Transcripts For CSPAN2 Mary 20240705

Of the Clare Booth Luce Center for conservative women. And thanks to cspan booktv for covering excellent author and important new book. And thanks to all of you for coming. This year marks the Clare Booth Luce Centers anniversary of preparing, promoting conservative women. Our primary focus on college age and some school girls. And you see the photos on, the wall teaching them to be better leaders for the country in the years ahead and inspiring in policy and work ethic with women like those we sponsor at this event this loose the conservative Womens Network is one of our favorite. It began over 23 years ago for the purpose of promoting the best conservative leaders and their tremendously messages. Also cw and brings together from virginia maryland and d. C. Sometimes further to get to know and network like minded women and learn from conservative Women Leaders. Conservative Women Leaders like todays speaker Mary Eberstadt ten years ago, in 2013. Mary wrote a wonderful book titled adam and eve after the pill paradox crisis of the sexual revolution. This year, 2023. Marys book was republished, updated and titled adam and eve after the pill revisited. Her book is so excellent explaining the legacy of sexual revolution, revealing the toll that the sexual revolution has taken on so much of western. For example, she points out that set of lowering the rates of abortion out of wedlock birth divorce and fatherlessness as was promised. It accelerated all of and theres so much more in this other books by mary include primal screams how the sexual revolution created, identity politics and how the really lost god a new theory of secularization. And also the loser. A comic tale life, death and atheism. And that novel, the 2010 novel the loser letters about a young woman, strict struggling with addiction in rehab, was adapted for stage and premiered at Catholic University in the fall 2017. And marys. Shes such a fine writer. Theyve appeared many, many places. The wall street journal, policy review, national. First things time to name just a few. Shes a Senior Research fellow at the faith and Reason Institute and holds a chair at the Catholic Information Center in washington d. C. And during the reagan administration, she served as a speechwriter, secretary of state George Shultz for two years, and she founded the kirkpatrick society. Im in that the Literary Organization which mentors hundreds of writers. Mary graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University with two majors philosophy and government. She has four children the grown right pretty much and shes married to celebrated author nicholas eberstadt. Now, following todays and a little bit of time for questions, i hope youll join us for lunch next. And marys book is available purchase and she has graciously agreed to sign them for you, if you like. So please join me now in welcoming Mary Eberstadt. Thank you, michelle, for that wonderful introduction and thank you, lindsay and all who have made it possible to be today. Our last time together, several years ago was one of my all Time Favorite book events and it made me look forward to our gathering today. So id like to start some of the back story to this new adam and eve after the pill revisited in my mind, this new book, a body of work, that over ten years ago with its predecessor, adam and eve, after pill. Now in saying that this project is closed, i dont mean that the last word has been had on it. Far from it. In a most informed development, new voices are emerging including from nonreligious orbits that are also newly skeptical of the post 1960s status quo. I mean, instead that an idea that i started developing over a decade ago has with this new book received the more or less systematic treatment first envisioned for it. The elevator version. That idea is simple. For six decades, a secular rising western society has been telling itself a falsely happy story about the outcomes the sexual revolution. To counter that reading, weve needed an account of its fallout that was closer to the truth that account, i thought, should have two parts. One examining postrevolution reality among individuals and the other examining its effects on the wider world. Now this, unexpected adventure really began with the oddest spark a reading of the people. Humanae vitae issued in 1968, reiterating traditional christian teaching about marriage and sex. Its hard to get across just transformative. That First Reading was for me as a researcher who had studied and written about various of American Society over years. I knew from various forms of evidence popular as well as expert that the predictions in encyclical were not just predictions as they had actually all come true. And i get into this more both in the first book and the second. Sources abound and especially in the social sciences to prove it. What me most forcefully here was that ancient moral teaching was vindicated inadvertently but roundly by secular sources. It was not theology that was demonstrating the downside of separating recreation and procreation, though no doubt theology can. Instead, it was scholarship about subjects like broken homes, rising rates, mental illness, interrupted relations between the sexes and lots of other interrelated. This body of work understood full has gone to show effect that ancient teaching, however unwanted or ignored it may be, had gotten something right that perception that a ha moment went on to result in the two. Adam and eve and their contrarian readings of the sexual revolution. The first one examined what might be called the microscopic fallout of humanitys embrace