Ah, liberty.:

According to the highly respected demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, sex-selective abortion is much, much more common than thought.  Between 21 and 24 countries (depending on the data used) have a sex ratio at birth (SRB) of at least 107 males born for every 100 females, exceeding the ratio commonly held as natural, about 104 to 100.

These distorted SRBs are found on almost every continent and in societies comprising a wide array of religions and cultures: Catholic Italy and El Salvador, mixed-faith Lebanon and Muslim Libya, traditionally Confucian China and South Korea, traditionally Buddhist Vietnam, diverse India. In each place, parents are ordering sex-selective abortions to have sons—even in countries that ban prenatal gender-determination technology—largely based on the calculation that sons will contribute financially to the family and better provide for them in their old age. It’s the economy, not just cultural mores, that is creating a generation of ghost girls and lost boys.

Feminism is better for some females than for others.

Pete Wehner isn’t having this pro-Gingrich narrative that says all the “establishment” conservatives are against Newt because they fear his revolutionary potential. Excerpt:

The reality is that conservative/”establishment” opposition to Gingrich generally falls into three categories. One is that if he won the nomination, he would not only lose to Barack Obama, but he would sink the rest of the GOP fleet in the process. A second area of concern is that Gingrich is temperamentally unfit to be president –he’s too erratic, undisciplined, and rhetorically self-destructive. A third area of concern is the suspicion that the former House speaker is not, in fact, a terribly reliable conservative, that he is not philosophically well-grounded (see his attachment to Alvin Toffler for more).

I suppose his serial marital infidelity would fall somewhere between the first and the second area of concern.

What’s something of a mystery to me is why so many of the Palin-type conservatives, many (but not all) of whom are Newt backers, are so sold out to bad faith as the only reasonable explanation for why people would oppose Gingrich’s candidacy. As Wehner puts it, “If you’re for Gingrich, so goes this story line, you’re for ‘genuine’ and ‘fundamental’ change. If you oppose Gingrich, on the other hand, you’re for ‘managing the decay’ of America.”

Ron Paul diehards — not all Paul supporters, mind you, just the diehards — tend to do this too. They so identify with their candidate that they can’t imagine any good reason why anybody would oppose the Doctor. If you do, it can only be because you lack virtue. Paul has highly countercultural opinions about foreign policy, the general thrust of which I agree with; if I voted on foreign policy alone, I’d be in the tank for Paul. But come on, most Republicans are strongly against Paul’s views. Paul has unorthodox views on monetary policy, and a host of other issues. These put him out of step with the GOP mainstream. Hell, that’s why so many people feel passionately about him! But to say that the only reason anybody opposes Paul is because they’re bad people is not only inaccurate, it’s unfortunate — unfortunate, because it’s to consign oneself to a kind of epistemic closure.

Being wrong and being bad are not necessarily the same thing.

Anyway, who do some politicians inspire this reaction in their most committed followers, and others don’t? I think it must have something to do with the extent to which those politicians inspire messianic passions.

Philip Larkin famously said:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Well, the Sixties were about sex, which allows me a sloppy segue to: blogging about his review of Charles Murray’s new book — review exclusively available to TAC subscribers — Steve Sailer poses an interesting question:

As Murray’s subtitle suggests, he uses the 1960 Census as his anchor point for many of his graphs. But, as his chapter on 11/21/1963 demonstrates, the whole Kennedy era makes a good baseline, not radically different from the preceding decade.

But that raises a question that Murray doesn’t particularly try to answer that I’ve been thinking about again. I believe I may have a fairly unusual answer to the old question: Why, in the popular imagination, did The Sixties not start until JFK’s assassination? Why does 11/22/1963 show up around a lot of inflection points in a lot of trends? Why do the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras seem more of one piece than do the Kennedy and Johnson eras?

