One Little Word

The Public Square

It is an unprecedented “but,” although I expect it will turn out to be ephemeral. My unscientific survey of reactions to the November election led me to read, for the first time in months, an editorial in the New York Times. The gist of the editorial, published the day after, is that President Bush does not have a mandate. He does, however, have a chance of being a great President if in his second term he follows the instructions of the New York Times. No surprises there. Then this: “This page will never give up our commitment to women’s right to reproductive choice, as well as full civil rights for people of all sexual orientations. But a leader who was prepared to make political sacrifices in order to stake a claim to that middle ground could be laying the foundation for a new national consensus that might finally bring the nation’s social wars to an end” (emphasis added). The “middle ground” in question is defined as “providing gay couples with the right to have some kind of civil unions, and guaranteeing women the right to legal abortion in most, if not all, cases.”

This is an extraordinary change for the Times, and I am not at all sure it will be a lasting change. Until now, the paper’s devotion to the unlimited abortion license and same-sex marriage has been absolute. At least in the immediate aftermath of the election, the editors recognize that that position is political suicide. On abortion, the fact is, and has been for years, that 80 percent of Americans believe that abortion should not be legal for the reasons that 95 percent of abortions are procured. The “leader” who is likely being given editorial permission to make “political sacrifices” in order to claim the “middle ground” is Senator Hillary Clinton. She would not have to do much. She could say that, while she personally supports it, the nation is not ready for same-sex marriage. She could oppose partial birth abortion and support very modest measures such as parental notification in the case of minors seeking abortion. That would alienate a small number of pro-abortion extremists, but they may be deemed politically expendable. And even they might recognize the necessity of “political sacrifices” to save most of what the Supreme Court handed them in Roe v. Wade. The great pay-off is that Democrats could present themselves as “flexible,” and their candidate could run in 2008 as “moderately pro-choice”—or even, with enough definitional sleight of hand, as “pro-life.”

The Times editorial of November 4 may be just a trial balloon. Or that editorial “but” may signal the next major reconfiguration of cultural and political alignments in our public life. What the editors call the “social wars” could be brought to an end, or at least effectively marginalized. It is significant that they are suing for terms. Until November 3, they would settle for nothing less than unqualified victory. What would it take to end or effectively marginalize the culture wars? On the most hotly contested issue of abortion, it might mean a limitation to the first month or so, with exceptions for rape, incest, and direct threat to the life of the mother. Or a reversal of Roe v. Wade with the entire question returned to the states. Such developments would not be morally sufficient but might be enough to remove abortion from the center stage of American politics as the central issue of the culture wars. Again, that editorial “but” may soon be withdrawn, but on this issue the Times is the bellwether and the unprecedented signal of a readiness to temper its absolutism could be very important indeed.

The End of Obscenity

Forget about obscenity, writes Jeffrey Rosen in the New Atlantis, the new journal published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Already back in 1973, the Supreme Court was caving when it adopted (in Miller v. California) an impossible-to-maintain distinction between hard-core and soft-core pornography, with the latter limited to adults. The idea of judging by “community standards” was short-lived. Ten years after Miller, a federal court ruled that “detailed portrayals of genitalia, sexual intercourse, fellatio, and masturbation” are not obscene “in light of community standards prevailing in New York City.” Not if the measure is what was then the X-rated Times Square area, which has in recent years been turned into a “family friendly environment.” But those court rulings were in the days before the Internet. Rosen, who is the New Republic‘s regular on legal matters, cites data from a number of studies. For instance, one fourth of search engine requests every day are for pornographic material. Far below, one notes, the number of requests that fall into the broad category of “religion.” So Chesterton’s nation with the soul of a church has not closed down its whorehouses. What else is new?

