O Diversity! O Sensitivity! Teach us thy ways:

The Army is ordering its hardened combat veterans to wear fake breasts and empathy bellies so they can better understand how pregnant soldiers feel during physical training.

This week, 14 noncommissioned officers at Camp Zama took turns wearing the “pregnancy simulators” as they stretched, twisted and exercised during a three-day class that teaches them to serve as fitness instructors for pregnant soldiers and new mothers.

Army enlisted leaders all over the world are being ordered to take the Pregnancy Postpartum Physical Training Exercise Leaders Course, or PPPT, according to U.S. Army Medical Activity Japan health promotion educator Jana York.

Look upon us, ye enemies of America, and tremble!:

(H/T: Mark Shea, who asks, “Where’s Patton when you need him?”)

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Rick Santorum appears to imply that Barack Obama is a crypto-Hitler who has bamboozled the masses into thinking that he’s not so bad after all. Good grief. The thing is, I don’t believe Santorum is cynical at all. I think he believes all of it. Noah Millman speaks to why even though I’m on the same side as Rick Santorum on a number of social issues, the guy makes me nervous:

I find the highly ideological character of Santorum’s mind to be quite scary, much scarier than the specifics of his views.

I wouldn’t have said “scary,” but the milder “off-putting.” But it’s really off-putting. Santorum doesn’t so much hold views as grips them with white trembling knuckles. In him there is something of Savonarola: a righteous and religious man who spoke out courageously against the moral corruption of his age, but who got carried away when his pious rectitude turned into rigidity, and ultimately into fanaticism.

Pete Wehner, also a social conservative, gets it too:

It’s almost impossible to overstate how important tone and countenance are when it comes to social issues. There is a great deal to be said for those who care about the cultural condition of American society. But the arguments on behalf of moral truth need to be made in ways that are winsome, in a manner that is meant to persuade. What this means, in part, is the person making the arguments needs to radiate some measure of grace and tolerance rather than condemnation and zeal. What we’re talking about is using a light touch rather than a heavy hand. To understand the difference, think about how the language (and spirit) of the pro-life movement shifted from accusing people of being “baby killers” to asking Americans to join a movement in which every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. Social conservatism, if it ever hopes to succeed, needs to be articulated in a way that is seen as promoting the human good and advancing human dignity, rather than declaring a series of forbidden acts that are leading us to Gomorrah.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat:

All things being equal, a populist style that’s at odds with the Acela corridor’s attitudes and values can often play well in the heartland. But no presidential candidate can succeed without a modicum of favorable media coverage, and so a successful populist needs to be able to disarm elite journalists (as Huckabee so expertly did, schmoozing on The Daily Show and elsewhere) as often as he alienates them. And nobody has ever used the word “disarming” to describe Rick Santorum’s approach to politics.

That’s because the former senator has the instincts of an activist, rather than of a president or statesman. Whether the topic is social issues or foreign policy, his zeal exceeds his prudence, and as a result his career is littered with debating society provocations (referencing “man-on-dog” sex in an argument about gay marriage, using his doomed 2006 Senate bid to educate Pennsylvanians on the evils of Hugo Chavez, etc.) that have won him far more enemies than friends. His passion for ideas and argument often does him credit, but in a national campaign it would probably do him in.

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Last week, I think it was, there was a big swivet over some leaked, or stolen, documents from the Heartland Institute, purporting to show the underhanded role the think tank plays in pushing climate-change denialism. Though I generally believe the case for man-made global warming, and hate the way many conservatives treat the whole thing as a test of ideological purity, I hesitated writing about all of this after seeing Megan McArdle’s post raising questions about the authenticity of one of the documents. Nota bene, some of them are true and accurate, and reflect poorly on Heartland. But Heartland adamantly claimed that one of the worst was a fabrication. McArdle said they might have a point, and made a case for her suspicions about this sting.

She was right, at least in part. As McArdle posts tonight, Peter Gleick, chair (until, like, yesterday) of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics, confesses to having contacted Heartland under a false name, and tricked them into sending him the confidential material. As a gobsmacked McArdle writes:

This is . . . just . . . words fail me . . . I mean, seriously . . . um . . . well, what the hey?!?!

The very, very best thing that one can say about this is that this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties.  Let’s walk through the thought process:

You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute.  It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland’s opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion.  Do you:

A.  Throw it in the trash

B.  Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance

C.  Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.

As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always “A” or “B”, never “C”.

It’s a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he’s not a journalist–and in truth, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks.  So leave ethics aside: wasn’t he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don’t know, illegal?  Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.

