This is the centerpiece of Murray’s argument: The American project can be sustained only by virtue; and culture, more than politics or economics, is the social force that sustains (or corrupts) our virtues. The Founders knew this. For them, it was a truism that our republican form of self-government depended on a virtuous people who could exercise individual self-governance. And from the founding generation until 1960, a shared national culture fostered the virtues necessary to sustain both the American project and our authentic happiness, which Murray defines as “lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.”

But since 1960, Murray argues, the virtues of the bottom third of America’s population have weakened, and two social classes with divergent cultures and little interaction have emerged, threatening the future of the American project. His thesis leaves us wondering how this happened and how we can fix it, but his book disappoints those who seek causal explanations or plausible solutions. He focuses on the scene before us, not on how it arose or how we can change it. (I should add that the cultural changes he reports aren’t based on race or ethnicity; Murray filters out these variables by focusing on non-Latino “white America.”)

Murray defines the “founding virtues” as industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion. The basic idea is that one should work hard to get ahead in life, follow the law and keep one’s word, be faithful to one’s spouse and do right by one’s children, and worship that author of the universe who makes everything—morality included—intelligible. Culture long sustained these virtues through fraternal organizations such as the Elks, Moose, and Odd Fellows, television, cinema and radio, the Sunday pulpit, and the McGuffey Readers used in American schools.

For Murray, what made America exceptional before 1960 was that almost everyone shared and participated in this culture. The rich and powerful weren’t hermetically sealed off from the rest of society. People tended to view themselves and treat others as if all were of the same class. He points, for example, to a 1963 Gallup poll in which “95 percent of the respondents said they were working class (50 percent) or middle class (45 percent).” Following Tocqueville’s observation that “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations,” this attitude built up what Robert Putnam termed “social capital”—connections to other people, norms of reciprocity, trust, and neighborliness. These voluntary associations, Murray notes, “drew their membership from across the social classes, and ensured regular, close interaction among people of different classes.” And the classes weren’t all that different: they lived out the same virtues, valued the same goods, and led similar lifestyles. They watched the same TV stations, listened to the same music, ate the same food, lived in homes more or less comparable, drove similar cars.

The culture of the 1940’s and 1950’s taught Murray what it meant to be a man:

To be a man means that you are brave, loyal, and true. When you are in the wrong, you own up and take your punishment. You don’t take advantage of women. As a husband, you support and protect your wife and children. You are gracious in victory and a good sport in defeat. Your word is your bond. Your handshake is as good as your word. It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. When the ship goes down, you put the women and children into the lifeboats and wave good-bye with a smile.

He admits that his summary sounds like a list of clichés, but that’s his point: “they were clichés precisely because boys understood that this was the way they were supposed to behave.” School, church, and the airwaves reinforced the message: “It was taken for granted that television programs were supposed to validate the standards that were commonly accepted as part of ‘the American way of life’—a phrase that was still in common use in 1963.” It was a time, in fact, when the Production Code of the Motion Picture Association of America could include this line: “The subject of abortion shall be discouraged, shall never be more than suggested, and when referred to shall be condemned.” Murray isn’t blind to the many problems that plagued America during this time—racism, sexism, poverty, pollution—but he insists that the culture did support many crucial virtues.

And then it came apart. In the past 50 years, a “new upper class” and a “new lower class” have formed. The new upper class, accounting for about 20 percent of the population, has been formed by competitive admissions in higher education that select for intelligence, a new economy that values cognitive ability above all else, and marriage patterns that couple successful intelligent people, who go on to have equally talented children. Living, working, and socializing together, they’ve formed a distinct upper-class culture while continuing to live out the founding virtues: crime is low and industriousness is high, predictably, but they also marry, stay married, and practice religion at remarkably high levels. And, as a result, they’re pretty happy.

Things aren’t so good for the lower 30 percent. Few people go to college, only half of those aged 30–49 are married (and their marriages aren’t as happy as those on the top), 45 percent of their children are born out of wedlock, only 60 percent of adults work at least 40 hours a week (only 53 percent since the recession), crime is up, and religious practice is down: 60 percent are religiously disengaged, and only 12 percent, by Murray’s estimate, constitute the “religious core.” This last factor is particularly troubling, for as Putnam noted, about “half of all associational memberships are church-related.” Not surprisingly, these behaviors produce rather unhappy lives.

Murray’s observations aren’t novel. David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise popularized some of these trends at the top, and Brad Wilcox’s research at the University of Virginia has highlighted them at the bottom and top, and in the middle. While Murray doesn’t explain what caused the bottom third’s plight, he does note broader cultural changes that began at the same time: the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the sexual revolution and introduction of the contraceptive pill, and the introduction of government welfare programs through the War on Poverty. Surely these had some impact.

So how does one rebuild a common culture, one that promotes virtue for those on the bottom? Murray predicts two futures. His pessimistic vision sees a hollow elite. Though they enjoy great wealth and social capital, the new upper class lacks the self-confidence necessary to defend the founding virtues. They ascribe to “ecumenical niceness,” whereby one is to live and let live. They “lost self-confidence in the rightness of [their] own customs and values, and preach nonjudgmentalism instead.” This attitude contributes to the “unseemliness” of some elite behavior: Aaron Spellings’ 56,500-square-foot home and a Pfizer CEO’s $99 million golden parachute (after poor performance) are prime examples. If the elite really are hollow, then for Murray “all is lost”: the class is “as dysfunctional in its way as the new lower class is in its way.”

Murray’s optimistic outlook, however, foresees a great civic awakening. Murray favors this event as the likely future, though tentatively and for impressionistic reasons. He predicts the following: The elite will wish to avoid an American version of the European collapses. They will realize that the welfare state cannot work for scientific, moral, and fiscal reasons. And they will rally around American ideals, start “preaching what they practice,” and engage the bottom of society. Murray doesn’t ask that the elite “sacrifice their self-interest,” only that they recognize its breadth: “a life well lived requires engagement with those around us.” Though it might “be pleasant to lead a glossy life, it is ultimately more rewarding—and more fun—to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.”

I have trouble seeing this prediction as a viable solution to the problems Murray has described. First, too many elites are deeply committed to the sexual revolution and secularism—and thus are actively working to undermine the founding virtues of marriage and religion. Second, I fear that many of the new elites practice the founding virtues only for their utility, not their moral value.

As to the first point, Brooks in his review claims that Murray’s data show that “it’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.” But is this really true if the Hugh Hefners and Margaret Sangers of the world shaped American culture post–1960? Today’s popular culture no longer promotes the founding virtues—we need only consider our music, movies, television shows, and the public morality imposed on us. There’s no denying that there has been a coordinated effort to undermine the family, morality, and religion in America.

As to the second point, I’ve noticed a sort of practical Machiavellianism among the undergraduates I’ve taught—many of whom come from and are going to the new upper class, though most are of the middle. Insofar as they behave in ways that conform to traditional morality, it’s largely because they’ve figured out that those behaviors lead to the most practical success. Rather than practicing moral virtues, they’ve acquired Machiavelli’s “effective truth,” virtu. They’re good utility-maximizers. But they don’t believe in a binding morality, in obligations to virtuous behavior, or in any sort of moral sanction from God. If they do believe in God, it’s a God without demands. It’s what Christian Smith described as a “therapeutic deism.”

You can even see this phenomenon in Murray’s own language. The harshest denunciation he can muster is to call something “unseemly”—a term more suggestive of aesthetic than binding moral judgment. And the biggest push he can give the new upper class to help the new lower class is to say that a “textured life” is more fulfilling than a “glossy” one.

We are left with an elite who through education, law, and media have torn down the values and beliefs that made America prosperous, even while they still behave more or less in accord with those values for strategic, utility-maximizing reasons. If this is true, I don’t foresee the optimistic future in which they choose to interact with the lower class, nor how their engagement could fix the problems of the lower class. University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax has noted that we need to create and sustain “simple rules for simple people.” While the particularly cunning may be able to navigate this world by cost-benefit analysis for their long-term happiness, most people can’t. They’ll default into maximizing their short-term welfare. What we need, and used to have, are a series of shortcuts, heuristics, mores, and life-scripts—culture—that help people navigate their lives without recreating the rules from scratch.

Wax’s analysis “reveals why preserving a ‘marriage culture’ is not just a matter of ideological commitment. Its most important effects are in encouraging the daily habits of thought and action that foster lasting bonds. Strong marriage norms help guide and shape decisions that lead to optimal choices.” Other research shows both that marriage causes behavioral change and that non-marriage can explain cultural pathologies. As the late Steve Nock demonstrated, after their wedding men tend to spend more time at work, less time at bars, more time at religious gatherings, less time in jail, and more time with family.

But I don’t see how Murray’s suggestions will restore this lifestyle. Regardless of the technicalities, the recent discussions on Public Discourse show that God and morality are linked at a conceptual level—and even more strongly on a psychological and motivational level. What’s more likely to prompt a new elite to interact with the poor: a discussion of unseemly behavior and textured life, or seeing Christ in the poor and hearing commandments to love one’s neighbor? What’s more likely to help restore the founding virtues: documenting how they lead to long-term self-interest and utility-maximization, or believing that God desires virtue of his people and sanctions those who fail to practice them—especially those who work to destroy them?

Murray is right to remind us that republican self-government relies on virtue, and that virtue needs the support of culture. But he should go a step further to ask what creates culture. George Weigel reminds us that at the heart of culture is cult, religion. Murray’s data and analysis don’t tell us enough about the types of religion being practiced, and the specific beliefs being fostered. Therapeutic deism and sexual revolution a healthy culture do not make. But a morally demanding God, with transcendent values, just might.

Ryan T. Anderson is Editor of Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good.

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In the pre-Islamic period, the practice of female infanticide was widespread in much of Arabia, but it was immediately forbidden through Islamic injunctions. Several verses of the Quran were revealed that prohibited this practice to protect the rights of the unborn and of the newborn child: “When the female infant, buried alive, is questioned for what crime was she killed; when the scrolls are laid open; when the World on High is unveiled; when the Blazing Fire is kindled to fierce heat; and when the Garden is brought near; Then shall each soul know what it has put forward. So verily I call” (81: 8-15). Indeed, there are many verses in the Quran that remind us of the sanctity of life. We are told that “Wealth and children are an adornment of this life” (18:46), and we are commanded to “Kill not your children for fear of want: We shall provide sustenance for them as well as for you. Verily the killing of them is a great sin” (17:31).

While the religious injunctions reverberate through faith on a spiritual level, the blessings of life touch us daily on a worldly level, as well. As the mother of three beautiful children, I can truly attest to and appreciate the gift of life. But I also understand how heartbreaking it is to lose it.

I want to share with you the story of how I came to realize life’s fragility and the importance of making the most of our spiritual journeys here on earth. Over thirteen years ago, my husband and I were eager to start our family. We were ecstatic when, a few months shy of our first anniversary, we found out that we were expecting. Very early on, we began playing the “new parent” planning game, picking out names and nursery colors even before our first doctor’s appointment.

A few months into the pregnancy, the doctor scheduled a routine ultrasound. Giddy with excitement, we entered the darkened room and waited in great anticipation to see our child. There on the screen—fuzzy, yet discernible—we could see our baby’s outline. We imagined the features and jokingly guessed who the baby might look like. But the ultrasound technician did not laugh with us. As she solemnly stared at the screen, we followed her gaze. As inexperienced as we were, we could tell that something was not right: our baby had no heartbeat.

After losing my first child, I truly began to understand the meaning of life. When the heartbeat we’d heard so clearly on the Doppler suddenly ceased, our baby’s life ended in the womb, before he or she even had a chance to begin in the outside world.

But strong faith and an unshakeable belief in a just God is a great formula for filling any emotional void. As the Quran states in Verse 156 of Surat Al-Baqara, there are great blessings for those “who, when a misfortune overtakes them, say: ‘Surely we belong to God and to Him shall we return.’” Losing our first baby led to a deeper appreciation of God’s magnificence and the miracle of His creation.

Several months later, we found out we were expecting again. This time, the excitement was tempered with worry. Our first ultrasound came much earlier in the pregnancy, and we eagerly scanned the screen for the telltale beating before glancing at fingers and toes or eyes and nose. And there it was, strong and steady! We breathed a sigh of relief. Our baby was alive.

As the months of this second pregnancy progressed and the baby bump grew larger, we began to hope. Each ultrasound revealed a little more of our child and each kick confirmed that this time we were really going to begin our family. As the due date quickly approached, we felt more confident in choosing baby items and room colors. We even chose the name for our baby girl. Her name would be Jennah, which means Heaven in Arabic.

With just a few weeks left before my scheduled delivery date, I went into labor. As we sped to the hospital and I was wheeled into the darkened ultrasound room, out of habit, my eyes went directly to the heart area on the screen that I knew all too well by now. That tiny heart, which I had sought out so many times in the previous ultrasounds, had stopped beating.

That day, so many years ago, I delivered Jennah, my stillborn daughter; and that day we buried Jennah. We hadn’t known how fitting her name would really be. As the infection that had ended the pregnancy sped through my blood in the days that followed, I recognized just how delicate life really is. Nothing can bring life into perspective as much as loss. And nothing can affirm faith as much as life.

Today, as I look at my three beautiful children, I know that God is good. No, God is great, or in Arabic, Allahu Akbar. And what gives me the greatest solace in times of trial is the verse in the Quran that states: “It may be that you detest something which is good for you; while perhaps you love something even though it is bad for you. God knows, while you do not know” (2:216).

As Muslims, we believe in the power of life to change others, and we believe even more in the power of God. In any disaster, in any calamity, and in the face of any death, we are urged to repeat “inna lilah wa inna ilayhee raji’un”—“To God we belong and to Him we return.” In the end, only He knows what is best for us.

I could share with you so many stories from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran that illustrate the power of God in our lives: the creation of Adam, the patience of Job, the perseverance of Noah, the purity of Joseph, the judiciousness of Solomon, the trials of Jonah, the obedience of Abraham, the wisdom of Moses, the devotion of Jesus, and the inspiration of Mohamed. I could share these stories with you, but they are available to all in the Holy Scriptures.

Instead, I want to share with you the story of an amazing woman whom I met recently at a conference. This woman truly exemplifies the spirit of respecting life. Melinda Weekes had recently returned from a trip to the Sudan, where she was helping to enact a policy of slave redemption. For years and years, a rampant genocide was perpetrated in southern Sudan by the wealthy slave traders of the north. They would pillage and torch the mud huts of the villagers, and then capture the women and children to sell them into slavery.

Heartbroken by what was happening in Sudan, this woman traveled across the world to help free these slaves by buying them back from the traders and returning them to their villages. Upon their return, she helped them rebuild their lives by establishing schools and educating their girls so that they could break free from oppression. Describing the strength of these women in the face of modern-day slavery, Melinda shared story after story of the things she had seen on her trips to Sudan. She spoke of one of the most powerful experiences she had had, when she sat with a woman who had lost her home, her husband, and her children, and had suffered incredible harm at the hands of her slave master. She asked the woman, “How do you survive? How do you manage to continue living?” The woman responded, “When the world pushed me down to my knees, I knew that it was time to pray. I am blessed to still have these old knees that allow me to kneel, blessed to be able to prostrate, blessed to be able to pray. And I am blessed because I have God.”

I ask you today to reflect on women like these, to reflect on their inner strength, and to reflect on your own life as you know it. I ask you to accept life as a gift and to understand that your life belongs to a greater power, to a higher authority that breathed life into your soul at your beginning and decreed that you should live it with good morals, good ethics, and a good heart that can truly make a difference in the lives of those around you.

In the memorable words of Mother Theresa:

Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it.
Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
Life is life, fight for it.

I’d like to end with a prayer, a Muslim ayah (verse 286 from Suratul Baqara) from the Quran:

On no soul doth God place a burden greater than it can bear. It gets every good that it earns, and it suffers every ill that it earns. (Pray:) Our Lord! Condemn us not if we forget or fall into error; Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden like that which Thou didst lay on those before us; Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden greater than we have strength to bear. Blot out our sins, and grant us forgiveness. Have mercy on us. Thou art our Protector; help us against those who stand against faith.

I ask you today once again to respect life, for there is no greater gift. Respect life, yours and the lives around you. For when we lose respect for life, we lose respect for humanity, and when we lose respect for humanity, we lose respect for God’s creation, and when we lose that, we have lost everything.

Suzy Ismail is a Visiting Professor at DeVry University in North Brunswick, New Jersey and is the author of When Muslim Marriage Fails: Divorce Chronicles and Commentaries. This article is adapted from remarks made in the Princeton University Chapel for Respect Life Sunday.

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This development came to mind when reading Ryan Anderson’s recent admonition, published here in Public Discourse, that conservatives should pay more attention to social justice. Anderson identifies two concerns about capitalism: First, capitalism tends to promote materialism, which corrupts culture and morals. Second, though capitalism benefits the poor more than non-capitalist systems, there remains the question whether the prosperity that capitalism has created is distributed justly. Anderson invites conservatives to consider what obligations individuals might have in justice to share their wealth.

Anderson’s challenge is well-timed. Material inequality is presently a hot topic, with good reason. And he is right that the champions of economic freedom can do more to affirm the obligation that each of us has to provide for the least well-off. One wonders, is it possible to challenge both the collectivist practices that have impoverished Cubans (and millions of others) and the radical individualistic claims that are often invoked in support of free economic institutions?

It seems that any account of how to improve our system of free enterprise ought to begin by observing what we already do well. The United States, for all of its faults, is a generous nation. Set aside the aid and development assistance that the United States government spreads around the world. Look merely at the actions Americans take through our private associations and institutions. To take just a few examples, American-based non-profits fight slavery and sex trafficking; build sustainable drinking water resources in impoverished villages; provide micro-finance loans to the world’s deserving poor; create educational opportunities for under-privileged urban youth; and visit those in prison. American individuals, foundations, and corporations gave nearly $291 billion in 2010, despite the hard times. Of this, $211.77 billion came from individual donors. More than a quarter of Americans over the age of 16 are reported to have volunteered through or for organizations, and in 2009 volunteers contributed service worth approximately $169 billion.

