Pornography on the Left and the Right

Ryan Sager at True/Slant looks at the research on pornography and social depravation:

While the question of free speech is philosophical, the question of whether porn does any social harm is an empirical one. And the data is pretty clear: Pornography either reduces sex crime by giving males a non-violent outlet for excess sexual impulses, or it has no effect.

I find this result pretty unsurprising, but of course I tend toward a libertarian perspective on social issues.

The debate over pornography has always made for strange bedfellows. Feminists usually oppose it, arguing that sexual objectification of women leads to violence against women. Social conservatives typically see it as a gateway to infidelity and a threat to strong families. For years, both groups have maintained that the research bolsters their argument, pointing to (among other things) the methodologically flawed Meese Report as evidence of the connection between porn and various social ills. But most of the recent research suggests quite the opposite.

While it’s impossible to produce a perfect study on the subject, it seems fairly clear at this point that pornography is not the evil that many on the left and right insisted it was.

The implications for feminism are quite profound. If pornography reduces violence against women, isn’t it something that should be promoted? Should visceral opposition to sexual objectification really trump empirical reality?

Social conservatives confront a similar dilemma. The crime rate has long been an important metric for those on the right. Many conservatives have argued that pornography leads to antisocial behavior, which ultimately leads to higher incidents of crime. But if the opposite is true – if pornography actually reduces crime – shouldn’t social conservatives rethink their position?

I realize that there are broader points of opposition among feminists and conservatives, but at the very least, I think that both groups need to seriously wrestle with their ideological preconceptions on this issue.

The Politics of Good and Evil

This might just be Ross's best column yet.

Read it, read it, read it.

Belated Thoughts on the Health Care Summit

FactCheck has a rundown of some of the more egregious errors and distortions here.

I think the president came off looking pretty bad in his dust up with John McCain. I was particularly taken aback by this response:

We can have a debate about process or we can have a debate about how we're going to help the American people at this point. And the latter debate is the one I think they care about a little bit more.

I don't know whether the "American people" concerned about product more than process at this point, but the president's snarky dismissal of McCain's point set me on edge.

One of the reasons that I voted for Senator Obama was because he seemed to actually care about the process. Transparency was one of the central planks in his platform. He continually railed against special-interests and backroom deal-making. He called for honesty and integrity in politics. And he eschewed the Machiavellian tactics of the Clinton campaign.

For him to now play the world-wise pragmatist is a bit disconcerting. Process is, in my view, just as essential as product.

And McCain is right -- there was no justification for provisions like the "Cornhusker Kickback" or any of the myriad of exemptions and special privileges that Democratic lawmakers carved out for their individual states.

But it's not just the sweetheat deals. I also have to agree with Ross Douthat here:

I look at liberal commentators and see a group that’s intent on being on-side against Republicans, and that’s willing to downplay significant weaknesses in major legislation (be it the stimulus, cap-and-trade, or now health care) in the quest to get things done.

I understand the frustration that most progressives feel. This has been a long, drawn-out debate, and many of the Republican attacks have been unjustified and unsportsmanlike. John Boehner's remarks toward the end of the Summit -- which seemed to begin magnanimously, but quickly descended into fear-mongering -- perfectly illustrate why so many on the left want to see health care reform forced through in reconciliation.

But I fear that, while Republicans appear to be balking at everything, Democrats remain single-mindedly focused on passing something -- regardless of whether it's good policy. Both parties deserve immense criticism here. The Republican antics are despicable, but the response from Democrats has been shameful . . . and politically troubling to those of us who actually care about how things get done.

It's just as dangerous to be overzealous as obstructionist.

Abstinence-Only Education Doesn't Work . . . Any Better Than Comprehensive Sex Education

Ross has another wonderful opinion piece in today's NYT on the debate over abstinence-only education:

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication. On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate. The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.

. . .

If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy, the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached. (And yes, this goes for the dollars that currently flow to Planned Parenthood as well as the money that supports abstinence programs.) Don’t try to encourage Berkeley values in Alabama, or vice versa.

