In today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, we’re talking about the Tea Party Movement, the Republicans’ latest pledge to America, the upheaval in the White House’s staff, and we’ll talk to Weekly Standard senior writer Jonathan Last about his powerful new piece on America’s One Child Policy.

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Related Links:

Bloomberg: Jobless Claims Rise
WSJ: Exodus at the White House
RealClearMarkets: Obama’s Problem is Ideology
John Goodman: The True Cost of Health Care
WaPo: Ahmadinejad’s Challenges
WSJ: John Boehner’s Business Ties
Politico: White House Denies Eyeing Koch Tax Returns
Weekly Standard: Goolsbee Talked About Koch Tax Status
Jonathan Last: America’s One Child Policy
TNL: Marriage and Children in America
CBSNews: The Republican Pledge to America
Redstate: The Pledge to Nowhere
Erick Erickson: Most Ridiculous DC Product Since McClellan
Tim Carney: Tea Partiers and Abortion
Bob Inglis: Reagan Wouldn’t Be At Home in Tea Parties
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Matt Lewis has an excellent piece this morning concerning the blowback over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel, who is assigned to cover the political right, and a recent tweet where he shared his feelings about covering those who oppose same-sex marriage. Weigel wrote:

“I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots. In 20 years no one will admit they were part of that.”

Lewis covers the responses from the usual parties irate about Weigel’s language, and he makes a key point which goes beyond that:

But opposition to gay marriage is hardly a fringe movement. A majority of Americans tell pollsters they are opposed to it, a number that, if you take him at face value, includes President Obama. Presumably Weigel would also count as “bigots” the 70 percent of African-Americans who backed Proposition 8 in California.

Weigel issued a mea culpa the next day. The language was harsh, but I’m a little confused why conservatives would be surprised at Weigel’s opinion, which I would assume is both 1) honest and 2) shared by other journalists who cover the right.

Unlike his colleague Ezra Klein, Weigel is being asked by the Post to do shoe leather journalism, not just opinion and analysis — but unless this view will result in him not getting calls back from people he’s writing about, I see no reason why his expression of his personal opinion on those who oppose same sex marriage should spark any reaction other than “well, that’s what a lot of people in the media think.” (Frankly, Klein’s view that Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the health care bill would result in the deaths of thousands is a far more jarring comment. But that’s beside the point.)

I don’t know Weigel and I have never met him, but as far as I know he doesn’t represent himself as a conservative, just as someone who primarily writes about them. He first contacted me several years ago while doing a story for Campaigns & Elections in just that arena, wrote a bit for the libertarian Reason, and then moved to smart lefty journal The Washington Independent, funded in part by the Gill Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Institute. So why would anyone assume that Weigel, after working for places funded by same sex marriage activists like Tim Gill, would have any difference of opinion on the matter than the rest of his colleagues?

Sure, conservatives might have hoped for more balanced coverage after Weigel professed his eagerness to write fairly about the Tea Party movement, and responded to those on the right who doubted his approach by saying “I’m going to work hard on changing your mind about this.” But I don’t know why anyone would assume that’s more than just polite pleasantries (delivered with Weigel’s typically sarcastic tone). He’s covering the right with the traditional “conservatives in the mist” approach, and nothing I’ve seen that he’s written thus far would indicate he has a more unique perspective to offer.

In fact, if there is something unfortunate to take away from Weigel’s remarks, it’s not the “bigots” word — it’s the response he gave to Lewis when prodded on the issue:

“I like (and largely agree with) pro-lifers. But I do not understand or respect the motivation of anti-gay marriage campaigners.”

