Why other versions of your book adam and eve after the bill and adam and eve after the bill repeated . The first one was written about ten years ago called adam and eve after the pill and a microscopic at the sexual revolution. Individuals, men and women, children and a decade later after the pill revisited looked at the effects of the sexual resolution on politics, society and christianity itself so the aperture has been widenedst and taking in the biggest possible terrain. For some of those macro trends youve noticed . Its a long story but ill try to do the short version here. Ive been interested in a long time tracing the need to society as we know it. I dont look at the surface trying to get underneath transforming our world. One ofor these events is sexual resolution and the collapse of christianity which begins in the 1950s. What is the effect of these trends . One thing is families have gotten smaller. They are more broken than they used to be, many people live alone he just seems to and its been transformative effect on our world. We can talk in more detail about that one but collapse of the family has meant we areas ending more and more people into the world who dont have experience of whats called the Primal Community community of family and this i think is the need what we talkn about on the surface when we talk about cedivisiveness of politics for example. The fact that people seem polarized and at each others throat. I believe underneath this the accumulated factors of six decades that resulted inen children people who know less about each other as humans because they didnt get that in the family. We are going to show headline from 1960 and itsra about the a approving the show you can see on the screen. In your view, did that change the world . Is it fair to say . I think was the most transformative thing to happen sincema the couple and the government and transform relations between men and women personal. We have to go back to the 1960s and that this would be a positive thing and would strengthen marriage for example like giving people more power over and thought it would think in society because women would be able to join the workforce, they were no longer tied to large families but something happened in the next few years. Instead of strengthening marriage, it looked at contraception, suddenly divorce skyrocketed and cohabitation skyrocketed and abortion became legal and there were millions of those so what happened . Is supposed to liberate humanity and its having a negative effect. It Secular Congress have looked at this. A pause here in our book tv programming to bring live coverage of the u. S. Senate continuing 40 year commitment to current congress. Lawmakers meeting this afternoon and whats expected to be a brief session, no boats expected. Live now to the floor of the senate here on cspan2. The senate will come to order. The parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. The parliamentarian washington, d. C. , october 10, 2023. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable mark warner, a senator from the commonwealth of virginia, commonwealth of virginia,. Previous order, the senate stans adjourned until 9 15 a. M. , adjourned until 9 15 a. M. , and the senate now gaveling out from its brief session. When lawmakers return you can see live coverage here on cspan2. And we take you back now to our booktv programming. Guest the latest substantiation of this that im describing the begins in early 1960s. Host Mary Eberstadt, you write in adam and eve after the pill revisited that since the two was introduced, theres been a rise in abortion and an unwanted pregnancy. Guest thats a paradoxical effect. Thats why my first book adam and eve after the pill revisited talks about the paradoxes of the sexual revolution because a lot of this fallout was unexpected and him talk about the sexual revolution, peter, i want to make clear imle not being mono causal. Thats a bad word. Im not saying there is one cause for thehe deterioration tt we were seeing around us. What im saying is that is a one cause that is not been addressed sufficiently in sociology or by church leaders, or by others in authority. Its become the thing that is hardest to talk about. We need to talk about it because splitting the human out in the way that we did in the 1960s and beyond is beneath a lot of the worst problems of our time i believe. Host im going to read four quotes from adam and eve after the pill revisited just to give viewers an idea of the themes that youre talking about in the book. You can expand on any of them you want but the very short quotes. The sexual revolution indoors as a force of modernity second to none. Second quote, six decades of social science have established that the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. Third quote, christian believers are an open roiling uncharted waters. And finally, post 1960s disorder was indeed generating casualties of all kinds. Anything you would like to expand on . Guest all of it. But i wouldn . Like to start with the idea of casualties. Everyone knows the subjects are difficult to discuss. Everyone lives in some kind of family and it is fact about all of the trends under discussion when i raise the question of fatherlessness im not trying to point fingers andto make people feel bad. I am trying to connect the dots so the generations that come next might suffer a little less from the kinds of trends where describing. After the first adam and eve book came out over ten years ago there was one thing that really surprised me which was the emotional resonance of the book. This is not a selfhelp book. It was i thought pinnacle kind of undertaking to discuss the effects of the sexual revolution using sociology, psychology, anthropology. It had nothing to do with theology. None of my books depend on theology at all. I am not a theologian, but i was very surprised by readers who got in touch by email and otherwise to say this chapter on pornography really resonate with me. Let me tell you my story. Let me to the story about it destroyed my marriage. For example. And there were even harder stories