Are Men Failing?

New York Times columnist David Brooks's recent "Why Men Fail" merits attention. Mr. Brooks's column summarizes a recent book by Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, to the effect that during the last 40 years, men in our culture have failed to demonstrate sufficient flexibility and have accordingly lost ground, while women have exhibited greater adaptablilty and, relatively speaking, have prospered.

Men's hyper-rigidity has doomed them to dropping out of the labor force in disturbing numbers, says Mr. Brooks, echoing Ms. Rosin. They more and more find themselves collecting disability compensation, and they are ceding the lead in jobs and, in some cases, even pay to women.

All because women are more adaptable.

Brooks contrasts Ms. Rosin's hypothesis with the older theory that men and boys have disadvantages that are at once cultural and genetic/neurological: so they fidget and daydream in school; they aren't "emotionally sensitive and aware of context" as adults; they can't "communicate smoothly" as employees.

I don't really know whether Rosin's hyper-rigidity thesis explains why little boys get more D's and F's in school than little girls do. Perhaps the old theory and the new hypothesis are both telling us something we need to know.

But Brooks's column says something else that is of great interest to me:

Rosin also reports from college campuses where women are pioneering new social arrangements. The usual story is that men are exploiting the new campus hookup culture in order to get plenty of sex without romantic commitments. Rosin argues that, in fact, women support the hookup culture. It allows them to have sex and fun without any time-consuming distractions from their careers. Like new immigrants, women are desperate to rise, and they embrace social and sexual rules that give them the freedom to focus on their professional lives.

"Desperate to rise" seems a bit wide of the mark. Desperate? Yet I bet Brooks is right that the hookup culture in colleges is chosen by women as a surrogate to committed relationships that might truncate their professional aspirations.

* * * * *

What if as a woman professional — specifically, a university professor — you are breast-feeding a baby, and you need to teach a class at baby's feeding time?

Under normal circumstances, working mothers can cope by pumping their breasts and feeding baby on expelled milk while in public. But American University professor Adrienne Pine ran into a situation where her baby was sick one morning and she had no good child-care options, so she brought her infant along to a 75-minute class she was teaching. I'm guessing that pumping was for some reason not an option in this situation. Once in the classroom, the baby grew restless, and "Pine breast-fed her while continuing her lecture in front of 40 students." So says this article in The Washington Post.

That sparked a controversy. "Some students [who were interviewed] said breast-feeding doesn’t belong in the classroom."

This was a feminist anthropology class, and Pine has since written that "I fed my sick baby [in it] without disrupting the lecture so as to not have to cancel the first day of class. I doubt anyone saw my nipple, because I’m pretty good at covering it. But if they did, they now know that I too, a university professor, like them, have nipples."

A sign of the times, I think. Beyond that, I'm not sure how I feel about this.

* * * * *

Another Washington Post story points up that both women and men today are, uh, desperate to enhance those bodily features that distinguish them from the other sex. "NJ woman charged with fatal penis enlargement injection pleads not guilty to manslaughter" says a 23-year-old man died the day after Kasia Rivera, 35, injected silicon into his penis, supposedly to lengthen it.

Kasia Rivera, charged with
reckless manslaughter in
penis-enlargement botch

According to Dr. Daniel S. Elliott, an associate professor of urology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.:

Enhancement procedures performed by unlicensed practitioners or people with no medical training are more commonly seen among women ... Liquid silicone is sought on the black market by women seeking to enhance their figures, even though it is not approved for cosmetic injections. Besides liquid silicone, injections of substances including paraffin, petroleum jelly and hydrogel have been illegally used to enlarge women’s breasts, hips and buttocks.

Of course, silicone breast and buttock implants (not liquid silicone) are often used cosmetically by women today.

Many men resort to other techniques to enlarge their penis. As far as I know, none of them work.

But why? Why the need for a bigger sex organ (men), bigger boobs and booties (women), and buffer bodies (both sexes)?

Both sexes, I think, realize they have to attract and then hold onto mates not just once or maybe twice in a lifetime, but maybe once or twice in a college semester. There's a continual lottery going on, from both sexes' point of view. A survival-of-the-sexiest, if you will.

It's a reflection of how long it takes to get a first-class education these days, a factor that affects both sexes, but also of the gender-specific need of today's women to hold firmly onto men's interest while at the same time keeping them at arm's length as they go for that advanced degree.

Meanwhile — dare I say it? — men feel increasingly emasculated. A bigger male member seems entirely in order. It makes them (us) feel more of a man.

As a 65-year-old, unmarried Catholic man, I personally favor chastity and abstinence. But I think it's unrealistic to expect that of young women and men who must wait many long years for marriage and children, owing to how long they're in school.

That same situation as it affects women, primarily, seems to be driving all I reported above. Young women must be abstinent — fat chance, for most of them — or use contraception. If contraception fails, then abortion is in order. Those are two realities today that Catholic authorities resent and reject.

But they and many other Catholics likewise resent the hookup culture, not to mention the seemingly excessive emphasis women and men are putting on their physical attributes.

And professors breast-feeding in front of their students will seem, to most Catholics, an affront to common decency.

We Catholics really need to come to grips with how much society has changed! That much I'm sure of, and for that change in Catholic attitude, I earnestly pray ...

Exalting the Vagina!

Yes, you got that right. This sixty-something, male, never-married Catholic blogger is blogging about something that, in common parlance, is often deemed "naughty," or worse.

The vagina.

I'm writing in response to Ariel Levy's book review in the September 10, 2012, New Yorker, that discusses Naomi Wolf's new book Vagina: A New Biography.

Herewith, a brief summary of what I take Levy to be saying about what Wolf is saying (since, sadly, only New Yorker subscribers can view the full review).

Levy says Wolf slots into the continuing evolution of feminist thought. We who are not exactly frontline feminists may not realize that feminism bifurcated somewhere around the early 1980s over the question of whether to revile pornography as culprit number one in the crime of men "objectifying" women.

Some feminists sided with Susan Brownmiller in working politically to expunge porn from the cultural scene. Others objected that the women of the movement ought not to be "patrolling the erotic imagination": policing what goes on in the heads of, yes, even those feminist sisters who choose to pleasure themselves sexually while looking at porn.

The first group were the "anti-porn" feminists. The latter group became known as the "pro-sex" feminists. (Who knew?)

Now comes Ms. Wolf, who in earlier books had railed against how "strictly and heavily images of female beauty have come to weigh on us." Reducing women to their bodies stood in the way of full women's liberation, thought Wolf. Except ... in this new book, Wolf has it that, "To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain but it is also part of the female soul — it is a gateway to, and medium of, female self-knowledge."

Naomi Wolf

This "profound brain-vagina connection" dawned on Wolf after undergoing successful surgery to remedy spinal compression that was impinging on her pelvic nerve. She knew something was wrong when sex stopped giving her "the usual postcoital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive."

Apparently, Wolf's pelvic nerve that was amiss connects to the vagina but does not connect to the clitoris, since her clitoral orgasms were still "as strong and pleasurable as ever."

