Conservatism teaches that individuals are not inherently good and so must be carefully civilized.
Michael Gerson, former Bush speechwriter and conservative/religious shill. This is from a column in the WaPo entitled “The Kind of Village it Takes.” Takes to what? you may find yourself asking.
To be honest, I’ve read the article, and I can’t be entirely sure. Except that it has to do with teenagers having sex. Specifically, evangelical teenagers, and how Michael Gerson wants everyone to just stop saying that they have sex just like any other teenagers, and that being Right With Gawd doesn’t stop them from having sex any earlier than their “mainline Protestant” peers:
Recent books and studies seem to indicate disturbing sexual trends among evangelical Christians. And this time we’re not talking about their pastors or political leaders. The new attention is on evangelical teenagers, who reportedly start sex earlier than their mainline Protestant peers.
One gleeful headline on an Internet site recently read: “Evangelical Girls Are Easy.” That is not the way I remember it.
What is this? Rashomon?
I dunno, Michael, maybe it was just that you weren’t getting any. And that your peers who were maybe didn’t want to confide in you, because they suspected you might do something squirrelly like rat them out to their pastors. Just a guess.
After being confronted with that little factoid, Michael consults a social scientist, who assures him that it’s much more complicated than the “sniggering media” reporting showing evangelical kids have sex at the same age as their non-evangelical peers.
My, isn’t that interesting. A conservative embracing nuance when it serves his purpose.
Michael is quite relieved to find out that “intensely” religious kids put out a few months later on average than their less-intense evangelical peers and the irreligious mainline scum, meaning all that tithing has paid off:
When the statistics on teen sexuality are controlled for social and economic factors, conservative Protestant teens first have sex at about the same time as their peers — the average is midway through their 16th year. That is hardly comforting to conservative Protestant parents, who would expect more bang for the bucks they spend funding Sunday schools — well, actually, less bang.
But these numbers shift when controlled for religious intensity. For those who attend church often, sexual activity is delayed until nearly 17, while nominal evangelicals begin at 16.2 years, earlier than the national average.
So, really, the “nominal” (and what a nice way to distance yourself from these results) evangelicals put out earlier than the non-evangelicals, and the “intense” evangelicals put out later. Which, I’m sure, when averaged together, gets you right back to the beginning: evangelism is no cure for teenage sexuality. But still, speaking in tongues and snake-handling and believing in literal demons only buys you about 9 months over the rest of the WWJD crowd.
But that’s inconvenient! So Gerson pulls out a bunch of statistics about cohabitation and children out of wedlock that really have nothing to do with teenagers having sex, but everything to do with making the uncomfortable fact that evangelical kids fuck, too, a little less uncomfortable. Oh, and have we directly bashed liberals yet? We have not! So, back to Michael:
These messages of responsibility are often reinforced by tightknit religious communities, but they are not owned by them. Wilcox notes that American liberal elites often “talk left and walk right, living disciplined lives and expecting their children to do the same, even when they hold liberal social views.” Divorce rates among college-educated Americans, [Sociologist Peter Berger] points out, have fallen since the 1980s, as it became more evident that casual divorce did not serve the long-term interests of their children.*
Because they can’t really be liberals if they do moral things! They can’t really be liberals if they lead disciplined lives and give their children the tools to do the same things!
Kind of a problem he has with the “live and let live” concept, isn’t it? But then, this is the guy who also has trouble with the idea that atheists can have a moral framework when they don’t have an angry invisible friend threatening them with eternal torment if they fart the wrong way.
Now, he does recognize that support networks are crucial for influencing behaviors, and he does recognize that kids who have goals and ambitions are less likely to get sidetracked by early pregnancy. And he even recognizes that abstinence-only sex miseducation doesn’t automatically confer any sort of protection against having sex. But his solution — to the extent he offers one — just seems to be more of the same; more intense and tight “moral” networks, more rigidity. Heaven forfend he might concede that those socially-liberal parents who give their kids accurate information and the tools to make good choices might have something there.
H/T: Thers.
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* Actually, my understanding of the reason for falling divorce rates among college-educated Americans has to do with the fact that they tend to marry later than non-college-educated Americans, and not just because they want to have sex. Though the real statistic he should be looking at is the divorce rate among evangelicals as opposed to other groups. But I’m guessing that wouldn’t have worked out well for him.
“For those who attend church often, sexual activity is delayed until nearly 17, while nominal evangelicals begin at 16.2 years, earlier than the national average.”
So the “nominal evangelicals” have sex at 16.2 years, while the “real” evangelicals have sex at, what, 16.8 or 16.9 years assuming we take that sneaky “nearly 17″ at face value?
Which means that regular church-going can delay your child having sex by six months at best. Whoo-hoo! They really are better than us!
The “talk left and walk right” language is offensive. Telling my daughter not to have sex until she is prepared to discuss consent, limits and protection forthrightly (as I will) is certainly not the solution that he would propose, or an approach that he would accept. What he’s really saying, then, is that conservatives are preeptively claiming all good outcomes as theirs, and determining that all personal collapses are ours.
He can take that and shove it up his ass. Which is not exclusive to the left either, if the behavior of the Catholic priesthood or the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang are any indication.
Hey, why try to come up with real potential solutions when you can just wordsmith something that makes people so emotional they can’t see the lack of logic?
