Here at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, we’re doing our part to help kill off serious film criticism. I sat down with distinguished League alumnus Freddie deBoer and Sonny Bunch of America’s Future Foundation (and a few other places) to talk about the Oscars. Full podcast after the jump.

[Read more →]

Does the name Cully Stimson ring a bell?

In 2007 Stimson, in his capacity as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, made a series of bizarre statements on NPR criticizing the law firms (many of them among the nation’s best) whose partners or associates were representing detainees, disgracing himself (he subsequently resigned), the legal profession and the very idea of American justice, which requires equality under the law no matter how unpopular the defendants.  This bizarre rant of Stimon’s prompted a very pointed response co-authored by Neal Katyal, the Georgetown Law Professor who represented Salim Hamdan in the landmark Hamdan v Rumsfeld, and former solicitor general Theodore Olsen:

With the war on terror, which unfortunately may go on for generations, America doesn’t have any margin for error. The legal issues that surround this war are enormously intricate and don’t lend themselves to sloganeering-based solutions. When government officials are called “war criminals” and when public-interest lawyers are called “terrorist huggers,” it not only cheapens the discourse, it scrambles the dialogue. The best solutions to these difficult problems will emerge only when the best advocates, backed by weighty resources, bring their talents to bear. And the heavy work of creating solutions for these complicated issues can only move forward when the name-calling ceases.

I have to assume that the stunads* esteemed writers at the Weekly Standard failed to get this memo because not only does Thomas Joscelyn’s obnoxious hit piece stoop to the sort of playground shit talk that has no place in complex legal debates but he also fails to demonstrate even a remedial understanding of the issues.  Take this passage, where he attacks a Slate article written by Katyal that criticizes the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (“MCA”):

Katyal has made some other questionable comments about Hamdan and the military commissions as well. In a piece for Slate in December 2007, Katyal started off by lamenting the fact that Hamdan was not being tried in a regal Washingtonian court, but instead in a “rickety courtroom at Guantanamo.” Katyal then compared Hamdan to your average green-card holder in America…Katyal is flat out wrong when he says that the Bush administration’s military commissions were the “first time” America has attempted to dispense “justice” in such a manner. Military commissions (tribunals) have a long history in this country dating back to the founding. The Obama administration is even using them to try Gitmo detainees. What’s worse is that Katyal didn’t seem to understand that the “them” are al Qaeda. And only someone who cannot tell the difference between us and our terrorist enemies would compare al Qaeda members to “green-card holders.”

Set aside the fact that the last part of this quote is nothing more than useless political conjecture that makes the author look like a bona fide stunad polemicist.   Joscelyn trots out an old talking point about the use of military commissions throughout our country’s history.  This was not the issue in the Hamdan case.  The argument Katyal made to the Supreme Court in Hamdan was that the Executive Branch alone was not authorized by the Constitution to establish military tribunals (which actually would be a break from the long history of military commissions in this country).  Katyal writes:

The longstanding restrictions on commissions are not such disposable niceties. Rather, they are time-tested barriers to the dangerous seepage of martial law into our civilian order. To fail to enforce these limits would be to allow a dangerous and unprecedented expansion of Executive authority whose legal premise must be that the fight against terrorism justifies a reallocation of constitutional power. There would be no principled way to prevent that precedent from becoming the edifice upon which any number of actions could be grounded, even against U.S. citizens, from surveillance to indefinite detention, on the mere allegation that they are affiliates in that “war.” If fighting terrorism requires such a basic shift in our legal order, it is for Congress, not the Executive, to sayso; and Congress must say so in the most explicit of terms.

Katyal’s position and understanding of this issue was shared by a sizable portion of the legal community. For anyone interested, more amicus briefs on the constitutionality of the Executive Branch unilaterally establishing military tribunals can be found here.

Joscelyn also fails to grasp one of the most controversial portions of the MCA as written.  The statute was not only formulated to strip the ability of detainees to challenge their detention in federal court, but it also explicitly forbids resident aliens in the United States from doing so as well (more here).  A Chinese national in the United States, legally protected as a resident alien, could be detained, designated by the Executive Branch as an unlawful enemy combatant, and transferred to military custody without a chance to challenge this detention in federal court***.  An American citizen faced with the same situation would not have his or her habeas rights revoked.  Therefore, the statute did create a two-tiered system of “us” and “them” because under the law, both detainees at Guantanamo Bay and foreigners in the United States were unable to access federal courts to challenge their detentions.  Apparently, Joscelyn never bothered to read the statute or attempt to understand the law as it was written.

