Part-Time Pundit

Book Review: The Meaning of Marriage by Robert George and Jean Elshtain

The debate on gay marriage is full of conjecture and assumption on all sides. In preparing for a recent panel discussion on gay marriage, I looked for resources that could help me cut through the various facets of marriage and its history. I found those resources in The Meaning of Marriage.

This book is a collection of essays (see below) that take different approaches to marriage and its recent development in the United States. As a complex social institution, all too often discussion on marriage is over-simplified depending on the area of expertise (or for that matter, the agenda) of the author. This book overcomes those problems by presenting a wide range of thinkers from a variety of fields to present their views on marriage. It takes approaches from the law, philosophy, sociology, history, economics, and religion and puts them into a concise volume.

The essays themselves are easy to access and digestible, even for readers not fluent in the fields the author is coming at marriage from. The authors are well-known and respected in their fields of study. They provide fresh intellectual ammunition that seems lacking in the gay marriage debate by answering and providing a framework to discuss what marriage has meant, what it means, and what is should mean.

Many of the essays shed light on the philosophical underpinnings of marriage that make it possible to overcome the various rhetorical traps gay marriage advocates use to deconstruct the traditional view of marriage. The legal analyses bring to the fore some of the disturbing and absurd trends in marriage law that has virtually made marriage into nothing more than any relationship between two people who share property. For instance, recent court decisions have stated that sex is not required nor an essential component of marriage. Lastly, the sociological discussions take apart the recent studies that gay marriage advocates like to use to defend their viewpoints even though those studies are fatally flawed.

The collection is a timely work that presents the history and theory of marriage in a cogent manner that makes discussing marriage policy not only possible, but can provide a framework for actually coming to a serious policy other than the typical libertarian “do-whatever-you-want” nonsense that ends up going nowhere.

1 - “Sacrilege and Sacrament,” by Roger Scruton
2 - “What About the Children? Liberal Cautions on Same- Sex Marriage,” by Don Browning
3 - “Changing Dynamics of the Family in Recent European History,” by Harold James
4 - “Why Unilateral Divorce Has No Place in a Free Society,” by Jennifer Roback Morse
5 - “The Framers’ Idea of Marriage and Family,” by David F. Forte
6 - “The Family and the Laws,” by Hadley Arkes
7 - “What’s Sex Got to do with It? Marriage, Morality, and Rationality,” by Robert P. George
8 - “Soft Despotism and Same-Sex Marriage,” by Seana Sugrue
9 - “(How) Does Marriage Protect Child Well-Being?” by Maggie Gallagher
10 - “The Current Crisis in Marriage Law, Its Origins, and Its Impact,” by Katherine Shaw Spaht
11 - “Suffer the Little Children: Marriage the Poor, and the Commonweal” by W. Bradford Wilcox

May 13th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Book Reviews, Politics, Religion | no comments

Is Big Brother watching?

The latest controversy about the NSA spying on Americans once again takes facts, twists them to the breaking point, and then panics that the sky is falling. The sole source for this program has been the USA Today article that alarmingly says the NSA is spying on Americans.

The program was voluntary

According to the USA Today article, giving the information to the NSA was not required. In fact, one carrier (Qwest) declined to participate. This means that the federal government did not require these companies to participate, it merely asked them. In fact, it paid the companies for the information and it was provided “under contract”.

The NSA’s domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their “call-detail records,” a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation’s calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA’s domestic program began in earnest.

The government is not prevented by any law from buying records that companies willingly will sell. If those companies violated their privacy policy, an entrepreneurial lawyer will have a cause of action in litigating the phone companies for their breach of privacy policy. However, the government is not “spying” when it buys records that are put out on the common market, even if there is only one buyer.

Data-mining in not spying

Once again, data-mining is not the same as spying. What the NSA received was a list of phone calls with call durations and source and destination phone numbers. That’s it. Spying would be listening to the call. Spying would be recording the call. This was not spying.

The continuing use of the most inflammatory language possible indicates an agenda and an attempt to drum up fear that “Bush will kill us all”. Time and time again the MSM gets caught up in these attempts to manufacture a crises. In this case, it appears that the American people support the President on this one.

Don’t believe everything you read

It is important to note that the first draft of these so-called scandals that get run by the MSM tend not to hold up much more than a week after being scrutinized. The press has to gain readership to raise their advertising income. They tend to do this two ways, by making their readers afraid or making their readers angry. This influences how they write their stories.

In this case, the inflammatory language is misleading and the legal question rests not on whether or not warrants were needed, but whether or not the phone companies should have sold the information in the first place. Certainly in the complete absence of any coercion.

May 13th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Military / War, Politics, The MSM | no comments