Greetings, Tory readers! My name is David Byler, and I am the new Publisher of the Princeton
Tory. I am both honored and excited to assume the duties of Publisher for this upcoming year.
The first order of business is to thank Toni Alimi, the Publisher Emeritus of The Tory, for all the
hard work he did on the magazine last year. He is a smart, dedicated leader and his presence will
be missed.

Since this is my first issue as Publisher, I have been thinking about the mission of The Tory
and how to best carry it out. Our goal is to put every Princeton student into regular contact
with conservative thought in its strongest and most relevant form. In carrying this out, The
Tory contributes to the broader effort of conservative intellectuals to change the perception of
conservatism. While many Princetonians view conservatism as an obsolete philosophy grounded
in the mistaken ideas of the past, we at The Tory strive to show that it is in fact a vibrant, relevant
philosophy that promises a better way forward than the alternatives. Our hope is that The
Tory provides examples of good, relevant conservative arguments to Princeton students, thus
replacing some of the negative perceptions of the philosophy with examples of how conservative
thought works well .

The articles in this issue do exactly that. In our cover story, John Paul Spence argues for
the value of a strong core curriculum founded on the Western Canon. This exemplifies the
esteem that many conservatives hold for past thinkers in a way that is relevant to our daily
education. Peter Kunze also points out the strong points of the new book “What is Marriage?
Man and Woman: A Defense” (co-written by Professor Robert George and Princeton alumni
Sherif Girgis and Ryan Andersen) while also noting some of the weaknesses in the argument.
Margaret Fortney points out the limits of science and criticizes the application of scientism in
politics. Additionally, while Josh Zuckerman does not take an explicitly conservative stance,
he rigorously engages Politics Professor Alan Ryan with questions about his life, experience,
political thought, and advice for Princeton students. Finally, Ben Koons shows how the “Love
and Lust in the Bubble” series in The Daily Princetonian showcases what happens to people
without a coherent philosophy regarding love, sex and romance in their daily lives. While these
articles tackle widely different themes, they all contain high-quality material and are relevant to
Princeton students and in that way push forward towards improving the narrative surrounding
conservatism on campus.

Perceptions about conservatism will not be changed overnight. Nor do I expect The Tory to
single-handedly alter those perceptions. I do have high hopes for what we can accomplish this
year though, and a large part of that hope is grounded in the new officer corps. Each officer is
dedicated, talented and well-qualified to do their job. Building six magazines from the ground
up in a year is no small feat, but our team has the exact right mix of skills, personalities and
perspectives to do it well.

It is my hope that The Tory will continue to provide nuanced and intellectually robust articles
that are pertinent and challenging to students. More than that, I want The Tory to change the
conversation surrounding politics, philosophy and life here on campus. Conservatism deserves
a fair hearing and a strong voice here at Princeton, and I’m excited about what The Tory will be
doing this year to work towards that goal.

Sincerely,

David Byler

With the Supreme Court set to hear arguments against the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA), the issue of “same-sex marriage” has grown in its relevance. Leading Republican
figures are calling for a shift in the party’s line on the issue, with former Utah governor Jon
Huntsman writing recently in the American Conservative, “the marketplace of ideas will render
us irrelevant, and soon, if we are not honest about our time and place in history.” Governor
Huntsman may have a point. In the last fifteen years, support for the legal recognition of “same-
sex marriage” has gone from roughly a quarter of Americans after the passing of DOMA, to
roughly half of all Americans today. Young conservatives, in particular, increasingly differ from
their older ideological comrades on the issue of “same-sex marriage.” The issue has reached a
fever pitch, and the next few years will likely provide a decisive moment, whether in its
affirmation or its rejection.
Expanding on their 2010 article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public
Policy, Robert P.George, Sherif Girgis, and Ryan T. Anderson attempt to give a precise
definition of marriage. Separating the views about the definition of marriage into two categories,
conjugal and revisionist, the authors critique the revisionist definition, claiming that it only
defines marriage in terms of its emotional bond. This poses problems, as friendship and
marriage so defined are distinguishable only in the degree of the relationship, and not by their
essential natures. The traditional and more accurate definition, the authors write, is the conjugal
view.
“Marriage is of its essence, a comprehensive union: a union of will (by consent)
and body (by sexual union; inherently ordered to procreation and thus the broad
sharing of family life; and calling for permanent and exclusive commitment,
whatever the spouses’ preferences.”
Defined this way, marriage brings value to society, by helping to produce “healthy, upright, and
productive citizens.” Since laws contribute to our social and cultural norms, the authors argue,
the legal recognition of traditional marriage strengthens the institution by making it costlier for
individuals to break these norms. They write, “Marriage is not just about private problems and
rewards, for which private solutions are enough. At stake are rights, and costs and benefits
(externalities) for all society.”
In the polemic height of What is Marriage, the authors lay out how recognizing “same-
sex marriages” would hurt the institution of marriage as a whole. Relying on their assumptions
that laws shape beliefs and beliefs affect behavior, they claim that a legal redefinition of
marriage would misinform society about its proper meaning and thus damage the institution
as a whole. In their view, this confused definition has five consequences. First, marriage as
a human good will be harder to achieve, since individuals will increasingly have a confused
definition. Secondly, marital norms will erode, as society will begin to view the institution through
the revisionist lens, as a bond defined primarily by its emotional intensity. Thirdly, the confusion
of marriage will also confuse the roles of mother and father, and encourage single-parenthood.
Fourthly, and I would suggest most controversially, the authors argue that changes to marriage
laws would threaten the ideological freedom of those who believe in traditional marriage.

Finally, it would damage friendship as an institution, as the revisionist view makes marriage
distinguishable from friendship only in the intensity of the emotional bond. To hammer home
these consequences, the authors quote gay rights activists themselves to prove that even those
who support the revision believe that it will affect the institution. The most effective part of the
book, this section
clearly illustrates the consequences of marriage revision and why compromise along the line of
civil unions is simply untenable.
The authors also seek to rebut common criticisms of the conjugal view. Responding to
the perceived exclusion of infertile couples, they argue that these couples differ from those with
children in the degree, but not the nature of their relationship. While their sexual activity may
not result in children, it is still ordered toward procreation and thus fulfills the conjugal definition
of marriage. As for the historically charged objection that traditional marriage laws smack of
prohibitions against interracial marriage, the authors reply first by saying that while it is possible
for interracial marriage to meet the definition of conjugal union, “same sex marriage” cannot
claim the same potential. Secondly, they argue that the traditional definition of marriage is not
based on animosity toward homosexuals, pointing to the fact that this definition has stood even
when society has affirmed or even celebrated homosexuality.
What is Marriage? succeeds in making a strong case for the preservation of traditional
marriage laws. For those new to the philosophical debate on marriage, the arguments are clear,
coherent, and accessible. George and others persuasively argue for the state’s role in
preserving traditional marriage. The authors certainly present the abstract case against “same
sex marriage,” but I think it is vital to do it in this manner, since anything else would lack the
intellectual rigor necessary to withstand accusations of homophobia or bigotry. The authors
shrewdly emphasize the secular nature of their case, though I wonder if this undercuts their
position in the long term, given the correlation between religiosity and defense of traditional
marriage.
That said, the book has some issues. First, the authors’ argument about the
impingement of intellectual freedom is unsound.The authors claim that a change in the definition
of marriage will negatively impact the intellectual freedom of those who still hold to the
traditional view, but this line of reasoning only makes sense if you in fact hold the traditional
view. If current marriage laws are in fact unjust, then it does not matter that changing the status
quo will hurt those who have the most invested in it. This logic would seemingly justify the
preservation of Jim Crow laws, seeing as how their repeal negatively impacted those who held
a racist view of society. Only if one already assumes the justice of traditional marriage laws, or
the injustice of its alternative, does one then see the effect on moral freedom as negative. If the
authors are correct in noting that law shapes beliefs, then the same reasoning could be turned
on traditional marriage, with advocates of “same sex marriage” showing that the status quo
negatively impacts those who hold views contrary to it. The supposed effect on those who
oppose the norm does not make a law more or less just. Otherwise, the justice of laws would in
fact vary based on the societal context, and would ultimately be relative, a claim that I am sure
the authors would not like. Thus, the problem for the authors is not really that a change in
marriage laws would impinge on intellectual freedom, but that it would punish those who hold to
the correct view. Harping on “intellectual freedom” in this manner too easily rationalizes the
defense of unjust laws for the sake of those who support the injustice.

