Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution

hi my name is Taylor Hanul and I'm a senior this year from Hillsdale Michigan and I'm majoring in biochemistry it is my pleasure today to get the chance to introduce Mary ever stat Mary other stat is a senior research fellow at the faith and reason Institute a graduate of Cornell University mrs. ever stat was a special assistant to ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick at the United Nations and speechwriter to the Secretary of State George Shultz during the Reagan administration she has written for numerous publications including Time The Wall Street Journal the Washington Post National Review first things and the Weekly Standard she is the author of numerous books including it's dangerous to believe religious freedom and its enemies how the West really lost God a new theory of secularization and Adam and Eve after the pill paradoxes of the sexual revolution please join me in a warm welcome for mrs. ever stab thank you good afternoon and thank you for that warm welcome it's a privilege to be here for the first time at Hillsdale a college I have admired and hoped to visit for years now sincerest thanks to the conference organizers for inviting me and for this unique opportunity to reflect on one of the most critical developments not only in recent times but in human history itself the sexual revolution a few words about my enduring interest in the subject like everyone else here I have diverse curiosities and leanings I've been fortunate to write in many venues about many different things but more and more I have found that when trying to understand the post 1960s contemporary world tracing matters to their roots inevitably involves circling back to the sexual revolution including in some ways that we will count here today academics vary in their definitions but here's a straightforward uncontroversial formula the revolution refers to the changes in sexual behavior and mores following the widespread adoption and approval of reliable contraception over half a century ago the first accelerant here is the birth control pill widely dispersed in the population after 1963 and the second accelerant is the legalization of abortion on demand in 1973 via Roe vs. Wade modern contraception and legalized abortion not only changed behavior they also changed attitudes around the world social tolerance of non marital sex in all its forms has risen alongside these other changes for logical reasons that I've talked about elsewhere including in Adam and Eve after the pill now with the possible exception of the Internet it's impossible to think of any other single phenomenon since the 1960s that has reshaped humanity around the world as profoundly as this revolution some of the revolutions record is well-known for years ago on the 50th anniversary of the approval of the birth control pill there was an outpouring of commentary and reflection most of it positive the revolution it was claimed and acclaimed in Time magazine and other secular venues had leveled the playing field in the economic marketplace between men and women as it had never been leveled before it had also confirmed could conferred freedom on women such that they had never known before both those propositions are true as far as they go but there's another side of the ledger that's been mostly ignored by a mainstream society saturated with the revolutions pleasures with every passing year more evidence accumulates that will someday change that predominant happy storyline today I'd like to discuss five ways in which the revolution has reconfigured reality as we know it including reality has taken straight from your news feeds and Twitter headlines so let's look in some detail at five seeming paradoxes that point to the revolutions power and in particular to its awe-inspiring destructive power I'd like to start with a little story that captures the scale of that change in a snapshot I grew up in a series of small towns scattered across beautiful and forbidding upstate New York north of the Hudson River Valley a planet away from New York City in an area known as the leather stocking region where author james fenimore cooper's set his famous tales this was and still is rural blue-collar country it was the kind of place where more local boys in the 60s went to Vietnam than went to colleges and universities in many ways a lot about this place is still the same as it was when I as a child with one massive exception which we'll call the family thing in the 1960s most men in this area worked as manual laborers mainly in local copper and silver mills many women if they married stayed home most families no matter how chaotic were still intact religious and non-religious alike one of my strongest memories from those years is an odd but significant one in 1972 just months before the legalization of abortion a teenage girl in town became pregnant the baby's father was a young soldier newly returned from Vietnam the town gossips were up in arms because as it turned out he didn't plan to marry her in those days that was considered shocking although pregnant brides were not exactly unknown and pregnant teenage Brides for that matter men who didn't marry their pregnant girlfriends were objects of opprobrium eventually the girl had the baby somewhere else where adoption followed she came back and finished high school to my knowledge without stigma but the stigma that does remain memorable was the other one the one about her boyfriend the idea that he should have taken responsibility which the majority of adults in their era certainly seemed to believe is an idea that's now gone vanished with the revolution now fast-forward some twenty years in the nineteen 1990s I went back for a visit to the same town and I saw a former teacher she told me that in the high school that year in a class of 200 graduating seniors one-third of the girls were pregnant not one was married and of course we can safely assume there