This issue was making its way through the courts in  Al Marri v Spagone., where a resident alien was transferred to military custody after being designated an unlawful enemy combatant, held indefinitely without being charged and was forbidden from challenging his detention in a federal court (the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of al Marri).  The Supreme Court would have heard the case, but it was dismissed as moot when the Obama Administration transferred Al Marri back to civilian custody to be tried on charges unrelated to terrorism.

Josceyln’s lack of legal knowledge is bad enough.  Worse still is the way he ends his piece:

Now, we don’t know what assignments these lawyers have taken on inside government. But we do know that they openly opposed the American government for years, on behalf of al Qaeda terrorists, and their objections frequently went beyond rational, principled criticisms of detainee policy.

Here, Joscelyn says everything he needs to say about his lack of respect of the rule of law, the Constitution and the American justice system.  Joscelyn, like Stimson, can’t bring himself to accept the notion that American justice means suspects, whether tried in a civilian court or a military court, are entitled to the best defense possible, regardless of popularity.  It is through this system, where the best on both sides advocate their positions to the fullest extent, that the rule of law prevails, whether it is John Adams defending the British soldiers accused of participating in the Boston Massacre or Neal Katyal representing clients suspected of terrorism.

That Josceyln suggests Katyal went beyond “rational, principled” criticism of the MCA is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.   No one “openly opposed” the American government.  Lawyers raised specific legal issues based on laws or policies perceived to be dubious either on statutory or constitutional grounds.  In many significant cases, the Supreme Court did not side with the Executive Branch (would Joscelyn suggest that the Supreme Court, in siding with “terrorists,” is also opposing our government?).  Between the series of court defeats and the redactions of a number of other legal positions maintained by the Bush Administration until the very end of the second term (memos and here and here), it seems to me that criticism of the last Administration’s positions was very warranted and quite rational.  That Joscelyn disagrees does not make Katyal irrational or unprincipled.

Olsen and Katyal conclude their article by arguing that patriotism requires a belief that the American legal system will reach the right results.  The editors and writers of the Weekly Standard should take that to heart and reconsider this shameful stance.

The same also goes for the yokels running Keep America Safe, who Walter Dellinger takes to task in today’s Washington Post.

Shameful indeed.

*** I am operating under the assumption of the majority opinion in Boumediene v Bush in that the procedures the MCA set forth to guarantee detainees an adequate substitute for a habeas challenge in a federal court were inadequate.

Brief update: the term “stunad” is Italian slang for stupid person.

Taking a breather from celebrity nudity and Rob Reiner’s thoughts on health care, the Huffington Post is currently on a tear about college tuition rates. Angry undergrads are protesting tuition hikes across California and other parts of the country; they have good reason to be upset. I’d like to try to explain why tuition rates are reaching this tipping point.

What’s going on, in very general terms, is the states have been gradually cutting funding to their public universities for a few decades now (sound familiar?). Meanwhile, the state universities, instead of tightening their belts, have been in a bit of an arms race with each other to see who can offer the most extravagant perqs to prospective students. Explicitly remaking themselves along the lines of consumer capitalism, most universities are starting to resemble vacation resorts with 24 hour gyms, alumni fairs, and free rock concerts. None of this actually relates to education, but none of them want to back down and the students and their parents apparently buy into the nonsense about college being an “experience” first and foremost.

Freakonomics: “When I visited my undergrad alma mater a few years ago, the chancellor pointed out that three buildings had gone up in the past decade or so that were each larger than any existing building on campus. There was a library, a convocation center (a multipurpose arena), and a huge student gym. The gym, he said, was a top priority because parents and prospective students increasingly think of themselves as customers, shopping for the most amenities for the best price, and the colleges that didn’t come to grips with this would soon see their customers going elsewhere.”

