I’ve marveled for decades at the “abortion distortion factor” in American law.
[N]o legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court when an occasion for its application arises in a case involving state regulation of abortion.
(Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who arguably drove the “ad hoc nullification machine” herself a few times.) This is expanding into a sexuality distortion factor, by the way; nobody is allowed to disapprove of any form of sexual expression “by and between consenting adults” (as the secular benediction has it).
But law does not stand off by itself until summoned to intervene in a dispute. It instructs and molds, too, and there’s a consequent societal abortion distortion factor as well.
I’m thinking of the dramatic drop-off in stigma for young women pregnant out of wedlock and for single mothers among the most conservative and pro-life Christians. We still disapprove fornication, at least pro forma, but if a young woman shows up at most Pregnancy Resource Centers for a pregnancy test, she’s not going to get lectured about the naughty behavior that brought her there. Eventually, she may be gently offered help in learning how to avoid a repeat appearance by learning to cultivate healthier relationships, but for the time being, she’s a heroine for carrying her child to term rather than killing it.
Inevitably, the diminution of stigma has produced more out-of-wedlock births. It’s a trade-off – better an out-of-wedlock birth than a stigma-induced abortion – and some chickens are coming home to roost because we made it.
The presence of stigma has never been an entirely effective prophylactic, to be sure. There’s plenty of stigma remaining in at least parts of India, for instance, where pregnant women who have been cajoled into sex by promises of marriage are calling in their chips by filing “false promise rape charges.”
Young women in India are gaining far greater social freedoms—to work, to study, to date—than in the past. However, for large parts of the population, tradition still holds that premarital sex is an absolute no-no with harsh consequences. Pregnant, unmarried women in particular may suffer ostracism from families, a sole avenue for support, as well as harassment.
Paradoxically, filing a rape complaint to try to secure a marriage is one of the few tools these women have to achieve social acceptance. Interviews nationwide with more than two dozen law-enforcement officials, lawyers and women’s advocates, as well as women who themselves used India’s rape law this way, suggest the practice is relatively common. And it is legal, as courts have ruled.
“If the girl has conceived, then the boy must go for marriage,” says Bahar U. Barqi, a New Delhi lawyer who this year represented a man accused of making false promises to obtain sex. “Her image in the society is more vulnerable than a man’s.”
You can lament it all you want, but as long as women bear pregnancies visibly, they will be disproportionately stigmatized, whether the stigma is crushing or trivially small. It’s not always even clear who the inseminator is, apart from any “boys will be boys” double standard when he’s known.
Indian courts have dealt with that social reality, and with a related reality, more realistically than we have been dealing with it in our egalitarian delusion:
A “live-in or marriage-like relationship is neither a crime nor a sin though socially unacceptable in this country,” India’s Supreme Court said in a judgment this week in the case of an unmarried woman seeking financial support from a man she had lived with. When a relationship breaks down, “the woman invariably is the sufferer,” the court said.
I have no desire to import false promise rape theory into American law as a new kind of “shotgun wedding” – especially not in our climate of no-fault divorce. But the biological realities remain, intractable, and the sexual part of The Sexual Revolution has been bad for women. I strongly suspect that the economic part of the sexual revolution is the cause of much of our huge increase in economic stratification as well.
Afficionado of fellatio and SUVs, Mark Driscoll, who has a second career as religiopreneur and megachurch “pastor,” has added a third career as far-ranging author, though it took plagiarism to pull it off.
His accuser in the plagiarism affair has done her homework, including putting the evidence up for examination. May her courageous tribe increase. Collin Garbarino (H/T, by the way) says he has flunked students for less egregious plagiarism and so flunks Driscoll; he would be no happier if Driscoll hires ghost writers to plagiarize for him (i.e., plausible deniability). The Slacktivist says Driscoll showed poor taste in what he plagiarized (“Driscoll’s plagiarism, in other words, seems to consist of cloning Jones’ strawman” and “Woody Allen said, ‘If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.’”).
Has anything spiritually healthy ever come out of the great ego-stroking, market-driven megachurch model? Just like Pope Tony the Schismatic, Pope Mark of Mars is answerable to nobody.
