This Guy Actually Writes For the New York Times, Huh?

 Op-Ed Columnist

Why Monogamy Matters

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Shouldn't there be bigger issues for a Times columnist to be covering? Like Libya, or Afghanistan, or the economy, or what Sarah Palin is re-tweeting today?

Social conservatives can seem like the perennial pessimists of American politics — more comfortable with resignation than with hope, perpetually touting evidence of family breakdown, social disintegration and civilizational decline.

Yes, they can sometimes seem like that. Just like lions can sometimes seem like large cats, or policemen can seem like law enforcement officers.

But even doomsayers get the occasional dose of good news. And so it was last week, when a study from the Centers for Disease Control revealed that American teens and 20-somethings are waiting longer to have sex.

But you social conservatives have been howling for years about the "hook-up" culture, and the ":friends with benefits" phenomonen among today's teens. Is it possible that these sexual bogeymen might have been the masturbation fantasies of the unwillingly celibate? Or maybe just made up to keep the donations flowing from the church ladies?

Why is this good news? Not, it should be emphasized, because it suggests the dawn of some sort of traditionalist utopia, where the only sex is married sex. No such society has ever existed, or ever could: not in 1950s America (where, as the feminist writer Dana Goldstein noted last week, the vast majority of men and women had sex before they married),

But not after!

But there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

Oh, you are going straight to hell with that kind of attitude, son! Everyone knows that sex is dirty and evil unless it makes a baby! That's why we can't let the gay people marry each other.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

Or at least that's what we told the ladies to get them into the back seat of our dad's Packard. That or "I'm shipping out tomorrow."

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime.

So, the whole "abstinence before marriage" argument? Maybe not holding up so well? Shouldn't the happiest young adults be the virgins?

Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite

Hmm, what could be missing from their lives to make them less happy? Hmm, what could it be?

 

I just can't think of anything.



Yep, it's a mystery, all right.

When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity

Since when? What the hell were all those abstinence-only classes about, then?

Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

Romantic Happiness? Is that what's at stake?

This is what’s at stake, for instance, in debates over abstinence-based sex education. Successful abstinence-based programs (yes, they do exist)

No, they don't.

Successful abstinence-based programs (yes, they do exist) don’t necessarily make their teenage participants more likely to save themselves for marriage.

And successful Driver's Ed classes don't necessarily make teens into competent drivers. That's some definition of success you got there, Douthat.

. But they make them more likely to save themselves for somebody, which in turn increases the odds that their adult sexual lives will be a source of joy rather than sorrow.

The joys of unwanted pregnancies and STD's? Those kinds of joys?
And while we're on the subject. . .

Abstinence-Only a Failure, Latest Research Shows
Douglas Kirby’s study, “The Impact of Abstinence and Comprehensive Sex and STD/HIV Education Programs on Adolescent Sexual Behavior,” reveals that most abstinence programs did not delay initiation of sex

 another federally funded study of four abstinence-only programs by the Mathematica Policy Research Inc., published in April of 2007, revealed similar results. The research group found that “participants had just as many sexual partners as nonparticipants and had sex at the same median age as nonparticipants.”

It’s also what’s at stake in the ongoing battle over whether the federal government should be subsidizing Planned Parenthood. Obviously, social conservatives don’t like seeing their tax dollars flow to an organization that performs roughly 300,000 abortions every year. But they also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe” — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism they’re trying to restore

.Yeah, fuck safety! The only judgement young people should be making sex-wise is "Are we having the sort of sex of which Ross Douthat would approve?"


 Mmm, probably not!

But realism can blur into cynicism, and a jaded attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social conservatives look at the contemporary sexual landscape and remember that it wasn’t always thus,

 
You just said it was! Remember "No such society has ever existed, or ever could: not in 1950s America (where, as the feminist writer Dana Goldstein noted last week, the vast majority of men and women had sex before they married)" That was you, like three paragraphs ago.  
So, anyway, the subject of Today's column was what, again? "Why Monogamy Matters?"
We're still waiting for an answer.
 
 

Defending the Indefensible

First up: Bill Donohue on Larry King says that these priests aren't really pedophiles, since most of the boys they abused were post-pubescent. And of course, the real problem with the church is, wait for it. . . .The gays! What a shock! The seething ragetard thinks the gays are the problem!



I can not for the life of me understand why American Catholics allow this hateful moron to speak for them. If I were a Catholic, I would punch Bill Donohue in the dick. Actually, I would anyway, just on principle.

Next, Ross Douthat who is somehow allowed to write for the actual, honest-to-god New York Times, blames the Seventies. Really.

(This picture is not doctored or photo-shopped, he really does look like this!)

In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.)

Read more at Wonkette: http://wonkette.com/414564/ross-douthat-blames-child-raping-catholic-priests-on-hippies#more-414564#ixzz0jn4GtlE8

Hey, we all did crazy things back in the Seventies, am I right? I know I once took a puff on a Mary-Juana cigartette! Can you imagine? Ha ha, so come on, who among us can honestly say that they didn't molest a few altar boys back then? Things were different then! Once we heard about Plato's Retreat, it was pretty much open season on little boys!

Batting third, it's perennial asshole Newt Gingrich defending people who have made death threats to congressmen and senators who voted for healthcare:

“I’m happy to condemn any effort to engage in personal threats," Gingrich says. "But I think that the Democratic leadership has to take some real responsibility for running a machine that used corrupt tactics that bullied people and enraged much of the American People.”

So, yeah, I really don't like people making death threats, but I gotta say they had it coming. And this is a guy who is probably going to run for president making this morally bankrupt and completely disingenuous argument.

