Word: sociologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sociologist James Jasper of New York University, today's would-be censors and neo-Puritans belong to two disparate groups. One consists of those, frequently working class in origin, who feel their status threatened by differing life-styles -- hence their hostility to drugs and casual sex and their sympathy for the goals of decency-obsessed media baiters like the Rev. Donald Wildmon or Senator Jesse Helms. The other group, Jasper says, consists of cause-oriented activists, such as animal rightists and environmentalists, who are intent on making people think about the consequences of letting endangered species die out or contaminating...
Both groups have contributed to what sociologist Jack Douglas of the University of California at San Diego calls "a degree of self-centered moralism that is unprecedented in American history." Douglas worries whether the pendulum will ever swing back the other way. Among other things, he notes, the new forms of personal intolerance occur at a time when the common bonds of U.S. society -- our shared values, our political understandings -- seem weaker than ever. "Maybe," he glooms, "America is too large and diverse to be one country under democracy any longer...
Women are not unanimous in supporting the idea of females in combat. Even within the armed forces, combat lust is more widespread among female officers than enlisted servicewomen. "What we're seeing," says Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University, "is a push by female officers and civilian feminists." Moskos and others argue that introducing the notion of combat equality may sharply reduce the number of women who enlist and could cause problems in the future if the draft is ever reinstated...
...widespread is this sort of disaffection, says author John Taylor in a sizzling New York magazine article, that a double-barreled social phenomenon now threatens the real exercise of civil liberties. The first barrel is "victimology." The other is what George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni calls the "rights industry" -- the creation by individuals and special-interest groups of freshly minted freedoms and prerogatives that must be upheld even when they are foolishly asserted, and whose transgression is -- always -- a matter for outcry...
...issue is not that words can hurt, or that civil rights and tolerance are essential in a democracy, but that hypersensitivity clouds rational discourse: how to knit a contentious American society together rather than allow it to become balkanized by competing interests. "We need to reset the thermostats," writes sociologist Etzioni, "not shatter windows or tear down walls. Extremism in defense of virtue is a vice...