If social justice is primarily a matter of equal distribution of resources, then why do Communist nations such as Cuba do so little, by comparison, to promote justice? (Are there in Cuba any such organizations as those listed above?) On the other hand, it seems equally clear that a defense of free markets is not the same as a defense of justice. Charity is not a market exchange.

These are obvious facts, but one must sometimes call obvious facts to mind. Here’s another fact that bears observing: all of the organizations enumerated above, and many others like them, are faith-based institutions, run and financed by people who take religious teachings as true and obliging. They are members of faith communities, who subject their own preferences to moral truth claims, and submit in varying degrees to the authority of clergy, religious teachers, and traditions. They sacrifice in some degree their individual autonomy for the sake of some good greater than themselves. They are, in short, communal beings who act through communal means for common goods.

This observation suggests an answer to the materialism that lurks within capitalism, and which threatens the good that capitalism has achieved. If free institutions protect only the rights of the individual to pursue his own material comfort, then they are difficult to reconcile with the demands of justice. But viewed as communal institutions that serve truly common goods—ends that are both good for all and known to all, though realized in plural and incommensurable varieties—free institutions can act as vehicles of both opportunity and justice. Indeed, they might render obsolete the trench warfare between the individual and the state that pervades much contemporary public discourse about questions of justice.

Take, for example, the institution of private property. If property is viewed through the usual lens, it distends in tension between the individual preferences of property owners and the collective good of the greatest number. On this view, property must either free the individual to pursue whatever he finds subjectively satisfying, or instead sacrifice the individual’s property rights for the sake of some greater societal end. Both of these options are troubling. Property rights proponents rightly excoriate collectivist approaches to property, in which the rights and interests of some property owners are sacrificed for a greater collective good, often to the benefit of the wealthy and well-connected. This logic was on display in the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City New London, which upheld the taking of a private citizen’s home to make way for a redevelopment plan, the primary beneficiaries of which were to be Pfizer and private developers. The means were unjust and contrary to the constitutional text, and the end used to justify the means, renewed economic prosperity, never materialized.

On the other hand, state interference in property looks more attractive to many people as the gap between rich and poor grows wider, and particularly as opportunities for the poor become fewer. Some wonder why property rights should protect consumption at the expense of one’s neighbors. A particularly galling abuse is strategic default, in which a homeowner who owes more than his house is worth (and in many cases purchased more house than he needed and could prudently afford), but is able to make payments on his mortgage, nevertheless defaults in order to avoid the loss. In states that do not permit lenders to seek recourse against the defaulting mortgagor in his personal capacity, that mortgagor walks away from his obligation without cost to himself. His neighbors bear a cost, however, in depressed real estate values.

What if property could serve truly common goods, which are reducible neither to individual preferences nor to the collective decisions of political bodies? Property, in the central case, is neither an atomistic nor a collectivist institution. Indeed, when it is working at its best, property does much to promote human flourishing, enabling property owners to realize common goods both for themselves and for their families and communities. Communities pursue goods that are truly good for all, the value of which is knowable by all. Property, understood as a communal institution, can and should serve these goods.

In order to work properly, property must to a large extent be a free and independent institution. The private charity described above would not be possible if citizens were not free to exercise sovereignty over their assets. And something equally valuable would be lost, as well. Charity makes a difference not only to the material condition of the recipient but also to the moral condition of the donor herself; it makes the donor a different sort of person. But the charitable act could not have this effect upon the charitable person if it were coerced. One who is required by law to give to another is not making the other person a reason for her action. She has not established a moral connection with the recipient.

On the other hand, the law need not recognize rights to use assets to satisfy whatever desires individuals happen to have, particularly where those satisfactions cause harm. Property is properly directed, at least to some extent, toward ends that the community identifies as worthwhile and away from ends that the community perceives as harmful. Freedom to do good things with one’s property need not conflict with the obligation to act rightly toward one’s neighbors.

All of this suggests a way forward on questions of social justice. A successful account of social justice must affirm the primacy of communities, and institutions directed by communities, over both the individual and the state in promoting human flourishing. The job of the individual in promoting social justice is to act in concert with others in his or her community to serve real needs, both within the community and in other communities. The job of the state is to support and enable free institutions—the church, the family, property ownership, charitable organizations, for-profit businesses, trade groups—to do their good work. This perhaps is not all that social justice requires, but it is a good place to start.

Adam MacLeod is an Associate Professor at Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law.

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But Father de Lubac knew that optimism and hope are very different creatures. In real life, bad things happen. Progress is not assured, and things that claim to be “progress” can sometimes be wicked and murderous instead. We can slip backward as a nation just as easily as we can advance. This is why optimism—and all the political slogans that go with it—are so often a cheat. Real hope and real joy are precious. They have a price. They emerge from the experience of suffering, which is made noble and given meaning by faith in a loving God.

A number of my friends have children with disabilities. Their problems range from cerebral palsy to Turner’s syndrome to Trisomy 18, which is extremely serious. But I want to focus on one fairly common genetic disability to make my point. I’m referring to Trisomy 21, or Down syndrome.

Down syndrome is not a disease. It’s a genetic disorder with a variety of symptoms. Therapy can ease the burden of those symptoms, but Down syndrome is permanent. There’s no cure. People with Down syndrome have mild to moderate developmental delays. They have low to middling cognitive function. They also tend to have a uniquely Down syndrome “look”—a flat facial profile, almond-shaped eyes, a small nose, short neck, thick stature, and a small mouth which often causes the tongue to protrude and interferes with clear speech. People with Down syndrome also tend to have low muscle tone. This can affect their posture, breathing, and speech.

Currently about 5,000 children with Down syndrome are born in the United States each year. They join a national Down syndrome population of about 400,000 persons. But that population may soon dwindle. And the reason why it may decline illustrates, in a vivid way, a struggle within the American soul. That struggle will shape the character of our society in the decades to come.

Prenatal testing can now detect up to 95 percent of pregnancies with a strong risk of Down syndrome. The tests aren’t conclusive. They can’t give a firm yes or no. But they’re pretty good. And the results of those tests are brutally practical. Studies show that more than 80 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome now get terminated in the womb. They’re killed because of a flaw in one of their chromosomes—a flaw that’s neither fatal nor contagious, but merely undesirable.

The older a woman gets, the higher her risk of bearing a child with Down syndrome. And so, in medical offices around the country, pregnant women now hear from doctors or genetic counselors that their baby has “an increased likelihood” of Down syndrome based on one or more prenatal tests. Some doctors deliver this information with sensitivity and great support for the woman. But, as my friends know from experience, too many others seem more concerned about avoiding lawsuits, or managing costs, or even, in a few ugly cases, cleaning up the gene pool.

In practice, medical professionals can now steer an expectant mother toward abortion simply by hinting at a list of the child’s possible defects. And the most debased thing about that kind of pressure is that doctors know better than anyone else how vulnerable a woman can be in hearing potentially tragic news about her unborn baby.

I’m not suggesting that doctors should hold back vital knowledge from parents. Nor should they paint an implausibly upbeat picture of life with a child who has a disability. Facts and resources are crucial in helping adult persons prepare themselves for difficult challenges. But doctors, genetic counselors, and medical school professors should have on staff—or at least on speed dial—experts of a different sort.

Parents of children with special needs, special education teachers and therapists, and pediatricians who have treated children with disabilities often have a hugely life-affirming perspective. Unlike prenatal caregivers, these professionals have direct knowledge of persons with special needs. They know their potential. They’ve seen their accomplishments. They can testify to the benefits—often miraculous—of parental love and faith. Expectant parents deserve to know that a child with Down syndrome can love, laugh, learn, work, feel hope and excitement, make friends, and create joy for others. These things are beautiful precisely because they transcend what we expect. They witness to the truth that every child with special needs has a value that matters eternally.

Raising a child with Down syndrome can be demanding. It always involves some degree of suffering. Parents grow up very fast. None of my friends who has a daughter or a son with a serious disability is melodramatic, or self-conscious, or even especially pious about it. They speak about their special child with an unsentimental realism. It’s a realism flowing out of love—real love, the kind that forces its way through fear and suffering to a decision, finally, to surround the child with their heart and trust in the goodness of God. And that decision to trust, of course, demands not just real love, but also real courage.

The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is never between some imaginary perfection and imperfection. None of us is perfect. No child is perfect. The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is between love and unlove; between courage and cowardice; between trust and fear. That’s the choice we face when it happens in our personal experience. And that’s the choice we face as a society in deciding which human lives we will treat as valuable, and which we will not.

Nearly 50 percent of babies with Down syndrome are born with some sort of heart defect. Most have a lifelong set of health challenges. Some of them are serious. Government help is a mixed bag. Public policy is uneven. Some cities and states provide generous aid to the disabled and their families. In many other jurisdictions, though, a bad economy has forced very damaging budget cuts. Services for the disabled—who often lack the resources, voting power, and lobbyists to defend their interests—have shrunk. In still other places, the law mandates good support and care, but lawmakers neglect their funding obligations, and no one holds them accountable. The vulgar economic fact about the disabled is that, in purely utilitarian terms, they rarely seem worth the investment.

That’s the bad news. But there’s also good news. Ironically, for those persons with Down syndrome who do make it out of the womb, life is better than at any time in our nation’s history. A baby with Down syndrome born in 1944, the year of my own birth, could expect to live about 25 years. Many spent their entire lives mothballed in public institutions. Today, people with Down syndrome routinely survive into their 50s and 60s. Most can enjoy happy, productive lives. Most live with their families or share group homes with modified supervision and some measure of personal autonomy. Many hold steady jobs in the workplace. Some marry. A few have even attended college. Federal law mandates a free and appropriate education for children with special needs through the age of 21. Social Security provides modest monthly support for persons with Down syndrome and other severe disabilities from age 18 throughout their lives. These are huge blessings.

And, just as some people resent the imperfection, the inconvenience, and the expense of persons with disabilities, others see in them an invitation to learn how to love deeply and without counting the cost.

Hundreds of families in this country—like my young friends in Denver, Kate and JD Flynn—are now seeking to adopt children with Down syndrome. Many of these families already have, or know, a child with special needs. They believe in the spirit of these beautiful children, because they’ve seen it firsthand. A Maryland-based organization, Reece’s Rainbow, helps arrange international adoptions of children with Down syndrome. The late Eunice Shriver spent much of her life working to advance the dignity of children with Down syndrome and other disabilities. The Anna and John J. Sie Foundation committed $34 million to the University of Colorado to focus on improving the medical conditions faced by those with Down syndrome. And many businesses, all over the country, now welcome workers with Down syndrome. Parents of these special employees say that having a job, however tedious, and earning a paycheck, however small, gives their children pride and purpose. These things are more precious than gold.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer once wrote that, “A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.” Every child with Down syndrome, every adult with special needs; in fact, every unwanted unborn child, every person who is poor, weak, abandoned, or homeless—each one of these persons is an icon of God’s face and a vessel of His love. How we treat these persons—whether we revere them and welcome them, or throw them away in distaste—shows what we really believe about human dignity, both as individuals and as a nation.

The American Jesuit scholar Father John Courtney Murray once said that “Anyone who really believes in God must set God, and the truth of God, above all other considerations.”

Here’s what that means. Catholic public officials who take God seriously cannot support laws that attack human dignity without lying to themselves, misleading others, and abusing the faith of their fellow Catholics. God will demand an accounting. Catholic doctors who take God seriously cannot do procedures, prescribe drugs, or support health policies that attack the sanctity of unborn children or the elderly, or that undermine the dignity of human sexuality and the family. God will demand an accounting. And Catholic citizens who take God seriously cannot claim to love their Church, and then ignore her counsel on vital public issues that shape our nation’s life. God will demand an accounting. As individuals, we can claim to believe whatever we want. We can posture, and rationalize our choices, and make alibis with each other all day long—but no excuse for our lack of honesty and zeal will work with the God who made us. God knows our hearts better than we do. If we don’t conform our hearts and actions to the faith we claim to believe, we’re only fooling ourselves.

We live in a culture where our marketers and entertainment media compulsively mislead us about the sustainability of youth, the indignity of old age, the avoidance of suffering, the denial of death, the nature of real beauty, the impermanence of every human love, the oppressiveness of children and family, the silliness of virtue, and the cynicism of religious faith. It’s a culture of fantasy, selfishness, sexual confusion, and illness that we’ve brought upon ourselves. And we’ve done it by misusing the freedom that other—and greater—generations than our own worked for, bled for, and bequeathed to our safekeeping.

What have we done with that freedom? In whose service do we use it now?

John Courtney Murray is most often remembered for his work at Vatican II on the issue of religious liberty, and for his great defense of American democracy in his book, We Hold These Truths. Murray believed deeply in the ideas and moral principles of the American experiment. He saw in the roots of the American Revolution the unique conditions for a mature people to exercise their freedom through intelligent public discourse, mutual cooperation, and laws inspired by right moral character. He argued that—at its best—American democracy is not only compatible with the Catholic faith, but congenial to it.

But he had a caveat. It’s the caveat that George Washington implied in his Farewell Address, and that Charles Carroll—the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence—mentions in his own writings. In order to work, America depends as a nation on a moral people shaped by their religious faith, and in a particular way, by the Christian faith. Without that living faith, animating its people and informing its public life, America becomes something alien and hostile to the very ideals it was founded on.

This is why the same Father Murray who revered the best ideals of the American experiment could also write that “Our American culture, as it exists, is actually the quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian world. It would seem to be erected on the triple denial that has corrupted Western culture at its roots: the denial of metaphysical reality, of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, [and] of the social over the individual . . . Its most striking characteristic is its profound materialism . . . It has given citizens everything to live for and nothing to die for. And its achievement may be summed up thus: It has gained a continent and lost its own soul.”

Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in—not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now—is somehow friendly to our faith. What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV. And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral—the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called—is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

A friend of mine has a son with Down syndrome, and she calls him a “sniffer of souls.” I know him, and it’s true. He is. He may have an IQ of 47, and he’ll never read The Brothers Karamazov, but he has a piercingly quick sense of the people he meets. He knows when he’s loved—and he knows when he’s not. Ultimately, I think we’re all like her son. We hunger for people to confirm that we have meaning by showing us love. We need that love. And we suffer when that love is withheld.

These children with disabilities are not a burden; they’re a priceless gift to all of us. They’re a doorway to the real meaning of our humanity. Whatever suffering we endure to welcome, protect, and ennoble these special children is worth it because they’re a pathway to real hope and real joy. Abortion kills a child; it wounds a precious part of a woman’s own dignity and identity; and it steals hope. That’s why it’s wrong. That’s why it needs to end. That’s why we march.

Never give up the struggle that the March for Life embodies. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many times you march—it matters, eternally. Because of you, some young woman will choose life, and that new life will have the love of God forever.

The great Green Bay Packer theologian, Vince Lombardi, liked to say that real glory consists in getting knocked flat on the ground, again and again and again, and getting back up—just one more time than the other guy. That’s real glory. And there’s no better metaphor for the Christian life. Don’t give up. Your prolife witness gives glory to God. Be the best Catholics you can be. Pour your love for Jesus Christ into building and struggling for a culture of life. By your words and by your actions, be an apostle to your friends and colleagues. Speak up for what you believe. Love the Church. Defend her teaching. Trust in God. Believe in the Gospel. And don’t be afraid. Fear is beneath your dignity as sons and daughters of the God of life.

Changing the course of American culture seems like such a huge task; so far beyond the reach of this gathering today. But St. Paul felt exactly the same way. Redeeming and converting a civilization has already been done once. It can be done again. But we need to understand that God is calling you and me to do it. He chose us. He calls us. He’s waiting, and now we need to answer him.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Roman Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, is the author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. This essay is adapted from a lecture Archbishop Chaput delivered this past weekend at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life.

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On the face of it, this would appear like an unpromising thesis, considering the momentous transformations in belief and culture that have occurred over a period of nearly three millennia. But the radical nature of modernity’s challenge to customary conceptions of the human has thrown into relief a number of extremely basic premises that had been taken for granted by almost every generation of Western man prior to the twentieth century: that humans are creatures endowed with consciousness, or mind; that language conveys meaning; that human actions are the proper subject of moral evaluation.

Likewise, the radical stylistic departures of modernist poets compel us to recognize a very basic stylistic consistency that obtains in the work of the early Greeks all the way through the late Victorians, and this stylistic consistency, so I will try to argue, embodies that basic level of philosophical agreement in pre-modern thought. To put the point another way: there are certain truths about man and the world that one must assume in order to write formally structured, consecutively ordered verse, and conversely, the writing of formally structured, consecutively ordered verse attests to the presence in the mind of the author of certain truths about man and the world, and disseminates them among his audience. What, then, are those truths?

Let me begin addressing this question in somewhat oblique fashion, by calling the reader’s attention to a particularly remarkable passage in Shakespeare. I have in mind that scene in Act Four of King Lear when the convalescent king, just awakening out of his fit, finds Cordelia standing by him and tending to his infirmity. Faintly recalling the great wrong he committed against her in the play’s opening scene, he acknowledges his guilt, and Cordelia responds with what I find to be the most poignant four syllables in English poetry:

Lear: If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
I know you do not love me, for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
You have some cause, they have not.

Cordelia: No cause, no cause.

