Reuters: Steve Bannon drafting curriculum for right-wing Catholic institute in Italy (SEPTEMBER 14, 2018)

Benjamin Harnwell, director of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute based in a mountaintop monastery not far from Rome, told Reuters Bannon had been helping to build up the institute for about half of its eight-year life.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading Vatican conservative who is president of the Institute’s board of advisers, said Bannon would be playing a leading role there.[...]

Bannon’s increased engagement with the Institute demonstrates how his involvement in Europe extends beyond electoral politics to an effort to build a populist faction inside the Catholic Church.[...]

Harnwell said he founded the institute while working as an aide to a British Conservative European Parliament member. At the time, one of the legislature’s committees was trying to block Rocco Buttiglione, a confidant of Pope John Paul II, from becoming European Commissioner for justice and security.

During a confirmation hearing, Buttiglione, who was nominated to the European Commission by then-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, described homosexuality as a sin and said the principal role of women was to have children. Amid political uproar, Buttiglione withdrew from consideration for the Commission.

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The Atlantic: So Is Living Together Before Marriage Linked to Divorce or What?

It’s not unheard of for contemporaneous studies on the same topic to come to opposite conclusions, but it’s somewhat surprising for them to do so after analyzing so much of the same data. Both studies analyzed several cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), a longitudinal dataset of women (and men, starting in 2002) between the ages of 15 and 44, though Kuperberg’s study incorporates some data from another survey as well. Still, this isn’t the first time researchers have come to differing conclusions about the the implications of premarital cohabitation. The phenomenon has been studied for more 25 years, and there’s been significant disagreement from the start as to whether premarital cohabitation increases couples’ risk of divorce. Differences in researchers’ methodology and priorities account for some of that disagreement. But in the curious, still-developing story of whether cohabitation does or doesn’t affect odds of divorce, subjectivity on the part of researchers and the public may also play a leading role.[...]

However, over the years, many researchers began wondering whether earlier findings that linked cohabitation to divorce were a relic of a time when living together before marriage was an unconventional thing to do. Indeed, as cohabitation has become more normalized, it has ceased to be so strongly linked to divorce. Author Steffen Reinhold, of the University of Mannheim’s Research Institute for the Economics of Aging, pointed out in 2010 that in European countries, the correlation disappeared when the cohabitation-before-marriage rate among the married adults reached about 50 percent; the U.S. seemed to have just gotten to this threshold. In 2012, a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family concluded that “since the mid-1990s, whether men or women cohabited with their spouse prior to marriage is not related to marital stability.” This is the same journal that just published a study finding the opposite.

Galena Rhoades, a psychologist at the University of Denver, has a few theories as to why it’s so difficult to glean what effect, if any, cohabitation has on marital stability. For one, she says, it’s hard to study divorce in ways that are useful and accurate, because the best data sets take so long to collect. Many people don’t get divorced until many years into their marriages, and the social norms around cohabitation in the U.S. have evolved quickly, so “if we study a cohort of people who got married 20 years ago, by the time we have the data on whether they got a divorce or not, their experience in living together and their experience of the social norms around living together are from 20 years ago,” Rhoades says. In other words, by the time researchers have enough longitudinal data to know whether one is meaningfully linked to the other, the social norms that shaped the findings will hardly be of use to couples today trying to figure out how how cohabitation could affect their relationship. Thus, Rhoades says, longitudinal studies tend to paint a fuller picture of the relationship between living together and divorce, while also simultaneously telling Americans today less about the time they actually live in.[...]

As researchers moves toward a more nuanced understanding of what cohabitation means for the future of unmarried romantic partners, there are several factors that the experts I spoke with believe urgently need to be taken into account. Lehmiller says studies of cohabitation should start working with data sets that include same-sex couples and move away from equating the stability of a marriage with its success. “Some people have views about marriage that would lead them to stay in one even if it’s not satisfying,” he says. In other words, just because a marriage lasts doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best outcome for either party involved.

