How Protestants Swallowed the Pill and Evangelicals ‘Out-Libertined’ the Mainline Every great president since Abraham Lincoln has learned that political success requires uniting one’s party and splitting the opposition. In the same way, the success of Margaret Sanger in transforming American attitudes toward contraception, without which the government’s forty-year campaign for birth or population control […]
Read MoreTitle X, Medicaid, and the Eisenstadt Decision In a 1972 decision widely hailed by the political classes, the Supreme Court opined in Eisenstadt v. Baird, “If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right to be free from unwarranted government intrusions into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to […]
Read MoreThe Folly of the McNamara Approach to Family Planning When Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, passed away in 2009, the media recounted achievements that few in his generation could match. While charting his rapid rise in the Ford Motor Company and his leadership of […]
Read MoreWhen the U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future—a project of President Richard Nixon and John D. Rockefeller III to tap the bright minds of their generation on a pressing issue—released its report in 1975, its cover letter stated “we have concluded that, in the long run, no substantial benefits will result from […]
Read MoreThe research continues to demonstrate that dual-income married couples, especially those who are high-earners, contribute substantially to rising levels of income inequality. Even as the labor-force participation rate of married women has declined since the mid-1990s, the earnings gap separating men and women has narrowed while the income gap separating rich households from all others […]
Read MoreSince the Clinton presidency, the pundits have regularly lamented the “polarization” of politics that divides the parties ideologically and allegedly results in legislative gridlock. Why such developments are necessarily problematic is more assumed than explained, but a recent study by Kyle Dodson of the University of California (at Merced) finds that increased polarization has its […]
Read MoreTo paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “There they go again.” Indiana University was the source for the notorious Kinsey Report. The same agenda that characterized the discredited 1953 report seems to permeate a new survey, the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, whose findings were released in October by the school’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion. […]
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Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle Over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama James T. Patterson Basic Books, 2010; 264 pages, $33.95 Among the characteristics of what Angelo M. Codevilla calls America’s Ruling Class is widespread skepticism, expressed by Republicans as well as Democrats, of the ability of public policy […]
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The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart Bill Bishop Houghton Mifflin, 2008; 384 pages, $25.00 Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture Naomi Cahn and June Carbone Oxford University Press, 2010; 288 pages, $29.95 When Mexican poet Octavio Paz went to Spain in 1937 […]
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Condom Nation: The U.S. Government’s Sex Education Campaign from World War I to the Internet Alexandra M. Lord The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009; 224 pages, $40.00 I’m someone who managed to reach adulthood without so much as thirty seconds’ worth of sex education. My parents were far too lace-curtain to broach the subject voluntarily; […]
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