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Ep. 1 - Conn Carroll - Sex and the Citizen
70 Plays4 months ago
PolicySphere Publisher Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry speaks to Conn Carroll, commentary editor of the Washington Examiner, about his new book, "Sex and the Citizen," in which he discusses the history of marriage from our hunter-gatherer days to now, and why it's all gone terribly wrong, and how we can fix it.
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Transcript
Introduction and Humor
00:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All right, everyone, uh, welcome to the sphere podcast. And the first thing I want to say is that this is our first ever episode that we're recording.
00:00:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So it's going to be awful.
00:00:16
Conn Carroll
ah
00:00:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh,
00:00:16
Conn Carroll
ah wait ah Way to sell it.
00:00:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah Yeah, no, all of the all of the problems are going to happen, we have to assume, and all of the problems are on me. You can see my very professional studio, which is also my home office. ah You can see all of the unprofessional things.
Introduction to Han Carroll and His Book
00:00:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah So I want to apologize in advance for ah the future disaster, and I want to thank you, Han, for being my guinea pig for this For this experience, I want to introduce you very briefly, but you're going to introduce yourself. ah You're currently at the Washington Examiner. You used to work on the Hill before, and you and I have known each other for a long time.
00:00:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And you've always been very smart and I've always found everything you have to say very interesting. And now you have a book ah which has a very good title.
Thesis: Decline of Marriage and Societal Issues
00:01:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah So why don't you introduce yourself and then we can talk about the book.
00:01:15
Conn Carroll
Absolutely, you're way too kind, honored to be here. Yeah, ah so my name is Khan Carroll. I'm the commentary editor for the Washington Examiner. um Before that, I was with Senator Mike Lee as communications director for seven years on on Capitol Hill there. And I do have a new book out that was born out of my time on Capitol Hill. and It's called Sex and the Citizen, How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy.
00:01:41
Conn Carroll
And I hope Pascal has some good questions for us today.
00:01:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, so i I started laughing with myself because you said ah my book came out of my experiences on Capitol Hill and the book has the title has the word sex in it.
00:02:00
Conn Carroll
Well, that's fair. That's fair.
00:02:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I always like it when conservatives have books with the word sex in it because you can you can tell it's going to be good because it's a topic we like to dance about. So what what's the argument of the book? What's the basic thesis of the book?
00:02:20
Conn Carroll
Well, the basic thesis of the book is that marriage is fundamental to us as as humans. um Even before civilization, marriage existed. And that it is the foundation of happiness, of thriving, of human cooperation.
Impact of Federal Policies on Marriage
00:02:37
Conn Carroll
And it has been throughout human history, um but that since um Pretty much the 1960s 1970s marriage has been falling apart in the United States, because of a kind of coordinated effort by a progressive liberal elite to undo and take apart the ah foundations of marriage and nuclear family in the United States, and that this has led to. um
00:03:06
Conn Carroll
deterioration of the the nuclear family and and marriage so that fewer than half of all households in the United States now feature a married couple. It used to be throughout the American history. As long as there's been a census, about 80 percent of households have had a married, featured a married couple. um Now it's below half. And then I detail through the book all the bad effects this has on wealth inequality, income inequality, polarization, crime,
00:03:32
Conn Carroll
um birth dearth, any problem you can think of today that afflicts the United States stems from the deterioration and the fall apart and the end of marriage. And then the last chapter of the book is what we can do about it. And basically, there's
Societal Interests in Regulating Sex
00:03:51
Conn Carroll
hope. There's a lot of things we can do about it because there's a lot of bad policies stemming from the federal government that we can change to, as the chapter is titled, make marriage great again.
00:04:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Make marriage great again. ah So as I understand it, there's like two interesting things about the book that I want to discuss, and I'm i'm sure there's plenty of others.
00:04:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
but there' is one
00:04:12
Conn Carroll
I'd like to say hoping wouldn't too.
00:04:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I said very. No, so the first thing is, well, the book isn't called Marriage and the Citizen. It's called Sex and the Citizen.
00:04:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And there's this idea which today seems ah crazy to most contemplate contemporary people and and ah particularly in the United States, I would say, ah but which was taken for granted for ah basically all of human history, which is that because and In large part because sex produces babies, but also because it's sort of psychologically – the word that came to mind is perilous, but I don't want to sound like a fussy anti-sex conservative, but it's sort of weighted with sort of psychological consequences.
00:04:25
Conn Carroll
Yes.
Historical Evolution of Marriage
00:05:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Society has an interest in regulating it.
00:05:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Um, and obviously today that's a very shocking idea. Uh, and not just, not just on the left, but also on the right, whether it's the sort of more, I mean, libertarian ish sort of lip small L liberal limited government conservative or the sort of new bar stool type, right. Um, so I wonder if you could talk about that idea.
00:05:39
Conn Carroll
Sure. So I think what a lot of people don't realize is that you know you have the the the The regulation of who has sex with whom predates civilization. you know it it is It comes from how we organized ourselves in in the small hunter-gatherer bands that spread to seven continents and conquered the world. In these small settings, um the foundational unit was a man and wife, a husband and and a wife unit.
00:06:12
Conn Carroll
um you When you encounter hunt hunter-gatherers across the world, there has never been an encounter of any group, any society where you had like a promiscuous horde, where you had just people sleeping with people. Everywhere you go, you have people pairing off. Now, people, um you know,
00:06:34
Conn Carroll
Think about, well, what about all of these polygamous societies across the country, across the world? I'm sorry. And that is very true. And in fact, there's a whole chapter in my book about the polygamous world order. What people don't understand is that polygamy came after ah the monogamous hunter-gatherer beginning. It wasn't until you had societies that were becoming sedentary and you had started having wealth inequality um that you had polygamous societies. And then not only did you have them, but you had them everywhere.
00:07:03
Conn Carroll
you look at any, um you know, large empire throughout history, it was a polygamous society that, by the way, also had slavery. This was just as the chapter of the title of the chapter of the book, and or chapel that title the title that chapter implies, this was worldwide. um You know, you you look at the Mongols, you look at ah Africa, you look at China, you look at the Vikings in Europe, everywhere you go, slavery and polygamy side by side. um And so it really wasn't until Christianity that you have a change back to monogamy. And so what Christianity does is through
00:07:45
Conn Carroll
by By trying to enforce these new monogamous norms, which of course rich powerful men push back against. So the church had to have the overall plan to do this.
00:07:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:07:54
Conn Carroll
um And there is a they developed what ah Joseph Heinrich, who is a ah professor at Harvard had called the the marriage and family program. Which includes no cousin marriages, which includes no um property rights for illegitimate children, which is focuses on consent for the married parties. And so what this does is by outline.
