Harvard University Press Blog

Why the Supreme Court's Marriage Decision Won’t Be the Next Roe v. Wade

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, many have looked to the Roe v. Wade ruling in an effort to forecast the cultural and political impact of federally sanctioned same-sex marriage. But as Mary Ziegler shows in After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, the narrative that now surrounds that decision and its effects overly simplifies what was a very fluid situation, projecting today’s polarities further back in time than the history supports. Below, Ziegler outlines the folly in declaring Obergefell the next Roe when we still have such trouble understanding the first.

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Critics of the Supreme Court’s recent marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, have predicted that it will be the next Roe v. Wade. Indeed, comparison of Obergefell and Roe has become almost mandatory for Republican presidential candidates and conservative activists.

Some use the analogy to criticize the Court for short-circuiting political debate about marriage in the states. Others clearly want the Court to worry about the consequences of striking down marriage bans in so many states. Politicians turn to these arguments because they might appeal to voters otherwise supportive of marriage equality. If Obergefell is indeed the next Roe, the Court may have once again escalated the culture wars, making it harder for Americans to agree on issues of sexuality or gender, much less on same-sex marriage itself.

Are the Court’s critics right? At first blush, the comparison between Roe and Obergefell seems unconvincing. While the nation remains divided about abortion, polls have shown increasing support for marriage equality, particularly among younger Americans. For many, the moral issues also seem easily distinguishable. Pro-life Americans argue that a woman’s decision to choose abortion harms a person not included in the decision. Longstanding agreements about fetal personhood aside, the argument that abortion is not a purely self-regarding act is much easier to make than any related claim about marriage equality.

Gay Marriage and Gay Culture

“Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a distinctive way.” So writes David Halperin in How To Be Gay, expressing the contentious notion behind his controversial University of Michigan course of the same name. “‘Gay,’” he continues, “refers not just to something you are, but also to something you do... Gayness, then, is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.” American gay male life, he argues, is reflective of “a common culture” and “shared sense of self” that must be acquired, a “characteristic relation to mainstream culture” that must be “discovered” by gay male subjects who “resist the summons to experience the world in heterosexual and heteronormative ways.”

To Halperin, gay culture is something of value, able to enhance or enrich the perspective of people of any sexual orientation. But for Halperin, as for others, the gay rights movement seemed to have prioritized “normality” in ways that both denied and jeopardized gay culture, perhaps nowhere more so than in the effort to legalize gay marriage. With the U.S. Supreme Court having deemed same-sex marriage a right, we look to Halperin’s take on what “gay marriage” might mean for “gay culture.”

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When gay people are deprived of a common, communal existence, of a social world of their own, the keynote of gay politics ceases to be resistance to heterosexual oppression and becomes, instead, assimilation—that is, accommodation to the mainstream, the drive to social acceptance and integration into society as a whole. It’s all about the need to fit in, to adapt yourself to the locality in which you already happen to be living and working. Issues like gay military service or marriage equality, which had formerly been about access to benefits, distributive justice, and the removal of discriminatory barriers, now become struggles over the symbolism of social belonging. They are reframed to center around social recognition, the definition of citizenship, the meaning of patriotism, the practice of religious worship, the idea of family. There are still important material demands behind such struggles for inclusion, but they tend to be subordinated, at least in the rhetoric of the movement, to the goals of assimilation and conformity.

In such a context, gay culture seems an increasingly bizarre, insubstantial, intangible, nebulous, irrelevant notion. It is the sign of a failure (or refusal) to assimilate. What would gay people want nowadays with a separate culture anyway? Such a thing might have made sense in the Bad Old Days of social oppression and exclusion. Now it is simply a barrier to progress. It impedes the achievement of assimilation. No wonder we keep asking, with barely suppressed impatience, why gay culture doesn’t simply disappear. Surely social acceptance and integration will spell the end of gay culture. Since gay people are no longer so oppressed, there is little reason for them to band together in separate social groups, let alone to form distinct cultural communities. The assimilation of gay people into straight society has put an end to all that. Gay culture is a vestige from an earlier time. It is archaic, obsolete. Gay culture has no future.

These predictions, I believe, overlook a crucial consideration. Social acceptance, the decriminalization of gay sex, the legalization of homosexual social and sexual institutions, the removal of barriers to same-sex marriage, to military service, to the priesthood and psychoanalysis, along with other previously off-limits professions, should not be confused with the end of sexual normativity, let alone the collapse of heterosexual dominance.

What Is Rape?

