Ross Douthat had an admirable column earlier this week arguing that, because we don’t really have strong evidence about the effectiveness of abstinence-only versus comprehensive sex-ed, we should just leave the issue to the states. Douthat says, accurately, that this battle is about “community values” more than public policy anyway. And, he concludes, values should be imposed, when they have to be imposed, at the most local level possible — no Berkeley values in Alabama, no Alabama values in Berkeley.
But was this ever really a debate about public policy? If it were shown that abstinence-only education actually reduced teen pregnancy, would Berkeley types change their minds, or would their belief in what Douthat calls the “naturalist” view of sex continue to guide them? I think the latter. My intuition is that people who like abstinence-only education like it because they really, really don’t want their kids having sex, period, and people who like comprehensive sex-ed like it because they think teen sexuality is acceptable, maybe even desirable. It seems to me that the public-policy debate was always a proxy.
Should moral values be imposed on the most local level possible? (Douthat says the issue should be “intensely local.”) I’m pretty sympathetic to that argument, but note that this isn’t really an argument for federalism, but for localism. There are a lot of variations between towns in the same state; Austin residents are probably going to feel differently about sex-ed than many of their fellow Texans. So, what Douthat’s argument logically leads to is a very fine patchwork of different sex-ed policies (or marriage policies, or abortion policies, or what have you).
That result might have the virtue that people will usually be ruled by laws they morally approve of. But it might also entail that people will self-segregate in communities that share their values, and thus contribute to the already-vast divide between social liberals and conservatives. It might contribute to the feeling, which I hear a lot from my liberal friends and family, that we don’t or shouldn’t really share a country with people who are so incredibly different from us. It’s harder to feel that way if you share a community with such people, and see that, in addition to favoring laws you disapprove of, they also make good Little League coaches and friendly neighbors.
In other words, federalism, taken to its extreme, might just threaten our national unity. I realize this is a hyperbolic conclusion for a little blog post about sex-ed, but I do generally think that this is the divide: Do you prefer proximity in law-making, or e pluribus unum in culture?