00:08:17
Conn Carroll
cousin marriages, and by making children outside of marriage illegitimate, it breaks down the power of these patriarchal clans and allows for ah other civil society to emerge, ah guilds, universities, um civic associations, et cetera, that take over these this patriarchal power structure. And this has been the foundation for democracy, capitalism, and everything that makes the West wonderful today.
00:08:46
Conn Carroll
um And unfortunately, our liberary friends our libertarian friends just forget all this. And they're they're very much you know kind of focused on a John Millian idea of you know culture can be just as oppressive to us as and as our individuals as government can. And that's just not true. So much of ah what we do and accomplish as humans together through cooperation depends on on cultural norms.
00:09:14
Conn Carroll
And without the cultural norms for monogamy and for marriage, you just have civil society that democracy depends with falling apart. And that's what we're seeing in America today.
00:09:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. So that was the second ah thing I wanted to talk about, which you sort of touched on, which is your
Christianity's Influence on Marriage Norms
00:09:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
book includes a kind of history of marriage and and shows how marriage evolved. And this is this is sort of back to the, ah you know,
00:09:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
uh, the, the discussions around same sex marriage, people are like, oh, marriage has constantly involved. And like part of the answer is yes. Like it took millennia to find a model that works. So let's not mess with it. Uh, but I wonder if you could go a little bit more into your history of marriage and what changed. I mean, you sort of touch on it Christianity, but, um,
00:10:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, and I can i can ah give my objections to ah to your history once you've laid it out.
00:10:21
Conn Carroll
Sure, sure. So I think I, you know, pretty much ah mostly laid it out so far. um But we can get into a little bit of, you know, a lot of the um people will know and say, oh, well, you know, Christianity didn't didn't create monogamy. You know, monogamy existed in in first Greece and then Rome.
00:10:39
Conn Carroll
And that's not entirely um not true. um Greeks and the Romans did have a type of monogamy, um but I call it unilateral monogamy, in that the Greeks and the Romans had a monogamy that was enforced on on the wife.
00:10:54
Conn Carroll
um but very much not so on the husband. So if you were a Greek citizen or a Roman citizen um and you were a man, you were not allowed to have sex with other men's wives, but when it came to concubines, mistresses, slaves, unfortunately young boys,
00:11:13
Conn Carroll
ah It was free game. ah you were you were Not only was it allowed, it was encouraged.
00:11:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:11:18
Conn Carroll
it was It would be somewhat surprising if you weren't having if you didn't have you know a number of ah mistresses on the side that you were you know having sex with. um And so it really wasn't until Christianity that you had a reciprocal expectation of monogamy.
00:11:36
Conn Carroll
And that's what really did make it different, is is that you have um the the The man is every much as expected to be faithful to the wife as the wife is to be faithful to the man. um and that And that was new. It it it was came out of the concept of you know the just the equal dignity of all of all humans. um And it was an idea that, for a number of reasons, spread throughout the the the Roman world. and and was able to reinsert itself as the dominant norm ah throughout um civilization.
00:12:13
Conn Carroll
So even today, I have the exact number in my book, but I think it's like either like 25 or 20% of the world is still living in polygamous
Historical Cruelty in Polygamous Societies
00:12:22
Conn Carroll
cultures. But the vast majority of us are now in monogamous cultures.
00:12:26
Conn Carroll
And most of it was was peaceful. you know Sometimes it wasn't. um you know The Spaniards landed in in Mexico and enforced their their values on the native population.
00:12:37
Conn Carroll
So that was we'll put that in the well put that in a less consensual column.
00:12:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
The far right, again.
00:12:42
Conn Carroll
um But, you know, after the end of World War I, you have Russia, Japan, China, India, just a slew of countries all voluntarily changing their laws and saying, you know what, the West has this right, politically dumb, we need to adopt monogamy. And it's been working out for a lot of, for a lot of nations.
00:13:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, I mean, so the my my sort of ah experience with this, I mean, it's not personal experience, but ah
00:13:11
Conn Carroll
You have personal experience with monogamy, I hope.
00:13:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, my my personal experiences with monogamy, ah but I was going to talk about polygamy. Like one of the things that you read ah in like the journals of European explorers in Africa in the 19th century, ah these societies were just extremely cruel just because of course you you have and sort of Sub-Saharan Africa sort of was the
00:13:20
Conn Carroll
Okay.
00:13:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah sort of paradigmatic example because it was still um very close to hunter-gatherer ah models and so you really had like the village and like the chief with like 40 wives and and which obviously leads to all these extra men who you need to then either kill or enslave or um and And it was just it was just deeply – you can sort of sense that you you're dealing with a society where like cruelty is just sort of part of the fabric of life.
00:14:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And in a way that is just very hard for us to even imagine, ah there's this – I'm going to get the reference wrong, but there's this –
00:14:22
Conn Carroll
yeah yeah you know
00:14:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah passage by an explorer where he arrived, English explorer I think in East Africa around Uganda or some ah Great Lakes region anyway, and he arrives to this village um and it's like utopia, like it's everything is beautiful and it's like this peaceful village and so on and so forth and he goes for a walk and he finds the pit where ah they throw all the human sacrifice victims.
00:14:47
Conn Carroll
Yeah, yeah.
00:15:03
Conn Carroll
Vietnam?
00:15:06
Conn Carroll
No, I mean, I mean, would you agree?
00:15:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's like, oh, its so the noble savages and so noble after all. Um, and, and so that,
00:15:16
Conn Carroll
I guess i guess the only the only comment I would add to that is, um you know, is's the same was true of Europeans. I mean, you know, I touched on this a little bit in my book, but Tom Holland in his book, Dominion, you know, just talks about just the the He calls it alien.
00:15:31
Conn Carroll
just There's an alien cruelty and savagery to the Roman Empire, to the day-to-day torture of people in order to maintain that order, that people, you know, when you watch the movie Gladiator, it just doesn't touch on it.
00:15:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:15:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:15:46
Conn Carroll
It it glosses over it. I mean, you know, you have the Gladiator, but you just just the the alienness of the cruelty that was going on during that time, i us moderns do not understand.
00:15:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, I mean the the ah Rome, the BBC show, Rome is like extremely good at it. And it turns out that the guy who made it is actually a conservative, super Trump guy, but it's an excellent show.
00:16:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And I, i if you haven't seen it.
00:16:15
Conn Carroll
I have one, I'll check it out.
00:16:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, you should. it's It's great. And it's very good at particularly this, like as somebody who sort of grew up in classical culture. And so I i knew this stuff because if you read the primary sources, you just just know. um But you don't see that in sort of popular notions, popular depictions of Rome. It's like it's like modern life with togas.
Rome's Societal Norms and Patriarchy
00:16:40
Conn Carroll
Right.
00:16:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um and And no, it's a much more cruel society, you know, men can ah divorce women with just like ah by signing a piece of paper. um And of course, women can't get divorces at all, right?
