{"id":189238,"date":"2026-05-24T09:35:02","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T17:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=189238"},"modified":"2026-05-26T19:20:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T03:20:52","slug":"female-reporters-in-the-lockerroom-what-was-gained-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=189238","title":{"rendered":"Female Reporters in the Locker Room – What Was Gained & Lost?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The access argument won because it was widely considered right. The story is made in the locker room. That is where the quotes are, in the minutes after the game while the emotion is still hot and the player has not yet been coached into clich\u00e9s. A reporter barred from that room does not get a softer version of the story. She gets it late, secondhand, and worse. So as long as women were kept out, women in sports journalism were structurally a second tier. They could not compete for the thing the job runs on. Melissa Ludtke’s suit against Bowie Kuhn<\/a> (1926-2007), decided in 1978 by Judge Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005), settled the principle that a press credential, not sex, governs access. That principle was correct according to the ruling hero system, and it traveled well beyond sports. The gain is a real one: a level field, a larger talent pool, more reporters, and some of the best sports writing of the next forty years came from women who finally got into the room.
\nNow the losses.
\nThe locker room was one of the last rooms where men were unobserved by women, and a space changes when it stops being that. Men behave differently when women are present. The candor drops, the crudeness goes underground, the rawness gets managed. So part of what the reporters fought to enter was partly destroyed by their entering it. The unobserved locker room and the observed locker room are not the same source. The thing that made it valuable, that it was a place where guarded men dropped the guard, is the same thing that made it incompatible with a mixed press corps. You cannot fully have both. The victory quietly altered the prize.
\nSecond, the athletes had a dignity claim that got steamrolled. Naked men interviewed by clothed strangers is already a strange arrangement; the sex difference made it stranger, and the players’ objection was mostly treated as bigotry rather than as a real complaint about being exposed in their own workplace. There is an asymmetry the era preferred not to look at. We would not, then or now, send a male press corps into a women’s locker room and tell the athletes to get over it. The principle was applied in one direction and the discomfort was assigned to one party.
\nThird, the cost of the transition fell hardest on the women who walked in first. The law was won before the culture moved, and the gap between them was paid for by the pioneers. The Lisa Olson episode<\/a> with the Patriots in 1990, the harassment, the players exposing themselves to make a point, showed what it cost to exercise a right that existed on paper and not yet in fact.
\nFourth, honesty went out of the arrangement. The old rule was unequal but legible. Everyone knew it and could see it. What replaced it is a permanent management problem that never resolved, only got papered over with robes, cooling-off periods, and separate interview rooms. The underlying weirdness of the naked workplace and the coed press is still there. We answered the access question and left the awkwardness sitting in the middle of the room, handled by etiquette.
\nMen are never allowed in female locker rooms. We grant women a dignity in their own nakedness that we deny men. We say a woman’s exposed body deserves protection from the opposite sex’s eyes, and we tell a man to get over it. That is a double standard. We do not take male vulnerability seriously. A man’s discomfort at being seen naked by strange women is treated as not real, as something unmanly to even raise, while a woman’s identical discomfort is treated as a right.
\nThe argument that while women belong in male locker rooms, men do not belong in female locker rooms has two main components. One, the threat runs mostly one direction. Men commit the overwhelming share of sexual aggression, and a naked woman among clothed men of unknown intent faces a physical danger that a naked man among clothed women does not. The protective norm around women’s undress is not superstition. It tracks who actually gets hurt. A clothed man’s gaze on an exposed woman carries a history of predation behind it. The reverse carries embarrassment but not fear, and fear is the whole difference. So when we refuse to put men in a women’s locker room, we are responding to a difference in consequence, not inventing one.
\nThere is also a power direction. When women fought into the male locker room, they were breaking into the room where a profession happens, the gatekept space, the place of access and money and standing. That was entering upward, into power. According to the conventional wisdom, men entering a women’s locker room would be the powerful walking into the space of the less powerful, which reads as intrusion and not as inclusion.
\nWhen interracial crime statistics run in a one-way direction, proponents of the conventional wisdom deny the legitimacy of discrimination that they sanction on behalf of women.
