Welcome to our special Mother’s Day edition of the Weekend Beacon, featuring all the subjects we love discussing with our mothers: faith, sex, drugs, and politics! (Okay, not all the subjects.)
We begin with Mary Eberstadt, who reviews Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
“Believe is vintage Douthat, marked by genial narration, lightly worn erudition (and lots of it), and authentic concern for readers. ‘The Fashioned Universe,’ a chapter summarizing the argument that science points toward God, sweeps through modern physics to remind us that the conditions required for reality as we know it are almost unimaginably peculiar. From the structure of atoms to the rate of expansion in the cosmos, it amounts, statistically, to ‘the most improbably winning number in the largest Powerball drawing in the history of the world.’ Another chapter, ‘The Mind and the Cosmos,’ deploys philosophy and new science to attack materialist accounts of consciousness, demonstrating again that the place in which humanity finds itself is ‘strangely suited to both our bodies and our minds.’
“In a chapter on miracles, Believe tackles a truism widely taken for granted: ‘the idea that modernity means the death of miracle and magic.’ To the contrary, ‘[m]odern human beings continue to have the kinds of experiences that are fundamental to religion.’ Citing consistent accounts of near-death experiences, Douthat frames an interesting point: ‘the fact that many dying people really have all their memories brought back to them and replayed under a frame of moral judgment.’ Surely, he reasons, ‘faith has won a provisional point from atheism’ here. … Douthat’s authorial affability does mean pulling punches here and there. In a discussion of theodicy, for example, he gently makes the point that ‘there is no good evidence that religion has been a special source of violence in human history.’ That is a much milder proposition than, say, ‘atheistic humanism was responsible for the worst crimes of humanity, against humanity: the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot’—which is also true.
“The book is similarly circumspect about the centrality of sex in our contemporary chaos. Though it suggests that ‘no one can agree on precisely when’ religious belief went over a cliff, this is not quite right. Sociologists broadly agree that religiosity—which was in notable revival across the United States, Europe, Canada, and the antipodes after World War II—began its steep descent beginning around 1963. I have argued elsewhere (in How the West Really Lost God, 2013) that the hinge moment is the widespread adoption of effective contraception. The promise of sex without consequences disrupted homes on a scale never seen before, and with them, the transmission belts of religious belief. It also intensified the temptation to jettison ancient teachings. This double whammy, far more than Copernicus or Darwin, is what has been emptying churches from the mid-1960s onward.”
Speaking of sex and consequences, Louise Perry is out with A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century: The Young Adult Adaptation of ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.’ Weekend Beacon contributor Christine Rosen gives us a review.
“In brief, pithy chapters, Perry outlines persistent fallacies about the sexual revolution, including the idea that the contraceptive pill, access to abortion, and freedom from supposedly restrictive norms about sex out of wedlock would liberate women. The revolution in morals did bring new freedoms, she concedes, but they were not enjoyed equally. ‘The sexual revolution has not, in fact, freed all of us,’ Perry writes. ‘It has freed some of us, at a price. Which is exactly what we should expect from such a massive change.’ She argues that it is past time we set aside the popular narrative about the sexual revolution, which sees it ‘as a story only of progress.’
“Central to Perry’s argument is the quietly radical acknowledgment of differences between the sexes. The longstanding feminist message that, when it comes to sex, girls can do anything boys can do, is dangerously simplistic. ‘I accept the fact that men and women are different,’ Perry writes. ‘They have different goals and interests. Those differences aren’t going away.’
“These differences, moreover, spring from biological realities that feminism has either ignored or attempted to replace with specious claims: ‘Liberal feminism promises women freedom,’ Perry writes. ‘But female biology imposes, in reality, limits on that freedom. Women get pregnant, and being pregnant and having children is not compatible with complete freedom.’
“Perry acknowledges exceptions to such generalizations; there are women who don’t want children, for example. Yet her generalizations offer a useful way to engage in necessary moral reasoning about the impacts of tectonic changes in behavior and morals. The sexual revolution promised freedom from a great many things in theory (old-fashioned shame, for one) but for whom did it offer more liberation in practice?”
From sex to drugs, Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs by Garth Mullins.