Here, in one brief utterance, Shakespeare reveals to us the deep beauty of genuine love, the love that is resilient in the face of all of life’s vicissitudes, the love that “forgives wrongs blacker than death or night.” One would have to be uniquely cloddish to read this passage, or watch it performed on stage, and not be moved at such beauty, and it is in being thus moved that we understand the passage. For whatever else the play ultimately means, it means that love is a precious, fugitive thing; it does not change the trajectory of fortune, it does not preserve the purest of souls from the most reprehensible of deaths, but it is our consolation in the midst of suffering, and not one to be disdained—the something that comes from the bleak nothingness of human misery. We cannot know love in the play by its effects, for it is perfectly ineffectual. One must simply recognize, in Shakespeare’s depiction, the intrinsic loveliness of the thing, and this recognition must be felt. To be cold to this scene, to lack any apprehension of its beauty, is to be in danger of misreading the play severely. (See, for instance, Harold Bloom’s essay on King Lear in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, where he refers to the play as “nihilistic.”) A defect of feeling is here a defect of understanding.

All truly excellent poetry works like this. All great poetry moves; this was, for Sir Philip Sidney, the distinctive potency of poetic discourse. But in moving us, it discloses to us something essential about our natures. We are stunned by the beauty of Cordelia’s affectionate clemency toward her father, and are thereby jolted into an awareness of the springs of such virtue in our own souls. We sympathize with depicted goodness because, as rational creatures, we prefer goodness; as that sympathy is elicited, that preference is raised to consciousness (and conversely, our revulsion at depicted wickedness signals to us our disgust for that). It is not too much to say that great poetry reveals us to ourselves, and what it reveals is a creature fit for moral predicates.

The first question of all sound poetic interpretation ought to be, “why was I moved?” and the answer to that question will generally bear some reference to our ethical nature. Horace famously declared that the ends of the poetic art are to “teach and delight” (aut delectare aut prodesse est); I would modify his dictum slightly, exchanging the coordinating for a subordinate conjunction. Poetry teaches because it delights; it conjures in our minds an emotional pleasure through its representations, and thereby teaches us the disposition of our native sympathies—how far they are already oriented toward our rational perfection, and how far not.

Something is obviously being assumed about human nature here, something fundamental: that there is in all of us something excellent, something worthy to be nurtured, however much overlaid with the other crudity of our natures. In some very elemental way, poetry seeks to gratify our desires—not all of them, of course, but those that tend toward the great transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth. Poetry, therefore, rests on the assumption that at least some portion of our desires does tend toward these things, and is therefore answerable to reason. It is an art that demands, for its proper practice, a minimal degree of admiration for the human creature, and a minimal confidence in that creature’s capacity for rational improvement. There can be no stronger contrast with the customary attitude of modernist poetry, which from the beginning was at war with human nature. “It is not an exaggeration to assert that modern paintings and sculptures betray a real loathing of living forms or forms of living beings,” wrote Jose Ortega y Gasset in his essay The De-humanization of Art, and a similar “loathing” of the human permeates modern poetry as well. A mind that loathes human nature will never attempt to delight it. Rather, as Jacques Barzun noted in The Use and Abuse of Art, the goal of the modern author is to “brutalize” his reader; modern literature “is meant to nauseate us and it succeeds.”

If my argument is accepted thus far, the significance of form in classical poetry should be evident: it is there to gratify, and thereby cultivate, the better portion of our nature. Clarity of meaning, regularity of syntax, consecutiveness of thought each become regulative principles of the art for the very simple reason that they are what our rational natures hunger after, and such a desire ought to be satisfied. Obscurity in all of its varieties—dislocation of syntax, arbitrariness in image or idea—is to be eschewed for the very simple reason that it frustrates the expectations of our rational natures. Formal, structured poetry satisfies our desire for the true and the beautiful, and, in doing so, reveals that we are truth-craving, beauty-craving creatures. I am, of course, supposing a basic philosophical realism, and I think that poetry, as an art, supposes such realism too. Poetry supposes that human experience, and concepts such as truth and beauty that are necessary for the direct interpretation of human experience, are more real than any system of concepts that has been abstracted too far from such experience, a point magnificently expressed by Chesterton in his brief book on Robert Browning:

Poetry deals entirely with those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any argument, however conclusive . . . If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. And here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the actual desires of man.

All classical poets are moral and metaphysical realists in just this way, in the belief that among the elemental desires of a human being are the desires for truth and beauty, and that these are desires for real things. And this is why, at a certain point, radical skepticism simply precludes the possibility of writing and enjoying poetry.

This endeavor to gratify our better natures is reflected even in the sensual presentation of language in classical poetry. Meter, rhyme, and stanzaic structure please through their creation of patterned sound. Such pleasure is not merely bio-mechanical, however, for the mind hears too and is pleased in its apprehension of order. But order is a rational principle. Contrast such purposes with those of that arch-modernist, Rimbaud, who wrote that “the poet should make himself a seer by a long, immense, deliberate disorder of all the senses.” Here, again, is the credo of a mind at war with human nature. The classical poet, finding the senses in a native state of order—attracted toward order, and therefore in harmony with our rational nature—only seeks to preserve that order, to cultivate it, to direct it toward greater and more encompassing realities. In doing so, the poet reveals again his conviction that something is there in human nature to be redeemed, something that extends all the way down to our sensual nature, since we are attracted to objects in nature that are proportional and lovely, and where we do not find these things outside of ourselves, we conjure them from within ourselves and usher them into the world.

In brief, the practice of classical poetry assumes, and simultaneously nurtures, the intuitive belief that human beings, for all of our undeniable imperfection, are marked in our essential natures by certain commendable desires, the gratification of which is edifying, that these are the desire for truth, goodness, and beauty, and that these are real things. I maintain that the art of poetry flourished in the West because, throughout its history, such beliefs were more or less normative, and that in the twentieth century, the beliefs and the art died together.

I will go further. I maintain that authentically civil life is impossible in the absence of such beliefs, which is almost as much to say that civil life is impossible in the absence of poetry. This was the meaning of the old fable of Amphion, who moved the stones into their place in the walls of Thebes when he sang to the music of his lyre. Poetry establishes the polis, the ordered community, because only poetry teaches men their “actual desires,” the desires that must be accommodated in any lasting and beneficial order. The community must be organized in accordance with human nature; all other disciplines render a theory of human nature, but only poetry reveals to us the real thing.

For these reasons, I cannot end without lamenting the failure of modern Christians—and clergy and theologians, in particular—to take the art of poetry seriously. I myself am no theologian, and I comment on religious topics only with the greatest diffidence, but it seems evident to me that Christian doctrine presupposes the same general conception of human nature I have delineated. We live in an age of skeptical “theory,” and that theory now appears more real to most of our contemporaries than their own experience. It will do no good, then, to go on preaching a doctrine presupposing that experience to an age so utterly seduced with theory. We must regain our natures before we can regain super-nature.

I sincerely wish all modern Christians would consider how far modern unbelief is involved in false and distortive theories of human nature, and consequently, how far a revival of the poetic art might be a true antidote to the prevalence of unbelief. I think of those ancient Christians who responded with vehement indignation to a decree of Julian the Apostate that forbade them from teaching the pagan poets to their children. They understood what I hope their spiritual descendants in our times will soon understand, that we must first be men, and only after that the children of God.

Mark Anthony Signorelli is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in the New English Review, the Front Porch Republic, the University Bookman, Arion, and the Evansville Review.  His personal website is markanthonysignorelli.com. This is the second in a two-part series. Read the first here.

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Similarly, when one watches a performance of the Japanese Noh drama, one cannot help noticing the carefully restrained, almost ritualized movements of the actors, the way motion and language suggest, rather than directly imitate, human behavior. Here is a dramaturgy of reserve, rooted in the ancient Japanese aesthetic of wabi, “according to which anything gorgeous becomes truly beautiful with something subdued, so as to become half concealed by it” (Yamazuki Masakazu in an essay entitled “Artistic Theories of Zeami”). The aesthetic of wabi itself stems from certain Zen Buddhist teachings; Zeami, the great theorist of Noh, refers continually to the term yugen, a term from Zen Buddhist literature that refers to “what lies beneath the surface, the subtle as opposed to the obvious, the hint as opposed to the statement” (Arthur Waley in Noh Plays of Japan). Again, the artistic form embodies the philosophical convictions.

I call attention to these examples in order to illustrate what ought to be a basic principle of artistic theory, namely, that artistic form is never philosophically neutral, that it always embodies some identifiable ethical or cosmological perspective in itself, without any reference to the content of the artwork (insofar as form and content can be conceptually distinguished). This does not mean that the form of the artwork is propositional in any manner; Byzantine art does not assert the truth of neo-Platonic doctrine, nor does the Noh drama assert the truth of the wabi aesthetic. It is doubtful whether even the content of an artwork is propositional in just this way. There is no more difficult, no more crucial, question for artistic theory than the question of how the work of art means, and only the most hideous propaganda—that is to say, the very worst art—signifies in any unambiguously discursive manner. The sentences of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura do not mean the same thing, nor in the same way, as the sentences of Epicurus’ teachings, though the former, in a certain way, is just a synopsis of the latter. The interpretation of the content of Lucretius’ poem is therefore already a more complex endeavor than the interpretation of Epicurus’ treatise, but this task becomes all the more daunting when we ask of Lucretius’ hexameters what, and how, do they mean.

I have chosen the word “embody” to describe the relationship between artistic form and philosophical perspective, and I think it suffices to capture something essential about that relationship. The Virgin of Vladimir does not propose the veracity of Orthodox Christianity; it embodies it. The audience member attending a performance of Noh is not being persuaded of Zen truth; he is being invited to share in a vision of things shaped fundamentally by Zen Buddhism. The drama is not submitted for his agreement or disagreement, but presented for his delectation, and insofar as that delectation is accomplished, he will regard the perspective not necessarily as true or false, but as desirable. And as his visits to the theater become more frequent and more attentive, as he becomes more accustomed to the Zen vision of things represented by the Noh drama, his mind becomes more and more habituated to that perspective.

Even as the artist’s encounter with the world is mediated by his artistic form—a dutiful sonneteer will eventually think in sonnets—to some extent, the same holds true for his audience as well; a people’s appropriation of reality is significantly determined by the artistic forms prevalent among them. Johann Huizinga, for instance, makes very clear how profoundly the late medieval society that he explored in The Waning of the Middle Ages was affected in its customary attitudes and behavior by the courtly lyrics and chivalrous romances so popular at the time. Similarly, the revival of the ideal of the classical orator during the early Italian Renaissance brought men such as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni into the political arena for the first time; the rigid neo-classicism imposed by Richelieu’s Academy on the theater of the times prepared a generation of ambitious Frenchmen to acquiesce to the ritualistic formality of Versailles. As an artistic form becomes more common among a people, the philosophical perspective embodied by that form permeates the deepest structures of their minds, shaping their conceptions of reality in a way that is finally more consequential and consistent than would be the case with their conscious assent to any set of propositions.

With these principles in place, I ask of modernist poetry in particular: what is the philosophical perspective embodied in its forms? What is the conception of reality insinuated among its audience? What are the habits of thought produced by a regular exposure to its productions? Of course, I am well aware that modernist poetry is no monolithic phenomenon, that it encompasses a broad variety of styles in its own right. Yet as with any artistic movement (and there can be little doubt that, whatever literary modernism has been, it has been a deliberate movement), certain general features can be identified and questioned. I wish to examine a couple of incontestable features of modernist poetry, and simply ask what these common features of modernism mean, in the sense I have ascribed to the meaning of artistic form.

To begin with free verse, the obvious question is: in what sense is non-metrical poetry “free”? What is the concept of “freedom” entailed by the practice of non-metrical composition? One useful way to answer this question is to ask a different question: why didn’t the thousands of poets who composed in meter throughout the millennia regard themselves as any less free than the modernists? No serious student of literature could really believe that a Virgil or a Swinburne chafed resentfully under the alien strictures of metrical convention, and there is not the least indication that any worthwhile poet ever felt that way prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Why not? Clearly, because they regarded the use of meter (or alliteration, or rhyme, or stanzaic form) as an appropriate technique to achieve one of the universal purposes of the art they were practicing, the purpose of causing the reader delight. Patterned language brings the reader pleasure, and thus was an appropriate technique for the poet. The poet was confined by this technique in the exact same way a painter is confined by his paints; these things constitute the limits of the art just because they constitute its essence. A poet could only wish to be “free” from meter insofar as he wished to be “free” of his art and its essential ends. This is precisely the kind of freedom claimed by the modernist poet.

The freedom in “free verse,” then, is the freedom of modernity, the conception of freedom absolutely divorced from all conception of form. It is what Servais Pinckaers called the “freedom of indifference,” which he said was “practically identified with the will . . . In this way it came to constitute, in some way, by itself alone, the very being of the person, at the source of all action.” It is that conception of freedom that, as applied to persons, has slowly eroded belief in the moral essence of human nature, redefining human liberty as nothing more than the unfettered will. The “free” in “free verse” is the same “free” in “free market” and “free love”—the freedom to “do what we like.” It is a corresponding caprice that moves the writer of “free verse.” Thus, Wallace Stevens could airily remark, “There is such a complete freedom nowadays in respect to technique that I am rather inclined to disregard form so long as I am free and can express myself freely.” The poet claiming his freedom from meter is merely asserting his desire to write with a perfect indifference toward the telos of his art. There is nothing philosophically neutral about the form (or formlessness) of free verse; it embodies our own debased conception of freedom, the moral fulcrum on which the West has tilted toward ever-greater societal depravity. The vision that modernist poetry thus invites us to share in is primarily a vision of the liberated ego, the individual severed from all obligation to tradition, nature, or rationality. It is the manifested artistic expression of modern license.

What about the most distinctive feature of modernist poetry, which is its fragmentation and obscurity, what Jacques Barzun, in The Use and Abuse of Art, called “obscure, non-objective, non-communicative art,” and what Jacques Maritain, in his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, referred to when he claimed that the art of his times “endeavors to get free from the intelligible or logical sense itself,” that it represented “a process of liberation from conceptual, logical, discursive reason”? Tolstoy believed obscurity to be the dominant characteristic of modernism, claiming in What Is Art? that it had been “elevated into a dogma among the new poets,” and that “it has come finally to this: that not only is haziness, mysteriousness, obscurity, and exclusiveness . . . elevated to the rank of a merit and a condition of poetic art, but even incorrectness, indefiniteness, and a lack of eloquence are held in esteem.” In that “haziness” and “indefiniteness,” in the sometimes total lack of all trace of consecutive thought or syntactic propriety which modernist poetry betrays, we should discern the verbal embodiment of that total skepticism that so thoroughly determined the intellectual climate of the twentieth century: the doubts about the integrity of human identity, as put forward by Freud and the materialists; the doubts about the efficacy of language, as put forward by the deconstructionists; the doubts about the validity of reason itself, as put forward by almost everyone. In truth, it is this stylistic feature of modernist poetry—its impenetrability, its defiance of coherent ordering—that is most pregnant with the philosophical radicalism of our era.

I think the point is clear by now; in the same way that the mosaics in the Hagia Sophia embody the philosophical perspective of neo-Platonism, in the same way that the Noh drama embodies the philosophical perspective of the wabi aesthetic, modernist poetry embodies the philosophical perspective of late liberal Western society. The conception of freedom divorced from essence, the theoretical primacy of the individual, the broad skepticism toward any notion of a rational human nature—each one of these integral facets of that perspective receives its adequate formal expression in the creations of the modernists. To peruse the pages of Pound or Stevens or Ashbery is to be presented with a vision of things wholly informed by the most fundamental beliefs of the decadent West.

For this reason, I am always amazed, and not a little disheartened, to discover how little antagonism toward modernist literature commonly exists among persons who regard themselves as, in one way or another, antipathetic to modern currents of thought.         Much philosophical work has been produced in our times, exposing the dubious grounds of that mass of prejudice, half-truth, and rhetorical affectation referred to as “modern thought.” But where is the corresponding literary movement? Where is the attempt of criticism to return to ancient principles, as ethics and metaphysics have been attempting to do? There is no sign of such things on our intellectual horizon. (The New Formalism, which some may propose as a candidate for this role, has proven far too timid to counteract the trends of modernism, and far too concessionary to its basic premises.)

To the contrary, it seems to me that numerous people who pride themselves on their hostility to the modern world are quite content to enjoy its poetry. There is nothing demonstrably illogical about entertaining an appreciation for modernist poetry alongside anti-modern philosophical convictions, but we must assume that those who espouse a certain philosophical position wish to see that position prevail in the world, and art is the most effective means by which a particular vision of things can be disseminated. That is why it is so incongruous to find Christian “poets” filling the journals with free-verse, modernist-style creations; they are working against the advance of their own convictions by the style of art they practice, a form of self-contradiction unfortunately sanctioned by the example of that detestable little fraud, T.S. Eliot, who first deluded himself, and who has gone on deluding generations of Christians ever since.

Most people are content to admire whatever it is that they admire in the arts, without giving the matter much thought. And this is probably healthy for most people. But if we wish to harmonize our aesthetic inclinations with our rational natures, if we wish our artistic production to spring from a spiritual integrity, then we must realize that our philosophical antagonism to liberalism, relativism, and existentialism enjoins an aesthetic revulsion from the literature of liberalism, relativism, and existentialism. Nor should we fool ourselves into believing that there is any set of critical criteria by which we can, with rational coherence, approve the works of the classical, or pre-modern, poetic tradition, and those of the modernist tradition, for the latter came into the world explicitly to be the rejection and destruction of the former. But to understand why this is the case, I must say more about the philosophical assumptions embodied in that pre-modern tradition of poetic composition. That is the subject of my next essay.

Mark Anthony Signorelli is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in the New English Review, the Front Porch Republic, the University Bookman, Arion, and the Evansville Review.  His personal website is markanthonysignorelli.com. This is the first in a two-part series. Read the second installment here.