\nThe argument that won the women-reporters fight was that the locker room is only a workplace. The refusal to ever run that argument in reverse shows that nobody believes it. If the locker room were only a workplace, men in the women’s room would be no more remarkable than women in the men’s room. We will not allow it, which means we do believe exposed bodies deserve protection from the opposite sex. We just enforce that belief for women and waive it for men.
\nFor millions of Americans such as myself, it is not even a question that women should be allowed in a male locker room. Of course they should not, just as men should not be allowed in a female locker room. Why is this our reflex?
\nI did not reason my way to the rule, so reasoning does not move me off it. The reflex came first. The arguments arrive later, aimed at a target that was never built out of arguments. You cannot talk a man out of a position he never talked himself into.
\nThe rule guards the naked body, and the body is where shame and exposure live, not where syllogisms operate. It runs on disgust and on the fear of being seen, both of which fire fast and below deliberation. These responses move you before you think. They evolved that way for good reason. A man cannot argue you into eating spoiled meat, and he cannot argue you into accepting the opposite sex at the next locker over. The same fast circuit handles both.
\nA woman undressing knows the difference between women looking and men looking. That knowledge sits in the flesh. It is closer to perception than to belief, like seeing a color or feeling cold. You can dispute a belief. You cannot dispute a perception by talking, because the person already sees what he sees. When someone tells her the male body across the room is a woman, the argument lands on her ears while her eyes report something else. The two never meet. The argument speaks the language of declared identity. The reflex speaks the language of bodies. They talk past each other, and so the argument slides off.
\nAlmost every society separates the sexes for undress and for bodily functions, even where the lines fall in different places. A rule that old and that wide stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like a fact about the world. Men sense that abandoning it costs them something concrete: privacy, the safety of their daughters and wives, protection against voyeurism and worse. The reflex protects against real harms, not imagined ones, so the men who hold it feel the cost of giving it up while the people asking them to give it up bear none of it.
\nAnd the burden of proof feels reversed to me. I no more owe an argument for keeping men out of the women’s locker room than I owe an argument for not handing a stranger my diary. The person who wants the change carries the burden. When he fails to meet it and demands I justify the obvious instead, I feel the bad faith.
\nCharles Taylor<\/a> (b. 1931) draws the line between a self that is sealed and a self that is open<\/a>. The buffered self, the modern one, holds a firm boundary between inside and outside. Meaning lives within it, the world outside is neutral matter, and it can disengage at will, hold things at arm’s length, decide for itself what gets to touch it. The porous self, the older one, has no such seal. The outside gets in. Forces, gazes, charged objects, the sacred and the shameful, all cross the boundary and move the self whether it consents or not.
\nThe “just a workplace” argument is the buffered self talking. It says the naked body is neutral matter, the gaze is light landing on a surface, and a professional can wall himself off from the exposure and treat it as nothing. On this picture, being seen carries no charge you do not grant it, so the room really can be only a place where work happens. The body is disenchanted. The reporter and the athlete are sealed selves who bracket the nakedness and feel nothing they choose not to feel.
\nThe dignity claim and the fear are the porous self talking. They say the body is not neutral and the gaze is not inert. Being looked at by the other sex enters you, alters you, can violate. Shame is the porous experience in its purest form. It is the other’s eyes getting inside and changing how you stand in your own skin, which a fully sealed self would never feel. The blush, the flinch, the urge to cover, these are the boundary proving it was never closed.
\nThe locker-room settlement was a win for the buffered account, but a win on paper. We ruled the body disenchanted and the gaze harmless to get the door open. And then shame did not go away, fear did not go away, the robes and the side rooms appeared, and the awkwardness never resolved. Taylor tells you why. You can rule the body neutral. You cannot make a porous creature feel neutral. The management problem that survives the victory is the porous self refusing the buffered verdict. Every robe is the old self reasserting that the look gets in.