Remember the case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who was filmed surreptitiously in a gay embrace by his roommate, who, with a friend, publicized what they’d seen? A day or so later, Clementi committed suicide. This case became emblematic for gay rights advocates, and for anti-bullying activists. But a new report by Ian Parker in The New Yorker contends that the facts of the case argue against a simplistic, moralistic reading. Excerpts:

It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet. But last spring, shortly before Molly Wei made a deal with prosecutors, Ravi was indicted on charges of invasion of privacy (sex crimes), bias intimidation (hate crimes), witness tampering, and evidence tampering. Bias intimidation is a sentence-booster that attaches itself to an underlying crime—usually, a violent one. Here the allegation, linked to snooping, is either that Ravi intended to harass Clementi because he was gay or that Clementi felt he’d been harassed for being gay. Ravi is not charged in connection with Clementi’s death, but he faces a possible sentence of ten years in jail. As he sat in the courtroom, his chin propped awkwardly on his fist, his predicament could be seen either as a state’s admirably muscular response to the abusive treatment of a vulnerable young man or as an attempt to criminalize teen-age odiousness by using statutes aimed at people more easily recognizable as hate-mongers and perverts.

I encourage you to read the entire article. Dharun Ravi, the roommate who is charged with a bias crime in connection with the death, is unquestionably a jerk who behaved badly. But a close look at the evidence indicates that many people have projected their own feelings about anti-gay sentiment and bullying onto this case, and this defendant. The truth is a lot more complicated. I too thought that Clementi had been outed after Ravi filmed him having sex. As Parker shows, Clementi was not closeted, and he wasn’t filmed having sex. And yes, Dharun Ravi is an ass. But he is not facing criminal trial for being an ass.

This is what moral panic does. I’m as susceptible to it as anybody. It is hard for me to hear of cases of priests accused of molestation and to think that they are innocent until proven guilty, because I already have a particular narrative in my head. It is hard for me to be fair in these particular cases, but it is necessary to fight against my own instincts in this case and in every case. You too.

Consider the Phoebe Prince bullying-suicide case in Massachusetts from a few years back. I well remember blogging with great righteous passion about what monsters those kids were, the ones who drove this high school girl to kill herself. Everybody thought that. Remember? And then Slate’s Emily Bazelon comes along, Dorothy Rabinowitz-like, spends a lot of time looking at the details of the case, and reaches a far more morally complex conclusion. Excerpt:

I’ve been reporting in South Hadley since February, as part of a series on cyberbullying. There is no question that some of the teenagers facing criminal charges treated Phoebe cruelly. But not all of them did. And it’s hard to see how any of the kids going to trial this fall ever could have anticipated the consequences of their actions, for Phoebe or for themselves. Should we send teenagers to prison for being nasty to one another? Is it really fair to lay the burden of Phoebe’s suicide on these kids?

Reader Rob identifies what I too find so frustrating about “Mad Men”:

None of this moral complexity exists in Mad Men. We know that Don shouldn’t be sleeping around, and we thus sympathize with his wife. But wait! She’s a cheater herself, and treats her children like trash! Is the show morally complex because everyone is morally flawed and because there are no shades of black and white? No. Mad Men depicts a universe of moral stasis. Everyone sucks, no one improves, and no one even tries. It’s not even clear what should be done if they decided to improve because the characters are designed in such a way that there’s no “out.” And so on week after week. Ennui and moral malaise don’t make for consistently great television. Maybe, thus, the form here is thus the (profoundly depressing) message about late modern, late capitalist society. But at point it’s boring. What more can “happen” in the series since, really, nothing happens anyway?

Rob compares “Mad Men” unfavorably to the moral complexity in shows like “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire,” neither of which I’ve seen, so I don’t know how valid this comparison is. One reason I was initially drawn to “Mad Men” was the moral complexity of its characters. Nobody was all good or all bad — just like life. But as the seasons progressed, there was no sense of moral progress in the characters. I didn’t get the idea that some were moving toward the light, while others were moving inexorably toward darkness. They just sat there spinning (with the exception of Peggy, who is becoming more worldly-wise, but not necessarily more morally conscious and responsible). I suppose there are plenty of people in real life who live this way, learning nothing from the trials and triumphs of their lives. But does this make for satisfying drama? I don’t think so.

