Sex is quite common among emerging adults, though not as common as they generally believe it to be. Among 18- to 23-year-old women currently in non-marital relationships, only 4 percent are not sexually involved with their partner. (The figure for non-involvement is slightly higher for men because fewer men consider their sexual attachments to be relationships.) While these figures seem high, most emerging adults believe that their peers are having sex more often, and earlier, than they really are. This “pluralistic ignorance” is a powerful shaper of sexual behavior, often causing people to engage in sexual practices they might otherwise be reluctant to consider.

Surveys and interviews indicate that emerging adults base their desire to delay marriage on a set of widely shared reasons. Emerging adults describe a desire to “become their own person,” but struggle to express just what this means. Nonetheless, they are notably united in their belief that one’s 20s is a time that should be reserved for experimentation. Related to this is the common “travel narrative,” the belief that one should travel before getting married. People who cite this desire rarely have a specific destination in mind, and few are able to explain just how marriage (which generally reduces expenses and increases resources) nixes travel possibilities.

Emerging adults must balance their ideas of life and love against sometimes harsh realities. Regnerus and Uecker explain the extent to which sexual behavior is determined by the “sexual marketplace.” Their study suggests that where there are more women and fewer men, sex happens more often and with fewer “costs,” like romantic attachment or male commitment.

The remarkable educational gains made by women—for every 74 men in college in 2005, there were one hundred women—has tipped the sex ratio in favor of the men on campus. A female college student who hasn’t had a relationship in college has an 85% chance of being a virgin if 30% of the student body is female. The same woman on a campus that is 70% female has only a 36% chance of being a virgin. These figures are a significant reflection of the power women wield in sexual relationships, since women are usually (though certainly not always) the partner that seeks to delay intercourse and stands to benefit most from doing so.

The female tilt in the sex ratio extends to the cities and neighborhoods frequented by college-educated young adults. In four zip codes in lower Manhattan, women constitute 78% of all 20-year-olds, declining somewhat over time to a still high 57% of all 30-year-olds. Such an imbalance in the sexual marketplace leads, Regnerus and Uecker report, to “lower levels of relationship commitment, less favorable treatment of women by men, and a more sexually permissive climate wherein women receive less in exchange for sex.”

After looking at these data, Regnerus and Uecker offer a powerful conclusion: the failure of American men to compete academically with their female peers has created a gender imbalance that leaves women at a disadvantage in the sexual marketplace. It is a particularly bitter irony that the societal neglect of the young American male has now become a significant threat to the happiness and well-being of the young American female. If we are to “take back the night,” we may have to first recapture a compelling vision of masculinity that makes education and achievement attractive to a lost generation of young men.

What exactly are the risks of premarital sex? The authors discuss the most well-known and widely feared, including pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection. In the process, they point out the many difficulties of promoting sexual health. Condom usage can be very effective in preventing pregnancy, if done consistently, but typical usage is so haphazard that it is no more effective than the extraction method.

Such are the frustrations of those charged with promoting sexual health, a notion that Regnerus and Uecker argue must be expanded to take account of psychological as well as physical health. They assemble data that shows that “most emerging adults will not experience an unintended pregnancy or an STI, but have already and will continue to experience regrettable sex.”

Indeed, our current preoccupation with keeping sex sanitary, salutary, and unencumbered by anything resembling a moral judgment has led to a narrow focus on preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and an effective denial of the regret and depression that follow many sexual encounters. Facing up to the psychological problems associated with casual sex (which are far more common among women) will require the medical profession to decide whether it is possible to withhold judgment without denying necessary care.

Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker gather together (while adding to) a vast body of social science. The picture they draw from the data is one of an age group whose most common sexual practices and social scripts can thwart the relational fulfillment and personal happiness its members seek. A scholarly yet accessible summary of the sexual practices and beliefs of emerging adults, Premarital Sex in America is a book that should be of as much interest and use to students as to their Sociology professors.

Matthew Schmitz is the managing editor of Public Discourse.