\nThe asymmetry is not only about who we protect. It is about who we permit to remain porous. We let women experience exposure as charged, as something that crosses the boundary and deserves shelter. We order men to experience the same exposure as nothing, to be buffered on command. The unequal thing is the distribution of permission to be open. One sex keeps its porousness. The other is told its porousness does not exist and should be ashamed of showing.
\nThe buffered self is the made thing, the cultural achievement, the trained composure. The porous response is closer to what the body does on its own. The shame at being seen is not a failure of modern poise. It is the older self showing through, told to be quiet but never abolished. The fight was won on the premise that we are all sealed, and it keeps producing the symptoms of openness because the premise is false to the creature.
\nThe law granted women access to male professional space and it granted women protection inside intimate space, and it did both through the same machine in the same twenty years. The vehicle was anti-discrimination law built for race and then extended to sex: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title IX in 1972, and a deliberate run of Equal Protection cases, Reed v. Reed in 1971, Craig v. Boren in 1976, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) and her litigators pushed step by careful step. Catharine MacKinnon (b. 1946) then supplied the theory that turned sexual harassment into sex discrimination, which the Court accepted in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson in 1986. Ludtke v. Kuhn in 1978 opened the locker room. By the end of it the conventional wisdom was not an opinion anymore. It was statute, precedent, and a payroll.
\nThe payroll is the part that made it permanent. Anti-discrimination law arrived alongside the expansion of the administrative state, and it found a home there. The EEOC, the Title IX office, the campus compliance shop, the corporate HR department, the harassment training vendor. Once the wisdom lives inside a standing office with a budget and a staff, it stops being a claim that has to win arguments and becomes a condition of continued employment. The office also has an interest in finding more of the thing it exists to police, so the mandate grows on its own. A position can be debated. An institution with enforcement power is obeyed.
\nNow the coalition that drove it. The women’s movement gave the moral energy and the bodies. The litigators gave the vehicle. The administrative state gave the home. And the beneficiaries were the educated professional class, the same class that staffs the courts, the universities, the newsrooms, and the corporations. There was no faction at the commanding heights with an interest in the other side. When every elevated institution agrees, the opposition is left to the powerless, who are then dismissed as powerless for a reason.
\nWhy were the opponents so weak.
\nWomen’s access rode in behind the Black civil rights victory, on the same statute, through the same clause, in the same vocabulary of equality. To oppose it you had to sound like a man relitigating segregation, and the analogy was unanswerable in public. The opponent could not separate himself from the bigot he had just watched lose. The stink transferred.
\nThe next reason is the logic of organized interest. The benefit of access was concentrated in motivated, articulate women with lawyers. The benefit of the old male space was diffuse, spread across men who mostly did not feel its loss sharply and would never form a lobby to defend a locker room. Concentrated interest beats diffuse interest every time. No one builds a movement around a thing he takes for granted until it is already gone, and by then the office is built.
\nThe courts decided the fight before anyone spoke. Law hears only the language of measurable interest, function, and harm. The thing the opponents were defending, the unobserved space, the room that was more than a workplace, has no standing in that language. You cannot enter “a meaning that vanishes when women watch” as a cognizable harm. So the defenders were mute in the one venue that counted, not because they had nothing, but because their currency did not spend there. The access side spoke fluent law. The other side could only gesture at something the courtroom was built not to perceive.
\nThe fifth reason is co-optation. Because the regime also protected women’s modesty, it could wave the banner of decency, and that absorbed the constituency that might otherwise have defended the old arrangement on decency grounds. A man inclined to guard modesty found the new order already claiming to be the guardian of modesty. You cannot easily organize against a system that presents itself as protecting your daughter.
\nWho decides what constitutes harm?
\nLegislatures define harms when they write statutes. Courts define them when they develop the common law and when they rule on what counts as a cognizable injury, which is the work that standing doctrine does. A court will not hear you unless you can show an injury the law already recognizes, so the gate is held by whoever controls the definition of injury. Agencies fill in the rest. That is the civics-class answer, and it tells you the offices but not the truth.