More generally, the authors should elaborate more on why law affects society’s morality.
Theoretically, the law might affect the values or norms of a society, but in a government run by
popular sovereignty, the norms of society would also affect the laws. The causal path between
laws and societal norms runs both ways, and thus the effect of changing laws is unclear. The
preservation of traditional civic marriage likely requires a substantial majority to believe in the
merit of the traditional definition, and thus the supposed impact of laws on norms would have
already been achieved.
That said, the book still has many more merits than flaws. George and others coherently
and clearly argue for the defense of traditional marriage and avoid the religious tropes of other
advocates. Their case has some unnecessary secondary arguments, but overall it still has some
major intellectual muscle.

JZ: Your latest book, The Making of Modern Liberalism, discusses the origin of liberalism
and its modern development. Why did you choose to write about liberalism, and what do
you find interesting about it?

AR: Well it isn’t one book. It’s very much snapshots from a career. The consistent thread, I
think, is an interest in broad issues of freedom. My natural inclinations are pretty much anarchic
in the sense that I am skeptical about the competence of government. I don’t, on the whole,
think that most claims to authority have a great deal of intellectual substance. I don’t, on the
whole, think that we very often have much reason to push other people about in ways they don’t
wish to be pushed about, and so from the moment I began to think about politics, I was thinking
under the broadly liberal umbrella. The general theme, minimum of authority and maximum of
individual freedom, gets one into the liberal tradition.

JZ: Within this liberal tradition lie classical liberalism and modern liberalism. What are
the differences between these two schools of thought?

AR: I don’t think the distinction really does hold up that well. It all goes back to Hayek’s book,
The Road to Serfdom. Hayek wanted to say that classical liberalism consisted of a state
guarantee to the rights that individuals need to function in the marketplace. Above all, property
rights, forms of contracts, meticulous rule of law, and things that went along with this, like not
too much discretion for public officials. If people had these rights, then they could look after
themselves, and become self-sustaining, free individuals. There would be no tendency for the
state to engross itself on everybody’s lives, no tendency for the state to start telling everybody

Modern liberalism is a rather difficult beast to lay hands on. It’s a sort of mixture of the ideas of
John Stuart Mill when he was looking for a form of market socialism and New Deal liberalism,

which Roosevelt put into place. So basically classical liberalism is Lockean, and modern is

JZ: You write that “modern liberalism has a basis in freedom because it seeks to
emancipate individuals from the fears of unemployment, hunger, [and] ill health,” but it is
also “exemplified by the assault on freedom of contract and on the sanctity of property
rights.” How does modern liberalism reconcile this assault with the goal of increasing

AR: Modern liberals tend to draw a line between what they think of as the legitimate use of
property rights (i.e. not reducing the workforce to beggary, starvation, excessively long hours,
ruining their health, and all the other things) and what they regard as the coercive or freedom-
limiting force use of property rights. It is a very, very tricky line to draw. The heart of the
argument that underpins modern liberalism and various kinds of socialism is the notion that
property rights can be coercive. Unless one sees that, then one can’t see why it is that it’s also
an argument about freedom. Freedom to use property stops at point where it becomes coercive.
Liberals tend to have anxiety about property rights and the means of production, where they
begin to hold hands with socialists.

JZ: What is the relationship between socialism and freedom?

AR: I think that’s a difficult question, and I have never been entirely convinced by anything. I
think that there are two versions of socialism that focus on freedom. The Marxist notion is quite
difficult to get a really clear grip on. It says human freedom is the productive, creative fashioning
of social life—interesting cultural objects: art, literature, music. Property rights get in the way of
this kind of freedom, and its feasibility of running an economy seems to be pretty dubious. That
kind of socialist ambition is emotionally and intellectually very attractive but pretty unpersuasive.

The other kind simply says that it’s absurd to talk about people having a choice, which is the
basis of freedom, if they really are in a work-or-starve situation. To believe this, you just have
to think that property rights aren’t sacred. People have lost some of their freedom to dispose of
their property as they choose. Nonetheless, the right they have lost isn’t enshrined in nature. It’s
a social convention, and nibbling into property rights for the sake of other kinds of freedom is all
right if the trade-off is a good trade-off.

JZ: What are the biggest differences between Princeton and Oxford in terms of the
overall academic culture?

AR: There are two crucial ones. Oxford very much still works on the tutorial basis, in which,
fundamentally, students teach themselves, and their alleged teachers interrogate them on how
well they’ve done it. So there’s much more face-to-face teaching and much less emphasis on
lectures. There really is a difference between the Oxford tutorial setup and Princeton, which
is still more in the American mode of lectures and class sections in which students try to work

out what on Earth the lectures were about. The other thing is that because people here do
four courses simultaneously, it’s much harder for them to focus for a continuous period on one
particular topic, like in the Oxford system. In an Oxford education, you drill holes deep, but not
with a great view to how the landscape connects. Here, on the whole, tends to be better at
connecting the landscape, but students do not tend to drive themselves mad by pursuing one’s
subject until right at the end, with the senior thesis. And that makes quite a lot of difference.

JZ: Why did you decide to leave Oxford and come teach at Princeton?

AR: I’ve done it twice. I did it in 1987, and that was because, by then, I had taught for nearly
twenty years in Oxford. I liked it very much. I had one of the nicest jobs the place had to offer,
but I thought I didn’t want to have the same job for forty years. Political theory was done
interestingly in this country, and I thought more interestingly in some ways than in Britain. I’ve
always liked America, and Princeton was a suitable place to be because I didn’t want to risk my
eleven-year-old daughter on the streets of New York at that point. I taught here for eight and
a half years perfectly happily. I was then offered the chance to be the head of my old college,
which is a job I’ve always rather hankered after, so in 1996, I went back and did that. But in
England, we have retiring ages, and in 2009, I’d run out of time. I thought it would be nice to do
a bit more teaching before I finally retired, so back I came.

JZ: You are teaching POL 321: American Political Thought for the first time. Why did you
decide to teach this course?

AR: The obvious reason why it’s absolutely fascinating is because the intellectual apparatus
with which the persons before 1776 and the founders are operating is essentially the apparatus
forged in all sorts of British political contexts, particularly the struggles between Parliament and
the Crown. It’s not so much just curiosity about the history, but curiosity about what happens
to ideas as well as people in this new, strange, wide open setting. Of course it’s always going
to be a story about slavery. Why do persons deeply committed to a liberal political conception
also keep slaves? So there’s all kinds of stuff like that which is absolutely impossible not to
get interested in. The old great question: why does socialism not take in America? Here is this
new industrial society, why do the ideas, which in Europe turn up in industrialization, just not
take? There’s a period in which they are about to take up socialism, but in the end do not. Why
did I decide to teach it for the first time? Well I retire properly in eighteen months, and I didn’t
want to go on teaching absolutely things I’d taught before, so I thought, give yourself some
exercise…perhaps too much.

JZ: What are your plans for retirement?

AR: I certainly want to travel. I used to sail small boats, and I’m now less agile at leaping
from one side to another on a sailing dinghy to stop it from capsizing than I was when I was
younger. But I wouldn’t mind having some more time to get back on the water. And there are
an enormous number of books I haven’t read. I’m not absolutely sure how much more I want to

write, but if people go on asking me to write, I daresay I shall. But certainly reading, travelling,
bit of sailing, and there after all is my grandson, my daughter, and her husband up in upstate
New York, so it’d be nice to see a bit more of them. The usual things that retired people do.

JZ: If you could assign one book to every student at Princeton, what would it be?

AR: That’s a dirty question because, of course, the obvious answer is going to be something
like John Stuart Mill’s Essay on Liberty, which is the book I read before I started quarrelling
with my teachers at my high school. But we need something that stirs people up. I think this
is something you may be surprised by. I think Primo Levi’s If This Be A Man [a Holocaust
survivor’s autobiography] is something that really throws people back on their heels. Once you
have the experience of something like that, then it becomes easier to see why people like John
Stuart Mill wrote on liberty. I think this is something that really gets into the soul. Once you read
it, you aren’t the same afterwards. Otherwise of course, I think people should all take long train
journeys and read War and Peace.

