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Quote of the Day: Momentum
“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises“Same-sex marriage…was the trigger for not only woke capitalism, but the radicalism of today’s left. It was the success that they had in achieving gay marriage that gave them momentum, made them think that nothing would ever arise within American society to stop them, and has led to a kind of acceleration of all these cultural issues. It wasn’t a week after Obergefell was decided that the cake baking episode happened, and then transgenderism became an issue, where all these same groups began accelerating their attacks on the traditional ideas that there are men and women. So I think same-sex marriage was a real accelerant in the decline of marriage from all of the perspectives, but also an accelerant in the collapse of America’s regime.”
— Dr. Scott Yenor, The American Mind podcast, July 19, 2021
The general public may be finally noticing the leftward lurch happening in universities and in K-12, public and private, but the culture has been shifting for decades. It started in the 1960s with a variety of changes in social norms, like the elimination of strict dress codes and curfews for women at the large public university my mother attended. Her first year, in 1962, the female students had a 10 p.m. curfew. The next year, those rules were scrapped. By the time I got to college, we no longer had female-only dorms. The closest to that you could come was an all-female floor. I have yet to embark on college tours for my own daughter, but what I have read suggests that it will be difficult to find such a sex-segregated living situation. Even in the 1990s, some colleges had embraced co-ed dorms to the extent that even the bathrooms were co-ed. A friend who attended one of these institutions told me about the discomfort of that living situation and the efforts she would make to find a single stall bathroom in another building when she really needed privacy.
These changes swept in with the tide of feminist thought. Americans have largely welcomed movements for increased equality, whether based on race, sex, or sexual orientation. We have liked seeing ourselves as part of a society that is fair and inclusive, or at least approaching more fairness and inclusivity. It also seems that we don’t want to be called, or to think of ourselves, as prudes or homophobes. Since the 1960s, the taboos against sexual promiscuity and immodesty have fallen away, so completely that now women complain that they are unfairly treated when airlines won’t let them fly with strapless outfits or with their midriff showing. Fine, we shrug, not wanting to seem “judgy.”
A lot of these cultural shifts seemed beneficial, or at least harmless. In the last few years, however, it has become clear that the LGBTQ+ movement, especially since transgenders have taken the primary place in it, and anti-racism advocates are making a moral claim that can’t succeed without the existence of an intolerant, bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic population. If that population doesn’t exist, they must infer its existence and presume that those awful people are secretly inculcating their hateful beliefs in their children. I don’t think that’s a particularly nice thing to do, so I am not disposed to be accepting of these insults. Thankfully, many American parents feel the same way.
What we really don’t want to be called is racist. When people were only complaining of microaggressions, we didn’t worry too much. Plenty of my friends have taken the attitude that all you have to do to avoid those is to just not be a jerk or say anything “wrong.” They are nice people, so they think everyone else is basically nice, too. But when the dominant culture skips over the step of making evidence-based accusations of racism and just moves right on to inferring racist beliefs and attitudes in our children, apparently that’s when Americans finally balk.
The demands for submission to the leftist narrative are encroaching more swiftly into the personal lives of Americans. It’s been happening gradually for decades, but I have noticed the acceleration since 2015. I could cite specific news stories, such as Christians being deemed unfit to hold certain government positions, but I noticed the shift in the public debate and in the tone of communications from our public school administrators and teachers. They were emboldened to express political opinions while treating them as simply conventional wisdom. The confidence of those on the left was not damaged when Donald Trump won the presidential election. To them, it simply demonstrated the righteousness of their cause that so many Americans would vote for a man that they deemed vile and racist. I think it was another accelerant in the leftist effort to conquer our culture. The coronavirus pandemic, the death of George Floyd, and the election of Joe Biden have all provided more momentum for progressives. They are, by definition, on the move. And they are moving pretty fast now.
Published in Group Writing
Before no-fault: you have to satisfy the State that your reasons for leaving this relationship are substantial. The State will accept a variety of thinly-sourced rote assertions about “mental cruelty” and the like. After no-fault: you do not have to go through the stork-dance of mouthing the proper cliches to get the State’s approval.
That said, no-fault contributed to a penumbra of an emanation, and made divorce easier, which means you get more of it. Bad for society in the macro, not so much so for the individual. I mean, people generally get divorced for reasons, and maybe they shouldn’t have to convince a judge of their sincerity.
What business does the State have in asserting that non-procreative act A is okay, but non-procreative act B lands you in the slammer? If sodomy is to be criminalized, ought not the State endeavor to investigate all assertions that a married couple is engaging in it?
There are probably a couple hundred residential colleges without co-ed dorms.
I was doing some book research, and I came upon this on the University of Miami web site:
https://hrl.studentaffairs.miami.edu/living-on-campus/faq/gender-inclusive-housing/index.html
Basically what it says is you can have a roommate of the opposite sex if you request it (I’m thinking of getting my PhD at The U!). Here’s my favorite part of the link:
Can people who are romantically involved live together?
