Andrew Sullivan is a man of many beard stylings. They are basically all awesome.
Andrew Sullivan recently announced that he’s quitting blogging. That’s a big deal, especially if you were around in the early 2000s when blogging got started. (I once asked Megan McArdle about becoming a professional writer after reading The Up Side of Down[ref]Which is incredible. The subtitle is “Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.” You should buy it.). She told me that the only shortcut she knew of was to start a blog in 2001. Oh well.)
I wasn’t around and blogging until 2006, when I launched my first (now abandoned) blog at Blogspot, so I’ve only come across Sullivan more recently, and I respect and admire him more for his political views (e.g. here) than as the god father of blogging. But I’ve read with interest the reaction of other elite bloggers to his news, like this Vox piece by Ezra Klein: What Andrew Sullivan’s exit says about the future of blogging.
Klein’s basic premise is that blogging is hard to scale. To some extent, this doesn’t matter to me very much. Klein notes that Sullivan “was trying to make his blog — and its sizable audience — into a business.” I, at Difficult Run, am not. I’d like to pay for hosting, but I have no interest in profiting substantially from DR. But Klein’s observation about why it’s hard to scale a blog is important to what we’re trying to do at DR. Basically, blogging is the antithesis of social networking:
Blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral… Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. Alyssa Rosenberg put it well at the Washington Post. “I no longer write with the expectation that you all are going to read every post and pick up on every twist and turn in my thinking. Instead, each piece feels like it has to stand alone, with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a clear conclusion.”
My thoughts: some of this is about the low quality of blogs back when there was no competition. You could afford to assume your readers would do background reading on you because there weren’t many bloggers to compete with. This is also why Klein talks about how in the good ole days blogging was “unedited,” which is basically a polite way of saying poor quality, I think. The connection between having a more direct, personal tone and editing is just not that strong. You can edit and still sound like a blogger: casual, informal, and with a distinctive style. I’m not impressed by that.
But when it comes to social media: I absolutely agree that blogging is hard to scale. It’s long-form writing. Social networking is about memes. And I don’t mean the technical term, I mean annotated cat GIFs. Social networking is also about tribalism, echo-chambers, and outrage. Sure, there’s a lot of that in blogs too, but in a blog you have time for nuance if you want to. In a meme? Not so much.
If we’re going to realize the potential of the Internet, we’re gonna need writers who are willing to write with some depth and readers who are interested in reading it. That’s what we’re trying to do here. Slowly but surely, we’re committed to carving out a little space where important social and economic and technological and religious ideas get discussed at greater length (and with greater context and civility) than outlets like Twitter or Facebook tend to foster. The reasons Klein thinks blogs are on the ropes, in short, are precisely some of the reasons I’m committed to staying the course.
Which, btw, is not at all a dig at Sullivan. I’m not sure Klein’s analysis was really correct. I think Sullivan’s business was largely successful and take him at his word that his real reason for hanging up his hat is to unplug and get back into the real world. That I can understand.
Larry Correia decided that twice was enough for him, but this year Brad Torgersen (friend of Correia, albeit a more mild-mannered conservative) took up the torch instead. So you’ve got a lot of blog posts from folks like Correia, Torgersen, John C. Wright, Sarah Hoyt, and others on what the Hugos have come to be about versus what they should be about.
One of the major flashpoints is a short story called, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” To the conservative contingent, this story represents basically everything that is wrong with modern sci-fi. John C. Wright wrote that It “was a story I could — and did — do a better version of in one sitting, in less than an afternoon,” ridiculed it for ripping off If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and called it neither a story nor science fiction. (I haven’t read his version, The Queen of the Tyrant Lizards, yet.) Sarah Hoyt attacked it at great length, writing that “It… could have been written by me at 12 and would have got, from my middle school teacher, exactly the sort of praise it got from science fiction professionals.”