JZ: If you could give one piece of advice to an incoming freshman, what would it be?

AR: Be skeptical, but not cynical. PS – It takes some time to work out the difference.

By Josh Zuckerman ‘16

The liberal arts are no longer in vogue. Then again, few things still are that first got hot in the fifteenth century, but if we are to listen to the prevailing wisdom among academia today,
that’s something to be thankful for anyway. Since the 1980’s and ‘90’s, the concept of
maintaining at a university a liberal arts curriculum founded on the core books of the Western
cannon has been largely panned. These studies are now the hollowed-out husk of an educational
fallacy, a body that’s been slowly rotting for centuries. They are no longer relevant in an
enlightened and globalized world of higher education, and they won’t help students find
employment upon graduating into a harsh, globalized job market. As elite universities
restructure their general education requirements, and schools like Chicago and Columbia find
themselves increasingly alone and embattled for prescribing a liberal education, it is becoming
clear that that branch of learning dedicated to worshiping at the altars of “dead white men” is all
We should pause for a moment, however, to briefly reassess the value of these studies
before consigning them to the dust-heap of failed and forgotten educational experiments. The
fact remains that the liberal arts are useful and necessary for every student who passes through
Princeton, regardless of major or career plan. It is often said that the liberal arts are beneficial
because they teach communication or problem solving or creative thinking. While these claims
may be true, if also a bit nebulous, the liberal arts exist for far more. They are not simply an
educational game or gimmick. Rather, by exposing students to certain areas of study and certain
texts, they develop the human mind, and, in doing so, help human beings attain their full
potential as rational creatures.
We ought to view the liberal arts as a kind of physical education program for the mind.
Nearly every high school in America, and many universities, prescribe some sort of
comprehensive Physical Education (PE) program for their students. PE is recognized as
universally beneficial because it trains, tones, and develops the body, and human beings, as
partly bodily beings, are stunted or deprived in some way if they do not receive this training.
The same rules apply to the mind, because human beings are also rational beings. It is often said
that the liberal arts are a waste of students’ time—that they do not teach or communicate
anything practical that students will use in their professional careers. But think how ridiculous
this logic becomes when it is applied to the concept of schools’ PE requirements. I would
challenge you to find any educator in the country who would argue that students’ PE classes
should consist solely of typing exercises, even though typing is most likely all the physical
activity necessary for students’ professional careers. Educators realize that the body as a whole
must be developed for the formation of a healthy human being. The same concept holds for the
mind. Through certain studies, students train, tone, and develop the whole of their minds just as
they do the whole of their bodies through certain PE classes. The liberal arts teach students to
think, to write, to reason, and to argue, and to analyze the thoughts, writings, reasoning, and

arguments of others, and these abilities make them, in a very real sense, more rational, and thus
more human. They liberate students from ignorance and free them to reason effectively.
Earning a liberal education is time-consuming and painstaking work, and a focus on the
liberal arts necessarily entails less intense focus on more specific and perhaps more immediately
practical fields of study. But a university at the most basic level should exist to develop its
students—should serve to educate them for freedom. A university cannot serve merely as a
glorified trade school. It exists for a higher purpose.
What then should be included in the liberal arts curriculum? Traditionally, the studies
included were logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Today, the
term “liberal arts” applies to such studies as the great books, history, languages, mathematics, the
physical sciences, the social sciences, philosophy, music, and religious studies. Few argue that
students shouldn’t make at least basic progress in mathematics and the physical sciences—these
are “useful” or “practical” areas of study. But other courses are crucial for students as well, and
chief among them are those covering the core great books of the Western tradition. This is,
admittedly, not a popular claim, and courses dedicated to this pursuit cannot claim high
numbers—the humanities sequence at Princeton, for example, fields only about 30 freshman out
of a class of about 1300 each year. Despite their lack of popularity, courses of this sort are
vitally important for the formation of any student and responsible adult.
One reason for this fact is that we currently live in a nation whose laws and founding
principles have been profoundly influenced by those thousands of years of thought now referred
to as the Western core. The United States bears the fruit of centuries of this thought, dedicated
to questions such as what it means to be human, what it is to be a free citizen, the role religion
should play in our lives, how much power should be allotted to a central government, and a
hundred other questions which shaped our nation’s founding and with which we still struggle
today. Whether we like it or not, we all live within, and our lives are all shaped daily by, the
Western tradition, and at least a basic familiarity with this tradition is necessary for becoming
a conscientious citizen. The argument is often made that the Western tradition should not hold
an elevated place in the core curriculum—that reading great East Asian literature, for example,
broadens the mind just as well. While this may be true, such literature does not engage our
political and social climate today the way the Western tradition does, because unlike the Western
tradition, the Eastern did not found it.
But a study of the great books of the Western tradition is also important because these
are, well, great books. They are the some of the greatest creations the human mind has produced
since the beginning of time, and to ignore them is to ignore a seemingly endless font of wisdom
and insight into the human condition. Seriously engaging these works in a seminar setting
teaches a student to analyze the writing of others, and to effectively communicate the results of
this analysis both through prepared writing and impromptu speaking. And while it is true that
these skills can be won through the study of other, less significant if more “relevant” books, or
through other classes and disciplines altogether, they cannot be won to the same extent. All
books and all disciplines are not equal, and all do not offer the same educative possibilities. One

could learn to analyze texts and formulate arguments from a reading of Harry Potter or even
“The Vagina Monologues,” but not as thoroughly or as well as from a study of The Aeneid or
Don Quixote because the former are simply less profound works. A student could spend an
eighty-minute seminar poring over ten lines of Homer and return to the same passage the next
day and do it again. Performing this depth of analysis, submerging oneself this deeply into a
text, offers a sublime educational experience that Harry Potter, or a class in statistics or biology,
simply cannot. These books are called great because they are great, because they have
confounded and delighted humanity’s greatest minds for centuries. Studying them broadens the
mind to such an extent and provides it with such powerful analytical skills that even students
who in the course of their careers will never open another work of literature again should study
This brings us, at last, to Princeton’s general education requirements. Let us begin by
giving credit where credit is due. The university has committed itself in many ways to the liberal
arts curriculum, by requiring that all students take classes in a broad range of disciplines, from
science and math to history and literature. School administrators often speak of the great
benefits derived from this cross-disciplinary system—see President Shirley Tilghman’s remarks
at last year’s graduation ceremony for example. And the university hasn’t sold out to a
communications or marketing preparation school—both hallmarks the “practical” pre-
professional curriculum. But at the same time, the University does not prescribe for its students
a standard core curriculum focused on the great works of the Western tradition. In fact, students
can, without much effort, go their entire time at Princeton without ever reading a single work
from the Western core. Here’s how:

EC: Human Evolution
EM: Israeli Media; Race and Medicine
HA: LGBT American History; Race and the History of Racism in Brazil
LA: Sex on Stage; Types of Ideology and Literary Form – Pornography, Gender and the Rise of
STL: Natural Disasters
STN: Topics in Modern Astronomy
SA: Gendered Identities in Contemporary Korea; Production and Consumption of Culture

This plan of study does not even consider, of course, freshman seminars, some of which are
valuable offerings and others of which provide clever frosh a chance to escape with a painlessly
and fruitlessly earned requirement.
Consider this course selection in light of Princeton’s unofficial motto: “In the nation’s
service and the service of all nations.” This university expects its graduates to be model citizens
first to their country and then to the world. By this the university does not, or at least should not,
mean simply that it expects students to spend a few years in Teach for America before heading

into finance. Good citizenship arises from good education, from proper development of the
human mind through the study of the Western core, not from throwing a few years at community
service before heading down one’s own career path, or showing up to vote once every four years,
or attending a town hall meeting once a decade, as often seems to be preached. Princeton should
realize that its unofficial motto is as much a commandment to itself as to its graduates— and
thus should acknowledge that in letting its students skate by without even a passing nod to the
real and necessary formation brought by the liberal studies, it is letting its students down. If the
school really cares about developing those who pass through its halls as human beings, rather
than simply programming them for a lucrative or a prestigious career, it will shore up the glaring
cracks in its system of general requirements.
I realize that this way of thinking has been out of style for decades. I understand that
most educators see my views as whimsical, misconceived, and fossilized notions dug up from an
earlier and less enlightened age. To those who disagree with me, however, I would first point
out that Columbia has a core curriculum which forces its students to confront such works as The
Metamorphoses and Faust, and if Columbia’s doing it, it can’t be that reactionary. And second I
would say that a great education does not consist simply of “practical” courses. It does not even
consist simply of a rather vague commitment to the liberal arts as a whole. A great liberal arts
education, which is the greatest education, must be founded on the Western core. Students must
study these works, the greatest gems on the crown of human wisdom and ingenuity, if they
seriously wish to learn, to think, and to communicate as effectively as possible and to understand
the cultural and political climate of our day.