One thing I’ve appreciated about “Mad Men” is its exploration of the netherworld between ideals and reality. You get the idea, though, that there’s an essential nihilism at the heart of the series, because its writers are more interested in the characters’ moral contradictions and hypocrisies than in resolving them, or having its characters grope towards resolution. After the last season, I thought that there’s no way the writers are going to let Don Draper become a better man. They’re too invested in him being a stranger to himself.

“To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair,” wrote Walker Percy. Don can never be allowed to be “on to something.” Perhaps it’s because the show’s creators don’t believe there’s something to be on to — that is, they’re nihilists themselves. I don’t know this, but I’m hard pressed to see why they torture their characters so much, and don’t show any of them finding any sort of redemption. “Mad Men” is a show about despair — which is fine, I get that, I’m interested in it. But it’s a show that’s about nothing but despair. No grace, no mystery, just confusion.

My friend John Grogan, a Democrat and Catholic lawyer in Philadelphia, writes (and I quote this with his permission):

The Catholic theologian Michael Novak argues that Joe Paterno was a victim of Penn State:

When the hundreds of thousands of Penn State alumni hear the name JoePa, they think of moral leadership, of the kind of person they aspire to be. Of his warmth, his fatherliness, his steadiness, and his granite character. Joe Paterno was for hundreds of thousands of alumni the very model of the moral ideal of Western humanism.

… Despite the fact that JoePa had said he was going to resign after the 2011 season was over, they gave Joe (after nearly 60 years of leadership unparalleled in the annals of any university) over to the national press and the national mob as a scapegoat, to bear the whole heartbreaking scandal on his shoulders, to be burned as a live offering, in expiation of their sins.

Jesus of Nazareth JoePa of Happy Valley died for the sins of the rabble. Got it. So kids got raped by a sexual predator, and it got overlooked by Paterno and others in power because it was more important to preserve the myth of JoePa and Penn State football than it was to take hard stands to protect children from a predator. The tragedy here is not that a good man unintentionally allowed evil to be done. For Novak, the tragedy is that though the man was technically innocent of wrongdoing (“JoePa had met his professional responsibilities”), the Sanhedrin  Penn State board of trustees sacrificed him nonetheless. What did this sacrifice consist of? Firing him instead of letting him dictate the terms of his exit. They sure don’t do crucifixions like they used to.

Here’s a great follow-up to that last post: an interview with TAC editor Dan McCarthy about how his Catholicism affects his approach to politics and public life. I suppose it makes me look like a horrible suck-up, but there really is a lot to think about in this piece. Here’s a small but telling bit:

Readers deserve fair warning: today I am not a very observant Catholic. To hear the media tell it, Catholicism has only two categories, devout and dissident. Actually there are a lot of people who fall into neither set.

He’s right about that, and that’s something that I, once a highly observant, highly politicized, Catholic took a long time  to see. A few years ago, in what would be my final couple of years as a Catholic, I noticed that the only Catholics who had a real sense of the battles going on within the Church, and the stakes, were the fairly small number of engaged progressives and engaged orthodox Catholics. The great majority of people didn’t know and didn’t particularly care to know. It was like the Iraq War, in which all the fighting is done by a professionalized elite, while the majority of the population on whose behalf the fighting takes place, ostensibly, sat back unawares. Now, I would have argued then, and I would probably argue to a less forceful degree today, that they ought to have known. But I would have been better off myself if I had learned from them. Instead of seeing the great majority of Catholics as sitters on the sidelines, it would have given me a more educated and indeed healthier perspective on the faith if I had disengaged to a certain extent from its political side (and by “political,” I’m talking about Church politics, not secular politics), and tried to understand the experience of Catholicism as it is actually lived, not chiefly as how it deviates from the Theory. That’s not to say the Theory is unimportant; clearly it is. But it is to say that there is, in the minds of activist intellectual Catholics of both the left and the right, a kind of commitment to abstraction that can distort one’s vision. True, the disengaged Catholic may be faulted for not being as concerned or involved with the great struggles of our time within the Church, but the engaged Catholic can often fall into pridefulness over this. Besides, as Dan indicates, one doesn’t have to be a Catholic engaged in Church matters to have one’s Catholicism profoundly affect one’s engagement in other areas of life. That is a useful lesson to learn.