Receive Public Discourse by email, become a fan of Public Discourse on Facebook, follow Public Discourse on Twitter, and sign up for the Public Discourse RSS feed.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

This lazy slander is as common as it is untrue. Of course, there is much more that needs to be done, but in the decades since Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers have taken the lead in offering vital services to mothers and infants in need. Operating with little support—and often actual opposition—from agencies, foundations, and local governments, pro-lifers have relied upon a network of committed donors and volunteers to make great strides in supporting mothers and their infants. It’s time the media takes notice.

In the United States there are some 2,300 affiliates of the three largest pregnancy resource center umbrella groups, Heartbeat International, CareNet, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA). Over 1.9 million American women take advantage of these services each year. Many stay at one of the 350 residential facilities for women and children operated by pro-life groups. In New York City alone, there are twenty-two centers serving 12,000 women a year. These centers provide services including pre-natal care, STI testing, STI treatment, ultrasound, childbirth classes, labor coaching, midwife services, lactation consultation, nutrition consulting, social work, abstinence education, parenting classes, material assistance, and post-abortion counseling.

Religious groups also provide crucial services to needy mothers and infants. John Cardinal O’Connor, the late Archbishop of New York, famously pledged to assist any woman from anywhere experiencing a crisis pregnancy, and the current Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, recently renewed Cardinal O’Connor’s pledge. The Catholic Church—perhaps the single most influential pro-life institution in the United States—makes the largest financial, institutional, and personnel commitments to charitable causes of any private source in the United States. These include AIDS ministry, health care, education, housing services, and care for the elderly, disabled, and immigrants. In 2004 alone, 562 Catholic hospitals treated over 85 million patients; Catholic elementary and high schools educated over 2 million students; Catholic colleges educated nearly 800,000 students; Catholic Charities served over 8.5 million different individuals. In 2007, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development awarded nine million dollars in grants to reduce poverty. And in 2009, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network spent nearly five million dollars in services for impoverished immigrants.

The Catholic Church is far from the only pro-life religious group that assists the needy. At the Manhattan Bible Church, a pro-life church in New York since 1973, Pastor Bill Devlin and his congregation run a soup kitchen that has served over a million people and a K-8 school that has educated 90,000 needy students. Pastor Devlin and other church families have adopted scores of babies, and taken in scores of pregnant women, including some who were both drug-addicted and HIV positive. The church runs a one-hundred-and-fifty-bed residential drug rehabilitation center and a prison ministry at Rikers Island. All told, the church runs some forty ministries, and all without a government dime.

No major pro-abortion group or institution has taken on a comparable commitment to vulnerable Americans. Pregnancy resource centers devote significant resources to supporting women who have already decided to have an abortion, but abortion advocates offer no similar support to women who wish to continue their pregnancies. Indeed, they often devote their resources to shutting down the services provided by pro-lifers. NARAL Pro-Choice America reports spending twenty thousand dollars on “crisis pregnancy centers” in Maryland in order to “investigate” and publicly smear such centers for demonstrating a bias for life. (One might point out that the same bias once motivated the entire medical profession.)

If pro-life Americans provide so many (often free) services to the poor and vulnerable—work easily discovered by any researcher or journalist with an Internet connection—why are they sometimes accused of caring only for life inside the womb? Quite possibly, it is the conviction of abortion advocates that “caring for the born” translates first and always into advocacy for government programs and funds. In other words, abortion advocates appear to conflate charitable works and civil society with government action. The pro-life movement does not. Rather, it takes up the work of assisting women and children and families, one fundraiser and hotline and billboard at a time. Still, the pro-life movement is not unsophisticated about the relationship between abortion rates and government policies in areas such as education, marriage, employment, housing, and taxation. The Catholic Church, for example, works with particular vigor to ensure that its social justice agenda integrates advocacy for various born, vulnerable groups, with incentives to choose life over abortion.

One of the significant ironies of accusing pro-lifers of being “anti-vulnerable,” “anti-women,” and “anti-poor” is that poor women tend to be more pro-life than their more privileged counterparts. It is especially important, therefore, to offer them options that do not simply appeal to their economic interest or personal autonomy narrowly understood, but rather that accord with their moral outlook and overall wellbeing.

