I actually agree with Andrew on a scope-of-government issue! Amazing! Seriously, though, Ross Douthat's point is well taken: divorces and so forth fall hard upon working-class families. Conceded. So what can we do about it? Aside from many, many more homilies about the importance of family and the scourge of gay marriage?
I'm beginning to think that social conservatism is pretty much a worthless ideology in practice at this point. All sociocons do is tell us what everyone knows but nobody can fix, and then repeat said information at ever-increasing volume and remind us about the good ol' days. Umm, what's the point of this? I'm trying to think of a social issue where the sociocons have a valid plan to make things better. Not family matters, and certainly not abortion, where the prevailing right-wing plan (i.e. ban the shit out of it!) will be unenforceable, will cause many more deaths among women getting the procedure illegally, and will almost certainly necessitate the creation of a vast new regulatory apparatus or a beefing-up of existing law enforcement options to deal with the millions of these things that happen every year. So much for small government. The GOP has fuck-all to say about the problems in the Black community beyond the standard bromides of self-reliance. Well, drug dealers are self-reliant. This is not the problem. And the drug war? Education? No ideas, nothing. If anything these days, sociocon thinking tends toward trying to make life as miserable as possible for the types of people they don't like (e.g. like opposing non-discrimination laws against gays) not so much out of some grand principle as much as just to be a bunch of cussed bastards. To be fair, I'm not accusing Ross per se of any of this thinking--he's smarter than that--but just the prevailing thinking of the right right now. I think the time has come for a spell in the wilderness. It'll be better for everyone.