By John Paul Spence ’16

Second, science is easily manipulated by rivalrous ideological factions when brought into policy disputes, losing the very objectivity that makes it a powerful and useful policy tool. Too often, the words and findings of a single scientist are taken as truth. News anchors regularly invite a scientist to comment on a political issue, and this single scientist is taken to be an oracle of truth representing his or her entire field. For example, MSNBC’s resident climate change specialist is Dr. Reese Halter, an outspoken believer in human-caused climate change and a proponent of active government policies in climate control. Fox News, on the other hand, invites scientists like Dr. Timothy Bowls and Dr. Roy Spencer, both of whom question whether human activity is responsible for temperature fluctuations. Viewers watching these networks would reach very difficult conclusions about climate change, and both would feel confident in the scientific basis for their beliefs. Yet, there is nothing scientific about hearing one set of facts and extrapolating truisms. The objective guise of science is merely used to cover a premeditated ideological bias.There are many examples from history of this phenomenon. Scientific racism used pseudo-scientific studies to ‘establish’ the racial inferiority of persecuted groups, including blacks in America and Jews in Europe. Some scientists claimed to have proved that blacks and whites constituted entirely different species, using metrics like skull size. As recently as 1985, homosexuality was considered a personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder. These statements were once justified with the supposed backing of science, reminding us that we must engender a healthy wariness in immediately accepting its findings. Convenient “empirical” evidence can often be found to support a publically popular conclusion. It is naïve to dismiss those examples as relics from a bygone era and to assume that scientists today are immune from the pressure of public opinion.

Third, even if we agree on the facts of a policy, the value question of whether the policy is good or bad remains. For example, many pro-choice and pro-life advocates acknowledge the same embryological biology, but reach their positions through differing prioritization of values. A recent article in Salon titled “So What If Abortion Ends A Life” acknowledged that the debate isn’t about whether or not life begins at conception, but the relative prioritization of embryological life (to survive) and a mother’s liberty (to not have a child). In this case, a policy disagreement remains even after a scientific consensus is reached. Similarly, the debate about embryonic stem cell research is often misconstrued as a battle between politicians who are pro-science and anti-science. Both sides agree on the scientific possibilities that could arise from embryonic stem cell research, but they disagree about whether this practice is ethical. This ethical question cannot be answered by science. And yet scientists specializing in stem cell biology are often called upon to offer definitive policy recommendations, and we fail to recognize that we are accepting not just their scientific expertise, but also their moral opinions.

The politicization of science is harmful to both science and politics. Science is about the discovery of truth. Politicians look to science to support their preconceived notions, and scientists in turn look to the government for research funding. This cycle, with its distorted incentives, disrupts the scientific process. If we subscribe to a scientific approach to all policy decisions, then we presuppose that moral questions can be best resolved through the scientific method of hypothesis testing. A belief that the scientific approach to politics is optimal is not obvious and, moreover, cannot be proved by the science it touts so highly. This faith in the abilities of science is nothing less than another ideology. Replacing alternative moral paradigms with science is not an objective stance. A claim that science is better than alternative moral paradigms is merely another absolute ethical claim.

When science becomes another moral paradigm, it is especially pernicious because we deny its existence and yet find ourselves ruled by it. The claims of scientific racism were particularly difficult to unseat because there were supposedly discovered by the neutral, inductive methods of science. Similarly today, dissenters on issues like climate change are silenced, much to the detriment of science which thrives on competition. The hasty labeling of opponents of stem-cell research as anti-science excuses us from grappling with the moral arguments against the killing of embryos. This is especially hypocritical because these arguments, which hinge on the fact that an embryo, from its conception, is capable of undergoing self-directed specialization, are motivated by scientific reasoning. We must remember that good policy is founded on good values. The great political debates of our time are not scientific—they are debates about the relative prioritization of values: liberty versus safety, freedom versus security, opportunity versus equality, and others. We cannot let science distract us from discussing values and debating ethics. A proper understanding of politics, science, and the different questions they are meant to answer will allow science to better bolster, but not define, our political decisions.

By Margaret Fortney ‘ 13

Yet the most surprising thing to our future grad student may be the complete absence
of any narratives by chaste students. There have been thirteen articles, but none of them are
about struggling with living chastely or having a non-sexual romantic relationship (at least
35% of men and 47% of women at Princeton are virgins according one ‘Prince’ survey http:/
/www.dailyprincetonian.com/slideshows/213/expand/). Religion has been completely absent
from both the “Love and Lust” articles and from the op-ed discussion they’ve fueled, which is
surprising considering how important religious belief can be towards motivating sexual behavior.
It seems that religious and chaste students (not necessarily coterminous groups) just haven’t felt
the need to write these articles, which brings me to the next question for that American Studies
grad student to ponder: Why did anyone write these articles?
When it comes down to motive, the only one that makes sense is moral. People took
risks, made mistakes, or found love, and now they want to help others because they wish that
something like “Love and Lust” had existed their freshman year. The first article comes right out
and says it:
“[T]here are plenty of wide-eyed freshmen who will make every rookie mistake that there
is to make. I want to talk to those freshmen. I want to tell them, if you like hooking up,
if you think it’s fun and exciting, then good for you. But if you wake up lonelier each
time, if the memories keep you up at night or if you ever wonder before, during or after
the experience, ‘What am I doing here?’ then I would like you to know that I have been
where you are. I now understand that it is okay to brush yourself off, admit that you made
a few mistakes and then move on in a different direction.”
Another writer takes a similarly moral tack: “Maybe that’s the real tragedy of the hookup culture,
for both guys and girls: the creation of a third category of relationship between ‘boyfriend’
and ‘friend,’ a vaguely defined and haphazardly executed territory of genuine attraction without
genuine attachment.” Another concludes her article with good common sense: “Sex — whether
it’s with your boyfriend, drunk at a frat party or with a stranger in a car — doesn’t have to be
considered rape to warrant our caution, care and attention.” And another does similarly: “Of all
the things I learned in my freshman year, dating someone as wealthy as he was left me with at
least one life lesson: The next time I go on a date with someone, I’m paying.” This seems to be
the point of these articles: stories with moral lessons for freshmen by their elders. It’s really a
touching enterprise.
Ultimately, the articles are about making sense of a sexual culture through lived
experience. A series of op-ed debates sprung from the series after Dave Kurz penned his piece
“Why coffee dates trump DFMOs,” which came across as something between another “Love and
Lust” story and an editorial. The only difference was that it appeared in the opinion page and
announced its moral so frankly in the title. Instead of being read in the same vein as the “Love
and lust” stories, his sparked a months-long op-ed controversy. Seven articles came out arguing that Kurz portrayed women too passively, left homosexuals out of the picture, and generalized too much from his own experience. The controversy expanded to the hookup culture in general with a defense of hookups but a criticism of the hookup culture, a criticism of both hookups and the culture (which, full disclosure, I wrote with Audrey Pollnow), a criticism of op-ed theorizing about hookups, and a criticism of the criticism of op-ed theorizing. All of this is beside the point (except my article of course). The real interest is in the “Love and Lust” stories; these are what the future grad student will read because nobody wants to live in a world of theory, and nobodywants sex to be a part of an ideology.

