may discover that old age has become a nightmare. Perhaps we shall see the day when those who fail to commit to euthanasia upon an expensive diagnosis have their insurance discontinued. Whether such a barbaric society could long sustain itself is an open question. What is clear is that we would be ill-served by continuing a sequence of policies that could reach such ends.

A more encouraging possibility is that society will awaken to the destructiveness of abortion, and begin to restrict it. The debates over partial-birth abortion are encouraging in this respect. Most people seem to retain their basic instinct to preserve life when it comes to this barbaric practice. A successful ban—and getting the courts to cooperate will be far from easy—would set the healthy precedent that abortion is not an unqualified right. Just as allowing nearly unlimited abortion tends to desensitize people to killing, so too prohibiting one of the most egregious forms of abortion will restore people’s sensitivities, and more will ask: why, if infanticide and partial-birth abortion are unacceptable, is it tolerable that there are third-trimester abortions? Once the precedent is set for defending the life of the fetus, public opinion, and public morality, may shift more decisively in favor of life, and we may move closer towards a world in which forty million fetuses are not aborted every year.

John Londregan is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.