In terms of substance: both Wright and Hoyt have a point. Even folks who have praised the work, like Ana Grilo, point out that there’s not really anything science fiction about it. Hoyt’s argument goes beyond questions of genre or quality, however, saying that “it’s the ideas packed into the story that are truly disturbing.” She goes on:
A story that reveals a total lack of knowledge of an entire class of people (manual laborers) and instead others them as sort of scary all purpose evil that will beat to death anyone who doesn’t look/act like them won an award voted on by – supposedly – adult professionals. Not only that, but adult professionals who keep claiming their tolerance and love of the “other.” What’s more, adult professionals who would almost certainly embrace “Marxism” as a good or at least correct idea. When did Marxists start loathing and fearing the working class? And admitting it?
Hoyt is not wrong. Want to see for yourself? The full text is online, and the whole thing is less than 1,000 words. Give it a read. I only read it after reading Hoyt and Wright trash it and my response was, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” Don’t get me wrong: it’s melodramatic and a little manipulative, but I’m kind of a sucker for that.
The Sad Puppies crew is far from unanimous in anything, but to the extent that there is a consensus, it has two parts. The first part holds that the Hugos shouldn’t be merit badges for doubleplusgood duckspeak. I’m on board with that. Intentionally or not (could just be an offshoot of standard clique behavior), the Hugo process has come to be dominated by a small, ideologically uniform faction. And that’s a bad thing.
The second part of the consensus holds that the Hugos are bound to be a popularity contest, so you might as well make the a popularity contest with the widest possible fan base. Which boils down to pretty much one concept: fun. Again and again the central complaint of Correia, Torgersen, and others boils down to this nostalgia for sci-fi as pop entertainment. I’m not on board for that.
The three books that defined sci-fi for me as a teenager were Dune, Ender’s Game, and Speaker for the Dead. All three won the Hugo, and Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead remain the only two books to win the best novel award for the same author in back-to-back years (1986 and 1987). Ender’s Game is an easy, fun read that has come to be marketed as YA in subsequent editions. I don’t know how many times I reread it, but it was quite a few. But Dune and Speaker for the Dead were not fun. They were grim and a little disturbing to the incredibly idealistic young man I was at the time. I didn’t reread either one until I was in my 30s, although when I did I found that they had aged much better than Ender’s Game (although I do still love Ender’s Game, don’t get me wrong!) If I had to pick one word to describe these books, it would not be fun. It would be great. Not like Tony the Tiger great, but like “great work of art” great.
I don’t think we have any better chance of finding objective criteria for greatness than we do for funness, but it’s still an important distinction. A great work can also be a fun work, and I don’t think that a Hugo award winner should ever be a slog to read. But a great work doesn’t have to be a fun work. A great work is a work that is reaching beyond fun, which may (or may not) come along for the ride.
I’ve read a good proportion (about one third, I believe) of all the Hugo-winning best novels. They do not come close to living up to the standards of Dune, Ender’s Game, and Speaker for the Dead, but the decline in quality is not some sudden, new problem.
The first winner ever, from 1953, is The Demolished Man. It doesn’t hold up very well, but it’s clearly an attempt to be a meaningful, significant book even if the psychological theories are dated to the point of quaint. But if you look at books like They’d Rather Be Right (also known as The Forever Machine) which won in 1955 or Waystation (also known as Here Gather the Stars) which won in 1964, you’re going to see message fiction so didactic, awkward, and transparent that Ancillary Justice (which won in 2014) appears downright subtle by comparison. Let’s be honest: lecturing the reader may be most closely associated with Robert Heinlein, but it’s been a tradition in sci-fi since the beginning. If you want to fil in the gap between the 1950s and the 2010s, look no farther than Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which got a nomination in 1994 and a win in 1995 and 1997. These books are basically just the mirror image of Ayn Rand. (On Mars.)
The fact that message fiction is winning in the 2010s is not news. Message fiction has always been a part of the tradition of sci-fi. That’s just the baggage you carry with you when you’re “the literature of ideas” (as Pamela Sargent referred to sci-fi.) Whether the ideas are political or technical, there’s always the risk that they are going to steal the show and ruin your story. Hugos have gone to books like Ringworld or Rendezvous with Rama which are nothing more than flimsy, slipshod excuses to show off clever inventions. It’s not exactly message fiction, but it’s the same basic problem: a story that exists as an excuse for someone to tell you this really neat idea that they had. It’s like listening to someone describe their dream to you: shoot me now.