What makes these stories rise above moralizing is that they convey a yearning for
meaning. And this is the most poignant part of the series: the authors want to know what they’ve
learned just as much as they want to teach others. They want whatever sorrow or joy they just
went through to make sense, to have a beginning, middle, and end. And if they can’t fit the
past year or two of their life into a plot, then at least they try to fit it into a coherent vignette
(like “Harboring half-confessions”). None of these stories are theory. Rather, they give empty
concepts substance through the material of real life. For example, Jessica Ma, in writing about
her acceptance of a relationship, gives substance to the value of commitment. This faithfulness
to experience is exactly what will draw that future grad student to these stories of personal
revelation.
Yet, what’s so tragic about the series is that until we find a culture that works, people
will keep having to fumble in the dark, seeing what works and what hurts. Ultimately, the morals
we draw from “Love and Lust” articles are just heads-ups about what works and what hurts. I
dismissed theory earlier, but at its best, theory is also a guideline that tells us what generally to
avoid and what generally to pursue. We all need theory now so that we can reshape our culture
until we have a system of beliefs, practices, and norms which allow us to flourish without
theorizing, to care without justification, and to find love without philosophy.

By Ben Koons ’15

One mark of the Tory in recent years has been the magazine’s role as a space for conservative voices in the Princeton community. The magazine has never been committed to any one particular political cause. Instead, we have tried to provide space for students with moderate-to-conservative leanings to think and sharpen one another in thought. This commitment to providing a broad conservative space has manifested itself in the wide range of topics we’ve touched on in the last year. For example, we’ve analyzed the University’s treatment of small departments, investigated the problems with its new Greek Life policies, considered the future of conservatism after 2012, and defended the possibility of conservative women against the dominant liberal narrative of a so-called conservative “war on women.”As Publisher, I am extremely proud of much of the work that the Tory has been able to do in the past year. The above-listed articles are a testament to a great variety in content while maintaining consistency in quality. My hope for the Tory is that this breadth will be preserved going forward. In particular, I am wary of the magazine being simply a voice for social conservatives or fiscal conservatives. In light of the 2008 and 2012 elections, many have been asking whether social conservatism and fiscal conservatism ought to be married within the same political movement. In light of the apparent difficulty of Republicans to nominate a candidate who seemed fiscally responsible and socially conservative, and because of the growing demographic of those who identify as fiscally conservative but apathetic when it comes to “the social issues” some ask whether social and fiscal conservatism are simply aligned by convenience.This question seems to me ill-posed on a number of levels. Policy recommendations are the result of political philosophies interacting with the real world, which suggests that what one really ought to ask is whether there is a political and moral philosophical system of convictions that causes one to fight for limited national government and individual (and state) freedoms on the one hand, and traditional social institutions and mores on the other. The next question one ought to be asking is whether this system offers explanatory or practical benefits that its alternatives don’t, and if so, whether we ought to adopt it.

Professor Robert George seems to think such a system is plausible; more than that, he advocates for it. In a column published in First Things ten days after the November elections (“No Mere Marriage of Convenience”) he proposes a three-pillared understanding of a healthy society. The first pillar is the respect for all human persons, the second is the institution of the family, and the third is a fair system of law and government. Crucially he sees each of these as fundamentally necessary for the others to flourish. For example, respect for all persons is fundamental to just governing and without healthy familial institutions basic cultural goods such as respect for other people and civility flounder. In addition, societies where government is unjust cannot have sustainably healthy businesses and economies, thus causing the detriment of all persons who participate in the economy (virtually all persons). Professor George’s column provides a wise analysis of the contemporary spat between the fiscally and socially conservative wings of the conservative movement at large, and whether or not one finds his argument wholly convincing, I’m inclined to think that there is truth to be found in what he says. Importantly conservatives at Princeton and at large cannot simply bend to the narrative that fiscal and social conservatism are incompatible. Though one may adhere to a philosophy that renders them so (and that is one’s prerogative), it certainly is not an open-and-shut problem. Instead, we must critically examine this narrative and ultimately decide for ourselves whether it is believable.

Yours in Final Valediction,

Toni Alimi ‘13

The election has ended, and President Obama’s administration will stay in the White House for four more years. Demographics have always played a key role in presidential elections, and as Obama’s and Romney’s presidential campaigns attempted to attract the majority of the electorate, it is interesting to speculate what would have happened if Romney had appealed to more minorities. While Sikh Americans do not make up a crucial percentage of the electorate, this group has attracted more attention in recent years due to a number of hate crimes against them for their supposed likeness to Muslims. This discussion of the American Sikh population as a voting group is significant as it sheds light on the importance of integrating minorities into society and signals for future candidates to target lesser-known voting blocs that together can be a sizeable force in future elections.

Sikhism is a religion that is not well known in the United States. While it is the fifth largest religion in the world, the majority of its 30 million followers reside in the Punjab province of India. Founded in the 16^th century as a monotheistic religion, Sikhism teaches its members to follow the teachings of their gurus, or holy teachers, who stress the importance of good deeds rather than rituals.

One recent event that put American Sikhs in national spotlight occurred on the morning of August 5, 2012. A gunman killed six people and wounded three others before the police shot him dead at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek. He opened fire during Sunday services upon entering the temple’s kitchen, where women were preparing the Sunday meal. This tragic attack was considered an act of domestic terrorism and has raised awareness for Sikhism in America—and the racial profiling they endure.

This mistake in confusing the Sikh community with the Muslim community demonstrates many American’s lack of awareness in regards to Sikhism. In addition to knowing little about the Sikh faith, most Americans are unaware of the discrimination that many Sikh Americans face. Sikhs are the victims of various hate crimes, profiled at airports, bullied in schools, and denied the ability to practice their faith in the workplace. The vast majority of Sikh Americans are even unable to join the military unless they give up wearing their turbans. At the very least, their distinct religious customs have made it more difficult for Sikhs to integrate into American society at large.

Fighting against discrimination is nothing new for followers of Sikhism. In the 15^th century, the founder of Sikh tradition expressed a radical vision of unity, rejecting all social inequalities including caste hierarchies, gender discrimination, and religious persecution. Sikhs from the beginning have worn turbans as crowns that represent their commitment to be saint-soldiers that stand up to fight injustices. “Turbans are [meant to be] identifiers for members of the community and the outside world. It sets Sikhs apart and makes them distinct, reminding Sikhs that when they act, they represent the entire community,” said Keshav Singh ’13, President of Sikhs of Princeton, in an interview with the Tory. Unfortunately, the turban has tragically become a symbol unjustly marking many Sikhs as targets of hate, violence, and discrimination, especially after the Iran hostage crisis, the Oklahoma City bombing, and finally 9/11.

Sikhs have faced persecution since the time of the religion’s founding. In the time of the Mughal rule of India in the 16^th century, Sikhs were persecuted for their casteless principles, and prominent Sikh Gurus were killed by Mughals for opposing Mughal persecution of other minority religious communities. However, this persecution has only added to their strong belief in equality for all: a belief that was extremely radical during the time of its founding. In fact, Sikhism was one of the first religions to give women equal rights, and some women were even allowed to vote and join the battalions in the 15^th century.

The persecution that Sikhs have faced and the discrimination that they are facing now only fuel their passionate commitment to equality for all, especially for minority groups. It has fundamentally altered the way Sikhs view minorities, also leading to a perceptible shift in their political posture. Sikhs want minorities to be actively integrated into society, and for this to occur, society must exert a conscious effort to facilitate inclusion. However, because the majority is less inclined to naturally act in such a manner, government action is almost always necessary. Such conclusions directly affect the political views and voting behavior of American Sikhs.

According to Singh, American Sikhs span the political spectrum; there is no real political commonality among American Sikhs. “There is an openness to interpretation in Sikhism,” Singh stated. “Our Sikh organization on campus is politically neutral, though our individual members may have strong political beliefs.” Just as anyone else’s political beliefs can be shaped by their surroundings and circumstances, so are the political beliefs of American Sikhs, according to Singh.

From the emphasis on equality arises a natural commitment to minority rights. “Sikhism requires a commitment to minority rights and women’s rights,” states Singh, “and in my opinion, that also includes the commitment to gay rights.” However, as he was quick to point out, many Sikhs come from a more traditional environment, so what constitutes a “minority” is open to interpretation and personal beliefs. The commonality among all Sikhs is the commitment to justice and equality; how it plays out in a Sikh’s actions and beliefs depends on his or her own interpretation.