Abortion advocates, however, continually argue that one public policy in particular—further increases in government-supplied birth control—can become a panacea for high abortion rates. However, there is more than a little doubt about the claimed relationship between contraception programs and abortion rates. Rather, in the altered sex and marriage markets made possible by contraception and legal abortion, more and more women engage in non-marital sex without any “shotgun marriage” guarantee in the event of pregnancy. This leads (ironically) to more non-marital pregnancies, more non-marital births, more sexually transmitted diseases, and (irony of ironies) more abortions.

Figures out just in the past few weeks show that this contraception-related increase in abortion is not limited to the United States. In Spain, legal availability of birth control and abortion has drastically increased, with some 60 percent more women reporting that they used contraception in 2007 than in 1997. Over the same period, researchers found abortion rates more than doubled. The results of government policies promoting widespread contraception are clear: more of every outcome that birth control and abortion were promised to curb, including non-marital pregnancies, births, and abortions. Not to mention sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment; is it any coincidence that Planned Parenthood serves roughly the same percentage of clients for STIs (31%) as it does for contraception (36%)?

No one doubts that birth control used in a particular instance of sexual intimacy increases a woman’s chances of avoiding pregnancy. But the social policy of widely available birth control has been accompanied by an increase of out-of-wedlock births and abortions. In New York City some 41 percent of all viable pregnancies ended in abortion in 2009 despite the fact that the city distributed 40 million free condoms during the same year.

The insistence that pro-lifers make birth control the centerpiece of a pro-life strategy has reaped a three-fold reward for abortion advocates. First, its surface logic (“birth control equals no baby”) has blinded onlookers to the historical results of birth control as a social policy. Second, pro-lifers are easily tagged as “religious zealots,” ignoring the most obvious solution to abortion for irrational, theological reasons. Third, abortion advocates can claim to be women’s best friend—by increasing sexual autonomy—despite the dubious effects of their proposed solution.

In sum then, the charge should be laid to rest once and for all that the pro-life movement is not active on behalf of women, children, and vulnerable persons generally. Those bringing the charge—the same groups that do very little personally to help women and children—should be held to account, both for their lack of real charity and for their refusal to acknowledge that their entire strategy—state supplied birth control and unlimited abortion—has backfired upon the very groups they promised to help.

While the pro-life cause has always been animated by the conviction that life begins at conception, it has never forgotten that it continues after birth. The pro-life movement’s message has been vindicated by 40 years of legalized abortion: the personal dignity, happiness, and prosperity of women, children, men, and the nation is advanced when life is cherished both before and after birth.

Helen Alvaré is associate professor at George Mason University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. Greg Pfundstein is the executive director of the Chiaroscuro Foundation. Matthew Schmitz is the managing editor of and Ryan T. Anderson is the editor of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The central feature of the resolution is a call for enforcement against conscientious objectors who refuse to perform or make referrals for abortion. The report encourages member states to “establish effective complaint mechanisms that can address abuses of the right to conscientious objection and provide women with an effective and timely remedy.” While many European countries are woefully lacking in conscience protection, authorities have sometimes hesitated to enforce these unjust laws. This provision seeks to end that. As the European Center for Law and Justice says in its report on the proposed law, “the ‘conscience clause’ is nothing other than an official immunity from liability for refusing to participate in abortion.” While the law fails to specify how this unjust law will be enforced, doctors can be forgiven for worrying that its implementation will be far from sensitive and sympathetic.

Among the report’s many specific recommendations, the most sinister sounding may be a call for the creation of national registries of conscientious objectors in order to further what the report describes as “oversight and monitoring mechanisms.” In Norway, doctors are already required to notify hospitals of their conscientious objector status, and the hospitals in turn are required to report the names of conscientious objectors to state authorities. The goal of these mechanisms seems to be to enable a highly inappropriate and political scrutiny of doctors who have deeply held objections to procedures like abortion and euthanasia.