Nope, what is different about the 2010s is not fun-vs-message. It’s that the message has never been so dogmatically uniform. Heinlein and Robinson will both frustrate you with their philosophical meanderings (although Heinlein could also write), but at least they are polar opposites. Being frog-marched through a tour of someone’s neat invention might make you weep for the English language, but at least you’re not going to be labeled as a bigot if you find fault with Niven’s ringworld concept. (For the record: the concept really is stunning.)
The current crop of social justice message writers imagine they are the first on the scene to explore gender or write sympathetically about LGBT characters, but the only way it is possible to think that is if you have not actually read the masters who came before, folks like LeGuin and Bradbury that should be household names even if you don’t read a lot of sci-fi. The philosophies and minority characters of contemporary social justice writers have been an integral part of the sci-fi community for literally decades. There’s nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants, but it is galling when a writer looks down from their lofty perch and thinks they made it up there all alone. That’s not the real problem, however. The real problem is that these writers are not only interested in expressing their message fiction in their writing, but also in enforcing conformity to it outside of the writing through (e.g.) control of the SFWA and domination of the awards process. The risk is not that we will get stuck with award-winning, unreadable message-fiction dreck. We’ve had a half century of that (off and on). The risk is that genuine intellectual diversity—which has been one of sci-fi’s greatest contributions—may finally be stamped out. That is an existential threat to the genre.
Which is why, as I said, I am basically on board with Sad Puppies. I am particularly happy that they went out of their way to put some authors on the slate who are liberal rather than conservative, as an expression that sci-fi should welcome intellectual diversity. Bravo. Let’s fight back against the homogenization of sci-fi. Down with echo chambers and three cheers for cognitive dissonance and multi-party conversations!
But when we do all that, I’d rather shoot for greatness than for fun. When I think of greatness, I think of a work where a great idea and great writing come together. Not necessarily a great story, however. Wright knocked “If You Were a Dinosaur” for not being a story, but I wonder what he would think of LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” This work is also arguably not a story, since it has not a single named character, no dialogue, and—strictly speaking—no plot. It is also, without doubt, one of the most powerful short stories ever penned in the English language, and it won the Hugo for Best Short Story in 1974. Once again, I urge you to judge for yourself. Here’s the complete text. It’s a little longer than “If You Were a Dinosaur,” but it’s also much better. Be warned, however, it might break your heart. Which is to say, it is not fun. But it is great.
This is why I can’t hop on the populist bandwagon that wants to dismiss literary sci-fi. Literary sci-fi, when it fails, fails miserably. You have fiction that is neither fun to read nor great. Case in point: Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives series. The first book in that series, Shikasta, was literally unreadable for me. (That didn’t stop her from winning a Nobel in literature. Go figure.) But when it is good, it can be really profound. I didn’t like every single story in The Secret History of Science Fiction (an anthology of literary sci-fi), but I did like a lot of them. I also found a book like Never Let Me Go incredibly powerful. I don’t care that The Handmaid’s Tale is message fiction because the writing is incredible and the story is also really, really compelling. I know The Road is trendy, but when I read it last year I decided it deserved the accolades.
I don’t have anything against fun fiction. Every time I start a John Ringo series, I find my self-control vanishing as I pony up for the sequels in Audible instead of waiting for my monthly credit because I just can’t restrain myself. (Side note: no one can tell me with a straight face that Ringo doesn’t have a political agenda loud and clear in his books, either.) Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series doesn’t do it for me, but his Grimnoire books were amazing, and contained some of the best fight scenes I’ve ever read in any genre. Jim Butcher is my favorite living author, bar none, due to his incredible Dresden Files series which is definitely some of the funnest reading I’ve done in my life. Nor am I discounting fun fiction as merely fluff: both Ringo and Butcher have brought tears to my eyes. (That might seem a bit odd, especially of Ringo, but I dare anyone to read the first chapters of Islands of Rage and Hope and not wipe their eye at least once. If you pass the test, congratulations: you have no heart.)