I take the following from this deeply personal experience of Wolf's: Each of us, male or female, is tasked by our human nature with the responsibility of construing ourselves. A big question is, do we construe ourselves as something separate and apart from the rest of "everything alive"?

Another big question is, do we construe our interior selves as separate from our bodies?

The history of western thought — and therefore Catholic thought — runs through the teaching of 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who famously wrote, "I think, therefore I am." Descartes construes himself fundamentally as a disembodied rational being who can be certain that he exists only because he thinks, because he has the capacity to doubt. His body, perceived through sense experiences, is to him less certain to exist because his senses are notoriously unreliable.

Descartes' interior self is construed by him as separate from his body.

Naomi Wolf's interior self is construed by her as intimately connected to her body, and specifically to her vagina. When her vagina is working properly — when the stimuli arising from sexual pleasure successfully reach her brain — she is infused with creative energy and worldly delight. She feels richly interconnected to one and all.

I can't imagine anything more true of the way I feel about myself. True, I don't have a vagina. I have a penis. My lifetime sexual experience is not extensive, but I can say that sexual feelings of arousal and satisfaction for me are not just in my penis. They suffuse my whole pelvic and perineal area. According to Wikipedia:

The perineum is the region of the body inferior to the pelvic diaphragm and between the legs. It is a diamond-shaped area on the inferior surface of the trunk that includes the anus and, in females, the vagina. Its definition varies: it can refer to only the superficial structures in this region, or it can be used to include both superficial and deep structures.

It's there that sexual arousal begins. The penis may or may not heed the call and get stiff.

The penis is analogous to the clitoris, as the two organs arise from the same embryonic tissue. I have no idea what the female embryo does to create a vagina, but I'd say there has to be an analogy between it and the male perineum. So what Wolf says about her vagina comes to me as no surprise. For me, there is nothing that gives me a God's-in-His-heaven-and-all's-right-with-the-world feeling more than the pelvic-perineal response I feel when a lovely woman smiles at me.

Here, then, we have a topic that I feel needs to be talked about more in Catholic circles: the connection between our bodies, and especially our sexual organs, and how we construe ourselves. Can we break our habits as thoroughgoing Cartesians — victims of the mind-over-matter thought of René Descartes?

Jesus Preaching a Sermon

At stake is an understanding of how we ought to see ourselves in relation to our world. I believe Jesus wanted us to stand together, all for one and one for all. "Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me" (Matthew 25:28). God bless us, every one — no exceptions!

It's a lot easier to get to that beneficent all-inclusiveness from "a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive." I think Naomi Wolf is on to something!

Not Enough To Go Around? Let's Remedy That!

"There's not enough to go around!"

In this presidential election year, that's the overarching worry that's driving voter behavior, I take it.

Not enough income. Not enough wealth. Not enough jobs. Not enough economic opportunity.

When we hear President Obama's forces snipe at Mitt Romney about the girth of his bank account and the secrecy surrounding his tax returns, that's the not-so-hidden theme: Romney has gotten more than his fair share, and, as head of Bain Capital, he acquired it by zeroing out American jobs.

Romney snipes back that Obama is clueless about how wealth is created, which is why the current economic recovery is so anemic.

I have yet to hear either side tell how America can be returned to truly robust economic vigor. I think the president has, sadly, been notably silent about this topic.

Yes, we do get to see a few pieces of the respective economic jigsaw puzzles each candidate would try to put together if elected. Obama would let the "Bush-era" income tax cuts lapse for top earners, but leave them in place for the middle class. Romney would reduce all brackets' tax rates by 20 percent.

Obama would preserve Medicare's current way of doing things — though he hasn't really said how he'd head off the program's eventual insolvency. The Romney-Ryan ticket wants to convert Medicare to a voucher program for most yet-to-arrive-at-65 Americans.

Romney wants to solve the debt threat by drastically cutting programs, a full list of which which he has yet to announce, while generating more tax receipts (at albeit reduced tax rates) by "broadening the base" — eliminating or reducing itemized deductions and loopholes. Obama would cut federal programs more sparingly, while increasing tax rates sharply on upper incomes.

One approach or the other, or a mix of both, could shrink the deficit and thus keep the public debt from ballooning out of control, and that's a good, even necessary, thing.

Problem is, neither solution is aimed at enlarging the "economic pie." They represent two approaches to how after-tax income is allocated, addressing fairness-of-income-distribution concerns in two contrasting ways.

The two parties likewise exhibit two different attitudes toward expensive government entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid.

But what about making the economic pie much bigger than it is? Can't we agree that this is a goal we ought to pursue?

Can't we at least discuss it?

Here is problem number one with that, in my opinion: neither candidate really seems to have a clue about how to open up opportunity in this land to its fullest throttle, so more people could become better equipped to hold down ever more challenging jobs, thus enlarging the economic pie with their enhanced productivity.

Romney claims his experience as a businessman gives him the ability to manage the economy better than Obama. Well ... maybe.

But we know he killed or offshored jobs while at Bain; that was, supporters say, simply a much-needed bout of "creative destruction." I'm willing to accept that that kind of thing — putting American enterprise on a slimming diet — may sometimes be necessary for reasons of competitiveness abroad. But it's not the whole answer to growing our economic pie.

So, Mitt, what is the whole answer?

And how about you, Mr. President? Don't you have a plan to once again make America the fecund "land of opportunity" it once was?

If so, I for one haven't heard it.

Here's the kind of thing I think we need: How about a G.I. Bill, not just for servicemen and -women who have risked much in America's wars abroad, but for their children, too? The volunteer military is heavily weighted toward lower-income recruits whose kids may not get the opportunities Barack Obama's daughters and Mitt Romney's grandchildren will enjoy. Let's endow them all with the means to go to the very best schools for which they can qualify.

Meanwhile, I think we all need to get behind those conservative hobbyhorses, school vouchers, along with the parallel education revolution that seems to be exploding today, charter schools. True, vouchers-plus-charters needs to be augmented by serious reforms to traditional public schools, so they don't turn into warehouses for the least educable. And — sorry, NEA — I think teachers' unions will have to stand aside on this.

A G.I. Bill for "servicekids," as a variety of income redistribution, is a liberal notion. Mitt Romney could never embrace it. Vouchers-plus-charters-plus-union-disempowerment is a conservative notion. Barack Obama would never endorse that.

But if there's really not enough to go around these days, enriching opportunities for all demands that a lot of conventional orthodoxies be ushered into unceremonious retirement.

For instance, I propose that we get busy and pass the DREAM Act, the long-stalled-by-GOP-hard-liners congressional legislation that offers conditional amnesty to illegal immigrants in exchange for obtaining, or working diligently toward, a bachelor's degree or higher, or serving honorably in the U.S. military. They'd be helped along (this is not part of the current bill, unfortunately) by eligibility for Pell grants. If they go the military route instead, they'd come away with a sizable amount of training in IT, engineering skills, and the like, that will look great on their civilian résumés.

In addition, I'd pass state laws allowing children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuitions at state universities. Even Rick Perry, the conservative GOP governor of Texas, thinks anyone opposing this doesn't "have a heart."