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After King was arrested for parading without a permit, he took a moment, from the confines of his jail cell, to pen a response to his fellow clergymen and offer a justification for his resistance to segregation ordinances. Like any civically minded lawbreaker, King faced vexing moral and philosophical questions from the outset: how did he know whether a law was just or unjust, and when, if ever, was it morally permissible to disobey? In his now-celebrated “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” King’s answer was that “a just law is a manmade code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” “To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas,” King explained, “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”

Those who praise the modern civil rights movement, but who also want to keep morality and theology absent from public discourse, seldom mention King’s reliance on natural law in his justly famous letter. Scholars such as the late John Rawls were at great pains to show how their thoroughly secularized theories of justice and public reason could make room for King, but in fact they could do so only at the cost of minimizing the seriousness of King’s argument. The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, King had studied the Western philosophical tradition while completing his doctorate in philosophical theology at Boston University, and his defense of civil disobedience drew from the work of Thomas Aquinas in particular.

Human ordinances, Aquinas argued in his Treatise on Law, can be contrary to the human good—and therefore unjust—by way of their end, author, or form. The first mode of legal injustice, according to this schema, is a law designed to bring about private gain at the expense of other members of the community. Otherwise benign laws can also be terribly unjust if made by someone without legitimate lawmaking authority or enforced in an illegitimate or partial manner. King, of course, had in mind Jim Crow laws when he spoke of legal injustice, but the concrete examples he marshaled in his letter followed the general contours of Aquinas’s natural law theory.

First, King suggested, “a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself” is unjust, because the end of the law is some private good rather than the good of the community. Second, “a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because they did not have the unhampered right to vote” is unjust, because such a law, in a republican regime, was made by an illegitimate authority. The final mode of legal injustice—and perhaps most obvious given King’s arrest for marching without a permit—was “a law just on its face and unjust in its application.” There was of course nothing wrong with requiring permits for marches, but it was unjust, King thought, to specifically deny permits to civil rights protesters in an attempt to silence their message.

Following Augustine and Aquinas, King famously claimed that unjust laws were no laws at all. Rather, they were acts of violence and usurpations of law that damaged the human good and failed to instill a moral responsibility to obey. And yet even in the face of legal injustice, Aquinas cautioned great prudence and forbearance when deciding whether to engage in disobedience. For the sake of avoiding scandal or the breakdown of public order, Aquinas taught, it may be appropriate in many circumstances to simply suffer injustice. Aquinas’s thought on this point seems to be that the good of individuals and communities will often be more secure under an imperfect but stable order than in a broken, unstable, and scandalized community.

Theological concepts play an important supplementary role in King’s case for overcoming the heavy prudential burden against civil disobedience. After offering specific examples to demonstrate why Jim Crow laws were unjust in end, author, and form, King suggested that these laws were also unjust in a much more fundamental sense. Even if some of the procedural aspects of justice were fulfilled, King insisted, these laws would remain “morally wrong and sinful,” because, as he argued, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”

Although the reference to human personality here may seem a bit out of place, King’s comments were rooted in a tradition of philosophical personalism, which emphasized the personal—rather than material—nature of ultimate reality. Under the tutelage of Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Harold DeWolf, and other philosophical personalists at Boston University, King came to believe that ultimate reality was necessarily personal. The philosophy to which King was exposed in Boston buttressed his belief in a personal God, which he had long ago developed as a child growing up in the Christian church. In fact, the “two greatest formative influences on King’s thought and action,” King’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David Garrow notes, were “the biblical inheritance of the story of Jesus Christ, and the black southern Baptist church heritage into which King was born.”

King was, first and foremost, a pastor, nurtured in the Christian tradition and sharpened by his encounter with the classic texts of Western philosophy. His description of segregation ordinances as “morally wrong and sinful” occurred within a theological framework, and his justification of civil disobedience was indebted to the tradition of natural law philosophy. Indeed, the cogency and persuasiveness of King’s letter depend on such controversial and contested theological and philosophical claims.

These aspects of King’s letter provide a challenge to modern theorists who would, as a matter of principle, scrub the public sphere clean of all philosophy and theology. Lest their insistence on a naked public square appear to be merely an unprincipled attempt to silence conservative moral and religious arguments, they must reluctantly exclude much of King, as well. Attempts to erase or diminish King’s theological and philosophical commitments will not do, for although he was famous for declaring that he had a dream, we sometimes forget that his dream was of a world in which “every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight.” One of the most famous passages of King’s most famous political speech comes verbatim from the fortieth chapter of the book of Isaiah, and the original context was a prophetic vision of one preparing the way for the political rule of God.

King is of course the kind of historical figure that practically everyone wants to claim as his own. Reality, however, is often complex, and the truth about King is that his primary motivations, his most fundamental commitments—the very core of his thought—were rooted in a worldview repugnant to many of those who now claim his legacy. Despite his personal failings, many of which have come to light in the years since his assassination, we should remember King for who he was: an imperfect man and a Christian pastor who, in the best tradition of American politics, fought for justice by appealing to a law higher than the state while respectfully and thoughtfully engaging his interlocutors on the principles of a just political order.

Justin Dyer is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri and author of Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (Cambridge University Press). Kevin Stuart is a political consultant at Teddlie Stuart Media Partners in New Orleans, LA and a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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A recent national survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) provides a closer look at public opinion on same-sex marriage. The survey was funded by the Arcus Foundation, an organization that champions the rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual persons. According to the 2011 PRRI survey, views on same-sex marriage are evenly divided among the U.S. population as a whole: 47 percent of Americans favor it and 47 percent oppose it. Interestingly, this national survey reveals that 62 percent of Millennials (age 18 to 29) favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. In contrast, only 31 percent of senior citizens (age 65 and older) report favoring same-sex marriage. The fact that Millennials are twice as likely as senior citizens to support same-sex marriage provides important evidence of a generation gap on this hot-button issue.

The media coverage of the PRRI survey, however, has painted a very different picture of the findings, drawing the more general conclusion that younger Americans are pro-gay while senior citizens are anti-gay. But does the PRRI survey, as well as other recent national surveys, provide data actually supporting such a conclusion? The 2010 Baylor Religion Survey (BRS) contains relevant questions regarding views on homosexuality that may be helpful in gaining a more accurate understanding of the degree to which there exists a generation gap on the specific issue of gay marriage, as well as the issue of homosexuality more generally. Like the PRRI and other national surveys, the BRS reports that 63 percent of Millennials favor same-sex marriage, while only 33 percent of seniors support same-sex marriage. Additionally, the BRS found that 74 percent of Millennials and 56 percent of seniors agree that “homosexuals should be allowed civil unions.” Though Millennials are significantly more likely to support civil unions, it is not the dramatic split found in support of gay marriage. This finding confirms that civil unions are significantly more palatable than gay marriage for younger as well as older Americans.

Several other questions on the BRS shed additional light by asking questions on homosexuality as well as gay marriage. For instance, the BRS finds there is essentially no difference between Millennials and senior citizens in response to this survey question: “Homosexuals should have equal employment opportunities.” Fully 93 percent of Millennials and 90 percent of senior citizens agreed with that statement. In other words, both young and old Americans overwhelmingly (9 out of 10) believe that homosexuals should have equal employment opportunities. If older Americans are indeed anti-gay, one would not expect 90 percent of senior citizens to support equal employment opportunities for homosexuals.

Millennials and older Americans actually respond in much the same way when asked another question about homosexuality. For example, 54 percent of Millennials and 59 percent of seniors agree with the statement: “People are born either as homosexual or heterosexual.” Finally, Millennials are slightly more likely than seniors to agree with the statement: “Do people choose to be homosexual?” Thus, one can argue that Millennials are more similar than they are dissimilar to senior citizens when asked questions about homosexuality.

As stated earlier, the one area where there is a dramatic divergence of opinion between the young and the old is on support for same-sex marriage (62 percent and 31 percent respectively). Perhaps the striking difference between the views of the young and the elderly on gay marriage is merely a function of the fact that Millennials are much more likely to be exposed to homosexuals or have homosexual acquaintances than senior citizens are. But this is not the case, as there is very little difference between Millennials and seniors, with the vast majority (87 percent and 82 percent respectively) indicating that they “personally know someone who is homosexual.” Simply put, it is inappropriate on methodological grounds to draw the conclusion that opposition to same-sex marriage is synonymous with being anti-gay.

But what are we to make of the undeniable evidence that older Americans (age 65 and older) are twice as likely as young Americans (age 18 to 29) to oppose same-sex marriage (62 percent and 31 percent respectively)? Why is there such a large age effect when it comes to views on gay marriage? I offer two possibilities for consideration.

First, since the issue of gay marriage is a relatively new one, it makes sense that younger Americans have had to confront the issue much earlier in life and with far more social pressure. Americans age 65 and older grew up in a time when they simply did not have to contend with the issue of gay marriage. Millennials, on the other hand, have not been as fortunate as their older counterparts. Most young Americans between the ages of 18 to 29 have been exposed to the issue of gay marriage throughout their adolescence and young adulthood. This is especially true of youth attending public schools in the last several decades. Indeed, public schools in recent years have been much more likely to utilize curricula in support of favorable rather than unfavorable attitudes toward homosexuality and gay marriage. Additionally, television shows over the last several decades have increasingly portrayed these issues in more normative and favorable ways. The data would seem to support the notion that these efforts have been consequential for many Americans.

For example, according to the General Social Survey (GSS), in 1988 only 11 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: “Homosexuals should have the right to marry one another.” By 2008, the percentage of Americans agreeing that homosexuals should have the right to marry one another had more than tripled to 38 percent. Further, the GSS has asked the following question for almost four decades: “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?” In 1973, 76 percent of Americans responded that sexual relations between two adults of the same sex was wrong. In 2008, the percentage of Americans feeling this way had dropped to 53 percent.

Second, it is also possible that religion has had something to do with the apparent generation gap when it comes to the issue of support for same-sex marriage. Most American denominations and church teachings do not condone the practice of homosexuality, and most certainly do not support gay marriage. However, we also know from decades of survey research that the young tend to be less religious than the elderly. Research consistently confirms that the elderly are much more likely than the young to attend religious services and report that religion is important in their lives. Simply put, senior citizens exhibit higher levels of religiosity than Millennials. It stands to reason, therefore, that since the elderly are more religious, they are less likely than the young to favor same-sex marriage. However, should we not also expect Millennials and seniors to differ likewise on other questions regarding homosexuals? As demonstrated earlier, Millennials and seniors hold rather similar views on a number of questions regarding homosexuality.

We also know from the research literature that consistent differences exist between people based on their particular religious tradition or affiliation. For example, Evangelicals tend to be more conservative than mainline Protestants and other religious groups on a host of moral and political issues. Consequently, I examined views on gay marriage among Evangelicals and found a far different picture when comparing Millennials to senior citizens. According to the 2010 GSS, only 38 percent of Evangelical Millennials support gay marriage. Among all other Millennials in the GSS, 72 percent support gay marriage. Turning to Evangelical seniors, we find that only 25 percent support gay marriage, compared to 40 percent among all other seniors. In sum, young Evangelicals are more likely to support same-sex marriage than Evangelical seniors (38 percent and 25 percent respectively), but the difference is nothing close to the 2-to-1 split found in the general population.

There is indeed a significant gap in support of same-sex marriage when one compares all Millennials to all senior citizens. However, when one looks at the views of Evangelicals toward same-sex marriage—a group estimated to be 100 million strong—a considerably different picture emerges. Being an Evangelical Protestant significantly lowers the chance one will agree with gay marriage in either age range, and brings the 18-to-29 age group down to a level of support similar to all others in the 65-and-over age range. Perhaps Evangelical churches are doing a better job combating the considerable cultural influences in support of same-sex marriage.

It is unwarranted and irresponsible to interpret opposition to same-sex marriage as a proxy for being anti-gay. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that senior citizens are anti-gay.

Byron R. Johnson is Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University and author of More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How It Could Matter More (2011).

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You will say that we had the Great Recession, and that bad policies played a role. But will you be able to add that we elected politicians who rose to the challenge and forged a new social compact—one with fewer billionaires but more decent jobs, one with less unsustainable welfare but more family and community support for the poor and the elderly?

Could this be our future past?

I think it could be. To make the needed improvements, we must focus on three key concepts: government, economics, and virtue.

The first two dominate the headlines and the larger public discourse. The financial and fiscal crises have forced us to rethink how politics and economics interact. A consensus is finally emerging about the tough choices that Western democracies must make—thank you, Europe!

But getting our economic house in order, though necessary, is not sufficient. In order to achieve a better government, one that keeps within its competency and fiscal means, we have to think hard about the kind of lives we want and ought to live. The moral character of citizens and the possibilities for good government go hand in hand.

The crucial question is whether we can encourage a more responsible citizenry to address many of the social needs that we have hitherto entrusted to government, often with disastrous results. I believe we can, but we will need to remind ourselves of the basics: Economics 101, Political Economy 101, and Ethics 101.

Here is a taste of Economics 101:

The government must not spend more than what it takes in, except in crises. Even then, it must return to the norm within a few years. In general, targeting the size of government at around 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) is a reasonable benchmark for efficiency. To approach and maintain that goal, we must address the following issues: entitlements, taxes and regulation on the fiscal side, and central banks on the monetary side.

Western social democracies must reform entitlements, but the public must first be persuaded that there are better ways to structure society with less government regulation and fewer transfers of wealth. We also must simplify the tax code by eliminating loopholes that favor the politically influential and distort incentives for productivity. Another essential step is that we demand of the government what we expect of corporations: an honest assessment of all financial obligations. Regulations should reward good behavior as well as penalize bad behavior wherever the existing market structure does not; it is especially important that businesses bear the costs of their own bad decisions rather than distribute their losses to taxpayers through politically brokered bailouts.

Lastly, central banks must adopt a clear rule, a single mandate of targeting inflation, price level, or nominal-GDP targeting. They must be the lender of last resort but allow institutions to fail, regardless of size, when they have made bad bets.

This is an enormous undertaking, but it is not impossible. It becomes less daunting the more we remember what is at stake: not only immediate material benefits, but the possibility of long-term economic stability.

Now, turning to Political Economy 101:

We must set the record straight about two notions: that only a crisis will force politicians to act, and that politicians who cut spending will be punished. In the last twenty years, Canada, Sweden, and Australia have found politically feasible ways to cut back on entitlement commitments in times that were tough but not dire. Moreover, research suggests that a platform of limited government can win at the ballot box.

Are we going to court entitlement bankruptcy and risk the social unrest that emergency solutions bring? Or will we direct our efforts to long-term security now? People can work harder to meet higher ideals set by strong leaders. More importantly, people are willing to make sacrifices when they see the bigger picture and understand the greater good they are advancing. The question, then, is what sorts of ideals can motivate citizens to trade short-term self-interest for interest in today’s downtrodden and tomorrow’s citizens?

This brings us to Ethics 101:

People’s ethical convictions are most shaped by the institutions of civil society, particularly religion and the family. This suggests an answer to the question of how to promote the ethical foundations of a good society: Let the government make space for private institutions to develop their own practices and promote their associated virtues. Let it encourage virtue by, for instance, enforcing laws that protect children’s innocence, encouraging (or at least not discouraging) family stability, supporting parental rights in education, refusing to sponsor gambling, and so on.

Government can promote virtue in at least three ways. First, it can enforce criminal laws against obvious and gross vices: theft, child pornography, rape, murder, and other clear moral evils. Second, it can avoid well-meaning but counterproductive social policies that end up discouraging virtue. Third, it can let formative private institutions, including businesses, flourish on their own terms.

We know that top-down economic structures foster cronyism, corruption, and abuse of power. But the alternative vision of free markets requires a societal commitment to responsible living, and a government that provides the legal structures necessary for private enterprise and the institutions of civil society to play their indispensable roles. Government cannot be the primary teacher of virtue, but it can and should encourage virtues at the margin and likewise discourage vices, especially by protecting individuals and social institutions—beginning with the marriage-based family—that promote virtue.

Finally, governments should target assistance to the disadvantaged in two ways: first, by shifting responsibility to more local levels, where care can be best administered; and second, by facilitating the good work of private charities. Historically, the initiatives of churches, community organizations, and other non-profits have been models of effective aid, not least because they understand the local realities and people with whom they deal. Moreover, even the most disadvantaged are often capable of contributing to their own betterment, if those caring for them understand their unique abilities and needs and are willing to make demands of them. This approach to assistance is more effective and dignified; it’s not perfect, but it is better than the alternatives.


Luis Tellez is President of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

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The publication of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex promised readers a “radical, refreshing, and long overdue reassessment of how we think and act about children’s and teens’ sexuality.” The book was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2003 (with a foreword by Joycelyn Elders, who had been the U.S. Surgeon General in the Clinton administration), after which the author, Judith Levine, posted an interview on the university’s website decrying the fact that “there are people pushing a conservative religious agenda that would deny minors access to sexual expression,” and adding that “we do have to protect children from real dangers … but that doesn’t mean protecting some fantasy of their sexual innocence.”

This redefinition of childhood innocence as “fantasy” is key to the defining down of the deviance of pedophilia that permeated college campuses and beyond. Drawing upon the language of postmodern theory, those working to redefine pedophilia are first redefining childhood by claiming that “childhood” is not a biological given. Rather, it is socially constructed—an historically produced social object. Such deconstruction has resulted from the efforts of a powerful advocacy community supported by university-affiliated scholars and a large number of writers, researchers, and publishers who were willing to question what most of us view as taboo behavior.

Postmodern theorists are primarily interested in writing that evokes the fragmentary nature of experience and the complexity of language. One of the most cited sources for this is the book Male Intergenerational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological and Legal Perspectives. This collection of writings by scholars, mostly European but some with U.S. university affiliations, provides a powerful argument for what they now call “intergenerational intimacy.” Ken Plummer, one of the contributors, writes that “we can no longer assume that childhood is a time of innocence simply because of the chronological age of the child.” In fact, “a child of seven may have built an elaborate set of sexual understandings and codes which would baffle many adults.”

Claiming to draw upon the theoretical work of the social historians, the socialist-feminists, the Foucauldians, and the constructionist sociologists, Plummer promised to build a “new and fruitful approach to sexuality and children.” Within this perspective there is no assumption of linear sexual development and no real childhood, only an externally imposed definition.

