Friday Links from the Week

26 May 2023

LGBT ok but Q?

Andrew Sullivan (The Queers Versus The Homosexuals) highlights one of the great, anthropological truths that events tend to outpace intention. Over time, a movement can not only take on a life of its own but move in directions unanticipated and even unwelcome by its founders.

It was the most speedily successful civil rights story in memory. Its case for equality was simple and clear: including us in existing institutions needn’t change anything in heterosexual life. “Live and let live” in equality and dignity was the idea. And the most powerful force behind this success was the emergence of so many ordinary gays and lesbians — of all races, religions, backgrounds, classes, and politics — who told their own story. America discovered what I had discovered the first time I went into a gay bar: these people were not the stereotypes I was told about. They were not some strange, alien tribe. They were just like every other human, part of our families and communities; and we cared about each other.

But

No one held a news conference and announced that from 2015 on, after Obergefell, the gay rights movement had changed its entire rationale. But they sure gave hints. The Human Rights Campaign, once a relatively moderate group, replaced “gay” and “lesbian” with the acronym “LGBTQ+” and expanded the word “queer” to describe anyone gay, lesbian, transgender, or even straight who defied heteronormativity. They changed the flag from a simple rainbow, to one that included some races (only black and brown — no Asians or whites) and transgender ideology. Their building in DC is festooned with a massive banner declaring their mission: “Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter.” Their new head is a woman who calls herself “queer,” not lesbian.

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What Happens When Technology Changes Us?

The Parents Saying No to Smartphones

And not only social movements. Technological innovations can also take on a life of their own. Olivia Reingold writes:

By age 12, seven out of ten American kids own a smartphone. They also spend about eight hours online a day, inhaling TikTok trends, toggling between texts, and turning their daily lives into Snapchat and Instagram content. Most will have seen pornography by age 12, with three in four teenage boys saying they watch adult content at least once a week.

The mental health consequences are now coming to light:

…a growing body of research shows that smartphones are at least partly to blame for skyrocketing rates of teenage anxiety and depression. As author Jonathan Haidt, reporting on a recent worldwide study on smartphone use among nearly 28,000 youths, put it: “The younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health the young adult reports today.” 

To this, we can add negative moral consequences as:

…kids had become dependent on their phones, and their school work suffered as a result. This year, an increasing number of school districts—in Ohio, Maryland, Colorado, and other states—have banned the devices in class. And in July, the state of Florida will enforce a new phone fatwa, barring their use during instructional time at all public schools.

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And When Our World Gets Smaller, Then What?

TL(PM) DIGEST: Seems like every path leads to nowhere

New polling from AP/NORC finds Americans deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country and the nation’s economy. Only 21 percent of U.S. adults feel that the country his headed in the right direction while roughly one-quarter feel that the economy is in good shape.

Americans across party lines are clearly not happy with the state of the nation—and by extension, the nation’s political leaders who are responsible for running things. 

Add to this the growing danger of easing social strictures on recreational drug use:

It’s perfectly reasonable and democratic to legalize recreational use of marijuana if that’s what a state’s citizens want—but it’s totally unreasonable and unsafe to have no public boundaries whatsoever for pot. People can’t just walk around wasted and drinking alcohol in public in most places—or worse, drive under the influence—and states like New York that have legalized pot will need to reconsider their approach given irresponsible and antisocial behavior among a number of marijuana users.

The problem is not only here in the US or Europe:

Beijing reported a youth unemployment rate of 20.4 percent last week, meaning that over a fifth of Chinese citizens aged 16 to 24 did not have jobs in the most recent statistical reporting period

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What Moving Forward Requires

J.S. Mill vs the Post-Liberals

Though he’s getting pretty worked over by some progressives and conservatives, John Stuart Mills has something to say about the creeping nihilism of our age:

“No one’s idea of excellence in conduct is that people should do absolutely nothing but copy one another. No one would assert that people ought not to put into their mode of life, and into the conduct of their concerns, any impress whatever of their own judgment, or of their own individual character. On the other hand, it would be absurd to pretend that people ought to live as if nothing whatever had been known in the world before they came into it; as if experience had as yet done nothing towards showing that one mode of existence or of conduct, is preferable to another. Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth as to know and benefit from the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way. It is for him to find out what part of recorded experience is properly applicable to his own circumstances and character. The traditions and customs of other people are, to a certain extent, evidence of what their experience has taught them; presumptive evidence, and as such, have a claim to this deference…”

Commenting on this Richard Reeves writes

Mill believes that customs and traditions not only can change over time, but that they should. The alternative, which is Deneen’s only defensible position, is that somebody somewhere should decide, at some point in time, that our traditions and customs be cast in stone. 

