Gay-Baiting Keynes: An Old Conservative Habit Burns Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson provoked a public furor (and soon apologized) for repeating a wheeze I’ve been hearing from conservatives since I first studied economics, the one about how John Maynard Keynes supposedly didn’t value the future because he didn’t expect to have kids. [Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly; Waking Up Now; Andrew Sullivan; Jonah Goldberg; more, Memeorandum]

It always revealed more about the speakers’ prejudices than anything else. Whatever its failings, Keynes’ theory gives as much weight to the welfare of future generations as do rival theories; the “long run = all dead” snippet seized on by conservative critics does not assert what they imagine it does; and relevantly, if anecdotally, it’s our own libertarian/free-market side that can offer a more noteworthy concentration of childless economic theorists (which also doesn’t refute libertarian/free-market views).

Economic discourse is relatively good at identifying and rejecting prescriptions (eat the seed corn, grab the furniture for use in the fireplace on a cold day) that demonstrably rob later generations of prosperity. The divisions within the discipline arise from unavoidable disagreements as to which prescriptions will in fact result in such prosperity, not from the presence of major schools that lack enthusiasm about that goal.

Why then does the meme live on through generations of conservative commentators you’d think might know better, from Gertrude Himmelfarb to Mark Steyn? Perhaps because it is easier, or more rhetorically effective, to paint our adversaries as having weirdly deformed psyches rather than as sharing our broad goal of future improvements for the human condition but disagreeing on how best to get there.

It might also be mentioned that at least one of the major religions of the world imagines that forbidding its clergy to become parents better trains their minds on Eternity.

Walter Dellinger on the Prop 8 Arguments

Last week I attended a first-rate panel on the Supreme Court’s gay marriage cases sponsored by the D.C. chapter of the National Gay and Lesbian Journalist Association and the Human Rights Campaign, with presentations by former acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger and by Paul Smith, winning counsel in the landmark case of Lawrence v. Texas. I thought the best line was Dellinger’s, when he described the difficulties counsel Charles Cooper faced in defending the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8. In the earlier Lawrence case, the Court had ruled that moral disapproval of homosexuality was not an adequate basis for legislation. Trying to construct a defense of Prop 8 that did not rest on such a basis, Dellinger said, “Cooper was left like one of those French philosophers trying to compose a novel without the letter ‘e.'” Yes, if you tried hard enough you might do it — but oh, the strain and the artificiality!

Adoption as Bridge Across the Culture-War Divide

Comment from “MidGaGuy” at National Review:

As a gay man who is an adoptive father — can’t we all agree that children raised by caring loving parents are better off than those in unstable, broken systems or institutions. My three children were adopted from the foster care system but part of what opened my heart to adoption was spending time in Eastern European orphanages. No child should ever be subjected to that life. When my partner and I were training for adoption we met many couples who came from a conservative religious perspective, I hope we found some common ground during those 30 hours because a caring parent regardless of religious affiliation or sexual orientation beats instability or an institution hands down any day. This ought to be an issue that unites the right and the left.

The comment came as part of the discussion of a post by David French responding to suspicions of evangelicals’ supposed “orphan fever.” Relatedly, Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review has responded to my recent post on the adoption-unfriendly tone taken by certain social conservatives in denouncing gay parenthood, and I’ve added a brief addendum to my post indicating some of our areas of agreement or otherwise.

Mark Oppenheimer on gays and divorce stigma

Mark Oppenheimer suggests that when you meet a social conservative willing to blast the late President Ronald Reagan vocally for his role in de-stigmatizing divorce, you will have met a truly consistent so-con, worthy of defending the state of family values circa 1950. But you hardly ever meet such a person:

Maybe same-sex marriage is, as they like to say, “the last straw” in this sexual revolution. But rights for the most marginalized people will always be the last straw in social revolutions. The marginal people will always get everything last. If you’re honest and ethical, you have to go after the elites who started the revolution, not the marginalized who later said, “Me too! Please, me too!” And you can’t just pay it lip service, like, “Oh, straight people are culpable, too, since they began divorcing at higher rates in the 1970s…”—you have to actually try to shame straight divorcés more than you are trying to shame gay people for wanting to marry, because the straights started it. If you aren’t horrified by Rush Limbaugh being married four times—if you didn’t see Ronald Reagan as a less fit leader because of his divorce—then you simply have to shut the hell up about gay people marrying. You can’t ethically go after the marginalized people who try to eat the fruits of a revolution. You have to go after the revolutionaries. …

If it were the goal of the traditionalists at First Things and National Review and The American Conservative to help us re-think the Reagan presidency on the grounds that he helped normalize divorce, and thus helped usher in all that is terrible about libertine USA ca. 2013, they could.