Understand is the key word there, and I’d argue it’s the more disappointing one than “bigots.” The reasons for being opposed to same sex marriage are often tied to arguments about morality, faith, the effect on civil society, and certainly in some groups a degree of homophobia. But there are also very complex legal questions which arise concerning religious freedom and the legal status of churches and faith groups. A key question for me, as someone who opposes court-mandated same sex marriage but favors civil unions, is how it is even possible, absent Constitutional amendment, to grant same sex couples protections under equality provisions without resulting in a massive increase in lawsuits against churches and faith based groups. As we saw earlier this year in Washington, absent carve-outs for faith-based organizations, the Catholic Church and other groups are forced to make a decision between continuing providing social services in the city and following the tenets of their faith. Worse, the fact that lawsuits of this variety are already proceeding, where a Methodist organization lost tax exempt status for refusing to assent to a permit for a same sex union on their property, should concern many faith groups. As it happens, Wikipedia informs me that Weigel is a Methodist — surely he doesn’t think of his own church as populated by bigots?

These are complex issues, cutting across lines of individual rights, equality under law, religious freedom and more. Referring to people who oppose same sex marriage as bigots is insulting, of course, but it’s something people should be used to by now — the “understand” comment is worse because people might have hoped Weigel would at least try to understand the right’s perspective on something, as a part of his job. It reflects a strong degree of dismissal of an entire viewpoint, one that most polls indicate is still held by the majority of Americans. The complicated ways this issue runs across political boundaries isn’t just exemplified by the coalition of churchgoing Hispanics and African Americans who defeated same sex marriage in California, but shows in individuals as well. Consider David Blankenhorn, a personal friend, a lifelong Democrat, a dedicated Obama supporter, and a leading figure in the fatherhood movement. He’s also strongly opposed to a redefinition of marriage and has done his best to work across partisan and ideological lines to achieve compromise on the issue with people like Jonathan Rauch, packaging expanded recognition with religious protections.

Even if you disagree with his views, Blankenhorn and dozens of other key respected figures in the political opposition to same sex marriage put the lie to the idea that this is a movement motivated by bigotry. Weigel can of course hold his own personal opinions about anyone he covers, that’s his right — I’d just ask that he take the time to try to understand the motivation of those he’s going to write about regularly on this beat. After that, he can of course go back to dismissing them as bigots.

Follow Ben Domenech on Twitter.

Conor Friedersdorf, subbing for Andrew Sullivan, shares his ideas on my Once Was America essay with a post at The Daily Dish today which I think is worth a response. My chief concern in my original essay is that we have failed to recognize a technology-and-culture driven fluctuation in fertility, union, and mortality that may hold widespread ramifications for the nature of our country, representing a permanent and fundamental shift from the past. Within the current generation, the value assigned to marriage and family have decreased dramatically, resulting in a delay in the median age of marriage, a marked decline in reproduction rates, and an associated loss of some of the admirable qualities that enabled Americans to contend with the great trials and challenges of the 20th Century.

As I pointed out in response to Peter Lawler and James Poulos, from 1950-1970, the average man got married by age 23, and the average woman when she was 20; from 1979-1994, the echo boom had 60 million children, the second largest generation in American history. For all the negative things that can be said about the Baby Boomers, they got married young and therefore reproduced at high rates — Echo Boomers so far have not, and I believe that they will not. I believe this represents a fundamental shift in what Americans value — that children and family have diminished as other things have risen to take their place.

Conor disagrees, but I believe he is disagreeing out of impressions formed, as he writes, “In my experience.” I’d suggest Conor consider that the experiences he and his friends have gone through in recent years, while fascinating in their own way, are not a broad enough sample group to evaluate how children and marriage are viewed in 21st Century American life (were I to rely only on my own experiences, one would assume the American family is thriving and reproducing at an astounding rate) — and in some cases, I believe Conor is mistaking chicken for egg.

Conor writes: “Young people in the middle and upper classes in America delay marriage partly out of a desire to avoid the rampant divorces that plagued their parents’ generation.” In other words, they just want to wait to make sure their families work, since the marriages of their parents did not. While this might make rational sense, I don’t believe most young people view their relationships in terms that are equivalent to social science, and I simply don’t see the data to support this perception. Marriage gets delayed for a lot of different reasons: men can have more fun (see the classic 2002 documentary Buying the Cow), women can somewhat fulfill feminist career demands, everyone can delay the responsibility of babies and growing up (as Kay Hymowitz has written) — but a sober reflection on the endurance of late marriages is not among them. I see no reason to doubt Robert Bitter’s 1986 study on this point, nor Sandra McGinnis’s work with the NCFR on cohabitation. Absent statistical proof to the contrary, I believe fear of divorce is just not a statistically significant reason for delaying marriage — especially as divorce’s occurrence has plateaued — and certainly not significant enough to result in the kind of dramatic shift we’ve seen since the 1970s.