While there are no studies specifically targeting American Sikhs and their voting patterns, more general data on Indian American voting habits seem to partially contradict Singh’s claims of political pluralism. The Pew Forum’s recent study, “Rise of Asian Americans,” includes information about the perceptions of subgroups within the Asian American community, including Indian Americans. Sixty-five percent of Indian Americans, who form the largest portion of the Sikh community, are Democrats or lean Democrat. While this study may seem to be irrelevant to the voting habits of American Sikhs, Rupinder Mohan Singh, a writer for the American Turban, asserts that this is enough evidence to hint at the American Sikhs’ left-leaning voting behavior.

Because of their commitment to minority rights, it is not surprising that American Sikhs may tend to vote Democrat due to the generally hostile feeling towards multiculturalism, minorities, and homosexuality that some associate with the GOP. Another reason why Sikhs may lean left is because charity, arising from Sikhism’s strong commitment to equality, is also of great importance. One political debate that has been of great interest to American Sikhs, according to Valerie Kaur, producer of Divided We Fall, the first feature film on hate crimes against Sikh Americans after 9/11, is the extent to which the government should become involved with helping the poor. Although there is still an element of openness to interpretation in terms of the government’s role in citizens’ lives, Sikhs come from a background of a redistributionist government. Because Democrats promote a bigger government role in welfare, healthcare, and other areas of need, this appeals to American Sikhs. Lastly, with the recent shooting in Wisconsin, this tragic event highlighted the topic of gun control in the American Sikh perspective, and this may be yet another reason why Sikhs lean towards the left and its stringent gun control laws.

Though Sikhism is a religion that has only recently been on the American public’s radar, Sikhism is not all that incompatible with American society. It lends itself to a host of views, and American Sikhs have taken an active role in American political life. Ricky Gill ‘09, a Princeton alumnus and Republican candidate who sought to represent California’s 9^th District this past election, grew up immersed in Sikh traditions, though he preferred to call himself “a nontraditional candidate” and emphasize his education in Catholic schools. Rupinder Mohan Singh saw this as disappointing, interpreting this political move as further proof of the negative reputation of Sikh Americans. He argued that while “it is considered groundbreaking for a Sikh American to run for office, it will only be truly groundbreaking when one runs on the strength of his background rather than in spite of it.” At the same time, for Gill to downplay his Sikh background may not have been an act of disregarding his differences. Many candidates, such as former GOP candidate Mitt Romney, prefer to avoid the topic of religion because it polarizes the electorate. Religion in and of itself is a divisive issue, so an unease with discussing it on the campaign trail certainly did not make Gill an outlier.

Although there is no direct evidence and information on their voting behavior yet, American Sikhs seem to be leaning left for a number of plausible reasons. One thing is certain, though. In order to capture their vote, there must be a strong emphasis on social justice and equality not just for the Sikhs—but for all. American Sikhs have faced injustice, the very thing that they are fighting against, and this has fueled their passion for minority groups. As minority groups grow to be more prominent and as they become a more significant part of the American voting population, candidates will have to face the reality of a no-longer-homogeneous nation to which to appeal.

I’m extremely idealistic on certain issues. Freedom of religion, for example, is sacrosanct: short of using drugs in ceremonies, religion should generally be left alone. Freedom of speech is another great example: there’s intrinsic value in being able to say what you want to say, and that is enough for me to warrant a general right to free speech.

Not so with the right to bear arms. On the right to bear arms, I’m almost completely a pragmatist. And yet, I still find myself (albeit often reluctantly) on the side against gun control.

The general case for guns

The main reason I, along with many fellow gun rights advocates, support the right to bear arms is that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens can and do save lives. Many opponents of gun rights argue that the highest goal is to keep the police well-trained and well-armed, and to keep civilians out of the fight. But both the empirical data, along with many of the police themselves, disagree. The Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA), which represents tens of thousands of police officers across the United States, noted, “Guns save lives. In the hands of law-abiding citizens, guns provide very substantial public safety benefits.” Later, it quantified this by adding, “the deterrent effect of U.S. home defensive gun ownership… reduces the total U.S. violent crime rate by about 9%. Numerous surveys show that firearms are used (usually without a shot needing to be fired) for self-defense at least 97,000 times a year, and probably several hundred thousands times a year.”

You heard about the Columbine High School massacre. You didn’t hear about the Pearl High School massacre. You heard about the Virginia Tech shooting. You didn’t hear about the Appalachian School of Law, Virginia shooting. You heard about the Aurora, Colorado killing. You didn’t hear about the New Life Church, Colorado killing. You heard about the Sandy Hook deaths. You didn’t hear about Clackmas Mall deaths, three days before, or Mayan Palace Theater deaths, three days after. Why? The would-be killers in the latter cases were all stopped by armed bystanders.

The reason you’ve never heard of any of these incidents is because non-events aren’t news. The murder of dozens will make CNN breaking news. But the prevention of murder will, often, never make it past the local NBC affiliate. For the media companies, it’s just not that exciting of a narrative. Additionally, these killings are often prevented when a civilian pulls out a gun and brandishes it menacingly in front of the perpetrator. As the LEAA notes, this means that many violent crimes are prevented without firing a single shot. These brave acts may save the lives of countless innocents without harming a single individual, but will never make The Today Show.

Of course, guns can also be used for evil. But as will be argued below, gun control is often ineffective. Given this, policymakers must ask the following question: is it preferable to tie the hands of law-abiding citizens and hope that criminals won’t get guns, or is it preferable to put more power in the hands of the citizens? In some cases, indeed, the first case is preferable. This is particularly true in the cases of nuclear weapons and fully automatic machine guns, where the weapons are both well-defined and limited in number. But on balance, when talking about gun control in general, the second option is more pragmatic.

Additionally, guns are used for many legitimate entertainment purposes. I don’t particularly care for hunting, but then again, my roommates don’t particularly care for baseball, which I love with a passion. It’s hard to see the value of something you don’t enjoy. But that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to a large minority of others. And the crucial lynchpin of freedom is the affordance of allowing everyone to pursue their own desires, as long as it doesn’t infringe on other pursuits of happiness.

Of course, some argue that guns are different: they are dangerous and thus should be banned. This argument is persuasive but insufficient: junk food is harmful to individuals and creates health care externalities, but we still allow individuals to consume junk food, because we think that the harm isn’t great enough to warrant a ban. Other instruments, like kitchen knives, can also be deadly, but again, under a cost-benefit analysis, aren’t harmful enough to warrant a ban. Therefore, in order to justify state intervention on gun ownership, advocates must not only show that guns are harmful, but also that they provide such a great harm as to outweigh any self-defense and recreational benefits.

The theoretical case for regulation

Unlike most gun advocates, I’m not against regulation in theory. That’s because unlike most gun advocates, I don’t believe that the 2nd Amendment precludes all regulation on the right to bear arms. This article couldn’t possibly delve into the legal interpretations of the Constitution, but on face, regulation of other fundamental rights seems to be permissible. For example, the right to free speech isn’t absolute: you can’t falsely shout “fire” in a theater. Even for the right to bear arms, we recognize certain limits: we don’t (and shouldn’t) allow civilians to own nuclear weapons. Generally, there are also very few legitimate uses for a machine gun, so most also support banning automatic weapons. This includes the government: these weapons are, for the most part, already illegal in the status quo.

But setting aside this theoretical regulation, the actual regulation proposed is often quite questionable. The questions presented below aren’t questions of liberal vs. conservative philosophy; they are questions of pure pragmatism and workability. The utilitarian calculus is where the most gun control regulation truly falls apart.

Policy proposals

Complete gun bans. Very few people advocate this position, and for good reason: there’s almost no empirical data supporting it. The most-quoted study is a 2004 National Academy of Sciences literature review (commissioned under President Clinton) that evaluated eighty gun-control measures. It concluded that not one of these regulations had been effective.

There are a variety of reasons that gun bans are ineffective. First is the aforementioned deterrence effect of keeping guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Additionally, the United States currently has much more guns than most nations. This makes comparisons to other nations implausible. John Howard, the prime minister of Australia, recently penned a New York Times op-ed headlined, “I Went After Guns. Obama Can, Too.” The difference, of course, is the number of guns: for better or worse, America has a much stronger gun culture than Australia. Under its program, the government received 700,000 guns from its citizens. Compared to the 300,000,000 guns in the United States, this number seems almost paltry.

