Double Standards
24th February 2012
I think it gets it exactly right, that while both Santorum and Obama say that marriage is between a man and a woman only, everybody knows that only Santorum actually means it, and Obama is just saying so.
We seem to have discovered a moral hazard that is really, really hazardous and arguably not very moral either. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad that the descendants of the people who brought us prohibition should now have done so much to create a society where the men sit around and play video games and the women work and have babies the fathers of whom are long gone (see above) in ever increasing numbers. And the solution to this is somehow that we all should subsidize the already dirt cheap Pill (presumably because cigarettes and lottery tickets are so expensive). And all this somehow follows from hygiene. Very strange. It’s all as clean and sterile as a condom still in its foil wrapper and as pastel as diaphram case and yet it ends up with a 4 month old whose daiper hasn’t been changed in two days. Go figure. But here I am being naive. I am forgetting that the solution to failed policy is always more of the same.
February 24th, 2012 at 08:16
So, the gist of his argument is that if birth control were unavailable, men would stick around to raise the babies?
How does that follow?
February 24th, 2012 at 11:28
“We seem to have discovered a moral hazard that is really, really hazardous and arguably not very moral either. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad that the descendants of the people who brought us prohibition should now have done so much to create a society where the men sit around and play video games and the women work and have babies the fathers of whom are long gone (see above) in ever increasing numbers.”
I was struck by the seeming random application of morality. Dennis, I came away with the same impression. I’m not sure if he is making the right inference. If we have created a moral crisis by making contraception so available, what about the moral crisis created by “free love”? Sex casually or with superficial commitments seems to be the moral crisis to me. Maybe that is what he was driving at. Available contraception has made casual sex a culturally accepted practice or at least aided its acceptance. The secondary crisis comes from haphazard application of contraception? IDK. Once it is culturally acceptable to engage in sexual activity then go home, well… that’s what will happen contraception or not.