that a hard from all over. So the thesis that the sexual revolutione was having negative consequences that were not well understood seem to be vindicated by these personalbe stories, the raw testimonials of people who wanted to talk about how they were worried about raising their child without a father, for example. So there was a lot of emotional resonance and intensity that i didnt expect and it was part of why i continued to look at that subject resulting in the second book. Host Mary Eberstadt, one of the adam and eve books you talk about a a high school gin 1972 who was pregnant and was quite the scandal. And today that doesnt rate and eyeblink. Guest that is a snapshot that tells us how the world changed after the 1960s. The story goes like this i grew up in rural upstate new york in a series of u small towns, hamlets, villages, and down the street at one point that the young teenager who got pregnant. It was the talk of the neighborhood because the father, who was a young soldier, return from vietnam, did not intend to marry her. That is to say the scandal was not about her. What was that scandalous was that he would leave her as a singlewa mother. She went away and had the baby, and returned to school. There was no social program to my knowledge that was directed at her. 20 years later i went back and was talking to a former teacher. She said a third of the girls graduating high school that year were pregnant. None of them were married. So in this 20 year gap i think we see what was repeated in america, the story by the millions, where no longer was it thought that pregnancy was something that two people were responsible for. Suddenly only one person, usually a frightened young woman, was responsible for it. And that i think is a civilizational step backwards. Host how did you get from rural new york to washington . Guest well, i was very fortunate. I went to cornell university. On a scholarship. After that i i thought maybe d like to be a philosophy professor. I double majored in philosophyt and government but i decided to take a year off and to make a long story short i started writing and i got involved in the world of new york journalism, especially the small intellectual magazines that are not the thing today that they were back then. Back then in the 1980s magazines like Public Interest and commentary were very exciting places to write for and to hang out in. I ended up as an assistant editor at the Public Interest magazine run by irving kristol, a legendary editor and writer. And from there ended up doing some ghostwriting for major officials in the reagan administration. One was Jean Kirkpatrick who was ambassador at united nations, and from there i ended up speechwriting for secretary of state George Shultz for two years. So that was the path. Host what is your fulltime job currently decides author . Guest we have four children, and there is that. I did very little writing for about 15 years as they were growing up. Once they were safely in school i came back to this. Host but you are with the think tank now . Guest yes, im a Senior Research fellow at the faith and Reason Institute and also i hold a chair of the Catholic Information Center in washington, d. C. Host and it is fair to say you are a practicing catholic . Guest i try. Host because the forward of your most recent book adam and eve after the pill revisited was written by Cardinal George pell hereto is at . Guest Cardinal George pell of australia was a great intellectual and spiritual leader. And i would not pretend that i knew him well. But he was kind enough to dig and interest in some of my writing, and we had correspondence about some of the themes in my book. For example, one thing that caught his eye was a meditation that i wrote about the theme of chaos. In 1930 when when the great novelist eva lenoir converted to catholicism, he was asked by a newspaper why he did that. He just threw away this line. He said, because in our civilization now the choice is between kristi indian chaos. Now, the chaos of his time was very different. In 1930 the end of period, it was political chaos, all the carnage of the 20th century to come, world war ii. The chaos in our time is a different i think and yet we are seen it in more detail than he ever specified. Several an essay about that outlining anthropological chaos and intellectual chaos, chaos within christianity itself. And Cardinal George pell, because of that essay, kind or to write a forward for the book. Host you go on or Cardinal Pell went on to write that the Church Teachings over the years have been coherent and consistent. What did he mean by that . Guest well, he meant that the Catholic Church stood as a quote sign of contradiction in the world, that whatever was going on around it, they would continue the same teachings. These teachings go all the way back when jesus tells the disciples that, unlike the jews, his people are not allowed to divorce, for example. The disciples become the first christians to complain that this is hard, these are hard teachings. But there is a consistency there that has drawn people in. All the things available to the romans, you name it, divorce, et cetera, or put offlimits to christians. This teaching has not changed. Of course we talk about mercy and redemption because those are also teachings, but the idea that human beings if they were christians were being held to a higher standard has been consistent. And just as that idea as repelled many people and upset many people through all alle centuries, it is also drawn others in. Host i want to go. Back to quote we read earlier. And talk about this. Christian believers are an open, roiling, uncharted waters. You going to talk about indie book the church of nice and christianity like your what do you mean by that . Guest so under the pressure since the sexual revolution, christianity has buckled. And what i mean by that is that there is always a desire to accommodate these radical changes inn the way people live. Lets not be judge e, lets just softpedal the teachings and christianity that people dont like and lets talk about the teachings they do a