contraception, the effects on individual men women and children. Now, id like to share that some of the first books on fallout came as a surprise. In particular, the emotion or reaction among some readers. After all, neither of these books is a work of selfhelp. Theyre both based on social science. Theyre both analytical, and they no sentimental appeals. And although like most authors, i have tried to avoid boring readers into narcolepsy, i did not. And not believe that the prose in the first book accounted for this emotional. And yet it was forceful as the volume made the rounds first in english and then spanish, polish and other languages, evidence of its unexpected impact continued to accumulate in email and in the rounds of often a book talk individual in the audience would linger and confide that reading adam eve after the pill had changed the way they saw the world. Sometimes even way they lived. Men and women alike told with tears or wrote in pain their, hard stories of blight, of families and children and lost to the revolutions troika. Divorce, pornography abortion. Let me offer a few snapshots in response to one chapter in the first book, a man who had lived on the streets, prostitutes himself, started posting commentaries online about how postrevolutionary permissiveness had nearly destroyed him. Another time, after a talk in texas, a woman approached to confide. The books analysis had somehow convinced her to have more children, and she brought a friend with her as proof. And they showed me photographs of these kids. Please. Following a speech in ohio in a different year, a young woman came forward from the crowd tell me that she had traveled some to be there just to give one message that a chapter in that book had made her understand the pain she had suffered as a child of sexual abuse and that she had become a after reckoning with it. What to make of these raw testimonies was puzzling as out during the years after the first adam and eve book. Three conclusions suggests in themselves. The first was that these kinds of stories and experiences amounted to an affirmation the books thesis. The post 1960s disorder or was indeed casualties of all kinds. And their suffering was not being noticed, let alone or addressed by a secularizing culture steeped in denial. Second, it was clear that some readers were galvanized by something else. The idea that the sexual revolution was open for questioning at all. After all, ever since 1960s, liberation must have anchored their successes to the supposed inevitability of. Adam and eve. After the pills suggestion that these changes might not be permanent, that they might be subject any other social phenomena to, revision and scrutiny seemed to some readers a step forward and a third conclusion. Also, material like rosencrantz and guildenstern and hamlet that first adam and eve book had wandered unknowingly into a wider drama. The books contrary case implicitly raised a question if the secular consensus could the human damage out there in the name of progress, what other critical fallout it be missing . So this leads us to the book at hand. Adam eve after the pill revisited is a new installment. Its a follow on to the original. A new argument based on a decades worth of related research and writing. Its is united to the first book by the same, the desire to understand through empiricism the fruits, the seeds planted in the 1960s. So the new book widens the aperture to talk about the macro cosmic fallout from the revolution when it dissects the effects of the revolution on Society Politics and church. Needless to add, the foreword the late great cardinal pell, with whom i discussed some these arguments, is the honor of a lifetime. Lets look at one area covered in the book the revolutions effects on society. The first thing to understand is this thanks to the compounding factors, six decades people today live very differently the way our ancestors did. Very differently from people across the planet, across history. This is simple arithmetic. Families are smaller. Families are broken. Many people longer have siblings of the same sex or the opposite sex or siblings at all. Abortion continues. More and more kids growing up without a father in some. These are all acts of subtraction and i call them acts of human subtraction. Postrevolutionary men and have subtracted trusted souls out of our lives on a scale never seen before. Inadvertently. But really this a diminished pool of loved ones to count on. It means fewer people to trust and learn from it. That rudimentary social learning is harder to come by. The difference is between men and women. The meaning marriage, the sanctity of motherhood. Fatherhood. More and. More people lack the vocabulary for these foundational concepts. Postrevolution. The route to fulfillment and has become more elusive. It has to be rediscovered or reinvented by people who have been deprived again of rudimentary social learning by subtraction. So consider just some the empirical evidence illustrating our social disintegration. We are surrounded by data showing that something about postrevolutionary is inflicting widespread. Second largest site an unprecedented Mental Health crisis among the young. And this was true for many years before the pandemic. Also at record levels psychotropic for adults licit and illicit across the states this year. Drug overdoses are higher they have ever been and the first time in recorded history Life Expectancy is declining. Meanwhile atomized broken children take to the streets sometimes in gangs, sometimes as solitary murderers. As proving that fuels evil deaths of despair. A phrase that did not