CURB YOUR (SEXUAL) ENTHUSIASM: Love is dead. Feminists killed it, Stacy McCain writes:

Do young people no longer have desires, instincts, urges? Have words like “passion” and “seduction” and “romance” lost all meaning? Does anyone expect hormone-addled teenagers parking in the moonlight on Lovers Lane to conduct their adolescent trysts like diplomats negotiating a trade agreement? Is there no longer any expectation or hope for spontaneous magic in human sexual behavior? What kind of dingbats are giving kids this wretched advice about sex?

Read the whole thing.

RELATED: At Reason TV, Professor Laura Kipnis Explores How Campus Feminism Infantilizes Women.

INTRODUCING PJ MEDIA’S NEW PARENTING SECTION.

US NEWS & WORLD REPORT: POLYAMOROUS RIGHTS ADVOCATES SEE MARRIAGE EQUALITY COMING FOR THEM:

Like others across the country last week, a Washington, D.C., couple and their housewarming guests buzzed about the Supreme Court’s ruling that legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. But they were far more interested in Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissent than the majority opinion that made same-sex marriage the law of the land.

The couple – a husband and his wife – are polyamorous, and had just moved in with their girlfriend. And in Roberts’ dissent, they saw a path that could make three-way relationships like theirs legal, too.

“Did you see we were mentioned by Roberts?” the husband beamed as he welcomed guests the day after the ruling. The chief justice wrote that polygamy has deeper roots in history and that the decision allowing gays to marry “would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.”

“If the majority is willing to take the big leap,” he added, “it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one.”

Unexpectedly.

“But why stop there when the concept of liberty goes a lot further?”, Richard Epstein writes in “Hard Questions on Gay Marriage,” at the Hoover Institute’s Defining Ideas Website. “In particular, Kennedy never explains why his notions of dignity and autonomy do not require the Supreme Court to revisit its 1878 decision in Reynolds upholding criminal punishment for polygamy, which is still on the books. Nor does he ask whether the dignity of workers could, and should, be used as a reason to strike down the full range of labor regulations on both wages and hours that make it flatly illegal for two individuals to enter into a simple employment contract on mutually agreeable terms.”

TURKEY PLANS AN INVASION OF SYRIA–not to fight ISIS, but to fight the Kurds.

BYRON YORK: TEN THINGS TO WATCH IN GOP 2016 RACE RIGHT NOW.

I’M GLAD THAT SOMEBODY NOTICED: “Blogger Glenn Reynolds noted that when the South was solidly Democratic, we got ‘Gone With the Wind’ nostalgia. Now that it is profoundly less racist, but also less useful to Democrats, it’s the enemy of all that is decent and good.”

WHO NEEDS SHAKESPEARE? A high-school English teacher caught flak for bragging in the Washington Post that she refuses to teach Shakespeare and believes he doesn’t belong in the curriculum. But Mark Bauerlein says her critics are wrong to focus on her. She’s merely following the principles she learned in teacher training programs:

• Students need “representation”—black students need to see black authors and black characters (humanely portrayed), and it’s best if they are presented by a black teacher.
• The past is irrelevant or worse—history evolves and mankind improves (if steered in the right social-justice directions); to emphasize the past is to preserve all the injustices and misconceptions of former times.
• Contemporary literature is better—it’s more diverse and more real.
• Classics are authoritarian—they deny teachers and students the freedom to chart their own curriculum and take ownership of their learning.

“Shakespeare can’t survive hack teachers, and he can’t survive progressive principles, either,” Bauerlein writes.

Shakespeare endures in the classroom on aesthetic and cultural grounds that progressivism refuses.  It casts aesthetic excellence as a political tool, the imposition of one group’s tastes upon everyone else.  And it marks the culture at whose pinnacle Shakespeare stands (the English literary-historical canon) as an outdated authority.

To say that Shakespeare is central to our cultural inheritance—beloved by audiences in the 19th-century American west, quoted by presidents, source of countless American idioms—is to dispel the multiculturalist breakthrough of the mid-20th century.  If progressivism reigns in secondary and higher education, Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth are doomed.

Yeah, but we’ll still have The Joy Luck Club and The House on Mango Street. 

TUNISIA ATTACK: LOCALS FORMED HUMAN SHIELD TO PROTECT TOURISTS.

THE IRS SCANDAL, DAY 782: “IRS Won’t Release Lois Lerner Emails — Because They Might Be Duplicates.”

HAPPY ASTEROID DAY!

THE ATLANTIC’S JEFFREY GOLDBERG interviews former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. They argue. A lot. Mostly about Barack Obama. Goldberg says the transcript reads like two Jews yelling at each other on a park bench in Brooklyn, and it does.

“OUR REPUBLICAN CONSTITUTION” IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER ON AMAZON. My new book, Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Sovereignty of the People, won’t be published until February 2016, but you can now pre-order your copy on Amazon. The page does not yet contain a description of the books, so here is one:

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence affirmed that “it is to secure” the inalienable individual rights of the sovereign people that “governments are instituted among men.” By 1787, however, Americans had grown unhappy with “democratic” state governments that had restricted their liberties and stifled the economy. They then replaced the Articles of Confederation with a new form of “republican” government embodied in a written constitution. But because the Constitution of 1787 preserved the democratic power of states to maintain slavery, it fell to the newly-formed antislavery Republican party to complete our Republican Constitution with the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Today, the constitutional limits on state and federal power are often criticized as “undemocratic” and even ignored altogether. This book explains the origins of our Republican Constitution, how it has been undermined, and the proper role of judges in securing the sovereignty of We the People, each and every one.

So if you pre-order yours here today, you can truly say you were among the first!

