With your cheap rewards, your blackmail, and your comical rage,

Just remember you’ll only watch my blog as long as you pay my wage…

Camassia on search requests that brought people to her blog: “what evidence supports that humans are basically

“If the end of that sentence is ‘good,’ try Rousseau, or maybe Star Trek. If it’s ‘bad,’ try Augustine, or maybe world history.”

(I should note that there’s a big distinction between “basically bad” and “basically Fallen,” but now I’m just ruining the joke, so I’ll shut up.)

MarriageDebate has a LOT of interesting stuff up now, including an extended conversation between Maggie Gallagher and Jonathan Rauch on marriage’s relation to gender and procreativity. More tomorrow. Go over there and join the debate!

And you’ve probably seen this report on infant euthanasia in the Netherlands; Hugo Schwyzer‘s comments section has some really powerful posts, especially the one from La Lubu.

Google has a government-only search engine. Via Hit & Run.

ETA: My cousin Sam (a.k.a. Professor Samuel Bagenstos) has a blog on disability law. Via How Appealing.

M TO THE A TO THE S TO THE K: Came back yesterday from a conference on “the renaissance of traditional marriage.” I spoke on marriage and masculinity (yeah yeah, I know, those who can’t do teach)–brief version of my talk will be on Marriage Debate tomorrowish. As usual, I felt a lot like a lion in a Christian suit. But I was really heartened to hear a lot of support for prison reform; so I figured I’d link again to my Crisis magazine piece on that subject, “Fifteen to Life: Reforming the Criminal Justice System.”

CAN THIS INSTITUTION BE SAVED?: Interesting Christianity Today piece on the Smart Marriages conference. Via Family Scholars.

WILD AND AN UNTAMED THING: New question at MarriageDebate:

Would same-sex marriage tame gay men?

Okay, so most iterations of that argument don’t put it quite so bluntly.

But one of the undercurrents of the gay marriage debate is the idea that marriage tames men, in general, and so gay marriage would help transform gay male culture, shifting it away from promiscuity and toward responsibility and sexual restraint.

But a lot of people within the gay community find this line of argument insulting, irrelevant, or wrong-headed from the start. And many opponents of SSM suggest that it’s women who tame men in marriage; or that the cultural influences might flow both ways, reducing the cultural belief that marriage requires sexual fidelity.

What’s your view?

(longer version of question here; email me if you want to join the debate!)

SPENT MY LAST TEN DOLLARS…: So I have a long, rambling, only slightly polemical thing up at MarriageDebate about bisexuality, emotional stress, and… stuff. Readers interested in gender, sexuality, marriage, and related whatnot might visit and let me know what you all think.

And I’m almost done with the next scene of “Odysseus’s Scar,” I promise. Just stalling on some awkward transitions. It’s a disappointing scene, I think, because we’re in the middle where nothing plotty is happening, but it will be posted by 3 a.m.

“FEAR OF REDEMPTION”: Brilliant essay. Excerpts:

…When Emerson says, “Imitation is suicide,” he is drawing attention to the spiritual death that stems from self-alienation. When we stretch ourselves to meet the standards and goals set by others, we risk waking up one morning drowning in the responsibilities of marriage, children, job, and mortgage, feeling as though we have lost touch with all the passions and desires that once animated and moved us. An empty life is the antithesis of self-possession, and it is against the dispersing, emptying force of duty and responsibility that Emerson preaches his American version of the faith of the Savoyard Vicar: “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and evil are but names readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.” The highest good is self-affirmation, and thus Emerson concludes, “If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” Self-loyalty is the antidote to alienation. To thine own self be true is the first commandment.

[clipped]

…Like Dante before the wall of fire that forms the exit from purgatory, Augustine hesitated before the disjunctive demand of Christian morality, a demand that is the moral form of the promise of redemptive change. The demand seems to require a death of the self, a renunciation of personal identity. Augustine could not believe that a bush might burn without being consumed.

more! you know you want more!

She keeps Moet & Chandon

In her pretty cabinet;

“Let them watch blogs,” she says,

Just like Marie Antoinette…

Volokhs a-Go-Go: The mainline Protestant churches on religious freedom: “Overall, criticisms of Israel amounted to 37 percent of the 197 human rights criticisms offered by the churches during those years, only slightly higher than the 32 percent of criticisms leveled at the United States. The remaining 31 percent of criticisms were shared by twenty other nations.” Let me know if I have to explain why this sucks.

On a far less important note, E. Volokh is exactly right: Respect the Box.

A blogchild: “My interests, in no particular order save one: Catholicism, liturgical music, choral music, opera, German, Russian, French (gasp! — but they make wonderful pipe organs), and Tolkien. Not to mention poetry, literature, Southern-ness, etc. etc.”

Meet the New Deal, same as the old deal; or, Solidarity forever, the union makes them strong–Reason book review on the New Deal’s effect on black workers. I note that I have exactly no expertise here. Still, fascinating piece… with bonus Chicago Defender cartoon! Via Hit & Run.

Marriage Savers in Virginia. Yay! Via Dappled Things.

In other news, Jim Henley has made me rediscover a CD I already had, Elvis Costello’s All This Useless Beauty, and I am grateful.

Fastidious and precise…