DOCTOR, MY EYES: Unequally Yoked is holding a contest-type thing where atheists and Christians attempt to answer relatively basic apologetic questions without letting on what they really believe. Then, you guys (yes, you, the viewers at home, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea) get to vote on which responses you think are from real atheists and which are from papists and snake-handlers dressed up in ghost suits. This seems fun! So I figured I'd let you know that voting on the Talk Like an Atheist round is now open.

I have a lot of problems with the questions for atheists, which seem to provoke really bloodless and boring responses (cf the repetition of some variation on, "If I had a road to Damascus experience, I'd check myself in to a respected medical establishment"). That said, I think it's kind of fascinating to see what people think atheists are like, as a tribe or contemporary identity-group, and I suspect the same will be true for the Christian responses.

I'm startled and dismayed by how few of the "atheist" responses (again, some are really written by Christians, so keep that in mind) are basically, "The world is obvious and boring! Morality is mostly a matter of willpower, not discernment. I'm a good person!" Very few of these guys have anything to say to Kafka, let alone an actual Christian. That said, I'm totally fascinated to see which kinds of self-presentation are considered most convincing by atheists and by Christians; I think this is mostly an exercise not in philosophy but in cultural criticism, in which we try to figure out who we think we are and who we think they are. As such it's pretty great.

THROUGH BLUE-TINTED GLASSES: My review of Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture is in the 8/30 issue of the Weekly Standard. The online version is subscribers-only for now, but I'll let you know if that changes.

I'm not thrilled with this review. I don't think I quite nailed the problem(s) with the book. I don't like doing negative reviews as a rule, and especially not negative reviews of work by people who have done good work--I don't remember reading any non-"red vs. blue" writing from June Carbone, but I've read things by Naomi Cahn which I really liked--but this book is just not good. I'm right about the lack of qualitative data a.k.a. letting people from radically different worldviews speak, letting them explain themselves rather than being explained by those who are not complicit in their choices, but I don't think I really explained the problem too well. I hope the review includes my praise for Cahn and Carbone's criticism of the contemporary American economy; the whole book should have been just that stuff. But I guess then nobody would have read it.

EVE'S ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN: Just a bit more on that APA thing.

Some commenters have suggested that requiring only gay people to abstain is differential treatment which constitutes discrimination. This claim prompted a series of thoughts, which I present here, ranging from most relevant to the APA to least; the ones most relevant to the APA are least interesting to me, though, and vice very versa.

"It's Lent." "Well, when you get it back, come up and see me sometime!": Does the APA prohibit marital-status discrimination? If so, it seems that unmarried heterosexuals are "similarly situated" to homosexuals at completely-Christian-conduct-code colleges; if required abstinence is discrimination, and marital-status discrimination is barred, unmarried heteros can get just as indignant as gay people.

And yet that isn't the issue. I wonder why!

(Sex is the new religion, and the gay-liberation movement is the new Caesaropapism.)

Juno and Mary: Actually, I suspect you could also bring a claim of sex discrimination against anti-fornication colleges, given that only women get pregnant, thus only women might be faced with the choice between dismissal from their jobs or clandestine abortion.

That's one of many, many reasons I don't actually support the C-C-C-C colleges.

But again: Why hasn't this issue been raised? Possibly--and I don't know the players, so I'm just raising this as a possibility--because gay and straight people have a very easy time isolating themselves from the other group's tragedies, in this culture. I wrote about that here. Although this is a stupid idea for many reasons, I still do wish that every straight evangelical could be forced to spend time at a gay-youth group, like the Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League here in DC, and every gay-liberationist could be forced to hold the hand of a woman sobbing because of an unwanted pregnancy or a decades-past abortion.

There's really enough suffering to go around.

A woman taken in adultery: This whole kerfuffle got me thinking about how I would reshape C-C-C-C colleges, if I could. Because I do get that the gutter-punching, "here comes everybody," bar-brawl style of a Yale (or Georgetown, or Notre Dame) education isn't necessary for or beneficial to everyone.

I guess I'd say that you could replace conduct codes with: a) parables of transgression and forgiveness. This is how Jesus did it, you know? What if your college conduct guide told you stories of how you could be forgiven academic, sexual, even criminal transgressions? What if they gave examples of confession, penance, and communal re-embrace--not just rules?

b) a requirement that you profess certain beliefs, and/or not speak against them. I like this less, but it does get at the key claim that heresy is worse than acknowledged sin. It would also distinguish interestingly between sins which are commonplace at university yet kept quiet (drunkenness, lechery, hypocrisy); those which are commonplace and condemned (dishonesty, plagiarism); and those which are commonplace and argued for strenuously as human rights (no need to list them!). Sinners of all kinds would be welcome; heretics would be advised not to attempt to spread their heresies.

Neither of these are what I, personally, would want in a college--I basically would want Yale, and hey!, I got her--but they're better than a cocoon of complete conduct-code conformity.