This is a blogwatch that is fasting from pop music…

Andrew Sullivan: Kurds, torture, and stuff. Scroll down for more.

Blogging Baghdad: NBC News correspondents in Baghdad, inc. local Iraqi journalists. Must-read. Via The Corner.

Done With Mirrors: Archaic bawdy! Via Dappled Things.

Family Scholars: US prisons shackling women in labor.

MarriageDebate: Excellent, ongoing discussion of marriage, family, same-sex marriage, European and American demographic changes, and the “Second Demographic Transition,” sparked in part by Maggie Gallagher’s column this week:

…Over the same period, the U.S. illegitimacy rate rose from 18 percent to 33 percent. Our crisis is bad, but European countries have now surpassed America in many key indicators of the Second Demographic Transition, which is the one that leads to demographic death. Amidst America’s serious marriage crisis, we are also showing signs of “American exceptionalism.”

But not all over America. In a fascinating recent study, Lesthaeghe and a colleague looked for evidence of the Second Demographic Transition in America. What states are leading indicators of SDT, as measured by postponement of marriage and children? California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and (the most extreme outlier of all) Massachusetts.

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The MD.com debate includes (in ascending order of how much I think they rock) MV Lee Badgett, Stanley Kurtz, Jonathan Rauch; and The Maggie-nator, who IMO has the best of it so far. Plus assorted comments-boxing. A quote from Maggie to get you going:

I would like to say, just for the record, that I did not say and do not believe that gay partnerships caused the fertility collapse or the retreat from marriage.

What I said and believe is that cultures deeply committed to generativity, to marriage as a procreative norm, are going to find it hard to get to gay marriage. While cultures in the middle of the Second Demographic Transition are going to find it a very congenial idea. In my view gay marriage and SDT are therefore both the product of the same cultural trend, or tendencies thereto.

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