Conservatives who blanch at those two proposals will grin at this one: I suggest we end the practice of affirmative action in hiring and college admissions based solely on race. Race-based affirmative action has outlived its usefulness, and it now just produces jealousies based on skin tone. In its place I would put affirmative action based strictly on socioeconomic factors. Smart working-class kids of any race who'd otherwise lack the slick résumés of the upper crusters would be given a leg up.

Get the point? We need to create a ladder of opportunity for all who now face an unadorned blank wall. This approach to the country's problems would tap the highest potential of all who live and work here, boosting their productivity and enlarging the economic pie for every one of us to feast on.

It would thus dispel the current atmosphere of fear, envy, class jealousy, financial greed, and worse. From the point of view of a Catholic voter like me, it would be a very Christian thing to do, since the current rancid, not-enough-to-go-around atmosphere is inimical to the spirit of Christian charity and poisonous to the milk of human kindness.

The Need for Centeredness

My recent posts have revolved around society and sexuality:

Where Does the Urge to Rape Come From?
Lessons from "The Sex Lady"
Uncommitted Sex? Just Say No!
Our Baser Selves
The Procreative Norm

I think our society is way off balance — when it comes to sex, and when it comes to a lot of other things.

Another way to put it is that we are way off-center, and we need to be a lot more centered.

We need more self-respect and more respect for others. If we are off-center in our lives, it's a struggle to be respectful of others' needs, because we don't even understand our own needs.

Urges are not the same thing as needs. Urges can pull us off-center. True needs will not.

We are off-center as individuals, and we are off-center as a society and a culture. If the culture were more on-center, there wouldn't be as many rapes. There wouldn't be as many unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Not as many relationships that end in breakups and divorces. Not as many instances of domestic violence. Not as much child sexual abuse.


And, taking this out of the realm of sex, there wouldn't be as many tragic shootings by crazed individuals with guns.

Nor would there be as much crime in general. Most crime comes from individuals who think they have a right to something that only breaking the law can get them. That kind of self-centeredness is the exact opposite of the centeredness I'm talking about.

Most of us keep our baser behavior patterns in check, most of the time. Most of the time, we are kind to and respectful of others. Most of the time, we don't do wild things that may make us feel good in the short run, but then inevitably wind up making us feel sorry in the long run. Most of the time, we don't disrespect or bully people who "aren't like us."

But then sometimes we do stuff that we wouldn't do, most of the time. Stuff we "shouldn't" do, but we do anyway — some of the time.

Why do we act so schizoid? Why do there seem to be two different people inside our skins?

It's a sign of being off-center.

And how often do we seem to get pulled off-center by such things as pressure from our peers, as well as by the stuff we and they see every day online, or on TV, or at the movies. The whole culture seems to be conspiring to pull everybody off-center, over into our baser selves ...

... where the urge arises to fight, to snarl, to be snarky, to exhibit hostility ...

... and to behave sexually in less than a "chaste" way ...

... to act as if the world is out to hold us down, to keep us from the pursuit of what we imagine to be our happiness ...

... and so we get cynical about so-called "good" behavior. People who are good and generous and kind are simply pretending "the dark side" isn't there. They'll surely end up losers.


Whatever name you prefer to call "the dark side" of human nature and human behavior, it recedes into the background when individuals and the society as a whole are on-center.

A certain number of people today seem to have bought into the idea that the dark side might even conceivably "save the planet."

How ironic! When the phrase "the dark side" entered the language back in 1977, from the first Star Wars movie, no such idea was meant or implied. It's a sign that we have become ever more off-center that this notion of a heroic "dark side" has taken hold today.

We live in an age of irony. In every aspect of life, we feel like we serve two masters, the "Force" that Luke Skywalker learned to "feel" as a budding Jedi knight, and the "dark side" that the evil Darth Vader epitomized. We mostly triangulate between the two, which is manifestly the cause for our overarching sense of irony today.

Most of us surf those roiled waters just fine, thank you very much ... most of the time. We may not be centered in any spiritual sense, but we do manage to keep our balance.

But "balanced" and "centered" aren't the same thing.

Balanced and cynically ironic about it, are we: it's a sure sign that we need centering.

As individuals, being balanced between our inner Luke Skywalker and our inner Darth Vader clearly "works" for us ... most of the time.

I see the problem as the effect on the culture of too much balancing and too little centering. We often feel we are balancing precariously, with one foot hanging over the edge of chaos. Some of us occasionally go over the edge. Others of us go permanently over the edge.

These are the rapists and sex offenders, the serial killers and crazies with hair-trigger fingers and loaded semiautomatic weapons, the people whose terminal self-centeredness makes them stony-faced criminals and cheats. There are way too many of them because of too much balancing and too little centering in the broader culture.

What centers us? It used to be our spirituality that did it. Spirituality, that is, that was anchored in religion. Religion tethered us to an ethos, a shared sense of right and wrong. As we shared it with one another, our centering came from God. We were a God-centered people.

Now, not so much.

Now we often find we need to take extraordinary measures just to keep our balance. This is where the free-floating anger just under the surface of our lives comes from. For some of us, it's right on the surface a good deal of the time. We get righteously angry, and it makes us feel so much better for a while.

If that doesn't work, we can always try bullying someone.

Or stalking someone.

Or tearing someone to shreds in a "flame war" online.

How often that word, "war," crops up today! We hear of a "war on drugs," a "war on poverty," a "war on terror," a "war on women." Conflict and mortal combat are constant metaphors in movies, in television, in sports contests, in the video games we play.

It was not always thus. War/conflict/combat themes didn't used to be omnipresent. Throw a dart at the monthly program guide of the Turner Classic Movies channel and the chances of hitting a old movie where somebody gets killed are at most fifty-fifty.

There were the World War Two movies, of course. They were more about people sacrificing, people standing together, people serving with honor, than they were about superheroes — imaginary stand-ins for each of us personally — saving the world from Armageddon.

We used to have something that kept us on-center without our having to imaginatively enact our own personal mortal combat situations over and over and over.

That something used to be religion. What are we going to replace it with?

Where Does the Urge to Rape Come From?

Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri (left) claims to have misspoken in saying — with reference to what he called "legitimate rape" — "from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from it] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." With those remarks he created a firestorm in American politics.

He later apologized, saying that he had misspoken and that he had meant to say "forcible rape" instead of "legitimate rape."

Advocates for women's rights continued to howl. "Forcible rape," they contended, is language that Republican lawmakers have tried to use, without much success, to narrow the legal definition of rape.

Women who are coerced to engage in sex acts — who are raped — don't always have a way to prove that they were "forced" into compliance: no cuts or bruises, no witnesses to testify that they cried out, etc. So what is or is not rape?

The whole question of the definition of "rape" has changed much during our history, says Estelle B. Freedman (left) in The Washington Post here. Freedman is the Edgar E. Robinson professor in U.S. history at Stanford University and the author of “No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women,” and a co-author of “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America.”

