The debate between DeSantis and Newsom will take place on Fox News at 9 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, Nov. 30.

I’ll be watching using this link. (I don’t have cable)

Washington Examiner explains why this will be a better debate than the other presidential debates:

One man has made cutting carbon emissions his state’s top policy priority. The other has prioritized energy production.

One made his state the most welcoming sanctuary jurisdiction for migrants from all over the world. The other signed one of the nation’s strictest anti-illegal immigration laws ever.

One oversees a state higher education system that has abandoned standardized tests and embraced mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion loyalty oaths. The other is fighting the higher education cartel and returning academic standards to classrooms.

The substantive policy contrasts between California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis couldn’t be starker. Both men not only represent the future of their respective parties, but both also have track records guiding their states in new directions.

Newsom versus DeSantis is a debate our country needs right now. Do we keep mandating more expensive cars, homes, and appliances while also prohibiting energy production from record amounts of public land? Or do we let people drive the cars they want, build the homes they want, and produce the energy they need to make a good life affordable for all?

Do we keep our southern border open, releasing every migrant who claims asylum into the country — most of the claims are without merit — bankrupting cities from Denver to New York? Or do we return illegal immigrants to Mexico, eliminating the incentive that is causing a historic wave of mass migration across the hemisphere?

These are big questions that our political debates should be focusing on.

Basically, when you watch Nikki Haley and Vivek Pharmaswampy, you’re looking at people who haven’t got the achievements that allow us to know what they would really do. DeSantis has conservative achievements by the dozen. Newsom is the same on the leftist side. Lots of actions, lots of leftist results. Elections should be about results vs results. Not about zingers, insults, clothing, make-up, etc. After all, we have to live with results.

If I had to pick one of the biggest sources of evil today, I would pick the public school system, especially the administrative staff and the teacher unions. Unfortunately, even in red states, it can be hard to fight back. One of the red states that seemed to be very committed to the status quo is Tennessee. But that’s all about to change, and their moderate conservative governor Bill Lee is on board.

Here’s the story from Fox News:

Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is launching an ambitious effort to take school choice statewide on Tuesday, and he’ll have some company for the announcement in Nashville.

With Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in tow, along with supportive legislators and families, Lee is announcing the Education Freedom Scholarship Act, which his office says will “extend school choice to every family across rural and urban Tennessee communities, putting parents at the forefront of their child’s education” and giving them all access to the best school for them. Sanders signed an expansive school choice voucher bill into law for Arkansas in March, calling it a “transformational education plan.”

“When I ran for Governor, I said every Tennessean deserves access to a good job, a great school, and a safe neighborhood,” Lee told Fox News Digital in a statement. “We’ve made great strides in education, but there is more work to do. To ensure Tennessee continues to lead the nation, it’s time for a statewide school choice plan that empowers parents, equips students for success, and allows Tennessee taxpayers to decide how their own dollars are invested.”

Usually, when conservatives want to get rid of welfare or trim down a government monopoly, they try to put the money and the responsibility to decide back in the hands of taxpayers. Leftists don’t trust taxpayers to know how to choose – they want the government to decide. Conservatives trust taxpayers to know what to choose.

And that’s the approach Tennessee is taking:

“The Education Freedom Scholarship Act will empower Tennessee parents with the freedom to pick the right school for their child, while giving families a choice where their taxpayer dollars are spent,” according to a memo obtained by Fox News Digital.

“Universal eligibility” means everyone is going to be included:

The proposal could change during the legislative process, but Lee’s plan calls for 20,000 scholarships to be made available to Tennessee students, including “10,000 scholarships for students who are at or below 300% of the federal poverty level, have a disability, or are eligible for the existing pilot program,” and an additional 10,000 scholarships “available to a universal pool of students entitled to attend a public school,” according to the governor’s office.

They would get a little more than $7,000 in vouchers for the 2024-25 school year, with eligible expenses including private school tuition, fees, and uniforms required by the private school, textbooks, curricula, and instructional materials required by the private school, tutoring services, and computer hardware. By the following school year, the proposal would have “universal eligibility for all Tennessee students entitled to attend a public school, prioritizing currently enrolled students, low-income and public school students if demand exceeds available funding.”