Decrying “essentialist views of sexuality,” these writers attempt to remove the essentialist barriers of childhood. This opens the door for the postmodern pedophile to see such behavior as part of the politics of transgression. No longer deviants, they are simply postmodern “border crossers.”

In 1990, the Journal of Homosexuality published a double issue devoted to adult-child sex titled “Inter-generational Intimacy.” David Thorstad, former president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance and a founding member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), writes that “boy love occurs in every neighborhood today.” The movement continues but has gone underground since NAMBLA found itself embroiled in a $200 million wrongful death and civil rights lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston. The suit claims that the writings on NAMBLA’s website caused NAMBLA member Charles Jaynes to torture, rape, and murder a 10-year-old Boston boy.

Not so long ago, the postmodern pedophiles had help in defining down their deviance from the American Psychological Association. In 1998, the association published an article in its Psychological Bulletin that concluded that child sexual abuse does not cause harm. The authors recommended that pedophilia should instead be given a value-neutral term like “adult child sex.”  NAMBLA quickly posted the “good news” on its website, stating that “the current war on boy-lovers has no basis in science.”

It appears that a number of postmodern pedophiles have taken the advice to heart. For a while, we lived in a culture in which man-boy sex was not only tolerated, it was celebrated. And while the furor over the allegations at Penn State and Syracuse reveals that male pedophilia remains contested terrain for most, women-girl sex, because of the power of the women’s movement, scarcely registers on the cultural radar screen.

“The Vagina Monologues,” for example, is still part of the standard dramatic repertory in student productions on college campuses—including Penn State and Syracuse. The original play explores a young girl’s “coming of age,” beginning with a 13-year-old girl enjoying a sexual liaison with a 24-year-old woman. Later published versions of the play changed the age of the young girl from 13 to 16 years old, and the play continues to be performed. Last year’s February production at Syracuse was enhanced by inviting an “all-faculty” cast to perform the play on campus.

While the anger over the recent sex abuse allegations would suggest that the deviant label will remain for pedophilia, the reality remains that powerful advocates with access to university presses will continue their semantic and ideological campaign to define down this form of deviance.

Anne Hendershott is Distinguished Visiting Professor at The King’s College, New York, NY.  She is the author of The Politics of Deviance (Encounter Books).

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Yet it is making some headway. To understand this, is it necessary to grasp how myriad family law developments over the last forty to fifty years have ignored or minimized children’s interests, thus paving the way for the arguments same-sex marriage proponents advance today. For example, as against the idea that marriage and child well-being go together, state laws approving no-fault divorce and normalizing cohabitation (by enforcing cohabitation agreements) do not take children’s presence in a household into consideration at all. Rather, they allow more and more children to be reared outside of households containing their married, biological parents. They also expose more children to instability in living arrangements, and to stepparents and new boyfriends, each of which is, on average, correlated with increased risks to children’s safety and to their emotional and educational achievement.

Against the notion that marriage is the place where society is born and formed, federal constitutional law concerning birth control and abortion from the 1970s through the 1990s stridently instructed us that decisions about procreation are about the individual, not the married couple and not the child. In the 1972 “birth control for singles” case, Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court bluntly opined that “the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup. If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” In the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey abortion decision, the Court went even further, declaring that the liberty interest in deciding to abort one’s own child is, at its core, a matter of “defin[ing] one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”

Finally, against the idea that parental rights are derivative of parental duties to children, there are not only the counter-examples of no-fault divorce laws and the legal right to abortion, but also the fact that neither state nor federal law meaningfully regulates adults’ access to assisted reproductive technologies, including to donor gametes, deferring completely to adult desires for children versus children’s need to know and be loved by their own mother and father.

A look at the legislative transcripts or the judicial opinions or other sources that brought each of these legal regimes into being indicates how little children’s fates were considered from the very start. The legislative hearings leading to no-fault divorce, for example, are replete with references to children’s resiliency, or how the facilitating of their parents’ wishes for a divorce will indirectly lead to children’s happiness.[1] The California Supreme Court opinion that started the ball rolling toward many states’ recognizing and enforcing cohabitation agreements (Marvin v. Marvin, 1976) paid no attention to the possible effects upon children of the greater normalization of cohabitation. Some of the most popular assisted-reproductive technologies were not even tested on animals before being used to create thousands upon thousands of human children. And of course, nothing could have been further from the minds of the judges who gave us Roe and Casey than the well-being of the child on the other end of the abortion instruments.

Given this history, it should surprise no one that in the most recent family law controversy implicating children’s well-being, same-sex marriage proponents have devoted so little attention to the question of children. It shouldn’t surprise us when the Iowa Supreme Court relegates to a footnote its assurances that children will do just as well with a father or a mother as without one (Varnum v. Brien, 2009), or when that California district court opinion in the Proposition 8 case (Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 2010) concludes that opposite-sex marriage is merely an “artifact” of pernicious sex-role discrimination within marriage and society, a discrimination that is now passé. It should sound perfectly mainstream when members of the Massachusetts legislature (before refusing to allow citizens the right to vote on same-sex marriage) called marriage a “right” that “individuals” have, a matter allowing people to love one another, or of “guarantee[ing] the greatest amount of happiness to the most people.”[2]

Are these conclusions about marriage the inevitable follow-up to lawmakers’ recent dissociating of marriage and child-rearing? What about the vastly different concerns featured in over a century of Supreme Court opinions linking the state’s interest in marriage to children and their formation? There are several possible responses. Technically speaking, of course, the Court’s decisions from Reynolds to Lehr have not been overturned; they remain good law. But proponents of same-sex marriage could argue that the language in these cases linking marriage with parenting is dicta—i.e., not essential to their holdings—or even merely historically conditioned expressions of a moral sensibility bearing no relation to our current age. Maybe. Maybe today’s Supreme Court would accede to such a characterization. After all, look at its opinion (albeit over a stinging dissent) in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) granting constitutional status to sodomy, in response to perceived current trends here and abroad.

In light of the mode of reasoning adopted in Lawrence, then, those loath to see marriage and children divorced from one another would be wise to adopt an additional strategy. They should argue that the Supreme Court was more right than it even knew during the past two centuries, when it identified the state’s interest in marriage as children and their formation. In fact, today, more than ever before, we have a substantial body of literature linking children’s—and communities’—flourishing with the stable presence within a family of married, biological parents. Two additional developments also argue for reappropriating and reinvigorating Supreme Court precedents on marriage, rather than moving in the direction suggested by the last few decades’ retreat from child-centered marriage.

First, the most vulnerable members of society appear to be paying the highest price for this retreat. African Americans, Hispanics (our newest large immigrant group), the poor, and the less educated are suffering the most notable financial, emotional, and educational fallout. They now marry less, cohabit more, bear more children out of wedlock, and divorce more often than more privileged citizens, with the result that their children, and perhaps even their grandchildren, risk becoming part of an entrenched underclass in American society. To allow this to continue is to risk the rise of the perception that Americans are different from one another at very basic levels—in our fundamental needs for permanent and faithful love, for support when we are very young or very old, for harmony between the sexes and the generations. This is a very dangerous kind of separation between fellow citizens and human beings.

Second, it should be pointed out that the family law developments of the last forty to fifty years, described above, often proceeded on the claim that children would ultimately benefit from each of them. In other words, even those who were busy effectively dismantling family law’s orientation to children’s well-being were not deaf to the tradition embodied in the Supreme Court’s marriage and procreation cases. Rather, they argued that children would be happier when their parents were happier—because their parents were getting a divorce, or cohabiting, or living in whatever arrangement they chose. They argued that children would be happier if “wanted,” and what could be more wanted than a very planned, well-timed child, or even a “designed” child? They argued that cohabitation should lead to more stable marriages.

Now that each of these claims has been disproved, or at least called into serious question by respected research, there are proposals—for the first time in a very long time—to reform various family laws in order once again to take account of children. More scholars are proposing and more states are considering requiring sperm donors to provide information allowing their biological children to find out more about them. There are active efforts to promote legislation to slow down the divorce process, especially for parents of minor children. Scholarship about the dangers posed to children by cohabitation is gaining a national audience. In short, current reform efforts provide an additional reason to refuse to deem the last half-century of family law “progress,” let alone to take their “adults-first” or “adults-only” rallying cry any further, to its logical conclusion in same-sex marriage.

Helen Alvaré is associate professor at George Mason University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. This is the second in a two-part series. Read the first installment here.

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[2] See, supra, Helen M. Alvaré, “The Turn Toward the Self in the Law of Marriage,” 174-176 and notes therein.

Those who champion marriage between a man and a woman would like to see the Supreme Court settle the matter according to a long series of precedents treating procreation and child-rearing as primary state-recognized goods of marriage. But given that one ought to be realistic about judicial willingness today to ignore precedent in favor of some perceived zeitgeist, an additional strategy to preserve the link between marriage and children in the Court’s reasoning is warranted.

This strategy would show, first, how the path of divorcing marriage from children—a path taken to its logical end by same-sex marriage—not only disadvantages children, but is already helping to effect troubling social divisions between the more and less privileged in the United States. The persistence of such divisions could begin to suggest, falsely, that the well-off and the poor, the more educated and the less educated, the majority and various minorities, do not share the same fundamental nature where marriage and parenting are concerned. Second, such a strategy would highlight the relatively recent willingness among scholars and lawmakers to come to grips with the fallout of “disestablishing” the interrelated goods of marriage and effective parenting, and to begin proposing reforms. This is not the time, therefore, to ignore or deny the robust empirical foundations of such reform efforts, via legally redefining “marriage” to exclude its intrinsic orientation to children. A brief look at our Supreme Court’s longstanding positions on the meaning of marriage (in this first of a two-part series), followed by a look at the whirlwind of family law developments from the 1970s to today (in the second part), will suffice to sketch the argument I am proposing.

A preliminary note: It is important to understand that family law is made in large part at the state level and, regarding marriage, consists not in lengthy disquisitions on the meaning of marriage, but rather in brief lists of the necessary preconditions for entering into it. States’ lists are similar. To enter marriage, there must be two persons: of opposite sexes (in the vast majority of states), of sufficient age, not related within prohibited degrees of consanguinity, free to marry, capable of marital consent, etc. On the one hand, state laws conditioning entry into marriage are fairly laissez-faire. On the other hand, all states signal the importance of marriage by refusing to acknowledge purely “private contracts” to marry. Rather, the state imposes terms upon marrying couples—a set of mutual rights and obligations with which they are not even likely familiar. Even when couples make prenuptial agreements, the state constrains their contents in the interests of fairness to the adults and solicitude for children.

The federal government tends to “make family law” when it feels threatened by developments in the states. Increasing rates of nonmarital births in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, and the resulting astronomical federal welfare expenditures, led to a series of federal child support laws, programs about preventing premarital sex and pregnancy, and later initiatives encouraging stable marriage and fatherhood. The latter, in particular, were grounded upon the growing body of data linking marriage with child well-being. The Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s sprang from fears that one state’s approval of same-sex marriage would lead to demands for interstate and federal same-sex marriage recognition. For the most part, however, federal “characterizations” of the meaning and importance of marriage appear most often in a long series of Supreme Court cases concerning the constitutionality of various state laws affecting marriage or parent-child relationships. While a complete history of these rulings is not possible here, I will characterize their leading messages.

The first message, and the most plain, coming from the Supreme Court concerns the relationship between marriage and the birth of children. While it is impossible to disentangle completely this state interest from its interest in the healthy formation of children within marriage, still it is possible to discern it. In a late nineteenth-century case refusing to recognize a First Amendment right to practice polygamy, for example, the Court wrote that: “Upon [marriage] society may be said to be built” (Reynolds v. United States). Nearly 100 years later, in a case striking down a law banning interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia), the Court referred to marriage as “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”

In several cases from the late nineteenth century to 1967, the Supreme Court revealed in a different fashion its understanding of the link between marriage and children: in cases where only a right to marry was at stake, or only a right respecting childrearing, the Court would nevertheless speak of the two interests as a pair. The plaintiffs in Loving asserted a right to marry as against antimiscegenation laws, and still the Court referred to marriage as necessary for “our very existence and survival.” Skinner v. Oklahoma concerned a law punishing certain felons with forced sterilization, but the opinion spoke of “marriage and procreation” as basic rights. In Meyer v. Nebraska, the case vindicating parents’ constitutional right to instruct their children in a foreign language, the Court referred to citizens’ rights “to marry, establish a home and bring up children.”

The state’s interest in linking procreation with marriage is also shown by the history of laws discouraging sexual intimacy and procreation between the unmarried, while protecting it between the married. Today, laws punishing adultery, fornication, or cohabitation rarely exist or are enforced. Still, even in the 1965 Supreme Court decision granting married persons the constitutional right to access birth control, a concurring opinion could observe: “It should be said of the Court’s holding today that it in no way interferes with a State’s proper regulation of sexual promiscuity or misconduct. . . . But the intimacy of husband and wife is necessarily an essential and accepted feature of the institution of marriage, an institution which the State not only must allow, but which always and in every age it has fostered and protected” (Griswold v. Connecticut).

A second prominent theme in the Supreme Court’s marriage jurisprudence is the importance of the marital family for forming and educating the citizens necessary for the continuation of our democratic society. In the 1879 polygamy opinion Reynolds, for example, the Supreme Court opined:

For certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth, … than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement.

The Reynolds case also contains a less frequently noted observation linking the shape of marriage and the shape of society: “According as monogamous or polygamous marriages are allowed, do we find the principles on which the government of the people, to a greater or less extent, rests. … Polygamy leads to the patriarchal principle, and, when applied to large communities, fetters the people in stationary despotism, while that principle cannot long exist in connection with monogamy.”

In 1943, in Prince v. Massachusetts, the Court not only affirmed parents’ authority over their children within reasonable limits (here, obedience to labor laws), but more importantly for our purposes, characterized their authority as a function of their responsibilities to children and to society, writing: “A democratic society rests, for its continuance, upon the healthy well-rounded growth of young people into full maturity as citizens, with all that implies.” An even more pointed expression of the economy of adults’ rights respecting children appeared in the case vindicating parents’ constitutional right to educate their children in religious schools. Nearly echoing John Locke’s observation in his Second Treatise on Government—“The Power, then, that Parents have over their Children, arises from that Duty which is incumbent on them, to take care of their Offspring”—the Supreme Court wrote in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that “The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

As recently as 1983, in the single father’s rights case Lehr v. Robertson, the Court even more explicitly stated that “the Court has emphasized the paramount interest in the welfare of children and has noted that the rights of the parents are a counterpart of the responsibilities they have assumed.” It furthermore linked marriage and marital parenting with facilitating citizens’ ability to self-govern. Refusing to treat a single father identically to a married father in terms of rights respecting the child, it wrote that “marriage has played a critical role … in developing the decentralized structure of our democratic society. In recognition of that role, and as part of their general overarching concern for serving the best interests of children, state laws almost universally express an appropriate preference for the formal family.”

In sum, our Supreme Court has time and time again, and in an axiomatic fashion, expressed the state’s interests in marriage as: children, their formation, and the building up of a society of citizens well-prepared for self-government. In the process of recognizing various rights claimed by parents respecting their children, the Court has further observed that to the extent parents have such rights, it is because they have duties toward children. Those who demand that the state recognize, as marriage, partnerships of two persons of the same sex, ignore or deny the long line of Supreme Court decisions affirming the links between the state’s interests in marriage and child-welfare and social health. Their insistence, however, that marriage is about the individual self, seeking satisfaction respecting matters related to sex, romance, and parenting, is not new to family law. Same-sex marriage proponents are only the most recent in a long line of voices urging American society to divorce children from marriage, and to vault adults’ interests over children’s needs. The second part of this article will treat this trajectory in family law.

Helen Alvaré is associate professor at George Mason University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. This is the first in a two-part series. Read the second installment here.

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That startling assertion sheds light, I believe, on the abandonment or collapse of both community and solitude in our time. It warrants some explanation. Maritain notes, with Aristotle, that man is by nature a political animal, a being who thrives best in the context of a self-governing polis. This is not simply because man needs the assistance of others to provide for something better than mere subsistence—that he needs carpenters, masons, farmers, and so forth. It is also because he is made for friendship. He is meant to rejoice not so much in a private good, like a mansion with a tall hedge around it, but in those things that bind him in love with others. For Aristotle, the polis is the arena for our practice both of the practical virtues—prudence in educating our children, for example, or courage in defending our homes against enemies abroad—and of the intellectual virtues. The deepest friendships are forged when we share with others the truths we have beheld. With respect to this view of man, the pagan philosophers and the Christian theologians and contemplatives were at one.

In earlier times, even when a man seemed to have left the community behind, to retire in solitude to the desert, as did Anthony of Egypt, he was not abandoning social life so much as incorporating it into a way of life that transcends the social. So Maritain cites Thomas Aquinas, who argues that although the solitary contemplative, unlike almost all other men, has attained to a kind of self-sufficiency, his condition presupposes long exercise in virtues he could not have attained “without the help of the society of his fellow beings—with respect to the intelligence, to be taught; with respect to the heart, that harmful affections be repressed by the example and correction of others.” That is why, Maritain says, the ancient Christians used to drag the hermits from the desert to be their bishops. They were the ones who knew best the social and the individual good of man.

Whether that assessment was correct in every case is not the point. I mean rather to ask what happens when the conditions and assumptions that made the assessment possible no longer obtain: when self-government has been absorbed into the machinery of a vast, impersonal state, whose acts and ends are evaluated quantitatively according to a model of industrial efficiency (or inefficiency), and when people are taught that there is no objective moral or metaphysical truth, and no beauty of being, to provide the objects of contemplation. If solitude is the flower of life in community, then perhaps we may say, turning the equation inside out, that the terminus of a life that knows no contemplation, no higher good than the efficient pursuit of quantifiable objects, is isolation.