America’s competing visions of sexuality — permissive and traditional, naturalist and sacralist — have been in conflict since the 1960s. They’ll probably be in conflict for generations yet to come.

As far as I know, the only independent longitudinal study comparing abstinence-only education to comprehensive sex education was carried out by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. The study found no statistically significant differences between students in abstinence-only programs and comprehensive sex education programs. (The final report can be read here.)

The sample groups were randomly assigned. In addition, the researchers used a data-analytic approach (looking at regression-adjusted means) to statistically control for various "individual demographic and background characteristics."

The study's conclusion:

Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age. Contrary to concerns raised by some critics of the Title V, Section 510 abstinence funding, however, program group youth were no more likely to have engaged in unprotected sex thancontrol group youth. [My emphasis]

I'm not opposed to comprehensive sex education -- if nothing else, I think kids should be exposed to information -- but I think Ross makes an excellent point. There doesn't seem to be any sensible reason to force more socially conservative communities to teach their children about contraception.

On this issue, at least, we should stay out of each other's backyards.

Update: A coworker directed me to this recently-published study, which was highlighted in the Washington Post today. The findings suggest that some carefully-crafted abstinence-only programs may, in fact, be significantly more effective than certain comprehensive sex education programs.

I think this only bolsters Ross's point. Different communities should be able to try different things.

Update II: Ross responds to this post by Hanna Rosin, and offers his views on the study that was featured in the Washington Post:

Does this prove that abstinence-based education always lowers teen sexual activity? No — it proves that one abstinence program designed in a particular way, implemented by a particular group of teachers, and aimed at a particular age group in a particularly area was considerably more effective than a contraception-based approach. And that’s all that any controlled experiment is likely to prove. The data on this question are necessarily deeply particular, and partisans on both sides will probably always be able to find studies that “prove” the superiority of their preferred approach. (Here’s a recent entry for the pro-comprehensive sex ed side, for instance.) Which suggests, to my mind, the virtues of both widespread experimentation and local control, rather than an inevitably polarizing quest for a one-size-fits-all solution.

. . .

The idea that only a federally-mandated health curriculum can save America’s teens from sexual ignorance strikes me as a vast overstatement of the federal government’s power. And the dream of constructing a program that’s somehow perfectly “neutral” on such a deeply fraught, inherently values-laden subject seems like a recipe for endless controversy, and little real progress.

Incremental Reform and Path Dependency

Ross Douthat has a brilliant piece in today's NYT:

Under Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, liberals created a federal leviathan that taxes, regulates and redistributes across every walk of American life. In the process, though, they bound the hands of future generations of reformers. Programs became entrenched. Bureaucracies proliferated. Subsidies became “entitlements,” tax breaks became part of the informal social contract. And our government was transformed, slowly but irreversibly, into a “large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clients but impervious to any broad, coherent program of reform.”

In other words, the problem with big governmental reforms is that earlier decisions create public interest groups that dramatically constrain later decisions. This ultimately leads to path dependence. Large public interest groups that benefit from earlier decisions become resistant to change. So, bad public policy decisions that affect large groups of people -- like the deduction for employer-based health insurance -- become nearly impossible to reverse.

This isn't a new theory, but Ross lays the argument out very well.

For anyone who's interested in this subject, I'd recommend reading Rauch's book, Government's End, as well as Jacob Hacker's The Divided Welfare State.

Avatar Misses the Mark

I would like to second every bit of this critique.

Ross is absolutely right: Avatar may be a visual masterpiece, but the hackneyed premise was pretty disappointing. It was not a particularly good movie, but it was certainly amazing to watch.

One of the few times I've walked away from a movie feeling both awe and indignation.

Are Corporations Conservative?

Ross Douthat responds to this (characteristically overdone) tirade from Keith Olbermann:



Ross makes the obvious point that large corporations are not "conservative" by nature. Rather, they have a rent-seeking agenda that is politically ambiguous:

Such rent-seeking doesn’t always translate into support for the administration’s policies. The business/government nexus is more potent on some issues than on others, and the “business community” is hardly a monolith. (Different industries have different interests, and rival companies often want different things from Washington.) Corporate America has been divided on cap and trade, for instance, and the health insurance industry has played a double game on health care reform (now trying to shape the bill to their liking, now trying to stir up public anxiety about it) that’s so complicated I’m not sure even they understand it.

