Red states= higher divorce & teen pg rates.....family values analyzed

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/socialstudies.php

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved.

The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

The country's lowest divorce rate belongs to none other than Massachusetts, the original home of same-sex marriage. Palinites might wish that Massachusetts's enviable marital stability were an anomaly, but it is not. The pattern is robust. States that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in both 2004 and 2008 boast lower average rates of divorce and teenage childbirth than do states that voted for the Republican in both elections. (That is using family data for 2006 and 2007, the latest available.)

Six of the seven states with the lowest divorce rates in 2007, and all seven with the lowest teen birthrates in 2006, voted blue in both elections. Six of the seven states with the highest divorce rates in 2007, and five of the seven with the highest teen birthrates, voted red. It's as if family strictures undermine family structures.

<snip>

Fact 1 gave rise to a strong linkage between sexual activity, marriage, and procreation. It was (and still is) difficult for teenagers and young adults to abstain from sex, so one important norm was not to have sex before marriage. If you did have premarital sex and conceived a child, you had to marry.

Under those rules, families formed early, whether by choice or at the point of a shotgun. That was all right, however, because (Fact 2) the man could get a job and support the family, so the woman could probably stay home and raise the kids. Neither member of the couple had to have an extended education in order to succeed as spouse or parent.

True, young people often make poor marital choices. But that, too, was usually all right, at least from society's point of view, because divorce was stigmatized and fairly hard to get. Even a flawed marriage was likely to be a stable one. Over time, the spouses would grow into their responsibilities.

That is what "families form adults" means. Many teenagers and young adults formed families before they reached maturity and then came to maturity precisely by shouldering family responsibilities.

<snip>

In this very different world, early family formation is often a calamity. It short-circuits skill acquisition by knocking one or both parents out of school. It carries a high penalty for immature marital judgment in the form of likely divorce. It leaves many young mothers, now bearing both the children and the cultural responsibility for pregnancy, without the option of ever marrying at all.

New norms arise for this environment, norms geared to prevent premature family formation. The new paradigm prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until marriage, it enjoins: Don't form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility. In other words, adults form families. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning.

Red America still prefers the traditional model. In 2008, when news emerged that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential nominee was pregnant, traditionalists were reassured rather than outraged, because Bristol Palin followed the time-honored rules by announcing she would marry the father. They were kids, to be sure, but they would form a family and grow up together, as so many before them had done. Blue America, by contrast, was censorious. Bristol had committed the unforgivable sin of starting a family too young. If red and blue America seemed to be talking past one another about family values, it's because they were.

<snip>

A further twist makes the story more interesting, and more sobering. Cahn and Carbone find an asymmetry. Blue norms are well adapted to the Information Age. They encourage late family formation and advanced education. They produce prosperous parents with graduate degrees, low divorce rates, and one or two over-protected children.

Red norms, on the other hand, create a quandary. They shun abortion (which is blue America's ultimate weapon against premature parenthood) and emphasize abstinence over contraception. But deferring sex in today's cultural environment, with its wide acceptance of premarital sex, is hard. Deferring sex and marriage until you get a college or graduate degree -- until age 23 or 25 or beyond -- is harder still. "Even the most devout overwhelmingly do not abstain until marriage," Cahn and Carbone write.

having to pay taxes and "big" government, are those very states that are getting the biggest return from the Federal govt on every dollar they pay in..


Once again..showing they are so stupid that they do not even know how stupid they are.
It is so very ironic that those that are considered "blue" states are paying the highest in taxes compared to what they get back from the Federal govt.
The "red" states dominate the list of those that get the biggest bang for their Federal tax buck!!



http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22685.html

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/publications/what_came_to_and_left_your_state_in_2005

they start preaching this to the children, from the beginning of understanding words. it is said often. drilled into the people. over and over and over and over. in cult like manner. at a certain point, our spirit, lite, subconscious, however you believe, have got to prove that we are all sinners. ergo, they set up traps in life to make this their reality.

my two kids went to a christian private school for a time. prek, they started learning bible quotes, and this was the first one. had no problem at all teaching to oldest son. my lesson for him, that none of us are perfect, and yet.... we love ourselves. we are all perfectly imperfect.

with my youngest son three years later, i am teaching from the we are all sinners card and i stop in mid sentence. look at this little devil child. totally change my tone of drilling for memorization to... lite and laughing and snarky .... look baby, they say you are a sinner. my beautiful little angle of perfection in all your lite. how precious you are. no sinner. i dont see a sinner.

why?

if he learns he is a sinner, then he is going to do wrong and then say.... hey, it says i am a sinner. and at 4 i did NOT want to feed him this crap, because of who he is. he would take it and run with it.

just a story.

And everything they said rang true to me, having grown up in a "family values" area. I've long thought that the high divorce rates were caused by horny teenagers getting married at 18 because they can't stand it any longer and want to have church-sanctioned sex. Then, a few years and several kids down the road, they're totally different people. And since women aren't as economically dependent, they can go ahead and get divorced.

had another man all ready to marry. these women were on three, four and more marriages. when i FIRST moved here, i found it fascinating.

In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families.'

but in a general sense this make sense (langauage issues lol)....at least I've seen this type of phenomina, but had a hard time putting it into words. For some reason I was want to blame religion rather that politics.

I'm not all that surprised. In a lot of rural conservative areas, most people are married by the time they are 21.

now we just have to figure out a way to get the two "types" talking.

Can't expect anything less from states that still use corporal punishment and teach creationism. Lowest test scores in the nation i believe.

When you've got solidly middle-class parents, you have both an example of deferring marriage until you're financially stable and the family support to make it possible.

When you grow up poor and don't have any prospects except finishing high school (with luck) and going to work pumping gas or mining coal, there's no incentive to aim for anything more long-term.

The red states cited in the article are mainly the poorest states as well. And they get back more from the federal government than they pay in taxes for the same reason.

Clinging to god, guns, and traditional values follows on the poverty -- it doesn't cause it. The values serve to validate the lifestyle they're already stuck with. But poverty is the root cause of the rest -- and it's the only place to break the generational cycle.

with this cause and effect statement:
Clinging to god, guns, and traditional values follows on the poverty -- it doesn't cause it.