Academia’s Clown Quarter, I mean:
The meaning of the term “marriage fundamentalism,” a term used repeatedly, isn’t made entirely clear, and its allegedly racist and life-crushing particulars are, inevitably, “hidden,” “invisible,” and conveniently vague – despite the loudly announced use of “an intersectional lens.” But it seems to mean something like the tendency of many adults to see marriage as of mutual benefit and an optimal way to raise children.
However, our stipulator of pronouns and lecturer in Critical Praxis in Education prefers a more dismissive formulation:
Well, statistically, and by almost any measure, it is superior. Hence, presumably, the espousal.
Stripped of contrivance, I’m assuming this is a roundabout admission that, on average, people who find marriage an alien concept and much too demanding, and who opt instead for transient partners, fatherless children, and unstable relationship trash fires, tend to do less well in life, along with their offspring. And quite possibly, in turn, their offspring too.
Though I’m not sure why the response should be to blame those who get their shit together, marry, and raise children more successfully. As if their competence in this matter, or good fortune or whatever, were somehow lamentable, and racist, and a basis for indignation. And from the child’s point of view, other, more credible candidates for resentment may come to mind.
A conclusion that is simply untrue. With the benefits of stable two-parent families – an exclusively “white” phenomenon, according to Professor Letiecq – actually extending to all racial groups:
The author of the study quoted above, Brad Wilcox, can be seen being interviewed here. An interview in which he points out,
Buy hey, let’s not let the numbers get in the way of our radical posturing. Instead, let’s offer the young and credulous really perverse advice, and bitch about marriage as merely an act of complicity in “white supremacy.”
And yes, we’ve been down this path before.
Update, via the comments – which you’re reading, of course:
Regarding this,
EmC replies, tersely,
Well, if little Don’t-Know-Who-My-Dad-Is is starting fires at school and looks destined for a life of delinquency and crime, this is not obviously the fault of the happily married Mr and Mrs Jefferson and their two non-fire-starting children. And no amount of chest-puffing about “heteropatriarchy,” “unequal power relations” and “white supremacy” seems likely to alter that fact.
A child in an unstable home and consequently on an unhappy trajectory may have things to grumble about, in between the brawling and disruption, and starting fires in the toilets. But those grumbles have little to do with other people’s parents making better choices. The grumbling, it seems to me, should probably be directed closer to home.
FredTheFourth adds,
That’s this argument here, for those who may have missed it. I recommend reading the linked post in full – there’s much to chew on, and much of it mirrors the assumptions aired by Professor Letiecq.
This blog is kept afloat by the buttons below.
Let me stop you there, professor…
Heh. The term does rather suggest impending bollocks.
impending bollocks
Band name.
I question the ‘impending’.
That.
Well, if little Don’t-Know-Who-My-Dad-Is is starting fires at school and looks destined for a life of delinquency and crime, this is not obviously the fault of the happily married Mr and Mrs Jefferson and their two non-fire-starting children. And no amount of chest-puffing about “heteropatriarchy,” “unequal power relations” and “white supremacy” seems likely to alter that fact.
A child in an unstable, fatherless home and consequently on an unhappy trajectory may have things to grumble about, but those grumbles have little to do with other people’s parents making better choices. The grumbling, it seems to me, should probably be directed a little closer to home.
I know, I know. I denounce myself.
Shades of the argument, a couple years ago, that parents who read to their young children were giving them an unfair advantage over children who’s parents did not.
It’s just another push for universal government child-rearing. It takes a (trillion dollar with great retirement benefits and coercive power) village to raise other people’s kids, donchuknow.
…let’s offer the young and credulous really perverse advice, and bitch about marriage as merely an act of complicity in “white supremacy.
These nutbars are Marxists either fundamentally or overtly. Their objective is disruption of the status quo and bring on the revolution. Anything they don’t control is bad until they control it and the two biggest stumbling blocks to achieving the dream are the family and religion. Both require loyalty and fealty to something other than the state and we can’t have that, can we. What they haven’t learned is their first in line for the gulag.
One of the big benefits of a 2 parent household is that boys learn to control their aggression–which they do not do in a mom only household. This is one big reason black boys do so much crime–almost all raised by single mothers due to welfare. Married black families have median incomes similar to white married. So many benefits.
The most dangerous situation for either a woman or her children is for her to be single with boyfriends coming and going. The safest demographic (in terms of murder or assault) is married women.
Sure, it is oppression (rolls eyes so hard ….)
Shades of the argument, a couple years ago, that parents who read to their young children were giving them an unfair advantage over children who’s parents did not.
Crab bucket.