As publishers, with our list forever in mind, there’s an involuntary reflex to filter all the day’s news through the books we’ve worked on. Sometimes that’s welcome; it’s nice to see it validated that the Press’s books are relevant to events in the world. Other times, as with Estelle Freedman’s Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, not so much. From Todd Akin’s comments on “legitimate rape,” to congressional Republicans debating rape’s definition while attempting to tighten requirements for federal funding of abortions, to Dr. Phil’s noxious Twitter poll on the meaning of consent, to the dismissal of countless survivors and acts that don’t satisfy the classic definition of rape, one need barely be attuned to notice the ongoing cultural and political battles over the answer to what may seem a simple question: what is rape?

As Freedman shows, the question is hardly new. Today’s debates about sexual assault, and the role of race and class within these debates, have a long prehistory in the US. The definition of rape, Freedman demonstrates, has been central to sustaining gender and racial injustice—and contesting its definition has been central to activists’ pursuit of greater equality.

Beginning her story in the 18th century, when many women, especially enslaved and non-elite women, had little or no legal recourse when sexually assaulted, Freedman traces the work of suffragists, black activists, and their allies to redefine rape. By expanding the definition of sexual assault to include women of color and non-elite and sexually experienced women, by raising the age of consent, by combating street harassment, by agitating for the prosecution of coercive sex, and by fighting lynching, activists sought to achieve civic equality for women and for people of color.

As Freedman explains in the video below, across our whole national history of debating its definition, the politics of rape have always been bound to questions of power and justice.

 

Catharine MacKinnon on Lovelace

The pornographic film Deep Throat, released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of the film.

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Q. You’ve noted that prior to the 1980 publication of Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal, you had no view of pornography one way or the other. For those unfamiliar with her story, who was Linda Lovelace?

“Linda Lovelace” was the fictional name of Linda Boreman, later Linda Marchiano, who was forced into captivity and made to perform fellatio and other sex acts by pimps, including organized crime, so that pornography, notably the notorious film Deep Throat, could be made of her. The film was instrumental in establishing pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. After her escape, Linda’s valiant opposition to the sex industry included chronicling her abuse in Ordeal and extensive public testimony. Her revelations enabled a change in the way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from morality to harm.

Q. This film comes decades after the landmark pornography civil rights hearings at which Marchiano testified, as documented in In Harm’s Way. Can you remind us what was at stake in those hearings?

The anti-pornography civil rights hearings collected in In Harm’s Way created a space for people victimized by pornography to speak about what had been done to them in its making or through its use.  Up to that point, the legal argument over pornography had essentially only considered the freedom of speech issues.

The hearings documented the inequality that is foundational to the industry: that the “speech” of the pornographers is the use and abuse of the bodies of mainly women, who were far from free and were not speaking for themselves. The consequences of the distribution and use of the materials was shown to be equally silencing and endangering to legions of women and children who are abused by its consumers.  Thus the sexual exploitation of women and children in making pornography is mass-produced through its consumers to become violation of other women and children.

The civil rights ordinances the hearings debated were passed several times, then found to violate the First Amendment on the theory that the more harm the materials do, the more protected as speech they are–an incorrect, indeed reversed, view of First Amendment law. The ordinances could still be passed and found constitutional today.

Practical Ways to Beat the Sexting Impulse

When news broke this week of former Congressman and current NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s further indiscretions, we were put in mind of a forthcoming book, David Lewis’s Impulse: Why We Do What We Do Without Knowing Why We Do It.

Informed by the latest research in neuropsychology, the book explores all the mystifying things people do (and do again) despite knowing better, from blurting out indiscretions to falling for totally incompatible romantic partners. Seems an apropos book for a man in Weiner’s position.

On closer consultation, though, the book was found not to speak directly to the issue of impulsive sexting. It does, however, offer practical ways to beat the overeating impulse, some of which we’ve adapted below.

1. Eat Sext from smaller plates and bowls phones. Because we eat sext with our eyes as much as with our mouth hands, using smaller plates and bowls phones is a quick and easy way to reduce the number of calories consumed sexts sent. In a study I conducted in London as part of a Channel 4 television documentary entitled Secret Eaters Sexters, we found that volunteers who served themselves ice cream into a sexted with a large bowl phone took sexted 44 per cent more than those with a smaller bowl phone.

2. Eating Sexting with chopsticks without autocorrect, rather than a knife and fork with autocorrect, obliges you to take smaller mouthfuls use shorter words and eat sext more slowly. Eating Sexting more slowly allows time for the digestion process to work effectively. It also gives you a better chance of recognising when you have eaten sexted sufficient food sexts.