Mullins “wants drug addicts to be able to get drugs when they need them legally. And the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), the organization he helped to found back home in Vancouver, was determined to find ways to accomplish that. Like many who want to legalize or at least decriminalize drugs, they worried about drugs that were laced with fentanyl causing overdoses, that dirty needles would transmit diseases that would kill people, and that people’s lives would be destroyed by the criminal activity and incarceration that result from trying to get drugs illegally.
“To save people from these fates, DULF even ordered drugs on the dark web, tested them to make sure they were not contaminated with other drugs, and then distributed them to people who were chronic addicts. Why can’t government do this?
“For one thing, it has proven very difficult to restrict access to drugs once they are decriminalized or legalized. Mullins assures readers that his movement will not provide drugs to new users or ‘weekend warriors’ or kids. But that’s not how things work. The cannabis decriminalization movement of the 1970s resulted in a significant increase in adolescent and teen use of the drug. Once parents realized the extraordinary rates at which their children were engaged in drug use, they launched a movement to push back against it.
“Mullins assures readers that kids will use drugs no matter what. ‘The mere availability of something isn’t what causes people to get wired.’ That is true and so is his assertion that the internet has made all this easier. But the same laws of supply and demand that make drugs easier and cheaper for adults also mean that kids and people who want to experiment can also obtain them more easily. In any population of children (or adults), there will be a certain percentage who will use drugs and a percentage who will never use drugs. Public policy must address the people in the middle—those who are influenced by the availability, price, legality, and social stigma surrounding drugs.”
From dubious policies to dubious politicians, our Andrew Stiles reviews Mallory McMorrow’s Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.
“McMorrow is a two-term state senator from Michigan and a former Hot Wheels designer for Mattel. She was filled with ‘rage’ after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, so she started writing mean postcards to Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education. When that didn’t work, she decided to run for office. In 2022, she became a liberal superstar after a Republican colleague accused her of trying to ‘groom’ children. The angsty five-minute speech McMorrow gave in response, which the author proudly dubs ‘The Speech,’ was a rousing defense of Democratic efforts to prevent the removal of overly sexualized content from kindergarten classrooms. It was the primal scream of a ‘straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom’ who refused to let ‘hate win.’ It was profound. ‘The room froze as those words hit the towering walls of the chamber like shots out of a cannon,’ McMorrow recalls with Obamaesque self-pride. Naturally, this sent thrills up the legs of MSNBC employees and viewers alike. ‘I felt it in my soul,’ Jonathan Capehart gushed.”
“Meanwhile, normal Americans might be somewhat perplexed to learn that McMorrow is held in such high regard among the weirdos who follow politics professionally. She is a younger version of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), the candidate she endorsed for president in 2020. Warren, sometimes referred to as ‘Pocahontas’ because she advanced her career by pretending to be Native American, was adored by people like McMorrow. (She represents some of the wealthiest suburbs of Detroit, and goes on yoga retreats to Nicaragua.) Pocahontas’s failure to gain traction in the Democratic primary prompted liberal journalist Matt Yglesias to write an article explaining ‘Why Elizabeth Warren is losing even as white professionals love her.’ McMorrow doesn’t claim to be a minority, but she shares Warren’s lecturing schoolmarm vibe and vague policy views that favor emotion over substance.
“McMorrow wrote this book because she’s running to join Warren in the U.S. Senate. She won’t have any trouble raising money or getting positive media coverage, even if she never gets around to filling out the ‘priorities’ section of her campaign website, which is currently inaccessible due to a ‘404 Error.’ McMorrow has star power. The back cover of Hate Won’t Win features approving blurbs from celebrity billionaire Mark Cuban and former pop icon Mandy Moore. … She also brags about how great she is at posting online and appearing on chat shows. ‘I’d imagined this must be what professional athletes feel like when they know they’ve done the training, they’re in the last quarter of the semifinals, and they are on fire,’ she recalls feeling after reciting some Democratic talking points on CNN about how ‘it was not hyperbole to say’ the 2022 midterms could be ‘the very last free and fair election we ever have.’ (It was hyperbole.)”
Happy Mother’s Day.
Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