Men make up 65 percent of visitors to porn sites, reports Rosen. No surprise there. Then there is this: “Moreover, 15 percent of teens (ages twelve to seventeen) and 25 percent of older boys (ages fifteen to seventeen) have lied about their age to access an Internet site, according to the Pew research center.” Only 15 and 25 percent? That strikes me as encouragingly low for boys in those hyper-hormonal years, considering that lying involves nothing more than pushing a button and nobody will know (except, apparently, the people at Pew). Rosen cites international data: 40 percent of adults in Spain, 25 percent in Britain, and 19 percent in Sweden, have visited what he calls “an adult site,” meaning, of course, an adolescent site, all pornography being adolescent. He concludes from this that “there is no country in which consumption of hard-core pornography could plausibly be said to be ‘patently offensive’ to the average person by applying contemporary community standards.”

I suppose it depends on the meaning of “average.” If 75 percent of adults in Britain have not visited porn sites, despite their ready availability in the privacy of one’s home, might not that have a bearing on what is average? I expect that more than 20 percent of Americans have gotten drunk at some time, which hardly means that they, never mind all those who haven’t, think that drunkenness is not patently offensive. That a minority of a population gets drunk from time to time or furtively—and possibly with feelings of shame and guilt—watch pornography is hardly the measure of “community standards.” Unless, of course, the majority of the Supreme Court is doing the measuring. At this point, Rosen reaches more solid ground. It is not, he notes, the standards of the American people that matter but the opinion of the Court. There probably is nothing to be done about obscenity or pornography if the last word is the Court’s ruling on sexual autonomy in Lawrence v. Texas, which established a constitutional right to sodomy.

The Sweet Mystery Again

In that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, repeated the “sweet mystery of life” rule that was first announced in Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) in upholding the unlimited abortion license: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Ah yes, those are no doubt the solemn questions pondered by a middle-aged sex addict visiting a site titled “Hot Dudes Do Dixie Chicks.” Rosen correctly observes: “Now that moral disapprobation is not considered a constitutionally rational reason for restricting behavior, no definition of obscenity that relied on communal disapproval could easily pass constitutional scrutiny, unless one could demonstrate a clear harm to others.” He thinks that John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” may still forbid child pornography. I expect he underestimates the influence of experts willing and eager to testify that it’s good for the kiddies. He entertains the possibility that the next thing to be decriminalized is incest between consenting adults, at least if they are “using birth control.” The legal requirement that brothers and sisters, or fathers and daughters, use contraception may strike one as a flagrant violation of their constitutional right to define for themselves the “the mystery of human life.”

The editors of the New Atlantic paired Rosen’s article with an essay by David Hart, “The Pornography Culture.” Hart is perhaps a bit too vain about not being a lawyer, but it does help him to view the Supreme Court’s rulings on pornography with something suspiciously like common sense. “It is difficult for me to grasp,” writes Hart, “why the Court works upon the premise that whatever means are employed to protect children from Internet pornography should involve the barest minimum imposition possible upon the free expression of pornographers.” He fails to appreciate that the Court has long since decided that pornographers have a constitutional right to do what they do, but there are still inhibitions about their doing it with children or aiming their product at children. We are not yet prepared for the unbounded flight of the liberty affirmed in the “sweet mystery of life” doctrine.

As for the harm principle, Hart again indulges in dangerous flirtation with common sense. “The damage that pornography can do—to minds or cultures—is not by any means negligible. Especially in our modern age of passive entertainment, saturated as we are by an unending storm of noises and images and barren prattle, portrayals of violence or of sexual degradation possess a remarkable power to permeate, shape, and deprave the imagination; and the imagination is, after all, the wellspring of desire, of personality, of character. Anyone who would claim that constant or even regular exposure to pornography does not affect a person at the profoundest level of consciousness is either singularly stupid or singularly degenerate.” Here Hart betrays his insouciant indifference to jurisprudential precedent, quite ignoring the fact that the Court has long since made the discovery that one man’s stupidity is another’s genius, and that one man’s degeneracy is another’s poetry. Hart goes so far as to say that our courts, reflecting our culture, are confusing liberty with license.