But let’s be honest: the reason most franchise fiction doesn’t get nominated (despite its popularity and despite a lot of it being fun) is that most of it is dreck. There, I said it. It’s mediocre writing just one notch above fan fiction designed to milk diehard fans who would pay money for a book containing nothing but the ingredient lists from breakfast cereals if it had Star Wars or Star Trek on the cover. And let’s further stipulate that if the Hugos were really just a broad-based popularity contest we could skip the whole nominating / voting hoopla and just use pick the best-seller for the year. Then the problem just reduces to data availability and politics are out the window (except as they pertain to the aggregate purchasing behavior of fandom). Nothing says “popular” more loudly than “sales,” am I right?
The trouble is, we don’t need an award for best-seller status. We already have that award. It’s called “best-seller status.” What the Hugos should try to be, in an ideal world, is the best guess of people who are smart and educated (about the sci fi canon in particular) of which of the stories that came out this year are going to be the stories that will still be powerful, relevant, and important in the future. In short: which of this year’s stories are great.
Sometimes, the awards have done a pretty good job of that (as with Dune, Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and several others). Sometimes, the awards have done a lousy job at that. But, until now, the awards may have been very uneven, but they were not hijacked and used as a tool in an ideological war. I’m rooting for Sad Puppies. If the Hugos just went back to their regularly scheduled unevenness: that’d be great. But hey, as long as the topic is open for discussion, I’m pulling for us to aim a little higher.
As all three readers of The Slow Hunch probably know, I have onceagain failed to link to its latest posts here at Difficult Run. Alas, this is probably one of many reasons that my personal blog tends to be rather lonely.
Therefore, instead of linking to every single TSH post individually whenever it goes live, I will do monthly recaps with links to all the latest write-ups. My posts tend to be short and it seems a bit much (both for readers and my memory, apparently) to dedicate a DR post to a single TSH one. So, without further ado, here’s what you missed at The Slow Hunch this last month or so:
Feeling Good About Work – Features a TED talk by behavioral economist Dan Ariely on how meaning, creativity, and challenge can motivate us at work. I briefly connect it to the Mormon concept of eternal progression.
2015 Faith & Knowledge Conference – The abstract for my upcoming presentation at the Faith & Knowledge Conference at the University of Virginia, entitled “”Labour…Is Their Religion”: Toward a Mormon Theology of Work.”
Reimagining Business – Features a TED talk by business professor Raj Sisodia on why business is good, ethical, noble, and heroic and how conscious capitalism can keep it that way.
“…Working With, For, and Through Other People” – Features an interview with Wharton professor Adam Grant on creating a “giver” culture within organizations. I round it out with a quote from Hugh Nibley on consecration and charity.
Jonathan Haidt on Dynamism With Decency – Features a Zurich.Minds presentation by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt about capitalism and business ethics. His comments fit comfortably into my version of a Mormon theology of work.
Wellbeing: The Dignity of Work – Looks at Gallup research on the impact one’s career (or lack of) has on overall well-being. Long-term unemployment can be surprisingly detrimental. Plus, you get a performance by Irish folk singer Christy Moore.
Blessed Are the Laborers? – Draws on Arthur Brooks’ research on work and happiness, eschatological hopes of the Old Testament, and Jesus’ beatitudes to suggest that work has an integral role in the age to come. Plus, Incubus rocking out.
I expanded my thoughts on the LDS Church and gay rights from a blog post into a piece that First Things liked enough to run with. Couple of quick notes. First, that article has even more typos than my usual posts. The “heard of Jesus’s message”? I can only hang my head in shame and try to do better next time. Second, I’ve been talking with a law professor about religious liberty to make sure I’m not too far off-base. The one thing he says I was missing from my analysis was that liberals don’t believe religious liberty is confined to only the liberties that you get via secular civil rights (like freedom of speech or privacy). They also tend to suggest that religion ought to be treated as a suspect classification like race or gender. This means that any law which explicitly targeted a religious group would be subject to strict scrutiny.
Practically speaking, however, that doesn’t change much. Most of the rules that would constitute a real burden on a person’s free expression of religion are not going to be crafted as explicitly anti-religious, so we’re still talking about a huge gulf between what conservatives have in mind when they talk about religious liberty (and also what the First Amendment strongly implies about religious liberty by mentioning it explicitly) and what liberals have in mind when they talk about religious liberty.