I was reminded as I Googled “Mark Driscoll” that Fred Clark, The Slacktivist, is maybe the best “progressive Christian” blogger around. Granted, that’s not a crowded field (many “progressive Christians” seem to be infidels who don’t want to admit it, whereas Clark plausibly calls himself an Evangelical – and who can deny him the title?), but I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise, either.
Indeed, having recently dropped following a few blogs, for the Nativity/Advent season at least, I picked his up again as one I need to hear at times – not to get my doctrine righter, heaven forbid, but especially to have shibboleths challenged.
Expect to see him cited here more in the future. You might want to start with Christians have not been “reading the Bible this way for 2,000 years”, which has the virtue not only of shibboleth-challenging, but of being substatntially correct about the facts (until that concluding timeline, which seems a non-sequitur cheap shot).
Mark Driscoll isn’t the only religiopreneur in the news. Paul Crouch, founder of the Fundy Rococo Trinity Broadcasting Network has finally gone the way of all mortals, leaving even more devastation in his wake than did Robert Schuller (though, sadly, not yet in the form of bankruptcy). Rod Dreher pulls together a pastiche of his life, Pope of Prosperity Gospel Dies, which concludes:
What a life Paul Crouch had. That’s the most neutral thing I can muster. If you sell people hope and meaning, you can make millions.
Well played, Rod.
How do you write a straight obituary for such a personage? The Grey Lady gives it a shot.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian at New York University, thinks out loud at the Washington Post that we should repeal the 22nd Amendment. James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal has got to work with what he’s got:
Now of course the way this was supposed to work was that Obama would be such an amazing president that he would come to seem indispensable. There were people who felt that way about Reagan and Clinton in their last years in office. Probably someone somewhere would still stake that claim on Obama’s behalf, but we doubt even Slate would publish such a far-fetched argument, never mind the Washington Post.
So Zimmerman doesn’t argue that Obama deserves a third term to continue his great success, only that “Barack Obama should be allowed to stand for re election [again]” and that “citizens should be allowed to vote for–or against–him.” Where it gets funny is in Zimmerman’s resort to the 22nd Amendment as an excuse for the failures of Obama’s first and second terms.
…
Right off the bat it seems obvious that Zimmerman has committed a fallacy of causality. We puzzled over whether to call it post hoc or cum hoc before realizing it’s a rare example of an ante hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Zimmerman is asserting without evidence that events in the present are being caused by an event in the future, namely Obama’s leaving office for good on Jan. 20, 2017.
Taranto goes on to cite successful second terms to prove his point.
I’m actually on Taranto’s side of the argument at the end of the day, but it’s for reasons that historian Zimmerman overlooked from the realm of political science. We’re still erecting a system of incumbency protection, and a Presidency, in the modern Imperial mode, with incumbency protection like Congressmen and Senators, does seem to me a formula for fascism, whoever the occupant of the Oval Office might be. Better to exclude worthy third-termers than to risk that.
Bob Garfield deliciously critiques Buzz Feed’s decision to ban even the most delicious of negative book reviews:
To my way of thinking, BuzzFeed’s heroic initiative will succeed even if it merely eradicates the depressing negativity that has for so long kept literary criticism from becoming a full-fledged economic sector, like agriculture, transport and erectile dysfunction.
It also brings us one step closer to my two lifelong dreams: first, a newspaper that delivers only good news; and second, diet bacon.
And that’s just the conclusion. Read the whole thing – not at BuzzFeed.
I’ve studied/taught at three evangelical Protestant institutions, and attended a half-dozen Protestant churches. I taught at one Catholic institution (Gonzaga).
I heard more vocal hostility toward Catholic church teaching and leadership at Gonzaga than I ever did at the evangelical schools. Granted, that was back when the pope was a Roman Catholic instead of a Jesuit!
After generations of Protestants needed to waste so much energy on fervent anti-Catholicism, it’s nice to be able to transfer that responsibility back to the Catholic laity.
(Edward Hamilton in a Rod Dreher Combox) I can’t say I’ve hung around anti-Catholic Catholics much, but I was once in a setting where I and another Orthodox Christian on a committee were arguably more faithful to Catholic teaching than any of the Catholics serving with us.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 