Sociologists Elizabeth Marquardt and W. Bradford Wilcox find evidence that it doesn’t have to be, if couples are willing to live by certain rules. Excerpt:

A substantial minority — about 35 percent — of husbands and wives do not experience parenthood as an obstacle to marital happiness. These couples seem to navigate the shoals of parenthood without succumbing to comparatively low levels of marital happiness. What is their secret? We identified ten aspects of contemporary social life and relationships — such as marital generosity, good sex, religious faith, thrift, shared housework, and more — that seem to boost women’s and men’s odds of successfully combining marriage and parenthood.

Our findings go beyond the tired, old debates about gender roles and marriage. In the 1960s and ’70s, in part as a consequence of the feminist movement and the therapeutic revolution, many wives understandably rejected what was then a heavily-gendered ethic of marital sacrifice and instead took a more individualistic approach to marriage, focused on meeting their own needs. But if the 1970s divorce revolution taught us anything, it was that heavy doses of individualism and a good marriage aren’t very compatible.

Our report suggests, in contrast, that in today’s marriages both wives and husbands benefit when they embrace an ethic of marital generosity that puts the welfare of their spouse first. That is, both are happier in their marriages when they make a regular effort to serve their spouse in small ways — from making them a cup of coffee, to giving them a back rub after a long day, to going out of their way to be affectionate or forgiving. So the lesson here is not for wives now to throw off an other-centered ethic as a relic of an ancient era, but rather for contemporary husbands to embrace this ethic for themselves and their families.

I find from experience that this is deeply true. It’s a challenge, certainly, but it has its rewards. I’m really glad we live in a time in which it’s a normal thing for men to help with cooking, cleaning the kitchen, and so forth.

It’s hard to say that marriage with family makes one happy, per se, but it does make one joyful. I remember when Julie and I were first married, we had a great time without kids. We lived in Manhattan, and had no responsibilities or encumbrances beyond ourselves. After about a year of that, we felt like, “Is this all there is?” And then we started our family. How often both of us would love to experience again the freedom we did back in the day before children. But would we trade what we have, and have had, for that again? Not in a million years. This is a very difficult thing, I find, to convey to those who aren’t married, or who don’t have children. But it’s true. This morning I went in to wake my little girl up, watched her sleeping for a few seconds, and my heart nearly burst.

Jon Corzine to Congress today: “I simply do not know where the money is.” 

Hey, it could happen to anybody, mislaying hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m sure he meant well. Pobody’s nerfect!

Seth Mandel, at Commentary’s blog:

[T]o recap: Corzine made risky investments in European bonds as the continent sank toward insolvency and after he was warned by executives at MF Global about the risks; he used his influence with federal regulators to get them to back off on instituting rules that would have prevented Corzine’s activities and protected his investors from his recklessness; and several hundred million dollars of investor cash went missing, prompting an investigation into whether Corzine covered his firm’s bad bets with other people’s money.

Mandel notes that Corzine also said, in his statement to Congress, that he “may not testify accurately” because he didn’t have enough time to get his story straight prepare his testimony. Ah.

The Tea Party fave does like to travel in style:

Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential candidate with a penchant for luxury jets and Tiffany & Co. jewelry, also appears to demand top-notch accommodations when he travels for a speech.

The Smoking Gun Web site, which specializes in unearthing revealing documents, has posted a copy of a speaking gig contract apparently signed by Gingrich for an appearance at Missouri Western State University in October 2010.

The contract called for payment of “first class expenses,” including the hotel of Gingrich’s choice, and “first class airfare.” A Gingrich aide gets a smaller hotel room ”located nearby the suite, but not attached.” A contract addendum also notes that “Mrs. Gingrich” may sometimes travel with her husband and “will be needed to be seated beside Mr. Gingrich at all functions.”

Perhaps most curious was language requiring a “non-smoking one-bedroom suite (preferably with two bathrooms).” The Smoking Gun compared Gingrich’s “loo requirement” with “Mary J. Blige’s toilet seat proviso,” in which the singer required “a private toilet (with new toilet seat)” as part of her standard performance contract.