were other pregnancies besides the visible ones because various girls were also rumored to have gotten abortions this too wasn't back in 1992 that was in 1972 because after all Roe vs. Wade had been the law of the land for two decades so here's the take-home from my story from one scandalous pregnancy in a rural high school in the 1970s too many non scandalous pregnancies in the same school by the 1990s that's one snapshot showing how the sexual revolution has changed the world it also leads us to the first of several paradoxes about the revolution let's call this paradox one if the whole point of the revolution was the availability of cheap reliable birth control then why did the following decades see an unprecedented rise in both abortions and pregnancies outside of marriage this is a profoundly important question it's an intellectual puzzle so puzzling that it's come to engage attention in serious places after all back when contraception became commonplace many people of goodwill defended it precisely for the reason that they thought it would render abortion obsolete Margaret Sanger is one prominent if surprising example she called abortion barbaric and she argued that contraception would put it out of business of course there's reason to wonder how transparent she was given that Planned Parenthood has gone on to claim her as its patron saint but even so Sanger was making a point that might seem to make common sense a great many people both before and after the 60s have believed something similar but the empirical record since the 1960s shows their logic to be wrong that's exactly why research papers and arguments have emanated from the world of social science during the past decades trying to explain the puzzling fact that far from preventing abortion and unplanned pregnancy contraceptions effects on society more convoluted contraception abortion and out of wedlock births all exploded simultaneously so consider this attempt to solve the puzzle from over 20 years ago by economists George Akerlof Janet Yellen and Michael Katz writing in the quarterly Journal of economics they spelled out the dynamics of these simultaneous explosions with admirable clarity in a summary of their argument they said before the sexual revolution women had less freedom but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare today women are more free to choose but men have afforded themselves the comparable option if she's not willing to have an abortion or use contraception the man can reason why should I sacrifice myself to get married by making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother the Revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the Father unquote so in other words they say reason one why contraception led to more pregnancy and abortion was that it eroded the so-called shotgun wedding or the idea that men had equal responsibilities post contraception as the example of the story goes to show the reasoning became that pregnancy was the woman's responsibility and that if birth control failed that was not the man's problem there is also the secondary fact that contraception and abortion are bound together juridically that is to say as a matter of law as Michael Holick professor at Catholic University of America recently pointed out quote as regards jurisprudence the fruit of contraception is abortion by 1973 only eight years after Griswold the Supreme Court in Roe versus Wade had inferred the right from the right to contraception a right to abortion unquote or to put the point more kalokhe in the matter of legal reasoning no contraception on-demand no abortion on demand another interesting theory about why contraception failed to prevent abortion comes from researchers Scot Lloyd writing in the National Catholic bioethics quarterly in 2015 using studies and statistics from the abortion industry itself he argues like others that one leads to the other he summarizes quote the bottom line is contraceptives do not work as advertised and their failure is at the heart of the demand for abortion contraception enables sexual encounters and relationships that would not have happened without it in other words when couples use contraception they agree to sex when pregnancy would be a problem this leads to a desire for abortion unquote so there are several other efforts within social science to explain this same paradox but the larger point stands contrary to what people back in the 60s believed would happen abortion and unplanned pregnancies have both flourished despite contraception now many people present at the creation of the revolution couldn't possibly have anticipated that paradoxical consequence many people operating in good faith hoped that humanity would master these new technologies and that they proved to be a social good but those of us alive today are in possession of a wealth of empirical evidence that's been piling up for decades now and we can see through perfectly secular social science that the revolutions story took a different and darker turn now let's look at paradox 2 which illustrates the same argument it goes like this the sexual revolution was supposed to liberate women yet simultaneously it has become harder than before to have what most women still say they want marriage and a family that's not a tendentious way of phrasing the point women from across the political spectrum agree that marrying and mating for life has become more difficult than it used to be that's one reason why biological experiments like commercial surrogacy and egg freezing are now being conducted in the case of egg freezing with the enthusiastic endorsement of the corporate world the idea behind these innovations is to extend the horizon of natural fertility so that women are freer to stay in the workplace and can take longer to find a husband and raise a family the idea like the idea behind widespread contraception and abortion on demand is to empower women and put them in control yet here again paradoxically