\nHarm is built, not found. There is no shelf of pre-legal harms that law walks along and reads off. What counts as harm is the set of injuries a society has been talked into recognizing, and that set moves. Marital rape was not a harm and then it was. Sexual harassment was the price of having a job and then it was an actionable wrong. Emotional distress, environmental damage, psychological injury all crossed over from “that is just life” to “that is a claim.” And the traffic runs the other way too. Blasphemy was a harm and is now a freedom. Alienation of affection was a tort and is mostly a joke. Reputational injuries that once ended a man now bounce off. The category breathes in and out across decades, which means the real question is not who occupies the offices but who can move the line.
\nMoving the line takes a particular sequence, and watching the sequence tells you who decides. A group has to feel a wrong. Then someone has to translate the felt wrong into a category the law already honors, because law does not hear pain, it hears pleadings. MacKinnon did this when she took something women felt and rendered it as sex discrimination, a harm the statute already recognized. The wound was old. The translation was the invention. Then an expert class has to certify the thing as real in the technical register the law now trusts, the psychologist on trauma, the economist on the loss, the social scientist on the disparity. Then a sympathetic forum ratifies it. Then a bureaucracy locks it in and starts hunting for more of it. Run that chain and you see that the people who decide what counts as harm are the claimant who can organize, the advocate who can translate, the expert who can certify, and the judge or legislator who can ratify, in that order, with the bureaucrat last to make it permanent.
\nRecognition tracks standing, not suffering. The deciding variable in whether a wound becomes a harm is whether the wounded group has enough voice to get the wound named, and a group with great suffering and no standing has its injury filed under bad luck, or the way of the world, or its own fault. Equal pain, unequal recognition. This is the whole answer to the locker-room business. Women had acquired the standing to get the gaze on the exposed female body recognized as a harm. Men had not acquired the standing to get the gaze on the exposed male body recognized as anything, so the identical situation produces a harm on one side and a shrug on the other.
\nThe quiet sovereign is the expert guild. Because law now wants harm to be real in a measurable or scientific sense before it will move, whoever certifies reality holds a piece of the decision. The professions that pronounce on what counts as trauma, injury, and disparity have inherited a moral and political power that wears a lab coat. A felt wrong that no expert will validate stays mute, and a felt wrong that the experts bless walks into court already half-won. So part of “who decides what counts as harm” is “which credentialed class gets to say what is real,” which is a strange place to have parked a question that used to belong to the whole community.
\nPower gets your harm recognized. A recognized harm is then itself a source of power, a cause of action, a claim on other men’s behavior and on resources and on the language everyone has to use. So the winners of the last round hold the gate for the next one. The inarticulate lose by default, not because their loss is small but because they cannot say it in the one dialect the room accepts. That was the opponents’ whole problem with the male space. They had a real loss and no way to enter it as an injury, so the law recorded a harm to the women who wanted in and no harm to the men who lost the room, and the silence in the record looked like proof that nothing had been taken.
\nAlong with these changes in law, have we had a decline in male chivalry and noblese oblige? Many men I know feel the game is rigged (every group can claim with a basis in fact that the game is rigged against them, I try to avoid adopting victimhood narratives) against them (particularly in institutions such as divorce courts), and thus are less inclined to protect and honor women who don’t abide by traditional norms. Why should we sacrifice for women who don’t share our hero system? For example, if I am out with a woman and for no good reason she starts a verbal altercation with a dangerous stranger, I will likely walk away and get ready to call 9-1-1. Her bad judgment has put us in danger and if she refuses to follow my cues, she’s on her own.
\nChivalry was never free-floating virtue. It was the etiquette of a contract. Under the old arrangement men held the power and women’s security ran through male provision and protection, so the gallantry was the noblesse oblige of the stronger party toward people whose welfare depended on him. Codes like that survive on reciprocity. Change the terms and the etiquette goes with them. When the law and the paycheck take over the protective work men used to do, the male side of the bargain loses its point, and a man who senses that the female side of the old deal, the deference and the role, has been withdrawn while his obligations stay or grow will read the trade as one-sided and walk. That logic is sound. Chivalry declined partly because the system it greased was dismantled, and you cannot keep the manners of a contract after voiding the contract.