“Heart of Africa” is a feature film set in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country consistently misrepresented. We will show it in its dignity and beauty. The film is based on experiences of missionaries there, both African and Anglo. One of the missionaries is a Congolese former revolutionary and another a young man from Idaho who has heretofore not seen black people. Aime Mbuyi, who was a revolutionary before he became a missionary, has provided the screenwriter with full descriptions of the revolutionary meetings, including the songs sung at the boarding school where the revolutionaries lived.
The film will be bi-continental, much of it filmed in South Africa using the “Out of Africa” production team, with portions shot in Kinshasa, DR-Congo. Our director is one of the best in the nation, Sterling Van Wagenen.
The initial goal of the Kickstarter is $30,000, but they can do a lot more if they raise the funds.
At the $400,000. level, we can move into filming beyond the preliminary and do full principal photography. With another $100,000–making a total of $500,000–we can do editing and post-production, and we can integrate the music as well. (Music will be one of the most compelling aspects of the film.) Were we to raise $1.8 million, we could not only complete the film but move into wide distribution.
That’s a long way to go, but this is a project that is well worth supporting. The faster we help them get to $30,000 the better shot they have of getting to the higher goals, and the early days of a Kickstarter campaign can be the most crucial. Check it out and if–like me–you think that this is a story worth supporting then lend a hand. Backer levels start at $5. Here’s the link again.
Nathaniel recently pointed to a new study that reported the drop in unemployment benefit duration in 2014 led to an increase in job creation.[ref]This type of evidence goes hand-in-hand with the research from the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan.[/ref] An NBER study[ref]New version found here.[/ref] toward the end of 2014 on minimum wage hikes complements this research.
The abstract reads as follows.
We estimate the minimum wage’s effects on low-skilled workers’ employment and income trajectories. Our approach exploits two dimensions of the data we analyze. First, we compare workers in states that were bound by recent increases in the federal minimum wage to workers in states that were not. Second, we use 12 months of baseline data to divide low-skilled workers into a “target” group, whose baseline wage rates were directly affected, and a “within-state control” group with slightly higher baseline wage rates. Over three subsequent years, we find that binding minimum wage increases had significant, negative effects on the employment and income growth of targeted workers. Lost income reflects contributions from employment declines, increased probabilities of working without pay (i.e., an “internship” effect), and lost wage growth associated with reductions in experience accumulation. Methodologically, we show that our approach identifies targeted workers more precisely than the demographic and industrial proxies used regularly in the literature. Additionally, because we identify targeted workers on a population-wide basis, our approach is relatively well suited for extrapolating to estimates of the minimum wage’s effects on aggregate employment. Over the late 2000s, the average effective minimum wage rose by 30 percent across the United States. We estimate that these minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point.
As shown above, the study found that minimum wage hikes “significantly reduced the employment of low-skill workers” as well as their “average monthly incomes.” Furthermore, low-skilled workers (especially those without a college degree) experienced “significant declines in economic mobility” over time. As entry-level jobs decreased, so did the chance for low-skill workers to gain the work experience and skills to move up the economic ladder. As economist Arthur Brooks put it, there are no dead-end jobs: each one brings more experience, more skills, and consequently, more economic mobility. We should stop promoting policies that make entry into the job market that much harder.
I ran across a particularly instructive apparent Biblical contradiction while I was reading Mark the other day. Jesus’ disciples have just gleaned[ref]gleaning means “to gather grain or other material that is left after the main crop has been gathered”[/ref] on the Sabbath, which is unlawful according to the Pharisees. Jesus responds to the Pharisees:
“Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: 26 how he entered the house of God, when Abi′athar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?”
But we have a problem here. Abi’athar wasn’t the high priest during this episode of the Old Testament. His father Ahim’elech was. Abi’athar was present during this episode, but as a priest under his father. Jesus seems to have misremembered history, or possibly Mark (the recorder of this Gospel) or Peter (the traditional source of this Gospel) made a mistake.
A quick note before I launch into analyzing this passage. The first and most important goal of exegesis is understanding what the author meant, not resolving difficulties or attempting to harmonize the Gospels with each other or the Bible as a whole. An explanation that is logically coherent can still fail utterly because it doesn’t mesh with the speaker or author’s historical background and, most importantly, why the speaker or author would word a passage a certain way.