Here we need not consider the sadness at the heart of pleasure seeking—the profound loneliness that settles upon young people drinking at a party when there is nothing to celebrate, as they warily circle about one another, checking one another out, reckoning and being reckoned. It should be obvious that what is quantifiable is by its very nature finite and therefore—since man is never satisfied by the finite—felt as scarce. Thus the pursuit of such fleeting goods, as if they were the highest ends to which man can attain, is necessarily divisive. Here I mean more than that people compete for eminence in them. I mean that there is nothing in them that unites us; they presuppose that we are not meant for one another in love, but that at best we can get along beside one another, sometimes pursuing a pleasure we have in common, but otherwise acknowledging that people themselves are to be valued only according as they assist us in our own pursuits. And when their condition is such that they cannot do so—a child starving in Somalia, or a grandmother with a disintegrated mind—then we subject them to the merciless calculus of our utilitarian world. We tacitly say, “It will be better, all told, if they were to die quietly,” meaning that it will be more convenient for us, less of a reproach to our lives.

“No man is an island,” wrote Donne, but now we are all islands. That is the meaning of the word isolation—which has nothing to do, etymologically or existentially, with solitude. When the lover of wisdom retreats to the hills, he may commune with Socrates and Phaedrus under the plane tree on the country road from Athens, or he may recite to himself the poetry of Milton. He may open his heart to the fundamental goodness of the creatures around him, the trees, the animals, even the rocks and the dust. Solitude is thus often a retreat into relationship, a quieting of the noise of daily living so that we may live in the world and with one another the more richly.

But isolation—literally, island-making—is altogether different. If we say, “Because there is no transcendent good, we must each pursue what looks appealing to us, so long as we remain within the law,” we might as well invert the wisdom of Donne, affirming that we are not a part of the continent, a part of the main. If we say, “It is good that modern government provides for so many of our needs, so that we need not depend upon our neighbors,” we might as well reconceive our republic as a vast archipelago of individuals, delimited by the only freedom we acknowledge: freedom from one another.

So it is that a moral philosophy of isolation, of the autonomy of the individual pursuing his own pleasures, coincides with a politics of isolation, whereby individuals purchase that autonomy at the price of ceding to the state everything that people as social beings used to do for one another. We see this bargain implicitly in the ancient, apolitical hedonists, the Epicureans. They scorned political ambition, but ultimately for a suspect reason: it troubles a man’s life. Somebody, of course, would have to assume the burden of governing and soldiering, but it would not be the Epicureans. It is true that they wished, like the followers of Pythagoras and Plato and the philanthropic Aristotle, to promote the friendship of truth-seekers as the highest of human goods, but ultimately that hope had no solid foundation. For once one has said, “All things are only the collocation of atoms colliding in empty space,” there is not too much to say that can make the heart leap. Exalting pleasure to the highest good, as Cicero trenchantly noted in his treatise De Amicitia, reduces friendship to utility and the friend to an instrument. Friends do not love one another because they find the love useful to their pleasures—that is a contradiction. They wish rather to be useful to one another because of their love. Thus the Epicureans fail in both regards: their principles isolate people from one another and from any active responsibility for the common good.

It is important that we recognize the affinity between these forms of isolation. We may see it more clearly by imagining the converse. Whenever people unite in their devotion to a good that is not quantifiable, not reducible to pleasure, not deliverable by the state, and not subject to change or the drifts of human opinion, they stand against both the state and the hedonistic isolation it encourages. It must be so. They will affirm, if only implicitly, that there is something greater than the state, and that we are meant for one another, to share the beauty of what we behold, which, since it is independent of our beholding, allows our community to embrace those who came before us and those who will come after. Pleasure is bound to the moment and to the person experiencing it, but this joy beckons to the universal and the everlasting. The state is a fictive union, a faceless collective, but this joy is essentially personal and unitive. It casts land-bridges from man to man, from age to age. It is therefore suspected by statists and hedonists alike.

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Ironies of Faith. He has translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

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Some, particularly those who have witnessed student activity surrounding such significant social issues as the Vietnam War, civil rights, or apartheid, expressed surprise at such activity. Many observed in dismay the stark contrast between the rowdy protest and the deafening silence on campus for the children who were allegedly sexually assaulted on the hallowed grounds of the athletic facility.

Sadly, however, there are two main reasons that we should not find ourselves surprised by this juxtaposition of silent indifference for the child victims of sexual assault, on the one hand, and massive support for those whose reputations have been sullied by the subsequent allegations, on the other. This disturbing outcry is consistent with how we approach child sexual abuse.

First, this reaction of societal indifference to the reality of child sexual assault is not new. As any child abuse prosecutor will tell you, similar community reaction is par for the course. Often, community support is placed with the alleged perpetrator, a phenomenon whose roots are analogous to those of the Penn State protesters’ support for an allegedly complicit supervisor. Once a child has bravely disclosed sexual abuse by a public figure, the challenge for him or her is often not the trial, but the collateral public fallout; community members often respond hostilely to those who reveal the true nature of a socially integrated sexual offender, one who has gained the community’s trust in order to gain access to and assault children. Prosecutors find themselves preparing families for threats, bullying at school, protests in the media, public rallies in favor of the accused, and courtrooms packed with citizens who vouch for their accused pillar and ignore evidence that supports the accusation. In the face of such a societal reaction, the victim is lost, if not targeted.

Why does this occur? Perhaps it is public denial, fueled by the desire to believe that this could not take place in one’s community, that one could not so egregiously have misjudged the perpetrator. Perhaps it is the scheming of the offenders, who count on this indifference and often select and groom victims who are at-risk, more vulnerable, and unlikely to be believed or valued. It could be fear, incited by the personalization of what before were just numbers: some studies report that 25 percent of girls and 16 percent of boys experience sexual abuse during childhood. It also could be the attempt of ordinary people to distance themselves from the horror and insidiousness of child sexual abuse, modeling the diverting eyes of adults who suspect—or, in this case, witness—and ignore inappropriate contact between adults and children.

The second reason we should not be surprised by the callousness of Penn State’s protesting students may be a new one: they have been raised in a culture that has normalized children’s sexual objectification, defined by the American Psychological Association as “being made into a thing for others’ sexual use.”

This generation has so regularly witnessed the sexualization of children that they have become numb to it. This is not a general complaint on the place of sexuality in media today. This is a more refined concern about the unhealthy messaging portraying children “as commodity” available for the consumption of adults. As a society, we have bombarded them with so many images and messages through the internet and various media platforms that they are not shocked by it. They have developed in a society where the average age at which girls and boys become involved in prostitution is between 11 and 14, and where a multibillion-dollar child pornography industry thrives. They have attended schools where their objectification is omnipresent: recently, the American Association of University Women released a study indicating that 48 percent of 7^th- through 12^th-graders surveyed experienced sexual harassment in the 2010–2011 school year. We subject them to media that label cases of adults sending sexual pictures to children, or asking them to do the same, as “sexting” rather than calling it what it is: solicitation, luring, or grooming. We glorify the concept of adult-child sexual relations by using titles such as “barely legal” or by selling child-size “pimp” and “prostitute” costumes at Halloween.

This disturbing trend has developed despite alarms being sounded by organizations such as the American Psychological Association, which has warned of the many negative consequences of the sexual objectification of girls; the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation, which has issued a National Plan of Prevention calling for an end to the normalization of this behavior; and numerous researchers and authors who have written extensively on the negative effects of our “culture’s” shortening childhood and endorsing the sexual objectification of our children at younger and younger ages.

Having created and perpetuated this cultural climate, are we now surprised that some of the young adults it produced do not understand the true nature and gravity of the sexual abuse of children? Are we now surprised that some of these young adults express indifference to the kind of abuse that increases victims’ risk for short-term and long-term physical and psychological damage? How can we be? Not only have we groomed the victims for these offenders, we have groomed the generation for indifference.

There is much to be learned from the events unfolding at Penn State, regarding not the offense but the response to it. Some of the students at Penn State are missing the real story: that, at its core, this is not a case about personnel decisions or a game; this is a case about rape, about a young, groomed, weak, and vulnerable boy possibly being anally penetrated by a trusted adult against a shower wall; and about an allegedly indifferent community of professionals, lawyers, staff, and other officials, who found it easier to divert their attention from the abuse than to face its ugliness.

However, these college students are not the only ones missing the real story. The rest of us are, as well. The other real story is about responsibility and accountability, and not just of the individuals and institutions who considered these children expendable. We must acknowledge our collective responsibility for having created a society filled with negative, unhealthy sexual images that foster the sexual commoditization of children.

There is hope, however. It can be found in the students who held candlelight vigils to support victims of child abuse and in the courage of Penn State’s trustees to take dramatic steps to increase accountability, despite the expected resistance to this countercultural approach. More broadly, it can be seen in the Declaration of Rome, an action plan arising out of the recent international Forum on the Abuse of Children’s Rights, which recommends, among other things, that “citizens in every country be made more . . . aware regarding the abuse and sexual exploitation of children, and that they be urged to report.” Hope also can be found in the revival of long-dormant statutes to penalize adults for failing to report their suspicions of sexual abuse to the authorities.

If these students want a cause to get behind, let me suggest this one: raising awareness of the despicable reality of child sexual abuse. More tangibly, they can focus on the law, which reflects the values of a society. Demand that these mandated reporting statutes, which exist across the country, actually be enforced. Demand that such laws be paired with penalties to deter the indifference. Most importantly, demand to live in a society that reflects the inherent dignity of children and our communal responsibility to protect them.


Mary Graw Leary is an associate professor in the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America.

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A short time later, however, the limitations of such boundless optimism became apparent. Just six months into the new administration, Henry Louis Gates, a prominent African-American academic (and a friend of the president), was mistaken for a burglar in his own home and subsequently arrested by a white police officer. Though charges were quickly dropped, President Obama, asked to comment on the incident, said the police “acted stupidly.” The remark caused a national uproar, raising suspicions of racial profiling, on the one hand, and anti-police bias, on the other. Embroiled in yet another racial controversy, America, it seemed, had not really changed after all.

Race has always been a neuralgic point in American society and, as such, is very difficult to write about. One scholar who has done so, with distinction, is Randall Kennedy, Professor of Law at Harvard. While staunchly liberal, Kennedy is not afraid to buck the liberal establishment, and indeed has occasionally been attacked by it. In Race, Crime and the Law, he offered a remarkably fair account of an incendiary topic; and in Sellout: the Politics of Racial Betrayal, he defended the right-of-independent black thinkers (including conservatives he strongly disagrees with) against charges of disloyalty.

In his new book, The Persistence of the Color Line, Kennedy explores the history of racial politics in America, focusing on the historic 2008 campaign and the first few years of the Obama presidency. The result is a provocative but uneven work that alternates between insightful commentary and tenuous liberal polemics.

Kennedy’s opening words set the theme of his book: “The terms under which Barack Obama won the presidency, the conditions under which he governs, and the circumstances under which he seeks reelection all display the haunting persistence of the color line.” As proof, he cites the long and sad history of racism in America—against not just blacks, but also other minorities—and highlights events that reflect that up to the present day. To his credit, Kennedy doesn’t simply assail obvious racists, but also criticizes their (often overlooked) enablers, including prominent liberal icons such as Franklin Roosevelt. For all his achievements, FDR “played a major role in the moral disaster of Japanese-American internment during World War II, tolerated Jim Crow segregation, and declined to push hard for federal anti-lynching legislation.” Many of FDR’s opponents were scarcely better, and African-Americans suffered terrible degradation and abuse as a result. Reading Kennedy’s summary of the struggles of African-Americans at that time, including a moving account of his father’s own travails, one can well understand (if not agree with) Malcolm X’s bitter lament: “I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”

Although American race relations have dramatically improved, thanks to the positive vision of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, the cultural legacy of American racism remains, and it was into this socio-political vortex that Barack Obama stepped. In analyzing Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency and the challenges his campaign faced, Kennedy makes a persuasive case that Obama carried a burden—and still does—that no white candidate ever would. From his early bouts with the Clintons, to the crisis created by his long-time former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, to his “More Perfect Union” speech, Obama was forced to deal with race relations at an almost unrelenting pace. While his determination to be a “post-racial” politician may have been overoptimistic, Kennedy, who can be a harsh critic, gives Obama considerable credit for succeeding as well as he has.

Where Kennedy’s analysis goes wrong, however, is in his explanation (or lack thereof) of President Obama’s recent decline in the polls and the daunting task he now faces to win re-election. So focused is Kennedy on racial perceptions about the Obama presidency that he barely considers whether Obama’s policies—on everything from economics and healthcare to social policy and Middle East diplomacy—may be contributing to his waning popularity. To the extent that Kennedy does address policies, and their failures, he blames Obama’s “right-wing enemies” and the president’s supposed timidity in fighting them. But Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the conservative blogosphere were not able to prevent Barack Obama from becoming president in 2008, and neither will they be the decisive factor in the 2012 election: the independents who helped elect Obama but have now grown sour on his presidency will play that role. The 2010 mid-term elections were not an example of reactionary and racially tinged backlash against Obama; they were a legitimate center-right response to a coercive and unproductive liberalism.

Indeed, liberal excess and overreach have revived American conservatism in ways unimaginable after the 2006 and 2008 elections. The GOP’s recent electoral gains have even reached into the minority community, as witnessed by the gubernatorial wins of Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, and Susana Martinez; of Senator Marco Rubio and freshman Representatives Allen West and Tim Scott. Alarmed by this trend, Kennedy, revealing his partisanship, refuses to give any credit to the Republicans, and instead asks us to question their motives: “What does this outburst of Republican ‘diversification’ signify? It shows that under certain circumstances among Republicans ideology does trump race….Voters were not indifferent to the race of the candidate; it’s just that the weight of race was overmatched by other considerations.”

In other words, conservative Republicans are still, at some basic level, racially motivated, though they are willing to suppress their racism for the sake of conservative ideology. Kennedy admits that he cannot prove this theory, and so he instead bases it on his “impression” and suspicions about the hearts of GOP voters. But given the gravity of the charge, hunches and feelings are simply not enough. More importantly, Kennedy ignores an alternative explanation: that today’s mainstream Republican voters—particularly those who are religious and embrace the Christian vision of Reverend King—believe that racism is immoral, and indeed sinful, and so would never consider race as a voting factor. Kennedy cannot bring himself to imagine this, so hostile is he to the GOP and so attached is he to the idea of “racial conservatives,” as he calls them.

In fairness, the Right has left itself vulnerable to such suspicions because of its own missteps, some serious. Many leading conservatives originally opposed the Civil Rights Act; when the notorious book The Bell Curve came out, too many flirted with its offensive and discredited ideas; and even to this day, some self-described “conservatives” have a strange affection for the confederate flag and the antebellum south. Moreover, as Kennedy showed in Race, Crime and the Law, conservatives have not given sufficient attention to racial disparities and abuses in our justice system.

But modern conservatism has gotten plenty right, and one of its principal insights is the danger of contemporary liberalism’s lack of constraint. Even when contemporary liberalism gets something right, it doesn’t know when or how to stop. Increasingly, it has become morally reckless, as we have seen in the current debate over abortion and marriage. Since its triumphant support for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, American liberalism has been misled by an “unconstrained” vision of humanity and its favoring of “rights talk” over personal responsibility. Kennedy’s book is blind to this.

Kennedy also loses his focus in a bout of political activism. In a work that is supposed to be about the dimensions of race in American politics, Kennedy awkwardly introduces the idea of “gay liberation,” and condemns what he calls “the heterosexist orthodoxy of this era.” Like many on the Left, he conflates race with sex, and equates today’s gay rights movement with the original civil rights movement. Of course, by doing so, he implicitly rebukes Reverend King, who never made this erroneous analogy, and in fact counseled against homosexuality, out of charity and love. Gay marriage is not in his “I Have a Dream” speech, or any of his other great addresses. Moreover, many African-Americans continue to uphold traditional morals and marriage, despite efforts to demonize them in the media (a prejudice Kennedy is utterly silent about).

Bad on sex, Professor Kennedy is even worse on abortion. Given his legal expertise and sensitivity to racial matters, one would think that Kennedy would squarely address the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, as abortion disproportionately affects minorities, in ways many believe to be racist. Astonishingly, however, Kennedy virtually ignores the subject, and makes no mention of Obama’s extreme views favoring abortion. Nor does Kennedy say anything about those unsavory figures, who, as pro-life congressman Bob Dornan once told the House, enthusiastically approve of “reproductive choice” for minorities as a means of keeping their population down. It is tragic irony that many liberals who claim to champion civil rights have become the ideological bedfellows of their most ardent opponents, at least on the matter of “choice.”

Having given a pass to Obama on abortion, Kennedy nonetheless assails a host of black conservatives for their views on a wide range of issues, particularly affirmative action. This marks a regression. In his previous work, Kennedy tried to find areas of common ground with conservatives, but here he is explicitly partisan, denouncing distinguished thinkers such as Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell (“an ultraconservative academic turned propagandist”). It is unclear why Kennedy goes down this path (especially since Sowell has praised Kennedy’s work), but by resorting to name-calling and invective, Kennedy sounds like the over-the-top broadcasters he properly rebukes elsewhere in his book.

Brilliant as he is, Kennedy does not really understand American conservatism or the Judeo-Christian beliefs that inspired it. Instead, he rails against “retrograde religiosity,” warning that such beliefs “have caused or been deployed to justify all sorts of horrible practices”; while true, this is quite disingenuous. As Leszek Kolakowski and Richard John Neuhaus have reminded us, secularist ideologies have brought about infinitely worse evils. Reverend King, in response to just this line of attack on Christianity, agreed that Christians have frequently sinned, but affirmed that the church still has a noble purpose: “This [sin], however, is not the whole church. The church at its best has always stood as the conscience of society.”