OK, it’s not unusual for a public figure of his prominence to demand first-class accommodations. But two toilets? Is Newt really that full of … ?

When this diva blows up, it’s going to be something to see.

This morning I heard a story on the radio about the HHS secretary nixing the recommendation of her scientific panel that Plan B, the emergency contraception pill, be made available over the counter to people of all ages. Boy, I can’t imagine why anybody would object to 12 year olds being able to buy on her on, like it was a pack of Life Savers, a dose of hormones that will keep her from getting pregnant after sex.

Don’t believe it when people say Plan B isn’t abortifacient. According to the manufacturer, one way (but not the only way) it works is to prevent implantation of the fertilized egg. For people who believe life begins at conception, this is abortion.

There was on the radio this morning the usual rigamarole about how the secretary’s decision reflected a preference for “politics” over “science.” These are almost always stupid complaints. Of course it’s a political decision! So what? “Science” only offers an opinion about whether this pill is or isn’t safe for kids to take. It doesn’t offer an opinion about whether or not it’s a good idea to make it available to them. That is a moral decision, which means, inevitably, a political one. Again: so what? Had the decision gone the other way, it would also have been a political decision. Again: so what?

It’s a source of frequent irritation the way we cannot get straight in our heads the difference between science and morality in these discussions. This is not the fault of science, but of politicized people who wish to use the authority of science to justify political or moral agendas. When Darwin published his work, you have imperialists in the UK claiming that science justified British imperialism (survival of the fittest applied to geopolitics), you had abolitionists claiming that science backed the anti-slavery movement (because we are all brothers under the skin), and you had eugenicists seizing the mantle of science to support theories of racial superiority.

I’m not saying that science never indicates which course of action would be the best one to take in a given situation. But I am saying that this is not one of those situations, and it happens a lot less often than is claimed.

The other night my kid was fiddling around with my iPhone as it perched on a stereo dock, and settled on the Talking Heads’ iconic 1980s album Remain in Light. As I listened while doing the dishes, I thought about how strangely contemporary that album sounded. If it came out today, it would sound as fresh as it did 31 years ago. And that’s very strange. It occurred to me that Remain in Light was a very forward-sounding album when it was released, so maybe it’s not the best example. Yet listening to my kids go through my music collection, and settle on Eighties bands like New Order, or the Clash (late Seventies/early Eighties), and then on more contemporary groups like the White Stripes, it has occurred to me that it’s much harder to classify that stuff by era based on the sound alone.

We listen to a fairly eclectic range of music in this house, so the kids are exposed to a lot. I doubt they could say, “That comes from the Thirties” or “that comes from the Fifties,” but just as they can tell a difference between jazz and folk, they can tell a difference among eras of popular music. But sometime around the end of the 1980s, perhaps with the fading of radio as a tastemaker, that kind of thing went away. That seminal Talking Heads album is as far away from us today as chart-toppers by Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como were from the pop culture that first heard Remain in Light. Yet it sounds far, far closer to us in time.

I almost never listen to pop radio, but on the occasion that I do, it’s startling to me how derivative, how unoriginal, the music sounds. Aside from a few sonic tweaks, most of this stuff wouldn’t be out of place at any moment over the last 20 years. Nobody listening to the radio in 1987 would have mistaken any of that music for 1977’s, much less 1967’s. What’s that about?

It’s not just music. When Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X came out in 1991, it hit like a bombshell among me and my friends. Finally, someone had written a novel that spoke to our sensibilities and experiences! We couldn’t stop talking about it, and the ideas in it. The other day, as I was going through my bookshelves preparing to pack things away for the upcoming move, I came across my three copies of the book (I was forever lending it out, then having to buy a new copy; sometimes people returned them) and thought, “It’s about time for me to let Matthew read this.” He’s deeply ironic (already, at 12!) and will probably understand the book. Which is awfully strange, if you think about it.

And to me, strangest of all: Happy Days. It was the most popular TV show of the late ’70s, when I was in my prime-time kid years. It was set in a world in the far-off past, or so it seemed to us. Today, if there were a Happy Days on TV set in that same far-off past, measured as equidistant from today as the ’70s were from the ’50s, it would be set in or around 1991. Fonzie would be some grunge hipster. You can walk into any coffee shop today and see grunge hipsters whose look hasn’t changed much since the first Nirvana album. In 1977, the only place to see modern people dressed like Fonzie was on the syndicated nostalgia show Sha Na Na.