00:16:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
so
00:16:57
Conn Carroll
well no um they would they would need they would need permission from They would need permission from their pots or familiars.
00:16:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Well, yeah, it was somewhat.
00:17:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right. Yes, true.
00:17:04
Conn Carroll
So so if if you were if you were a Roman woman who wanted divorce um and your and your father was against it, you were staying married.
00:17:14
Conn Carroll
But if if you know for whatever reason dad was like, yeah, I don't like the way he's treating you, then that that marriage was done.
00:17:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:17:19
Conn Carroll
But you know whenever you whenever you think about what life was like in Rome, you really have to think very patriarchal.
00:17:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:17:25
Conn Carroll
And you have to be the the only real decision makers are the the male leaders of each family.
00:17:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Yeah. um But also. That's why I, and this is sort of academic debate. We don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but I do think that the Greek and sort of Roman switch to even partial monogamy ah was was hugely significant because you, you know.
00:17:54
Conn Carroll
And I i don't make that point in the book, you know, especially especially with Greece and because so on had a number of these reforms that kind of first instituted um monogamy saying you know look if you if you have um children outside of basically any children outside of the
00:18:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:18:12
Conn Carroll
ah The one marriage ah can't be citizens, right so they're they're not slaves but they can't be citizens, and that this really, um and that you know, like ah this isn't my idea i you know I cite the historian she's from USC in the books he said this movement, you know, kind of away from, you know,
00:18:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:18:30
Conn Carroll
powerful men being to have anything they want, really kind of solidified the idea of Greek identity and and Greek citizenship as an identity kind of apart from um you know patriarchal clans.
00:18:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:18:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, wow. That's fascinating.
00:18:43
Conn Carroll
um but yeah and And that's all in the book. So so you know I do want to make a distinction and delineation to show that, yes, Christianity was was a huge break. But you're you're right.
00:18:53
Conn Carroll
they're they the Greeks and the Romans did take some steps down the road to what we ended up with today. um I just think that, you know, greek Greece was a slave society, Rome was a slave society,
Slavery, Marriage and Women's Role in Christianity
00:19:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:19:05
Conn Carroll
and and that these are important points that we need to remember when we talk about, you know, the great Western tradition.
00:19:11
Conn Carroll
It's like, hold on buddy, there's there' some problems with that.
00:19:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, oh, absolutely. ah the ah And there' is there's an entire ah separate thing about the abolition of slavery in and Europe, ah largely by the church. There's there iss a wonderful book and movie to be made if we had good Hollywood studios about the ah the Frankish queen who abolished slavery in France in the sixth century, ah who was a former slave girl And this is a true story. ah She was a slave girl, and the king fell in love with her and and married her, and he died, and so she became the queen and like the ruler of the country. And so she…
00:20:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
She didn't do an emancipation proclamation, but she decreed – A, made the purchase of slaves illegal, and B, ah decreed that the children of slaves were free.
00:20:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So basically, current slaves remained slaves, but slavery was eliminated over a generation, and and it was.
00:20:18
Conn Carroll
Right, right.
00:20:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It was.
00:20:24
Conn Carroll
Yeah.
00:20:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and and but And just finishing this point, ah you know, sometimes you read, oh, the reason why slavery went away was because of economic progress and therefore, you know, it sort of became uneconomic.
00:20:25
Conn Carroll
and
00:20:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's like, it was the middle of the dark ages. Like literally it was the middle of, it was like the poorest period in the history of Europe. And that's that's when, ah that's That's when ah France de facto abolished slavery.
00:20:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Anyway, ah but that but that story, you know if it did if it didn't happen to make a conservative point, it would make such an incredible movie.
00:21:01
Conn Carroll
Yeah, I guess the point.
00:21:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like you know the But that movie will never be made.
00:21:11
Conn Carroll
No, i totally I totally agree. I think, you know, well, well maybe, you know, if if it has a female protagonist these days, you never know.
00:21:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:21:19
Conn Carroll
ah And I do think that is kind of one theme of the book is how an important role women played in the the spread of Christianity and the victory of of monogamy
00:21:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
00:21:31
Conn Carroll
over polygamy in that you know it it was very often um the the mothers who were Christian who often married um pagan husbands but then they raised their children to be Christians and that that is often how it how it spread and then also Christians because they didn't practice sex selective killing of children.
00:21:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:21:55
Conn Carroll
um They had a lot more children.
00:21:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:21:57
Conn Carroll
when you When you don't put all the girls out to die, you have a lot more children that survive into adulthood and a lot more women who survive into adulthood who then can spread the faith.
00:22:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
00:22:07
Conn Carroll
um So Constantine, obviously very important figure in the in the history of Christendom, um you know, he He didn't make Christianity the official religion of Rome as a lot of people think that that's not true, but he did he did legalize it.
00:22:21
Conn Carroll
And then very importantly, he allowed the church to become a legal entity in and of itself, which which as its own corporation that can own land, of course, is very important to the ongoing survival of the church.
00:22:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep. Yes.
00:22:35
Conn Carroll
um But ah his father was a pagan. His mother, however, was a Christian.
00:22:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Ah, I did not know that.
00:22:43
Conn Carroll
And so he was, her mother raised him not to be Christian, but definitely shared with the Christian faith. And so that's where he knew about Christianity from was from his mother. And when you see this over and over again, the birthplace of the Merovingian dynasty, Clotide, she was Christian.
00:23:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:23:03
Conn Carroll
She marries a pagan nobleman and he doesn't convert right away. But, um you know, a couple Christmases later, he wins a big battle and and he converts. And then you have the whole Maribyrnia Chinese.
00:23:15
Conn Carroll
So you keep seeing the common theme in some
00:23:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And the greatest nation in the history of the West was founded.
Cultural Evolution and Monogamy Philosophies
00:23:21
Conn Carroll
people's opinion.
00:23:21
Conn Carroll
ah But yeah, the the the theme you see over and over again is is is Christian women ah converting their husbands, raising their their their sons to be Christian.
00:23:32
Conn Carroll
And and that is how um Christianity spreads over time. it's It's not a light switch where you know, Jesus dies on the cross, and then all of a sudden, boom, the next day, everyone's monogamous. No, it it it took centuries to get powerful men to give up the privilege of having sex with many women. And it it took a long time for for mostly women to, you know, establish this new norm. But but thank God they did.
00:23:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um theres there's There are so many um there's so many different directions we could go. i guess so um you You mentioned ah Heinrich um and he's written these two books that you know a lot of people have read that you've read that I've read.
00:24:10
Conn Carroll
you
00:24:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:24:19
Conn Carroll
Weird and the secret of our success.
00:24:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, and they sort of, they you can read either one, but they sort of go together because like the second one is like the the second half of the story. um
00:24:32
Conn Carroll
I would do secret of our success first because A, it came first and B, it's a lot shorter.