like. Now, son churches mainly protestant churches have completely abandoned these kinds of teachings they go all the way back to jesus. They lined up on divorce. They lighten up on homosexuality. They lined up on a much anything that the sexual revolution would cling as a prerogative. And the interesting thing is the result of this has been institutional decline, or the churches at rambus experiment. The anglican communion, for example, comes to mind here. The anglican communion is collapsing. Ive read a story recently with a headline that said for the last person to leave anglicanism please turn out the light . So it is not only the anglican communion. Every denomination that tries the church of nice were split over the question of the church of nice ended up going in the nice direction has not flourished as a result. So here we have a paradoxical thing, right . Because you would think that being nice with make it more likely that people would show up in your church. But instead the opposite is true. Whats been burned is that strong churches, sorry, strict churches are strong, as the saying goes. The more the churches stick to the original foundations, the more likely they are to pull people in. This doesnt mean the Catholic Church is thriving these days. Far from it. We are seeing across denominations, but the collapse seems to have been worse for the churches that he sent to jettison the most unwanted teachings, the teachings that make our contemporaries most uncomfortable. Host so Mary Eberstadt, tie that intoie the 1960 fda approval of the contraceptive pill and the sexual revolution. Guest so the pill becomes the biggest temptation of all time. If you were to ask most human beings what you like most i think sex with a consequence would probably be up there on pthe list. And it was widely embraced including by catholics. And yet, what we saw was that the churches, including the Catholic Church, shied away from traditional teachings because they didnt want to make people uncomfortable in the post orrevolutionary era. So we had this dynamic where the decline of the family brought on by the pill fuels the decline of faith and the klein of the practice of institutional religion and organized religion. And we can talk a lot more about that one if you like. Host lets look at your book, its dangerous to believe. This came out in 2016 i believe it was. In that book if you would expound on this. For more than two centuries americans have prided themselves on their commitment to freedom of religion. Readers who lean in a more secular direction might be surprised to hear that anything has happened to shake that bedrock pledge, yet in recent years that historic commitment to freedom has come under siege. L revolution is on a collision worse with traditional christianity. There is no getting around it. Traditional christianity had a bedrock of that were unpopular in roman times and when unpopular ever sent. Along comes sexual revolution and its devoted partisans obviously, the opinions i am describing our minority opinions, but the question is, how destructive is that fight . I think it is very destructive of the u. S. Lets talk about how christian adoption agent has been shut down in some. Clearly, the pressure coming at them is from people who want to replace the teachings of christianity with the anything goes sexual revolution. I really believe this has become a rivals to christianity. We have to ask ourselves, is it good for those adoptees to miss out on a loving home just because the parents and it our christian . Is it good for the poor among whom the Little Sisters work with lawsuits about contraception, of all things . Well, who does that help . It does not help the Little Sisters or the poor, so my point is, when we see this collision will receive a 10 to cap good works done by christian, we are seeing something that is bad for the worst off among us, and i do not think this is well understood, but people who are ideological about the sexual revolution go after christian good work, routinely. This is not called out the people who it is hurting called out. Host i want to ask you about the Supreme Court decision on roe v. Wade last year. It affected years of eagle abortion. Should abortion be legal, in your view . Mary i am a constitutionalist and turning the question back to the state was an overdue constitutionalist correction. Dobbs was a very important decision and represent the first time the 1960s that there has been serious, institutional rollback on a question involving the sexual revolution. The Supreme Court says that it is wrong. We need to turn it back to the state. I think it may be a game changer, not only in the u. S. , but elsewhere in the world. What happened after roe v. Wade is that country after country came to adopt similar laws, came to legalize abortion red had always been criminalized. Both countries, i think, both leaders are having second. As well. This decision will reverberate, and i would predict that it would have it affect u. S. Because if there are more babies among us, that would be a humanizing thing, not a bad thing. This is another issue that we should talk about. What humanizes people . It seems like a question. Taking care of those smaller and weaker or older and sicker is one of the ways we are humanized. Additional families, up until the interruption of the 19, this was done routinely. Old people are taking care of and everybody knew what to do with a baby, etc. Im not saying we should go back to the 1950s, which is a decade i live in, but what im saying is babies have good effects, not the thanks, just as having to take care of other people has a good effect on people. With the collapse of the family, i think we have seen a generalized it has increased in our society, as people are out of the pack this of taking care of others. Simultaneously, as christianity is in decline, they are not being told that one of their jobs on earth is to take care of others. These two things have impacted us negatively. Host when you look at the election result, it favored those who are prochoice or favored abortion rate. Realistically, did this