After a tumultuous week

The past week or two has seen an extraordinary burst of both news and commentary on the marriage issue. Here are some highlights in case you missed them from my Twitter feed on gay issues, which you should consider following today:

  • In one new poll Republican support for gay marriage has jumped from 13 to 37 percent in just 10 months [CBS News] If the numbers are to be believed, a plurality of under-50 Republicans now support it [Sargent, WaPo] 67-30 favor in California [KPIX]
  • Andrew Ferguson is always worth reading, even when he’s on the wrong side of an issue, but he lost me at sentence 2 when he described Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield as “disinterested,” as opposed to all the gay-marriage-case amici who are actually committed to strong points of view [Weekly Standard; see also Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, Ted Frank, etc. on the state of the social science on gays and parenthood]
  • Jeff Rosen on federalism and the Prop 8/DOMA cases [New Republic]
  • When Justice Kennedy meant when he raised the issue of the “voice of these children” [Ann Althouse; related, Sullivan] Sorry, Mr. Clement, but no one’s gonna buy the line that DOMA was meant to serve purposes of “uniformity” [John Steele Gordon, Commentary] And if you still haven’t watched, my Wednesday Cato panel on same-sex marriage is online [C-SPAN2]
  • Freedom opens up possibilities: “Capitalism and the Family” [Steve Horwitz, FEE] “Why Gay Marriage Will Win, and Sexual Freedom Will Lose” [Megan McArdle] It’ll probably have a slight positive net effect on government fiscal coffers [Josh Barro] “Limited government means marriage equality” [Adam Bates, Daily Caller]

As gay families come under attack, adoptive families suffer collateral damage

You may have noticed — I certainly have — that for the past year or two the NOM/Witherspoon Institute/Princeton crowd’s campaign against gay marriage has been steadily reorganizing itself as a campaign against gay parenthood. Increasingly, as a powerful Esquire piece by Tom Junod argues, that campaign is resulting in the belittlement of non-biologically-based family forms — and among the targets to suffer collateral damage are adoptive families whether straight or gay.

Until lately, NOM and its friends had actually spent little time criticizing adoption by gays, and some had even put in a kind word for it. Many anti-gay activists were also active in the anti-abortion movement, which generally regards adoption as an extremely good thing. But with the new strategy shift a distinctly harsher line has emerged. Any parental structure other than a married biological mother and father, it is now argued, should be presumed to inflict damage on kids.

There began a search for evidence to back up this thesis. When the exceedingly weak Regnerus study burst on the scene last year — purporting to find that children of gay parents do much less well on a range of social health indicators — critics quickly shredded its methodology, and noted that it had been financed by a $695,000 Witherspoon Institute grant; more recently it was confirmed that in the study’s rush to publication, sponsors had one eye on the likelihood of its use in a Supreme Court case. And sure enough, the much-refuted Regnerus study is now the centerpiece of “empirical” social-conservative arguments in the Prop 8 and DOMA cases. Adding a reality-television dimension, when internal documents from the National Organization for Marriage were disclosed in litigation last year, they revealed that, as I noted at the time, “NOM had budgeted $120,000 for a project to locate children of gay households willing to denounce their parents on camera.”

Junod was taken aback to find NOM’s literature, as it extolled the “natural family,” casually denigrate the role of nonbiological parents:

The conservative movement that once minimized the difficulties of adoption because it provided an alternative to abortion is now both explicitly and implicitly denigrating adoption precisely because it provides an alternative to the perfect biological families said to have a patent on God’s purpose. Adoption is not essential to same-sex marriage; it is, however, essential to many same-sex couples who wish to build families, and since families present all marriages with a built-in case for their own legitimacy, it is adoption, as well as same-sex marriage, that has come under attack.

Even if you’ve come to expect the attacks, the sheer virulence can surprise. Jennifer Roback Morse, who directs NOM’s research affiliate Ruth Institute, has publicly termed it a “breach of faith” for orphanages to place children with gay parents — though as she surely is aware the alternative for many orphanage children is never to find parents at all. In the Witherspoon Institute publication Public Discourse, favorite NOM author Robert Oscar Lopez goes so far as to denounce international adoption as “trafficking” — an attack that in its viciousness cannot by its nature be limited just to those adopters who are gay, since straight and gay intending parents alike navigate the international adoption process in the same ways using the same agencies and methods.

Last year, when Catholic League founder and perennial anti-gay commentator Bill Donohue insulted Hilary Rosen’s adoptive family — he wrote that Rosen “had to adopt kids,” in contrast to Ann Romney who “raised 5 of her own” — I wrote the following:

There are lessons for gays, I think, in the long and heartening story of how adoption came to lose the social stigma once attached to it. Before “love makes a family” was ever a gay-rights slogan, it was a truth to which adoptive families had been given special access. Lurking behind both disapproval of adoptive families and disapproval of gays is the prejudice that in the final analysis only biological, “natural” ways of forging family connections really count. Only a generation or two ago, during the same general period that most gays were constrained to lead lives of deep concealment, it was common for adoptive parents to conceal the fact of adoption, not only from neighbors and teachers, but even from children themselves. We now realize that an obligation to keep big secrets, especially secrets about love and commitment and the supposed shame that should attach to family structure, is too great a burden to carry around without good reason.

We do not need the Catholic League’s offensive tweets to remind us that anti-adoption attitudes are still with us. In many parts of the world, especially those where a more tribal approach to family life has not yet yielded to modernity, adoption is culturally or even legally disapproved and raw biology does rule the day, to the great detriment of stray children who languish on the streets or in institutions. When modernist views of adoption advance, and likewise when same-sex marriage advances, more people find “forever families” to love and to commit to their care. That is why both march alongside in the genuine pro-family cause.

P.S. On how gays succeeded in becoming parents in large numbers before opponents really took notice of the trend and could organize to block it — a remarkable instance of the benefits of America’s open order, in which social innovations are generally legal unless affirmatively banned rather than the reverse — don’t miss a new Washington Monthly article by Alison Gash.

P.P.S. Ramesh Ponnuru responds at National Review. Most of his piece concentrates on points where he and I disagree little if at all (I’m not offended by the Ross Douthat column, for example) while skirting the elements of NOM/Witherspoon propaganda I found more offensive, such as the NOM pamphlet Junod cites (PDF) by Jennifer Roback Morse. While I could go on for hours about the problems with this pamphlet, note especially its items 22-28 which weirdly conflate stepparent family structure with adoptive or planned-gay-family structure as “non-biological,” and erroneously proceeds as if the negative outcomes long associated in family studies with the former (which of course typically arises following traumatic family events such as divorce) can be imputed to the latter.

Time for a GOP gesture on Uganda?

At the Daily Caller, Jamie Weinstein has now suggested a couple of times that Republicans speak out against the horrendous gay-suppression bill in the legislature of Uganda:

Why doesn’t a conservative GOP senator — or senators — pick up the cause and speak out strongly against this human rights travesty, demanding that the Uganda parliament reject the bill lest there be penalties?

Maybe this would help the GOP with the gay community by showing that just because conservatives generally oppose gay marriages, they are not indifferent to violence against gays around the world. Maybe it wouldn’t help. But at the very least, it would be the right thing to do.

Aside from the intrinsic merit of this idea, I agree with Weinstein that it would be good politics — many moderate voters are currently put off by the Republican Party’s image of disrespect for gay people, and speaking out against persecution is one way to signal respect. But are senators ready to court the wrath of the likes of the AFA’s Bryan Fischer, who has applauded the Uganda legislation?

“My generation is tired of the culture wars.”

Rachel Held Evans calls on fellow evangelicals to “end the culture war on gays and lesbians.” Relatedly, a survey reported in Baptist Standard finds that by a ten-point margin, respondents would be less likely rather than more likely to visit or join a church if they knew it taught that homosexual behavior was sinful.

Plus, Sarah Bessey: “I’m an evangelical Christian. And I think same-sex marriage should be legal.” And Mark Osler, “The Christian case for gay marriage.” [CNN “Belief Blog”]

“Stand up for freedom”


An extraordinary video contribution to the debate over marriage in Minnesota. The speaker is Republican state representative John Kriesel, who (as David Link recounted last year) took a prominent role in the Minnesota legislature’s debate last year on the marriage issue. Kriesel’s website begins with the following first line, from a Minneapolis Star-Tribune profile:

John Kriesel may be the only representative in the Minnesota Legislature who believes two men should be able to marry each other AND shoot someone who trespasses on their property.

Speaking of marriage and the military, Freedom to Marry and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network have collaborated on a highly effective video that concludes with the haunting question, “What if you lost the person you love… and you were the last to know?”

Catholic League Vs. Adoptive Parents

Bill Donohue’s Catholic League, long known for its hostility toward gays, on Wednesday found a new group to antagonize when it Tweeted the following:

Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.

Outraged reactions from adoptive parents lit up the web. Writes blogger Eric Kirk, “I guess adoptive parenting isn’t real parenting and our kids aren’t ‘our own.'” Notes Malinda at China AdoptionTalk, “This tweet certainly shows that adoption stigma is alive and well.”

The League’s sentiments were also roundly and promptly condemned by a long list of conservative, Republican and traditionalist commentators, including RNC communications director Sean Spicer (“The @CatholicLeague should be encouraging adoption, not demeaning the parents who are blessed to raise these children”); blogger Elizabeth Scalia; The American Conservative contributing editor Michael Brendan Dougherty; and Michael Potemra at National Review (“thuggishness…hateful”).

Dougherty says of Donohue “I just wish people would stop funding him,” which is certainly an understandable sentiment. But if people do keep sending Donohue checks to keep enabling his garish and contentious presence in American public life, perhaps it’s because they’re reading the signals given by respectable figures in his Church. As Commonweal points out, “Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who surely ought to know better, gives Donohue friendly cover on a regular basis,” as do many other top churchmen. For confirmation, take a look at the League’s “About Us” page, which includes, along with a string of endorsements by leading archbishops, a “Board of Advisers” that lists pretty much every prominent traditionalist Catholic intellectual: Hadley Arkes, Gerard Bradley, Robert George, Michael Novak, George Weigel and so forth. The support of these big names is a crucial reason Donohue is taken seriously, and makes it idle to try to dismiss his League as some sort of fringe group with no real constituency. If his group indulges in schoolyard taunting, it is a schoolyard just one jump away from Notre Dame, Amherst, and Princeton.

There are lessons for gays, I think, in the long and heartening story of how adoption came to lose the social stigma once attached to it. Before “love makes a family” was ever a gay-rights slogan, it was a truth to which adoptive families had been given special access. Lurking behind both disapproval of adoptive families and disapproval of gays is the prejudice that in the final analysis only biological, “natural” ways of forging family connections really count. Only a generation or two ago, during the same general period that most gays were constrained to lead lives of deep concealment, it was common for adoptive parents to conceal the fact of adoption, not only from neighbors and teachers, but even from children themselves. We now realize that an obligation to keep big secrets, especially secrets about love and commitment and the supposed shame that should attach to family structure, is too great a burden to carry around without good reason.

We do not need the Catholic League’s offensive tweets to remind us that anti-adoption attitudes are still with us. In many parts of the world, especially those where a more tribal approach to family life has not yet yielded to modernity, adoption is culturally or even legally disapproved and raw biology does rule the day, to the great detriment of stray children who languish on the streets or in institutions. When modernist views of adoption advance, and likewise when same-sex marriage advances, more people find “forever families” to love and to commit to their care. That is why both march alongside in the genuine pro-family cause.