The new guideline further restricts conscience by requiring that doctors give timely notice of their conscientious objections. But what happens if a doctor’s view on conscience changes? What if he is serving as the sole medical provider in an under-served area? Will he be required to give up his job?

There is already discrimination against conscientious objectors in Britain, where the National Health Service has urged hospitals to ask job applicants whether or not they are conscientious objectors and to refuse to hire conscientious objectors unless there is an already present physician willing to perform acts like abortion. One’s conscientious objector status becomes a matter of administrative record that must be consulted at every step in one’s employment, from hiring, to promotion, to professional security. Conscientious objectors become last hired, first fired.

Consider a doctor who gives up his ability to practice in under-served areas and instead locates to an urban center that offers ready access to abortion. Say he also is willing to have his employment be secondary to that of all his colleagues. He is also willing to fill out the form that will enter his name in a national registry of conscientious objectors. Will he then be left alone? Though he is willing to submit to a thousand harassments, he is still required in all situations to become complicit in abortion by referring his patients to a doctor willing to perform them.

The notion that the document is motivated by egalitarianism and a concern for individual rights is undercut by its creation of two classes of conscience protection. While doctors directly performing procedures like abortion are allowed conscience protection, the document refuses to grant any protections to support staff, such as nurses and assistants, who might be asked to be involved in the procedure. The rights of doctors are grudgingly and insufficiently recognized, but the moral agency and freedom of their less powerful and well-paid colleagues is denied altogether. This means that if a patient requests abortion or euthanasia, the doctor could object and face no prosecution. But if a lower-paid nurse levied the same objection the nurse could be subject to administrative and legal penalties.

While the report preserves a charade of conscience protection for individual actors, it denies that institutions like religious hospitals have any right to refuse to perform procedures like abortion. The report claims that, “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion is an individual right and, therefore, institutions such as hospitals cannot claim this right.” These institutions are not only the corporate expression of rights to association and free speech; they also play an important subsidiary role in providing education and medical services, often more effectively and at lower cost than public providers.

These same issues are taking on increasing importance in the United States. As the federal government becomes increasingly involved in health care, the temptation to politicize medicine and weaken longstanding conscience protections has proved hard to resist. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) passed earlier this year failed to incorporate the language of the Weldon Amendment, an annual rider to the Health and Human Services (HHS) appropriation bill that protects conscience. In its place there are scattershot partial protections. Health plans are prohibited from discriminating against institutions and individuals who have conscientious objections, but governments and entities that receive government funds are not. Similarly, the Secretary of HHS is prohibited from requiring the provision of abortion as an “essential service,” but there is no similar exclusion for physician-assisted suicide, contraception or other morally contentious issues.

As the Council of Europe votes on guidelines that would severely curtail conscience, the American Congress should move to repair the problems with the PPACA by passing a bill with comprehensive individual and institutional protections of conscience. One bipartisan bill, sponsored by Democrat Daniel Lipinski and Republican Joseph Pitts, seeks to do just that by patching the holes in PPACA’s protections for conscience. Congressmen are understandably occupied by the upcoming election, but a bill that fixes these issues should be one of the first orders of business for the new Congress, be it Democratic or Republican.

Matthew Schmitz is the managing editor of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The White House has played host to its share of unusual marriages, but the Obamas have broken new ground by bringing in Michelle’s mother, Marilyn Robinson, to help care for their children. The Obamas’ stated reason for inviting Robinson to live in the White House was so that she could assist in the care of Sasha and Malia, the Obamas daughters. As baby boomers age and America becomes what the President’s Council on Bioethics called the “mass geriatric society,” more and more elderly Americans may begin to live with their adult children. As with the Obamas, the desire for improved care-giving will be the main motivation. But in this case, the elders, not the children, will be the ones receiving the care.

Our society has not always been very clear about what obligations grown children have toward their aging parents. But in the case of the Boomers, the question becomes exceedingly complex. Taking advantage of the rise of no-fault divorce laws, they sought flexibility and happiness through more negotiable romantic and sexual attachments. They had fewer children than their parents’ generation, but those they did have were buffeted by the chaos of divorce, remarriage, custody battles, and multiple Christmases.