Read McArdle’s entire post. If you like, here is Heartland’s reaction to Gleick’s confession. Looks like Pete better lawyer up. To be clear, this by no means exonerates Heartland from the embarrassing material in the bona fide documents. But Peter Gleick lied to trick someone into giving him confidential information. In so doing, he made himself the story — and handed to his opponents a public relations victory of monumental proportions.

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How exhausting it must be to be a liberal in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where you can never stop thinking about politics, especially cultural politics. Remember the 2006 Park Slope freak-out over a resident posting a “found” notice on a neighborhood e-mail list involving what she identified as a “boy’s hat”? The gender politics exploded over that one. It started with this:

I’m sorry, I know that you are just trying to be helpful, but what makes this a “boy’s hat”? Did you see the boy himself loose it? Or does the hat in question possess an unmistakable scent of testosterone?

It’s innocent little comments like this that I find the most hurtful…

What does this comment imply about the girl who chooses to wear just such a hat (or something like it)? Is she doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with her?

And then the crazies really came out. At one point:

As someone else pointed out, this was the very same forum where, just recently, all kinds of people wrote of the anguish they felt about their young children already acting in gender-stereotyped ways. Although I myself did not realize at first that there was anything amiss about saying “boys’ hat,” and I say things like that, unwittingly, all the time, I do recognize how such expressions are caused by and contribute to gender stereotyping. Without people to point this out to us, how do we change our language, and thereby change the way our children perceive gender?

Can you imagine? Well, here’s the latest Park Slope bourgeois lefty Gotterdammerung, via the Wall Street Journal:

After three years of heated debate, the Park Slope Food Coop is at last ready for a vote.

That is, a vote on if, in fact, there should be a vote at all.

Next month, the 15,500-plus member cooperative will decide whether to hold a referendum on what may be the most controversial issue in its nearly 40-year history: a boycott of products made in Israel.

The boycott—which has dominated the coop’s newsletter with back-and-forth letters for months—is expected to draw as many as 1,000 people, forcing co-op staff to look for an alternative meeting location.

… The co-op is used to spirited discussions. The decision to introduce meat at an institution where organic and nonorganic products don’t comingle was divisive. The green light to sell beer came only after two referendums spaced more than a decade apart. And a ban on bottled water took two years to push through.

But the issue of an Israeli boycott has evolved into the most polarizing debate yet.

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Reader GingerMan points to these two James Poulos posts — here’s the first, and here’s the second – as being accurate descriptions of the culture war, as it touches upon human sexuality. GingerMan writes:

It comes down to belief in natural law vs. the liberation of the protean self.

The precise problem facing cultural conservatives is that we have a rights-based legal and constitutional framework combined with a large and polyglot cultural society. Coming to agreement upon the boundaries of natural law seems to be well nigh impossible in such an environment, therefore only procedural liberalism can fill the vacuum.

Poulos writes, in his first column:

In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for. None of our culture warriors are anywhere close to settling the matter. The prevailing answer is the non-answer, a Newt-worthy challenge to the premise that insists the real purpose of women is nothing in particular.

Such an answer may or may not be a landmark in the progress of the human race, but it is anathema to most conservatives of any political party, and for that reason conservative folkways, prejudices, and ideals are once again on trial.

Poulos explores the divisions on the cultural left about the purpose of femininity, and of women, if indeed there is purpose there. If women are entirely free to define themselves and to choose their own behavior, then that puts them in conflict with others on the cultural left. In his follow-up column, written in response to an avalanche of contempt from the left, Poulos writes:

It’s not very controversial to point out that sex and gender are foundational to the culture wars. But it is apparently extremely controversial to claim that we can’t make sense of how and why they’re foundational without acknowledging that the root of the battle is over reaching — and enforcing — a consensus about the relationship between what women do and who women are.

This despite the fact that many on both sides of the culture war are frank about their desire to craft an enforceable consensus on issues like abortion, birth control, prostitution, gay marriage, and gay adoption.

For many on both sides, the belief is that their opponents really do stand for barbarism and against civilization. Supporters of the right to choose to have an abortion are believed by many pro-life people to support a barbaric, uncivilized act. Those who would restrict officially recognized marriages to one man and one woman are seen by many gay marriage advocates as using the power of the law to atavistically reverse the partly organic, partly hard-fought progress of civilization.

I confess I don’t really understand what James is advocating for, other than the general point that GingerMan discerns, and James’s view that the clash of orthodoxies here is more than our political system can bear. But that itself is enough. Read the responses to James’s columns, and you see how fierce this battle is. There’s a reason it’s called a culture war — and I do wish the left would disabuse itself of the pretense that only the right fights it.

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