Society

In ”Much Depends Upon Dinner”, Cameron Stracher discusses the family dinner. Apparently studies prove its importance. For instance, one from Columbia shows

teens from families that almost never eat dinner together are 72% more likely to use illegal drugs, cigarettes and alcohol than the average teen and that those who eat dinner with their parents less than three times a week are four times more likely to smoke cigarettes, three times more likely to smoke marijuana and twice as likely to drink as those who eat dinner with their parents at least six times a week.

This strikes me as soft science; obviously, a lot of related variables lead to such outcomes and dinners on the fly are more symptom than cause. But maybe not. Dinner is significant.

In the first chapter of his autobiographical Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington tells us:

I cannot remember a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together, and God’s blessing was asked, and the family ate a meal in a civilized manner. On the plantation in Virginia, and even later, meals were gotten by the children very much as dumb animals get theirs. It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another. Sometimes a portion of our family would eat out of the skillet or pot, while some one else would eat from a tin plate held on the knees, and often using nothing but the hands with which to hold the food.

Slave owners set tasks for even a young child that made family dinners impossible in the slave quarters. To Washington, eating together meant eating “in a civilized manner”; that he saw it as important we see in his contrast of that ritual with food taken by “dumb animals.”

Dining together, the charm & weight of tradition bears down on us as children; we learn and grow. The family civilizes us, helps us transcend our brute nature, supports us as we fumble toward maturity.

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I raised this question tangentially in the comments to one of my recent posts. Here it is more plainly:

Which behavior is worse: 1) expressing racist views, i.e., that some people should be treated better or worse than others on the basis of race, or 2) abusing individuals, but not on the basis of race? (Stipulation: (1) and (2) are not necessarily correlated.)

Discuss.

Michael Blowhard discusses. Worth reading for the anecdotes about Susan Sontag and other wacko culturati, and also for the main idea. Strange, difficult people may or may not be overrepresented in the arts, but there certainly are a lot of such characters among successful people in some walks of life. Some of these people have obviously gotten under Michael’s skin, and this is one of his more forceful essays (and the better for it).

Some of the people quoted in this article are concerned that new FDA guidelines will discourage homosexual men from donating sperm for purposes of artificial insemination. Putting aside concerns about AIDS transmission, which do not seem to me to be as far-fetched as the gay-sperm-donation advocates suggest, a bigger issue is being skirted here: given the possibility that homosexuality has an inherited component, why would a couple, even a homosexual couple, want to increase the odds of having homosexual kids by using gay-donated sperm?

Sure, if you have a homosexual child you shouldn’t value him less than you would any other child of yours. But homosexuality is a handicap and may remain one as long as it is infrequent in the population. Prospective sperm recipients might think: Why take the risk? I wouldn’t blame them.

The article seems to focus on sperm banks that are run for the benefit of homosexual couples, but I think the same considerations apply to such couples as to anyone else. Do they want to increase the risk of having handicapped kids? Perhaps, since the magnitude of the risk is unknown, they are reasonably unconcerned. Or maybe they think it’s fine if their kids turn out gay, or indeed prefer them to. In that case they are following the pattern of other parents, notably some deaf ones, who want their children to share the handicap that defines their particular subculture. If that’s the case I think it’s unfortunate, because some of the kids might not share their parents’ political and cultural preferences. That’s not such a big deal if your parents want you to be a doctor and you want to be an artist, or if you want to marry outside of your ethnic or religious group. You can still do those things even if they displease your parents. But if you are gay or deaf because your parents wanted you to be, and you don’t share their differently-abled enthusiasm, you’re stuck.

People have kids for all kinds of reasons. Some conventional couples conceive children knowing that their offspring will face above-normal risks of severe health problems, so these issues aren’t unique to gays or deaf people. But to seek donor sperm that may increase the risk your kids will have a particular handicap, when other donor sperm is available, strikes me as being not in the children’s best interests.

Dr. Deborah Cohan, an obstetrics and gynecology instructor at the University of California, San Francisco, said some lesbians prefer to receive sperm from a gay donor because they feel such a man would be more receptive to the concept of a family headed by a same-sex couple.

“This [new FDA] rule will make things legally more difficult for them,” she said. “I can’t think of a scientifically valid reason – it has to be an issue of discrimination.”

It sounds like minimizing discrimination trumps minimizing AIDS transmission and parental self-actualization trumps the best interests of the child. Am I being selectively harsh on these people or are they merely being clear about what matters to them?

Lex found the following image here.

He posits a quiz question: Can you identify Core, Gap, Emerging Core from this graphic alone?