\nNow the complications to this male grievance narrative.
\nThe withdrawal from dating and mating is real and steep, but legal protection is one input and not the biggest. Weekly sex among adults 18 to 64 fell from 55 percent in 1990 to 37 percent by 2024, and the share of young adults living with a partner dropped from 42 to 32 percent between 2014 and 2024. Pew finds 63 percent of men 18 to 29 single, nearly twice the rate among young women. When researchers go looking for why, the heavy causes they keep naming are smartphones, social media, pornography, gaming, declining male earnings, and the collapse of steady partnering, plus dating apps that flood the field with options and breed a consumer attitude, and a widening political hostility between young men and women. Legal liability belongs on the list, because a man who can lose his job or his name over a misread approach will approach less, and that suppression is real. But it sits well below porn, screens, the app economy that routes most female attention to a few men, and men’s relative economic slide. Pin the mating collapse mainly on the lawyers and you have found a cause you can resent and skipped the larger causes that implicate the phone in your own hand.
\nChivalry worked because it presented as unconditional. The gentleman protected the woman because he was a gentleman, not because she had filed her paperwork. The moment protection becomes conditional on her performance, you no longer have chivalry. You have a negotiated exchange, an explicit tit for tat, and that is precisely the cold arrangement we now live under, with its prenups and its apps and its terms stated up front. So “I will honor women who play their role” does not restore the old grace. It completes its death and replaces it with a contract, and contracts between the sexes run colder than codes did. There is a further trap in it. The role you want women to play has no agreed content anymore. There is no consensus on what a woman owes, which makes the condition unmeetable and turns it into a permanent grievance generator. A man waiting for women as a class to resume a role they no longer share any definition of will wait forever and call the waiting principle.
\nThe third complication is that this is not only a male story, and telling it as one distorts it. Women lost their half of the bargain too, the security and the being honored, and large numbers of them feel the deal is bad, hence the steady complaint that men will not commit, will not lead, will not provide. Surveys find single women often believe they are happier than married women yet believe married men are happier than single men, which is a picture of mutual disappointment, not a one-sided raid. The old system traded female autonomy for female security and male obligation for male authority. In the renegotiation each side kept the half it preferred and shed the half it found heavy. Women kept independence and protection and dropped dependence and deference. Men shed obligation and authority both, except that the authority was taken by law and economics while some of the obligation, the financial exposure in divorce and custody above all, was kept or increased. That specific asymmetry, in family law, is where the rigged-game complaint has its strongest real basis. But it is a complaint about a few domains, not a proof that the whole field is tilted, and men generalize from the family court to the cosmos because the family court is where the wound is deepest.
\nThe rigged-game story, even where it is accurate, is a poor thing to live inside. Resentment corrodes the man holding it faster than it touches anyone he aims it at, and a posture of withholding honor until the world resumes terms it will not resume leaves him alone with his principle. The grievance has real parts. As an operating philosophy for an actual life it tends to deliver the man exactly the isolation it predicts, and then present the isolation as confirmation.
\nFor millions of Americans who oppose women in male locker rooms, there is also a reflex that women and homosexuals should be nowhere near combat units.
\nThe locker room reflex rests on perception. You see a body and no argument unsees it. The combat reflex bundles three separate claims.
\nThe first is physical. Men and women differ in upper body strength, load carriage, bone density, and injury rates, and the gap widens at exactly the loads and tasks ground combat demands. Carrying a wounded man and his kit out of a fight, breaching a door, humping eighty pounds for miles day after day. This part holds up. When the Marines ran their mixed task force study, the all male units outperformed the mixed ones on most ground combat measures, and women suffered injuries at far higher rates. A man who looks at the numbers finds his instinct confirmed. So argument does not move him because the evidence sits on his side.
\nThe second is eros. The fighting unit depends on a brotherhood that men sense, correctly, that sex corrodes. Put attraction inside the foxhole and you introduce jealousy, favoritism, pairing off, and the protective pull a man feels toward a woman he wants. That pull degrades the cold calculation combat requires. A man will take a risk to pull a woman out that he would not take for another man, and that instinct, admirable in a living room, kills people on a battlefield.