Recognizing, as Hart does, that “we are already a casually and chronically pornographic society,” one is left wondering what might be done about it. With the Child Online Protection Act, Congress tried to outlaw certain kinds of pornography, while the Supreme Court ruled that the act was not sufficiently solicitous of the rights of legitimate pornographers. That these questions are left to Congress and the Court reveals, says Hart, our supine dependence on the state to impose rules that we are not prepared to impose on ourselves. “We call upon the state to shield us from vice or to set our vices free because we do not have a culture devoted to the good, or dedicated to virtue, or capable of creating a civil society that is hospitable to any freedom more substantial than that of subjective will. This is simply what it is to be modern.” Hart ends with the always pertinent reminder that there is a permanent tension between the biblical tradition and that of liberal democracy. “We belong to a kingdom not of this world; while we are bound to love our country, we are forbidden to regard it as our true home.” To which let all the people of God say, “Amen.”

However: I think it both unnecessary and unwise to resign ourselves to the inevitability of liberal demo-cracy ending up in the cesspool of libertinism. The founders spoke of “ordered liberty,” liberty ordered to moral truth. Perhaps that understanding of liberty cannot be revived, but it certainly will not be revived if we give up on it. In dissenting from Lawrence, Justice Antonin Scalia said it marked the death of laws reflecting a democratically determined sense of morality, of right and wrong. There is a measure of truth in that, but, in the larger picture, all laws reflect a moral judgment about what is right or wrong, fair or unfair, supportive of or opposed to the common good. So long as we are a relatively free society, politics, including law, will be a process of, as Aristotle would instruct us, deliberating how we ought to order our life together. The “ought” in that formulation signals the inescapably moral character of the enterprise. Justice Kennedy’s notion of “the heart of liberty” is a sure formula for the undoing of law itself. It may not stand. Court majorities come and go. The courage of legislators to challenge judicial tyranny waxes and wanes.

A Transitional Homeland

Admittedly, history does not provide many examples of the revival of liberal democracies that turned against their founding principles in culture and morality. In fact, no examples come readily to mind. The very consideration is haunted by the memory of the Weimar Republic. Whatever happens, in times doleful and times hopeful, we must never forget our true home or the anticipation of that home in the life of the Church. The second century Letter to Diognetus says that, for Christians, “every foreign country is a homeland, every homeland a foreign country.” In this foreign country that is our temporary homeland, it may now be decided that the law is not permitted to take cognizance of virtue and vice. What is decided can, sometimes, be undecided. If that turns out not to be possible in this liberal democracy of unprecedented influence, the world will be a much darker place. The Church and the promise it bears and anticipates will increasingly be posited, not by our choice, against this constitutional order. That may well be the future; and for that future we must be braced, and work to equip the next generation for heroic fidelity. Both Rosen and Hart recognize that the dispute over obscenity is but part of a larger dispute over the connections between law, culture, and morality. Both seem to be resigned to the sundering of those connections.

Hart recognizes that rulings on obscenity are “nowhere near as apocalyptic” in their implications as Roe v. Wade‘s imposition of the unlimited abortion license. But, whatever the issue at hand, he says that the biblical and liberal democratic traditions are in inevitable conflict. “What either understands as freedom the other must view as a form of bondage,” he writes. The current majority on the Court agrees. American history and, I believe, most of the American people favor the alternative that is ordered liberty. Rosen and Hart may be right that, in an era of globalized googling, there is not much of anything that can be done about obscenity. Except to avoid it and encourage others to do likewise. Anyone suggesting censorship is promptly condemned as a prudish, pinch-lipped advocate of Comstockery. But without censorship, whether in personal or public life, decency is deprived of definition.

To be sure, there is legitimate debate over where to draw the line. The Court’s effort to terminate that debate by declaring that no line can be drawn lest it inconvenience those whose definition of the mystery of life excludes decency does not square with a Constitution ordained and established to, as stated in its Preamble, “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” No doubt there was pornography in 1787, but I doubt if anyone thought it was among the blessings of liberty that the Constitution was intended to secure. The sociologists on the Court declare original intent outdated by what they discern to be our evolving morality, but some consolation may be drawn from the fact that they are appointed only for life. It is not inconceivable that, at some point in the future, the people, acting through their elected representatives, may be permitted a say in the kind of society they want for themselves and their posterity. In fact, it is quite possible that we saw the beginning of such a change on November 2, 2004.

