Debunking the Marriage and Fertility Crisis
Exposing the absurdity of the right’s latest moral panic
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat scored a perfect 1600 on his SAT.
He would want you to know that, and I don’t mind advertising it for him. After all, given my skepticism about the validity of these tests as proxies for real intelligence, making note of his flawless score serves to drive home rather viscerally the proof of their inadequacy.
Because for a guy who is deemed smart by the standards of our culture, it is nothing short of stunning to read his feeble efforts at erudition, such as the one from this week, which fellow bloviator Ben Shapiro called “excellent” on Twitter because there is honor among fools:
His answer to this utterly fatuous question is, of course, yes — or at least yes, sorta. Douthat, being a man of deep thoughts who aspires to nuance, can’t simply leave it at that, of course. So he tries to offer a hat tip to liberals like Thomas Edsall and Barack Obama, both of whom have publicly proclaimed that families are important and valuable. Presumably, in Douthat’s mind, this separates them from the rest of us…