many women seem to find themselves less able than ever to get married stay married and have a family just consider the way this preoccupation echoes across media and social media here are some recent headlines from the New York Post 8 reasons why New York women can't find a husband number 2 by the way is always looking at your iPhone Daily Beast why college-educated women can't find love and there are many like-minded headlines again from across the political spectrum illustrating the conundrum here well as it turns out economists have explained the reality behind these apprehensions - they are more an unanticipated fallout from the revolution sociologists Mark Regnerus has explained this very clearly in his new book cheap sex men marriage and monogamy which uses the tools of economics to explain the post-revolutionary sexual market aided by a formidable supply of new data that he uses to make his case so I will spare you the data sets and regression analyses and just go straight to the point Regnerus distills the essence of his argument as follows - plenty of women it appears that men have a fear of commitment but men on average are not afraid of commitment the story is that men are in the driver's seat in the marriage market and are optimally positioned to navigate it in a way that privileges their interests and preferences unquote in other words the same force that eroded the shotgun wedding has gone on to empower men not women one of the economists cited by Regnerus is Timothy Ryker who wrote a lengthy and like-minded economic analysis of the Revolution in a 2010 essay for first things I recommend this essay especially for the Economist among young mr. Reichert argued using data from the 1960s onward that quote the revolution has resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth and power from women and children to men unquote that is a striking formulation more technically he points out contraception set up what economists call a prisoner's dilemma game in which each woman is induced to make decisions rationally that ultimately make her and all women worse off unquote so let's step back from the argument for a moment obviously we are not speaking here of the deliberately countercultural clubs and communities and universities including this one that have banded together as a counterculture since the 60s precisely because they want an alternative to the dominant revolution embracing culture but if we keep our focus on the other side the going cultural narrative and non-religious precincts the the kinds of places where the revolution isn't regarded as problematic this is what we find in that world which is now the cultural mainstream the fact that a lot of men aren't settling down marrying and having families is a constant preoccupation it's why the phrase Peter Pan syndrome was coined in the 1980s it's by the phrase failure to launch is common shorthand today and it's why man a lesson for those who haven't heard that one became a noun in urban dictionary so all of these culturally common phenomena according to the economists have the same origin which has diminished incentives for men to marry due to the flooded sexual marketplace this outcome too is not one that people who cheered the revolution in this who cheered on the Revolution in the 60s could possibly have foreseen and it also can't be an outcome that many of them would have wanted a third paradox has become the dominant social social media soap opera of the day and it goes like this the Revolution was supposed to empower women so why do we have the secular sex scandals of 2017 etc and the me2 movement in addition to the fact that marriage for many women has become a harder reach there's also another paradoxical fallout of the revolution and that's the fact that in retrospect it licensed sexual predation on a scale not seen outside of conquering armies let's start with the emblematic example of Hugh Hefner founder of playboy who died last year his vast empire was made of course on pornographic photos of a great many women he made himself an exemplar of his own philosophy the Playboy philosophy of sophisticated drinks and music and of course easy sex it was a commercial idea that caught on quickly and it seems safe to guess that most people when playboy started had no idea what would later emerge from accounts within the Playboy Mansion about the sordid truth behind the advertising nevertheless when Hefner died many progressives including many stealth styled feminists glowed with praise for this apostle of the river lucien why because he cloaked his predatory designs in the language of sexual progressivism as a piece and Forbes summarized the record Playboy published its first article supporting the legalization of abortion in 1965 she's well before most other venues were signaling support that was eight years before the roe v-- wade decision and even before the feminist movement had latched on to the cause it also published the phone numbers of hotlines that women could call and get safe abortions unquote my point is that Hefner's support of these causes appears an ex trick ibly tied up with his desire to live in a way that exploited women and that same theme as the unwritten common denominator that joins together many of today's secular sex scandals the Weinstein etc scandals revealed the same strategic role occupied by abortion for many other men who want to objectify women and who disdain monogamy after all without the backup of abortion where would these men be they would be in court paying child support now in this case too more and more thinkers outside the religious sphere have come to conclude the same thing the revolution did not deliver on its promises to women instead it further enabled men especially men without the best of intentions consider this quotation from non-religious social scientist Francis Fukuyama author of the end of history this comes from his 1999 book the great disruption which is about the 60s he said