She says rape and race have been intimately tied in American belief and practice, with rape laws in the Jim Crow South routinely defanged by the perceived need to look the other way re: forced sexual relations between white men and black women. Yet for a black man to be accused of sexually molesting a white woman was a hanging offense.

Freedman says:

In the 19th century, state laws around the country defined rape as the carnal knowledge of a woman when achieved by force by a man other than her husband. According to a principle known as coverture, a husband had authority over his wife’s person and property. Therefore, women could not withhold sex from their husbands. Similarly, enslaved women could not refuse sex with their masters or testify against them in court.

We've come a long way from coverture. Yet, even with the more liberal legal view that has prevailed since ...

... the late 20th century, [when] second-wave feminism generated an anti-rape movement that identified sexual assault as an abuse of power that has been central to women’s oppression ...

... rape is both widespread and underreported.

Even if it does get reported, it continues to be hard to prove that a rape has occurred. Karen Mulhauser (left), chair of the advisory council for the Women’s Information Network, had this to say on a recent Washington Post editorial page about the time she was raped.

Several years ago, Mulhauser was attacked by armed intruders who came into her home and who bound her, ransacked the dwelling for valuables, and raped her repeatedly for 2 1/2 hours. She didn't cry out for fear of waking her young son. She wound up with no bruises or other evidence of having been forced into having sex. She reported it anyway. She does not say whether the police were able to bring her assailants to justice.

The emphasis of the response to Akin's ill-considered, ill-founded remarks has been on the question of what rape consists of and what can be done in utmost justice to aid its victims — especially those who wind up pregnant because their bodies inexplicably failed to "shut that whole thing down."

My concern is different. My concern is to figure out why rape happens in the first place.

Freedman talks of "sexual assault as an abuse of power," and I think that description is right on point. Rape is not about sex, it's about power.

But most of us want to exercise power. And advanced opinion on sexuality today — see the writings of Michel Foucault (left) — says it can't be understood without reference to power relationships.

Sex can be a tender ceding of power over our bodies and souls to a marriage partner whom we love and who loves us. That there is a power relationship that exists between the spouses is normal. Ideally, it is a good thing.

But rapists want to exert power, not tenderly but forcibly. And there are a lot of them. I have read that nearly 1 in 5 surveyed women report having been sexually assaulted.

A rapist is someone whose power urge has gotten way out of bounds.

So the question-to-which-I-have-have-no-answer is: Why has this power urge gotten so far out of whack for such a sizable number of men that they so often commit rape?

Lessons from "The Sex Lady"

Deborah Roffman has been dubbed "The Sex Lady" for her strong advocacy for teaching kids about sex the right way. Here's an example:



Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer, in "'The Sex Lady' offers lessons for parents" in today's edition, writes glowingly about Roffman and her new book. Roffman's book is titled Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids' "Go-To" Person about Sex. Reimer lauds Roffman for the way "she employs the fundamental elements of parenting — affirmation, information, clarity about values, limits and guidance — and applies them to a child's developing sexuality."

I don't claim to know much about teaching kids about sex. My reaction to Reimer's column is, however, one of great concern. Reimer writes that so much has changed in "the four decades Deborah Roffman has taught [children] about their bodies," and that:

... the only thing that hasn't changed is the discomfort of their parents when they try to talk about sex. Even the sex has changed, becoming casual and transactional, invasive and pervasive. Marketing and advertising have driven the mercury higher. Technology has put sex only a touch or a keystroke away. "The boundaries that used to separate children's lives from adults' lives have in many respects vanished," said Ms. Roffman ...

And, per Roffman:

"We spent the 20th century carving out the stages of child development, and marketers have managed to collapse them. Now 8-year-olds are just short 14-year-olds. And 14-year-olds are just short 20-year-olds."

I know this much: there was a time in human history when the line between childhood innocence and adult sexual maturity was a clear one. It was crossed at the appropriate age by virtue of initiation ceremonies that were once part and parcel of religions. For example, Jewish bar mitzvah ceremonies, as originally conceived, were when a young male of the species could finally say (in Hebrew) "Now I am a man" ... and mean it!

The treatment of young women was somewhat different, since the onset of menstruation is in itself a threshold. But the point is that there was a threshold, and religions enforced it.

Not today. Our religions seem to have yielded to the general culture and "dumbed down" the whole concept behind thresholds, confirmations, bar mitzvahs, and religious initiations in general. Or maybe it's that the secular culture has drowned out our religions' ancient messages.

So now we hear from Reimer that Hoffman:

... writes with candor about ... the 12-year-old who announces to her stunned father that she will be going to parties this school year and she will probably be performing oral sex when she gets there.

Say what? Seventh-grade girls going to parties and performing oral sex? When I was in seventh grade, at a class party in 1959, I kissed a girl (her name was Carol Scott) for the first time, and considered myself bold for having done so. My how times have changed ...

... for the worse.

I agree with Roffman in the video above that "abstinence only" sex education in schools is not the answer, and that an admirable goal is to bring up children to be able to think clearly about sex. The goal of "chastity," mentioned in passing by Roffman, is, I agree, not the same as the goal of "abstinence." As I define chastity, though, it is a matter of "just saying no" in specific situations because you have made a personal choice to do so. So I think I have to disagree with Roffman's words in the video, to the extent that she seems to believe "abstinence only" actually means "chastity" — which she thinks is an inappropriate goal.

I'd say there still needs to be a threshold of maturity on the early side of which "just say no" is a rule, not a choice. Our sex-drenched culture, as Reimer says, obliterates that threshold ... mainly, I'd say, because sex sells products (left).

So I think we need to make at least three changes in our culture. One, as Reimer and Roffman say, we need to teach our kids about sex the right way. Two, we need to give our pre-teen children back their childhood by insisting on the old-fashioned rules concerning bodies and sex. Three, we need to get our churches and religions back on the same page with us, and us with them, because without religion's underpinnings for sexuality's thresholds, there is no earthly reason why 8-year-olds should not consider themselves short 14-year-olds.

Uncommitted Sex? Just Say No!

I've been struggling to come up with a way to say how I personally feel about the rights and wrongs of sex. What I have finally arrived at is this, as at least Step 1 toward attaining the ideal of thoroughgoing chastity: Just say no to uncommitted sex.

Committed sex is, quite obviously, what is normally associated with a married heterosexual couple. In contradiction of Catholic orthodoxy, I would extend it to all committed couples, straight or gay, whether legally married or not.

Uncommitted sex is every other kind. According to my ethics for sex, extramarital sex is out. Premarital sex, unless the couple is in a committed relationship, is out. Recreational sex: out. Group sex: out. "Friends with privileges" sex: out. Pick-up Friday night sex: out. Pornography: out. Voyeurism: out. Masturbation: out.

That's Step 1. The next step, Step 2, would have to address the tender question of what exactly the couple's commitment entails. Is it a commitment to each other, and nothing more? Or is it a commitment to their existing (if any) and potential children? To their families, friends, and loved ones? To the larger society? To God?

The Catholic Church's answer: all of the above.

