Ross Douthat on Jon Shields New Yorker Interview

Ross Douthat of New York Times fame (and most recently a PSU event) weighs in on The New Yorker interview with Jon Shields. (I blogged about that here.)

Naturally, I'd wager that because the subject matter is abortion, you won't hear a peep out of CMC's PR office, despite the success of one of their professors making the blog of The New York Times and the magazine, The New Yorker.

Here's Douthat's commentary:

Conservative Christians’ attitudes toward women in the workplace, in particular, have evolved dramatically across the last two decades, even as their pro-life convictions have remained essentially constant. Consider Bob McDonnell’s now-famous law-school thesis, for instance, with its hard-edged critique of working women. In 1989, that represented the default position for an awful lot of social conservatives. (That’s one reason why the early-1990s Hillary Clinton — the first First Lady to be a career woman as well — was such a polarizing figure.) Flash-forward 20 years, though, and nobody on the pro-life side batted an eye at McDonnell’s ads highlighting his platoon-leader daughter (designed to defuse the thesis issue, of course), any more than they batted an eye at Sarah Palin’s career-and-children juggling act.

During the ‘08 election, you’d often hear media types buzzing about how Palin was a bad mother for putting her political ambitions ahead of her family; you’d almost never hear that from pro-lifers. Some of this reflects partisan biases, obviously — but some of it reflects a real sea change in how religious conservatives view women in the workplace.

Indeed, you might say that the pro-life movement has done an impressive job of embracing, albeit slowly, the positive achievements of the feminist revolution, while remaining steadfast in its opposition to that revolution’s darker consequences. (Well, O.K., you might not say that, but I probably would.)

He's right that Christian conservatives are a lot more receptive to the positive achievements of the feminist revolution, but I don't think they ever provide a real philosophical reason for why these achievements are positive. They almost never talk about it in those terms. Instead, you'll here them decrying the negative aspects, only. Why is that?