Assault weapon bans. My position here is pretty simple. Like most gun controllers, I agree that most people don’t need to own an AK-47. Unlike most gun controllers, however, I don’t think you can craft a reasonable policy that bans AK-47s without either banning a lot of legitimate guns, like hunting rifles, or creating gigantic loopholes that would render the assault weapon ban nearly toothless to perpetrators of violence.

The main example that gun control advocates point to is the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban. However, the problem with this assault weapons ban is the problem with almost all types of assault weapons bans: it had massive loopholes. So why do these loopholes exist? The underlying issue is that there is no standard definition of an “assault weapon,” because “assault weapon” isn’t really a technical term. Fully automatic weapons (think machine guns) are, for the most part, already illegal. The “assault weapons” that most gun control advocates, like the authors of the 1994 ban, target are semiautomatic rifles like AK-47s.[1] However, banning all semiautomatic rifles would be impossible, because most guns are semiautomatic. Congress recognized this problem and instead defined “assault weapons” as all semiautomatic rifles with two of the following five criteria: folding/telescoping stock, pistol grip, bayonet mount, grenade launcher, and flash suppressor.

However, most of these features don’t affect a gun’s ability to mass murder. The exception, of course, is a grenade launcher, but mass killings with grenade launchers are not all that common (and regardless, a gun with a grenade launcher and without the other four features is not considered an assault weapon under the ban). But the other four features don’t really change anything. And simply creating stricter criteria isn’t an easy task. As the Stanford Law and Policy Review noted, “Prior to 1989, the term ‘assault weapon’ did not exist in the lexicon of firearms. It is a political term, developed by anti-gun publicists to expand the category of ‘assault rifles’ so as to allow an attack on as many additional firearms as possible on the basis of undefined ‘evil’ appearance.” Often, the only difference between an assault weapon and a hunting rifle is that one looks scarier than the other.

As a result, it’s extremely easy for gun manufacturers to get around whatever criteria policymakers put forth. For example, the assault weapons ban would have banned the Colt AR-15, used by James Holmes in the Aurora shooting. However, a nearly identical weapon, the Colt Match, would have been perfectly legal, and the changes were minor details like the lack of a bayonet mount. It’s somewhat doubtful that losing his bayonet mount would have made Holmes’s senseless rampage any less deadly. Similarly, Adam Lanza’s weapon, the Bushmaster M4 carbine, was legal in Connecticut despite a similar assault weapons ban, because it met the technical criteria.

Even if one could ban these scary assault weapons without banning hunting rifles, the effectiveness of a ban would remain questionable. Standard assault weapons aren’t more powerful than “legitimate” guns, like hunting rifles. In fact, because hunting rifles are legally required to use large ammunition, hunting rifles are often more powerful than so-called assault weapons. For example, Lanza’s Bushmaster uses .223 ammunition, which is smaller than what many deer-hunting rifles use.

Of course, this all assumes that such bans would actually keep assault weapons (whatever that might mean) out of the hands of criminals. This is an entirely different debate, and equally controversial. After all, Columbine occurred five years into the 1994 assault weapons ban. And as noted before, getting guns out of the hands of criminals, given the amount that are floating around the United States, is no easy task.

But even if assault weapons bans could differentiate between illegitimate and legitimate weapons, and even if these weapons were more powerful than legitimate weapons like hunting rifles, and even if the bans could get rid of all of these weapons, the impact on violent crime would still be called into question. The FBI’s Crime in the United States 2010 report found that 68.5% of murders involving firearms used handguns. Assault weapons, in contrast, were likely 1%-2%. After all, most intelligent criminals wouldn’t want to commit a crime with a big, obvious weapon: it would be much more effective to use a concealable weapon, like a handgun. As Handgun Control spokesman Philip McGuire admitted, assault weapons “play a small role in overall violent crime.”

Magazine limits. The magazine limit was another policy that many gun rights advocates initially agreed with. However, here too, we need to look at the likely impact that magazine limits would have. Because magazines exist, shooters can reload their weapons with ease and speed. Some argue that the victims could rush the shooter while he reloads, but this is usually unrealistic: since reloading only takes seconds, there’s usually not enough time to process that the shooter has stopped shooting, decide to rush the shooter, and actually rush the shooter before the shooter has finished reloading. More importantly, the victims are usually paralyzed into fear. Thus, shooters simply get around magazine limits by carrying a larger number of magazines. The evidence bears this out: the Virginia Tech Review Panel, for example, admitted that limiting magazine capacity to ten rounds “would have not made that much difference” in the 2007 shootings.

On the other hand, there are a few legitimate reasons for having high-capacity magazines, though admittedly in very rare situations. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, for example, shopkeepers would fire several rounds in the air to scare off the rioters. If there were a low magazine limit, this tactic would have been extremely ineffective: firing a half-dozen shots to get people’s attention would leave only a few bullets left, allowing the rioters to rush the shopkeeper with ease. Since the rioters were stirred up by anger, rather than paralyzed by fear, this scenario is not unlikely. Thus, shopkeepers would have had to choose between firing the warning shots and hoping no one was counting, or firing directly into the mob to prove that they meant business. With their high-capacity magazines, however, there was no such danger. Thus, high-capacity magazines allowed many shopkeepers to defend their property and their lives without taking a single life.

Admittedly, this is a very rare case. Most of the time, a high-capacity magazine isn’t necessary. But a policymaker needs to balance the potential costs and the benefits of a proposed policy against each other. Is it more likely that the above scenario occurs, or that a perpetrator attempts to commit a mass murder with only one ten round magazine, never intending to reload?

Mental health. Mental health is one area in which, generally speaking, most gun advocates agree there is something the government could do to reduce gun violence. Even the NRA doesn’t want mentally handicapped people getting guns. But the problem here, again, is that some of the proposed policies fall flat.

The most problematic proposal related to keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally handicapped is New York State’s proposal to have mental health care professionals alert officials if a patient “is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.” The government would then seize this patient’s weapons, and the patient would be added to a national database.

While this sounds beneficial on face, this completely violates doctor-patient confidentiality. Doctors already have to respond to threats of violence, but this law provides much vaguer guidelines. Under the new law, doctors may feel more pressure to disclose, even if they don’t actually feel that the patient is a threat. Besides the obvious ethical issues, there are also substantial pragmatic issues. As the executive director of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services noted, this law could lead to patients simply not sharing all their symptoms and thoughts with their psychiatrist. This loss of trust in the mental health care system could result in less health care to mentally handicapped patients, along with increased legal costs for their doctors.

Background checks. This is the one policy that most gun rights advocates and gun control advocates agree on. Should a dangerous ex-convict be allowed to own a gun? Probably not. What gun rights advocates do caution, however, is that this should not be considered a silver bullet. While licensed gun owners may only sell to individuals with clean backgrounds, there’s no effective way in the status quo to stop the buyers from reselling their guns to people with more unsavory backgrounds. Certainly, this is not reason enough to block more stringent background checks or more sharing of databases across state lines. However, when policymakers pass a policy, they often congratulate themselves and assume that their work on that issue is done. Increased background checks are a good idea, but not a panacea. They need to be coupled with other effective policies — for one, ensuring that law-abiding civilians have the ability to protect themselves against law-breaking civilians by owning guns.

How should conservatives address income inequality? As much as Mitt Romney and the Republicans attempted to dodge the issue in the recent election and paint the Democratic presentation of it as “class warfare,” the increase in income inequality in the past half-century is a disturbing trend that demands our attention. The fact is that the tremendous economic growth experienced by the US in the past 30 years has gone largely to the richest in society. Yes, the tide has risen, but the middle and working classes, as we know them, are crumbling, and increasingly, America has been stratified into the upper-middle class and the lower class. Class solidification has clear implications; its very definition connotes something undesirable and something that Americans should work to avoid. The presence of substantial income inequality destroys any sense of community. As the rich become richer and the poor more destitute, the civic culture declines as the downtrodden feel like their participation in democracy means little to nothing.