00:24:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah But I was wondering, you know, a Can you give it like a short introduction for those who haven't read the book, but B, how does his argument sort of fit into your overall thesis?
00:24:54
Conn Carroll
Sure. I mean the secret of our success is about humanity, um and it it tells much of the same story I do I site and i satan have one big block quote of text from from Heinrich when Heinrich is talking about how ah cumulative learning.
00:25:10
Conn Carroll
And his point is that, you know, we really are, ah we we we have our own brains and everything else, but it really is the group brain that is able to figure out cultural advancements and is able to advance things.
00:25:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:25:22
Conn Carroll
And so his whole book is about, um you know, the history of humanity and us being able to evolve into these social learning machines that create kind of larger brains that can figure figure stuff out. um And so, you know, in that book, he he does talk about the the the marriage and family program of the church. um My only critique of Heinrich is that he really makes it seem like this marriage family program is an accident that the church kind of stumbled into and that it has nothing at all to do with the theology or underlying philosophy of of the church.
00:25:58
Conn Carroll
um and And I can theorize as as to why that is, but I don't find it convincing. And so, you know, I make a ah point in in my book to say, no, no, no, this, this is exactly where in, you know,
00:26:13
Conn Carroll
Corinthians, Paul lays out the whole reason behind monogamy, and everything else, and and that there is a a a theoretical, philosophical underpinning for monogamy in Christianity, and it makes sense, and it's true, and and and that's why I went on to to reconquer the world. Whereas where Heinrich, for all that he's explaining, makes it seem like an accident.
00:26:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. And, uh, yeah, no, I have the, I have, I have the same quibble and like, you can find quotes from people like Augustine, also a case of like a female mediated conversion. Um, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, where they speak about like why the church bans cousin marriage and they explain it's, it's just sort of reduced clannishness in the society and sort of, so they, they, they knew about it. They didn't do it by accident. Um,
00:27:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And okay, so now let's get let's jump ahead um ah let's jump ahead to America and ah the past 40, 50 years, like what went wrong and how did it all get wrong?
00:27:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And then after that, we can talk about how we need to establish a fascist theocracy to ah
00:27:30
Conn Carroll
Sure, sure. Well, you know, like everything bad in life, the the downfall of marriage starts in France.
00:27:39
Conn Carroll
my My main villain is Rousseau, and I already know you're...
00:27:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Russo is Swiss, damn it!
00:27:45
Conn Carroll
He was no, you're right. He was he was not French Catholic. He was born in Geneva and he was in fact Calvinist. So point point for you. However, ah Rousseau really is the first one who starts talking about ah society um as something that harms individual well-being and self-exploration. He has a noble savage which in his state of nature um is able to be free and be their true self and it's not until the creation of property and civil society that that is what oppresses man and and and makes him unhappy.
00:28:24
Conn Carroll
um And so then you have this kind of continued with Mill who we touched on a little bit earlier. You know, Mill's often his focus is on how the individual needs to be allowed to have, you know, all these experiments of living so they can better find ways to live and that the existing cultural norms are oppressing individuals and they should be allowed to to free themselves.
Cultural Relativism and Western Norms
00:28:45
Conn Carroll
um I then hop across the pond and I start looking into the kind of the early days of anthropology. ah You have Margaret Mead who writes about young women in Samoa and she says it's like this free sex paradise where teenage girls have sex with whoever they want.
00:29:06
Conn Carroll
And of course, it's all fates. Not true. Whole books have been written going back and forth about it, but even even her defenders admit that she mischaracterized it. That Samoa, like I said earlier, was was part of the polygamous world order. Your Christian missionaries come in.
00:29:26
Conn Carroll
you know, they start establishing, you know, monogamous mores, and that that is exactly what you had in Samoa, you had you did have you know somewhat more um extramarital sex among among among teenage women, but not, you know,
00:29:44
Conn Carroll
not nearly as much as they're having today, and only slightly more than Americans were having at the time. So it was it was just a very false picture which she painted. But she wrote that ticket all the way through. And you know she was part of a larger school of cultural relativism that was that was popular in the universe at the time and only became more popular. And the entire project of cultural relativism is to you know kind of tear down Western society um and the nuclear family. um And so the next villain along these lines is Alfred Kinsey at the Indiana University. um you know He's a biology professor studying wasps when Indiana University wants to have a
00:30:25
Conn Carroll
class about marriage. um And then so he volunteers to teach it and he starts interviewing his students. And then you have, I think it was the, I'm going to mess this up, is the forefront.
00:30:35
Conn Carroll
But then you have some like, you know, big money NGO come in and give him a bunch of money to study sexuality. And that's where he gets the money to do all his his interviews. and the Right, right.
00:30:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Ford Foundation.
00:30:48
Conn Carroll
um
00:30:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I don't know for a fact that it's the Ford Foundation, but it was probably the Ford Foundation.
00:30:50
Conn Carroll
doesn't work go ah Well, whoever it was, you know, then you have all these findings where it's like, you know, 20% of men in their cheat on their wives, you know, one in two minutes gay, all these findings that have since all been, you know, like Mead found to be untrue.
00:31:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:31:08
Conn Carroll
And then even worse with Kinsey, we find out that, you know, he was encouraging his um staff to cheat on their wives, have sex with each other, and was was even was even filming sex in his house, um all his staff.
Supreme Court Cases and Marriage Laws
00:31:22
Conn Carroll
So he had an agenda, he was a pervert, um but he he was hugely immensely influential.
00:31:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
You can't blame him on France in any way.
00:31:32
Conn Carroll
That's true, you got me there, you got me there. Indiana University, there's nothing French about that. um But yes, but he's citing model legal penal codes. He's cited by the Supreme Court. You know you start having, at first it's in dissents, but um you start having the Supreme Court say, you know hey, you know monogamy is just one of many cultural norms that are out there when it comes to sex.
00:31:59
Conn Carroll
Polygamy is very common around the world. It's just as valid as monogamy was. And you start seeing that in in the 40s and 50s, which is something you never would have seen um in the 1870s, 1890s, or from the founding of the country.
00:32:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:32:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:32:11
Conn Carroll
The culture relatively starts seeping in to the academia, and and you start seeing it in court opinions. And then from there, I go into, well, I stopped briefly with Betty Friedan. Oh, and back to France with Simone de Beauvie. But anyways, coming back to the the main crux of it, um you have ah three Supreme Court cases in the span of five years that really kind of fundamentally undermine family law in the United States.