It has been documented more than once that poor black families speak to their children much less than white families, have almost no books in the home (note that books are available in any library for free) and do not read to the kids. An experiment in Georgia I believe of getting parents to read to kids had more impact that free preschool.
This argument here, for those who missed it.
White female professor wants to be loved by her black colleagues by adding to the “everything is racist” literature. Earns extra points for all the genuine academic jibberish.
[ Post updated. ]
Nine, actually.
[ Applies moisturiser. ]
I’m attempting find a personal bio of Bethany, but I’m betting spinster or divorcee. That anti-marriage, anti-family axe to grind sprung from somewhere. This on her X account
Ah! Pronouns! How unexpected.
Holy frijoles, I found her GMU Profile here …
It is chock full of Woke buzzwords and all the BIPOC causes she is lending her ‘white savior’ expertise to.
My only question, how many cats does she own?
All I could find is this:
So no ideology there, obviously.
From the article:
She wants to dismantle ‘family privilege’ you see.
One answer presents itself as to why:
For the professor, I might suppose that the structural oppression she has written in her Twitter profile is the flipside of structural success.
Parents who read to their young children are the parents (and children) least in need of even the most elaborate and well-designed interventions the professor can come up with.
Not only that, but these are the children who provide the evidence – through test scores and other measures of success – that perhaps no one actually needs such interventions as she can provide.
And not only that, but the kind of books that the kind of parents who read to their young children are, notable exceptions aside, most likely to choose are classics such as The Wind in the Willows or The Hobbit, positively riddled with the kind of values I’m assuming the professor would treat with disdain.
So, she’s married then?
That’s a technicality unlikely to convince anyone.
[ Moisturising intensifies. ]
Thank you. I should have scrolled down further in the paper, but just the Abstract was so chock-full of jargon and spin, I was too nauseated to continue.
But it appears she’s got a lot of personal issues and failures she wants to shift blame to “white heteropatriarchal supremacy” rather than putting on her big girl panties and womaning up to reality.
You know, once upon a time I was a quite liberal young lad, accepting of the immigrants, the open-marriage thing, the gays, the trannies, what have you. Live and let live, that was my motto.
Unfortunately, since those halcyon days of brotherhood and so forth, it has become increasingly apparent that I had no idea what I was dealing with. Live and let live is not how things have been going the last 50 years. It has been much more “You will submit!” At first subtly, and more stridently as time has gone on.
So here we are today, being told, AGAIN, that some basic Western social structure is racist, bigoted, and [insert victim group here] phobic. This time marriage and by extension, child rearing.
After 50 years, I’m good with that. Yes, I’m entirely good with being called a racist/bigot/’phobe for being married and having 2.5 children. Please go ahead and yell racist all you want. Have a paroxysm if you like, I’ll record it and make an internet meme video.
But do it from the sidewalk, because if you get on my lawn…
Evil clowns.
The two depressingly frequent conservative responses to this kind of language are (a) to jump through hoops to prove that they’re not racist, and (b) “the woke have gone too far this time”. Conservatives should be owning a lot of this, separating the principles from the provocation, and saying yes, we do think that a package of sexual differentiation, attaching real status and authority to fathers instead of being an auxiliary mother or a goofy manchild sibling, and promoting marriage as an explicit primary goal for young people, all of these things lead to a better civilization, or even to a superior civilization, we’ll own that.
Whites, especially poorer whites, actually aren’t doing as well as a lot of immigrant groups in getting people settled down into marriages.
Thomas Sowell has stated that in the 1920s marriage was proportionately higher amongst blacks than whites and that proportionately more illegitimate children were born to whites: so marriage is not a white concept if that is what she is trying to say.
Things really started to go wrong in the 1960s when welfare payments made marriage optional for having children.
Things really started to go wrong in the 1960s when welfare payments made marriage optional for having children.
Worse than that – it actively discouraged marriage. Father in the house, no gubmint money for yoo. This was embraced across the board by poor whites and blacks alike, although it seems to have hurt the blacks more. Or the results are more visible, I guess.
I grew up in the frozen hinterlands of the northeastern USA – rural, poor, and full of people so white they glow in the dark. A lot of welfare and not a lot of jobs. In the late 80s, my younger sister was told by her high school peers that the way to make money was to have babies and go on welfare. You didn’t need a job or a husband to get sweet, sweet government checks. In fact, if you acquired either, the money would stop coming in.
It is marriage but without legal protections for either partner or any children. Sure sounds like progress. Awkward to say though. People have started saying “partner” but what does that mean? Just co-habiting? Dating for a while but living separately? Business partner?