Ironically, the reason I didn’t have sex as a teenager was that I lived in a hellhole of misogynistic religious conservatives, and preferred a dildo. So I do think fundies can prevent OTHER people from having sex.
“…casual divorce did not serve the long-term interests of their children.”
Casual divorce? First of all, if there’s such a thing as “casual divorce,” why would anyone, including college-educated Americans, assume that it actually *would* serve the long-term interests of children? Second of all, what is casual divorce, and why does he seem to assume that once it was a trend? What is he *talking* about?!
“What he’s really saying, then, is that conservatives are preeptively claiming all good outcomes as theirs, and determining that all personal collapses are ours.”
Pretty much. It’s back to the old No True Scotsman argument. Socially conservative values aren’t a disaster, because all the people who crash and burn while preaching them were really closet liberals. All the people who endorse liberal values and tolerance without crashing and burning are closet conservatives.
Of course, it also gets extremely close to admitting the cherished belief that liberals engage in behaviors that conservatives think are de facto immoral and self-destructive simply because they’re immoral and self-destructive. In the cases where a conservative does something along the same lines and doesn’t get retroactively expunged from the conservative roster, the explanation for their behavior is that they only took action after a great deal of thought and soul-searching, after all other options had been exhausted. It’s okay that they did it, because they had a very good reason and didn’t take it lightly, unlike all those other people who did it because it’s Tuesday.
Am I missing something here? Is the writer conceding that abstinence only education doesn’t work? If so, and even though he might lament that fact, then does he still support such education rather than a broader agenda including discussions of pregnancy and disease prevention? Unless I’m missing something he’s basically saying that the difference between evangelicals of all stripes and everyone else is statistically insignificant (16.2 or 16.8 months is a drop in the hat for a lifetime).
The article goes on to convolute a whole lot of other discussions. The hoot for me was the influencing of a variety of behaviors. For instance, a recent study suggested that anti-smoking ads actually makes the idea of trying out smoking more appealing to kids (as the kids seek some way to rebel and instinctively see the ads as scare tactics thereby questioning the honesty of the campaigns - just like other drug war ads). Indeed, the results of these campaigns can be dramatic shifts in behavior over the short term, however over the long run the campaigns inevitably falter. “Just Say No” affects really young kids, but by the time they are teenagers that campaign has been proven to be ineffective (and costly). The abstinence only campaigns are just showing similar results in all groups.
What are we to make of this? That human behavior is consistent and rather than fight it, we should teach people how to be responsible, as safe as possible, and give them honest discussion and facts; not convoluted propaganda like Gersen’s article.
Pretty much. It’s back to the old No True Scotsman argument. Socially conservative values aren’t a disaster, because all the people who crash and burn while preaching them were really closet liberals. All the people who endorse liberal values and tolerance without crashing and burning are closet conservatives.
That’s also what he’s doing with splitting the evangelicals into “intense” and regular. Well, No True Evangelical would fail to be intensely religious, so all these other kids having sex before the non-evangelicals do aren’t really evangelicals! Our little world, which had been knocked off its axis, spins without wobbling again!
Am I missing something here? Is the writer conceding that abstinence only education doesn’t work? If so, and even though he might lament that fact, then does he still support such education rather than a broader agenda including discussions of pregnancy and disease prevention? Unless I’m missing something he’s basically saying that the difference between evangelicals of all stripes and everyone else is statistically insignificant (16.2 or 16.8 months is a drop in the hat for a lifetime).
He does acknowledge it, in passing. But doesn’t dwell on it, because acknowledging it would give aid and comfort to the enemy, a.k.a. those who want to cut off that sweet, sweet federal funding for abstinence-only education in favor of programs that actually work.
In addition, notice what he got you to do there? The 16.2 and 16.8 don’t represent all stripes of evangelicals vs. everyone else; they represent regular evangelicals vs. intense evangelicals. He didn’t give a numerical figure for non-evangelical Protestants, just “midway through the 16th year.”
I see the “talk left but walk right” thing differently. It’s still crap, but it is really a clear indicator that the fundamentalist mindset is all about behavior rather than intent or principle, and that it can be taken for granted everyone just naturally wants to impose their own worldview on everyone else.
Hence, a woman who says she believes that each woman should have the right to decide whether to carry a fetus to term, and then chooses in her own personal situation is really a closet conservative, because, obviously, she doesn’t believe in abortion.
Someone who says that they believe that sex is wonderful, natural, and a part of life, and that respect for one’s partner(s), openness and honesty, and satisfaction are far more important than a marriage license, but who encourages their child to wait until they are older, more mature, and ready for sex is really a closet conservative who believes in abstinence.
It’s the idiocy that cannot imagine someone who feels that divorce should be legal and available to all and still chooses to stay married (even, one assumes, if one’s marriage is happy.) After all, why would anyone support something for anyone unless they want to use it themselves?
And on and on. Look at the standard attack on gay marriage that if everyone married someone of the same sex, there would be no children (a fallacy, to be sure), which only becomes an issue even in principle if legalizing gay marriage turned everyone gay.
It honestly never seems to occur to these people that there can actually be someone who really believes that there is not one right answer to each question that has to apply universally to all, and that anyone could possibly choose one thing while fully supporting someone else in choosing another if that other is more appropriate to them.
Everything is dualistic, and absurdly so. If sex within marriage is good, it naturally follows that sex outside it must be bad. If straight marriage is good, gay marriage is bad. If Christianity is good, Buddhism must be bad. And so on.