Anyways, the first layer to peel back is the actual Greek. In particular, translating the word ‘when’ here is tricky because ‘when’ in English conveys a more precise timing than the Greek word used (ἐπὶ). An equally valid translation renders the word “in the days of”, as attested to by other translations and ancient Greek sources.
Now speaking generally, Jesus has a reason for mentioning Abi’athar over his father Ahim’elech. According to the commentary from the Second Catholic Edition RSV New Testament:
Jesus probably mentioned Abiathar instead of Ahimelech to post a warning for the Pharisees. Abiathar is infamous in OT history as the last high priest of his line, who was banished from Jerusalem and the priesthood for opposing Solomon, the son of David and the heir of his kingdom (1 Kings 2:26-27). He thus represents the end of an older order that passes away with the coming of David’s royal successor. As Jesus compares himself and the disciples with David and his men, he likewise draws the Pharisees into the story by casting them as figures like Abiathar….Jesus’ allusion to this OT tradition was a subtle yet strategic way to caution the Pharisees against their antagonism to his ministry.
I read many other explanations online (here and here), but I find this explanation the most compelling because, in accordance with the criteria above, it actually provides a reason for why Jesus would speak this way. This manner of interpretation then fits in well with general scholarly understanding of the Gospels: If Jesus said something and the Evangelists mention it in their gospels, those words are mentioned for a reason. The Evangelists mention non-essential actions of Jesus (Like Jesus doodling in the sand), but his quotes are chosen more carefully.
This interpretation also has an added point to commend it: Jesus begins his story with a massive insult towards the Pharisees in saying “Have you never read…” The Pharisees, being learned Jewish men, would be incensed at the implication that they haven’t read the Jewish Scriptures. So he begins his story with a massive internet-worthy insult towards the Pharisees, and ends it with a not-so-veiled warning towards that same group. We thus have coherence of tone. We also have a case of Jesus being sassy, which for the record is more common than people seem to expect of Jesus meek and mild.
I hope this walkthrough was instructive. I don’t claim to have expertise in exegesis, but I figured an amateur with the backing of scholars isn’t too much presumption. Mostly, I wanted to show how even seemingly blatant Biblical errors can make sense without straining credulity given a little research. Overall, that’s the attitude I try to take towards all scriptures, even ones I don’t consider inspired (The Qur’an, The Book of Mormon, etc.). If they don’t make sense, I first need to check that I’m not the one who is missing something.
As a general rule, I am very sympathetic to liberal arguments about protection of the poor and vulnerable, especially from a Christian perspective. That is why, for example, I am pro-life. For me the really tricky question is never, “Should we care about the poor?” We should. And in some cases, as with Utah’s revolutionary approach to homelessness, the policy and our ideals fall into perfect, sweet alignment. Utah has started just giving homes to the homeless (literally) and has found that not only is it more human, but it’s also cheaper. For maximum enjoyment, you can watch The Daily Show cover it.
Unfortunately, however, things don’t always work out this way. Take the example of unemployment insurance. Nothing seems more reasonable than extending unemployment insurance during a recession, right? Except that conservatives argue it actually causes people to remain unemployed longer. This is bad for the country, and it’s also bad for the people who remain unemployed. So, if conservative are right on the empirical question, it seems like we’ve got a situation where good policy and ideals (or at least sentiment) do not align. So, are they? New research suggests they are:
We measure the effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment… We find that a 1% drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points. In levels, 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut. Almost 1 million of these jobs were filled by workers from out of the labor force who would not have participated in the labor market had benefit extensions been reauthorized.
So, unemployment benefits were cut in 2014, and as a result 1.8 million new jobs were created (or, I supposed, filled) and of those a full 1 million were people who would not have re-entered the labor force if their benefits had not lapsed.
This is where policy gets hard, and it’s questions like this that make me the most frustrated with polarization in politics. Balancing the desire to help in the short-run with the desire to have healthy systemic incentives is the kind of work that can best be accomplished in an atmosphere of mutual good will. Issues like this are issues where compromise works and solutions should strive to be non-partisan.