. . .

But still: The hand-in-glove relationship between a Democratic administration and certain precincts of corporate America is one of the major stories of the Obama era. And if you want to know why the Department of Energy has become a venture capital firm, or what happened to Barack Obama’s pledge to allow American consumers to buy their drugs from overseas, or why the health care bill looks, well, the way it looks, [Tim] Carney’s book is a good place to start.

Carney is more stringently libertarian than I am — more anti-TARP, for instance, and more thoroughgoingly critical of the welfare state in general. But his kind of libertarian populism is a important counterweight to what’s been happening in Washington across the last twelve months. His analysis represents the cogent version of the inchoate angst that’s gripped the conservative base of late. And both conservatism and the country would be better off if it enjoyed [as] wide an audience as say, Glenn Beck’s nightly forays into performance art.

He's Back, Baby

Ross Douthat has a new blog -- "Evaluations" -- which I'll be adding to my blog roll.

I'm glad that Ross has finally started blogging again. We need more intelligent conservative voices in the blogosphere. (I'm sure that Conor Friedersdorf is ecstatic, as well.)

Here is a taste:

I’ve argued before that while the eventual health care legislation is likely to be a boondoggle, it at least holds out the hope of partially remedying the present system’s worst injustice: Namely, the way the current mix of semi-free markets, tax breaks and government subsidies interact to price millions of Americans — some of them lower-middle class, some of them sick, some of them employees of small businesses, some of them self-employed — out of the insurance market entirely. Obamacare, in whatever form it eventually takes, will pile further regulations, subsidies and perverse incentives atop the existing mess, and probably make our already-dysfunctional system more byzantine and more expensive. But it does promise to make it more equitable along the way.

For some people, at least. The trouble is that for millions of uninsured Americans, the reforms will make the system seem more unjust, not less. So, for instance, while the coverage of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’s assessment of the House health care bill has mainly focused, understandably, on the memo’s predictions about the impact of the projected cuts to Medicare, to my mind the more damning figure is the one that Keith Hennessey flags here — the projection that in 2019, the bill will leave 18 million Americans uninsured and paying a penalty for the privilege.

Gay Marriage Bigotry

Rod Dreher over at Beliefnet writes:

Unless I'm missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state.

. . .

[U]nless you're prepared to call more than half the country bigots -- and I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, gay marriage supporters are, and let that self-serving explanation suffice -- maybe, just maybe, you ought to ask yourself if there's something else going on here. And that maybe, just maybe, serious attention should be paid, instead of paying attention long enough to insult people who disagree with you as evil people who deserved to be excoriated and harassed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds:

I probably wouldn't use the word "bigot." I don't think, for instance, that half this country thinks hate crimes against gays is a good thing. But I have no problem believing that half the country--maybe more--is deeply prejudiced against gays. This generally fits into my view of all -isms. I think prejudice is part of who we are as humans, and thus as Americans. Following from that, I think prejudice is one of the many forces that influence how we vote. Hence the notion that half this country is deeply prejudiced against gays really doesn't shock me.

I'm sympathetic to Coates's argument. In my experience, people who strongly oppose gay marriage do tend to be animated by some form of prejudice. However, I think this debate is extremely counterproductive. Charging your opponents with bigotry -- or even the lesser offense of "prejudice" -- is a surefire way to lose the argument.

Even some social conservatives would admit that the secular case against gay marriage isn't very strong. Those of us who support marriage equality should be engaging with that argument and trying to expose its tortured logic, not hurling ad hominem attacks at our opponents.

We can accept prejudice as a given, but it doesn't serve our purpose to use it as a trump card when we're in the minority. Instead, why don't we just call on our opponents to defend their position?

It shouldn't be hard to point out the illegitimacy of that position.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)