For delicious irony, note that in many US states, if a couple live together for a while and buy a house together etc., the state decides they are a common-law marriage. ahahahaha
So all but married then. Another example of the luxury belief class not practicing what they preach.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but higher ed appears to employ a lot of useless hacks and charlatans that should be laughed out of polite company as quickly as we dismiss Scientologists spouting about Xenu and thetans.
More visible and more immediate.
Looks this blog and all its visitors would be well advised to avoid Scotland.
A clever way to outlaw sheep jokes, though.
Dear gays and lesbians, you are really just a subtype of transgenderism. Update your dictionary accordingly.
You’ll never guess who devised our (U.S.) welfare system.
Did you guess Big Labor? Neither did I.
But according to Amity Schlaes, that’s who architected the War on Poverty: leaders in the Dept. of Labor and the unions. Which, there’s no good reason for Labor to care about welfare programs, is there?
Except that when you put people on welfare, they exit the labor force, and with the smaller labor force, wages go up.
That’s it. That’s why they did it. They wanted to tighten the market to raise labor-union wages. They made welfare a better financial deal than working for the lowest wages, so it wasn’t hard to convince people to sign up.
In terms of raw numbers, most people on the welfare roles were/are white, but everyone knew that blacks would be disproportionately affected. Moynihan warned people about family breakup, but there was more than that. Welfare lays people idle, gives them nothing to do all day.
Imagine what that does to men, especially young men. Nothing to do, nothing to aspire to, nothing to build towards, nothing to dream about. So they get into trouble, committing crime and forming gangs (which is what all people of all races do in those circumstances).
In the meantime the females have nothing but a bunch of layabouts to choose from, so they don’t form permanent bonds or make fatherhood demands, because of the aforementioned welfare-check-as-father situation.
In those circumstances, people stop having hope, and they begin to abuse substances to ease the pain, making them horrible parents even if they are at home with the kids.
Leading to the current state of inner cities. People cite racism or the legacy of slavery for those disintegrated communities, but the bulk of the blame lies with the War on Poverty, which was never intended to help the poor at all.
Poor racial minorities live in the inner cities, concentrated, and within the view of Leftists and the news media.
Poor whites are rural, scattered around the country, stuck in trailer parks, nowhere near Leftist enclaves and the media.
Concentrated poverty in urban areas feeds on itself as the pathologies develop. In rural areas, there’s less opportunity for gangs, for example, Boyd Crowder and Dewey Crowe notwithstanding.
If I may be non-snarky for a moment…? The greatness of a stable, blood-related, one-house family consisting of a mother, father and their children isn’t merely the better ‘outcomes’ &c. It’s the victory of love. The love you have for someone who has children with you; the love those children have for you; that brothers and sisters have for each other; that you have for your own children — your beautiful responsibilities, their faces so like and unlike your own, resembling, and not, your own father and mother and sister and brother — this, and probably nothing else, is the foundation of a good society, and perhaps of the good individual. I’m no damn hippie, but absent the family…? Love can’t rule. And it must, it has to.
Somehow, I seem to be a tad short on moisturizer. And since I am currently sporting a manly skiing tan, straight from Lake Tahoe, I could really use some.
A lot of us grew up immersed in a liberal culture, so by default we absorbed the beliefs and assumptions of those around us, having never really encountered anything else. But then some of us started to change our opinions as we grew up and saw the real world unfiltered by liberal lies. It can be an intriguing pastime looking for clues as to why one person woke up while another did not.
Even with the advantage of introspection it can be difficult to figure out why. I sometimes credit Heinlein with planting seeds of ideas, but my far-left sister avidly read C. S. Lewis, whose Out of the Silent Planet should have in itself been an effective inoculation against totalitarian ideas.
Some take longer than others to learn, and only by bitter experience. But better late than never: Swedish politician abandons “refugees are welcome” opinion.
(The linked blog article includes a link to the politician’s own words in a Swedish newspaper.)
If David puts out a bottle of moisturizer, do not trust the label.
One should never trust the label on ANY bottle David puts out!
I speak from bitter experience.
[ From the cellar laboratory, bubbling sounds. ]
Hmmm
Always trust the Dibbler label!
In rural areas, there’s less opportunity for gangs
Here in Canada, a lot of rural areas are terrorized by gangs from the local Injun reservation. (Google for the Gerald Stanley case). That doesn’t gainsay the larger point – young men with booze and no responsibilities are a recipe for trouble.
Are the Indian police uninterested? Or even complicit?
I have heard that in America some Indian police forces even regard non-Indians as fair game for revenue-generating false arrests.
You will know they/them by their fruits.
From your linked post.
Level only in the sense that a city is after it has been destroyed during battle.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2024/03/where-perversity-is-status.html#comment-168172
You ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait till we get universal basic income, AI and robots.