00:32:38
Conn Carroll
So it starts with the next 1968 case is called King B. Smith. So this is a case out of Alabama where you have a ah woman who otherwise would have qualified for welfare challenging Alabama's man in the house rules. And um so this is regulations that were allowed by the original, the the aid to the family, aid to dependent children. It wasn't AFDC that again, it was ADC, aid to dependent children. And allowed states to, to you know, regulate for um deserving mothers. So, you know, if if um if a woman's husband died, of course, they would, they would we were eligible. But if a woman was um shacking up with a guy, um then that guy, should she should marry that guy, and he should be providing, so she she should she should not be eligible.
00:33:27
Conn Carroll
So, this case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and Alabama argues and says, you know, look, if you undo this man in the house rule, if you don't allow us to, you know, regulate who gets this and who doesn't, parents are going to be punished because if you get married, you're no longer qualified for aid to families with dependent children. But if you just cohabitate and have sex outside of marriage, then you still qualify. And if you, the Supreme Court, strike this down, you're going to have this wave of cohabitation and marriage is going to fall apart. And the Supreme Court said, we don't care.
00:34:05
Conn Carroll
ah marriage is irrelevant and um they ruled against the state of Alabama and you've had marriage penalties ever since. Five years later after that, um so so the King V. Smith was decided on ah on a statutory question of of how the statute was written. um and it was saying it Basically it said that because Alabama didn't offer a separate, rehabilitative program for moms, that their specific program was allowed. But that other states that were, you know,
00:34:38
Conn Carroll
good states like New Jersey still could have it. Then three years later, nineteen or five years later in 1973, there was another case comes along, this time challenging New Jersey's welfare man in the House rules. And the Supreme Court says, you know what we've thought about some more? And there's just 14th Amendment says you can't discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate accreditation. So that's all that's all thrown out. um And so in the next decade, you can see in the stats, just the absolute bottom falls out of marriage in the African-American family.
00:35:06
Conn Carroll
So up and up through the 50s, young African-American men and women were actually more likely to be married than young whites.
00:35:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:35:13
Conn Carroll
men and women. and then round about nine By the end of the 60s, it's just a little less, but by 1980, throughout the 70s, it's down to 20%, and it's it's never it's never recovered. um so That's the first case. um the The second case is Eisenstadt v. Baird. A lot of conservatives look at Griswold as the big baddie of family law, in that Griswold was the first to find a right to privacy. Which is true, but Griswold is in the same line of cases um that established marriage as the foundation of civil society. When you look at other cases like Meyer-Norsa, Nebraska,
00:35:54
Conn Carroll
All these cases that say, look, the government can't come in and tell parents what language to teach or or or you know send their they have to they can send their kids to to to Catholic school, all those things. Those cases all said the foundational unit was the married household. Griswold was within that because Griswold said married couples have a right to contraception, not individuals.
00:36:17
Conn Carroll
But then you have Eisenstadt B.
00:36:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and
00:36:19
Conn Carroll
Baird, which is pre-wrote. Eisenstadt B. Baird comes along and take and says, look, we totally disagree. All that flowery stuff that Griswold said about the family, that's all BS. It's all about individual rights.
00:36:31
Conn Carroll
Individuals have a right to contraception, not married couples. And of course, you've had the the sexual revolution and the decoupling of marriage and sex ever since. um And then the final case is Miller versus California. Here you have the Supreme Court has had a regime that allowed the federal and state governments to prosecute people for pornography. It's been successful. um You know, pornography is it exists, but it's it's not widespread. um But just as you're having
00:37:03
Conn Carroll
you know, deep throat and behind the green door, the Supreme Court comes along and rewrites this standard, very, very liberalizes it in Miller versus California. And then since then, pornography prosecutions have, you know, just dropped off a cliff and you have the 80s boom of VHSs, pornography is, you know, in every home. And then of course, with the advent of the the phone, now you have just literally endless hours of the most hardcore, disgusting pornography at everyone's fingertips 24 hours, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. um And of course, as a touch in the book later, um pornography has a number of bad effects on men in particular and on their ability to form monogamous relationships with women. So those those are the big three cases that, you know, after you have Mead and Kinsey, um you know,
00:37:59
Conn Carroll
spreading this this cultural relatism really takes hold in in the academy. and and And it just undoes the foundations of American family law. And we've been suffering ever since.
Cultural Figures' Influence on Marriage Views
00:38:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. um Man, there's there's so much I wrote down ah to say. It's interesting that you mentioned Mill. um There's ah somebody who you whose work you're probably familiar with, um ah Gertrude Himmelfarb.
00:38:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
himmo far but I'm sorry, ah wrote this – she wrote several articles, ah at least one, which was very funny about Mill. And basically, she describes how Mill, who's seen as this sort of forerunner of feminism, was this – Totally, basically he was his wife's toy and like she quotes at length from this these sort of abjectly submissive letters. and like she would like So he would send her drafts of his books and like she would change she would just change entire things and be like, yes, dear.
00:39:12
Conn Carroll
Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, since you brought up Mill again, one thing that I found interesting was, you know, Mill was alive around the time when the Mormons were in the United States. And I do spend a good chunk of a chapter on on the Mormons. and And people don't realize, you know, how many cases there were that went to the Supreme Court where the Mormons were trying to protect their right to polygamy.
00:39:36
Conn Carroll
um And Congress kept upping the ante. um But we yeah we can't we don't have to get into all those cases. But the the bottom line to link this back to Mill is that Mill basically said, you know I personally am against um polygamy, but that's something where the government shouldn't be involved.
00:39:51
Conn Carroll
The Mormons should be allowed to you know live how they want to live. um And it's just like, no.
00:39:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:39:57
Conn Carroll
know um i mean i People should go back and read.
00:40:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That one's on the Anglos. I'm sorry. like that
00:40:03
Conn Carroll
but
00:40:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
the
00:40:05
Conn Carroll
I mean, people should go back and read the um decision the Supreme Court decisions against the Mormons. there's There's three of them. And the language that the Supreme Court uses would just be so alien to us right now because it was very much along the lines of, this is a Christian nation. The foundation of this nation is the monogamous married family. And Congress has every right to stamp out any resistance to it. And you read it today and you're like, wow, what what happened to that Supreme Court?
00:40:34
Conn Carroll
Can we have those guys back again?
00:40:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:40:36
Conn Carroll
um And you know, maybe we do now. ah Hopefully we do. um We'll find out.
00:40:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, ah it's the I mean, it's the same thing about blasphemy. You read Supreme Court decisions um on blasphemy and they're like, yeah, of course you can't mock Christianity.
00:40:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and Like, are you crazy? Like, that's not what the First Amendment is for. ah ah The other thing about Semen, I mean, there's so much to say about Semen de Beauvoir because she was such a ah terrible, terrible person.
00:41:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:41:07
Conn Carroll
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, just, you know, I have a quick paragraph in the book where, you know, she was a lover of Sartre and they they very purposely chose not to get married so they could you know live their alternative light styles.