quote one of the greatest frauds perpetrated during the great disruption was the notion that the sexual revolution was gender neutral benefiting women and men equally in fact the revolution served the interests of men and in the end put sharp limits on the game that women might otherwise have expected from their liberation from traditional roles unquote that's almost 20 years ago and with that observation mr. Fujiyama joins a long and growing list of non-religious thinkers who can now see more clearly in retrospect what some religious leaders have been saying all along again the revolution effectively democratized sexual predation no longer did one have to be a king or a master of the universe to sexually abuse or harass women in unrelenting serial fashion all one needed was a world in which many women would be assumed to use contraception and in which many would also be further deprived of male protectors in other words all one needed was the world delivered by the revolution a fourth paradox that has barely been studied at all at least not systematically needs to be and that is the effect of the revolution on Christianity itself to look back over the decades is to understand that the revolution is simultaneously polarizing the church's within and creating tighter ties among different denominations than ever before for a long time after the 60s commentators have argued about what the 60s meant for the churches some welcomed the innovations of Vatican 2 for example and the radical theological transformations of mainline Protestantism others deplored these changes but wherever they have stood observers of Christianity today have come to find one central fact unavoidable the revolution is the single most divisive issue now afflicting the faith itself and this is recognised by Protestants and Catholics on both sides of the divide in 2004 for example a book called a church at war by ste and bates about the anglican communion summarized the argument on its back cover will the politics of sex tear Anglicans and Episcopalians apart i think we know the answer to that one a few years later writing of the same subject in a book called mortal Follies Episcopalians and the crisis of mainline Christianity author William Murchison concluded his argument with this observation for Episcopalians as for large numbers of other Christians the Paramount issues today are sex and sexual expression neither viewed by the culture as a means to an end but as the end unquote in his 2015 book onward Russell Moore reflected on the tensions between evangelical progressives and traditionalists like this quote when it comes to religion in America at the moment progress always boils down to sex unquote and there are many more quotes that I could give you making the point that this truth is now widely recognized so once more as in our other examples it seemed safe to say that the divisive nests out there today in the churches wasn't anything that most Christians of the 1960's wanted to embrace the point is that those voices within the church's decades ago who just wanted Christianity to loosen up didn't know what they were starting which is today's figurative civil war across denominations within the faith itself a fifth and four now final paradox the revolution didn't stop at sects what many people thought would be a private transformation of relations between individuals has gone on to radically reconfigure not only family life but life period perhaps the least understood of the revolutions effects are these what might be called the macro cosmic consequences the way in which it continues to affect not only individuals but society and politics both some of these changes are demographic across much of the world families are smaller and more splintered from within than ever before in history some effects are political smaller and more fractured families have put unprecedented pressure on the welfare states of the Western world by reducing the tax bases required to sustain them there are also social effects and some of these are only beginning to be mapped like the sharp rise in people living alone or in reporting or in people who report greatly reduced human contact or other measures that make up the burgeoning field of what's called loneliness studies and then there's the spiritual fallout which also couldn't have been foreseen in the 60s I have argued elsewhere that the revolution has given rise to a new secularist quasi religious faith the most potent such body of beliefs since Marxism Leninism according to this new faith pleasure is the highest good and there is no clear moral standard beyond consent for anything that adults wish to do with one another whether they are conscious of it or not many people in what is now the mainstream culture of our world treat the sexual revolution as religious bedrock off-limits for revision no matter what consequences it has all of these are just some examples of the new world that needs mapping out there and that will come to absorb intellectual attention for what we should hope is a long time to come and there's grounds for optimism it's taken over 50 years after all for opinion including non-religious opinion to realign about just some of the revolutions negative legacy it may take 50 more or a hundred for a full and honest empirical and intellectual accounting revisionist thinking about the revolutions effect in the world however has only just begun in closing one parting thought the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was once sent by a journal to report about what happened in a local slaughterhouse what he saw there moved him deeply his subsequent description included an immortal line that I think applies widely including to us here today after relaying the facts of the matter Tolstoy observed with devastating simplicity we cannot pretend we don't know these things and that I think is exactly where humanity is in 2018 with respect to the sexual revolution we can no longer pretend we