Here's my excuse for the past month's radio silence.

I've finally recovered from jet lag and am full of European travel tips for anyone who wants them.

The highlights: Delft, Holland; Salzburg and the Zillertal, Austria; and Florence. The lowlight: the ordeal getting home, due to mechanical difficulties and other snafus.

Michael Gerson summarizes this paper, presented at this conference (other papers here). Here’s Gerson’s conclusion:

It would be nice if teen sexual behavior could be automatically changed by an abstinence lecture or a sermon. Setting those norms and expectations, however, is a small part of a larger cultural task. Moral men and women need moral communities.

This is why an abstinence program, by itself, may not accomplish much. And this is why there are no substitutes for healthy communities, beginning with families, in which young people are embedded.

In this context, the right question to ask of any government program is: does it support or "empower" families and "civil society"? Perhaps another way of putting it is: What Would Tocqueville Do? read more »

Good intentions make bad policy, Africans tell Bono.

After his impassioned defense of aid, an African man in the audience asked Bono, "Where do you place the African person as a thinker, a creator of wealth?"

Celebrities make easy targets. Many at TED attacked Bono (ironically the catalyst for holding a conference in Africa in the first place) less for what he has done and more for what he represents. He has done more for raising Africa's profile and our awareness about debt relief, unequal trade, malaria and HIV/AIDS than perhaps any human being in history. He represents a game we have all played for nearly fifty years whose only winners have been corrupt governments and the international development industry.

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I used to think well of Rep. David Scott, regarding him as relatively thoughtful, relatively moderate, kind of a metro Atlanta counterpart to Rep. Sanford Bishop, who actually seems to try to represent all of his southwest Georgia district.

That was then; seems to be now.

Nothing, so far, in .

This NYT article describes the findings of this poll. We learn, shockingly, that young people lean liberal, as (apparently) they almost always have, at least for the past half century.

I doubt we can predict anything about their future political behavior from this. And I’m not even sure that, given their general participation rates and the difficulty of mobilizing them, their predilections will make a big difference in 2008.

What we don’t from the article is that, for the most part, there’s not an appreciable difference between the views of those folks and the general population. read more »

I'd heard news of a press conference on my campus, and I'd guessed about its subject, but rumors are flying that Will's state representative--all-around nice guy Mike Jacobs--is about to switch parties, moving from moderate D to moderate R.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the vitriol being spewed at him. Party-switchers aren't popular with their ex-mates. But Jacobs hasn't officially switched yet. read more »

Michael Gerson invites attacks from the left and the right by sticking up for the legacies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. I think he’s right about Clinton, but needlessly provocative in his defense of Bush. These lines, for example, can’t be calculated to do anything other than annoy (immensely) his conservative readers:

Talk-radio conservatism assaults the most obviously Catholic elements of Bushism -- a role for government in compassion and a welcoming attitude toward immigrants. "Purity" is defined as the empathy of Tom DeLay and the racial sensitivity of Tom Tancredo.

The alternatives to "Bushism" are, he says, libertarianism and nativism.

This sort of provocative name-calling won’t persuade conservatives to consider whether there’s anything worth preserving in the rationale Gerson helped the President construct for his domestic policy. Indeed, Gerson would do well to get past his epithets on immigration (a reflex that cheapens him, by the way) and examine why so many well-meaning (former?) Bush supporters are opposed to comprehensive immigration reform. He’s smart enough to know that most of them don’t simply hate furriners; rather, they don’t trust a government that has given no indication of a willingness actually to gain control of our borders. And yes, they naturally care about national identity, but not in a racist or nativist way. They’re perfectly willing to welcome immigrants who are perfectly willing to learn English, obey our laws, work hard, and love our country. They recognize that cultivating citizenship takes time and effort, and that it can be done more easily with a manageable flow of legal immigrants. And that manageable flow begins with a border that isn’t unconscionably porous.

If Gerson took his conservative opponents seriously, and actually engaged with them, he might--as the keeper of the compassionate conservatism flame--contribute constructively to a conversation about the future of conservatism, persuading his interlocutors that points like this are worth taking seriously on theoretical, as well as practical political grounds:

The abandonment of Bushism and Clintonism is also leaving many Americans ideologically homeless: Catholics who regard themselves as pro-life, pro-immigrant and pro-poor; young evangelicals more exercised by millions dying of AIDS in Africa than by the continued existence of the Education Department; liberals who do not find their liberalism inconsistent with national strength or opposition to Islamic radicalism, the most illiberal force on Earth. All this alienation may, in a saner time, be the basis of a movement that mitigates polarization instead of glorying in it.

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I don’t have time to say much about it right now, but here are some accounts of an event held last night (you can find the video on this page). The three leading Democratic candidates spent a little time before a friendly audience answering basically softball questions on faith and politics. The campaigns will surely get some good footage to use for outreach to moderate and liberal Christians. I’d ask this: if one’s faith, or a precept derived from it, is a legitimate point of departure for a discussion about poverty policy, why isn’t it also a legitimate point of departure for a discussion of abortion, same-sex marriage, etc.? Another question: is it possible for people of faith to disagree about what policy faith demands for poverty and social welfare as--they would surely contend--it is about abortion, same-sex marriage, etc.?

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Over at PrawfsBlawg, they’ve been discussing this paper arguing for a state constitutional duty to "regulate homeschooling to ensure that
parents provide their children with a basic minimum education and check
rampant forms of sexism." The paper

highlights the legal distinctness of parents and children and emphasizes that parental control over children’s basic education flows from the state (rather than vice versa). States delegate power over children’s basic education to parents, and the delegation itself is necessarily subject to constitutional constraints.

Caricaturing the pro-homeschooling argument as depending upon parental "ownership" of children (naturally, no documentary evidence to back up that ridiculous claim), Northwestern University law professor Kimberly Yuracko contends that, in effect, the family is a creature of the state and that parental rights and responsibilities depend almost entirely upon state decisions, though she generously concedes that "[p]arents do have constitutionally protected liberty interests in their relationship with their children." read more »

I posted this, with links, at the NLT site.

Formal newspaper reports aren’t yet available on the web, but two veteran AJC reporters blogged on the visit here, here, here, and here. There’s video from local TV here (featuring a distinguished local political analyst) and stills on the Oglethorpe website. read more »