While We’re At It

• Some years ago we published one article titled “It’s the Culture, Stupid” (FT April 1994), but in fact many articles in these pages might well bear that title. Some pundits have denied the aptness of the “culture war” metaphor in describing the American circumstance, while others have contended that it may once have been appropriate but is no longer. Then came the 2004 elections. The percentages may change a little upon further analysis, but the immediate aftermath powerfully confirms the culture war thesis. Asked what issue mattered most to them, 22 percent of voters named “moral values.” Of those voters, 80 percent went for Bush and 18 for Kerry. Next on the list (20 percent) was “economy/jobs,” with 18 percent of those voters going for Bush and 80 percent going for Kerry. A perfect reverse symmetry. Third on the list (19 percent) was “terrorism,” on which Bush beat Kerry 86 to 14 percent. So much for the vaunted “economic realists” who claim that the one thing certain is that “the people will always vote their pocketbook.” In truth, however, I expect that the great majority of those who named moral values as their top issue also believed that a second Bush term would be good for the economy. People who say the economy is the top issue predictably think the economy is in bad shape, just as those who give priority to moral values think public morality is in trouble. A Democratic ploy is to pit moral values against the economy, but that is just that, a ploy. The likelihood is that most people voting for Bush thought he would be better both for moral values and for the economy. Here’s an analysis noting that Bush got 56 percent of the white Catholic vote and Kerry only 43 percent “despite Mr. Kerry’s being Catholic.” One might make the case that that “despite” might as well be “because.” Catholics were not amused by a man who seemed so confused about what it means to be Catholic. The perception that he was confused was, I expect, sharpened by the bolder bishops who issued highly publicized reproaches of pro-abortion politicians. The claim that politicians who are thus reproached would get a sympathy vote from people who resent “bishops meddling in politics” seems to be belied by the outcome. Asked what one quality mattered most in choosing a President, people who named religious faith went 91 percent for Bush. Of all voters who attend church more than once a week, 61 percent went for Bush and 39 percent for Kerry. Of those who never attend church, the numbers were exactly reversed. Bush did much better (44 percent) with Hispanic voters than in 2000, but there was slight movement among blacks (up two points to 11 percent). The issue of same-sex marriage had gained traction with many black ministers, but that apparently had little effect on black voters, who remain a securely taken-for-granted segment of the Democratic “base.” It is a great pity. A people with the highest rate of the poor locked in a culture of crime and dependency, and with 20 million of their children missing because of abortion, continues to follow leaders who have made a deal with powers that clearly do not have their interests at heart. What Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 called the American dilemma has sixty years later turned into the black American embarrassment. These, then, are some of the pertinent data in the immediate aftermath of the election that underscore the ascendancy of the religious-moral-cultural matrix of American politics. Whether one approves or disapproves of the electoral consequences, it is not a good thing that the two parties are so sharply divided in this way. Republicans are understandably and with great success exploiting a division created by Democrats, most importantly by their don’t-give-an-inch support for the unlimited abortion license decreed by Roe v. Wade. In the reconfiguration of our public life, including electoral politics, January 22, 1973, is the most important date of the last half-century on the American calendar.

• Not everyone on the left is joining the weeping and gnashing of teeth over the electoral triumph of the threatening theocrats. You’ve undoubtedly seen the articles claiming that the “moral values” vote really doesn’t mean very much. The argument is that the category “moral values” is, unlike “economy/jobs” or “war in Iraq,” so vague that it can mean anything or nothing. This is an argument from desperation. If nobody knew what the phrase meant, it would seem that Bush and Kerry voters would have been more or less evenly split on “moral values.” Unless, of course, one assumes that Kerry voters are in principle opposed to moral values. As it was, however, all sensate voters understood that “moral values” referred to the candidates’ clear differences on abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, a marriage amendment, and, more generally, the role of morality and religion in public life. There is no other plausible explanation of the 80-18 split other than that those who named it as their number one issue thought they knew very well what was meant by “moral values.” Back to weeping and gnashing of teeth.