Now, the balance of dependence is tipping. As boomers enter their second childhood, we may witness the historical irony of aged parents experiencing some of the chaos and uncertainty felt by their children. What responsibilities of care does one have toward a stepfather? Toward a parent with more than one set of children? It’s no longer a question of who gets to keep the kids but rather of who gets stuck with the grandparents.

In such an environment it is easy to see why the public provision of medicine and end-of-life care is becoming especially important. Complicated family arrangements matter less when the main caregiver for the elderly is the government. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that only 12% of parents age 65 and older report depending more on their children than their children do on them.

In another sense, America’s seniors are as dependent on their children as ever. Instead of direct child-to-parent support, government programs such as Medicare and Social Security formalize and standardize intergenerational support. The average person retiring at age 65 relies on Social Security for approximately 40% of their pre-tax income. Behind the illusion of independence there are painful fiscal liabilities. A May report from the trustees of the Social Security Administration reported that Social Security will no longer be able to pay full benefits by 2037. Things are even more dire in the case of Medicare, which is predicted to be bankrupt by 2017.

The budgetary shortfalls of Medicare and Social Security will require difficult political and economic choices. The main priority guiding those choices should be protecting the dignity of the elderly. We must remove any incentives for caregivers to hasten death. Here the principle of subsidiarity, of local care and family knowledge becomes evident. There will, of course, be exceptions, but in general family members are the most likely to understand the will and protect the interests of those entering senescence. Just as the family is necessary for the raising of children, it should be central to the process of aging and death. In the absence of easy budgetary answers, one potentially significant way to see to the care of our rapidly aging population is to make it easier for parents to live with or near their grown children.

If families are to play a greater role in the care and support of aging grandparents, we will need good laws and economic policies. We will need to promote strong and stable marriages that can support vulnerable children and care for aging elders. It will also be necessary to have neighborhoods built in order to accommodate a variety of living arrangements, including extended families. Aging parents will not want to yield all of their independence and privacy. The single-family middle-class dwelling in an auto-oriented suburb doesn’t do a good job of accommodating for aging parents or an extended family, no doubt because it was never designed to do so. People who already drive their children to soccer practice don’t want to drive their aging parents to the bingo parlor as well.

The Obama family has the benefit of a large mansion in which they can live close to an older parent while still preserving privacy. While moving into the White House is not an option for most Americans, a way to increase choice is to promote neighborhoods with a mixture of housing that includes smaller, single-person dwellings and walkable streets. Cities can also allow families to build so called “backyard cottages,” detached units that are well suited for semi-independent, aging parents, as Seattle has recently done. In some areas today, one is hard-pressed to find any old people at all other than the gentleman who welcomes you as you enter the local Walmart. He’s nice, but where are all his friends?

Opposition to euthanasia, expressed most recently in anxiety over “death panels,” should begin with a stand against the elimination of old folks from our everyday experience. The segregation of the young and the old should be a more alarming sign of how our country will deal with aging Boomers than any health-care proposal in Congress. Today, the use of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities is, of course, often necessary. But their widespread success indicates a culture that is troublingly comfortable with the absence of the old from the world of those who are young and healthy.

As we seek out broad, long-term solutions to dealing with a graying society, it will be important to keep in mind the ways that neighborhood and home design can encourage local, subsidiary, and family-friendly solutions to end-of-life care. Of course, no one type of family arrangement fits all, but it may be time to recognize that if we are to be less dependent on government interventions we may have to become more dependent on each other.


Matthew Schmitz is the managing editor of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

One of the most interesting disagreements between the panelists was what the future of social conservatism should be. David Frum, a former staffer in the Bush White House, argued that a successful GOP would need, among other things, to “turn down the volume” on social issues in order to appeal to an increasingly secular electorate. Would it really be a good thing if social conservatives turn down the volume, or even tune out by disengaging from politics altogether?

