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Alabama Voters Don’t Need Insults
This from John Podhoretz is just one of many similar comments out there:
Similarly, if you believe America has rotted away morally, the idea you’d hand enormous political power to a morally rotted person like Roy Moore reveals your own spiritual and moral rot.
What is wrong with simply saying “I disagree with your decision to vote for Roy Moore?”
Alabama voters are between a rock and a hard place. It’s not entirely their fault since Moore’s peccadilloes weren’t known until it was too late to take him off the ballot. The “establishment” offering, Luther Strange, was scandal-tainted himself.
It is true that Moore’s refusal to step down does not speak well of his character either.
But if you vote for Roy Moore, do you become him? If you vote for Doug Jones, do you become an abortion-promoting leftist?
If character should always trump political considerations, what ‘s the right choice if it were Moore versus a scandal-free Nazi?
Alabama voters have a choice between a predator and a progressive. Please, cut them some slack.
Published in General
Imagine were we talking of reincarnation.
True but old definitions change who now recalls the original meaning of silly or nice? Queer is in transition, and pervert is probably too. Many words change their meanings and it is by no one design.
I do, and I’ve always thought you were a nice guy.
Edited to add: You knew you had to expect this, didn’t you?
And now I am utterly at sea. To recap – and bear with me, I’m just a simple country doctor – you said “My view of ‘used to be’ goes back far before the day I was born. You should try it sometimes, James.” Me, concluding you regarded me as some modern-type dude who upends the Etch-A-Sketch whenever the political winds of the day demand it, posted a link to my site, which is a massive compendium of annotated examination of the time far before I was born. You, in response, implied that your knowledge of the site was the reason you said what you said, which implies I should take my own counsel and look to my site to temper my conclusions about current events.
Am I right so far? Then you throw in reincarnation. I am even more confused than ever. Help me, Obi-Wan! You’re my only hope!
It does raise a necessary issue: understanding the past is not the same as forgiving it. Inhabiting the ideas of the past on their own terms is essential to forming an opinion. If you say “the ideas of the past about X sucked!” and I ask why, and you reply “because we believe Y now,” that’s not enough. That’s a recipe for repudiating X just because it’s X.
This is the part where it went off the rails. You are mostly, from what I have seen, a contemporary cultural scholar, meaning 1945 to the present. You also dip into the late modern period as far back as some stuff from the Nineteenth Century, such as the Tom Swifties, but probably 99% of what I have seen of your work is Twentieth-Century focused. Is that fair?
Certainly some of that goes back “before you were born,” but the distance of your main interests is no more than twice your present age. Again, is that a fair statement?
When I’m looking at marriage and issues of hypergamy, I’m looking around the world for over 5,000 times your present age. It’s a very different perspective.
You compared how you and your peers, contemporary Yankees in the late 1970’s, would have seen a guy who was dating a high school girl. And, yes, I do know that the incidents in question with the even older Roy Moore were contemporaneous with your college years. But Roy Moore was also in the South, which has been culturally behind the times until quite recently. The South was culturally still largely part of the First-Wave Agricultural Civilization even after it had started modernizing, industrializing, and even entering the post-industrial age. It still has aspects of that civilization in its culture, although the overall culture has changed significantly in our lifetimes.
Now, say we go back to the 1920’s. (I skip the 1930’s due to the depression, although severely hypergamic relationships might have been even more prevalent then.) Would such a relationship have generally turned heads in the 1920’s? Sure, they might have called the guy a “cradle-robber,” but if the guy were an educated man, a former military officer, and a lawyer, I suspect most young ladies would be flattered at the attention, and their parents would see it as her being taken care of in life. The guy was established, stable, and had income.
As we go back even further in time, it was not unusual for a man to want to be established in his career before marriage. For a professional, such as a lawyer, that would often mean somewhere around thirty. If he wanted children and heirs, rather than a rich widow and the property she brought, he might very well marry a significantly younger woman. The imbalance had several purposes, especially among certain classes, places, and times.