In my opinion, Tennessee is the best state in the union, maybe tied with Florida for first place. If you are a Republican living in some other state, then what’s holding you up from moving to Tennessee or Florida? You don’t have to live in a big city. You just need to make sure that your tax money goes to people who trust you to decide. You just need to make sure that the police and judges are there to serve you. Why would you be content to live in a state that takes the money you earn and spends it, because they don’t trust you?

So, in response to yesterday’s post, I have been asked what are some of the other reasons that cause men to become disinterested in dating and marriage. I have a list as long as my arm. But here’s another one for today. Today’s reason is that the legal is system is biased against men. There many examples of the bias, but I’ll focus on sentencing.

The study I want to talk about today is called “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases“, and it’s published in the peer-reviewed journal “American Law and Economics Review”.

The abstract says this:

This paper assesses and decomposes gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Decompositions show that most of the unexplained disparity appears to emerge during charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding. The approach provides an important complement to prior disparity studies, which have focused on sentencing and have not incorporated disparities arising from those earlier stages. I also consider various plausible causal theories that could explain the estimated gender gap, using the rich dataset to test their implications.

The key sentence there is “It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables.”

I also found this paragraph interesting:

The estimated gender disparities are strikingly large, conditional on observables. Most notably, treatment as male is associated with a 63% average increase in sentence length, with substantial unexplained gaps throughout the sentence distribution.

This anti-male discrimination becomes apparent to men when they are going through the divorce process.

About 70% of divorces are initiated by women, and most of them for frivolous reasons (reasons that were not recognized as valid in the law prior to “no-fault-divorce” being enacted). The reasons are also not recognized in the Bible. Throughout the divorce process, men encounter anti-male bias. This begins with the common use of false accusations against the man, in order to get sole custody, which provides the woman with greater child support payments from the man. These false accusations are usually not based on any evidence, such as police reports. They just emerge during the divorce proceedings and are used to eject the man from the home, and get the woman sole custody of the kids. In 90% of cases, the woman gets sole custody of the kids. And this is despite the fact that single-father homes have similar outcomes for children as married two-parents homes. The results of single-mother homes are disastrous for children in many areas, including poverty, crime, mental health,  sexual activity, etc. But the court system insists on doing what is worse for children by separating the father from the child. Even the meager visitation rights that fathers get are not enforced.

Failure to pay alimony and child support can land men in prison. And the laws are enforced very unfairly there, as well. Consider this case from Canada:

A wealthy businessman will have to pay more than $50,000 a month in spousal support for 10 years to a woman with whom he had a long-term romantic relationship even though they kept separate homes and had no children together, Ontario’s top court has ruled.

Seeing this, many men today have declined to participate in dating and marriage. And I could come up with dozens more reasons like this one. Based in peer-reviewed studies. It’s not one reason deterring men from marrying, it’s dozens of reasons. In every case, society has decided that men are expendable. And sadly, the church has largely ignored the root causes of men’s retreat from dating and marriage. The church simply has nothing at all to say to men who are faced with these risks, costs and disincentives.

When I explain these problems to pro-marriage conservatives, they confess to never having heard about any of these issues. They say “I just like the idea of people falling in love and having lots of cute babies”. They haven’t really bothered to think about the calculations that men run before deciding what to do with women. Maybe it’s time for Christian leaders to do a little more homework about these issues. Maybe there is something Christian churches can do to make marriage a bit more appealing to men.

We are already seeing this happening in conservative states like Florida and Tennessee. In Florida, there are new laws requiring that child custody be 50-50 in most circumstances. This acts as a deterrent against women who want to file frivolous divorces just to get child support from wealthy men. Florida also banned permanent alimony, which is another positive step to make marriage more fair for men. (Although many women in Florida were furious about it). In Tennessee, it is now a misdemeanor to claim child support payments from a man who is not the biological father of the child.

These are the kinds of policy solutions that will bring marriage back. But I’ve never heard Christians talking about these issues. All I ever hear from pious Christian leaders is that men need to “man up”, as if manning up makes the threats from feminist laws and courts disappear. It doesn’t work, but it does signal virtue, which seems to be the goal of many pious Christian leaders. We’re going to have to do better than virtue-signaling if we want to reverse the decline of marriage. It’s not going to be solved by shaming and blaming men.