What do we mean when we speak of “cultural” or “social” issues? After all, economic policy and foreign policy are as much “cultural” concerns as issues related to sex and family life. One view is that the word “social” in phrases like “social issues” and “social conservatism” is a euphemism for religious. Religion, however, informs our public life very nearly across the board, and social conservatism is only one instance of its influence. American religious zeal has animated political action as wide-ranging as the progressive economics of the social gospel, the demands for justice of the civil-rights movement, and—most recently—arguments against global warming that cite the book of Genesis. If America is indeed growing more secular, its citizens will not just lose their interest in one or two issues, but also a near-universal moral vocabulary.

Conservatives today are accused by some of focusing on only two issues: abortion and gay marriage. Social conservatism, in fact, has never been limited to a narrow range of issues. An obvious example is provided by Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage. Gallagher has led the fight for upholding the traditional conception of marriage, but has also written about the effects of no-fault divorce on children and abandoned spouses. Authors writing in Public Discourse have made socially conservative arguments in favor of public transportation and against torture. The future of conservatism, then, should be modeled on its (often forgotten) past: addressing not just one or two political questions, but a whole range of social problems, with an overriding concern for the importance of the family and the lives of the most vulnerable human beings. Even if today’s hot-button issues fade, this kind of social conservatism will still remain.

Social conservatives must press their case with hard data and principled arguments. One of the leading scholars exemplifying this approach is sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia. Most recently, he penned an article in National Affairs that marshaled social-science data to argue that liberalized divorce laws have been especially damaging to the poor and uneducated. The results of social science are rarely conclusive, but to the extent that conservatives are right about the importance of family and the nature of the human person, the data will bear them out.

Politics is not simply an actuarial science, however. It is, above all, a contest of principles. Conservatives must make principled arguments for the dignity of human life and the importance of the family as a public good. Conservatives showed the need for welfare reform—one of the major successes of modern conservatism—through the analysis of data and the use of sound sociological arguments. This data, convincing as it was, would not have gained much of a hearing had there not been politicians willing to use a socially conservative rhetoric of responsibility to make the case for welfare reform.

We should not totally dismiss Frum’s argument, however. After all, the soft voice is often the most persuasive. Does this mean that conservatives should cease from making explicit arguments in defense of life and marriage? No, but conservatives tilting into a “culture war” must remember that the most ingrained cultural beliefs often go unspoken. A major challenge for conservatives will be to foster cultural institutions that are bearers of meaning, inculcating support for family life and human dignity without explicitly arguing for them. An encouraging sign could be found in recent films like Juno and Knocked Up that contained pro-life messages. Conservatives have devoted a great deal of effort to criticizing the media and some to gaining a foothold in it. What is really needed is more basic and difficult: ways of life—simple, everyday practices and public observances—that build respect for marriage and human dignity. How to foster such institutions is a difficult question, but electioneering is probably not the answer.

Frum called for a wealthier, more suburban, and more North-Eastern Republican party. Such voters tend to see social concerns like restrictions on abortion or divorce as restrictions of their personal autonomy. These constituencies are less concerned with social issues precisely because their economic and educational privilege has insulated them from the negative effects of divorce and non-marital sex. The country’s poor Black, Hispanic, and rural White communities suffer some of the highest rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and divorce and, not coincidentally, tend to be among the most socially conservative in their political views. Frum’s proposal might appeal to those safely perched on cushions of monetary and social capital who experiences these institutions as restrictions on their personal freedom rather than as necessary bulwarks of stability. But it does little for the plight of the rest.

This brings us back to the central problem with Frum’s argument. All political positions in the end appeal to a set of moral and social and cultural concerns, even if implicitly. It is difficult to elaborate the problems with massive imprisonment of black males, and the related problem of black single motherhood, unless one is willing to talk about the importance of family. Misguided attempts to reduce the role of social conservatives in political discourse will make it more difficult to address some of the most complicated problems our nation faces. The way forward for social conservatives—whether within current political coalitions or outside them—is not to retreat on social issues, but rather to show how social conservatism is a flexible, fertile philosophy as necessary today as ever. Let’s turn the volume up to eleven.


