 | | July 24, 2013 |  | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  |  | Remember when the Supreme Court created same-sex marriage? It was on June 26. That's less than a full month ago. Right after the decision came down, I spent a newsletter suggesting that the push for polygamy was just around the corner. Well, the corner came pretty quick.
In the last week we've had a new academic exploration of how the polyamory "community" views its claim to a marriage right. And we have a truly remarkable essay by Kent Greenfield in the American Prospect about what good progressives are supposed to think about both polygamy and incest:
It's been a few weeks since the victories in the marriage cases at the Supreme Court, and maybe it''s time for the political left to own up to something. You know those opponents of marriage equality who said government approval of same-sex marriage might erode bans on polygamous and incestuous marriages? They're right. As a matter of constitutional rationale, there is indeed a slippery slope between recognizing same-sex marriages and allowing marriages among more than two people and between consenting adults who are related. If we don't want to go there, we need to come up with distinctions that we have not yet articulated well.
The left is in this bind in part because our arguments for expanding the marriage right to same-sex couples have been so compelling. Marriage, we've said, is about defining one's own family and consecrating a union based on love. We've voiced these arguments in constitutional terms, using claims arising from the doctrines of "fundamental rights" and equal protection. Fundamental-rights analysis says that marriage is for many a crucial element of human flourishing, or as the Court said almost fifty years ago "essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness." Because it's so important, government can restrict marriage only by showing a truly compelling justification. The equal protection argument is simply that the marriage right should not be taken away from groups unless the government has good reasons to exclude those groups.
Greenfield—a professor at Boston College Law School—then goes on to demolish all of the purported "good reasons" for banning polygamy and incest. And concludes that America will probably have to "admit our arguments in favor of marriage equality inexorably lead us to a broader battle in favor of allowing people to define their marriages, and their families, by their own lights."
This falls under the category of things that would have been useful to know yesterday. Buy yesterday, the left was insisting, over and over, that only bigots and scoundrels would suggest any linkage between same-sex marriage and polygamy/incest.
Pair this, then, with an essay over the weekend by a libertarian writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, A. Barton Hinkle. Hinkle loves same-sex marriage and has lots of bad things to say about the conservative meanies who have long argued that it could lead to problems. But Hinkle is starting to get a little worried about all of these lawsuits being filed against florists and bakers who don't want to take part in same-sex marriages. Here he is:
It was a great day when the Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and threw out a California case that could have undermined gay marriage in the Golden State. On that day, gay and lesbian citizens won something profoundly important: acknowledgment of the right to live as they choose, without interference from others who think they know better.…
A gay Colorado couple have filed a discrimination complaint against the owners of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who declined for religious reasons to make them a wedding cake. The Colorado attorney general's office has taken their side. So, regrettably, has the ACLU.
And they have company: Similar complaints have been brought against bakeries in Oregon, Indianapolis, and Iowa; a Hawaiian bed-and-breakfast; a Vermont inn; a Washington florist; a Kentucky T-shirt company; and more. As gay marriage gains ground, cases such as these likely will flourish.
As they do, they will lend credence to the otherwise ludicrous assertion by social conservatives that there is a "homosexual agenda." Changing other people's sexual orientation has always been a conservative project, not a liberal one. But it will cease being absurd to suggest that requests for tolerance are actually demands for approval — and that those who claim to celebrate diversity actually insist upon ideological uniformity.
Hinkle doesn't like this "demand for approval," and his essay is a plaintive cry asking same-sex couples to just "live and let live."
So one month from the same-sex marriage decision we have liberals finally fessing up to the next steps of the anti-marriage project and their libertarian allies realizing that they've signed up with an agenda that's only interested in very narrow definitions of liberty.
It's one thing to make giant societal changes with your eyes wide open. It's another to have them foisted on the public by a confederacy of dupes and the dishonest. |  | | LOOKING BACK |  |  | "Do I exaggerate? So deep is Dan Rather's devotion that he even gets his suits made at Murrow's old tailor in Savile Row. 'To this little boy,' Rather once wrote, 'Murrow was a hero right out of the adventure books. Risking his life for the truth [emphasis, amazingly, in the original]. His work heightened my sense, even then, that being a reporter was a kind of vocation: demanding sacrifice, needing courage, requiring honor.' Here, in a brief three sentences, is almost everything that people find annoying about contemporary journalism. Rather, of course, personifies the sanctimony, the self-flattery, the missionary zeal, and the Olympian remove America has learned to expect of its TV news stars. But so, alas, did Edward R. Murrow, even back in the Golden Age. When his friend and contemporary Howard K. Smith called Murrow 'the most influential journalist of our time,' he was righter than he knew. The next time you see Gunga Dan Rather huffing through the Khyber Pass, with a camera crew in tow and a bathroom towel wrapped around his head, or Peter Jennings congratulating himself for having the guts to 'take on' the tobacco companies, or even Barbara Walters asking a stuttering movie star about his favorite tree, you know whom to credit."
—Andrew Ferguson, "Edward R. Murrow: Infotainment Pioneer," from our July 22, 1996, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST |  |  | Marooned at the North Pole.
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End of Days at Big Law.
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Was Stella a fella? |  | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan's Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself. The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, is now a border between the First World and the Third World — or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city's implosion would be literally incredible: Were he to compare photographs of today's Hiroshima with today's Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the 'arsenal of democracy,' and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land. Half a century on, Detroit''s population has fallen by two-thirds, and in terms of 'per capita income,' many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards."