That doesn’t mean it was ever anything close to 100% of marriages, but through most of history in most places, it was not a head turner. At worst, people in other situations might have been a touch jealous.
Very true. I’m not even defending Roy Moore. Just seeing the situation from the perspectives of different times, places, and social classes. That’s not the same as saying I think we should all go out and try heavily hypergamous relationships. I know when I was dating in my late twenties, one of my requirements was a woman who already had a college degree. Were I dating now, I’d probably want some sweet, young thing in her thirties or forties. But I wouldn’t rule out the fifties. (That doesn’t guarantee I could find any such, of course, I am a violinist.)
This is one of the things that’s been bothering me about the Roy Moore debate: A lot of the defenses of him veer dangerously close to relativism.
When it comes to defending him on the sex-related accusations, the only one with real heft is the first accuser who was underage. The second, the Allred client, seems to have blown her credibility. The WaPo article did seem to establish a pattern of his dating very young women, and the underage molestation accusation within that background seems very credible. On the other hand, forty years ago. And they have come up with nothing since?
There are much more recent things to call him unfit for office for. I think it’s silly to focus on the molestation allegations.
It’s about time, too.
Sounds like you had a rather unique peer group. My experience differs. Especially concerning guys who wanted more than entertainment and who only wanted to go out to the bars because that’s where the women were.
Oh, and inexperienced, emotionally undeveloped, and intellectually unformed perfectly describes most college students and even a good portion of twenty somethings.
It never is. If there’s one thing I will keep forever from the Trump Era it is this: trust no one, see the source for yourself because people have biases, angles, comprehension problems, poor logic, and simply narrow views which block out other possibilities. I won’t speculate publicly which I think applies to Gary R.
Isn’t that the milieu our culture marinates in? Personally, I think there can be no other way in the secular world unless the secular is positively and solidly tethered to the spiritual.
Aside from that, though, what objective moral standard are you relying on here? The proxy or arbitrary legal age of consent? Subjective measures of unformed intellect and undeveloped emotional maturity? What’should the objective standard and by which authority to you claim it to be the standard?
By objective standards, only 2 accusations meet a legal threshold of wrong-ness (with serious crediblility issues on at least one of them) and the other two vary from group to group on them.
Certainly, as I wrote before, our views on 16 year olds, consent, and sex are far from consistent. If they are capable of consent, then it matters not if Moor was 18, 25, or 30. If they aren’t capable of consent, change the law. (Its possible they did change the law between now and then).
My point being, it’s subjective and debatable on the 16-17 year olds.
It is natural for a man to like young women but it is perverted for a 32 year old to cruise high schools and shopping malls in search of them.
They gave themselves that choice and I agree with Mr. Podhoretz.
“Similarly, if you believe America has rotted away morally, the idea you’d hand enormous political power to a morally rotted person like Roy Moore reveals your own spiritual and moral rot.”
Anyone who thinks that men like Roy Moore are the answer is revealing their own spiritual and moral rot. Hopefully Alabama primary voters will learn from this debacle and give themselves better choices in 2020. And Moore’s character was fully revealed even before the allegations.
You might want to remove the log from your own eye before going after the mote in others’.
I call it the way I see it. Many seem to like that in some. Politicians are not wise to attack voters, but neither I nor Mr. Podhoretz are politicians.
Can someone think Roy Moore was the one to vote for without thinking he is the answer?
What is most natural and normal is for men to appreciate the looks of women in their twenties when they are probably at their most fertile. Junior high boys aren’t necessarily thinking too much about their peers, but of their younger teachers, women in their twenties. As they get into their late teens, twenties, and thirties, they are still looking mostly at women of that age group. As men get older than that, they start to look at and appreciate women who are older than the twenties more seriously.