The Church forbids the couple — if obedient Catholics — to forestall pregnancy using artificial means such as contraceptive pills and condoms. Step 3 in the search for chastity would have to address this question.

My answer is a tentative one. I've never been married, never had to worry about pregnancy. If I were in that position, though, I think I'd hope my wife and I could agree to try for successful management of fertility via Natural Family Planning.

NFP, according to the Couple to Couple League, involves determining when the woman is fertile and able to become pregnant, and avoiding having sex during that time. Her body temperature and certain other symptoms of her fertile time of the month can be measured as clues to when not to have sex. Also, after a baby is born, breastfeeding can postpone the return of her monthly cycle for several months and thus postpone the possibility of another pregnancy.

Clearly, NFP is based on the couple willingly remaining chaste during her fertile periods.

Step 4? It would seem to be the time when we ask whether commitment demands an actual marriage ceremony. Ideally, I think it does, as long as it's seen as a way to cement the commitment that already exists between the two people.

All this says nothing about how sex is done, when it's done. That would be a matter for Step 5, which would take up the vexed questions of the appropriateness of:

1. Oral sex
2. Anal sex
3. Sado-masochistic sex
4. The use of sex toys
5. Phone sex
6. Internet sex
7. "Sexting"
8. Etc., etc., etc.

Getting back to Step 1, I think it's something we all need to think about. Our culture today tolerates — nay, encourages — sex without commitment. It's thought of as normal and natural, while looking for Mr. or Ms. Right, to have casual sex at the drop of a hat. When Mr. or Ms. Right comes along, though, we find it hard to break the habit. Result: lots of breakups, lots of divorces. Chastity, I think, demands that we choose to break the habit now, before it breaks up a happy relationship. Or, better yet, never acquire it in the first place.

Our Baser Selves

I've been blogging about the "procreative norm," an ideal that our sexual ethics once revolved around. I'm in favor of it, but the culture today isn't. It hasn't been since the 1960s and the "sexual revolution." That's the era of my rock 'n' roll youth. So why am I in favor of the procreative norm now?

The procreative norm, which comes from Catholic thought dating to at least St. Augustine, basically says no sex without being (a) married (to each other) and (b) "open" to procreation, i.e., to pregnancy, childbearing, and child-rearing.

I favor the procreative norm because it reins in our baser selves. By "baser" I mean those aspects of the natural human self that ought not be given free rein — sexual lust, aggression, hostility, greed, and an overweening concern for one's own self-preservation.

We also have our "higher" selves. Fellow-feeling, concern for others, altruism, loyalty, Christian love ... and romantic love, with its procreative and connubial sexual component. These are among our higher potentialities.

I think our culture has gotten way too cozy with the things that come from and, in turn, potentiate our baser selves. Look at the amount of time which our popular culture devotes to movies, video games, iPhone apps, etc. that celebrate and encourage violence. Recently in Aurora, Colorado, a heavily armed crazy invaded a movie theater and shot to death several innocent patrons. It was a theater where a new Batman movie was getting its premiere — a "Dark Knight" film in which the Caped Crusader, Batman, uses all violent means at his disposal to dispatch equally violent evildoers.

The Aurora shooter was crazy. But so, too, is a culture which lionizes good-guy superhero purveyors of violent aggression (Batman, X-Men, Spiderman, etc.) to the extent ours does. Such preoccupations have to do with aggression and hostility, true, but they also involve indulging our fears for our own self-preservation. However appealing they are to today's consumers of popular culture, they are, in my lexicon, on the baser side of the ledger.

Notice how there is usually a thinly disguised sexual undercurrent to much of this fare. In many cases, you can delete the words "thinly disguised." The image at right is of Wonder Woman, a popular superhero. It's one of the least "sexy" depictions of her that I can find on Google Images.

And so much of the popular culture today is about greed — as, for instance, the Tiny Tower iPhone app (left) that is popular today. It's a game that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank calls:

... a business-simulation game that millions of people are using their iPhones and tablets to play capitalist, attempting to build ever larger towers with ever more businesses that generate ever more coins and “tower bux.” ... The game is devoid of business ethics; the goal is to maximize value by boosting output ... Tiny Tower nods to corporate responsibility: You improve your efficiency if you place bitizens in their “dream jobs.” But savvy players have discovered that you generate more tower bux if you fire people from their dream jobs and evict them from the tower after their birthdays pass.

Cold and heartless, yes, but within the rules — and in Tiny Tower, that’s enough.

It's greed with a thin veneer of corporate responsibility (placing "bitizens" in their "dream jobs"). Combining baser and higher motivations, though, Tiny Tower is an exercise in irony. Irony is big with the younger set today.

I can't prove it, but my belief is that when we jettisoned the procreative norm in the 1960s in the wake of the arrival of the birth-control pill, we opened up a Pandora's box of "base" behavior patterns and attitudes. Nowadays, each of us has to navigate the rapids of what is and is not behaviorally "appropriate," in view of the change from an earlier era in which sex and violence were constrained by notions of "common decency."

Back then we all knew what was "decent" and what wasn't. Not that we always did the decent thing. But if we transgressed, it had to be with stealth and secrecy. There was none of today's brazenness about flaunting the baser forms of human comportment and flouting the traditional norms of decent behavior.

My hope is that we can get back to the days of the lust-inhibiting, decency-provoking procreative norm. I think that if we do, a lot of today's evils will fly right back into Pandora's box.

The Procreative Norm

In Are We Just Wrong about Sex Today?, I said there used to be a core principle of our sexual ethics called the 'procreative norm'. That was before the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. 'Procreative norm' is a fancy way of saying that sexual activity, in order to be moral, had to have a due reverence for the begetting and rearing of children.

So just sex — sex that was morally right — was in those days always to be between married spouses. It had to be 'open to procreation', meaning that no artificial means of avoiding pregnancy were to be used. The recently introduced (1960) birth control pill was forbidden to Catholics by church teaching. Pope Paul VI's encyclical letter Humanae Vitae in 1968 affirmed this teaching ... and many modern Catholics erupted in protest.

In 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion ... another way of keeping sex from yielding live babies.

Until now, I personally have had a hard time accepting the teaching of Humanae Vitae, since it has seemed to me that 'openness to procreation' is a slippery notion best left to individual couples to be put into practice in the light of their own consciences.


Arguably, though, severing the tether connecting sex to procreation has ushered in a raft of society-wide woes:

1. HIV/AIDS has killed over 25 million people worldwide since 1981, when AIDS was first reported.
2. Though abortion should, in President Clinton's words, be 'safe, legal, and rare', Abort73.com reports that 'In 2008, approximately 1.21 million abortions took place in the U.S., down from an estimated 1.29 million in 2002, 1.31 million in 2000 and 1.36 million in 1996. From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal abortions have occurred in the U.S.'
3. TopTenReviews.com reports that 'According to compiled numbers from respected news and research organizations, every second $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography. Every second 28,258 internet users are viewing pornography. In that same second 372 internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines. Every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is being created in the U.S.'
4. According to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, 'Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted ... There is an average of 207,754 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year ... 54% of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to the police [and] only about 3% of rapists ever serve a day in jail'.
5. In North America, according to Wikipedia, 'approximately 15% to 25% of women and 5% to 15% of men were sexually abused when they were children'.

