Stanley Kurtz wrote an interesting summary of the controversy surrounding Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s book, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially. The book was originally scheduled to be published by Harvard University Press, but at the very last moment Harvard dumped the book and it went on to be published by Doubleday.
What gives? The book passed vetting by Harvard’s normal review process but got killed by the press’ Board of Synics which claimed Waite and Gallagher hadn’t adequately backed up their claims with enough evidence.
I haven’t read The Case for Marriage, but according to Kurtz the evidentiary problems are the sorts that are endemic to any book in the social sciences in that it establishes a lot of interesting correlations that don’t necessarily establish causation. For example, statistical studies and polls demonstrate two conclusions about married people: they tend to have higher incomes and they report having better sex lives than single people.
This certainly debunks claims to the contrary by feminists that marriage harms income and/or isn’t very sexy, but does it prove that marriage causes better sex and higher incomes? Of course not — it could simply be that people with higher potential incomes who are better lovers are more likely to get married. But that sort of objection is inherent with any study of social trends.
What irks Kurtz, however, is that at the same time Harvard rejected The Case for Marriage for its supposed lack of evidence and too strong of tone, it has had no problem publishing four books by Catharine MacKinnon which make grotesque claims that MacKinnon never even tries to back up with evidence.
In fact MacKinnon pretty much concedes that there is no evidence for her claim that pornography causes violence against women and retreated in one of her books to the ridiculous position that “there is no evidence that pornography does not harm,” which is about a vacuous claim as anyone could hope to write (in fact, as Kurtz notes, MacKinnon actually argues that even controlled social experiments to find the effects of pornography are useless since most men are prone to rape and there is no way to get a control group).
Similarly, Kurtz notes that Harvard press’s Board of Synics was apparently offended by the pro-marriage sentiments of Waite and Gallagher, but had no problem publishing a book by MacKinnon in which she wrote that, “What in the liberal view looks like love and romance looks a lot like hatred and torture to the feminist” among other things.
In fact in the Harvard-published Only Words, MacKinnon actually agreed with the legal theory put forth by a serial rapist that he should be set free since he had no free will to choose to rape or not — pornography programmed him to rape and he had no choice in the matter. Given the heightened awareness at most college campuses about rape issues, it is stunning that Harvard Press found MacKinnon’s legalistic defense of rapists uncontroversial while Waite and Gallagher’s defense of monogamous marriage is simply too much for it to stomach.
Source:
What Harvard Finds Unfit to Print. Stanley Kurtz, The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2000.