3. Put ice in your drink sext. Because the body has to use energy to heat up the beverage sext, around 1 calorie per ounce word of fluid sext is consumed. If you drink sext the recommended not recommended eight 8-ounce glasses of water sexts a day with ice cubes you will burn up between 60 and 70 extra calories each day.

4. We eat sext significantly more when dining sexting in company than eating sexting alone. For Secret Eaters Sexters, I asked diners sexters to have lunch sext alone, as a couple or at a table of six friends. The group consumed sent some 600 more calories sexts than the solitary diner sexter and over 80 more than the couple. What happens is that we tend to pace ourselves on the fastest eater sexter in a group. Also, distracted by conversation and banter we fail to notice how much we are eating sexting and are more susceptible to offers of second helpings sextings. Be aware of this risk the next time you eat sext with a group of friends or colleagues. Refuse second helpings sextings. Pace yourself to the slowest eater sexter at the table. Try to be the last person to start eating sexting.

5. When dining sexting out in an upmarket restaurant be aware of the effects of soft lights and classical music. Both encourage you to linger longer and so eat or drink sext considerably more than you realise.

6. When snacking on popcorn sexting in the cinema, use your other hand. That is, if you normally hold the popcorn container in sext with your right hand and pick don’t sext with your left, then swap around. By making this small change in your eating sexting habits you force yourself to think more about what you are doing and are, therefore, likely to eat sext less. During a study to test the effects of this tactic in a London cinema, I provided half the audience with an oven glove worn on the normal popcorn picking sexting hand. Their consumption sexting fell by a quarter compared to their non-handicapped companions.

Okay, that’s six solid tips. Maybe take them under advisement? Food Sext Food for thought, at least.

Making Sex, From the Greeks to Akin

After Missouri Congressman and Senate candidate Todd Akin shared his view that the female body could mysteriously and miraculously prevent conception in cases of “legitimate rape,” his remarks were swiftly condemned by even his own Republican party. Much of the response, and Akin’s own apology, focused on his use of the word “legitimate” when in fact he’d meant “forcible,” a modifier whose political implications are, to many, no less offensive. Of course, the reaction to Akin’s politics has in some quarters overshadowed consideration of his complete lack of understanding of the female reproductive system. As explained last week in an op-ed by Jennifer Tucker, and further considered on Saturday’s episode of Up With Chris Hayes, the long-dismissed “logic” of Akin’s thoughts on conception stem from the ancient notion that female reproductive organs were merely inward-turned analogues of male. If the male needed to achieve orgasm for conception to occur, then so did the female; the victim of a “legitimate rape” would take no pleasure; hence no orgasm; hence the raped woman’s ability to “shut that whole thing down.”

For more on the trajectory of Akin’s medical fairytale, we turned to Thomas Laqueur’s indispensable Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, from which the following passage is excerpted.

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An interpretive chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of the same story of death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with the problem of distinguishing real from apparent death.

The story begins when a young aristocrat whose family circumstances forced him into religious orders came one day to a country inn. He found the innkeepers overwhelmed with grief at the death of their only daughter, a girl of great beauty. She was not to be buried until the next day, and the bereaved parents asked the young monk to keep watch over her body through the night. This he did, and more. Reports of her beauty had piqued his curiosity. He pulled back the shroud and, instead of finding the corpse “disfigured by the horrors of death,” found its features still gracefully animated. The young man lost all restraint, forgot his vows, and took “the same liberties with the dead that the sacraments of marriage would have permitted in life.” Ashamed of what he had done, the hapless necrophilic monk departed hastily in the morning without waiting for the scheduled interment.

When time for burial came, indeed just as the coffin bearing the dead girl was being lowered into the ground, someone felt movement coming from the inside. The lid was torn off; the girl began to stir and soon recovered from what proved not to have been real death at all but only a coma. Needless to say, the parents were overjoyed to have their daughter back, although their pleasure was severely diminished by the discovery that she was pregnant and, moreover, could give no satisfactory account of how she had come to be that way. In their embarrassment, the innkeepers consigned the daughter to a convent as soon as her baby was born.

Soon business brought the young aristocrat, oblivious of the consequences of his passion but far richer and no longer in holy orders because he had come into his inheritance, back to the scene of his crime. Once again he found the innkeepers in a state of consternation and quickly understood his part in causing their new misfortune. He hastened to the convent and found the object of his necrophilic desire more beautiful alive than dead. He asked for her hand and with the sacrament of marriage legitimized their child.