even exist ten years ago has entered the vernacular. And Everybody Knows what it means. My point is that this tragic points to causality. The sexual revolution is not the only social force contributing to todays dysfunction, but as both books argue, it is the single most important cause of social decay that is not yet understood. Such. The hope behind both these is to change that misperception and to correct the record for the benefit of people present and to come. Consider briefly second area discussed in the book how postrevolutionary trends are affecting our politics. The book argues that as the primal communities of family and religious faith have become more dysfunctional, more and more people have transferred their loyalties and attachments to other groups in particular groups based on identity or a common of ethnicity, race, erotic leanings, lgbtq, etc. In other words, postrace change is at the root of identity politics. These groups operate as families and substitute religious communities for people who dont know the real thing as they used to, as proof the timeline, the phrase identity politics is relatively new. It first appeared in 1977 in a manifesto by a feminist group called the Combahee River collective. And in that document they use the phrase identity politic and tie it to victimization. They make several declarations that charted a new course for american. They declared that they were giving up on making common cause with men. They said that the conventional family and conventional were out of bounds. They said, in effect, that the only people they could trust were, people just like them, victims who shared the same oppression. Theres a line from that manifesto, 1977 to black lives today. That movement also against the conventional family. It also declares that peaceful coexistence with, the wider community, is somehow unwanted or impossible. The political wing of what is called the lgbtq is just as absolute best and just as hostile traditional ideas of tolerance. It is also just as insistent on dividing the known political universe into two simple groups. Allies. Enemies. The point is that this whole phenomenon of identity politics, the signature of our day, is born out of loss. It is born out of. The subtraction of people mentioned earlier. Identity politics says that the most important thing about an individual is not his or her relation to family or to god. It is instead that persons status as a victim. These groups command and receive absolute loyalty from their members. The kind of unthinking, primal loyalty formerly associated with family. Now i mentioned third area covered in the book, which is the effects of the sexual revolution. Christianity itself as the book shows in detail, the churchs today are being torn apart because this very question can christianity ancient teachings about marriage or sex without falling into decrepitude . Or can it not . Christians are often accused of being obsessed with sex, but this was and is bogus charge. It is difference over sex that the churches apart today not different interpretations. The beatitudes or the saints or angels dancing pins. No. This is all about the sexual revolution. All of the splits that we see in the churches amount to just that. Once again, the question us is can christianity a kind of christianity that turns its back on 2000 years of moral teaching succeed or can it not. I believe the evidence of the collapse of the mainline churches about which there is a whole in this new book speaks for itself. But readers should assess the evidence and judge for themselves. This brings us to one final point to consider. We are all witnesses here and. To a great irony, it encompasses not only the christians america, but those of the entire western world. After western christianity spends most of its time days in a defensive crouch squabbling internally and yet all the while, evidence from outside the churches continues to point towards something. Many people inside the churches seem not to know. Christianity practically alone among all institutions now has been harboring profound truths for 2000 years. Most notably in this case, the truth that living by that bad, difficult rulebook is actually better for human beings than discarding it. To repeat this irony is extraordinary. Even as the calls for capitulation to the revolution grow louder. Transforming and reforming discussions within our churches. The evidence thrown out by the world itself continues. Point in the opposite direction. In sum, both adam and eve books make a contrarian argument. Postrevolutionary reality is quite other than what the dominant culture says it is. It is gratifying to know, as i mentioned at the outset, that today more voices have joined that side of. The argument, including Secular Voices as the new book notes in its footnotes. But regardless of public, both books were driven by humanitarian conviction. The sexual continues to claim victims to honor their witness is some kind of reactionary indulgence as boosters of, the revolution would say, its instead an attempt to give voice to the previously voiceless. And there needs to be of it. Its my modest hope that the facts assembled in both books will persuade believers and unbelievers alike, and above all, give new heart to the wounded and those who tend them. Thank you very much. Thats great. I know everybody wants to read the whole book now. Its a great summary. Youll do a few questions. We have a microphone. Heres our first question. Caitlin, the mic. If you just give your name and affiliation if you have one. Thank you, katie gorka. Thank you so much for a great talk. So you trace the movement