To demonstrate the nature of this shift, I’d recommend the work of Robert Schoen of Penn State, whose statistical studies bear reconsideration. In 2005, in the course of a study co-written with Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Schoen demonstrated the overall trends tracking marriage and fertility rates based on relative ages: “Over the last several decades, the West has seen a dramatic retreat from marriage. There have been substantial increases in the mean age at first marriage, and recent period first-marriage rates imply large declines in the proportion of men and women who will ever marry. These changes have typically been accompanied by marked increases in cohabitation, very low fertility, and rises in the proportion of children born out of wedlock.”

In case you need a clearer picture: the top is England and Wales, the bottom the United States. Both trendlines have continued in the six years since these statistics end.

Conor writes that “The rise of career women — now dubbed ‘women’ — is another major factor.” He’s completely right that women in the workforce are a major factor in delayed marriage — and he’s completely wrong that we may now assume this is an unquestioned norm for American women. “Now dubbed ‘women’” can fairly be considered code for this assumption — which is a perfectly rational assumption, all the easier to reach if one knows precious few married women. As it happens, it is also wrong. The Department of Labor says so.

See item one: only 59.5% of eligible women are actual participants in the workforce. What are the other 40.5% doing? Whatever it is, they are failing to live up to the Friedersdorfian definition of “women.”

Extrapolating from this data (DOL doesn’t appear to have a male-specific statistical set), there are 82,838,710 eligible men in the workplace. We can get the 15-and-over male population of the U.S. through tedious addition of population pyramids here. It comes to 119,566,265 for mid-2009, which I’ll round down to 118,000,000 to exclude 15-year olds. So what’s the eligible-male participation in the workforce as a proportion of the total? About 69.3% — quite a lot higher than the 59.5% of women. Why the difference? And why do we see women vastly overrepresented as “Secretaries and administrative assistants” (the plurality top category in the DOL stats), and vastly underrepresented as senior management?

The answer to both questions: children! There’s actually been a great deal written about this at conservative institutions like the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and The Atlantic. (Note to archival Atlanticists: please, fix the spelling of George Gilder’s name).

Note that the ideological arguments in these essays (especially in the CSM piece) that “economics,” not children, drive women’s decisions to leave the workforce are all still child-centric, and merely cast the demands of child-raising in economic terms (mostly as failures of governments and employers to provide appropriately economic remedies, like the Village it Takes.) Also note that while it’s true that the upper and middle class in America have longer educational periods, and that this is one (though I would argue a very small) reason for the heightened delay in marriage, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics study quoted by the NYT shows declines of mothers in the workforce “have occurred across all educational levels and, for most groups, by about the same magnitude.”

As Conor notes, I certainly agree that if an upper or middle-class individual chooses to stay in college longer and enter the workforce later, it has an effect on marriage ages. It’s a generalization, but an accurate one I think, to contend that if you enter the workforce at a younger age, you may view yourself as an adult earlier, and one of the things that comes with adulthood is a tendency to value marriage (see the Kay Hymowitz series I referenced in my first piece). But only 29% of Americans have a college degree, a figure that is not expected to increase dramatically in the coming years — so what’s Conor’s explanation for the decisions of the other 71%? I don’t know how many of Conor’s friends are in this category, but before he responds that concerns about the economy are the largest motivation, it’s worth noting that the data we’re working from is all from before the current economic downturn began. Even in prosperous years, Americans are choosing to invest their money in personal enjoyment over family and children. This suggests that there is more going on here than the ramifications of class and career — it implies a fundamental underlying social cause.