Trust me, they all talk about their “customers” now. [Read more →]

An old joke holds that historians are gossips with footnotes. This often seems true of Herodotus, the “father of history”. Curious about everything anyone tells him, at times, he can be a bit credulous and some of the stories he relates are what we would call tall tales. Nevertheless, his methodology- taking various accounts of past events and making decisions about which are the most plausible and what resulted from those events- is indeed historiography. Besides, it’s pretty hard not to enjoy the sort of historian who can write a sentence like, “There is a place in Arabia… where I went to try to get information about the flying snakes.” [Read more →]

Jonah Goldberg makes some very good points about human welfare and markets:

I’m no unmitigated fan of Wal-Mart, but it can’t be denied that Wal-Mart—and stores like it—have improved the lives of a lot of low-income families by making life’s necessities, and even its luxuries, affordable. Lightbulbs put a lot of candle makers out of business[*], but lightbulbs also made indoor lighting cheaper, safer, and more widespread. That’s a good trade.

Indeed, the market is the only thing that transforms luxuries into affordable indulgences. A low-end car today has features that the best Mercedes didn’t have a generation ago. Teenagers have phones that are more powerful than the computers that NASA used to put men on the moon. Indeed, even leisure has become democratized.

[…]

One last point. I love the Templeton Foundation and I think they do fantastic work. But questions like “Does the Free Market Erode Moral Character?” bother me a great deal. As opposed to what? Socialism? Socialism certainly erodes moral character. Some of the most alienated, selfish, deracinated people I’ve ever met were people who grew up under the yoke of Communism. Arthur Brooks’s work has definitively shown that large welfare states siphon off philanthropy and erode altruism.

Adam Smith’s case for the free market rested on the fact that it encouraged good character (as Yuval Levinrecently detailed), and I think Smith won that argument a long time ago. A more fruitful question, with deep religious and philosophical implications and precedents, would be “Does wealth erode moral character?” Debating that would still allow for some healthy attacks on the free market, because without free markets, wealth really isn’t something to worry about.

First of all, I know citing Goldberg round these parts will earn me a whole host of angry comments.  How dare I quote the man who wrote Liberal Fascism!?  He’s a fascist!  He’s not very nice!  He strawmans liberals!

I admit, I have a fondness for Goldberg which allows me to ignore our many points of disagreement long enough to point out the many smart, sensible things he does write.  And this is one of them.

I think Jason and I disagree less than his critique of my post would suggest.  He is correct that my rather brief treatment of markets (and the purpose of markets) leaves a great deal to be desired.  I was not intending to write a piece explaining the many benefits (or limitations) of markets per say – mainly because, like Jason and the other libertarians here, I am an advocate of the free market.  I am not terribly interested in arguing the merits of a free market economy.  Certainly this will lead only to partisans in both camps hurling strawmen at one another.  As Jason notes, both the success and failure of markets can “discover distributed and inarticulate knowledge about preference and utility.”  And this is a good thing.

I think Jason’s strongest point is this:

But the real question is not whether markets work perfectly. It’s whether any of the alternatives can do the job as well or better. When we consider that the real work of markets is to gather up distributed knowledge and render it publicly legible, it seems clear to me that few other social institutions are even seriously trying. Many of the worst of them, government programs above all included, act as if this work has already been done — as if Hayek’s dispersed knowledge had already been aggregated once and for all, and as if the action at hand weren’t going to upset it all in the process.

To be perfectly clear, markets aren’t the be-all and end-all of public policy for me. They are, however, the option we ought to try first, because properly designed, they tend to tell us what’s going on. This is tremendously important, and it’s very difficult to admit that we don’t know it.

He goes on to argue that markets should also be a last resort – and that if there is a market failure, it is often as not a failure of the “given ruleset” not necessarily the market itself.  Healthcare is a prime example of this.

And of course, in order for markets to work, for human progress to continue, and really for a sane and somewhat rational, stable economy to flourish, above all else we must maintain choice.

Indeed, Jason’s advocacy of choice is compelling, and I tend to agree that the more choice the better, if only because I could not tell you where or with whom we should limit it.  The more freedom the better.  I certainly don’t want to be constrained in my own choices, and I am not nearly paternalistic enough to want to constrain others in theirs. Whatever constraint or sacrifice we make based on coercion is a false one.

I’m glad E. D. Kain’s post about markets has been recovered. It’s easier (and fairer) to critique something that actually exists. He writes:

Choice and economic liberty are only useful instruments within society because they avoid many of the traps that come along with big government picking winners, rewarding rent seekers, and so forth.