don't know these things back in the 1960s people could plead ignorance including in good faith about the fallout to come many had no idea how many millions of children would subsequently grow up without fathers or how many more millions would be aborted or just how much people from fractured homes might suffer in diverse ways including turning to drugs and other self-destructive behaviors many people back then hoped that the revolution would not incur collateral damage and in fairness who could have foreseen the library of social science that would be built over the next 50 years documenting just some of the human damage out there some people 50 years ago even hoped that the new freedoms and technological controls would have a stabilizing effect on marriage itself as everyone knows the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae which also reaches its fiftieth anniversary this year went on to become widely despised across the decades precisely for arguing otherwise for saying that the revolution would hurt romance and family and end up licensing predatory men and malignant governments in many places it's still reviled for those reasons a great many people including within the Catholic Church have ferociously resisted human evita's rejection of the revolution including in some pretty high places but again in 2018 can we still in good faith pretend we don't know these things in 1953 when the first issue of Playboy arrived on newsstands many people might have wanted to believe its market hype about enhancing the sophistication and urbanity and grooming of American men but by 2018 we can't pretend that this mainstreaming of Pinnock pornography has been anything but a disaster for romance and a prime mover of today's divorces and other breakups similarly in 1973 even supporters of roe v wade could not have imagined the evidence to come some 58 million never born micro humans in the United States gendercide or the Selective killing of girls for being girls in various countries around the world also numbering in the millions Norwood supporters back then have imagined the technological leap that would unveil the truth about abortion once and for all the sonogram machine can today's advocates for Roe claim the same unknowing that they could too faced facts squarely and to use them to tell a truthful story is not to deliver a jeremiad it is to empower going back to the example of Tolstoy his observation about not pretending wasn't just some pretty literary turn it it's a banner to carry through life to reject living under the falsehoods told by others about the revolution even if they are now the dominant narrative of the age is to embrace the freedom to write a new narrative and a truer one only one step is needed toward revising the revolutions legacy in the direction of truth ceasing to pretend that we don't know the record when every single year reveals it more and more thank you [Music] thank you mrs. ever stet has graciously agreed assigned copies of her book Adam and Eve after the pill paradoxes of the sexual revolution immediately following the lecture outside of Phillips auditorium we now have time for a few questions please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to be brought to you Supper's not thank you so much for coming out and speaking to us today so in 2015 the United States Supreme Court heard the case of Berger fell versus Hodges in which Justice Samuel Alito asked then Solicitor General Donald Verrilli what is going to be the impact of this decision on private colleges and universities that refused to recognize same-sex marriage in the same sense that for instance Bob Jones refused to recognize interracial marriages and verelli respond this is going to be an issue so my question to you is do you agree with verelli is this going to be an issue for colleges moving forward if so and if not if you could talk to us a little bit about what the role of law is going to be here moving forward after that decision thank you so much first let me say I'm not a lawyer so I'm not qualified to speak to the law but I'm glad you brought up Justice Alito I think in his opinions he has seen most clearly that what we're talking about here when we talk about secularism and religion is actually two rival faiths and he saw that very clearly and he saw that if the state enshrined one which it has for some intents and purposes the other would suffer which it is I think we're all pretty aware of that calling attention to this struggle as a struggle between religious faiths I think is more true to the facts than saying that it's about secularism versus religious belief people are wired to believe something the question is always what so I think just for starters we have to like keep breaking the ground of making the other side understand that what they're talking about is their own set of religious beliefs and that the state has to be even-handed between those things yes ma'am you mentioned the the effect of the revolution on Christianity what about on Muslim aspect that's a great question and it's not something that I feel qualified to talk about but about Christianity I think it's very interesting that in the case of Protestantism as well as Catholicism what's ended up happening is a Christian explosion across Africa and in this explosion more and more because of the civil war within the Western churches people are looking to leadership from a more traditional the issues that consume us these social so-called social issues are not the issues that consume African Christians for the most part and I think one of the reasons for optimism is that we can expect leadership from that quarter and it will be unafraid leadership that won't be pulled as pulled into the secularist mainstream that we have thank you for speaking miss Deborah Scott you've spoken a great deal about the negative effects of the sexual revolution here in the United States and touch briefly on international demographics in the post-revolution