back the sixties. But im curious if you think it goes back further and you look at all at the marxist roots of this or do you think there are marxist roots to this . I wouldnt quite there. I would distinguish two stages of the sexual revolution and obviously sexual were changing before Widespread Adoption of the Birth Control pill and related devices in the early 1960s. For example, the first big argument over sex was held by the anglican communion within the anglican communion in 1930 at their annual at lambeth, when it was decided for the first time in the history of christianity to make certain exceptions for artificial contraception. This is a historical point thats not wellknown understood because there unanimity within christendom about this question from the beginning, 1930 and the anglican think communion decided that in Certain Circumstance as in marriage in consultation with a pastor, etc. , etc. , there were several steps that had to be observed that contraception could be okayed. Now, as it turned out, that line did not hold and in various short order there were no more exceptions there was no more talk of married people, etc. But i draw attention to that both because it was pivotal within the history of christianity and because that year in 1930 suggests that there was a rethinking about sex going on well before the Birth Control pill in 1963. Mary susan yoshihara, president of the american on women, peace and security and i loved your first book, cant to with your second book. My question has to do with foreign policy. The United States has been promoting this revolution abroad in the postwar area and mostly since the sixties. We continue to do so now, not just in usaid and state, but also now in the defense department. What do you see relationship and how do you see this helping or hurting American Foreign policy . Have you thought about it . And or maybe the reverse might be true that some of our partners, by pushing back might have some reverse effect on american . Do you think thats a great question and one that i have thought about somewhat . I think it is obnoxious us and unsustainable for americans, whether inside the government or parties as part of ngos to go around the world telling people who are almost always browner and blacker people that they should make fewer of themselves and that solution to their countrys problems is to make fewer of themselves. I find the lack of empathy in that message extra ordinary. How many of us would like to be told that the solution our problems is to make fewer ourselves . Ive been told that that from when i was a teenager, overpopulate and be our responsibility and have fewer children. Again, i think theres a moral hazard that has gone unaddressed by. Practically everyone. But i know, for example, from friends in africa who are part of a university there, that when they receive aid from the United States, whether governmental or it often has Strings Attached to it. And one example that i was given was especially striking a University Professor told me that when computers were sent to a sixth grade class as a gift from unknown sources, unknown to me in the United States, the computers all came with a pamphlet about sexuality, pushing the standard version that we see in the newspapers every day. The dominant version trying to trickle stuff down to sixth graders in africa. Again, moral hazard. Can somebody address this. I was going to say, like case. Hope is. Eugenics just marilyn theory. You said the listeners could. Yeah. How do you. Or what do you propose that we as individual can do to have some effect on whats happening. And go through our schools . Do we try . What evidence do you see is the most productive. All of the above. So analogy that came to mind continuously in the writing of these books was that of tobacco smoking. And i say that not to knock smokers out. I say that because theres a striking analogy here. Decades and decades ago, smoking was so i can actually remember when could smoke in a hospital room. I remember seeing this as a child not if oxygen tanks were present. But you could smoke in a hospital room and and everywhere else. And we know the world is very different. That way today. Try lighting up in here now and see what happens. So what changed . What changed . Wasnt nicotine was and is an astonishing drug. What changed . Social and what arrived was a new consent was based on decades and decades of research about harms to some people tobacco smoking. And took a long time for this research to penetrate. I remember very well the resistance to it the first time that california banned smoking inside restaurants example. And yet over time what happened was a social transfer nation because of not because of religious revival, not for any other reason than the fact that information about harm eventually trickled down and made a difference in individual lives. I think Something Like that will happen. The case of the sexual revolution. I dont know how many of us be alive to see it because i think the is really just but were seeing things we didnt see ten years ago. For example its no longer just religious people who talk about the harms pornography perfectly secular therapists who deal with this addiction talk about it and celebrities who were themselves addicts have come out and talked about this this is a very encouraging and another example of how evidence about harm eventually does make a difference. Maybe. Also last year, she talk informally. Were there any other questions . Oh, go ahead. Oh, thanks. I think i remember. Well, i do one thing im very concerned is the suicide of our and i dont know if its so much ever