If you’ve paid much attention to the debate over gay adoption—and even if you haven’t—you’ve probably head some pundit or pol assert that “children need a mother and a father,” a claim that’s usually linked to the notion of gender complementarity, the idea that mom and dad each bring something unique to the parenting table, […]

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TalkLeft is upset by Jerry Falwell’s “latest knucklehead theory” that Jews and Muslims won’t get to heaven. Which is a little weird, because I always supposed that the “knucklehead theory” was pretty much a mainstream view: Belief is a prerequisite for salvation, and not just any old Belief—in Vishnu or Allah or Baal or even […]

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Hit and Run commenter Warren gets off the best one-line reply to the silly boycotts of stores that dare to greet customers with “Happy Hollidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”: Remember when the faithful use to complain that Xmas was too commercial? Now they complain that commerce is insufficiently monotheist.

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Steven Levitt responds to some critics of his “legal abortion lowers crime” thesis, drawing a comments reply from Steve Sailer, who’s been among the most vocal opponents of the hypothesis. I have nothing useful to contribute on the econometric dispute about the data, but I do want to take a stab at one of the […]

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An old friend and ex-D.C. resident mentioned over IM that Dahlia Lithwick, Slate‘s excellent senior editor/legal correspondent, was coming to town to speak. He added: The nice thing about the boonies is that visits by important, interesting people almost never overlap with each other. Furthermore, they’re kept at a manageable level such that you can […]

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So, Bill Bennett’s taken a bunch of heat for a recent radio appearance in which he objected to instrumentalist defenses of abortion by arguing that one could lower the crime rate by aborting every black child, and we’d all regard that as morally monstrous—and has also picked up some unlikely defenders. The defenders are mostly […]

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It’s a measure of the tenor of the times that I spotted two pieces today considering why the most rigid and illiberal forms of religious observance seem to be gaining ground: One, by Judith Shulevitz at Slate, offers a sort of rational choice explanation in terms of barriers to entry as a way of ensuring […]

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