world could you further elaborate on the extent to which in your view American culture has exported these negative effects to foreign countries and give us any ideas you have that could help us begin reversing that process well that's easy I think just as we look back on the 60s and say wow that looks weird now you know this looks weird this looks weird this looks weird I think in 50 years one of the things that's going to look really weird in the rearview mirror is that you have people like Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation proselytizing for contraception all over places with poorer darker people this is a very peculiar thing and it sends a really I think arrogant message which used to be known as the ugly American you know the American who goes around the world and stomps around trying to impose his views on everybody else this is a particularly I think noxious area where the view of America that people have in places like India Africa others one could name is partly the view of white people coming in and saying the solution to our problems is there should be fewer of you I don't mean this is what the people who do this kind of proselytizing have in mind I don't certainly don't think they're conscious of it but that is what it looks like very often on the receiving end and I think just having a little more humility about our nongovernmental organizations and the imaged negative image that they send of the United States I think that would be a good thing for starters and just raising consciousness about it seems to be the way to go thank you so much for your talk you mentioned that the Catholic Church is headed up a lot of the attack against the the sexual revolution the pushback with Humana vitae and Pope John the Paul Pope John Paul the second theology of the body and there's been a lot of division among other denominations about what to do about this what do you think the role of the evangelical church should be and what should they do to try to get behind the effort to push back against the sexual revolution like I have enough trouble trying to tell the Catholic Church what to do you know it's it's really interesting I think within both traditions there's a certain diehard contingent that comes straight out of the 60s that is not reproducing itself literally or figuratively that is to say when you look at who leads the charge on backing away from traditional teaching these days it's not the younger people I mean the younger people are coming into the churches Protestant and Catholic alike because they're looking for orthodoxy they're looking for something real you know I mean that is the signal thing about the Millennials that everybody agrees on that they're looking for something authentic so those people are on the traditionalist side of the equation and over time I think it's going to make some of this fewer just go away one book I would mention in this regard is there's a demographer named Eric Kaufmann who wrote a book some of you may have heard of it's called shell the religious and here at the earth and he makes the point he's perfectly secular but he shows that over time you can expect that religion will not only not go away but that the heterodox elements of it will eventually peel off and the reason is that the more religious people are the more they have families of size he calls this the iron rule of demography and over time the younger more faithful more Orthodox elements you know sort of once they put granny on the iceberg but you know they tend to have they tend to become more and more of the flavor of the church so this summer in New York City I met a lot of young Christian women who were single and looking for love and I'm wondering are there ways to I mean I mean there and my favorite I mean they were like they went to church and like I just met up with them in groups and they said you know we have these problems that there are just people and there's not a lot of men like who are in seem to be interested in awesome so I'm wondering are there ways to level the playing field I guess somehow in dating between men and women oh is that not a problem do you think of the cycle I mean I guess I'm interested in what you have to say well remember the New York Post says stop looking at your iPhone the first Harder's but in a way no because we're up against biology I mean that's the whole point of freezing eggs right is that men most men are fertile until forever and and women are not without a great deal of artificial interference so that's what egg freezing is for if that's where we have to go to level the playing field and I mean my guess would be we need to look at the playing field differently or build a new one which is what I see in these you know encounter cultural communities all the time who are not playing by these rules who are not on tinder who are not you know shopping for people that way and I think there is a lot to be said that's optimistic like that because the 1960s not only gave rise to the counterculture of its time it also has given rise to a very opposite counterculture that we see in places like this that we see in a lot of campus groups including on secular campuses of and all of that is grounds for hope so again no jeremiad so I mean are there ways that the church can help with that because I think these were young Christian women and they just like weren't having any I like there was just no men who are stepping up and do you think that's pervaded the church but there's like no no dating happening and I don't know I don't think he was just for like one church group that I went to it was several church groups that I went to over New York and it just seemed to be kind of a common problem so I'm wondering like how can the the church help with that or like what ya know I mean clearly some of what's going on here is that people are using tinder and other kinds of you know things on their phone to meet people because the churches are not doing what