CALLING ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS INTERESTED IN PROTECTING FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS: There is just one week left to register for the 2015 FIRE Student Network Conference, taking place July 24–26 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The event is completely free to attend, and travel stipends are available. Submit your application today!

ARE HAPPIER LAWYERS, CHEAPER LEGAL FEES ON THE HORIZON? Declining law school applications signal positive transformation of legal profession, Glenn Reynolds notes in his latest USA Today column.

SMART PARKING: Cities could dramatically ease traffic congestion, free up parking spots, and make money in the process if they made their parking meters smarter. City Journal’s Emily Washington says they just need to adopt the sort of congestion pricing that has successfully guaranteed drivers a fast commute on roads with tolls that vary according to the demand. The technology exists thanks to the electronic parking meters that are already being used. On the streets of central business districts, up to 30 percent of the drivers at any time aren’t actually going anywhere — they’re just looking for a parking space. Smarter meters would cost more at peak times, but by guaranteeing that spaces would be readily available, they’d unclog the streets and save valuable time for everyone.

ANOTHER CONSTITUTIONAL REWRITE: This time it was a Supreme Court rewrite of the Elections Clause, in the Arizona State Legislature vs. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission decision.  While the Court majority upheld the state legislature’s standing to sue, it also upheld the validity of the ballot measure that transferred the power to draw legislative districts from the state legislature to an independent commission.  According to the Wall Street Journal editorial:

In 2000 Arizona voters approved a ballot measure to amend the state constitution and give a five-member commission the power to draw the map for Congressional districts. The idea was to take redistricting away from politicians who invariably use it for partisan advantage.

Good intention, but the Elections Clause says the “times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” And the legislature didn’t sanction the referendum.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg nonetheless writes for the liberals and Anthony Kennedythat when the Framers wrote the word “legislature” they didn’t mean “legislature.” They meant it loosely because “the people themselves are the originating source of all the powers of government.”

The Founders weren’t perfect but they were more precise wordsmiths than the average Supreme Court Justice. For example, when they meant “the people,” they wrote “the people.” So when they wrote “the legislature,” confidence is high that they meant “the legislature.”

It’s been a bad week for words at the Supreme Court.  

FOUR THINGS I LEARNED WHEN MY TODDLER LOCKED ME IN HIS BEDROOM, not the least of which is, “If bedroom doors lock from the outside, it’s just a matter of time before something goes wrong,” Tricia Lott Williford writes at the new PJ Media Parenting section.

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ARE HAPPIER LAWYERS, CHEAPER LEGAL FEES ON THE HORIZON? Declining law school applications signal positive transformation of legal profession, Glenn Reynolds notes in his latest USA Today column.

PUERTO RICO GOES BROKE.

GEORGE WILL: A GREEK DEFAULT WOULD BE A VALUABLE LESSON IN BASIC ECONOMICS:

Since joining the Eurozone in 2001, Greece has borrowed a sum 1.7 times its 2013 GDP. Its 25 percent unemployment (50 percent among young workers) results from a 25 percent shrinkage of GDP. It is a mendicant reduced to hoping to “extend and pretend” forever. But extending the bailout and pretending that creditors will someday be paid encourages other European socialists to contemplate shedding debts — other people’s money that is no longer fun.

Greece, with just 11 million people and 2 percent of the Eurozone’s GDP, is unlikely to cause a contagion by leaving the zone. If it also leaves the misbegotten European Union, this evidence of the EU’s mutability might encourage Britain’s “Euro-skeptics” when, later this year, that nation has a referendum on reclaiming national sovereignty by withdrawing from the EU. If Greece so cherishes its sovereignty that it bristles at conditions imposed by creditors, why is it in the EU, the perverse point of which is to “pool” nations’ sovereignties in order to dilute national consciousness?

The EU has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament whose powers subtract from those of national legislatures, a bureaucracy no one admires or controls, and rules of fiscal rectitude that no member is penalized for ignoring. It does, however, have in Greece a member whose difficulties are wonderfully didactic.

It cannot be said too often: There cannot be too many socialist smashups. The best of these punish reckless creditors whose lending enables socialists to live, for a while, off other people’s money. The world, which owes much to ancient Athens’s legacy, including the idea of democracy, is indebted to today’s Athens for the reminder that reality does not respect a democracy’s delusions.

Of course. But the people who need to hear the lesson the most are the least likely to learn anything from it.

Socialism: it’s gotta work this time!

OH MY: TED CRUZ SAYS STATES CAN IGNORE SCOTUS GAY MARRIAGE RULING: Mary Katharine Ham writes in response, “I’m pro-same-sex marriage AND I have a lot of issues with the actual legal reasoning, such that it is, in both Obergefell and King vs. Burwell, but I don’t think the answer is to ignore those decisions any more than I’d support advocating for ignoring Citizens United if you’re a liberal governor who doesn’t like it.”

FOUR (NEARLY) GUARANTEED WAYS FOR PARENTS TO STAY SANE: From Stephen Green who adds, “never feel guilty about doing what it takes to keep your sanity, because you owe it to your kids not to go too crazy.”

BULLETIN TO GOP: WAKE UP, LITTLE SUZY!, shouts Roger Simon, who adds, “If you’re a social conservative and dedicated to traditional marriage, time to go back to the place it’s really decided.  And that’s not the Supreme Court of the Congress or the state house, but in our homes, churches, synagogues and, if you can dare to go near them, mosques:”

Meanwhile, in the real world, we have  GIGANTIC problems.  Obama is about to hand nuclear weapons to the Iranians who are well on their way to building ICBMs that can reach Chicago, if they haven’t already.  A nuclear-armed Iran is ultimately more dangerous than the Soviet Union because some of its leaders, at least, believe in a fanatical religious system that has no fear of armageddon.  Good-bye mutually assured destructions.

Read the whole thing.