Yesterday, I posted Clifton Roscoe’s ideas about using MAGA momentum to address the single-parenthood problem. Today on my show, we continue the discussion with the writer Conn Carroll, author of the new book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy. You can guess from the title that Conn is strongly pro-marriage. He sees the nuclear family—and he argues that the founding fathers agreed—as the core of a healthy democracy. If he’s right, the skyrocketing rates of single-parenthood that Clifton wrote about yesterday would seem to augur trouble not only for individuals and families but the nation as a whole.
Conn begins by running through a little of his history as a conservative—he’s worked for Senator Mike Lee and the Heritage Foundation, to give you some sense of where he’s coming from. We then go through what he identifies as the four sexual revolutions throughout human history: early monogamy, neolithic polygamy, Christian-influenced monogamy, and the post-1960s period to which the term “sexual revolution” commonly refers. This last revolution was a wrong turn, as Conn sees it. He argues that marriage promotes economic well-being, positive socialization, and political stability. But instead of incentivizing it, we’ve invested in punishing marriage through various welfare programs that affect the most economically precarious people in the country. And there are cultural factors working against marriage as well—he cites the explosion in online gambling and pornography. Conn hopes that we can reverse course, and that Trump will take his vice president’s lead in promoting programs to incentivize marriage. And finally, I ask him to sum up his conservative case for preserving birthright citizenship.
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1:00 Conn’s career in the conservative movement
4:34 The four sexual revolutions
14:17 What about feminism and LGBTQ rights?
20:25 Conn: “We spend over a trillion dollars a year on means-tested programs that punish marriage”
24:30 How online gambling is hurting working-class men
29:02 What are the benefits of marriage?
34:03 Why Conn thinks single-parenthood disproportionately harms boys
37:12 The link between political and domestic structures
44:49 Will Trump enact policies that promote marriage?
48:42 Conn: We should strengthen obscenity laws in order to restrain online porn
55:52 The conservative case for birthright citizenship
Recorded February 11, 2025
Links and Readings
Conn’s new book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy
David Blankenhorn’s book, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem
Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese’s report on pornography
Conn’s Washington Examiner piece, “The Conservative Case for Birthright Citizenship”
George Borjas’s books on labor and immigration
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