I can’t say I agree.

Let’s start with economic liberty. Although it’s true that a well-run market will avoid the traps that come with state action, markets are also good in another way. I’m sure he knows this, but it bears repeating.

Markets discover distributed and inarticulate knowledge about preference and utility. Markets are useful not only because they avoid the government picking winners, but also because outside of the market virtually no one, government or otherwise, can tell who the “winners” are at all, at least not if they act alone. The government may be bad at picking winners, but so is everyone else.

We need markets because we need to them to solve a very difficult problem, the problem of gathering up widely distributed, paper-thin, ever-changing knowledge about what people want and need. As Friedrich Hayek put it,

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources — if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

Do markets do this perfectly? Certainly not. Markets can fail due to outside interference (see: government). They can also fail because defining property rights, reducing transaction costs, and accounting for externalities can be very hard. These difficulties must often be solved by resorting to politics, and thus incurring the problems of politics anyway.

But the real question is not whether markets work perfectly. It’s whether any of the alternatives can do the job as well or better. When we consider that the real work of markets is to gather up distributed knowledge and render it publicly legible, it seems clear to me that few other social institutions are even seriously trying. Many of the worst of them, government programs above all included, act as if this work has already been done — as if Hayek’s dispersed knowledge had already been aggregated once and for all, and as if the action at hand weren’t going to upset it all in the process.

To be perfectly clear, markets aren’t the be-all and end-all of public policy for me. They are, however, the option we ought to try first, because properly designed, they tend to tell us what’s going on. This is tremendously important, and it’s very difficult to admit that we don’t know it.

We should also resort to markets, possibly with creative modification, when the other avenues have failed. Not everyone will agree with me here, but I’d argue that “the” market seldom fails, as if “the” market were always and everywhere the same thing. It’s much more often the case that free choice constrained by the given ruleset has failed, so we need to rework the rules to better reflect market principles. Perhaps we’ll succeed, and perhaps we won’t. Politics may intervene, as it so often does.

And briefly, as to “choice.” I can’t believe that “choice” merely serves to avoid the pitfalls of government, and that it has no other function. (Does anyone?) The exercise of individual choice is aesthetically beautiful. It sharpens our powers of judgment and reasoning. It grants dignity and moral responsibility to all of us, and these should not be lightly surrendered.

I see Br. Matthew has beaten me to the punch* on this one, but Mitt Romney is not dropping foreign policy science in his new book.

From Time’s Alex Altman:

It’s tempting to dismiss the section on foreign policy as an attempt to see how many different formulations Romney can use to profess his belief in American exceptionalism. But the theme is at the heart of the contrast Romney draws between himself and the president: while his prescriptions are designed to preserve American supremacy, Obama espouses American equivalence. “If the president accepts that America is in an irreversible state of decline relative to the world, it may well come to pass under his stewardship,” Romney warns.

It’s a dangerous perspective, Romney argues, at a time when China’s clout is growing, Russia is resurgent and the U.S. remains mired in a grinding war with Islamic extremists. “The truth is that we are at war with a formidable enemy and that nations like Russia and China are intent on neutralizing our military lead,”

I realize there are some potentially very fruitful (if potentially poisoned) political gains for Romney in this attack.  See Br. Matthew’s post at to why.  As further proof, consider how hard it will be for Romney to really distinguish himself substantially from Obama in any presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, for the record, it’s worth stating that Obama is nothing if not an American exceptionalist to the core (at times embarassingly so).  Obama is rallying support for a surge against a localist insurgency by trying to connect that conflict to a broader Global War on Terror which pretty much no one else is buying, he has violated Pakistani airspace/sovereignty all over the place (which, by the way, he said he would do as a Democratic primary candidate!!!), and gives laudatory paeans to America as guiding light of the world.

Depending on your point of view, you might find all of the above sickening or positive (or some combination of the two), but Obama actually seems to believe those things.  In short, he falls squarely within the American exceptionalist camp.

What Obama has realized and is working to accommodate is not US decline, but rather the rise of other powers.

Obama was snapped with a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s Post-American world in his hands during the early phases of the election campaign.  Obama has also consulted extensively with Parag Khann, whose work on second world powers (e.g. Turkey, Indonesia) is an excellent primer on emerging nations.