Gender-inclusive housing is not intended for romantic couples. As a general rule, we would strongly advise against doing so. We respect and honor the privacy of our students, so current procedures do not require students to disclose their reason for roommate requests. However, please note that the Department of Housing and Residential Life strongly encourages students to reconsider living with a person with whom they are romantically involved, regardless of whether it is a same-sex or different-sex relationship. Some relationships are ready for this step while others are not, and there can be serious challenges for both students should the relationship end.
It’s actually pretty good advice, but the point is the school allows it to happen.
Mr. Lileks, thanks for your comment. It’s always a treat when a major contributor joins our member conversation. I want to respond to your points, one at a time, starting with the issue of no-fault divorce.
I interpret your first paragraph to suggest that the adoption of no-fault divorce had little effect, because the old system could be gamed. I agree that the old system could be gamed, but the empirical evidence suggests a pretty large effect. Except where otherwise noted, the following graphs are from Our World in Data (here).
Here is a graph of the divorce rate in the US since 1950:
You can see the large spike that coincided with the adoption of no-fault divorce, from 2.2 in 1960 to 5.2 in 1980. Part of this was probably the effect of the large baby-boomer cohort, but during the big increase from 1967 to 1977, there weren’t that many baby-boomers of an age to have been both married and divorced.
The divorce rate did decline substantially from the peak, but this is because the marriage rate declined, as shown by this graph:
I think that this has many negative effects, including the serious problem of illegitimacy. Here is the graph on illegitimacy (this data is limited to 1960-2014):
That’s an increase from 5.3% in 1960, to 18.4% in 1980, to 40.2% in 2014.
I realize that the world is a complex place, and no-fault divorce laws are not necessarily the only factor contributing to these changes. But I think that this is significant evidence indicating that the adoption of no-fault divorce contributed to these major problems.
Next, on the issue of homosexuality:
It used to be widely accepted, and remains black-letter Constitutional law, that the state has what is called the “police power” to enact laws to “protect the public health, the public morals, or the public safety.” (This is from Mugler v. Kansas, here, a 1877 SCOTUS case.)
I think that many people who think of themselves as conservatives, and are probably more libertarian, adopt a “limited government” view that is wrong as a matter of Constitutional law. It was the federal government that is limited under our Constitution, with the broad, general police power not being non-existent, but rather being retained by the states. A good quote about this is from US v. Lopez (here), a 1995 SCOTUS decision by Chief Justice Rehnquist pushing back (a little) on the broad federal power accepted under the rather ridiculous Commerce Clause cases (like Wickard v. Filburn). In rejecting the federal claim to Commerce Clause power to regulate gun possession in school zones, the Chief wrote: “To uphold the Government’s contentions here, we would have to pile inference upon inference in a manner that would bid fair to convert congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the States.”
There are many, many other cases on this issue (if you want more information, here is a good summary).
So for most of our history, it has been perfectly well understood that the state has the authority, and I would say the duty, to enact laws to protect the public health, safety, and morals. I want to avoid writing a treatise, but this power has been used to regulate sexual behavior throughout our history — homosexuality, adultery, premarital sex, prostitution, and pornography — and other issues such as alcohol, drugs, and gambling. I don’t think that any of this should be controversial, except to someone wanting to make a radical break with our history, traditions, and law.
I’ve posted elsewhere about the enormous increase in homosexuality and other “LGBTQ++” identification (here). My principal graph, based on Gallup polling, is:
I think that it is a bad thing, and it was much less of a problem when we had laws against such behavior.
On your final point about married couples engaging in sodomy: While I find it rather repulsive, I probably would not outlaw heterosexual sodomy within marriage. There is ample reason to have different rules for different categories of behavior.
I could go on, probably at book length, about these issues. I have one more consequence to discuss: the fertility rate. Here is a graph from the Fed:
This is a serious problem. We’re not having enough kids to sustain our population. (Don’t look at me — I have 4.)
This graph does show a disturbing drop below the replacement level of about 2 between the early 1970s and the mid 1980s, probably relating to abortion. There was a recovery by around 1989, and the fertility rate remained healthy until 2008. Since then, there’s been a major decline.
In summary, I see a lot of bad trends. Marriage is down, divorce is up, illegitimacy is up, births are down. There are second-order consequences, like higher crime and other problems associated with fatherlessness.
I don’t think that it’s crazy to think that things were better under our traditional morality and law, which generally prevailed through the 1960s. I’m inclined to think that it’s a bit crazy to disagree.
My daughter has fond memories about camping in the “Coach K” lines to get BB tickets. She said he would sometimes drop by to chat.
Thank you. I was swamped yesterday, but I think you covered plenty of what I would have liked to say.
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I wonder how many Ricochet members have been divorced and what percentage of them think they or society would be better off if divorce were much more difficult to obtain? I know many people are unhappy that their parents divorced. I’m just curious how many of the divorcees themselves wish the law had made it much more difficult. I suppose it would be good for the employment of lawyers if every divorce had to be a lengthy court battle.
Can’t say much since I haven’t been divorced. I am interested in the responses. My parents divorced when I was in college. It may have had less impact on me than some, since I had been emancipated a couple years earlier.
This sounds like a good idea for a new post. I’ll think about it, but happy to let @randyweivoda take it on