theyre being warned in school. You are responsible for global warming. Theyre being warned in. To to the revision. Isnt something true . I dont know how that ties into your sexual rebel notion it just seems to me there is a lot going on there. Heroes have been destroyed. Now were being told george, a bad person. Everything is bad. There have been and also the crt thats being taught in school. What do they have to forward to . Yeah, its a if very sad question. First of all, we all realize by now i think that the internet in effect, is throwing gasoline on fire. Im describing here. And the more kids can be kept away from its darker corners, the better. I think its very encouraging. A number of states now make kids up their phones when they get to school. I wish every state would do this. I wish every school would be mindful that. The sons and daughters of the pioneers of Silicon Valley do not send their to schools where they can have screens there to write longhand and. So should everybody. But again the internet is a big problem here, as your opening sentence suicide and that i can only say it points again what i was talking about in the opening about the number of acts of humans subtraction and what they have done to people. You know weve had a spate these terrible shootings lately. One of these shooters left a simple note. He said, i have no i have no friends. Thats where this is coming from. It couldnt have been clearer. So if there is a way of getting good out of evil, maybe people should meditate on that note of his. Work. I read rebecca long county republican womens club. I was curious. If you have any thoughts regarding who might lead a future movement to push on this. Do you think itll be men or women and what do you see right now. Somebody to think, you know, wheres the women standing up against. Or denigration of just simply being a woman. People cant define that now. So what do you think about that . Well, its encouraging that during the past three years, three books, im aware of written by women, secular women, one in france, one in germany, one in england have gotten a wide reception and they were all critical of the same thing, sexual revolution stuff. So in that sense, i think especially since the metoo women in particular have more opening to asking these questions, why is it so hard to find a good boyfriend and will i ever get married and other questions that werent quite as hard to face before. So thats all to the good. You know, the danger there is that sometimes when women are arguing among themselves, that gets dismissed as some kind of. If, you know, internal catfight. So it would be good to have some of the guys stand and take a lead here to inside and outside the churches and synagogues. They share on the doors of experience. I know we probably overshadow maybe the last question ill ask is about College Girls. You know, thats the primary focus. The center for conservative women. And we talk about subject a fair amount right here. This picture on the wall is Cleta Mitchell talking to College Girls at one of our summer seminars. The name of her speeches is better be respected than liked is great speech and a lot of it is geared more toward the professionals sexual but its a really good speech. The girls at college now tell us pamela just graduated from arizona that the two things that most colleges tell them is you contraception and make sure you get tested regularly. These are the two words of wisdom or advice College Girls and boys get at college and theyre not getting a lot of other guidance. Some of the girls are smart enough. Theyre in groups. Theyre religious groups. Theyre they have groups of friends. But its so incredible hard. I know you raised you raised and we and we talk about it a lot but i wonder if maybe you just finish talking about that segment, the terrible damage happens to young women. Too many women when theyre in Higher Education. Yeah, i mean, Higher Education treats them like animals. I mean the view of human nature by, extension of those kinds messages about just make sure contraception and get yourself tested is a very flattened view of human nature. And its demeaning and against that. We do have ennobling versions, human nature and ennobling ideas of what men and women are for. I think we all need to do a better job of getting those out there and that message goes especially to the churches, but about how hard it is to be a young woman on campus. Today, i am encouraged by the existence of groups that are new on campus. Some of them are religious, some them not. The love and fidelity network, the focus fellowship Catholic University students is now in over 100 campuses, something called two mystic circles run by dominican friars, is now on every Ivy League Campus and many others. These, again, ten years ago, these things didnt exist and they prove of that. Theres an understanding there of the great need in this wasteland. Unfortunate that is, the Secular University today and sometimes the religious universities. So again, signs of hope. Thank so much. Thank you. What an excellent discussion. You so much. I want to give you our limited coffee mug with mrs. Lucias famous. Courage is the latter on which all other virtues mount. Youre certainly a courageous lady. Thank you. Its my favorite color. The way its the color of kings. And i want to give a copy of my book how to raise a conservative daughter. You probably could have written this covers a lot of areas with. Certainly the area that youve just discussed i give it to you with our thanks and our gratitude for all youve done and all youll continue to do in the future. Thank you. Thank you, michel