One-handed typing: the doom of mankind!

[elfs]

Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent from the ruling Lawrence v. Texas, said that the court's overturning its own opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, "calls into question state laws against masturbation."

Remember, this isn't just Scalia spouting off here. His version of the constitution may be weird, but it's consistent in the notion that some things, such as sexuality and privacy, which aren't explicit in the constitution, are not to be dealt with by the courts but must be deferred to the states. On the other hand, religion, which is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, is the province of the Court, which has the final say and sometimes defers to "the verdict of history." Anyone who remembers the Judge Bork case can remember his dissenting opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut.

As if that weren't bad enough, the religious right is now interested in "strengthening marriage," which include "addressing deliberate childlessness is marriage."

Isn't that special?

Comments

[intrepid-reason.livejournal.com]

I will say that it is frightening that the demographics are looking as if the majority of people choosing not to have children are in the intellectual top 5%-10% in the nation.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Why would you assume that? It's not as if intelligence is an inherited trait, and the assumption that those in the 90% below "the top" don't care about education is, well, not warranted.

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

Estimates of the inheritance of intelligence suggest that the heritability of intelligence may be as high as 50%. In other words, intelligence appears to be inherited, but nurture has an equivalent effect.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Intelligence is actually, to some small degree, inherited. It's mostly a crapshoot anyway and not hard-and-fast that intelligent people will have intelligent kids (or that morons won't have any smart kids). However, the most important factor in fostering intelligence in the population is generally going to be found only in households with intelligent/successful parents. This factor is a stimulating, open-minded environment during the formative years that teaches the offspring to reason for themselves and to shun irrational prejudice.

Now I don't want to sound too classist or anything, but doing the most simple math, there IS a troublesome trend. The open-minded population tends to be more concerned with problems they perceive for the Earth as a whole, one of which is overpopulation and all that. They tend to make up a large percentage of the childless-by-choice couples. Much of the remainder are successful professionals as others have noted.

On the other hand, another major segment of the population has narrow-minded religious ideals, and unfortunately they tend to breed like rabbits. Take your average devout Catholic couple, based on those friends I know personally who were raised in Catholic homes, I'd predict an average of no fewer than 5 kids per couple for Catholics. Even assuming 20% of their offspring bails on the faith and gets open-minded and educated, that's still a SERIOUS exponential rate of growth. The friends I have who were raised in other Christian denominations stayed mostly at the net replacement (families with 2 kids on average), but the trend of having families with closed-minded "values" breeding at faster rates is going to have consequences that will be reflected in the general tolerance and open-mindedness of the population as a whole.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

You are making a poor assumption here: that Catholics cannot be open-minded and educated. Yes, there are some areas we're likely to strongly disagree with, but they shouldn't be made the bogeymen of irrational thought.

No, I'm not Catholic.