A friend of mine attended a conference last week at Harvard, the purpose of which was to revisit the conclusions of what is known among social scientists and policymakers as The Moynihan Report, written by prominent sociologist, Democrat, and Senator (D-NY) Daniel Patrick Moynihan; its official title is "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."
The Moynihan Report was written in 1965, when Moynihan was an assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration. Moynihan's two most prominent findings were that the high unemployment rate for black men was a primary cause of homelessness and family instability in the black community, and that government intervention was necessary to alleviate this problem before the already rising rate of single motherhood in the black community led to the complete dissolution of the traditional family within the black community.
And at this conference, BushCo domestic policy advisor Karl Zinsmeister said something particularly stupid: claiming that strengthening the institution of marriage (of a heterosexual variety, of course) can cure all the ills of society, he argued that the causal mechanism that makes marriage so important is that it "harnesses the nuclear reactor of male sexual energy."
That's right -- crime, drugs, war, teen pregnancy, healthcare, Social Security, the dismal performance of our public education system, our national infrastructure crisis, poverty, our reliance on foreign oil, the immigration debate, Yankees vs. Red Sox, etc. -- all these problems can be solved by the power of the penis.
Now, I assume that the president's domestic policy advisor, when speaking about public policy, speaks with the voice of the president. So it seems that it is the official policy of the federal government of the United States of America that unless we concentrate our efforts not on all these other social problems but on strengthening the kind of marriage advocated by the most narrowminded bigots in our society while denying equality to all others, we will be condemning our children and our children's children to such calamities as tainted groundwater for generations, unusual cancer clusters, peeling the paint off our houses and giving our families permanent orange afros (thanks, Ghostbusters), and, of course, instantaneously vaporizing every living thing within 5 miles of every unmarried male in the world.
Indeed, Karl Zinsmeister has discovered the WMD, and they are located at approximately waist-high on the frontside of over a billion people all over the world!
As a social scientist, I could go into the many, many ways Zinsmeister's reductionist thinking makes about as much sense as, say, arguing that screwing over children is actually good for children, as Bill Kristol recently did...
...but I won't. I'll just assume that if you're reading this, you already know.
But as a man? As a man, I find this idea insane and insulting. The institution of marriage didn't stop Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Tom DeLay, Bob Dole, or countless other prominent Republican defenders of "traditional family values" from launching their apparently nuclear missiles by engaging (or attempting to engage) in adultery. And being unmarried doesn't make countless millions of ordinary, every-day American men who happen to be unmarried behave like the boors, ignoramuses, and bigots our Republican leaders apparently expect them to be.
We're not all the drunken, high-on-coke, stereotypical frat boy, idiotic assholes George W. Bush was when he was single and still is today.
Dear Republicans, trolls, and idiots who happened to stumble upon this site, there is a certain matter that you like to bloviate about frequently, but which you fail to live up to oh so often. The Democrats here know what I'm talking about: it's personal responsibility. You see, up here in the big leagues -- that's the "real world" for you denizens of the BushCo Bubble -- we like to practice a little thing we call "self control." We are not idiots and we are not feral animals. We can control our basest urges. And we tend to behave far more morally -- however you want to define that -- than the self-righteous hypocrites who pontificate about morality in the halls of power.
I met my fiancee back in 1996. We started dating shortly after that, and we've been together ever since. We just got engaged in August. We are completely devoted to each other and have been for a very long time, regardless of whether our relationship has been sanctified by any religious or civil authority. And all that would be true regardless of whether or not the "nuclear reactor" of my sexuality is ever brought on-line -- which is none of your damn business anyway!