Matthew Schmitz is the managing editor of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Ogden has argued that a law designed to protect children from molestation and rape at the hands of child pornographers would “burden too heavily and infringe too deeply on the right to produce First Amendment protected material.” The law Ogden opposed reasonably asks that those who wish to profit by selling explicit content keep documents verifying that their models are of legal consenting age.

Even those who think that adults have a right to obtain and use pornographic material should recognize that David Ogden’s advocacy for the pornography industry goes much further. His position would allow the purveyors of exploitative images to hide their abuse behind a vanishing paper trail. There is some irony in the fact that while our country employs thousands of inspectors to ensure that meat and poultry are safe, David Ogden opposed even basic steps to ensure that the images consumed by pornography users are not of children. While David Ogden’s stated concern was protecting “free speech”—in his confirmation hearing he said that he is opposed to the exploitation of minors, and presumably he is sincere—it is hard to see any justification for a position that has the effect of abetting abuse.

In addition to making it harder to prosecute those who sell images of child molestation and rape, Ogden has sought to ensure that pornography can be easily distributed and readily accessed in almost any medium or location. He has fought cases in Puerto Rico to allow Playboy to broadcast explicit programming on TV. He represented Philip Harvey, a man who runs the nation’s largest mail-order pornography shop out of North Carolina, in his attempt to deflect a Department of Justice investigation of his business. Completing a sort of multi-media grand slam, Ogden has sued to allow sexually-explicit content to be transmitted over the phone. Taking this quest to its absurd limits, he has even claimed in court that there is a constitutional right for pornography to be kept in firehouses. Ogden’s position is good for the industry groups he has represented but bad for female firefighters who could be subjected to humiliating and harassing images in the workplace. With an equal disregard for the comfort and protection of children, in 2000 Ogden sued to allow pornography to be accessed in public libraries.

If confirmed to be Deputy Attorney General, Ogden will be responsible for prosecuting the same clients he once represented. His long history in government and private practice suggests he will not have the objectivity to do so fairly. While clerking for Justice Harry Blackmun at the beginning of his career, Ogden wrote a memo that heaped scorn on opponents of public obscenity. Speaking of the distinction between commercial and non-commercial material that may be offensive, he said:

It will prevent the ‘morality’-based type of regulation at issue here from being employed to stop the advertisement of a host of products of which the “moral majority” types or their successors-in-interest disapprove. If they are deprived of the “offensiveness” excuse, they will have to come up with more creative excuses.

Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, himself a former Supreme Court clerk and government lawyer, called this a “disturbing” indulgence of “political biases.” Considering Ogden’s long affiliation with the pornography industry, it is hard to imagine how his belief in the right to unfettered access to pornography will not interfere with the Justice Department’s responsibility to protect children from obscene material and exploitation.

Pornography should not be regarded as immune from regulation because it is “free speech.” A mounting body of evidence shows that the social costs of pornography can extend to all areas of society, from creating a less productive and more harassing workplace to weakening marriages. Pornography’s effects, as discussed in papers submitted at a recent conference by the Witherspoon Institute, can be far-reaching and are measurable through economic, sociological, and psychological study. The philosopher Roger Scruton and the political theorist Jim Stoner have recently summarized some of these findings.

If there is any doubt that Ogden’s beliefs lie outside the mainstream of those of the Senate and the American people, one can look back to one particularly telling case. In Knox v. United States, President Clinton’s appointee for Solicitor General shocked the country and embarrassed the president after he declined to defend the conviction of a child pornographer. Ogden took the opportunity to file a brief in defense of the child pornographer, but the Senate reacted to the soft-on-porn stance advocated by Ogden by voting 100-0 against the actions of the Solicitor General. During his confirmation hearings this week, Ogden claimed that he had reversed many of his stands on child pornography and that he could not remember whether or not he had been paid by the clients he represented. Ogden’s past actions and “confirmation conversion” raise the question of why President Barack Obama could not find a qualified, liberal lawyer who had not argued in favor of child pornographers. People of all political persuasions who oppose child exploitation should pressure the Senate to reject David Ogden’s harmful views once again.

Matthew Schmitz is the Managing Editor of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.