The Stris (a.k.a. “Mom”) told me on Friday morning that a new book was forcing her to reconsider her views on marriage. Apparently, the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson had written a new book discussing the disastrous effects of single-parent families in the African-American community.

Before, The Stris said, she hadn’t been particularly partial to marriage, and didn’t really have a view either way on whether it had much to do with the many social problems which plague African-Americans, including higher rates of unemployment and imprisonment and lower rates of high school and college completion.

I must admit that while I don’t pretend to know all the answers to the problems that plague blacks in America, single-parent families certainly don’t seem to help the matter much. Raising a child in a stable, two-parent home seems more important to me, personally, than the parents being “married,” per se. After all, not all parents can make a marriage work, especially in cases where one partner is abusive or what-have-you.

But what occurs in the black community — where half of children are born out of wedlock — is that too often marriage is not even considered an option. Or too many of the men in the community are, frankly, unsuitable husbands. Anyhow, it’s a complex problem which merits open-minded discussion, as do all matters of public importance.

Later, though, The Stris told me that William Julius Wilson hadn’t written this new book at all. She hadn’t read it, you see, but only heard about it. It turns out that conservative scholar James Q. Wilson had written the new book, “The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families.”

That changed everything as far as she was concerned. William Julius Wilson was a respected sociologist, known for such probing works as “When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor,” which, while it considers cultural factors, puts most of the blame for inner-city rot on economic factors. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Wilson calls for a major government jobs program in the book.

In contrast, J.Q. Wilson explicitly rejects much of what W.J. Wilson’s analysis of the problems of inner cities. While admitting that one reason why marriage among blacks has dropped is the financial disincentives provided by welfare benefits, he argues that a larger factor is cultural, over and against W.J. Wilson’s economic arguments. He wrote in a winter 2002 City Journal essay, “Why We Don’t Marry“:

At least for blacks, one well-known explanation has been offered: men did not marry because there were no jobs for them in the big cities. As manufacturing employment sharply declined in the central cities, William Julius Wilson has argued, blacks were unable to move to the suburbs as fast as the jobs. The unemployed males left behind are not very attractive as prospective husbands to the women they know, and so more and more black women do without marriage.

The argument has not withstood scholarly criticism. First, Mexican Americans, especially illegal immigrants, live in the central city also, but the absence of good jobs has not mattered, even though many Mexicans are poorer than blacks, speak English badly, and if undocumented cannot get good jobs. Nevertheless, the rate of out-of-wedlock births is much lower among these immigrants than it is among African Americans, as W.J. Wilson acknowledges.

Second, Christopher Jencks has shown that there has been as sharp a decline in marriage among employed black men as among unemployed ones, and that the supply of employed blacks is large enough to provide husbands for almost all unmarried black mothers. For these people, as Jencks concludes, “marriage must … have been losing its charms for non-economic reasons.”

Of course, J.Q. Wilson’s larger point is that the reason why out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed among blacks (and among whites too, though not to the same levels) is that the cultural norms have changed in such a way that marriage is no longer a religious or social obligation but a personal choice. Wilson blames the Enlightenment for this development, and apparently now sees it as essentially irreversible except by a profound change in cultural attitudes.

But that was not the case four years ago when he advocated a “GI Bill for moms,” which would have the federal government giving education credits to women in exchange for their staying home with children. Apparently, not only is being unwed a crisis — being a working mother is too. This is the danger of cultural conservatism — it is a short leap from deciding what’s best to people to using government as a social engineer.

And I certainly don’t agree with J.Q. Wilson’s fierce opposition to drug legalization or his alarmist opposition to cloning. Still, I think there’s something to be said for the argument that marriage is devalued.

I don’t think it’s right for everyone at all times, but it’s useful as a social default — kind of like the Windows settings that come pre-set on your desktop the first time you power up your new computer. It doesn’t mean you can’t change things around, but for most people raising children, marriage probably works better than not being married. (Which, by the way, makes me wonder why so many conservatives are opposed to gay marriage. But that’s another issue.)

So I’ve got problems with both Wilsons, but I think it’s funny that The Stris was so open-minded about changing her position when she thought it was the liberal sociologist W.J. Wilson who wrote the book, and so off-put when she discovered it was conservative scholar J.Q. Wilson. I suppose we all filter out opinions and sources for information in this way. I read Reason religiously, but only read the National Review or The New Republic occasionally. And, certainly, I give more credit to the opinions of self-described libertarians than to liberals or conservatives.

But in the end, I like to think that I’m open to a viewpoint no matter it’s source. I guess The Stris is not. But she’s honest about it — you’ve got to give her credit for that much.

Today’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal makes the excellent point that Hussein’s oil stoppage is “a stupid and futile gesture.”