The moral that Jacques-Jean Bruhier asks his readers to draw from this story is that only scientific tests can make certain that a person is really dead and that even very intimate contact with a body leaves room for mistakes. But Bruhier’s contemporary, the noted surgeon Antoine Louis, came to a very different conclusion, one more germane to the subject of this book, when he analyzed the case in 1752. Based on the evidence that Bruhier himself offered, Louis argues, no one could have doubted that the girl was not dead: she did not, as the young monk testified, look dead and moreover who knows if she did not give some “demonstrative signs” in proof of her liveliness, signs that any eighteenth-century doctor or even layperson would have expected in the circumstances.

Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray

Word came recently that, in a rush to satisfy the overwhelming desire for Fifty Shades of Grey-style erotica, the UK-based erotic romance eBook publisher Total-E-Bound will be releasing a series of “Clandestine Classics.” The books, they say, will present the likes of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre “as they’ve never been seen before.”

The old fashioned pleasantries and timidity have all been stripped away, quite literally. You didn’t really think that these much loved characters only held hands and pecked cheeks did you? Come with us, as we embark on a breathtaking experience—behind the closed bedroom doors of our favourite, most-beloved British characters. Learn what Sherlock really thought of Watson, what Mr Darcy really wanted to do to Miss Elizabeth Bennet, and unveil the sexy escapades of Mr Rochester and Jane Eyre. We’ll show you the scenes that you always wanted to see but were never allowed. Come on, you know you can’t resist...open the pages and delve inside.

Surely the likes of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina have prepared us for these modern meme-ings of classic lit. But, we must insist, there’s at least one beloved work of 19th century British literature that needs no 21st century co-author tarting things up in order to give today’s readers those scenes we’ve “always wanted to see but were never allowed”: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Before Wilde’s novel saw first publication in Lippincott’s in 1890, the magazine’s publisher censored several of the passages that most fully explored the nature of homoerotic and homosocial desire. Even still, the work was met with such hostility that Wilde himself made further cuts prior to the novel’s 1891 publication in book form. Wilde’s original uncensored text went unpublished until just last year, when we released Nicholas Frankel’s lavishly illustrated and wonderfully annotated edition of the novel. And now Wilde’s original text is available as The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, a paperback edition that includes general and textual introductions from Frankel.

As Frankel explains, this original version of the story is “a more daring and scandalous novel, more explicit in its sexual content” than previously available editions. So, should you come across a copy of The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray you may mistake it for a mash-up, a “clandestine classic,” but rest assured: this is the novel as Wilde envisioned it.

Contraception and the Catholic Church

As of August 1, most new and renewing health insurance plans must begin offering a spectrum of women’s preventive health services, including birth control, at no upfront cost. This provision of the Affordable Care Act has been among its most controversial, with many Catholic and other religious organizations suing the government to block a rule that they see as compelling them to act in opposition to their beliefs, which they represent as steadfast through time.

This improbable reemergence of contraception as a public issue in the public square turned our attention to John T. Noonan’s Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. The book was originally published in 1965 and then enlarged back in 1986, but despite its age there seems to exist no comparable treatment of the entire history of the church and contraception, from the Roman Empire to Vatican II. One could argue that no such work could even be attempted today, as anyone with the access Noonan then enjoyed would today almost surely be censured for their effort.

On publication, Time called the book a “magisterially documented history of church teaching on birth control [which] suggests that there are good reasons why the traditional stand can change,” and Harper’s described it as a work of “inherent genius” that was as “truly exciting as a book can be.” In a post earlier this year, the U.S. Intellectual History blog detailed the roiling debate into which Noonan’s book entered in the mid-1960s.

What follows below is adapted from Noonan’s original Introduction to the book.

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“Contraception” is a term which could be applied to any behavior that prevents conception. Sexual continence is contraceptive in effect; sexual intercourse when an ovum will not be fertilized avoids procreation as much as intercourse where a physical barrier is used to prevent the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum. How has some behavior now generally approved by Catholic moralists been discriminated from other acts of contraception which have been condemned?

My focus is on the ideas and values clustered into a doctrine on contraception. Seen from one aspect, the doctrine is a reply to the question, “On what terms may the generation of human life be controlled?” Considered from another aspect, it is an answer to the question, “Under what conditions may human beings have sexual intercourse?” From another, it responds to the inquiry, “What revelation of God or what laws of nature are relevant to sexual conduct?”