00:41:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:41:18
Conn Carroll
But, you know, there's a biographer that came out later that talks about how, you know, she was a professor in in Paris and and she would seduce her underage students so that Sartre could deflower them.
00:41:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:41:30
Conn Carroll
um And you she was basically a pimp.
00:41:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:41:32
Conn Carroll
She was, you know, Maxine Jaswell before, you know, we have, you know, for Epstein.
00:41:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
00:41:36
Conn Carroll
But ah yeah, she was just clearly a gross and demented person.
00:41:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah Yeah, and so she was fired from one of of her teaching jobs ah for for sleeping with her students, and and this was during the wars. Later, she claimed that ah she had been persecuted by Vichy because of her political views, which was totally false. I mean, um ah there's there's a there's a couple of interesting facts about Beauvoir. One is what you described, but actually,
00:42:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um because she kept a diary. Now we know that ah she was deeply in love with Sartre and that his sort of like constant womanizing that she supported in public actually like completely destroyed
Policy Changes and Economic Conditions Affecting Marriage
00:42:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
her inside.
00:42:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like she She could not stand the fact that the man he loved was
00:42:22
Conn Carroll
Well, if only there was like a cultural morning that could have made him commit to her.
00:42:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, and Eric Zemore, who's sort of famous as ah ah as a once ah political candidate, ah but ah wrote many books. ah He wrote a book which has a hilarious chapter on de Beauvoir sort of pointing out ah that in the second part of her life, ah she fell in love with like this dashing American professor, um and they sort of you know went away together, and all of a sudden, you know
00:43:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
She had dressed like Frumpy Lee. She started dressing pretty Lee. She started doing her hair up. She started wearing makeup and she and basically like the fact of finding like like a good man just sort of like feminine feminized her or de-feminist her.
00:43:21
Conn Carroll
Yeah, I mean, we all we all even, you know despite all our ideological primping, um we have deep down you know biological needs and that that come out that need to get fulfilled.
00:43:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:43:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:43:35
Conn Carroll
Even feminism.
00:43:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All right. So then the next point is, you know, now that we've sort of established this history, shown how it's sort of, everything has gone downhill.
00:43:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah What do we do about it and how many libs can we send to camps?
00:43:56
Conn Carroll
Well, unfortunately, I don't have anything about sending libs to camps. But no, the the thing we need to do is we need to, ah first of all, the federal government needs to stop punishing marriage. You have this welfare state, and you see this all the time with liberals, Democrats, when they talk about marriage and welfare. They say, oh, you know, there's no link between AFDC and paid welfare and and the decline of marriage.
00:44:24
Conn Carroll
And and the the amount of payments that women get through the welfare program has fallen. And that's true. And that's true. But what they then ignore is how many other programs have expanded and grown since then.
00:44:35
Conn Carroll
They don't mention Medicaid.
00:44:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:44:37
Conn Carroll
They don't mention food stamps. They don't mention sex and housing. They don't mention the earned and income tax credit. Basically, every pillar of the modern American social welfare state punishes marriage.
00:44:49
Conn Carroll
American spends, including the state and federal government, American spends over a trillion dollars a year punishing marriage. right As I point out in the book, you basically have yeah you basically have two tracks in the United States.
00:45:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's the headline.
00:45:04
Conn Carroll
for for for the For the working class, the federal government actively punishes marriage. For rich people, through Social Security and through the tax code, you reward marriage.
00:45:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:45:14
Conn Carroll
Well, guess what?
00:45:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh wow.
00:45:15
Conn Carroll
Great people are ah married just as late they were in the 1950s.
00:45:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:45:21
Conn Carroll
Nothing's changed. For poor people, the bottom is falling out of marriage, they can't get ahead, and it's terrible. so So number one, we need to get rid of all the marriages in or not, in I'm sorry, get rid of all the marriage penalties.
00:45:33
Conn Carroll
in the in the social welfare system, the social safety net. That's step one, and that that'd be huge, just just to get the state and federal governments to stop spending a trillion dollars a year punishing marriage.
00:45:43
Conn Carroll
That's step one. Step number two is we need to make men more marriageable. So, um you know, one of my favorite studies in the book is about lottery winnings.
00:45:54
Conn Carroll
And so basically when a man, lottery winnings,
00:45:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
The what? Okay.
00:45:58
Conn Carroll
So when when a man wins the lottery, um he's more likely to get married and start having kids. When you win the lottery, they are more likely to get divorced. And so the reason why this is, is because um men are sought after by women as as providers. So a man who is otherwise average attractive, average earning power, if he becomes, if he's magically a millionaire, women are gonna desire him a lot more.
00:46:26
Conn Carroll
Whereas men, they want a loving, beautiful woman, and they really don't care about how much she irks.
00:46:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:46:32
Conn Carroll
And so the reason why there's more divorce is the thinking is is that women may have chosen a man because he was a provider and not because of other reasons, like he's a good communicator, he's funny, he's attractive.
00:46:45
Conn Carroll
And it's for for those women who only married because of economic reasons, once she's rich, she's like, I want to find someone who meets my other needs. So that that's the thinking there.
00:46:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
00:46:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, making a note, do not let my wife buy lottery tickets.
00:46:54
Conn Carroll
the
00:46:55
Conn Carroll
and take
00:46:58
Conn Carroll
The takeaway from all this is that if you want to increase marriage, you have to make men more miserable. And that you know you have a lot of capitalist apologists who go around saying, and they're not wrong, that the average wage of um of American workers has gone up since the 1970s. True, true. However, that's largely because women have entered the workforce and are making a lot more than they used to.
00:47:26
Conn Carroll
Average wages for men without a high school diploma have fallen in the last 50 years. So yes, for everyone as a whole, it's gone up. But for men without a high school education, average wages have gone down. Guess where marriage is the weakest? Weakest. Right in that same group.
00:47:44
Conn Carroll
So anything that makes it harder for ah low-skilled, low-educated men to make a wage that a woman will find attractive, that is against, that harms marriage. So immigration, ah low-skilled immigration, which of course Joe Biden has flooded this country with, lowers wages, makes it harder for for for men to attract a wife. um Trade with China. there' There's entire studies that show how Midwest towns were decimated.
00:48:12
Conn Carroll
um by jobs going overseas, men no longer being able to make wages and start families.
00:48:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I totally agree, by the way. it's just it's just i I would love to watch like Donald Trump, this president get up on pulpits and say we need to we need to slap tariffs on Chinese imports to sort of help marriage culture in the United States.
00:48:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That would be amazing.
00:48:31
Conn Carroll
Well, he's indirectly there, right?
00:48:33
Conn Carroll
I mean, he's he's talking about, you know, making, you know, wages great again, making people so people can get jobs and they get a manufacturing.
00:48:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, no, it's totally true.