Although Kennedy takes passionate liberal stands throughout his book, nowhere does he explain where he gets them, or why they should have any hold on us. Having rejected revelation as a basis for morality, and indifferent to natural law arguments, Kennedy simply draws on his own subjective progressivism, which is a frightening prospect for anyone seeking a coherent public philosophy. As Professor Robert George writes, contrasting today’s relativism with Rev. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

The eclipse of Natural Law thinking among those who speak for the civil rights movement makes it difficult to say anything very compelling about the problems of irresponsibility, drug abuse, promiscuity, crime, and collapsing family structures in many impoverished communities. In the absence of a Natural Law philosophy of civil rights, the politics of victimhood becomes understandable and perhaps inevitable. But it is an altogether inadequate philosophy to guide those who would complete the task Reverend King so notably advanced.

Race has been called “the American crucible,” and it will be with us, on some level, for our nation’s duration. Given human nature, it is unlikely that we will ever “overcome” race in every respect. We can, however, delegitimize it to the point that it no longer harms, obsesses, intimidates, or offends. If America is to reach that point, it will have to acknowledge and amend not only the sins of the Right, but also the “progressive” untruths espoused in this book. Our republic is owed nothing less.

William Doino, Jr., is a contributor to The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII, and writes often on war, religion, and morality.

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Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, while sharply criticizing the protesters, has helpfully identified a widespread loss of trust going far beyond the protest: “In some senses this is what our society now looks like. We are all protesters, even if we don’t take to the streets. We all have an inchoate sense that something is wrong and we have any number of culprits to blame—from Europe, to immigrants, to the banks, to politicians and media barons. Public distrust of the institutions of a civil society has reached an all-time high. . . .”

The notion that we are “falling apart” into competing factions is shared by many, and to general distress. Several years ago, Jonathan Sacks described his concerns over the fracturing of liberal societies in much the same way as Carey: “Culture is fragmenting into non-communicating systems of belief in which civil discourse ends and reasoned argument becomes impossible. The political process is in danger of being abandoned in favor of the media-attention-grabbing gesture, with the threat of violence never far from the surface.”

The failure of communication may have a variety of causes, but a primary candidate is the loss of a shared narrative and the subsequent loss of concord or political friendship. Lord Carey, for instance, suggests that we are divided “into many factions and separate communities” because there is no “sense of an overarching narrative to form our identity as a nation” without “the very faith and heritage that set us on our way as a great country.” A loss of religious and national unity turns communities into factions at each other’s throats.

A closely related explanation for the failure of civility is provided by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, where he explains that one of the primary marks of contemporary moral discourse is interminable disagreement, in which we are split into so many incommensurable camps that we are utterly incapable of moving forward. Failing to share foundational principles, we cannot really win or lose our arguments but simply confront assertion with counter-assertion, with morally indignant protest a predictable result:

It is easy also to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. . . . Protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because . . . protestors can never win an argument: the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because . . . the protestors can never lose an argument either. . . . This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective.

If we are in a condition of failed civility, with protest the new norm for discourse, I’d like to understand why, and I suggest that Bernard Lonergan provides both help and cause for concern.

Faction is a permanent possibility in social life because we are by nature spontaneously intersubjective. Every individual by nature seeks his good, understood initially as the object of his desire, as an object of satisfaction. An infant, say, has desires circumscribed by the limited range of their satisfaction, a range that expands with growing consciousness. Given our social nature and necessity, a similarly limited community is spontaneous—unplanned, not constructed by rational choice—with the community existing to prolong and secure the goods of satisfaction. In a basic sense, when an infant cries for some desired good, parents may seek to secure food for the infant and themselves by cooperating with other families in a village to divert a river for irrigation. So while spontaneous community is not unintelligent or merely animalistic, it is concerned primarily to satisfy desires.

Intersubjective community always remains, no matter how developed a civilization, and is not something outgrown or left behind. We cooperate within bonds of natural affection such as the family, the clan, and the neighborhood, and do so primarily for purposes of satisfying natural needs. However, civil community goes far beyond spontaneity and is a new and distinct mode of cooperation, with a distinct good. Civil community emerges when new patterns of collaboration occur amongst several distinct, spontaneous communities for the sake of goods not available or possible to the smaller groups. As Lonergan puts it, civility occurs when relationships “condition the fulfillment of each man’s desires by his contributions to the fulfillment of the desires of others, and similarly protect each from the object of his fears in the measure he contributes to warding off the objects feared by others.” To do so, each spontaneous group must be willing to forgo or limit a desired satisfaction in order to seek and collaborate for a common good emerging only through the collaboration. Lonergan claims that in addition to goods of satisfaction, a new good emerges: the good of order, which is not reducible to desires or their satisfaction, as it is the intelligible pattern constituting institutions. Government and law are means whereby various factions limit the full range of their possible satisfactions so as to attain the good of order, the polity.

Now, there always will remain intersubjective spontaneity and its constant temptation toward factionalism or group preference—tribalism, racism, classism, for example—even when an intelligently conceived and chosen social order is in existence. Consequently, there is always a tension between my desire to serve my interests and the interests of my group on the one hand, and my intelligent grasp of the common and political good on the other. Given this abiding tension, moments of “economic breakdown and political decay are not the absence of this or that object of desire or the presence of this or that object of fear,” as if we have the various Occupy protests because people are afraid they will not be able to feed their children today, but rather “they are the breakdown and decay of the good of order, the failure of schemes . . . to function.”

We are all simultaneously committed to these two sorts of good: the good of order and the particular goods of our desires. In periods of peace and happy relations, “the good of order has come to terms with the intersubjective groups . . .  it commands their esteem by its palpable benefits . . .  a man’s interest is in happy coincidence with his work” and his country. In times of crisis, on the other hand, the various groups “tend to fall apart in bickering, insinuations, recriminations, while unhappy individuals begin to long for the idyllic simplicity of primitive living in which . . .  human fellow feeling would have a more dominant role.” So crisis results not only in bickering and indignant protest, but in an active rejection of the accumulated complications of highly ordered and specialized society and a preference for the simple, the immediate, modeled on the sorts of feelings one tends to have for family and not the stranger. In such a breakdown, we should expect to see many people demanding the end of complicated systems of trade and development in favor of a return to the small village with its rather more limited satisfactions. Further, since sense satisfactions come in many varieties, one would also expect the demand for simplicity to be surprisingly varied and diverse in the goods demanded—a not-so-simple simplicity.

Such demands would not be unintelligent or unreasonable, as they indicate both that natural goods seem to be threatened and that the intelligently devised system of order is breaking apart. The fact that the demands seem to be incommensurable with each other, as well as virtually impossible to implement in a diverse, large, and highly technical society, would not per se indicate that the protests were irrational; it would merely suggest that the tension between the good of order and the satisfaction of desires had no obviously reasonable solution at the time.

At that sort of juncture, Lonergan suggests, it is likely that many will capitulate to their individual or group self-interest, and so delay and impair intelligent and reasonable solutions to the tension of community, since the cause and maintenance of civil community is always dependent on the various groups furthering the interests of others.

A commitment to the common good is thus the obvious solution to breakdown, although the common good is least likely to be sought at the moment of breakdown (thus contributing to more decline) since individuals and groups are most motivated toward self-interest at that time of fear and confusion. Further, since the groups split into factions and camps, the various satisfactions demanded grow exponentially and with the least chance of resolution. Finally, as civility declines and factions retreat to their own community, they tend also to retreat to the first principles and modes of thought of their own group rather than to the public and shared discourse prevalent in the civil community, creating mutual incomprehension and distrust in a vicious circle, spiraling downward into more and more indignation.

Now, if Lonergan is right about any of this, then progress at a time of breakdown cannot be made simply by meeting the various demanded satisfactions—bread and circuses won’t work. Nor will the mere enforcement of the law result in progress, as force causes groups to retreat from committing to the institutions of order. Something rather more remarkable needs to be done, just when we have the least motivation to do it given our natural tendencies—satisfactions must be transcended as citizens sacrifice for the common good.

It’s not clear that we are that sort of people with that sort of will; if not, the long cycle of decline may be upon us. Progress is not inevitable; decline is a real possibility, and it depends entirely on whether we are willing to seek the other’s good.

R. J. Snell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Eastern University and a Research Director of the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good.  

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Hawthorne provides a reason: public employment at the time. His judgment appears in a little-read introduction to The Scarlet Letter, called “The Custom-House,” and it takes place in Salem, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne was born and where he worked for three years as a tax surveyor in the late 1840s. Ships arrived from abroad carrying goods and Hawthorne met them at the dock to charge a federal tax on the imports. He obtained the position because of influential friends in the Democratic Party, whose leader James K. Polk became president in 1845 and placed hundreds of party operatives and supporters in federal posts around the country and abroad. One friend from his undergraduate days at Bowdoin College, Franklin Pierce, would win the presidency in 1852.

Hawthorne realized from the start that he had joined a small army of political appointments, part of the regular turnover every four years, and the job required but a few hours of work each morning. It was a plum position, bringing $1,200 a year to an impoverished 40-year-old author with a wife and two small children, and it might free up abundant time to write. But as Hawthorne recounts in the preface, he approached his task with the stern voices of Puritan ancestors in his ear. Salem brought back memories of childhood and forebears, particularly the moral example they upheld. Their devotion to God and community set a standard of selflessness and the public good, not the usual job-seeking that goes with the spoils system.

Indeed, Hawthorne imagines himself their inferior precisely because he has spent his adulthood on authorship, writing short stories instead of laboring for the benefit of his community. “No aim, that I have ever cherished,” he admits, “would they recognize as laudable.” He even imagines them in Heaven (or in Hell—one of his forebears was one of the three judges in the Salem witch trials) discussing his case, one “gray shadow” grumbling to another, “What is he? A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!”

That the tales “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Birthmark,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and other classics still commonplace in the American literature classroom should evoke their scorn is a whimsical comic moment, but a serious point underlies it. Every vocation is a “business in life,” and we judge each one by how well it serves God and mankind. Hawthorne applies it to his new job, which, in a small way, might meet his ancestors’ requirement. Yes, Hawthorne acknowledges, they were ruthless and lacked compassion, and perhaps they now suffer in “another state of being”; but whatever their vices and infamy, they possessed that cardinal trait proper to public service: civic virtue. They subordinated personal interest to the city upon a hill.

What a contrast to those strict and dutiful figures of the past does Hawthorne find working in the custom-house:

. . . a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen—seated, like Matthew, at the receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands—were Custom-House officers.

These are federal workers in lesser positions, people Hawthorne must direct and look to for assistance. They have no job security, for a new surveyor can fire them at will, but most of them have managed to survive several changes of administration.

They certainly haven’t done so on the basis of competence. All of them are aged, and a few on the payroll never even bother to show up for work. They resist change of any kind, too, and their only concern arises with “the periodic terrors of a Presidential election.” They were soldiers and seamen in their youth, strong and brave, but years of federal employment have extended their bellies and dimmed their memories. In Hawthorne’s diagnosis, government service means “monopolized labor,” and it turns even heroes into self-seekers. Monopolized labor makes workers think less about the quality of their work and more about the external, political conditions that ensure their place. When employment depends upon a political outcome, when federal posts become a monopoly, an election-winner-take-all system, people inevitably adjust. Civic duty subsides and personal protection and comfort take over. Hawthorne’s fellows focus on themselves and their next meal. They perform their tasks ostentatiously but inefficiently, and Hawthorne even accuses them of corruption:

Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers! Whenever such a mischance occurred—when a wagon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses—nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel.

If Hawthorne were a staunch partisan, he says, “hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life,” and it would be “nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those white heads under the axe of the guillotine.”

Hawthorne can’t do it, though, and after a period of trepidation, the officers return to their afternoon naps and “mouldy jokes.” But Hawthorne has no wish to mingle with them, sensing, perhaps, that he might compromise his own slight virtue. Instead, he climbs up into the attic, spending hours alone beneath the rafters and poking around. It’s musty and disorganized, with old barrels and crates filled with faded papers and bundles. They contain legal matters from decades before, commerce statistics and family lineages, things “not altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local history,” Hawthorne notes. One day, digging inside one barrel, Hawthorne makes a fateful discovery. One yellowed package catches his eye, and when he undoes the red tape around it, he finds records and writings by a former surveyor, including a rag of red cloth with some gold embroidery in the shape of a letter “A” together with a chronicle by the surveyor of one Hester Prynne.

The attic turns into his salvation from the corruptions below. The papers there excite his imagination, which the custom-house, he says, had sunk under a “wretched numbness.” They restore the reality of the past, and he begins to contemplate the imaginary world that would become The Scarlet Letter. The contrast between upstairs and downstairs, along with the effect each one has upon him, amplifies the depredations of monopolized labor. Monopolized labor not only erodes civic virtue, but it dulls the imagination and kills the sense of the past. Hawthorne even lets his Puritan characters rebuke him with that contrast: “What have you to do with us? . . . The little power you might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn your wages!”

Hence one of the classics of American literature, still studied by eleventh-graders everywhere, starts with the indolent, self-interested government employee. Hawthorne’s experience is worth remembering as battles over public employee benefits and salaries continue in California, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and elsewhere. The Puritan fathers vs. the custom-house officers, the spoils system vs. the American history in the attic, self-interest vs. civic virtue—these contraries lay a needed moral and civic yardstick alongside the words and deeds of people who occupy the state house in Madison, collect six-figure pensions in Newport Beach, and intimidate local politicians. Last June, the New York Times ran a long cover story on the situation in Orange County, California, and it contained one civic abomination after another. For instance, in the town of Costa Mesa, the police chief makes $298,000 a year, the former deputy fire chief enjoys a pension of $182,000, and the city manager retired in March with a pension of $190,000 per year.

With Hawthorne’s story in mind, we might ask them, “Are you not embarrassed?” When the president of the Laguna Beach Municipal Employees’ Association tells the reporter, “We fight for our pensions and paychecks the same way CEOs fight for theirs,” we can reply, “Do you believe that public service is no different from corporate boardrooms?” When local unions spend $200,000 to defeat a candidate for City Council (normally, these are $10,000 campaigns), and when public-sector unions spent $77,000,000 dollars on state elections and ballot initiatives in the early 2000s, we may charge, “Is it good for the state for the public unions to operate so aggressively as a special interest?”

Hawthorne’s work, and its inspiration, highlights the gap between public employment and civic motives, and it adds a standard that is, sadly, lost in the current debate. Think of the custom-house and we won’t be astonished when government workers react to the slightest changes in salaries and benefits with outrage, even when those changes appear to be modest accommodations to revenue dips. They have been conditioned to act this way. It’s a psychology that people who have never entered the government job world can’t understand, and that one of our great writers recognized and recoiled from.

Mark Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University. His most recent book is The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

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A few hours later, the women’s website Jezebel slammed Ripa for her “antiquated social extremism.” Its writer fumed, “A woman can buy a man a meal anytime she damn well pleases. . . . Ladies do want to pay. Yours truly wants to pay, likes to pay, plans on paying, has paid in the past and will pay in the future.” And pay she does. But considering these two contrary views broadcast loudly on a single day, one wonders what a man today should make of this. Is there a way to know whether the girl on your date is a Kelly or a Jezebel, or must you wait in mystery till the check comes? The risks are potentially disastrous either way. Maybe you should forget about the date altogether.

According to Kay S. Hymowitz in her recent book, Manning Up, that is precisely what men are doing. Hymowitz, the William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute, surveys generations of evidence to illustrate “how the rise of women has turned men into boys.”

This isn’t the first time that women have confused men. Today, however, in many ways men are being told that they are dispensable. From paying the bill on a date, to being the breadwinner, to being a father, to even being present for the act of procreation (as Hymowitz writes, “the confusion about what we expect from men is perfectly captured by the existence of the sperm donor”), Hymowitz shows how the past decades’ cheers for female independence have, at the same time, ushered in a message that men aren’t really needed.

There are consequences to that. For starters, there are consequences to motivation. Hymowitz describes a luxury of our times that she calls preadulthood, a longer route to adulthood for young people to find themselves. Preadulthood is a time to find answers to the new big question: “What should I do with my life?” As Hymowitz documents, today’s generation “is stunned with possibility, a predicament unknown to most of the human race up until very recently,” and the journey to find answers translates into a “longer, more chaotic trip to adulthood.”

The path to adulthood is further lengthened by what Hymowitz calls the knowledge economy, a new structure of earning a living that involves “trading in knowledge and ideas rather than brawn, manual dexterity, or routine clerical skills.” In America today, it is considered essential to have years more education than in the past, regardless of whether the education relates to the career one eventually takes up. University of Chicago professors Amy and Leon Kass used to ask their students, “What is the most important decision you will make in your life?” Typical answers ranged from “my career” to “what grad school to go to.” When one student answered, “the mother of my children,” he was met with a roomful of laughter. Because marriage steps in the way of the career track, Hymowitz notes, “preadults marry later than ever before in history.”

This may be because some women today are having love affairs at their jobs. Not affairs with other men, though—affairs with their work. As Hymowitz writes, “the language of romance pervades career talk. Preadults are far more likely to talk about ‘my dream job’ than ‘the man of my dreams.’” She also points to research that shows women and men “actually think differently about what role work should play in their lives. Women tend to choose careers more on the basis of what psychologists call ‘intrinsic rewards.’ That is, they are less likely to put money, power, and status at the center of their ambitions, and are more inclined to think about other sorts of satisfactions,” such as “bringing myself” to work, collaboration, and giving back to society.

This is such a new phenomenon—the language shift from job to career and from work to passion—that it is laughable to people from as little as a generation ago. Isn’t work something that no one actually wants to do but that people endure so they can fund their actual passions, or, say, pay the check at the end of dinner? Isn’t work the punishment man brought upon himself as he was kicked out of work-free Paradise?

Either way, women are signing up in great numbers. The past decade has seen growth in several new fields, such as design, journalism, public relations, event planning—“jobs for people who can communicate, persuade, charm, and multitask, who score high on empathy, intuition, communication skills, planning, and relationship building”; these are skills that, for whatever reason, women happen to possess more often than men.

