Stop your messing around,
Better think of your blogwatch…

Balkinization: Must-read (for right and left) post on the Miers maneuvering.

MarriageDebate: Me vs. gay marriage! Series of posts starts here; includes God vs. heterosexuals; the next St. Valentines; and atheist cathedrals. I strongly suggest you read the entire series of posts first, then hit the comments-boxes for various objections and my responses. I really think that strategy is the best way to get a sense of what I’m actually arguing, even if you still disagree.

The Cornell Society for a Good Time. Via Mark Shea.

Rosa Parks, R.I.P.

READ THIS BOOK OR I SHOOT THE DOG!: Two weeks ago I finished Elizabeth Marquardt’s new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. You can read excerpts here. Basically, this book is amazing, and everyone should read it, right now.

The book is based on two interlocking research projects: a nationally-representative survey of 1,500 young adults, and the in-depth interviews on which the survey questions were based. She interviewed 70 young adults with at least a college degree: 35 from intact families, 35 from divorced families who had ongoing contact with both parents. By focusing on college graduates and people who had maintained relationships with both parents, she hoped to screen out most of the worst-case scenarios–she wasn’t interested so much in the well-documented research showing that people whose parents divorce are at greater risk of low educational attainment, criminal involvement, etc. In the nationally-representative survey, respondents’ families were divided into low-conflict intact, high-conflict intact, low-conflict divorced, and high-conflict divorced. Marquardt wanted to study how even “good divorces” affect children’s moral and spiritual development: how children learn who they are, what is true, what is the right thing to do, how to understand and approach God.

What she learned is that there is, essentially, an undiscovered culture in this country: the culture of children of divorce. Their experiences, in general, differ from the experiences of children from intact families in a host of ways. They’re much more likely to focus on and monitor their parents’ emotions and needs from a very young age; much more likely to feel as though they were “a different person” with each parent; much more likely to have felt physically unsafe as a child. Beyond the abstractions and statistics, Marquardt really delves into how divorce is experienced–how children grow, and are strengthened by the challenges they face; but how even “resilient” children, “little adults,” suffer, often very deeply.

Marquardt is very clear that she isn’t saying all divorces are wrong. She isn’t calling for legal changes to make divorce more difficult (at least not in this book–I don’t know her position on such changes). She isn’t blaming divorced parents. She has a strong relationship with her own parents, who supported her in her research, and it’s clear that she loves them very much and knows that they both love her. But she does hope that by pointing out the often-hidden struggles children of divorce undergo, she will encourage more people in difficult marriages to work out their troubles and stay together.

This is a profound, moving book. A very good review is here if you need more before you spend your shekels.

MARRIAGE DEBATE: Maggie Gallagher is guest-blogging on same-sex marriage at the Volokh Conspiracy. Maggie–my new ex-boss, so if you want my resume, drop me a line!–may be the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. She’s insightful, intellectually honest, steeped in the current research on marriage and family life, and… yeah, I could go on, but really you should just read her posts. The Volokh.com posts are kind of disconnected, a problem made worse by the blog-protocol of posts appearing in reverse chronological order, so I suggest that people read from the bottom up. (You can get just Maggie’s posts at this link, but since a few other Volokhites have chimed in, you might not want to do it that way.) If you want more, there is an excellent debate between Maggie and Jonathan Rauch here. …Next week, Dale Carpenter will respond to Maggie’s posts, at Volokh.com.

Here’s a small tidbit from an early Maggie post:

Here’s my short answer: marriage serves many private and individual purposes. But its great public purpose, the thing that justifies its existence as a unique legal status, is protecting children and society by creating sexual unions in which children are (practically) guaranteed the love and care of their own mother and father.

The vast majority of children born to married couples begin life with their own mother and fathers committed to jointly caring for them. Only a minority of children in other sexual unions (and none in same-sex unions) get this benefit.

Sex makes babies. Society needs babies. Babies need fathers as well as mothers. That’s the heart of marriage as a universal human institution.

Please note: Procreation is not the definition of marriage. It is the reason for marriage’s existence as a public (and yes legal) institution. People who don’t have children can still really be married (just as people who aren’t married can and do have babies).

But if sex between men and women did not make babies, then marriage would not be a universal human institution, or a legal status in America. Yes, many people like intimacy–is that a good reason for the government to stamp the good housekeeping seal of approval on certain intimate relationships, but not others?

more

NEW FROM iMAPP: NEW RESEARCH ON FAMILY STRUCTURE AND CRIME. Hey look, it’s research I did!

Are children raised outside of intact marriages at increased risk for crime and delinquency? iMAPP’s latest policy brief, “Can Married Parents Prevent Crime? Recent Research on Family Structure and Delinquency 2000-2005,” looks at empirical research from the United States published in peer-reviewed journals since 2000.

All but three of 23 recent studies found some family structure effect on crime or delinquency. Seven of the eight studies that used nationally representative data, for example, found that children in single-parent or other non-intact family structures were at greater risk of committing criminal or delinquent acts.

download the brief here (PDF)

FAMILY SCHOLARS has the usual smorgasbord of blogging goodness, centered on the technologies and legal battles that are reshaping our understanding of family (PDF). For example: what makes men feel like dads?; “I feel that I came into this world for the sake of my mother“; sometimes I feel like a fatherless embryo; and much more.

BLOG/RELIEF: SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY FOR THE HOLY FOOL. Because he gave to Catholic Charities, and requested recommendations for five sci-fi/fantasy books he hadn’t read yet. I apologize in advance (which should be my motto!) that most of these will be repeat-recs, from my old Booklog blog.

1. Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers. A hard-boiled, episodic sci-fi novel about the future of identity. In a world where people buy and sell memories, personalities, even neuroses, how can we tell who we really are? Cadigan roams into Walker Percy territory: Why do we want to be other people? Why do we desperately seek out an identity? And Mindplayers‘ presentation of marriage and divorce had startling echoes of Maggie Gallagher’s excellent The Abolition of Marriage. The plot demonstrates, I suspect unwittingly, that marriage reinforces our sense of self while divorce disrupts it. The many references to the narrator’s divorce build up to a very “pro-marriage” plot twist. This is a tough, compassionate book, with a lot of insight into human nature, identity, and relationships.

2. David Gerrold, The Man Who Folded Himself. I read this because it was described (by National Review‘s John Derbyshire, I think) as “getting time travel right.” I didn’t expend the effort needed to verify that statement–the logical puzzles involved in time travel make my brain hurt–but certainly from a casual, vacation-type reading Derbyshire’s praise seemed warranted. The book was lots of fun most of the time, a bizarre workout for the brain, a suggestive look at what one man does when he becomes the only person he knows who can travel in four dimensions.

But the narrator, the time traveler, was a truly disturbing character. It was difficult to tell whether Gerrold was aware of just how disturbing this guy really was (not that the author’s obliviousness would make the book worse, necessarily). The narrator is lonely, alienated from others, and he becomes progressively more self-centered as he travels through time. Instead of folding himself, he seems more to collapse in on himself. There are some parts of the book where the damage caused by this self-centeredness is made explicit, but there is simply no alternative presented–there are virtually no characters except for different time-slices and “versions” of the narrator, and selfishness or the pursuit of personal happiness/pleasure is the only value system ever discussed or acted on in the novel. So you get the impression that although an excess of self-involvement is ultimately harmful, taking one’s own pleasure as the standard of value is A-OK as long as you’re careful–yes, you’ll have regrets (the sections of the book dealing with the nature of irrevocable acts are really good), but basically selfishness is the way to go. The novel begins to feel claustrophobic, and ultimately pretty hopeless, which I don’t think was the author’s intention. (Could definitely be wrong here.) It’s a quick and exciting read, and I recommend it to any sci-fi or time-travel fans, but in the end TMWFH feels like a parable about anti-eroticism, fear of difference, and personal collapse.

3. Tim Powers, Declare. There’s been quite a bit of chatter in the Catholic blogosphere lately about Powers, due to this interview. I wouldn’t say the things he says (I think experiences in the world do tend to reinforce our worldviews, and so if we draw upon or describe those experiences in order to illuminate those worldviews that isn’t necessarily special pleading or “message” fiction), but that doesn’t matter, because Declare is one of the most striking novels I’ve ever read. Admittedly, I was the target audience for this novel: I believe that seemingly random patterns and events often do in fact have existential and religious meaning; I’m Catholic, a recurring (though in no way preachy) theme of the book; and I was already obsessed with the Cambridge spies. (Oh come on–you could have guessed that!) Declare retells Kim Philby’s story in a world where mystical and demonic forces explicitly and directly affect the outcome of the Cold War. It’s fascinating from the first page.

4. Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn. Okay, so this is hardly an obscure work. But I get the impression that people avoid it because, ick, unicorn. I think people expect this book to be fluffy and happily-happily-happily-ever-after.

It isn’t. It uses all kinds of elements that in lesser hands would become cliches; but the book itself is full of rich characterization and poignant reflections on the interlocking nature of love and regret. (Yes, a theme of my senior essay in college.) There are elements of picaresque, and an extraordinary balance between sublime and ridiculous elements. (The scene where a sort of wild magic conjures up images of Robin Hood and his fellows, deluding a group of epigone bandits, might be the best example of that balance.) This is a bittersweet book with a lot of wisdom and many unforgettable images. …I should note that it’s also maybe the only novel that made the translation to the silver screen with all its virtues intact. The movie of “The Last Unicorn” is also quite beautiful and moving, with an obvious Japanese influence in the flowing lines, and a sly, homespun, Jewish-influenced sense of humor. You should read the book and watch the movie–really, you won’t be disappointed.

5. Rebecca Brown, The Terrible Girls. A lush, resentful little book full of linked parables about love and betrayal between women. Brown sometimes uses class as a metaphor for the power differences brought on by love–the one who loves more is a pawn of the one who loves less. It’s not clear whether, in her stories of furious self-sacrifice, she acknowledges that even a self-sacrificing lover can be selfish, enthralled by the image of herself as martyr rather than concerned for her beloved’s well-being. Nonetheless, this book is well worth your time.

WHO’S YOUR DADDY?: Tomorrow evening (Thursday), I’ll be speaking at a Heritage Foundation panel on contemporary fatherhood. It’ll be Pat Fagan on how fathers shape their children’s future relationships, Brad Wilcox on his 2004 Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, and me on “how marriage makes men.” The panel starts at six, in the Lehman Auditorium of the Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Ave NE, and it’s free and open to the public. (Heritage is at Union Station metro, right on Capitol Hill. So convenient!) After the panel and audience q & a, THERE WILL BE FREE FOOD!, so you really have no reason not to go. RSVP to me if you can, just so we get a decent head count, but if you just want to show up that’s cool too.

(Oh, and I have a “briefly noted” book review in the new First Things–reviewing Minna Proctor’s Do You Hear What I Hear?: Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father. Speaking of fathers.)