—Mark Steyn on the fall of Detroit, July 19, 2013 |  |  | | THE LAST WORD |  |  | Last week I asked you about your thoughts on Lee Siegel's interesting essay suggesting that the humanities ought to be liberated from the university and released back into the intellectual wild. (If you missed it, you can read the piece here.) His argument was predicated, in part, on the percentage of undergraduate humanities majors declining from 14 percent to 7 percent; and in part on the political detritus that has accumulated on the subjects in the decades since the liberal takeover of academia. A number of you wrote in with insightful comments. I thought it would be worth sharing them.
From reader J.L.:
From 14% to 7%? In a mere fifty years? Shocking.
A little analysis might be in order: 14% of what? versus 7% of a much larger student population, I would suspect.
And fifty years ago was 1963, at the early stages of the post-Sputnik STEM emphasis and the revolution in business management and economics. It would not be surprising to see geometric increases in those fields versus merely arithmetic increases in Humanities enrollments.
And, 1963 was the earliest year (really 1964-1965) for the first of the Baby Boom cohort to enter college, a huge wave of new students just beginning at the same time the preferred/encouraged/mandated switch to the "hard" courses was just beginning.
So, maybe not so shocking.
From reader T.F.:
My two denarii's worth on that Siegel essay, as a former history professor:
He focuses far too much of his laser beam wrath on English literature; history is also one of the humanities (despite clueless deans placing it in Social Sciences in many colleges), and the ignorance thereof is catastrophic for Western civilization. Not only are legions of Americans totally unversed in their own Constitution, but even more are thus convinced (thanks to woeful public schools) that all religions teach the same things as Christianity, thus making many in the body politic unable to understand the very real political and social threat of Islam and Islamization.
They simply don't grasp, because of a lack of studying history outside of the slave trade, slavery and civil rights--all that many young Americans are taught about history--that Western civilization in general and we Americans in particular devised a liberal democratic software that only runs on the hard-drive of Jerusalem and Athens, and will sputter and break down if Mecca and Medina are substituted, or if Jerusalem is taken out of the equation.
Here's reader T.M.:
Yes, his observations are accurate. But his conclusion is not. He argues that, given the sorry way literature is taught in our universities, we would be better off waiting, and read the stuff later ourselves. The problem with that position is that most of us would not have a clue where to start, if not introduced to the classics in school. As an adult, I have read most of the works which my professors unsuccessfully tried to get me to read in college, and which they then "interpreted" ad nauseum in their lectures. But give them their due: if not for them, I would never have done the reading.
Reader T.S. basically agrees:
I majored in the humanities, graduating in 1974. There was a recession on and jobs were scarce. As a result, I went back to school and took the required accounting courses to sit for the CPA exam and entered the world of accounting. The school I attended, Western Illinois University, had not succumbed to the changes occurring at elite schools, at least not while I was there. I received a decent education; one that provided me with some amount of training in critical thinking that I put to good use in my accounting career.
I still enjoy reading great literature because of what it is; a portrayal of the human condition with all of its triumphs, follies, and tragedies.
I could not endure the deconstruction mush taught today. It would be a waste of time and tuition. Maybe that's one reason for the decline in enrollment in the humanities.
Reader T.B. had a similar experience:
I majored in Geology and English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT in the 1970's. I made a living from the hard science part of my education but I made a life from the English major. My life is so much richer for reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Sophocles, etc. Recently I picked up a set of the Great Books of the Western World by Mortimer Adler. Reading them is the equivalent of a good undergraduate education. Makes a great winter project and will bring joy to your heart.
And I'll give the last word to reader M.A.:
I went to college at Northwestern University, where by sheer luck I ended up living in the Humanities Residential College. My major started in Biology and finished in Computer Science, while most of my dorm-mates were actually enrolled in humanities classes. To be quite honest, the most formative experiences of my college education happened during the "informal" instruction that was provided by the various professors who were aligned with our residential college. In my sophomore year, for example, I was allowed to enroll in a special seminar class led by T.W. Heyck on the Intellectual Foundations of the Industrial Revolution. In this seminar, which was 12 weeks long, our six-person seminar was responsible for reading 12 great books in and around the time of the Industrial Revolution from 1800 through to 1950. We would then discuss the books in detail in our class. I would say that was one of the highlights of my time at Northwestern.
But I also had another class on American History from 1864 to the present (though we pretty much stopped after Vietnam) where the professor and all of her teaching aides were unreconstructed Marxists. I enjoyed the class readings (especially the Progressive era Supreme Court rulings with their breathtaking racism) but the lectures were wooly-headed leftist nonsense. I wrote papers for this class inauthentically--in the style and voice of a Marxist, because it was obvious that anything else would be graded appropriately. That was one of the instructional low points at Northwestern.
I fear, and suspect, that although I could never (a) be admitted to or (b) afford Northwestern these days, classes trend toward the latter more than the former. However, I guess if you're into Marxism, maybe that's worth $45,000 a year to insulate yourself in a bubble of thought and behavior for four years.
Now that my wife and I have children, I annoy my wife constantly by pointing out to our children that college has become (in my opinion) a waste of time and money. The opportunity cost not to mention the outright financial toll for a top tier school would be better served for most kids by taking that money and starting a company or writing a book or traveling around the world for a year (or two or three.)
Very interesting, all of it.
Keep calm and carry on. And remember, you can always email me with tips, thoughts, etc., at editor@weeklystandard.com.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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