Kurt Andersen explores this phenomenon in a Vanity Fair essay.  I had hoped to quote from it, but I find it doesn’t offer any satisfactory explanations for why we’re in this Groundhog Day cultural cycle. (One thing he does point out that I’d overlooked: how much better, overall, people and things look today than they did in the 1970s.) Maybe it’s too hard to get a handle on. Anderson suggests that it may be that history is moving so fast that we hold on to more recent cultural forms because they offer us comfort. That might be part of it, but it doesn’t feel right. He also suggests, even less plausibly, that it’s about economic insecurity. I think it’s rather the case that the democratization of taste has done this to us (or rather for us; I don’t think it’s such a bad thing). My childhood and teenage years were pretty much the last time the ordinary person didn’t have a lot of choice in the pop culture he consumed. It was always possible, I suppose, to cultivate and serve non-mainstream musical tastes, but you really had to work at it. Most of us listened to what was on the radio, and that was about it. Remain In Light wasn’t on the radio; I discovered it when I was schooled in musical taste by an extraordinary classmate, A. Marc Caplan, who introduced kids like me to Elvis Costello, the Clash, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and suchlike (and look what happened to him — an eclectic genius, this Caplan, who opened so many musical doors for me). The early-Eighties advent of MTV radically expanded the kind of music we listened to by bringing the best of the British pop charts into our living rooms. Plus, “college radio” was on the rise then, creating markets for music that couldn’t be found on commercial radio. And so forth.

It’s kind of obvious what’s happened, isn’t it? It’s like a river that has jumped its channel, and rolls downhill to the sea in a thousand lazy bayous instead of a rushing, concentrated force. Popular taste is far more difficult to concentrate and to direct, given the revolutionary change in distribution technologies (I believe it’s impossible to overstate the influence of early MTV in breaking the hegemony of Top 40 radio). I find this impossible to complain about. To be sure, my usual stance is to object to cultural fragmentation, but maybe you would have had to have lived, as I did, through the era where the only thing to listen to on the radio was REO Speedwagon and Air Supply, and the only place to buy clothes you could afford was off the rack at Sears or JCPenney, to grasp how much better we have it today. As I write this, I have another window open on my browser, to an Amazon.com page for E.M. Cioran. I can have that book in the mail to me today with a keystroke. Twenty, thirty years ago, I probably wouldn’t have known who he was, or have any way to get his books. I would have looked to the bestseller list to define my taste, or listened to friends, whose tastes wouldn’t have diverged too far from the bestseller lists.

Even if we’re not making cultural progress in the way it was defined in the past, this, to me, is real and welcome progress.

My father (far right) and other Future Farmers of America meet Sweet Potato Man:

This was back in the day when the laws in some parts of America denied half-human/half-tubers the right to use the same public accommodations as white people. Cruelly enough, in some cases that didn’t matter to Sweet Potato Man. He couldn’t very well be forced to the back of the bus if he couldn’t get his big ugly potato head through the bus door in the first place.

Ross Douthat pointedly warns Christians to be very, very careful about associating themselves with Newt Gingrich — and for a good reason I’ve heard nobody else bring up. He points out that conservative Christianity is facing a big demographic challenge in this country. Younger American Christians are much less engaged by the same culture-war fights that have preoccupied their parents’ generation of Christians. As Robert Putnam and others have documented in social science research, many of the Millenials have turned from Christianity itself, or from conservative Christianity, out of dissent from the “Republican Party At Prayer” model of Christianity they discern there. Gingrich is a classic example the kind of thing that younger Christians (and ex-Christians) find so objectionable about the Religious Right, Ross points out, in that he is an icon of partisan piety that looks an awful lot like rank hypocrisy.