I look at those woes as cancers in our midst. I can't prove it, but I say that going back to enshrining the procreative norm would radically shrink those cancers!

Are We Just Wrong about Sex Today?

I like to compare today with 50 years ago. In 1962, I was fifteen. Although "the Pill" had recently been introduced, in 1960, the old strictures were still pretty much in place. You mustn't ever, ever have sex — except, of course, with your spouse. That was the essence of the strictures. It was, we were taught, the moral ideal.

Of course, there was a sizeable gap between that ideal and what actually went on. I call it the "hypocrisy gap." In 1947 the first Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, came out, revealing that American men were having a surprising amount of illicit sex. In 1953, the second report was published: so were American women ... if to a lesser extent.

But read "Good news, bad news about teen sex behavior and HIV," an article from The Washington Post of July 24. Note that:

... 46 percent of U.S. high school students in 2011 reported ever having sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991. The percentage of students reporting having had four or more sex partners was 14 percent in 2011, down from 19 percent 20 years earlier.

That makes the Kinsey Reports seem prim. Think of it: almost one high-schooler in six having at least four sex partners by the time he or she dons the mortarboard and graduates.

These graphs accompanied the article:

The article tells us:

The data also showed that sexually active black students were [compared with whites and Hispanics] the most likely to use a condom in their most recent sexual encounter at 65 percent, but that is a drop from a high of 70 percent in 1999.

60 percent of black students were sexually active, and so 65 percent of that group — roughly 20 percent of all black high school students — were putting themselves at serious risk of HIV infection.

White and Hispanic kids were somewhat less likely to be having sex, but they were also slightly less likely to be using condoms, if they were sexually active, so their HIV risk factor was right up there, too.

This comes in a time when, as the article says:

Four of every 10 new HIV infections occur in people younger than 30, according to the [Centers for Disease Control]. So reducing risky sexual behavior during teenage years is key. The average age when teens begin to have sex is 16 ... .

And when :

The research suggests that black youth are benefiting from school-based education about HIV, but once they leave the school environment, gay and bisexual youth enter a high-risk environment where HIV prevalence is high. Having sex with partners who are also black, and older, poses risks and helps spread the virus.

And yet, over the past decade:

Overall, the number of U.S. high school students who have been taught about HIV and received sexual education in schools ... has declined steadily due to budget cutbacks.

So lots of kids are getting let down bigtime. Lots of them are having lots of sex. Lots of them either don't study HIV prevention in sex-ed class, or they ignore what they've been taught. Lots of them, whether black, brown, or white, or whether straight, gay, or bi, are in line for HIV infection ... and transmitting it to others.

I think the gap between the nominal ideal and what actually goes on today is far uglier than the "hypocrisy gap" of 50 years ago.

The nominal ideal is (a) if you are married, never to cheat on your spouse; ( b) if you aren't married, not to have really promiscuous sex, but to restrain yourself (at least somewhat) to "meaningful" sex; and (c) if you do have sex with other than a known-safe partner, always use a condom.

We all know what that ideal is today. We generally ignore it.

I call this gap the "rambunction gap." Its side effect: HIV/AIDS kills a whole lot of folks ... and that's major-league ugly.

The Hypocrisy Gap's Unlovely Side Effects

The hypocrisy gap of yore had some unlovely side effects, too. It was an outright sin against God to shirk the ideal, so everyone had to keep their sexual needs and feelings under wraps — women, especially, as men benefitted from the proverbial "double standard." The Bible said wives should be subordinate to their husbands, so their own sexual needs didn't count. Best if they just didn't have any sexual needs — openly, that is.

If a woman's secret sexual needs got loose at the wrong time and place, she might end up pregnant with no legal recourse to abortion. It was something she couldn't even admit to in public, being pregnant out of wedlock. In fact, the word "pregnant" wasn't allowed in polite conversation or on TV.

Teens couldn't be taught about sex in schools, in a society in which words like "penis" and "vagina" were occasions for fiery-red blushes.

Forbidden fruit such as teen sex and gay sex and oral sex and solo sexhad no place, at least nominally, in our lives.

Neither, supposedly, did divorce.

The Comparative Death Tolls of the Two Gaps

But — and this is my first main point — few died because of the hypocrisy gap. Because extracurricular sex was rigidly circumscribed, even Kinsey didn't find all that much of it — by today's standards — going on. So a disease like HIV/AIDS didn't have a chance to establish itself ... and the old venereal diseases, gonorrhea and syphilis, were already pretty well under control thanks to penicillin.

Back-alley abortions did claim some lives, as did occasional suicides owing to shame and guilt, but between the first recognition of AIDS in 1981 and today, the disease has led to over 30 million deaths. Thus, the wages of the rambunction gap.

A "Post-Christian Sexual Ethic"?

My second main point is that the nominal ideal that we pay lip service to today looks on paper like just what the doctor ordered as a candidate for a post-Christian sexual ethic. Of course, it needs to be fleshed out quite a bit from the simple way I described it above ... and I'm reading an excellent book which does just that, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, by Margaret A. Farley.

But what Farley promulgates is just an albeit fairly liberal version of the nominal sexual ethic we find today, but mainly ignore:

• Avoiding doing unjust harm to anyone, especially by treating them as sex objects.
• Insisting that sex be consensual and mutually fulfilling in relationships set up voluntarily among equal and committed adult partners.
• Requiring that sex be fruitful in some way, either reproductive or abstract.
• Maintaining that sex must always serve rather than corrupt the "social justice" needs of the community.

But any thoughtful, modern, secular person would say the same — there's not much of a specifically Christian or even broadly religious outlook here. Meanwhile, many Christians would object to her tolerance for homosexuality, sex outside marriage, abortion, birth control, and masturbation.

Which brings me to my third main point, that there's no evidence that a sexual ethic that does not grow out of putatively God-given strictures can contain the rambunction gap. In fact, the evidence we do have says just the opposite, and the banishment of old-time religion from the public square has tracked closely with the boiling over of the rambunction gap.

The "Procreative Norm"

At the core of the dispute between liberal and conservative Catholics concerning sex today is the role of procreation. Catholic doctrine has long enshrined the "procreative norm," insisting that all non-celibates who marry put openness to procreation at the very heart of their connubial lives.

Sex is good, not evil, the Church maintains ... but only when constrained by the procreative norm.

Contrast that with this paragraph from Farley's book, in which she talks of other, non-Christian philosophical currents in the Greek world in which the early Christians were founding their churches:

Gnosticism was a recurrent religious movement that influenced formulations of Christian sexual ethics for the first three centuries C.E. Some Fathers of the church taught that there were two extreme positions among gnostics — one in opposition to all sexual intercourse and the other permitting any form of sexual intercourse so long as it was not procreative. The ascription of this kind of ascetic/libertine dichotomy seems not to be accurate, but in any case, Christian thinkers tried to avoid it.