Of course, most men are flexible when it comes to these things. In high school, they have little chance of dating the hot women in their twenties, so they date girls their age. As they get older and out on their own, their horizons expand. As they get even older, unless they get very rich, their horizons start to shrink again. The difference in life experience and outlook between eighteen and thirty is huge. The difference between forty-eight and sixty is not nearly as much. Again, though, men can be pretty flexible in their tastes and willing to take what they can get.
A thirty-two-year-old man cruising the high schools for dates could and should be described with many negative terms. But if said man is looking for a young bride with whom to have normal marital relations, that is not perverted. If he’s just looking for a good time, that would depend on what sort of good time he is pursuing as to whether it would constitute a perversion.
Sure as shootin’, brother.
I understand that (and I actually fall on the more liberal side of this particular question.) All I’m saying is that, “It [was/is] a different culture. We can’t impose our standards on them,” is the same sort of stuff we usually hear from the Left to defend their position that there should be no standards at all.
As a moral relativist myself (in the way that the Christian Scriptures are a document of moral relativism) I found it somewhat amusing that the guy who posted the Ten Commandments in a courtroom was being defended by moral relativists. Not that the Ten Commandments don’t provide a lot of room for moral relativism, but I doubt that Judge Moore thought of it that way.
Here’s the way that I put it:
And to really get this conversation off the rails, that is the problem with the versions of Islam where they think Mohammad was the most exemplary man who should be emulated in every way. Really? Like marrying a five-year-old? Uh-uh, Slim. That’s not working for me.
We can try to understand the mindset of the Phoenicians and other Punic peoples without saying, “Well, sacrificing babies to Baal was okay for them.” No, sacrificing babies is never okay.
Excellent and very interesting timeline overview.
I wonder then if what has changed is what women now want for their life course.
One of the gains for women of the women’s movement into the workforce and the availability of birth control has been to achieve a closer approximation to the man’s 1950s lifespan pattern. I remember my own mother saying about my dad during their bitter divorce, “He took the best years of my life.” My mother certainly wasn’t the only divorced woman who felt that way at that time. But over the last three decades, the time pressure for women has eased, and they have taken advantage of it. Today women look gorgeous right through through their sixties, just the way men have looked handsome during those (distinguished) years. Women have expended a great effort to gain those additional years of attractiveness. And they are working on extending fertility too.
Thus a forty-year-old woman today looks at a thirteen-year-old girl as too young to be a sex object.
I’ll bet this is what is happening. It’s women who are changing, and they want a longer childhood for their daughters.
It’s an interesting possibility. I had never thought of it that way. And you’re right, they don’t make sixty year old women as old as they used to. Men, either.
By the way, “You took the best years of my life,” is frequently heard in Russian movies. I have no idea about American ones.
Interesting theory. If that’s the case, they might want to start by setting much stricter rules for what their teenage daughters are allowed to wear outside the home.
To be fair, Alabama is a pretty primitive culture. We can’t hold them to the same standards we civilized people follow…
I don’t know about that – did you see the recent pictures of Christine Keeler in the obituaries last week?
So here’s my question for Mr. Podhoretz: It’s better then to hand enormous political power to a person who believes that late-term abortions should be legal? Abortions at gestational ages many premature births survive? Speaking as a mother who gave birth 6 1/2 weeks early and 5 weeks early (said children are now 21 and almost 15), how is someone who holds that belief not as “morally rotted” as someone who’s done what Moore is accused of doing? I ask because my understanding is that’s the situation those in Alabama were faced with – someone who might have done something really bad 40 years ago or someone who currently believes something really bad now. Who do you vote for if those are your choices?
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Having said the above, I went and read Podhoretz’s column and agree with what it said overall. (For those who didn’t read the column, I promise that the premise is deeper/different from what the isolated quote would seem to indicate.) My answer to the overall question of the column is: It happens because most people don’t make decisions in isolation. They never have.
P.S. To give a more complete picture of who I am, I have a third child born between the two I mention above. She’s 18 and was born 4 days late – and that was after being induced. She wasn’t ready to come on her own even then.