Politics non-Friday

Oh, for the love of.... hangon, count to ten.

Alright, this blog is of a decidedly non-political nature; those of you who want my political writing likely already know where to find it.  But as the conditions under which people get pregnant and enter the world are (at least nominally) associated with this blog's explicit topic, kindly indulge this rant:

EVERY DECISION SOMEONE MAKES IN HOW TO RAISE HIS OR HER CHILD IS NOT AN OCCASION FOR YOU TO CHIME AND SAY "WELL, ACTUALLY."

I want to begin with an observation, often enough made but seemingly never realized, that writing about parenting is the best way to ensure a flood of hate mail yet discovered under the sun.  Take the example of Lenore Skenazy, barraged with letters and emails for the (perfectly safe) way her kid gets to school.  Take Amy Chua, who if memory serves generated the most-commented article on WSJ's site for sharing how she disciplines her (by all appearances happy and well-adjusted, if perhaps a bit serious) daughters.  Hell, a guy shot someone in the head because he thought he shouldn't be taking his kid on bike rides.  Take Dan Savage last week, finding it necessary to opine that women who breast-feed past a few months are weird.

Well, yeah, it's "weird."  It's also weird to feel so shameful of breastfeeding you cut it off early.  It's weird to hand them off to a nanny they'll see more than their mother; it's weird to give up the mother's entire outside life the moment her water breaks.  It's weird to send them to daycare; it's weird to send them to Catholic school; it's weird to home school.  It's weird to keep them in diapers; it's weird to potty train.  It's all weird.

To digress slightly into constitutional law, every January 22nd (wonder what I put up that day, actually), a group of weirdos will congregate in front of the Supreme Court to protest its decision in Roe v. Wade, and to the uninitiated it may actually seem said weirdos make a strong argument when they say the privacy right including the right to abortion is not to be found within the text of the Constitution.  What they don't follow up to add---in addition to naming the law school that they didn't go to---is that for a century the Supreme Court has recognized a constellation of rights around family decisions, including how to raise your children and whether even to have children.  I think of it as Lockean in its logic (the family unit logically antedates the state; therefore, the state can regulate the public sphere but not invade the sphere of the family), but many different narratives are possible to justify this.  The upshot is that if you don't think the Constitution contains a privacy right against the government forbidding abortion, you also don't think there's a right against the government compelling abortion, and if you really think that's the right outcome, please do yourself a favor and put down the Kaplan LSAT guide right now.

Okay, to twist the conversation uncomfortably back to the present.  Someone else's decisions whether to get married, whether and how to have sex, and with whom, whether to have children and how to raise them, are all none of your business.  If your interest in the question is motivated by a desire to receive cards beginning "dear grandma," we make an accommodation for you in pretending it's partially your business, but that is merely a convenient fiction.  They're all personal decisions; they involve considerations of other people, which no matter how well you know them you can't possibly appreciate as well as they can; and due consideration of other people's autonomy entails letting them live their got-damn lives already.

Here's the part of the argument that I don't think gets made often enough:  Keeping your damn nose out of it is for your benefit, as well.  Other people's sexual habits are going to seem weird to you.  Other people's relationships aren't going to make sense to you.  Other people are going to want and to do things---as well as to not want and not do things---that seem preposterously bizarre.  If you really were to take the time to judge the personal decisions even your closest friends made, you'd be overwhelmed.  In the internet age, when you have available the personal decisions of your one billion closest friends, it would drive you positively insane.

So be a grown-up.  Save yourself the madness.  Learn to say, "Whatever gets you through middle school, man."