But wasn’t the Rise of Women due to the triumphant overthrow of a dominant patriarchy by second-wave feminists? Sorry, no. Hymowitz provides a sober look at the facts that show how other circumstances—the prevalence of household technology, the dawn of the knowledge economy, and the growth of new industries such as design and communications—are primarily responsible for the increased presence of women in the workplace. The pill? Not so much.

What second-wave feminists can take some credit for, however, is the phenomenon of the “child-man”—the kind of man who remains a child into his thirties. Hymowitz describes how second-wave feminists, by announcing that women were “no longer interested in male providers,” were “unwittingly linking arms with Playboy,” which also blasted the idea that marriage was slavery. What prominent feminist activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s sought to erase—the interdependence of the sexes—is precisely what began to disappear in the following decades, with fathers taking a decreased role in raising their children. What followed was the birth of the child-man or, as Hymowitz puts it, “the lost son of a host of economic and cultural changes” including “preadulthood, the Playboy philosophy, feminism, the Wild West of our new media, and a shrugging iffiness on the subject of husbands and fathers.”

Who exactly are these child-men? They are men like Tucker Max, author of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, and those who follow his blog of drunken exploits with women; the men between ages 18 and 34 who are now the biggest users of video games, almost half of whom play for an average of 2 hours and 43 minutes per day; the readers of Maxim; the viewers of The Man Show and 1000 Ways to Die. Perhaps the epitome of the child-man appears in Judd Apatow’s film Knocked Up, in which Seth Rogan plays an unemployed twenty-three-year-old who impregnates a girl and tries to learn how to grow up and out of his bachelor pad of fart-joking stoners. As Hymowitz puts it, Knocked Up is a “fairy tale for guys,” where “a beautiful, sweet princess” comes along to save the child-man who can’t help himself.

Despite his vices, one senses that Hymowitz has sympathy for the child-man. “His problem is that he has grown up in a culture with no wisdom to offer about being a grown-up man,” she writes, and it doesn’t help that his father divorced and disappeared. Even when looking at the phenomenon of Gamers—men who practice the rule-based method of seducing women called Game—Hymowitz speaks in their defense: “Game is best understood as a male attempt to bring order to contemporary dating disarray and a child-man’s effort to relearn the primal masculinity he has been taught to suppress.” Here Hymowitz shows her impressive range: She tackles these subjects of social import not by moralizing with predetermined principles but by letting her research tell it like it is, however surprising the result. And where the research doesn’t quite explain everything, she’ll admit it: “It would be impossible to prove for certain that the loss of the almost universal male life script—manhood defined by marriage and fatherhood—is the key to the mystery of the child-man. But there are a few studies suggesting that at the very least, young men who are married or who expect to marry are motivated to work harder and make more investments in their future and are less prone to substance abuse and unemployment.”

While today’s child-men are asking, “What should I do with my life?” today’s women are asking, “What happened to all the good men?” Women may be happy with their independence and full-time jobs, but in polling data, they continue to express desire for husbands and kids one day. To these women, Hymowitz effectively offers a much needed wake-up call. She outlines scenarios and realistically dismal outcomes of common (and glorified) lifestyle choices. Don’t want to end up single and hating it at forty? Then you may need to talk to the woman in the mirror.

While at first glance Manning Up seems to be mainly about men and what men need to do, the book in many ways calls women to, well, woman up. First of all, nothing helps men be men more than women being women. That means acknowledging what makes women unique as women. Surely a major part of womanhood is fertility. If women want their dreams of family life to be realized, Hymowitz puts bluntly, “young women will have to get a better understanding of the limitations imposed by their bodies.” There are some things we can’t change, like biology. But Hymowitz isn’t saying women shouldn’t work. Instead, she provides a book full of evidence to suggest tactfully that to embrace womanhood more fully, young women should embrace its blessings together with its limitations.

So, in a way, Kelly Ripa hit the issue on the head. No doubt she’s one of the most successful working women today. But she didn’t reach professional success at the expense of forgetting a fundamental part of womanhood: “We give birth.”

Mary Rose Somarriba is chief operating officer of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC, and managing editor of Altcatholicah.

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On October 17, 2011, Sequenom, a San Diego–based testing company, rolled out “MaterniT21” in twenty major cities across the United States. Using a technique called “massively parallel shotgun sequencing,” the test identifies fetal DNA in a sample of the mother’s blood and sequences it. The test detects whether the fetal DNA is positive for Trisomy 21, the most common cause of Down syndrome, with the lowest false positives and false negatives of current screening tests.

In reporting on the new test, headlines (for example, here and here) have highlighted how the new test is a “safer” prenatal test for Down syndrome. This is incorrect.

In 2007, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommended that all women be offered screening and diagnostic prenatal testing for Down syndrome. Noninvasive screening tests for Down syndrome have existed since the 1980s. Like MaterniT21, they use a mother’s blood sample and are just as safe, though less accurate in assessing a fetus’s likelihood of having Down syndrome. In this initial roll-out, Sequenom is only offering its testing to those mothers considered “high risk” due to advanced maternal age, having a family member with Down syndrome, or having already received a “positive” screen result from the existing screening tests. The only way to know for certain whether a pregnancy is positive for Down syndrome, even after receiving a MaterniT21 result, is through invasive testing, usually an amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling (CVS). Because invasive testing involves inserting a needle into the womb, it has a risk of miscarriage. MaterniT21 does not make invasive testing any safer—if anything, it might increase the risk.

The journal Genetics in Medicine published a Sequenom-funded study on the eve of the new test’s launching. Jacob Canick, one of the study’s leaders, explains how the test is “safer”: “It is possible that with the availability of this new DNA-based test, more women will opt for screening because of the increased safety resulting from far fewer amniocentesis and CVS procedures being performed.” This is the clinical reason cited as justification for introducing the new test: that it will drastically reduce miscarriages from invasive testing. As Dr. Glenn Palomaki, the study’s lead author, put it, “nearly all women with a normal pregnancy could avoid an invasive diagnostic procedure and its associated anxiety, cost and potential for fetal loss.” This quote deserves to be unpacked.

First, “nearly all” pregnancies currently do avoid invasive diagnostic testing. There are millions of pregnancies each year, with 750,000 being considered high risk for Down syndrome, but only 200,000 invasive procedures each year. ACOG made its 2007 recommendations because studies had found that the risk for miscarriage was lower than historically reported when invasive testing was performed at experienced facilities by experienced practitioners. If Sequenom’s goal of reducing the number of invasive tests is achieved, there also will be fewer experienced facilities and practitioners, thereby potentially increasing the risk of miscarriage for those undergoing invasive testing.

Dr. Palomaki’s assurance that “nearly all women with a normal pregnancy could avoid an invasive diagnostic procedure” also deserves consideration. Most parents of children with Down syndrome would object to the crass labeling of their sons and daughters as abnormal. Putting that aside, Down syndrome is but a small fraction of the baseline risk every pregnancy has for what is commonly considered a birth defect. Further, Down syndrome represents only about half of chromosomal conditions identified through invasive testing. This means that for each woman who opts for invasive testing following a positive MaterniT21 result, there could be another woman falsely reassured by a negative result that her child will not have a chromosomal condition.

Sequenom’s test has also been called safer because it can be performed earlier than ever in a pregnancy, as soon as ten weeks. This, however, is another reason for concern.

MaterniT21 can be performed any time from ten weeks forward in a pregnancy. In the research study, half of the samples were from the second trimester, but the test is offered earlier in the pregnancy specifically because it allows for earlier termination. Matthew Rabinowitz is CEO of Gene Security Network, a company developing its own noninvasive prenatal test for Down syndrome. Commenting on Sequenom’s new test, he clinically and candidly stated, “If a couple finds an abnormality, and chooses to terminate the pregnancy, it’s better to do it earlier.” Considering that the majority of women currently receiving a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome do opt to terminate, Sequenom’s new test is definitively not safer for the fetus.

For this reason, Sequenom’s product name for the test is rather Orwellian. “MaterniT21” recognizes that the test is for a mother, but provides the opportunity for most women to end their maternal status through abortion.

Sequenom’s justification for its testing is as misleading as the test’s name. In a press release, Harry F. Hixson, Jr., Sequenom’s CEO, said, “We believe that the MaterniT21 LDT will provide physicians and their patients with critical new information to help them make better informed decisions about the patients’ healthcare and pregnancies.” In the study Sequenom funded, however, it noted as an implementation issue that “educational materials for both patients and providers need to be developed and validated to help ensure informed decision making.” This long has been recognized, based on the current administration of prenatal testing.

Study after study has found that a significant number of expectant mothers and their partners do not understand the probability assessments of screening tests, did not expect they would have to make a decision about invasive testing, and, after a positive diagnosis, often are unexpectedly counseled about termination for the first time and rarely informed of the option of adoption. This has led one researcher to conclude that the current administration of prenatal testing does not respect a woman’s right to choose because so many make uninformed decisions. In response, just this summer, both the National Society of Genetics Counselors (NSGC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published new guidelines specifically calling for the delivery of accurate, up-to-date written materials about Down syndrome and referral to parent support organizations when a patient receives a prenatal diagnosis. The NSGC even listed the educational materials that should be provided to patients, but Sequenom has yet to invest in these equally important information resources for expectant mothers undergoing its testing.

Now, other prenatal testing companies have launched testing without providing the balancing resources, but Sequenom has recognized that these resources are needed from the outset of its testing and still does not provide them. Dr. Hixson’s statement simply makes Sequenom one more purveyor of the “prenatal testing sham” that I wrote about earlier this year—justifying prenatal testing as simply providing information while failing to provide all of the needed information. But Sequenom’s motivation for rolling its tests out without the accompanying educational materials makes its actions particularly unconscionable.

Sequenom had intended to launch its test in 2009, when it was being promised as a diagnostic test. On the eve of going to market, however, it had to admit it had manipulated its data. Its stock price plummeted, a shareholder lawsuit followed alongside an SEC investigation, and its research official pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Competitors, such as Gene Security, also are promising similar testing as soon as next year. Sequenom patented its methodology, promising patent battles should these competitors try to roll their tests out. With the launch of its new test, Sequenom’s stock price increased by 4.5 percent.

So, Sequenom having suffered a hit to its reputation and finances, with competitors poised to offer similar testing, pushed MaterniT21 to be the first available test, justifying it on the premise that it was “safer” and would help mothers make informed decisions, but implementing it without the needed educational resources called for by its own paid-for study.

With a potential market of up to 750,000 “clients” initially, and millions if its testing can be shown to be reliable for even low-probability pregnancies, Sequenom stands to reap billions of dollars in revenue. Yet it has not invested even a small fraction of this revenue into the educational materials it recognizes are needed for physicians and patients to make informed decisions about prenatal testing and following a prenatal diagnosis. In offering its testing with the business interest of most women accepting it, and knowing that most will choose to abort, without having been properly informed, Sequenom is participating in the reckless elimination of Down syndrome.

As a laboratory-developed test, MaterniT21 currently is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Therefore, absent public pressure, a lawsuit, or shareholder demands, there is no compulsion for Sequenom to fund the educational resources it recognizes are needed to inform expectant mothers’ decisions. One hopes its leadership will recognize that its current offering of MaterniT21 is reckless, and that investing in the educational resources is a small price to pay for a clear conscience.

Mark W. Leach is an attorney from Louisville, Kentucky, and a Master of Arts in bioethics candidate.  

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He proposed this solution in a New York Times column that will likely be studied by journalism students for decades—as an example of what happens when the last Fact Checker at a “newspaper of record” is asleep on the job.

It took only a 30-second Google search to demolish Kristof’s principal thesis—that the birth of the world’s 7 billionth person is the result of too much unprotected sex that contributes to all these ills.

The 30-second search confirms that population growth is not fueled by an excess of babies, as Kristof contends; it is fueled by more folks living longer than ever. The demographic evidence comes straight from the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). Using UNPD data, a Population Reference Bureau demographer compared population trends in the 0-4 age group and the 65-and-over age group. For simplicity, I’ll refer to these groups as Toddlers and Elders. Here’s what the UN’s data show.

In 1950 there were 335 million Toddlers worldwide and only 131 million Elders. Due to very low birthrates in developed countries and declining birthrates in most developing countries, today Elders are rapidly closing the gap. After Toddlers peak at about 650 million, sometime between 2015 and 2020, “for the first time in history, the [number of Toddlers] will decline” while Elders keep growing in number, reaching 714 million in 2020. By 2050, there will be 2.5 times more Elders than Toddlers—a complete reversal of the 1950 demographics.

Greater longevity is a good thing—the result of scientific and technological breakthroughs in agriculture and nutrition, in medicine, in water purification, and in improved sanitation.

But it’s the Toddlers on whom the future of humanity depends. When they reach adulthood, they will join the workforce, contributing to the nation’s wealth and tax revenues for roughly four decades, revenues sorely needed to fund Social Security and Medicare. It’s the cohort of former Toddlers who’ll be buying the cars, homes, and pricey electronics that keep an economy humming.

It is only right to provide a safety net for the elderly poor, from pure compassion, as well as in recognition of their contributions and sacrifices. But countries in the European Union are already reeling from the crisis of having too few workers to sustain the cradle-to-grave welfare state, even as the number of retirees explodes. Demographically, America is not far behind.

A good Fact Checker might also have questioned Mr. Kristof’s faith in the theoretical modeling exercises of the Guttmacher Institute, which purport to show that an X increase in access to and use of contraception will reduce unplanned pregnancies by Y, and abortions by Z.

The evidence simply doesn’t back this up. Empirical data of the last fifty years overwhelmingly show that with increased access to and use of contraception, unplanned pregnancies and abortions very often rise, or at best, stay about the same (an exception being found among women in former Soviet bloc countries, whose lifetime abortions often numbered well into double digits). Guttmacher and others have published numerous papers describing this apparent paradox.

Spain provides a recent example of this phenomenon: Between 1997 and 2007, contraceptive use among women rose 63 percent, while the rate of elective abortion in Spain more than doubled (108 percent).

In Sweden, teen abortion rates dropped 40 percent between 1975 and 1985, and teen childbearing also fell. Later the government increased pregnancy prevention efforts—providing free contraceptive counseling, subsidized oral contraceptives (OCs) and condoms, and over-the-counter emergency contraceptives. Between 1995 and 2001, teen abortion rates in Sweden increased by almost one-third—from 17 to 22.5 per 1000.

Duke University economics professor Peter Arcidiacono writes: “Our results suggest that increasing access to contraception may actually increase long run pregnancy rates. … On the other hand, policies that decrease access to contraception, and hence sexual activity, may lower pregnancy rates in the long run.”

Key studies with full citations are summarized in a fact sheet titled “Greater Access to Contraception Does Not Reduce Abortions.”

Why do contraceptives fail to live up to their name and their advertising? Many factors contribute to lack of effectiveness in preventing pregnancies (and STDs), especially among teens: method and user errors, the phenomenon of “risk compensation,” age-related fertility, and frequency of intercourse. Guttmacher’s Family Planning Perspectives reports the following 12-month pregnancy rates for sexually active OC users: 3.3 percent for middle-income married women age 30 and above; 13 percent for low-income single teens; and 48.4 percent for low-income cohabiting teens.

Among sexually active women whose partners use condoms as their primary method of birth control, 12-month pregnancy rates are as follows: 6.2 percent for middle-income married women age 30 and above; 23.2 percent for low-income single teens; and 72 percent for low-income cohabiting teens.

If it were just a matter of hormonal birth control not being 100-percent foolproof, and putting aside the moral questions involved in casual and contraceptive sex, some might argue for its use by disciplined, meticulous adults, in a stable relationship, willing and financially able to raise the potential “unplanned” baby.

Hormonal contraceptives are not benign, however, as any Fact Checker would learn from drug labels on the FDA’s website (even without perusing the voluminous Adverse Events data).

The link between hormonal contraceptives and breast cancer has been known for over thirty years. The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies the synthetic estrogen and progestin in contraceptives as carcinogenic to humans. The largest metanalysis (54 studies with over 150,000 women) found that women who use OCs before age 20 have almost double the risk of developing breast cancer before age 30, compared to women who did not use OCs as teens.

Until 2002, hormone replacement therapy (HRT), using hormones similar to those in combined OCs, but in lower doses, was standard treatment for menopausal symptoms. As HRT use increased, breast cancer rates rose by over 40 percent from the early 1980s through 2001. In 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative HRT trials were abruptly halted due to findings of increased risks of breast cancer, heart disease, blood clots, and stroke. As prescriptions plummeted, breast cancer rates in women over age 50 dropped 8.6 percent between 2001 and 2004. WHO now classifies HRT as carcinogenic in humans.

A Fact Checker could have told Mr. Kristof that there is, in fact, a way to slightly reduce population growth through contraceptive use, but not what he had in mind: Contraceptives can kill adults and teens.

In addition to having an increased risk of dying from breast cancer, women using hormonal contraceptives and their partners are dying at higher rates from incurable STDs, like HIV/AIDS, because hormonal contraceptives can double the risk of STD acquisition.

Women continue to die from high levels of synthetic hormones. For example, about 130 deaths have been linked to the Ortho Evra patch from blood clots resulting in heart attack, stroke, or pulmonary embolism.

Three new studies show a higher risk of lethal blood clots or gallbladder disease in women using birth control pills like Yaz. The manufacturer, Bayer, is already facing “6,850 lawsuits alleging that Yaz’s drospirenone ingredient is more dangerous than those used in competing pills. About 190 deaths from heart attack, stroke or pulmonary embolism have been associated with Yaz and similar pills.”

The manufacturer of NuvaRing® now faces 730 lawsuits in the U.S. for blood clot-related injuries and deaths associated with its use. About 40 deaths linked to NuvaRing® use have been identified to date in the FDA adverse event database.

A good Fact Checker could have given Mr. Kristof these hard truths and spared him from looking foolish. But where are all the good Fact Checkers when you need them? Not at The New York Times.

Susan E. Wills, Esq., is assistant director for education and outreach at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities.

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