Kelsey Hazzard (left) is the founder and president of Secular Pro-Life. Rebecca Kiessling (right) is an advocate for unborn human beings conceived through rape.
A majority of states have no laws preventing rapists from obtaining custody or visitation of the children conceived through their violence. Absent such laws, a mother choosing life after rape faces the horrifying prospect of an 18-year co-parenting relationship with her rapist.
Understandably, the pro-life movement is particularly sensitive to this issue because “people in that impossible situation are under tremendous pressure to abort.” Notable pro-life spokeswoman Rebecca Kiessling is leading the charge to reform these laws. Kiessling, who was herself conceived as a result of rape, is a controversial figure who opposes rape-exceptions to abortion restrictions. Her position in that regard is not always popular, sometimes even within the pro-life community. But this effort should have universal support, because there is no case in which the government should be protecting the parental rights of rapists.
Contacting your legislators is easy. Click here for your Representativesand here for your Senators. Take five minutes out of your day to email them, then tell a friend. It’s the least we can do for the families who have courageously chosen life after rape.
Last week the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held a rare public press conference. The topic was gay rights, and Jonathan Rauch described the main idea this way:
[Mormon leaders] made a startling offer to gay and lesbian America: If you will support reasonable religious-liberty exemptions for us, we will support expanded civil-rights protections for you.
So, what should we make of this? For his part, Rauch (who is gay) advocates giving the Church the benefit of the doubt and viewing the offer as a genuine olive branch. However, he concedes that “it could be a trap.” Brooke P. Hunter is not nearly as conciliatory in her piece: How the Mormons Punked the Press. She described the press conference as “mostly about defending Mormons’ right to discriminate.” She said “the new Mormon position is like that candy with a razor blade inside” and added
Today’s press conference took place in a twilight zone where parents are in danger of being jailed for teaching their kids about Jesus, and where believers can’t “share their views openly in the public square.” Oh, please. Show me the Mormons who have been jailed for sharing their views. There are none. And if you can point to one instance of the government preventing good Mormons from practicing their religion in their homes, we’ll eat our hat.
Let me make two observations. First, although Hunter doesn’t seem aware of this fact, her position constitutes a drastic reduction in the scope of religious liberty. First, because she envisions no protection for religious liberty outside of the strictly private sphere. Second, because she is contemptuous of the idea of religious liberty as religious. For instance, she decries Mormons for wanting “special privileges and special rights for churches and for religious people.” Well yes, in order to be religious liberty it has to be liberty specifically for (i.e. specially for) religion and religious considerations.[ref]Atheist and agnostic principles can be included as well by broadening the scope to include freedom of conscience.[/ref] Whatever Hunter has in mind when she talks about religious liberty, it seems to have very little do to with our historic appreciation for the special role religion has to play in the public sphere. This attitude, especially as it seems to be both widespread and innocent of any awareness of its own novel and revolutionary character, goes a long way towards vindicating the fears of religious people.
Second, I think the most logical way to take the Church’s position is the straightforward one. I do not think the bargain is merely political or expedient. I think, and this is born out by other changes in Church policy and teaching I outlined here, that the gay rights debate has forced Mormons (and the religious community as a whole) to do a better job of separating between principled religious doctrines of sexual morality and social convention. It is possible, and for a Christian it is necessary, to commit oneself to loving gay people (and bisexual, and transgender, etc.) in a way that affirms the unique dignity of every human being as in the image of God and also the religious principles that Christians believe lead to human flourishing. Does this break down to the old “hate the sin, love the sinner” trope? In short: yes. And it’s a distinction the world may find curious but that is at the heart of the Christian faith.
In short, I think Mormonism has come to an awareness that fighting against discrimination of the LGBT community is more than politically expedient: it is the right thing to do. The LGBT community should be protected from discrimination in housing, employment, and so on. I do not believe, and so far neither does the Church, that this extends to same-sex marriage, however, which is seen not as equal access to a common institution but as the redefinition of an institution. Even if you think that last bit makes no sense, and I know that many people do, my general message is just that I think Mormons (and a lot of the religious community) have been humbled by the past couple of decades and have come to a deeper understanding of how to live as Christians. That, I believe, is also what led to last week’s press conference.