Explanations for its occurrence and prescriptions to solve it abound, but most come from the left of American politics. Liberals would have us believe that solving income inequality just requires a simple rejiggering of our finance laws and more wealth redistribution. They have pointed to the deregulation of the financial industry and cutbacks to social welfare programs as primary causes for this slide. This, however, seems a specious claim at best. Certainly, the increased laxity in financial regulation has exacerbated the gap, and taxes on the richest would decrease income inequality in the short term, but these policy prescriptions do not pinpoint the root cause of the nation’s slide. Income inequality has risen substantially since the late 1970s, yet financial deregulation came about in the late 1980s—and only in full force in 1999, with the repeal of much of the Glass-Steagall Act in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

As for the claim that welfare programs can end income inequality, the implementation of LBJ’s Great Society programs began in the 1960s, yet inequality began rising in the late 1970s. All in all, the main problem with these liberal explanations is that they simply do not match up with the timeline of income inequality. Roughly speaking, the “Great Compression,” or the era of low income inequality, occurred from the 1940s until the beginning of the 1980s, with the “Great Divergence,” or the era of increasing income inequality, occurring into the present day. Financial deregulation and cuts to social welfare occurred both before and after this shift in income trends, indicating that other forces were at work. While an increase in marginal tax rates and social welfare may temporarily massage the numbers on income inequality, they will only mask it in the long run. Ultimately something else is amiss in the malaise of modern America.

What are the fundamental causes of this slide? I believe a number of factors intersect to cause this radical transformation – from globalization to the decline in religiosity – but I want to focus on what may be the biggest of all: the collapse of marriage.

Popular consensus has accepted the belief that marriage has declined as an institution, yet the assumption is that it either has declined across socio-economic boundaries or primarily in the upper class. Yet, the decline of marriage is most evident among those of the working class and not the rich. In the recent book Coming Apart, Charles Murray (yes, that Murray of Bell Curve infamy) divides the top 20% and the bottom 30% of Americans, socio-economically speaking, into two fictional towns: Belmont (rich) and Fishtown (poor). Using this distinction, he observes that in Fishtown, the percentage of individuals aged 30-49 who are married has fallen from approximately 85% in 1970 to 50% in 2010, while this percentage has only declined slightly in Belmont. This trend might not be a problem if not for two other disturbing trends in Fishtown: the rise of divorce and the rise of one-parent homes. In the same time period and statistical sample, the percentage of Fishtown individuals who are divorced or separated from their former spouse has almost quadrupled, rising from 8% in 1970 to 35% in 2010. In tandem with this rise in divorce, the percentage of children living broken homes has rocketed from 5% in 1970 to 23% in 2010. Additionally, among all socio-economic classes, the percentage of children born outside of a marriage has risen from 5% in 1970 to 30% in 2010; this compared with no significant increase from 1915 to 1960. When one separates these mothers by education, the trend becomes even more striking. While illegitimate births have flatlined among mothers with at least a bachelor’s degree, the percentage of illegitimate births among women who have not finished high school has soared from 10% to 60%. All in all, the institution of marriage has fallen to its knees among the working class. Divorce, illegitimacy, and broken homes are all on the rise, while marriage and traditional family life are falling behind.

“So what?” some critics will say. The institution has served to oppress women and suppress individualism. The rise in divorce rates most likely reflects the necessary dissolving of unhealthy marriages. The liberalization of family morals makes the community happier and healthier, as they can more readily fulfill their desires. Murray’s study, though, strikes down even this assumption, showing that self-reported marital happiness in fictional Fishtown has also decreased, plummeting from 68% in 1970 to 52% in 2010. Somehow, despite the supposed liberating effect of divorce, marital happiness has actually declined.

In contrast to the rhetoric of the sexual revolution, marriage not only produces more well-adjusted children but also makes the spouses more productive members of their community. The unquestioned consensus within sociology is that households with both biological parents produce, on average, better outcomes for their children than those without. The reasons for this are apparent to most observers. The presence of two parents ensures that the children receive more attention and more discipline. Divorced households unfortunately often have a competitive parenting dynamic, where the ex-spouses compete to win their children’s favor through pampering and lax discipline, or they ignore the children more in order to move on with their life. Single-parent households fare even worse, as the one parent must act as both the breadwinner and the homebuilder. These are obviously broad generalizations, but the point stands: stable marriages provide a more suitable environment for children.

Beyond the effect on child development, marriages make their participants more vibrant members of their communities. Married men earn 10 to 20 percent more than single men, and this does not simply occur as a result of any trend in partner selection, because this premium comes into effect after one marries. The sociological community has recognized and verified this bump. By virtue of bearing responsibility for a wife and children, married men conduct their personal affairs more seriously and produce more in a society. Additionally, marriage increases the civic participation of the spouses. By becoming parents, the spouses get involved in school boards, Little Leagues, and others organizations that strengthen the bonds of civic unity. Remaining single increases an individual’s isolation and results in more and more people “bowling alone,” as Robert Putnam described America’s collapse in social capital.

Where does this fit into the story of income inequality? Contrary to popular perception, marriage has not collapsed in the upper class. The majority of the previous statistics mentioned applied exclusively to those in the bottom rung of society, while the “Belmont” sector has remained relatively stable. In any case, the decline in marriage has produced a less vibrant civic society from the bottom up. It has made the working class less capable of producing in the economy, and handling unforeseeable circumstances. Nostalgic as it may seem, American communities once provided for its members when someone lost their job or suffered from an illness. As these communities have lost their vitality, the impetus for state intervention has increased, leaving those in hard times at the mercy of the government. It has increased crime and has destabilized once strong communities. Increasingly, members of the working class live not as citizens of actual communities but as wards of a faceless state.

Naturally, critics will point to the collapse in high-paying industrial jobs as the reason for the decline of marriage and civic society, yet this cannot explain it all away. Taking the recent recession out of the picture, the American economy has not experienced a protracted downturn in the past 20 years – and income inequality was on the rise that whole time. Additionally, the absence of high-paying union jobs should not preclude men from entering the workplace altogether. Since the 1970s, participation in the labor market among working-class men has dropped, with approximately 12% of males with only a high school diploma out of the workforce in the mid 200s, compared to 4% in 1960.  One may try to explain this withdrawal from the market as a consequence of falling wages, but a decrease does not unambiguously lower the labor supply. An individual can still make above the poverty line by working about 50 hours a week at minimum wage. An unfavorable labor market, then, cannot explain the decline in working class industriousness. Moreover, generally speaking, the men who drop out of the workplace are not doing so to re-educate or retrain themselves. Perhaps the best explanation really is that marriage has collapsed and thus the working class has as well. Is this the fault of these individuals? No. Extenuating circumstances mean that the blame cannot rest solely on the members of the working class for this collapse, but the decline has occurred nonetheless. Thus, regardless of who bears the blame, we must solve the decline of marriage and community life in order to stem income inequality.

What can we do?

What is there to be done about marriage? – Unfortunately, not much. Aside from making divorce legally more difficult, government policy cannot do much to reverse marriage’s downward trend. It will require an individual rededication to the institution, a social movement beyond the powers of government. What can be done, however, is a drawing back of the welfare state. The state’s welfare initiatives have done the opposite of what they promised to by “enfeebling,” as Charles Murray puts it, our civic institutions. By assuming responsibility for a community’s welfare, the system has removed the incentive for civic institutions to function properly. When the state takes over the role of charity-giver, it not only deprives the word of its voluntary character, but it also eliminates the responsibility the community once had for caring for its destitute. When the state steps in to cover medical costs, it removes the impetus the community once had to pool its resources to care for the sick. Simply put, when the state steps in, it undermines the strength of a community. Some economists have proposed a guaranteed minimum income as a solution, believing that individuals can make better choices with money, than the government can. This cash grant would allow citizens to become citizens again and choose for themselves, instead of the government acting as their proxy. Individuals will have security but also an incentive to spend it efficiently and in ways most desirable to them.

Personally, I favor this proposition, although I have some reservations about its implementation. More importantly, like any good conservative, I doubt the efficacy of any government program, even a relatively hands-off one such as guaranteed income, at turning the tide in American society. Ultimately, a civic revival must happen. Our society must turn back to its values of hard work and honesty. It must turn back to the institution of marriage and all the benefits it brings. It must again do what it made it great and form infinite associations with each other. The increased isolation of our society has and will always harm the great American dream, by failing to restrain the excesses of self-interest. Conservatives must not ignore income inequality, but must present the alternative narrative of its cause. For too long, liberals have dominated the conservation, painting it as a result of hare-brained Republican policies. The time has come for conservatives to pull their fingers out of their ears and start engaging in the discussion of inequality. If we do not, then the further crippling of American community is all but inevitable.