\nThe third claim is the one about homosexuals. The eros logic is the same: keep sex out of the unit. But the prediction attached to it has been tested. Opponents of repeal forecast that open service would wreck cohesion. The studies after the 2011 repeal, including the military’s own reviews, did not find the collapse that was promised.
\nChesterton’s fence<\/a> adds the causal story for why the dismantling kept producing costs nobody forecast.
\nThe principle<\/a>, from G.K. Chesterton<\/a> (1874-1936) in The Thing<\/a>, runs roughly: come upon a fence across a road, and if you cannot see why it is there, do not tear it down. Go away and learn what it was for. When you can come back and say you understand its purpose, then you may have earned the right to remove it. The reformer who clears away what he does not understand is not bold. He is careless.
\nRead the whole arc we have walked through as a run of fence-removals. The old sexual contract, chivalry, sex-segregated spaces, the courtship scripts, the norms around male pursuit and female protection. Reformers came to each of them and saw, correctly, a constraint. The contract bound women to dependence. Chivalry dressed control as courtesy. The male spaces locked women out of power. Every one of these fences was a restriction, and seeing the restriction was true sight. The trouble is that a fence is two things at once. It is a constraint and it is a structure holding something up, and the reform vocabulary can see the first and is nearly blind to the second. Rights and harms are its only currency, and a fence’s function, the coordinating work it quietly does, is neither a right nor a harm, so it does not register. It gets removed by default, not because anyone weighed its function and judged it worthless, but because the function was invisible to the instrument doing the weighing.
\nThat blindness is the link to everything before. The courtship script was a coordination device. It told both sexes what to do and in doing so absorbed most of the rejection risk and ambiguity that now paralyzes the dating field. Remove it and you do not get freedom plus order. You get freedom plus the apps, which coordinate badly, and the dating recession is partly the script’s absence making itself felt. Chivalry channeled male desire and aggression into protective forms. Remove it with nothing in its place and the channeling reverts either to crude liability law or to withdrawal. The old contract gave each sex a known role, and the mutual disappointment we mapped, the men who feel the deal soured and the women asking where the good men went, is the sound of two people who no longer share a script trying to coordinate without one. None of this proves the fences should have stood. It explains why knocking them down hurt in ways the knockers did not see coming. They evaluated obstacles and ignored functions, so the second-order costs arrived as surprises that were never surprises to anyone who had read the fence correctly.
\nNow the discipline, because Chesterton’s fence is abused.
\nThe principle is not an argument against removal. It is an argument against removal in ignorance. Once you understand the function, you are free to tear the fence down anyway, and sometimes you should, because the function may be bad. Some fences are only obstacles. Some old norms were nothing but the upkeep of an unjust hierarchy with no secret wisdom inside them, and they deserved the bulldozer with nothing owed in replacement. The work Chesterton asks for is investigation, not reverence. <\/p>\n

For most of Western thought the community came first. Aristotle<\/a> (384-322 BC) called man a political animal and held the polis prior to the individual, the way the body is prior to the hand. Thomas Aquinas<\/a> (1225-1274) and the natural-law tradition built the whole order around the common good as the end of law. Edmund Burke<\/a> (1729-1797) described society as a partnership across the generations, with the living as temporary tenants of an inheritance they owe to the dead and the unborn. Alasdair MacIntyre<\/a> (1929-2025), in After Virtue<\/i><\/a>, argued that the self is constituted by its memberships and its story, that a man is a son, a neighbor, a citizen before he is a chooser, and that duties run ahead of rights. Michael Sandel<\/a> (b. 1953) made the same case against the rights-liberal picture of the unencumbered self. On this view the rights-bearing sovereign individual, the Lockean atom who consents to society from some imagined outside, is the strange new thing. He arrives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and he dissolves what he touches. To the trad, rights-talk is a solvent. It reframes every bond, to parents, to spouse, to church, to country, to God, as a negotiation between separate proprietors, and the unchosen obligations that the trad considers the substance of a life cannot survive that reframing, because they were never chosen and the rights vocabulary recognizes only the chosen.