And in the cleanup spot, it's some horrid little person named Monica Crowley writing in the Washington Times in defense of the cop-killer Hutaree Militia:

The Democrats handle dissent by isolating it, smearing it and delegitimizing it in order to crush it. The warning should be clear: If you have small-government, traditional values, you may be considered by your own leadership to be an enemy of the state.

As if on cue, this week, Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of Justice's Joint Terrorism Task Force carried out raids against a purported "Christian militia group" in the Midwest. According to reports, nine people have been charged with plotting to kill police officers with "weapons of mass destruction." The indictment describes the group as an "anti-government extremist organization" and the FBI special agent in charge, Andrew Arena, cast it as "radical and fringe." That may be, but the description has a conveniently familiar ring to it.

It's mind-blowingly coincidental that these raids on a supposedly "Christian" militia group would come at the exact moment that Democrats were trying to change public opinion on Obamacare by claiming persecution by their opponents. They have cast Tea Partiers, conservatives, independents, Christians and militia members as all cut from the same unstable, volatile cloth. How can anyone take their opposition to the Democrats' agenda seriously when they're toting guns and being raided by Homeland Security and the FBI? They're all nuts, don't you know?

Oh, it's just awful how these poor little "Christian" folks are being smeared by the big bad Obama administration. All they wanted to do was kill a few cops and ignite a civil war! And for that, they're being portrayed as dangerous and unstable? It's all just so unfair!

This is Actually Published In The New York Freakin' Times!

Really! Look:

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Susan Etheridge for The New York Times

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008).

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In Search of a Jewish Narnia

Why is there no Jewish Narnia? That’s the provocative question raised by Michael Weingrad’s essay on Judaism and fantasy novels, published in the inaugural issue of the Jewish Review of Books.

Ooh, Ooh! I know! Call on me!

It's because Narnia is a made-up place from a book? And there is also no Christian Narnia, or Buddhist Narnia, or any Narnia because that book is fiction?

But really he’s raising a deeper issue, one that goes to the nature of the genre itself: “Why are there no works of modern fantasy that are profoundly Jewish in the way that, say, ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ is Christian? Why no Jewish [C.S.] Lewises, and why no Jewish Narnias?”

Um, maybe because Jewish people have better things to do with their time?
maybe the Jewish literary world was too busy producing Howard Zinn, J.D.Salinger, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer to come up with a Jewish C.S. Lewis?

Fantasy novels tend to involve re-workings and re-imaginings of the medieval and ancient European past, and they’re often shot through with nostalgia for agrarian communities, chivalric codes of social order, and pre-modernity in general. These conceits, Weingrad notes, “are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword,”

And they all swore a pact never to write a fantasy novel. Because there is absolutely no Jewish folklore on which to base such a novel.

Except a quick check of Wikipedia does turn up this:

An example of typical mythology in the Talmud (חולין נט ע"ב - ע"ב, Chullin 59b) exists as a discussion about a giant deer and a giant lion which are both originated in a mythical forest called "Dvei Ilai".

Nope, no way you could write a fantasy story about giant lions in mythical forests!

In Jewish folklore, a golem (גולם; English pronunciation: /ˈɡoʊləm/ GOH-ləm) is an animated anthropomorphic being created entirely from inanimate matter. In modern Hebrew the word golem literally means "rock,"
The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel the late 16th century chief rabbi of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who reportedly created a golem to defend the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks

^{Yeah, there's just no Jewish source material for fantasy!}

Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer also wrote a version of the legend. Elie Wiesel wrote a children's book on the legend. [of the golem]

Yeah, but they weren't Jewish, were they? Those sound like Irish names to me.

Part and parcel of Judaism’s resistance to explorations in the realm of faerie, he goes on, is a discomfort with the semi-dualism that’s necessary to classic fantasy — the idea of a Devil figure, in other words, who seems capable of actually conquering the mortal world (be it Narnia or Middle-Earth) and binding it permanently in darkness. As Weingrad notes, correctly I think: “Christianity offers a far more developed tradition of evil as a supernatural, external, autonomous force than does Judaism, whose Satan (or Samael or Lilith or Ashmedai) are limited in their power and usually rather obedient to God’s wishes.” Tolkien’s Sauron makes sense in a Christian universe; he makes less sense in a Jewish one.

Yeah, they totally don't get the whole good vs evil, God vs Devil thing in the Jewish culture. Except. . .

According to historian Bernard McGinn, the combat myth's imagery influenced Jewish mythology. The myth of Hashem's triumph over Leviathan, a symbol of chaos, has the form of a combat myth.^[39] In addition, McGinn thinks the Hebrews applied the "combat myth" motif to the relationship between God and Satan: originally a deputy in God's court, assigned to act as mankind's "accuser" (satan means "to oppose"), Satan evolved into a being with "an apparently independent realm of operation as a source of evil" — no longer God's deputy but his opponent in a cosmic struggle.^[40]

^{Hmm, God's "opponent in a cosmic struggle." But also "limited in power" and "rather obedient to God's wishes."}

What he seems to have demonstrated is that modern fantasy depends on Christianity, or at least a Christian-pagan synthesis of some kind, for its forms, conventions, and traditions. This suggests that you could write a novel that embodies a kind of Jewish critique of fantasy. . . But the genre itself will remain irreducably Christian, and a truly Judaic fantasy would have to belong to, or invent, a different genre altogether.

A Jewish Narnia, meanwhile, will be nothing like Narnia, and the real question raised by “Why There is No Jewish Narnia” isn’t whether such a work will ever exist—it’s whether Michael Weingard will be able to recognize it.

Actually, I think there are two real questions raised by this essay.
#1--Who gives a fuck whether there is a Jewish Narnia or not?
#2--What the hell happened to the standards at the New York Times?