00:48:40
Conn Carroll
oh
00:48:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's it's it's just very funny to when when it's put that way, but I i completely agree.
00:48:46
Conn Carroll
Right, right. um so So there's there's ah you know basically anything you can do to increase um male wages, particularly for low school male wages, you're going to be helping marriage.
00:48:58
Conn Carroll
ah Then you also just have to make a lot of things cheaper. um So I talk about ah housing, of course.
00:49:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:49:05
Conn Carroll
um Kamala Harris has touched on this. But of course, the Democrats aren't going to make housing cheaper. Look at California. Look at every place the Democrats control.
00:49:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:49:11
Conn Carroll
ah Housing is super expensive. Why? Because they have a bunch of environmental regulations that make it impossible to build anything. um So if you get rid of what I pick on one law in particular, the National Environmental Planning Act, NEPA, if you reform that, get rid of that so that people can build stuff again, including houses, you'll have a lot more construction jobs for men, which will make them a lot more manageable.
00:49:34
Conn Carroll
And you have a lot more cheaper houses. There's there's tons of research research that shows that the more expensive housing is, the harder it is for young families to buy a home, the less often they get married, the less children they have.
00:49:45
Conn Carroll
So if you want more marriages, you want more children, you need to attack the housing problem.
00:49:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:49:49
Conn Carroll
And the best way to do that is is but There's also zoning interests, too. You want to you know get rid of um restrictive zoning. um But you know a lot of these democratic plans to do that are like, oh, the federal government should set a model code and enforce that on the reservation. It's like, no, no, no, don't. Let's not have the federal government make ah take a model code, because it'll have a bunch of environmental stuff and DEI stuff in it, and it'll suck. What HUD should do is just reward those localities that are building.
00:50:16
Conn Carroll
you know, if if Texas and Houston are, you know, building, you know, thousands of units a year, they should get all the hot money. And if California and San Jose aren't building anything, they should get nothing.
00:50:27
Conn Carroll
And I think that will make the incentive for locality
00:50:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Race
Vices, Drug Use and Marriageability of Young Men
00:50:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
to the top but for housing.
00:50:30
Conn Carroll
change really well.
00:50:31
Conn Carroll
Race to the top of for housing. exact Exactly. Exactly.
00:50:37
Conn Carroll
And yeah, so so that's that's the the the agenda.
00:50:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No camps.
00:50:46
Conn Carroll
No cams?
00:50:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No camps.
00:50:49
Conn Carroll
Oh, no camps for killers. Oh, I guess there are two other ones that I make it out of. And this does go into the marriageable ah side of it, which is, you know, you have all these libertarians, God bless their souls.
00:51:02
Conn Carroll
um But, you know, they they with support things like online gambling, right? ah You know, people should be allowed to do what they want.
00:51:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:51:09
Conn Carroll
um But, you know, you have these new studies that are just coming out now um that look at states that legalize online gambling first.
00:51:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, no, it's terrible.
00:51:18
Conn Carroll
Oh, it's terrible. And of course, again, who does it hurt the most?
00:51:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:51:23
Conn Carroll
Young, uneducated men. The exact same demographic that is being hit the hardest by everything else is being hit the hardest by online gambling.
00:51:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And minorities.
00:51:32
Conn Carroll
So I don't care about libertarian's wishes that we should be able to have gambling. We need to, at bare minimum, ban the advertising. Ban it online, ban it under the air. We can revisit banning the apps later, which we should.
00:51:45
Conn Carroll
But least let's at least start with banning the advertising. um And then, of course, i we touched on this earlier pornography, right? um You know, you have all these studies that show um men do use, young men do use pornography as, unfortunately, a substitute for real human intimacy. And and that's tragically wrong and and stunts there to growth and and and terrible. And even worse, you have this epidemic across college campuses of choking.
00:52:14
Conn Carroll
Men are choking women during sex, and it comes entirely from porn.
00:52:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:52:21
Conn Carroll
Because of the economics of the porn industry, they have this thing where you have these weird fetishes that the power users gravitate to the most, so that's what gets produced, so that's what people see.
00:52:33
Conn Carroll
And then people think that's normal, and men think that that's what women want, and they do not. But you have this this epidemic of of young men choking women during sex, and of course if you're a woman, you you should be scared of sex by that point.
00:52:46
Conn Carroll
um So i mean that's just two reasons why we need to we need to attack the pornography industry and just just make it harder for for for people to get to. um So that's that's the agenda. Get rid of marriage marriage penalties. Make men more marriageable by you know limiting immigration, by making stuff easier to build, by stopping um by bringing back vice laws, by stopping young men from making the bad decisions that that make them less attractive to women.
00:53:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah What about part?
00:53:19
Conn Carroll
um Yeah, no, I don't touch a lot on pot in the book, but I think that is right along those lines. um Pot ah has shown to be way more harmful than than people originally thought. um Regular users have, suffer from psychosis, depression, suicide. um it's It's terrible.
00:53:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, yeah, but, uh, I mean the, yeah, well, so does Trump, but
00:53:46
Conn Carroll
And Kamala wants to legalize it.
00:53:52
Conn Carroll
We can all be perfect.
00:53:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
that So when, I mean, when you talk to, ah and I've had conversations of that nature on both sides of the Atlantic, ah when, you know, you'll find, and probably maybe you've had those conversations as well, you you talk to a lot of small, medium sized business owners who are sort of conservative types, and they and they will tell you like, I don't like it, but I have to hire immigrants because X.
00:54:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And in the United States, oftentimes acts is like the natives can pass a drug test. And so I really think it's a huge part of um of the story there. If you want to make young men, especially sort of low, low skill young men, you know, employable, and that's a huge part of, and I don't know.
00:54:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
that This is going to air after the election, so it it doesn't matter that I said, but I can't believe nobody ah picked up on this. There's a passage in JD Vance's book that's specifically about this, like he talks about.
00:55:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
He talks about like getting a job at a factory or something when he was in high school. And like all of the white kids from his town were like you know getting high and therefore like showing up to work two hours late or like taking you know taking bathroom breaks that lasted for three hours.
00:55:24
Conn Carroll
Yeah, no, I mean, it's a huge move.
00:55:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:55:26
Conn Carroll
I think a lot of it goes back into the fact that these these men these young boys don't have fathers in the home to to say that you know this is this is wrong behavior.
Government's Role and Divorce Laws
00:55:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:55:35
Conn Carroll
But you know um we've we've let the libertarian side win for too long.
00:55:40
Conn Carroll
There are just way too many ways out there for young men to make bad choices that make them unmarriageable, and including pot, including you know Oxycontin, including online gambling, including pornography.
00:55:52
Conn Carroll
And um they need help saying no. yeah we We once understood for a long time that it was the job of the government to help them say no.
00:56:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It takes a village.
