The Righteous Mind – Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Jonathan Haidt Pantheon Books, 2012; 448 pages, $28.95 “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in […]
Read MoreThe Ultimate Social Meaning of Friedan’s Sovereign-Self Feminism Radiant with the hopes kindled in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan concludes her landmark feminist manifesto with an optimistic question about the beckoning future: “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? . . . It has barely begun, the search […]
Read MoreAt a time when national marriage rates are astonishingly low and national divorce rates remain distressingly high, Americans might learn something from a new Finnish study about the personal characteristics of those young people most likely to make enduring marriages and about the contrasting personal characteristics of those most likely to divorce. Conducted by a […]
Read MoreParental divorce seriously hurts American children, some progressives have argued, only because the United States is politically backward compared to advanced social democracies, such as, say, Sweden. But that line of thinking loses plausibility when assessed against the results of a new study of parental divorce in that very land of the progressives’ hearts’ desires. […]
Read MoreWhat makes young people open to the idea of divorce? What makes them resistant to that idea? Psychologist Daniel R. Stalder of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater offers illuminating answers to these questions in a new study of how “cognitive dissonance” affects marital thinking. “Cognitive dissonance,” Stalder explains, “is a psychological discom-fort created by an inconsistency […]
Read MoreHow the Erosion of American Family Life Fuels Illegal Immigration For the vast majority of ordinary Americans, particularly those who fall between the center and the right of the political spectrum, illegal immigration is a simple issue: The Law is the Law, and the Law should be enforced. As commentator George Rodriguez, himself of Mexican […]
Read MoreAlthough the American Psychological Association (APA) boasts scholarly objectivity, the social-science guild has for years conducted studies that generate the results—from the alleged benefits of the “good” divorce to the virtues of homosexuality—that progressive activists’ itching ears want to hear. Consequently, it often falls to one brave solider to challenge the groupthink. Indeed, Mark Regnerus […]
Read MorePaul Amato, one of the revered deans of American sociology, has shown courage in bucking his academic peers, as he did when he suggested that a “good divorce” is not all that good for children (see New Research, Summer 2012). Yet the scholar has not demonstrated the same resolve in dealing with the academic and […]
Read MoreWhen it issued an official report on “lesbian and gay parenting” in 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) made the bold claim, based on fifty-nine published studies on homosexual parenting, that “not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual […]
Read MoreRediscovering the Virtues of a Maligned Decade Within what cultural historian James Billington has aptly labeled “the academic-media-foundation complex,” aversion to the 1950s is now de rigueur. The decade of the Fifties is an era that must trigger—at its very mention—shudders of revulsion at its “social regressiveness,” a regressiveness manifest by a “rush to marry […]
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