All of which points to the reality that America is not per se in absolute decline but that others are catching up relative to the United States, though none are anywhere close to taking the lead (Romney’s Chinese Red Dawn hints are laughable).

The Post-American world is not a world after American exceptionalism or after American influence/power.  It’s post American hyperpower status.

There are structural/economic reasons for why this state of affairs exists and is bound to continue.  Economic reasons that Mitt Romney is nothing but a gigantic supporter of, incidentally.  The main one being that there is no revolutionary form of economics with sufficient global influence to challenge capitalism — hence the failure of Fascism and Communism in the 20th century.

If you look at Foreign Policy’s list of 33 conflicts on the planet, notice how they are all local/regional insurgencies, civil wars, ethnic battles, independence movements and the like.  This ought to alert us to something very important–i.e. no more big wars.

Obama is willing to admit this state of affairs (you can call him a realist) and is trying to formulate a strategy to deal with it.  I wouldn’t say that strategy has been super effective to date, but it’s a start.  It’s certainly preferable to The Green Lantern Theory of Foreign Policy advocated by Romney.

In other words, there’s American exceptionalism that leads to increased isolation (Romney) or American exceptionalism that (potentially) leads to greater co-operative action.  But at the end of the day, the world is headed in an increasingly multi-polar/regionalist direction.  When others powers rise (even if only in degrees and not absolutely) they are going to want political buy-ins/recognition.  They are in a kind of adolescent state of nationhood and want independence and to be acknowledged while they learn there are rules in the World’s House they need to abide by.  The US, however, will no longer be The Mommy/Daddy in this case (if it ever was).

–

* Update/Clarification:  The reference to “punch” was not intended as a (in poor taste) er “jab” :) at Romney’s quasi-fight on the plane recently.

So, somehow new Gentleman Jason Kuznicki – hereafter known as the most unlucky blogger on the face of the planet – had his user account deleted along with all his posts.  In my attempt to restore these, I killed the last day’s posts and comments.  Sorry to all the writers and commenters.  Hopefully, we’ll have the posts back and Jason up and running soon.  I, meanwhile, will try to find out why my daily backup apparently does not include backups of user accounts.

Any questions, shoot me an email: erik dot kain @ gmail dot com

Thanks and sorry for the confusion and loss of comments and posts.

Following up a bit on my “General America” piece, I wanted to add that I find the “all markets all the time” position within conservatism to be somewhat unfulfilling as well.  Market solutions are only solutions insofar as they do not necessarily perpetuate problems quite so badly as government solutions.  Choice and economic liberty are only useful instruments within society because they avoid many of the traps that come along with big government picking winners, rewarding rent seekers, and so forth.  To base an entire philosophy of governance along these lines is somewhat short-sighted, I would argue.

Perhaps this comes down, paradoxically, to the philosophy of choice –that very thing which rests at the heart of both liberalism and capitalism and, for that matter, contemporary conservatism.  There is something fundamentally antithetical to conservatism – or to the way conservatism has been classically understood – about the notion that choice should rest at the epicenter of society, should so inform all public debate and should so define who we as a people.  With choice you must also parcel competition, liberty, and a host of other ideas which conservatives and libertarians especially hold dear.  That these things are the best vehicles for our economy is hard to debate, but that a world of limitless choice, fierce competition, and little if any public sector (or ‘commons’ for that matter) is best for society in the long run is a more difficult claim to make.

This is not to say that we should scrap free trade or limited government or any of these things – only that as a philosophy, man cannot live on free trade alone.  A conservatism not rooted in tradition is not really conservatism at all. A conservatism focused too entirely on market solutions inevitably ends up falling short, and may as well be libertarianism with a dash of culture war populism sprinkled on for flavor.

Similarly, a conservatism which takes its first philosophical baby-steps only as far back as the American revolution is doomed to perpetual immaturity.

This is one of the posts from my other blog that disappeared into the ether with our technical difficulties. It seems to deserve reposting here for a couple of reasons. First, it fits well with “Desire and Deviance,” below, and also with our upcoming discussion of Plato’s Symposium. Second, I think it was just a really good post, one of the best I’ve done in a long time. I’ve only very lightly retouched it here.

Ahem…

There’s a very interesting essay by Mary Eberstadt in First Things this month titled “How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool.” She argues that a cultural window briefly opened for pedophilia during the 1970s and 1980s, but that it slammed shut with the advent of the Catholic Church’s sex scandals in recent years. One of her big pieces of evidence is the almost universally negative reaction to those who would shield Roman Polanksi from arrest and trial, a reaction I certainly shared. Child rape is child rape. It’s a crime, and we should throw the book at him even if he’s brilliant, and old, and in (perhaps conveniently) poor health.

Our own Jon Rowe makes an appearance in the comments section, where he casts doubt on Eberstadt’s wider thesis:

As I understand the tale, traditional moral norms have been eroded since the 1960s watershed — fornication, homosexuality, adultery, and now perhaps pedophilia (with homosexuals leading the way for pedophilia).

But there is NOTHING “chic” about almost all of the examples she raises and terms “pedophilia.”

It might be true if it were all sex between adults and prepubscent children — that I think is and has been a “marker of right and wrong in a world where other markers have been erased.”

But almost all of her examples involve post-pubescent teens and there is nothing “chic” about them being sex-able.

In fact, the opposite is true — the post 1960s world has seen an average INCREASE in “age of consent laws.”

13 or 14 historically, traditionally and legally been an acceptable age for marriage and hence sex.

And THAT hits on the reason for the change. When fornication was stigmatized, fathers and older brothers protected the chastity of their daughters and sisters. And if she got pregnant a marriage ensued (sometimes at the point of a shotgun).

With fornication no longer stigmatized (and more fatherlessness) younger teen girls became more susceptible to sexual exploitation (a shocking number of abortions that young teen girls have involve men over 18). Hence the legal and social standard for when girls are “sex-able” had to raise to closer to 18.

But the idea that a 13 year old girl having sex with someone 18 or over is “pedophilia” is what is “chic” and “novel.” I would agree that it’s wrong, but not part of some clinical sexual disorder.

Loretta Lynn’s husband and Jerry Lee Lewis were not viewed as “pedophiles” for being in marriages where one party was an adult, the other a 13-year-old girl (as both were in the conservative South in the 1950s).

I think he’s basically right, and here’s where those crazy, crazy Greeks come in.

I would submit that while classical Athenian pederasty and classical Athenian marriage were by our standards both morally appalling institutions, marriage was far worse — provided only that we hold homosexuality vs. heterosexuality morally neutral. The fate of the classical brides was way, way worse than that of the classical boy lovers. [Note: Might this have something to do with why Plato ranked homosexual love higher than heterosexual love? A question for our meta-symposium.]

Yes, I’m aware that many of you won’t want to take this step, and you won’t hold homosexuality morally neutral. This post probably isn’t for you, then.

Greek women typically married at around age 14 or 15. Greek men typically married at age 30, an enormous age difference by today’s standards (which, as Jon points out, are fairly recent). In a pederastic relationship, there was certainly an age gap, but it was also usually a smaller one. The younger member of the relationship — I hesitate to say “partner,” because it implies an equality that didn’t exist — could be anywhere from 14 to 18, and he was often above that. The older member of the pair could be married but did not have to be, and could easily have been younger than thirty. If the age difference is what creeps us out about Athenian pederasty, then we haven’t been looking very hard, because the age difference was equal or greater in marriage.

And what about the non-monogamy that this setup entails? Well, yes, the married pederast was non-monogamous. But given the cultural acceptance and integration of pederasty into Athenian society, it’s difficult to say that non-monogamy was the fault specifically of pederasty — and not the fault of marriage, where non-monogamy was likewise grudgingly allowed. Women just had to accept that sometimes their husbands took boy lovers. Sometimes they took girl lovers, too, and in both cases there wasn’t a lot that the wife could do about it. This in my book counts as a strike against the Athenian marriage norms, not against that culture’s pederasty per se.

Life as a married woman was one of near slavery. Married girls were secluded from the world. Typically they were confined to the women’s quarters in the back of the house, wholly in the thrall of husbands. They could sometimes travel to a limited number of places to buy essentials for the household, but that was all. Seclusion was the ideal. If a wife had servants, she was to send them instead.