But wait, hasn’t Newt confessed Jesus and been forgiven of his sins? Perhaps so — but as Ross insists, that is beside the point:

But repentance isn’t the issue here. Of course Christians are obliged to forgive a penitent, whatever his offenses — though a cynic might note that it’s easy for an adulterer to express contrition once he’s safely married to his mistress. But one can forgive a sinner without necessarily deciding that he should be anointed as the standard bearer for the very cause that he betrayed. Contrition is supposed to be its own reward. There’s no obligation to throw in the presidency as well.

In a climate of culture war, any spokesman for conservative Christianity is destined to be a polarizing figure. (Just ask Tim Tebow.) But a religious right that rallied around Gingrich would be putting the worst possible face on its cause and at the worst possible time.

His candidacy isn’t a test of religious conservatives’ willingness to be good, forgiving Christians. It’s a test of their ability to see their cause through outsiders’ eyes, and to recognize what anointing a thrice-married adulterer as the champion of “family values” would say to the skeptical, the unconverted and above all to the young.

Absolutely right. Yet to that one might say: well, St. Paul was a persecutor of Christians, and look what he became. Okay, but is Newt St. Paul? St. Paul’s conversion, and later life, did not serve for his worldly glorification and entree to power. In fact, it landed him in prison, put his life in jeopardy, and, according to tradition, ultimately led to his martyrdom. Newt’s conversion has not borne similar fruits. Caveat emptor. 

You have heard, no doubt, about the new Obama administration policy committing US diplomacy to punishing countries where gay people are persecuted:

The Obama administration bluntly warned the world against gay and lesbian discrimination Tuesday, declaring the U.S. will use foreign assistance as well as diplomacy to back its insistence that gay rights are fully equal to other basic human rights.

In unusually strong language, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton compared the struggle for gay equality to difficult passages toward women’s rights and racial equality, and she said a country’s cultural or religious traditions are no excuse for discrimination.

“Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” she said. “It should never be a crime to be gay.”

Magister Parnassus comments:

I do not think a person should be abused or killed because he or she desires his or her own gender or practices homosexuality.  I also do not think a person should be abused he or she is a child or killed because he or she lives inside a womb.  My question, then, is this.  Why is abuse and killing of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people more worthy of the bully pulpit that is the the United States thanchildren caught up the sex trafficking trade or those butchered in the womb?  Why do they deserve more protection than Christians killed for their faith? … Are there more crimes against LGBT people around the world than against children?  Are there more crimes committed in response to sexual orientation than in response to religion?

I agree, and would also ask: how far do we take this? I would think (I would hope and pray) that even the most committed opponent of gay marriage would oppose laws in other lands that condemn homosexuals to death or imprisonment simply for being gay. Insofar as the Obama policy advances this goal, I support it. The mess in Uganda is evil.

But does this new policy mean that countries who do not embrace same-sex marriage are going to be disadvantaged in their diplomatic relations with the US? Will this mean that gays are more privileged in this way than victims of religious discrimination? (I’m asking sincerely; perhaps the US already makes religious freedom a priority in its diplomacy, in precisely this way.) If, for the sake of argument, the US does make pushing for religious freedom a priority in its diplomacy, what happens when that priority clashes with the new gay rights push?

From a friend; I’ve withheld the name of his city by request:

A couple of personal stories on the Occupy “movement”: My Father in Law works for the County Works Department as an engineer for public transportation. His office building is in downtown and shares space with the county courthouse.  This is what people decided to occupy.

Though the occupiers were not many in number, their presence proved to be a problem for the trendy shopping neighborhood they inhabited.  They caused traffic issues. And of course, there were issues of hygiene. So the occupiers cried out that the County should supply them with Porta-Potties.  For free. From the County Works.  The same folks they were occupying.

This just illustrates that the occupiers lost sight of what they were supposed to be occupying.  In what thoughtful reality is “Wall Street” in New York the same as the County Works and Courthouse in Small-Town America?  My Father in Law is not the 1%.  The fact of the matter is that — inasmuch as the occupiers thought at all about what they were doing — they saw Wall Street and Government (of all kinds) as one and the same.  While one might be able to make this case for certain sections of the federal government (like regulatory departments) this is certainly not true about county government.  What percentage of Americans work for county government? I’m sure it is more than one.