historically they did and that's not to dump on the churches but I mean in Washington DC where I'm from I can think of a number of venues for young adults that are specifically you know designed for this that is not in a creepy way of like you know on mass matchmaking but just to bring people together who have shared ideas and who don't want to be meeting in bars and on tinder so yeah I'm sure there's a lot more that churches could all do in this regard hi my question is with today's media presence that kind of jumps at the slightest word against this empirical evidence as to kind of the true reasons for the decline in our culture what in what ways can we gently educate the populace as to the actual empirical evidence behind these kind of down downward spirals maybe in a less controversial way say than like a ben shapiro figure oh yeah i think there's plenty of it I mean what I try to do in part is look at evidence that's not coming from religious precincts because I think that's very powerful evidence I'll give you an example some of you those of you who listen to Eminem probably know that he has a new song suck my ed sheeran called the river and it's very moving upsetting song came out last month it is man expressing his fury and his remorse over an abortion that is perfectly secular evidence that the idea that arose from the 1960s that's enshrined and roe v wade you know the blob of tissues idea is just untenable I mean if someone like raps biggest superstar can see that and put that out there that's proof that the ground has really shifted I think we should look for openings like that I think we should make you know common cause with feminists when the occasion suits I'll give you an example there's I think one fully one member of the board of now who is against commercial surrogacy because she thinks it exploits women so you know when the church were the one that churches resonate with natural law and come up with these rules for Humanity we have to have faith that that's not arbitrary that's like resonating with something about human nature that other people can see including people who are not churched and I think the final proof of this is the fact that on the social issues support for abortion has been dropping among younger people ever since say the invention of the sonogram so there we have another case where you know people just don't want to go there just because of the evidence that they've seen and I think you know we should work with all of that I think there's a big coalition out there waiting to happen on abortion on the life issues that might swing the pendulum the other way and on some other stuff thank you mrs. Evers dad for coming to speak here at Hillsdale I do one cultural trend I noticed that resulted from the sexual revolution is the loosening a standard for modesty and dress especially for women women and so you said want this the step that we need to take is to not is to acknowledge that the sort of truth behind what has resulted from the sexual revolution so would you think that churches acknowledging acknowledging the problem of set of dress and modesty do you think that could be a good step in trying to undo the damage of the psycho revolution yeah I think that's a great point I mean that is something that gets soft peddled and it's also something that everybody who's the parent of a daughter is aware of and again I mean I think there could be quite a lot to work with there yeah but part of what we're up against here is that a lot of women have been told have imbibed the lie that you know they're kind of interchangeable units with men they're not and so to establish standards for modesty it has to be explained the ways in which the sexes differ but yes I'm sure there's a lot of education that could be done that way thank you great point you've spoken a lot about how this issue affects females and certainly it's a very female centric issue but my question is in the secular world there's very much the claim that men should not speak about topics such of this and they have no business kind of interfering in abortion and in birth control pills so my question is to what degree is that the responsibility of one or both sexes to reverse this trend and how can men kind of get their foot in on the secular field in addressing these issues when they're largely told they shouldn't speak about them well I mean a little spine I I don't mean that demeaning Lee I mean to say like we have to be careful ourselves that we don't absorb lies of the kind that I was describing in the speech and one of those lies is the idea that you're not privileged to speak about X Y or Z unless you line up a B or C on the identity calculus I mean if anything I think trying to appeal to other people's reason and giving them the dignity of being considered full conversational partners is something that's a very good example to the other side because the other side doesn't usually do it so I would say if there are men hanging back from this discussion because they feel like they don't have standing to have an opinion then they've bought into a kind of false consciousness that they need to leave behind somewhere you've spoken some about how damaging apps such as tender can be to the modern dating culture and I'm just curious like do you think that religious dating apps such as Christian mingle and J swipe are in ways similarly exploitive and damaging to the formation and foundation of relationships like is the Internet culture of instant gratification in dating still damaging even when it's not secular I think getting in the habit of shopping for human beings the way you would shop on Amazon has got to take its toll that's not to say there aren't worse ways of doing it or better ways of doing it but fundamentally and I would appeal here to Mark Regnerus his book which I urge anybody interested in this stuff to read cheap sex which just came out he has a sensational title but the numbers are anything but sensational