Beloved boys, however, were allowed their freedom to move about, and the relationship between lover and beloved could be interrupted at any time by the boy’s father if he thought it in his son’s best interests to do so. While in the relationship, the boy continued his education (which women never got) and continued to exercise, to compete in games, and to prepare for life as a citizen (which women also never got… typically, they didn’t even get the exercise).

For women, divorce was exceedingly rare. Of course, we all believe that divorce ought to be rare, but in Athens it was so rare that historians have difficulty identifying any genuine historical cases of it at all. Surely this is too few divorces, given the reality of spousal abuse. Fathers did not typically watch out for the welfare of married daughters, and, unlike with their sons in pederastic relationships, the fathers were loath to take their daughters back. Judging by Athenian law, it appears that they would do so only if the dowry was also returned — with interest.

Even death didn’t end a woman’s obligations in marriage, which lasted as long as she lived. On death, and if she had no sons, she could be legally obliged to marry her husband’s closest kinsman in order to keep the property (that is, the real estate as well as her body) in the family. Marriage was even more binding than “till death do us part.” It was a sexual and property contract with an entire family.

Oh heck, let’s just let an ancient Athenian explain it. Here’s Sophocles; the voice is that of a married woman, believed to be Procne, in his only partially extant play Tereus:

But now, separated from my home, I am undone. Often, indeed, I have observed how miserable my sex is in this respect. When we are girls, our life in our father’s house is the sweetest, methinks, that can fall to mortal; for the days of thoughtless childhood are ever glad. But when we come to years of discretion, we are thrust out, and sold in marriage far away from our ancestral gods and from our parents; — some of us to other parts of Hellas, some to barbarians, some into houses where all is strange, some into places of reproach. And in all this, when once the nuptial night is past, we must acquiesce, and deem that it is well. — Sophocles, fragment 583. Cited in The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. by A. C. Pearson, MA. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1917, vol II, p 228.

Where am I going with all of this? I do not mean to defend Athenian or any other pederasty as a good thing. I only mean to point out that the attention — and the particular odium — attached to Athenian pederasty is curious. Side by side with it, we have an institution that was even more age-disparate, a great deal more restrictive of individual freedom, and a very great deal more legally binding. And what is it that attracts our attention? Why, it would appear to be the sheer fact that pederasty is between two males. Icky!

The payoff here, with regard to Eberstadt, is that pedophilia isn’t a level playing field, and if it’s skewed in any direction, it’s very generously skewed in favor of excusing heterosexual pedophilia. Some types of pedophilia, like ancient Athenian marriage, were never “chic.” That’s because they were never problematized. They were always just considered normal. Gay men today are made to disavow Athenian pederasty as a cultural antecedent, if ever they are tempted to claim it. Why isn’t Athenian marriage similarly disavowed? I can think of no good reasons whatsoever for this distinction.

Daniel Larison advises Republicans against attacking Obama on foreign-policy grounds:

Despite the endless inane attacks from the GOP, most of the public approves of Obama’s handling of foreign policy and a plurality approves of his handling of various national security issues. This is the wrong place for Republicans attack him. It is clearly on fiscal and economic policy where they may be able to gain a significant advantage, and this is kind of policy argument for which Romney is well-suited. Instead he wastes his time and makes a fool of himself discussing a subject he doesn’t seem to understand very well.

Larison is right to point out that Obama’s foreign policy doesn’t give the GOP much of an opening. A lot of hawks will really, really want to attack Obama on these grounds, but there’s no reason to think that the American people are anything but supportive of Obama’s broadly realist approach. That said, I don’t think Larison has realized what kind of attack is happening here.* When Romney hits Obama for saying something “on Arabic TV,” we’re no longer simply talking about foreign policy; we’ve leaped into the realm of cultural and identity politics. The suggestion is not that Obama is merely weak or pandering a la John Kerry. Romney is trying out the theme being developed in pieces like the Lowry-Ponnuru essay on exceptionalism: However sensible Obama’s policies may be, he is not a real American. He’s a European, or a Muslim, maybe both.

In a post-9/11 world, foreign policy issues have the same explosive cultural resonance that law-and-order issues once did. The next generation of Willie Horton ads won’t be about prisons and parole; they’ll be about national security. Democrats, and pundits, would do well to take notice.

*I still agree with Larison that Romney is ill-suited to such an attack. It’s hard to portray your opponent as alien when you seem like you were beamed in from outer space.