Another important point from the interview comes when Brad Birzer asks Dan about which public Catholics he admires, and why. Dan begins like this:

There there’s been a tragic diminution in the distinctly Catholic sensibility in American public life. I’ll speak here about my own areas of professional concern, politics and journalism.  A little over a generation ago there were enclaves of Catholic thinking within liberalism and conservatism — certainly the conservative movement once had an influential Catholic component. Now there are enclaves of partisan liberalism and conservatism within Catholicism.  On the right, a political ecumenism has been pursued in the name of fighting the culture war, and while it may be necessary in some degree, it has politicized and protestantized many Catholic conservatives. (There’s a wonderful book by Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950-1985, that gives a sense of how things used to be.)

There are still Catholic public figures and organizations, but they tend to be either less engaged with the mainstream than before or else so much more engaged as to be almost totally assimilated. The mainstream itself is both more aggressively Protestant and more aggressively secular than in the past, and Catholics reacting against one side often fall into the arms of the other.

That’s a pretty great insight. If you’re a Catholic, and you never find yourself dissenting from the views of the editorial page of The New York Times, there’s something you aren’t getting about your faith. Likewise, if you, as a Catholic, never find yourself dissenting from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, you are missing something. It’s so hard, though, to find much practical guidance for how to think in an authentically Catholic way about contemporary issues. The parishes, in my experience, are pretty useless. Homilies tend towards Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — though interestingly, in their study of American churchgoing (not just Catholic churchgoing), Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that there were more politicized pulpits on the left than on the right. And, as Dan says, so many of the magazines and institutions that could offer a distinctively Catholic point of view have surrendered that, for various reasons.

Though I am no longer a Catholic, my Catholicism dramatically shaped my own politics, and made me the kind of conservative I became. I found in time that I couldn’t accept the GOP gospel on economic matters, because it contrasted so sharply with what I believed to be true from my study of the Church’s teachings. Nor could I view the natural world (that is, the environment) as most of my fellow conservatives did, because the sharp divide between the soul and the body was something that is simply not supported in Catholic teaching. Though I am an Orthodox Christian now, that theological shift affected nothing in terms of my political and cultural thinking. In terms of thinking about public life, there is not much difference between the modes of thinking prescribed by the Roman church, and the modes of thinking prescribed by the Orthodox church. At least I have not found that to be so, on a practical level. Perhaps I have a lot to learn.

Anyway, please do read the entire interview. Daniel talks about the threat to authentic Catholicism posed by the “Brave New World” consumerist ethos, and about how the Catholic (and, I should say, the Orthodox) idea of cosmos — that there is a complex but orderly hierarchy to existence — can serve as a natural corrective to our imprudent and illiberal politics. I really do think that to read this short interview, and to know that a man who thinks like this is editing an actual magazine that one can buy, will bring subscribers to TAC. Hope so.

As a religious conservative whose politics are heavily informed by his religious beliefs, it gives me no pleasure to read this, but I think Tom Edsall is stating what has become obvious. He begins by recalling the late Paul Weyrich’s post-Lewinsky call for Christian conservatives reverse course:

In the face of this onslaught of moral corruption, Weyrich counseled withdrawal from society at large. A “legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture,” he wrote. “We need to drop out of this culture, and find places, even if it is where we physically are right now, where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives.”

What would Weyrich, who died in 2008, make of the fact that Newt Gingrich — who was himself having an adulterous affair during the Clinton impeachment proceedings (one of several conducted by the former speaker,according to his own testimony and a number of lengthy journalistic investigations, including this one and that one) — won the 2012 South Carolina Republican primary with a plurality of voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians?