Secular Right

Ross Douthat has a provocatively titled book out, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, so he’s making the media rounds. In general I find Douthat to be an interesting thinker, but there is one domain where I feel that he lacks a proper sense of balance, and that is in the domain of religion. By this, I don’t mean that I disagree with his belief in Roman Catholic Christianity. I do, but that’s a rather conventional disagreement. Rather, Douthat seems to perceive religious history and the relationship of religion to societies through the eyes of a nerd. It seems in his world that the particular theology of a religion is of greater import. Not simply because he happens to believe that the theology of his own religion, Christianity, is true, but because he believes that that theology has material consequences on the world around us.

Consider his most recent post in Slate. Let’s look at two passages:

Continue reading →

It is only a matter of time before the all-male character of prominent Silicon Valley start-ups triggers the following backlash:

A flood of articles and conferences exploring the “gender gap” in the high-tech sector; personal testimonies from disgruntled female undergrads and grad students about discrimination in the science fields; published rankings of venture-capital firms based on how many female-headed start-ups they bankroll; taxpayer-funded high school and college programs to cultivate female engineers and entrepreneurs; additional diversity bureaucrats in colleges to bludgeon computer-science departments into hiring female professors; internships for females at venture-capital firms; threats from the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to colleges and high schools regarding their responsibility for the start-up gender gap; Ford and Rockefeller Foundation grant programs to set up mentoring programs for female technologists; and awards ceremonies to honor venture capitalists who have nurtured female-headed start-ups.

Unlike National Review readers, I find no justification for Romney’s craven exploitation of delusional feminist tropes against Obama.  The Republican National Committee is parroting the absurd charge that the Obama White House is a “hostile environment” for females, for example. 

What’s next — an RNC Title IX lawsuit against Ohio State University for its football program? Sensitivity training for Army drill sergeants? (Oh, wait, we’ve already got those.) Assigned readings for Republican precinct captains from In a Different Voice? The chance that the Obama White House, staffed by eager products of the feminist university, is a hostile workplace for women is exactly zero — as low as the chance that the Bush I, II, or Reagan White Houses were hostile to women. Any Republican who actually believes [former White House staffer Anita] Dunn’s charge has merely allowed his partisan desire for political victory to silence what should be his core knowledge about the contemporary world.

The entire conceit that any elite workplace could be seriously hostile to females should be retired, not bolstered as the Romney campaign is doing.  You can’t feed the female victimology addiction just once and think that you haven’t strengthened it permanently.

  The Romney campaign’s weird claims about a female-hostile Obama economic policy are just as destructive. 

What would it mean for economic policy to pay attention to “gender,” as the Romney campaign apparently thinks it should? Women are undoubtedly overrepresented in government jobs and government-funded jobs . . . . Does that mean that Republicans shouldn’t cut big government? The Keystone Pipeline and other projects dear to the “drill, baby, drill” campaign will undoubtedly benefit male workers more than women. Should we therefore suspend domestic energy production until we figure out a way to shoehorn more women onto drilling rigs? And if the most certain way to make sure that women benefit more from the economic recovery would be to expand government hiring, should Republicans do so?

Every time that someone in the public sphere repeats the preposterous claim that females face serious discrimination today, he strengthens the falsehood and makes it harder to dislodge.   I understand that politics is ruthless and unprincipled.  But it is unbelievably short-sighted for Republicans to validate hoary feminist conceits, because those conceits will only be thrown back at them with all the greater force once they are on the receiving end of criticism.   It would be just as short-sighted to criticise the Obama cabinet, for example, for not being sufficiently “diverse” (and undoubtedly, some Republican operative has made or will make such a charge).   Doing so only lodges the expectations for racial quotas all the more intractably into the political psyche.