Celibacy for those called to it and, for others, married sex governed by the procreative norm — that was what the Church Fathers settled on as good and true doctrine.

It rules out the use of artificial methods of contraception, the Church has long maintained. It also rules out the Gnostics' "any form of sexual intercourse so long as it is not procreative."

So ... what goes on today, in a world with such a bodacious "rambunction gap"? We seem intent on engaging in any and every form of non-procreative sex, including but not limited to the terms of sex between married heterosexual partners.

When marriage partners use pills or condoms to avoid pregnancy, it's just one more stab to the heart of the procreative norm, conservative Catholics insist.

Farley proposes that that existing sexual ethic based on the procreative norm be updated to promulgate a new set of norms (see above).

Yet I don't see how Farley's proposal at all changes the secular normative ideal that (supposedly) rules our sexual behavior today. Most enlightened liberals, religious or secular, who have set the procreative norm conspicuously aside are already on board with Farley's replacement norms. And yet we have an ugly "rambunction gap" that is ruining countless lives via rampant rape and sexual assault (see here and here and here) and killing countless people via unchecked HIV infection.

I think we need to start reconsidering the value of the "procreative norm" as a religious and ethical tenet.

"Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?" ...

Ross Douthat

That was the title of a column by Ross Douthat in The New York Times of Sunday, July 14. A week later it was reprinted in the parish bulletin of St. Ignatius Church, Baltimore, with pastor Bill Watters, S.J., commenting that it offers food for thought.

And it truly does.

Douthat writes from the perspective of a conservative Catholic, while as a liberal one, I generally tend to disagree with him. But the points he raises are important, and they deserve to be considered by all.

Douthat has it that liberal Christianity, Protestant-style, has slid into an abyss of secularism and shrinking support. Churchgoers in mainstream denominations — Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran — are way down in numbers since the scurrilous sixties, when these faiths began deemphasizing the transcendant in favor of the what's-happening-now.

"The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life," Douthat writes. But the liberals have lost track of what people are to be personally converted to:

As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

So true.

But I still think Douthat goes too far, by identifying that sentiment with a general, undifferentiated opposition to:

... the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism.

Whoa! It's as if all the "evils" inherent in the progressive cultural forces of the last half century or more can be exorcised only by means of a widespread return to a more "dogmatic" faith.

So the recent Vatican crackdown against American religious women and the recent Fortnight for Freedom campaign of the American bishops can be seen as much-needed efforts to take back the night, as it were:

Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.

Catholic hospitals are, of course, among the institutions that under the new "contraception mandate" that Obamacare has brought about, will have to include free access to birth control in their employees' health insurance. Fortnight for Freedom opposed that on "religious freedom" grounds. At a deeper level, it's obvious that the more hospitals are run by administrators and the fewer by sisters, the more difficult it is to see them as "religious" in the first place ... and the more they would seem to qualify as institutions needing to be included in the contraception mandate.

All these things interlock with one another: the sexual revolution ... contraception ... women's health-care rights ... religious freedom ... Vatican crackdowns and bishops' campaigns .... a more dogmatic faith.

Truly food for thought!

Whither persuadability?

This is an election year, and in past elections there has been a veneer, at least, of the candidates engaging in real "debates" in an attempt to persuade picky voters to vote for them.

Richard Nixon, on left,
and John Kennedy

In 1960, we had the first televised presidential debate, Sen. John F. Kennedy (D) versus Vice President Richard M. Nixon (R). TV viewers decided they approved more of Kennedy than Nixon, and Kennedy went on to win the election by a razor-thin margin. The state of Illinois fell narrowly into his column, giving him a win in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

I remember that debate. It was about the issues — many of which I, as a 13-year-old, was clueless about.

Now, when we have "debates," candidates are drilled to slide off the issues whenever they don't fit into their rhetorical playbooks. The issues morph into talking points about how fine a candidate "I" am and how lousy "the other guy" is. It's campaign ads brought to life in the utterances of the candidates themselves — and it's virtually idea- and policy-free.

That's because the candidates think — and they're quite right about this — that nobody out there in TV land is persuadable. There are no rational arguments that could be brought up that would convince the voters to adopt a different point of view than the one they had going into the debate.

So watching a "debate" today is more about catching candidates in gaffes than about revising one's thinking.

Barack Obama

If I'm Barack Obama, I might wish I could persuade the unpersuaded in the electorate to vote for me because the programs I espouse for bringing down health care costs, or dealing with taxes and the budget, or coping with global warming and America's energy future are the best ones for the country.

Mitt Romney

If I'm Mitt Romney, I might hope the unpersuaded could be brought by my sensible arguments to agree with me about the need to get rid of senseless federal regulations that hamper our economic recovery.

Problem is: nobody out there is persuadable.

Nobody out there is willing to grapple with the issues in a rational way that opens the door to possible conversions in voting behavior.

Everybody out there — with the possible exception of a thin sliver of independent voters — is dug into hardened ideological trenches and won't ever budge.

And that thin sliver of independent voters and of the otherwise unpersuaded don't really matter, except in the possibly 8 or 12 "swing states" in the nation. If I'm unpersuaded in Maryland, where Obama is going to win hands down, it matters not at all whether one candidate or the other "moves the needle" for me personally in a televised "debate."

One state to the north, in Pennsylvania, "moving the needle" is indeed important, since Pennsylvania is a swing state with a lot of electoral votes at stake. The candidates desperately want to capture the independents and undecideds in Pennsylvania. Yet they have to do so while not alienating their "base." If the base stays home on election day, any gains in the middle will be for naught.

What brings the base reliably out? Not rational consideration of policy alternatives, which after all might cut against liberal or conservative shibboleths. So an Obama or a Romney needs to stick to a rhetorical script that energizes the base, while tossing out ill-defined scraps that just might sway the undecideds in the middle.

Is that any way to run an election?

The Opportunity Society

A recent Washington Post op-ed piece by the well-known economist Lawrence Summers (left), "Changing focus to inequalities in opportunity," hits an important nail on the head. What's really of more importance, he asks, equality of outcomes or equality of opportunity? Summers says the latter ought to be the focus of attention today.

Liberals have long sought outcomes equality. If some groups of people have less income or wealth than other groups, then the government ought to step in and redistribute same.

Conservatives rue redistributive government programs because they impose a drag on the economy: successful entrepreneurs are penalized by the taxes and other measures that take money from the rich to give to the not-so-rich. There is less incentive to succeed.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that ongoing dispute, Summers says disparities of wealth and income have been increasing, not decreasing ... and that's bad. It hurts American competitiveness, among other complaints.

"It is hard to see who could disagree with the aspiration to equalize opportunity," Summers writes, "or fail to recognize the manifest inequalities in opportunity today."

If "widening inequality jeopardizes the legitimacy of our political and economic system," as progressives claim, conservatives who insist there is nothing wrong with "success on a grand scale" should likewise be alarmed. America needs as many of its citizens as possible primed at a young age for success.

If only the children on the ever-narrower top rungs of the ladder get the best preparation for success in life, the whole country is worse off. There will be less innovation, less entrepreneurship, less economic dynamism.

What's the solution? "The global track record of populist policies motivated by inequality concerns is hardly encouraging," Summers points out, and "inequality is likely to continue to rise, even with all that can responsibly be done to increase tax burdens on those with high incomes and redistribute the proceeds. Fairness-oriented measures that are high on the usual liberal agendas today "are unlikely to even hold at bay the trend toward increasing inequality." So we need to focus a lot more than we do on equality of opportunity.

But how? "The number of children not born into the top 1 percent who move into it must equal the number of children born into the top 1 percent who move out of it over their lifetimes," Summers urges. "So a serious program to promote equal opportunity must seek to enhance opportunity for those not in wealthy families and to address some of the advantages currently enjoyed by the children of the fortunate."

Yes ... but, again, how?

"By far the most important step that can be taken to enhance opportunity is strengthening public education. For the past decade we have focused on ensuring that no child is left behind. This effort must continue, but if everyone is to have a real chance for great success we must also ensure that every child in public school can learn as much and go as far as his or her talent permits."

That means, Summers says, "judging schools on measures beyond the fraction of students who exceed some minimum." We need to supplement — or rethink — No Child Left Behind.

And the nation's leading colleges and universities — Summers teaches at Harvard and is its past president — should "make the kind of focused commitment to economic diversity that they have long mounted toward racial diversity. It is unrealistic to expect that schools [like Harvard] that depend on charitable contributions will not be attentive to offspring of their supporters. Perhaps though, the custom could be established that for each 'legacy slot' room would be made for one 'opportunity slot'."

Those are good, solid, specific recommendations, but what seems most important to me is that here is a goal that liberals and conservatives ought to be able to join hands over. It is also something Catholics who want to promote social justice should be foursquare behind. If either President Obama or Mitt Romney would make it the centerpiece of his election campaign, the entire country would cheer.

Bring Us Together!

I believe the main problem we face in America in this election year is not the economy, as important as that is. It is not Obamacare, as hot-button as that issue remains. It is not the budget, or taxes, or the federal debt, though all those are important. It is, rather, that Americans stand farther apart from one another than I can ever remember. We are a deeply divided nation. We need someone or something to bring us together.

Red vs. blue. Left vs. right. Rich vs. middle class. Citizens vs. immigrants, especially illegals. Social liberals vs. traditionalists. Straights vs. gays. Big government vs. small. The prerogatives of whites vs. the aspirations of nonwhites. These are political divides that have long existed — and there is nothing inherently wrong with them, until they become so fixed and hardened in place that no one is willing to compromise for the common good.

I think the principal reason the bishops in the Catholic Church are wrong to dig in their heels over the contraception mandate portion of Obamacare is that doing so divides rather than heals. If the bishops got their way, the employees of Catholic-run institutions would not be given contraception coverage in their health plans ... though other, similar, non-sectarian workers would. It would create yet another division in America, a nation in which vast majorities of women, Catholic and non-Catholic, use some form of contraception, at some point in their lives.

The bishops' stance is emblematic of all the inflexible stances being taken today. Republicans take a pledge never to raise taxes, no matter what. Democrats in control of the Senate won't advance any bill passed by the Republican House, no matter what.

When the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, at first liberals cheered, but the cheering died down when they realized that the deciding vote cast by Chief Justice Roberts did not uphold the rationale they favored: that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution should be interpreted broadly enough to justify the individual mandate, all by itself. Roberts instead called the penalty that those lacking health coverage must pay a "tax," which he said was within Congress's legitimate power to levy. Conservatives were unhappy at Roberts's side-switching to the extent that they are now even more earnestly pledging to do the impossible: repeal Obamacare.

Both sides are being ridiculous.

The individual mandate, which applies to anyone who lacks health insurance, is a prod to those who are in good health and have few doctor bills, who would otherwise be just as happy not to buy insurance, and who don't get insurance from their employer. They must now buy it on a state-run exchange or pay ... a tax. The upshot will be that their premiums will pour into the insurance fund that pays the medical bills of the ill and formerly uninsurable. It's an idea that was originally put forth by conservatives who wished to block liberals' efforts to enact a single-payer healthcare system, sometimes called "Medicare for everybody."

When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he enacted an individual mandate at the state level. It was at that time acceptable in conservative circles to do that.

That was then. This is now.

When true believers hold so fast to principle that we all end up being driven further apart, rather than brought together, I say that principle has to yield. But that's not what's happening today.

In my opinion, President Obama has been notably flexible during his presidency. He has not been the "socialist" his opponents claim ... far from it. For example, he changed the original contraception mandate to allow the cost of that coverage to be borne by insurers themselves, rather than by the Church. Though he has temporarily blocked the Keystone XL pipeline, he has allowed oil exploration in Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort seas. At times, it is true, he has moved in a decidedly progressive direction, rather than a conservative one, as when he came out in favor of gay marriage. But all in all, he has tried to strike a balance.

What does he get for it? Increased intransigence on the right.

We need to get the federal deficit under control, no? But Republicans won't raise income tax rates. So trimming the deficit would have to be done by expenditure cuts ... possibly in addition to vague suggestions about "tax reform" that would (if they could be enacted) eliminate certain tax deductions. Forced expenditure cuts across the board are due to happen this coming January 1, as is the end of the "Bush tax cuts." No one wants us to go over that fiscal "cliff" — it would boost taxes on the middle class, which Democrats hate, while cutting military outlays, which Republicans hate — but no one is putting forth credible alternatives.

Again, both sides are being ridiculous.

The Right Wing

But I believe the right wing, both religious and secular, is being more ridiculous than the left.

When Obama won in 2008 by a large margin over Senator John McCain, as a liberal I began licking my chops. My party controlled not only the White House but also both the Senate and the House — the Senate by virtue of a 60-vote supermajority. In his first year as president, Obama sent to Capitol Hill his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) ... and in town meetings all over, people came out of the woodwork to call it "socialist medicine." The Tea Party was born. Obama likewise supported, if tepidly, a House-passed measure to set up a "cap and trade" system for carbon emissions, the prime mover in global warming.

Then Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, died, and a special election saw Scott Brown, a moderate Republican, take his seat. The insuperable 60 votes the Democrats could muster to overcome a filibuster had become 59. It became impossible to get "cap and trade" — another regulatory mechanism, once favored by conservatives, that they have now disavowed — through the Senate. PPACA was passed, without a single GOP vote, only by some fancy legislative footwork in the Senate — and Republicans immediately starting working to get it declared unconstitutional.

I'd be wrong about the GOP being the more intransigent of the two parties if it weren't the case that both the individual mandate and cap and trade weren't originally conservatives' own policy suggestions.

But never mind. The overarching point is that everyone has dug ideological trenches and is doing nothing but lobbing mortars back and forth. This has got to stop. And it won't stop until some real grownups step forth and say it must. How about you, President Obama? How about you, Mitt Romney? How about you, Catholic bishops?

Please ... bring us together!