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Political Critique: The far right knocks on the the door of Spanish politics

On Sunday October 7, the Spanish far right party Vox achieved what they had been looking for for a long time: their baptism as a relevant political actor in the Spanish public sphere. They did it by filling the Vistalegre palace in Madrid with 10,000 supporters and leaving a thousand people out for lack of space. In the past few years, Vistalegre has symbolically become the venue used by Podemos for their annual congresses. The choice of the venue for this event is not coincidental: Vox is explicitly looking for parallels with the first Podemos. They want to turn the political indignation of a certain sector of the Spanish right into political capital. And to achieve this they hope to use the springboard of the European elections. In this sense, it’s fundamental to note that there are people within the Vox party who are studying the political campaign and strategy of Podemos in 2014, when the party entered candidates for the 2014 European Parliament election, polling with 7.98% of the national vote.[...]

In the arena, well beyond the burladero, there is a first row where writers, historians, journalists and even bullfighters, all identifying within the far right spectrum in Spain, gather together looking at the audience. However, the absences are more surprising: Vox had invited international personalities from other European political parties, both from the ENL parliamentary group (which brings together in Brussels the National Front, the Northern League, the Austrian FPÖ or the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders) and from the parliamentary group of the European Conservatives and Reformists, where Polish, Czech and British conservatives meet. But none of them attended. Not even Steve Bannon, whose presence was speculated a few weeks before.[...]

Vox’s strategy for the next year’s electoral cycle rests on three pillars: appeal to a vote of conviction, use politically incorrect language and indicate very clearly who the enemies are. Namely: the Catalan independence movement, feminism and immigration.With these wicks, the party led by Santiago Abascal will try to be involved in all the decisive issue on Spanish agenda and, in the end, win everything. Some polls indicate that Vox will foreseeable reach parliamentary representation in the European Parliament and that it could be decisive when it comes to deciding the balances between left and right in some regions such as Madrid or Murcia.

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Aeon: What do we consent to when we consent to sex?

If the presumption of the hypothetical fistee is ableist, the presumption of the complainants, juries and judges that masculine-presenting intimate partners have a penis is heteronormative (and the convictions are transphobic). One might reasonably expect her masculine-presenting partner to be penis-bearing. But if that expectation is unmet, the state should not thereby prosecute that partner for rape. Consider a partner with an unforgivingly large, disappointingly small or stubbornly flaccid penis. Here too expectations have been unmet, but no crime is committed.[...]

Second, it is important to understand that some questions are or should be unanswerable as legal truth claims. When it comes to sex, there should be no legally actionable way to answer the question: ‘Are you a man?’ Is gender a matter of genitals, hormones, chromosomes, secondary sex characteristics, social inequality or self-identification? The law cannot bring any clear answer to this question. One should not be convicted of sexual assault for failing to live up to a phallocentric standard of manhood.[...]

As for applicability: many people suppose that sex with nonhuman animals is wrong because animals cannot consent. But are animals really the kinds of creatures capable of consenting? Can Fido ‘consent’ or not to fetch? If you do believe animals such as cows can proffer consent, I would wager they are less likely to consent to becoming a cheeseburger than to sex.

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The Atlantic: The EU Has Rejected Italy's Budget. That's Just What Rome Wanted.

That fundamental incoherence met its biggest test yet on Tuesday, when the European Union rejected Italy’s 2019 draft budget—an unprecedented move against a eurozone country—saying its deficit targets and wishful thinking about growth posed a serious threat to economic stability in Europe. Italy now has three weeks to submit a revised budget.[...]

The wrist slap from Europe—or was it a melodramatically slammed door?—is exactly what the Italian government may have wanted. The driving force in the government, Matteo Salvini—the bellicose interior minister, deputy prime minister, and head of the League party—came to power spoiling for a fight with Europe. His senior coalition partner (who comes across as junior), the Five Star Movement’s Luigi Di Maio, also got elected on promises of redefining Italy’s relationship to Europe. Together, they form a government that needs enemies in order to justify its existence. Europe, with its irritating, sovereignty-straining rules and austerity measures, is an enemy.[...]

The government’s game of chicken with Europe might backfire. “It might be a lose-lose proposition,” Fubini continued. “If they hold on, it can be very damaging to the economy,” he said of the rising borrowing rates. “But if they step back, there is an element of face loss. So I think it kind of has to get worse before they change tactics.”

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