Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine by Candice E. Jackson (World Ahead, 304 pp., $25.95). Since 1992, books about President Clinton have become a cottage industry in conservative circles; there is scarcely enough room on the shelf for another title about the philanderer. Despite this, World Ahead Publishing has released Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine by Candice E. Jackson. Billed as the stories that Bill Clinton left out of his autobiography, My Life, the book uncovers the trail of threats and intimidation that Clinton's inner circle leveled at the women who got in their way.
While President Clinton's marital indiscretions have been researched by other authors, Jackson offers the reader more than another litany of allegations. Most of the coverage of Clinton's scandals has dealt with their political ramifications. Jackson looks beyond the politics, however, to detail the pattern of threats and intimidation that all of these women faced. Furthermore, the fact that Jackson herself is a victim of sexual assault gives her additional insight into the pain and trauma that many of these women suffered.
Jackson does more than just relate stories. Throughout the book she describes how tenets of modern liberalism allowed activists on the left to remain tolerant of President Clinton's misogynous deeds throughout his presidency. Jackson also includes a final chapter about Hillary Clinton's role in her husband's scandals, especially relevant considering her status as a likely presidential candidate in 2008. Throughout the book, Jackson describes herself as a libertarian feminist and admits that she is intrigued by the idea of electing a woman president.
Despite her curiosity, Jackson concludes the book by insisting Americans need to do better than Hillary Clinton. It is easy to see why. Hillary Clinton was a willing partner in her husband's attacks. She always defended her husband politically, and never gave her husband's accusers a shred of sympathy or credibility. Jackson thinks that Hillary Clinton's preference for her own political career over the well-being of other women makes her a poor choice for feminists, the Democratic party, and the American people. Wise words to consider with the 2008 primaries rapidly approaching.
--Michael J. New
Stand for Something: The Battle for America's Soul by John Kasich (Warner, 256 pp., $24.95). In an age of extreme partisanship, John Kasich is an anachronism. A onetime nine-term Republican congressman from Ohio, Kasich (currently the host of a FOX News show) was a politician who pointedly shunned special interests during his tenure in Congress. He was also a man willing to debate and compromise with his colleagues without sacrificing his principles.
Books by politicians and ex-politicians are a dime a dozen, and their messages can often seem monotonous. Stand for Something is different: Kasich presents his common-sense views on subjects such as government, business, and religion with striking candor. In one chapter, he describes his dedication to Reagan-style conservatism and chastises politicians who are more concerned with getting reelected than being public servants to their constituents. Kasich also profiles corporate executives who are using their clout to do good for society. While corporate chieftains like WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers and the late Ken Lay of Enron became household names for destroying their companies, Kasich makes the case for looking past these few bad seeds and examining the important work being done by corporate America.
--Timothy Olsen
The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, & Morals edited by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain (Spence, 316 pages, $29.95). "How does my marriage hurt yours?" It's a question regularly hurled on television by gay activists determined to convince us that no harm will come from allowing same-sex couples to marry.
They're wrong, but it's difficult to explain why in a soundbite. This collection of essays from a dozen of the world's foremost thinkers on marriage gives us the intellectual tools we need. It makes a powerful case for traditional unions, and explains why gay "marriage" will rip holes in the fraying fabric of American life.
The essayists--historians, ethicists, philosophers, psychiatrists, and political scientists--define traditional marriage as a naturally occurring, pre-political institution marked by fidelity and permanence, involving a one-flesh "communion of persons" of which only a mated pair are capable. Throughout history, notes political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain, societies have created many laws and customs that have influenced the institution of marriage and the family with the aim of securing a safe place to rear children and moralizing sexual behavior.
Not anymore. For some 50 years, an elite cabal of academics, lawyers, and judges have overruled the right of Western societies to define marriage, gradually reducing the idea of matrimony as a sacred, lifelong union rooted in duty to offspring to "a bureaucratic stamp with which to endorse our temporary choices," as philosopher Roger Scruton puts it.
Court decisions legalizing contraception and abortion wounded matrimony by detaching sex, procreation, and marriage from one another, argues sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox. No-fault divorce (which greatly accelerated the divorce rate), along with nonmarital childbearing, were critical consequences of the weakening of marriage, Wilcox adds.
By the mid-1980s, the language of morality had been stripped from matrimonial law, and marriage, once considered a matter of public concern, had been reduced to an unenforceable private contract. "No-fault" divorce, which allowed one partner to unilaterally jettison the marriage, "endorsed the notion that an individual inherently possesses the freedom to pursue the purpose of life, which is personal self-fulfillment," and should not be prevented from doing so, notes legal scholar Katherine Shaw Spaht.
Thus the stage was set for the latest (but by no means final) assault on marriage: reinventing it for same-sex couples. The separation of the goods previously united in marriage--in particular, the severing of marriage from child-bearing--has led the fair-minded to ask why same-sex couples should be prevented from marrying. The authors argue that not only is "gay marriage" a biological impossibility, but also that its legalization will strike a devastating blow to an institution already near collapse.
As political scientist Hadley Arkes explains, gay marriage supporters "insist that marriage will not be available to ensembles of the polygamous, or even to alliances of widows or brothers and sisters" wanting to take advantage of tax benefits. And yet, Arkes notes, "the parade of scary possibilities becomes virtually impossible to constrain precisely because it is brought forth by the very principles that are put in place by the argument for same-sex marriage." Events in Holland, where a notary public recently approved a cohabitation contract between a man and two women, bear out this prediction. And once marriage loses its integrity as a concept, Arkes warns, it "will lose also its special standing as something to be esteemed and sought," especially when forced to compete with "Marriage Lite": Cohabitation contracts that are far easier to get into and out of, and make far fewer demands, than marital contracts. Fewer and fewer people will see any point in tying the knot, as Scandinavians have already demonstrated. When de facto same-sex marriage became law in Scandinavia in the 1980s and 1990s, the rate of heterosexual marriage plummeted. Scandinavian children, who watch uncommitted adults wander into and out of their homes, are paying a heavy emotional price.
If same-sex marriage is legalized in America, the authors warn, it will become almost impossible to regulate sexual behavior of any kind. For instance, if marriage is rooted in sexual gratification rather than procreative, heterosexual intercourse (as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has declared), then why should a child be prevented from marrying an adult if a judge determines the child won't be harmed? On what grounds would we prevent a father from marrying his sterile daughter, or a woman from marrying her favorite dolphin, as a British woman did on December 28, 2005, in Israel?
The supporters of gay marriage would have us conduct this conversation exclusively in the language of rights. But the contributors to The Meaning of Marriage are determined to get readers beyond such talk to an understanding of how much we stand to lose if we allow our elites to continue tinkering with the definition of marriage. They provide irrefutable proof that marriage cannot be supersized to appease the demands of those whose main concern is social approval for same-sex unions, plural marriages--or worse. Either we retain the traditional form of wedlock, or marriage--along with healthy family life--will go the way of typewriters and buggy whips.
--Anne Morse