I couldn’t agree more. “It will neither help the Palestinians nor hurt the global economy,” the Journal writes, then continues, “though it is one more reason for President Bush to begin marshaling his coalition to depose Saddam.” Huh? If Hussein’s action is so harmless, why does it provide any rationale for ousting him?

The Journal’s editorial writers are again on the mark when they write:

What matters much more to the price of oil — and there is only one global price — are events in Venezuela. That country exports 2.5 million barrels a day, and for six weeks President Hugo Chavez, a Fidel Castro wannabe, had been messing around with the state-run oil company. And indeed after the military forced Mr. Chavez to resign Friday, oil prices dropped to just above $23 a barrel, after surpassing $28 a week earlier.

So Venezuela matters much more than Iraq, and things look to be going in the right direction there, precisely because Venezuelans punished their leader for trying to use their oil reserves as a political tool. They export 1 billion more barrels of oil a day than does Iraq. Sounds good. But the Journal editorial then concludes:

And if [Dubya] really doesn’t want to worry about an Iraqi embargo, he can go to the source of so many security problems and finish the job his father started against Saddam.

What? The entire editorial is about how what Hussein is doing is of little lasting consequence, and concludes with a call for Dubya to take out Saddam. If you can follow this logic, please enlighten me, as I’m a little lost. Wouldn’t a war on Iraq make other Arab dictatorships nervous about their own future and more likely to manipulate their own oil supplies for political reasons? Iraq is not the only country in the region hostile to the United States, and Hussein is not the only ruthless dictator in the region.

Taking on the entire Middle East is not a good idea and, furthermore, is completely unnecessary — as the first half of the Journal editorial makes clear — since the price of oil is global and not completely or even mostly dependent on the Middle East. Oh, well. I guess the answer to every question nowadays is to take out Saddam. Perhaps Dubya will somehow find a way to pin the Enron situation on him too.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Well, it’s equally ridiculous to fret about the supply of oil coming from the Middle East stopping anytime soon.

As Michael Lynch writes in a great new column, “For Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, or Kuwait to give up pumping oil would be the equivalent of Microsoft boycotting the software business.”

A perfect example of this phenomenon is the Venezuelan revolution to overthrow anti-trade president Hugo Chavez. While there were many factors involved in his ouster, his using the national oil company as a tool for political manipulation — denying much-needed revenue to that country’s poor people — was certainly a big one. A political leader may get away with oil boycotts for a while, but not for long.

In fact, the only thing that can really endanger U.S. access to Mideast oil — as I’ve said before — is heightened political tensions. You know, like threatening to invade a Middle Eastern country and overthrow its leader, or continuing to involve yourself in a territorial dispute that has no impact on your country’s security. Not that our country’s wise leaders would ever do anything like that.

Sure, handing over a chunk of change to Uncle Sam every year hurts, but there are plenty of other reasons to dislike the current tax system in America, as Chris Edwards explains. Even if you think the government deserves your money more than you do, you should still be upset about the many violations of civil liberties that go on in the name of paying for the many wonderful services government provides (including tax enforcement!).

What do the ACLU, right-to-lifers, the LP and the Christian Coalition have in common? Not much, except they hate each other’s guts and all have this odd affection for being able to speak their point of view.

Which is why they’ve joined forces with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-La.) to fight the campaign speech — er, finance — reform bill signed into law by Dubya. They’re all co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality.

McConnell, who has blocked speech control for years, was finally defeated this year as Dubya hoped to hush Democrat bleatings about the Enron controversy by passing the law. McConnell said that when it comes to free speech, ”There is no ideological divide. There is only one interest: freedom.”

Here is the complete text of the suit McConnel & Co. have filed. Most likely to fail constitutional muster is the provision which bans independent expenditure by political pressure groups in the final 60 days of a campaign. If there were ever a more blatant attempt to protect incumbents than this bill, it would be hard to pinpoint.

Dubya wants Congress to give Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld unlimited discretion over $130 million to support any military effort around the world he thinks would be helpful in fighting the war on terror.

The idea of supporting indigenous efforts to fight anti-U.S. terrorists or forces protecting or harboring such groups is not inherently wrong, but I think that such financial support would have to be weighed very carefully in each circumstance by Congress. It is Congress, after all, that is constitutionally charged with declaring war, and each new financial disbursement to a covert military group is an indirect act of war by the United States.

More importantly, important factors such as the likelihood of success, the extent and danger of the threat being fought, and possibility of further exacerbating the situation should be considered in a deliberate fashion. Rummy may be a lot of things, but he’s not very deliberate. More broadly, though, matters of when and where to go to war should not be decided by one man. They should be decided by the people’s representatives. Rummy’s job is to execute the war.