and he is particularly concerned with tinder and related apps he actually makes the argument that the three big technological leaps have been the birth control pill the invention of really high quality internet pornography and third he puts this on the same level devices that are you know absent that allow you to shop for people and one thing he's able to show is that the more of these are used the less likely it is that any one of them sticks because there's always the thought well if this one doesn't work out tomorrow morning I can just you know go back to that so I was here all day yesterday went home and I rose this morning to discover that the Senate yesterday failed to pass legislation which would have prohibited abortions after weeks very disappointing to read that apparently there were actually two Republican senators who voted to not go along with the legislation and of course I believe all the Democrats did it had already been passed in the Congress side on the house side and failed in the Senate so my question for you is do you think that in some ways this matter of abortion has really become more of a dog whistle issue for a lot of Republicans who are in fact they actually don't want it to be changed because they know they can continue to blow this whistle and to bring conservatives to vote for them but when the rubber meets the road they're actually unwilling to do what they do the right thing in this matter I was at the March for Life a couple of weekends ago and President Trump said a few things that indicated that if legislation were passed that he would actually sign it and it seems we've got a Republican House we have a Republican Senate we have a Republican president if if this is ever going to happen it seems like now is the time for it to happen otherwise really the Republicans are just cowards on this matter and they're using it to manipulate conservatives do you would you agree with that what is your opinion on that I can't speak to the state of their souls I don't know how many people on the Republican side are cynics are opportunists about this but I would point to a couple of reasons for optimism one is the fact that the decline in support for abortion among younger voters especially is something that is going to have to be reckoned with it may not be this year it may not be 10 years from now but it shows no sign of declining and it's something that politicians will have to take into account as a subsidiary point it was noted after the election that it was said by some Democrats and progressives maybe we've been too absolutist about abortion maybe that's where you know we could do a little compromising and get a pro-life voice back on our party again now so far not much has come of that but I think the fact that that thought emanated upwards and from various people suggests that eventually the Democratic Party is going to have to stop is going to have to relinquish its current absolutism on this and the other reason for optimism is that I was also at that March for Life and it's unmistakable the the face of that movement is a young face and the other side has nothing to match it again because neither literally or nor morally do they reproduce themselves in this way there are plenty of young women including young celebrities who they put up but they don't have anything like that show of force that's on them all and sooner or later the fact that like whatever you think about abortion you have to acknowledge that we've got the most extreme such regimen in the world almost that too is going to have to be reckoned with and I think by both parties so disappointing though that outcome that particular outcome was I think keep trying is probably the best thing to say about it we have time for one more question well one of my questions is the impact on children first of all you you talked about things that we can see at one point parents prided themselves and the number of children they could have today we seem to think small families are the norm and also it's the impact on the fatherless homes you know the number of children that are living in split homes these are things that anyone can see in our society you know what Western civilization is not repeat reproducing itself there is but there are two kinds of evidence here are the evidence of one census right in word what one see including in one's own surroundings and then there's also what I only referred to glancingly just because it's too large to get into the entire library of social science establishing all the various connections between the fractured family and bad outcomes for kids bad outcomes defined as things that I think most of us are familiar with lower educational achievement higher criminality etc and of course it upsets people to hear about this because something like half of almost half of all kids in America are now going to grow up without their biological father in the home so that's a lot of you know collateral damage but we need to recognize it as collateral damage and again you know as with other elements of this general argument I would look for friends in unexpected places I've had occasion to write elsewhere about popular music you know as jarring as it sounds two people who grew up with the Beach Boys there's a lot to work with and the music out there because a lot of it is reflecting all of these themes of you know what it's like to come from a tumultuous home what it's like not to know your father etc and this is especially dominant in rap music interestingly enough so I would just try to build bridges wherever we can to the understanding that the way many people are living now is unnatural not their fault but unnatural nonetheless and that there's like a better place where we can get this country [Applause]

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 97,380

Keywords: 60's, Sexual Revolution, History

Id: 7pki484uEXQ

Length: 59min 47sec (3587 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2018