\nThis is why the trad keeps losing the long war even when he wins a skirmish. The sex-equality fight, the locker room, the dismantled contract, all of it was won in the language of individual rights, and the venue that heard it, the law, speaks only rights and individuated harm. The trad’s primary good, the social fabric, the family form, the coordinated order that the fence held up, has no standing in that court. Recall the question of who decides what counts as harm. The trad’s injuries are exactly the kind that cannot register, because they are harms to a whole, to a fabric, to a shared form of life, and the regime’s harm vocabulary demands a single identifiable victim with a violated entitlement. A coarsened culture, a hollowed-out family, a lost common meaning, these are real wounds to the trad and invisible ones to the system, so they are dissolved by default and the dissolution looks, in the record, like the removal of nothing.
\nTrads reach for rights when useful. The trad invokes religious liberty, free speech, parental rights, freedom of association, the right of conscience, almost always on defense, to shelter his community from the state and the hostile culture. But whether that is hypocrisy depends on what he takes a right to be. A coherent trad can hold that rights are not the foundation of the good order but can be useful instruments for protecting the institutions that are foundational. The right is a tool, the community is the end, and using the tool to guard the end is not a betrayal of principle. It would be a betrayal only if he claimed the right was sacred in itself, which the consistent trad does not.
\nThe rights-liberal borrows the trad’s vocabulary just as readily when his own aims need it. He invokes the social good, the harm to the vulnerable, the health of democracy, the fabric of the community, whenever individual rights would cut against the result he wants, which is how you get speech codes, association overridden by anti-discrimination law, conscience overridden by public mandate. Each side has a primary commitment it would defend at cost, community for the trad, individual autonomy for the liberal, and each reaches across for the other’s currency when it pays. The trad who wants free speech for himself and censorship for blasphemy or pornography shows that speech was borrowed and the moral order is primary. The liberal who wants free speech against the trad and codes against harmful speech shows the identical structure flipped. Both sides fight for their hero system and use rights as ammunition when the ammunition fits the barrel.
\nFighting in the enemy’s language slowly remakes the man who does it. When the trad defends the family by asserting parental rights, he has already half-conceded that the unit that matters is the rights-bearing individual, which is the very claim he set out to deny. Each translation of a communal good into an individual entitlement is a small surrender of the ground. Do it long enough and you are no longer a traditionalist. You are a liberal who happens to have conservative tastes, a man who defends the individual’s right to live traditionally, which is not traditionalism at all but a flavor of the thing it opposes. Much of what called itself American conservatism conserved liberalism. It learned to fight so fluently in the vocabulary of rights and markets and individual freedom that it forgot it once believed something the vocabulary could not say. The real trad, the man who actually subordinates the individual to the order and will not make the translation, is politically homeless for that reason, because the only effective public language is the one that defeats him, and to win in it he has to stop being himself.
\nThe individual-rights innovation was a response to real crimes done in the name of the whole, the wars of religion, the absolutist state, the heretic burned for the health of the community, the dissenter fed to the nation or the party or the church. The community before the individual is also the formula under which every collectivist horror operated, and rights were invented in part to stop precisely those. So each framework has its characteristic pathology. Rights-liberalism dissolves the bonds and leaves a population of lonely sovereigns who cannot coordinate or sacrifice or sustain a form of life. Common-good communalism crushes the one who will not conform and calls the crushing health. The trad is right that the rights regime cannot see what it is destroying. The liberal is right that the common good has been the warrant for monstrous things. A fair account does not pick a winner. It holds that the deepest fights in the rights-and-discrimination story are fights between two incompatible primary languages, each true about the other’s danger and blind to its own, and each willing to speak the rival tongue when the speaking serves the cause it loves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The access argument won because it was widely considered right. The story is made in the locker room. That is where the quotes are, in the minutes after the game while the emotion is still hot and the player has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43015,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buffered","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t