But Still, We Face Unintended Consequences

Things Are About to Get a Lot Worse for Red State Residents

Though I am pro-life, I think it is important to consider the unintended consequence of even morally good laws. Though it makes me uncomfortable to do so, it’s worth at least thinking about Jill Filipovic’s point

…nearly 8 in 10 medical students saying that abortion restrictions will likely shape where they apply for residency programs, and nearly three-quarters of them saying that those same restrictions will shape where they settle and raise a family — and, ostensibly, where they work as doctors.

As a practical matter

…abortion bans have meant that far fewer doctors are considering becoming OB/GYNs, and the drop is double in abortion-hostile states — those states have seen more than a 10% decrease in OB/GYN residency applications since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and set all of these state abortion bans into motion.

And while I think it is a good thing to ban abortion as a matter of law, to often lawmakers seem to be more concerned with the virtue of their cause than the prudence of their legislation. And so while Filipovic wishes

…doctors would simply be brave and break these laws. I am sure some are. But it’s a mighty big ask to say: Please provide abortions and risk bankruptcy, going to jail, losing your license, losing your home, losing your future, losing your freedom, losing your ability to raise kids, losing everything you have built and worked for — to do a single procedure, and then losing your ability to help anyone else going forward.

OST needs to take seriously that negative, unintended consequences are not simply the result of bad laws or unrestricted access to technology. Even good laws cause harm.

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This Week’s Lesson: Good Intentions Aren’t Enough but Bad Theology Is Always Bad

Why This Stay At Home Mom Isn't Having The TradWife Nonsense

OST doesn’t see men and women as fungible. But neither do we hold to narrow sexual roles along the lines of what we see in the TradWife movement. We can say with Kaeley Triller Harms

I’ve long been a believer that a woman’s place is wherever God calls her. I also believe that sometimes God calls us womenfolk into places where some of our male counterparts resent our presence, and that’s just something they’ll have to get over.

While I’m not sure how widespread it is among Orthodox Christians, certainly their are Orthodox communities that are sympathetic with what Harms describes here:

My issue is a rapidly increasing segment of the religious right that is prescribing regressive sex role stereotypes as a broadstrokes, one-size-fits all solution to the gender insanity on the left. Where the left wants to completely eliminate any distinctions between the sexes, these conservatives want to carve out pre-approved roles for men and women based solely upon our physiological differences, and they want to codify them into the collective moral consciousness as God’s design for humanity. They want men in the public sector bringing home the bacon, and they want women in the kitchen wearing pinup dresses and stilettos, feeding a toddler with one hand and basting a turkey with the other.

There is a tendency among Orthodox Christians to fantasize about “Holy Russia,” “Byzantium” or the “Golden Age of the Fathers.” From here it is a short hop, skip, and jump to the current tendency among some American Christians “to fantasize about the 1950s and 60s as though they were some golden era” and forget that “Holy Russia,” “Byzantium,” and the “Golden Age of the Fathers,” like America “the 50s and 60s had a ton of their own moral decay; we shouldn’t romanticize them.”

And when we do?

The problem with tradwives isn’t their choice to live like Stepfords. That’s their privilege. If they want to live their entire lives as a giant cosplay session, they can do that. The problem with the tradwife movement is their legalistic push to cram everyone else into tidy little gender boxes that don’t fit them by pretending it’s God’s design.

Cosplay Orthodoxy—whether rooted in monasticism, traditionalism or ethnophyletism—eventually undermines not the Gospel but of correcting those aspects of the culture that deviate from the Gospel or Natural Law:

I’ve been on the frontlines of the great transgender debate for over 7 years now, and I promise you, conservatives, this chauvinistic hogwash is our personal contribution to the gender mess. Our fixation on rigid gender norms and our refusal to contend with the rampant sexism in our own camp have both contributed to the gender crisis we now face. No one wants to hear this, of course—it’s easier to chalk it all up as an exclusively leftist problem, but it’s not. Where the right says “Only girls can like pink and glitter,” the left echoes the sentiment by declaring, “If you like pink and glitter, you must be a girl.” They’re not all that far removed from each other ideologically.

What should we do? Harms’ example is worth considering:

I refuse to remain silent in a milieu that insists our sex points more heavily to God’s intended purpose for us in this world than the gifts He gave us do.

Rigid adherence to superficial gender norms [or Holy Tradition] is part of the problem, not the solution. Let people be who they were created to be, wear what is comfortable, and enjoy what they’re wired to enjoy without creating legalistic formulas that inevitably place a whole lot of people at odds with the reasons for which they were actually created.