Conor claims that he wishes to “push back against Mr. Domenech’s culturally driven arguments, which seem to assume that delaying marriage and family imply devaluing those things.” When people get married and have children, they transform from being a potential society to being real societies, creating a cycle of productivity and inheritance that allows individuals to succeed and surpass their parents, and forming a community of stability and support that dramatically reduces the demand for larger government to provide for the health and economic needs of the young (as poverty is feminized), the infirm (as caregivers disappear), and the aging. Increases in the number of unwed and childless individuals necessitates demand for expanded social programs and governmental authority to take the place of family. As a putative conservative, it surprises me somewhat that Conor would take issue with a position as paramount to conservatism in all its forms as the importance of culture, and the family as a crucial element of American culture. Or perhaps that is just the price of admission if one wishes to be published in The Daily Dish?

In any case, while I don’t concur with the entirety of his findings, the University of Michigan’s Ron Lesthaeghe’s belief that the United States is in the midst of a Second Demographic Transition is overwhelmingly borne out by what we know to be true. If one looks at the data, and not the anecdote, it is clear that women and families actually behave as if there is an either/or choice. This, in turn, leads a reasonable person to believe there is a valuation process underway. Conor may believe that this is not the case, but if he does so, he is deriving the substance of his ideas from something other than measurable facts.

>> A quick aside on Barack Obama’s new tax plan, as described by Obama advisors Austan Goolsbee and Jason Furman, which is purportedly in response to polls saying he was losing on the issue (unlike, of course, all other Obama policy shifts).  Essentially, they say President Obama would bring back the old and not missed 39.6% tax rate (as opposed to the current 35%) and a new payroll tax on top earners, because of course raising taxes on the entrepeneurial class will really help the country by taking away the disposable income they would otherwise reinvest in the economy. This is all kind of pointless, though, because essentially what Obama’s proposing is the same as what will happen when the Bush tax cuts expire – he doesn’t have to lift a finger to make them law, and none of these hikes will pay for the grandiose governmental expansions he favors in other areas (hello, trillion dollar deficits).

But it’s in the New York Sun’s hard-hitting editorial on the plan that we see an astonishingly anti-woman element to it that Austan and Jason aren’t particularly up front about, and that I had missed myself on first glance:

Meanwhile, the most astonishing sentence in the op-ed is this one: “His plan would not raise any taxes on couples making less than $250,000 a year, nor on any single person with income under $200,000.” It amounts to a declaration of war on two-income families, a marriage penalty of punitive proportions. If those two single persons with income just under $200,000 get married, Mr. Obama is going to hammer them with a huge tax increase. If the second earner, who in many cases is the woman, is going to have to give 54% of what she earns to the government, she might as well stay home with the children.

Ah, the full-throated return of the marriage penalty.  Here’s the problem with this area of tax policy, which has had a huge impact on society (read this Blankenhorn essay for more): the marriage penalty discourages people from getting married, economically – but it also encourages them to be a one-income household, with the kind of societal benefits on health, education, lifestyle, etc. that social conservatives (and the populist working class) approve of wholeheartedly.

Yet there’s no question here that Obama’s tax plan is, at its heart, anti-woman.  Forced to choose because of our tax structure to either stay at home and care for the kids or stay in the workforce, the overwhelming majority of married couples has mom stay at home, and dad go to work.  I’m frankly amazed that Obama’s policy shop has a blind spot on this, as this is the ideal sort of issue for McCain to point out in front of Hillary supporters (that, and he should announce as soon as possible as big an increase in the child tax credit as is feasible – he currently has said he intends to double the dependent exemption, but there’s tons of available political ground here by supporting a pro-family tax code).  This is amateur hour.

>> Only in California.  Only at the LA Times. The text: “Times Poll: Californians narrowly reject gay marriage” – By bare majorities, Californians reject the state Supreme Court’s decision to allow same-sex marriages and back a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at the November ballot that would outlaw such unions, a Los Angeles Times/KTLA Poll has found.” Four paragraphs before you get to the numbers: “Either way, the poll suggests the outcome of the proposed amendment is far from certain. Overall, it was leading 54% to 35% among registered voters.” Yep, 19 point margin = barely there. One wonders what they would’ve said if it had the same margin in the other direction.