There is an advantage to looking at a single set of concepts over two thousand years. As an attempt to set out what the purposes of sexual behavior should be, the tradition I explore uniquely combines appeals to divine instruction, natural laws, and psychological and social consequences. Is there any comparable effort, assiduously sustained within the same general framework for over nineteen hundred years, to express in rational terms a standard of sexual behavior?

The meaning of theory, however, is properly understood only when one determines what conditions it responds to. Consequently, I have described the contraceptive means known to different eras, and what can be inferred as to their diffusion and employment. The theory, then, will not be viewed as an abstract logic developed without reference to existing habits. I shall set out both the practice to which doctrine responded and the steps taken to alter the practice. The effort at enforcement tested the seriousness with which the theory was intended. Unlike a history of secular law, however, where the meaning of a rule may be measured by its effective sanctions, the history of a moral doctrine must be, chiefly, an account of what was taught. The application of a moral rule is effected primarily not by agencies of compulsion but by an individual's accepting it in his heart. If a moral teaching is violated, it may still have been “effective” if it played a part in the moral consciousness of the violator. The diffusion of a moral doctrine, and the external embodiment and enforcement of it, may be gauged; the principal effect of the doctrine, its effect on conscience, must largely be inferred from the terms in which it is proposed.

The believers to whom a moral doctrine is addressed will range from the devout to the conformists to the rebellious. Partly as a function of faith, partly as a function of other psychological attributes such as attitude to authority, partly as a function of social environment, the acceptance of the doctrine will vary. At no time, I suppose, has a specific moral teaching put forward by the theologians been received in an identical way by all the faithful. The seriousness with which a doctrine is taken by different persons and groups is a matter of estimate. The range of reaction in the audience may be presumed to have affected the enunciation of the doctrine itself. When the theologians speak to a community of various degrees of faith, various degrees of moral sensitivity, various degrees of education, they may use language unsuitable for more intimate dialogue, and, in the words of the Talmud, they may ''build a fence around the Law,” setting up outer ramparts to keep an inner treasure secure.

The assent of human beings, which gives effect to a doctrine, is not to a single set of propositions, but to the Christian faith. Within this faith there are beliefs on the Bible, grace, original sin, the sacraments, sexuality, marriage, the value of human lives, the purpose of human existence. These beliefs or doctrines structure the propositions on contraception. However tight the relation, however close the dependence on the Christian framework, the teaching on contraception has had its own set of problems, concepts, articulations: its own history.

James Franco's Beach Reads

At his Huffington Post blog, that great Renaissance man James Franco has been serving up recommendations for summer reading. Last week he offered what he describes as “two very fun reads”: Fredrick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, and Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal. Franco, who studied with Warner at Yale, characterizes The Trouble With Normal as “a smart and fun look at gay marriage and anti-normative lifestyles”:

(Warner) makes the liberating argument that the heteronormative lifestyles might learn more from queer lifestyles than the opposite, that instead of having the gay and queer communities try to conform to the hetero mainstream, maybe the mainstream might learn something from those wacky people living “alternative” lifestyles. As gay marriage is very much on people's minds, this is a book that can blow your mind about how we are taught to see ourselves in this country—straight, gay and otherwise—and how we can all learn to be still more open to variety.

The Trouble With Normal, a paperback edition of which we published in 2000, is something of a touchstone for a new work dealing with similar questions of identity, sexuality, and culture. In the much-anticipated How To Be Gay, pioneering queer theorist David Halperin joins Warner in arguing that the aspiration to “normalcy,” while understandable as a pragmatic approach to attaining civil rights and societal acceptance, leads to the embrace of an official, public gay identity that can countenance little deviation from mainstream norms, especially with respect to sex. Halperin cites Warner for “urging us not to turn our backs on the sophisticated and adventurous queer culture we have created around sex, not to sell out those members of our communities who do not (or who cannot) bury their sexuality discreetly within the sphere of private life, and not to purchase respectability at the expense of sex.”

For Halperin, the trouble with normal is its denial of a “unique subjectivity” expressed by male homosexuality. He argued as much in a recent op-ed occasioned by gay pride month and the attendant “state-of-the-gay” reports. Every year, writes Halperin, the “straight media,” offers triumphal declarations of progress along a projected narrative of complete gay assimilation into the mainstream. As the story goes, while older gay men may still claim a recognizably gay culture, today’s young gay men are said to have fully embraced the hetero-normal. The problem with this report of generational mobility, says Halperin, is that it’s been with us since at least the 1970s, and yet “gay culture” remains. So what work is being done by the continual report of its demise?

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.