Just sayin’.

Perplexed in Irving

My vote is that we stop pretending. Politics doesn’t need to be high-minded, doesn’t need to be principially pure, and certainly doesn’t need to be unconflicted. Embrace the ambiguity, roll with the contradiction, and dammit, govern.

But what you’ve pointed out here is almost certainly the rub, isn’t it? As New Deal federalism grows to proportions (probably) unimagined seventy years ago, it becomes increasingly necessary to protect one locality in ‘universal’ or ‘rights’ terms rather than in local terms. But that said, the localist bent doesn’t get us all that we want either, on two counts, I think. First, we can point to all sorts of behaviors that we would want to say should be incentivized or disincentivized governmentally, regardless of locality. And while most of localities would likely agree with most positions on most behaviors, it’s unsettling to think that there could be places where, say, pederasty were legalized or Miranda protections illegalized. Are we really willing to claim that the potential existence of unsettling places is the price one locality pays to live and promote the sort of life it wishes? Or is the current situation preferable, where the fight for one locality to live as it pleases is fought without end on a national stage?

Second—and the stickier wicket, if you ask me—is what to make of Article IV’s “Full Faith and Credit” clause. If you run it down the the local level, how is one locality to respect the laws in another locality, when some of those laws are going to oppose to the very essence of what it is to belong to the latter place? (See: DOMA) That’s one dilemma that’s hard to figure a way around without mandating local deference to increasingly larger jurisdictions—which, of course, terminates in the extreme authority that we afford to the federal government and Supreme Court that gave us the dilemma in the first place.

This is why two-party democracy is best. I wake up screaming when I think about what it would be like to live in a society where principle came first. There have been such places, also known as hell on earth.

School is such a small part of sex education because it is a small part of education. TV teaches them more than schools or parents ever will, and in this school they will be educated in the one true religion, consumerism. Moguls may run news channels that support “family values” (so long as the families don’t want any actual cash) but will work to destroy them on their entertainment channels, cuz that’s where the money is.

One point, though. Douthat says , “If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy, the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached.”

That unfortunately is impossible. Never happened and never will. It’s not possible either in theory or in practice. There will always be strings attached. To keep the discussion local, it needs to be funded locally.