Culture war

The downside of diversity

Boston Globe | Michael Jonas | August 5, 2007

A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger. But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

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Time Magazine Gets It Wrong: Boys Are Still In Crisis And Securing An Immoral Marketplace

Acton Power Blog | August 1, 2007

The boy crisis is not a myth. David Von Drehle’s article, “The Myth About Boys,” in this week’s Time Magazine argues that the boy crisis of the 1990s has leveled off and is now improving. Not exactly. This assessment, however, is completely dependent on one’s moral framework. Boys are still in crisis, regardless of what feminists and other women, like some published in the Washington Post, are saying. It’s a crisis of morality. The ongoing crisis will have dire consequences because the market produces whatever men want, good or bad. Immoral men, immoral market. It’s that simple. The real issue is “what kind of men are we forming,” not “what bad things aren’t men doing.” Tragically, 90 percent of boys raised in the church will abandon it by the time they turn 20-years-old, so there is much work to be done.

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The New Totalitarianism: Forcing People to Be Tolerant

New Oxford Review David J. Peterson July-August 1999

On a cold night early in 1998 a college freshman in Wyoming decided to engage in one of his periodic bouts of very hazardous behavior. He went out cruising the bars looking for rough sex with a male stranger or strangers. From a bar, the youngster went off into the night with two men who pistol-whipped him, robbed him, and left him tied to a fence by the side of a road. He died some days later in a hospital. The young man’s name was Matthew Shepard. Shepard’s parents instantly found themselves, their dead son, and their grief being exploited to publicize what the activists endlessly interviewed by the media announced was rampant anti-homosexual bias in American culture. His father told the thronging media that the death of his misguided and unfortunate son should not be so used. But the opportunity for exploitation was irresistible, and Shepard was made the poster-boy for a campaign to write into law a special protected status for homosexuals. This campaign had already been vigorous, and Shepard’s iconic murder turned it positively frenzied. The ever-opportunistic Bill Clinton appeared on television to condemn “gay bashing” and to demand new federal and state laws to combat it. He expressed perfectly the wishes of the liberal elite who intend to blanket the country with laws that will punish such “hate crimes.”

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Pornography — The Real Perversion

Townhall.com Dinesh D’Souza January 14, 2007

On a recent trip to Istanbul I encountered a group of Muslim students who insisted that American culture was morally perverse. They called it “pornographic.” And they charged that this culture is now being imposed on the rest of the world. I protested that pornography is a universal vice. “Yes,” one of the students replied, “but nowhere else is pornography in the mainstream of the culture. Nowhere else is porn considered so cool and fashionable. Pornography in America represents an inversion of values.”

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