I feel for Times op-ed contributor Ross Douthat—at times. He has to work extra-hard to communicate ideas about religion to atheists and Christians alike, and also to lock down his cases against hedonism and "pre-marital sex" and abortion, consulting as he does for a liberal paper in a liberal town. And as a religious person, he has to both obey and articulate his faith's professed principles of empathy, even while being a polemicist. This is a sticky situation! So it's reasonable that he sometimes succeeds at one but fails at the other.

This weekend, however, he's gone too far. He's mangled and misrepresented a major study to his own [...]

Ross Douthat is at it again, with an incitement towards monogamy and fewer sexual partners as a path to happiness. (Yay happinesss, by the way!) First, there is history! "Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock." Sure. Like in the late 1700s, when at least 1/3rd of all brides gave birth on average just five months after their wedding day. And then, to his point: "they [...]

"Douthat is full of crap in several ways." -Christina Ziegler-McPherson, author of Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908-1929.

Ross Douthat goes after what he calls "Hollywood's religion of choice" in the Times today: "Avatar is [James] Cameron's long apologia for pantheism-a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world." Describing pantheism as "a form of religion that even atheists can support," he argues that it doesn't offer humans the "escape upward" into immortality that he believes is the reason religion exists.

Are we still arguing about "assisted suicide"? Times web thinkie-typer Ross Douthat is, as he is "making an argument premised on the idea that suicide is generally wrong and helping someone kill themselves is generally a form of murder." Also he starts referring to the deaths of people who choose suicide who are of "sound-enough mind and uncoerced" as "self-slaughter"—while making the case that it's a "slippery slope." Why, if we let mortally ill people have control over their own deaths, then maybe everyone will just give up and die. (Also people will start gay-marrying pigs and sheep.) Yeah, that's why Jack Kervorkian assisted in all of [...]

"Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue—a murky landscape where worldviews get cobbled together from a host of baroque conspiracy theories, and where the line between ideological extremism and mental illness gets blurry fast." —Has Ross Douthat not seen any Glenn Beck monologues?

You may not have been expecting the Spanish Inquisition to become part of the debate about whether or not a "mosque" should be built near the site where the World Trade Center stood. But now that a Very Smart Person has pointed out how racism and xenophobia and religious intolerance did in fact make America a stronger and more unified country, the time seems right to celebrate things that don't often get celebrated.

Although Caitlin Flanagan has sketchily rewritten history (the teen pregnancy and abortion rate was much higher in the 70s than it is now!), her lament about "the coarseness of contemporary sexual culture and its impact on the souls of teenage girls" is still emotionally true, writes… Ross Douthat.

Absolutely astounding op-ed from the Times' Ross Douthat, which argues that George W. Bush wasn't as bad a president as we think he was if we're judging solely by every single metric that shows the lasting damage the nation incurred during his tenure. In fact, George W. Bush might actually have been a good president! You're wondering why, particularly when you look at the evidence of, say, every single metric showing the lasting damage the nation incurred during his tenure. Well, says Ross, Bush at least tried to fix some of the major fuck-ups he was responsible for: Iraq and the economy.

Here is some happy news for Ross Douthat: A majority of Americans surveyed believe Osama bin Laden is in hell.

"Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s—which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless—have been cut short in utero instead. And lives are what they are. On the MTV special, the people around Durham swaddle abortion in euphemism. The being inside her is just 'pregnancy tissue.' After the abortion, she recalls being warned not to humanize it: 'If you think of it like [a person], you’re going to make yourself depressed.' Instead, 'think of it as what it is: nothing but a little ball of cells.' It’s left to Durham herself to cut through the evasion. Sitting with her boyfriend afterward, she [...]

The reason I always make fun of low-level Times semi-conservo-wonk Ross Douthat being unwilling to publicly explain his opposition to gay marriage is that he said it was too personal, essentially. (I know: quite unlike being singled out by society your entire life for being gay-though I guess some people take that personally too? Anyway, that's why they call it privilege, Ross! Privilege literally means you don't have to deal with such things.) So good news! He has laid it out, and I really encourage everyone to sit down and read it slowly. I found it an amazing experience. I won't spoil the actually stunning conclusion-I was [...]

You can blame the surge of child molestation by Catholic priests on "the sexual revolution," says Ross Douthat.

Today, New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat weighs in on the "controversial power grabs" of the liberal Supreme Court, though he notes that "right-wingers, too, have grown accustomed to turning to the Court." The court overturns laws far too frequently, he says. "Prior to 1954, the Court had struck down just 77 federal statutes in a century-and-a-half of jurisprudence; in the 50-odd years since, it's overturned more than 80." He figures that a "super-majority" can't reasonably be enabled for court decisions, so what about the next best thing: term limits to curb all this activism!