• The social scientist James Q. Wilson undoubtedly means well, but he goes a claim too far. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he is attempting to counter the hysterics who say November 2 marked the dawning of theocratic totalitarianism. He points out that the left can be, and frequently is, more intolerant than the right, and that what a voter says is the “most important” issue can obscure “the variety of factors that characterize voting preferences.” For instance, “What is the vote likely to be in Ohio among gun-owning union members who attend church but who have just lost their jobs and think the U.S. should spend less time fighting wars?” Fair enough. But then this astonishing assertion, “In fact, abortion was not an issue in the election and Messrs. Bush and Kerry both opposed gay marriage.” In fact, that is not true. On gay marriage, Bush regularly stated his position in stump speeches and advocated a federal marriage amendment. Kerry mentioned it only when asked and opposed an amendment. On abortion, Bush has repeatedly declared himself pro-life, has steadfastly asserted the goal of “every unborn child protected in law and welcomed in life,” and has supported and signed pro-life measures in his first term. Kerry took and never deviated from the NARAL pledge of allegiance to the unlimited abortion license. These were not issues in the election? Does Mr. Wilson think Karl Rove was deluding himself in counting on Bush’s “base” among pro-life and pro-family voters? Wilson writes, “It is true that President Bush improved his voting support among people who attend church frequently and who describe themselves as Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, but Sen. Kerry won nearly half of all Catholic votes and over three-fourths of all Jewish ones.” Wilson presumably knows but does not mention the huge switch of Catholic voters to Bush, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jews never go to church, seldom go to synagogue, and have a deeply entrenched habit of voting Democratic. I recognize and sympathize with what Mr. Wilson was trying to do in his Wall Street Journal article. It is true that the election was not about establishing a theocracy. It is equally true that it was not about nothing.

• Two days after the election Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne catalogued the usual leftist complaints against President Bush in a series of sentences beginning with “We are aghast. . . . We are alarmed. . . . We are amazed. . . . We are disgusted. . . .” He fails to say “We are shocked, shocked . . . ,” but I gather he is. He is not about to give up, however. With the true grit of indomitable resolve in the face of catastrophe, he declares that “the independent media must not be intimidated by trumped-up charges of liberal bias.” One hopes that nobody has crossed the line by accusing Mr. Dionne of liberal bias.

• This is poignant. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times on the day after the election: “What troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don’t just favor different policies than I do—they favor a whole different kind of America. We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.” Admittedly, Mr. Friedman’s portfolio is foreign affairs, but one wonders if he should not have spent a little more time at home over the last thirty years. And one cannot help but wonder whether “tipped” is quite the right word for the outcome of the election.

• There is a thin line between Schadenfreude, which I take to be measured satisfaction in the discomfiture of opponents, and the sin of morose delectation. I tried not to cross the line in surveying some of the more apocalyptic reactions to the November elections. A contender for first place is Garry Wills’ op-ed in the New York Times the day after, titled, “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.” He compares America with nations such as Britain, France, and Germany, writing, “The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. . . . In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies. Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred of modernity? . . . We find it in the Muslim world, in al-Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein’s Sunni loyalists.” Oh dear, we are in deep trouble. Mr. Wills cites, somewhat improbably, the Dalai Lama as an authority who agrees with him on the importance of the Enlightenment to guard against the evils of religion in public. But his clinching argument that the Enlightenment went out on November 2 is the fact that more Americans believe in the virgin birth than in Darwinism. “Can a people that believes more fervently in the virgin birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?” His answer is emphatically in the negative, but it is an interesting test question. Mr. Wills insists he is a Catholic (see his recent little book Why I Am a Catholic) who believes in the defining doctrines of the faith, so he presumably believes, perhaps even fervently, in the virgin birth. The overwhelming majority of Americans are Christians belonging to bodies that formally subscribe to the consensual tradition of Christian orthodoxy in which the virgin birth is an article of faith. It is clearly supported by Scripture and has been authoritatively taught for two thousand years. Darwin’s theory, on the other hand, has been around for somewhat less than 150 years. Leaving aside whether any explanatory theory proposed by scientists should be believed “fervently,” Darwinism is propounded by a host of advocates who do not agree on what the theory is, although the more aggressive of them agree that it is not compatible with the biblical account of reality. Moreover, most people do not spend a great deal of time pondering theories about the origin of species. It is not a matter of life or death touching on their eternal destiny, whereas the virgin birth is inseparably related to the incarnation, the person and work of Jesus the Christ, and the hope of salvation. Why on earth does Mr. Wills think that anybody, apart from a few ideological fanatics, should believe in a theory of evolution as fervently as they believe in the virgin birth? It is to be feared that the election was simply too much for the delicately nuanced mind of Garry Wills.