00:56:02
Conn Carroll
And it yeah, in this sense, it does. um And so we do. We need we need to um you know find ways to get rid of pot and and other drugs that are ah destroying young men's lives and and and and really destroying young women's lives too indirectly because when when young women can't find good men to marry, um that causes a problem.
00:56:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, we only have a few minutes left. um I haven't come up with it like a good like end of podcast gimmick yet, ah so I'm just going to ask you one last question.
00:56:42
Conn Carroll
but
00:56:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah The one thing you haven't talked about, which is a thing that comes up a lot in those types of discussions, and I'm just curious if ah there's a reason, is no fault divorce.
00:56:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like Usually that's like the thing that people point to as the before and after
00:56:57
Conn Carroll
Look, it's in the book. It's in the book. um Yeah. So I mean, um the short answer is yes, no fault divorce is bad for marriage. There there's plenty that show there are studies that show um again, the same demographic.
00:57:12
Conn Carroll
um particularly men with low earning power are less likely to get married in in states with that that first adopted no-fault divorce regimes. The thinking being that um they had they have more to lose and and would be harder to recover from a no-fault divorce than others. But yeah, the studies are there. No-fault divorce does um make dev divorce make marriage less of an overall ah win for men.
00:57:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay. um No, I was, I was, I was just wondering because usually it's like a big part of the story. um
00:57:49
Conn Carroll
No, I mean, I definitely think it's part of the story. I think, you know, ah because there are so many other parts of the marriage regime in different states that are that are bad, particularly in states like California, which is basically written by the California Lawyers Bar.
00:58:01
Conn Carroll
So the entire system is written for the interests of lawyers, not definitely not for fathers, ah but not even from mothers.
00:58:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:58:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:58:10
Conn Carroll
it's late It's it's written to maximize lawyer or lawyers revenue and it's it's terrible. And so and so I you know, no far of normal fault. No fault divorce definitely is an issue. It's definitely something that can be fixed.
00:58:20
Conn Carroll
But the but you could write a whole book on on on divorce regimes and and what actually is conducive to to family stability and what's not.
00:58:32
Conn Carroll
But yeah, I mention it.
00:58:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so my ah my my grandmother, my late grandmother who died recently um was a feminist pioneer. She was a lawyer ah and started practicing in the 50s and practiced for 40, 45, 50 years. um And most of her work was ah divorce. And ah so France passed no fault divorce in the mid 70s.
00:59:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And then you had several rounds of reforms to sort of make divorce easier, basically. um And what she would say, and this is on the basis of like having gone through that process hundreds of times over ah many, many decades,
00:59:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:59:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
divorce needs to be difficult because when you get divorced, Uh, you have a lot of pent up, um,
00:59:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you know, sort of resentment against the other spouse. And so you need a sort of long, difficult drag out fight, uh, as a kind of cathartic, um, experience. And if you don't, she, she would go on to say, if you don't, you take it out on the kids.
00:59:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
the if If you don't have like a big divorce fight, the custody fights and and those fights become the vehicle for, you know, getting back at your spouse. And so the the the kids get hurt in that sense. And i i that's always stuck with me because it's not, you know, it's not a particularly religious.
01:00:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah It's not a theological argument. It's sort of very practical, very concrete. It's not judgmental of people who who may get divorced for whatever reason. um But it's just striking that it never features in the conversation. like I mean, divorce law is not natural is not national in the US, but like in France, every five years, like I swear, every eight years, there's there's a new law that says, oh, you know,
01:00:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Getting divorce is too complicated. like At this point, it's it's harder it's hard to fire someone, for instance, than to get divorced. so
01:00:57
Conn Carroll
Yeah, I guess i you know kind of two thoughts on that. One, you know as I mentioned in the book, as long as you've had marriage, you have divorce. You go back to hunter-gatherer tribes, they had divorce. Of course, we talk about Roman law, had divorce, definitely. You you look at the the code of Hammurabi, divorce is laid out in there. So wherever you've had marriage, you've you've had divorce. But um there definitely has been you know different regimes about how easy it should be. And of course, Christianity moved much towards the direction of it being difficult. Not impossible. I mean, you still have annulments. You still have different ways to get out of it. But this has always, my second one, this has always been an ongoing discussion in the United States. And the founders compared the revolution to a divorce, that they were getting divorced from the United Kingdom.
01:01:48
Conn Carroll
So they're saying, yes, divorces should be allowed, as as we are divorced in the United Kingdom, but they should be rare and for you know very, very strong reasons.
Conclusion: Teddy Roosevelt and Book Promotion
01:01:55
Conn Carroll
But you mentioned divorce being a state issue. But one of the heroes of the book that that we skipped over, um I blame myself really, is Teddy Roosevelt.
01:02:05
Conn Carroll
um Teddy Roosevelt was was a big believer in the importance of marriage, the foundational aspect of marriage, how everyone should get married and have kids. um He wrote his thesis, actually, that women should have the right to vote. As a New York state legislature, he proposed a law that not only outlawed spousal abuse, which was legal at the time, but called for public flogging of people who have convicted for spousal abuse.
01:02:33
Conn Carroll
But returning this back towards towards marriage, um there you go.
01:02:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Now that's feminism I can get behind.
01:02:39
Conn Carroll
Turning this back towards divorce, um in one of his state of the unions, he called for a ah national divorce regime. He called for a a national ban on a no-fault divorce.
01:02:52
Conn Carroll
um You had you you had a ah basically um the the western states famously had very liberal regimes and Nevada would say you you only have to be a resident of Nevada for like two weeks and then we get jurisdiction over your marriage and and and we could grant you divorce. You had all these rich socialites in New York you know training out at the time to Nevada getting divorces and then coming back and giving their spouses divorce papers which he thought was was a travesty.
01:03:19
Conn Carroll
um But he was, I think, the first and only president to say that we should have a national law and and and marriage regime, um which of course never happened.
01:03:30
Conn Carroll
But I just think it's ah it's an interesting note that, that yes, people people have thought, you know, we need we need to to fix this problem on a national scale.
01:03:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It is.
01:03:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah All right. Well, on that note, ah thank you very much for your time. um
01:03:47
Conn Carroll
Buy the book, Sex and Medicine on Amazon.
01:03:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
probably no but yeah Exactly. I was going to say everybody who's still watching, all five of you should definitely ah pick up ah Khan's book. ah You should definitely buy it and you should ah also read it.
01:04:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for, uh, agreeing to be ah my first guinea pig for this.
01:04:12
Conn Carroll
My pleasure.
01:04:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, hopefully it turns out good. And, uh, the podcast will launch, uh, sometime next month. And at this point, you know, sales of your book will, uh, will increase tenfold.
01:04:26
Conn Carroll
Let's hope, let's hope. Thank you so much.
01:04:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Thank you. Bye.