• Late in the campaign John Kerry convened “an informal group of fellow Catholics” to “shape his message” in order to “solidify his support among Catholics and undecided voters.” The result was a speech in which he defended his pro-abortion position saying, “I love my church, I respect the bishops, but I respectfully disagree.” According to Religion News Service, the informal group included Victoria Reggie, the wife of Senator Ted Kennedy, and Father Leo O’Donovan, S.J., former president of Georgetown University, a school “in the Jesuit tradition.”

• One of the problems with a literalistic “Bible only” approach to Christian thought is that it has no place for the role of reason or a tradition of authoritative interpretation. Here is an article by a Christian ethicist attacking the idea that abortion should be a decisive, or even a really major factor, in how a Christian votes. There are so many other issues, such as war, capital punishment, poverty, world development, and on and on. Interestingly, he invokes the Catholic bishops on “a consistent ethic of life.” But of course there is no reference to the document of the same bishops, Living the Gospel of Life, or to their statement of June 2004, on the singularity of abortion in making political decisions. One probably should not expect from a Protestant writer any allusion to magisterial teaching, such as John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae. The author does acknowledge that the first century “Didache” condemns abortion, but qualifies that by noting that the condemnation “does not stand alone.” The clincher in this way of thinking, however, is succinctly stated: “Nor does Scripture give us any precise definition of what constitutes innocent life.” There you have the widely and rightly criticized fundamentalist approach: if it ain’t in the Bible—and explicitly and precisely so—it ain’t necessarily so. The author of the essay is Father John Coleman, S.J., professor of moral theology at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.

• Duke University’s Stanley Hauerwas has insisted over the years that Christian thinkers “must not do ethics for Caesar.” In this view, doing ethics for Caesar (meaning the government) is an exercise of “statecraft” that constitutes formal cooperation with this oppressive liberal regime that is set against the lordship of Christ. Some might be surprised, therefore, to find Professor Hauerwas as an endorser of an advertisement in the New York Times sponsored by “Church Folks for a Better America,” which is a project of “Peace Action Education Fund,” which is a project of “Coalition for Peace Action.” The ad condemns the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq, declaring that “the time has come to bring this unjust and ill-considered war to an end.” It goes on to make a number of positive recommendations, such as “a truly international peacekeeping force to be established by the United Nations.” It does read very much like doing ethics for Caesar, and not very thoughtful ethics at that. The ad says, “We are Christians, from different communions. And citizens who span the political spectrum.” Span: as in far left to liberal left. The ad appeared nine days before the presidential election. The radical call to costly discipleship prescribed by Hauerwas’ mentor John Yoder and his The Politics of Jesus requires a bold and uncompromising commitment to defy what St. Paul calls the principalities and powers of the present time. With unflinching resolution, Hauerwas and friends courageously risk the wrath of the liberal academy and issue a clarion call for Christians to take up the cross and, despising the cost, prove their radical fidelity to the lordship of Jesus: Vote for John Kerry. Thus do the soaring flights of theological rhetoric make a crash landing in the thoroughly conventional moral posturings of partisan politics.

• In both Catholic and evange