Posted on 05/31/2005 12:32:34 PM PDT by COUNTrecount
NewsweekJune 6 issue - For the true commitment-phobe, living among the Na people in southwestern China would be paradise. The Na are the only known society that completely shuns marriage. Instead, says Stephanie Coontz in her new book, "Marriage, a History," brothers help sisters raise the children they conceive through casual sex with nonfamily members (incest is strictly taboo). Will we all be like the Na in the future? With divorce and illegitimacy rates still high, the institution of marriage seems headed for obsolescence in much of the world. Coontz, a family historian at Evergreen State College in Washington, doesn't proclaim the extinction of marriage, but she does argue that dramatic changes in family life over the past 30 years represent an unprecedented social revolution—and there's no turning back. The only hope is accepting these changes and figuring out how to work with them. The decline of marriage "doesn't have to spell catastrophe," Coontz says. "We can make marriages better and make nonmarriages work as well."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Well, if we are comparing our society to that of one where people earn an average of $1 a day, work by hand in agriculture 12-16 hours a day and just having a B/W TV in your mud shack is considered middle class...
Didn't Margaret Meade write similar crap about the Samoan people 80 years ago?
Except, for homosexuals; they are the only people in the world for whom marriage is not an outdated concept.
Don't tell me. Since the author is a woman, what needs to happen is men have to do more of the house work.
Evergreen Statre College is a joke also. My cousin got a "degree" there for burning a music CD. He didn't create any of the music on it, he just burned the disc. The neo-Luddites that run the show over there proclaimed it a minor miracle and gave him a BA.
Anti-Christian, you say? Yes, I say, after all is stripped away, that is what this is about.
Just keep in mind that that's exactly the sort of society in which the institution of marriage originally evolved.
That fool's errand successfully distracts them from the near universal failure of their plans in the real world.
Marraige is becoming more meaningless IMHO is because of what is happening with families in general...
If you are not planning on having a family why get married?
Although the bible does condemn fornication, you don't have to be married to have a commited love....
This is exactly what I told my 75 year old mother when whe told me of her wedding plans. Three years later and in a miserable marriage, she wished she would have listened to me.
This sounds like the "Ik" a supposed tribe in Africa wherein everyone is simply beastly to everyone else. It eventually proved to be fictional.
So how far back in the Stone Age are the Na people and why are we supposed to use them for role models?
Wasn't that a lousy movie starring Richard Dreyfuss.
Agreed..
The Evergreen College mention was a red flag for me too. A girl from my year in high school went there. She was a very grumpy, bigoted, ultra-liberal. She spent the four years in high school constantly bashing and ridiculing Catholicism (it was a Catholic school). She was especially peeved by the Church's audacity to condemn abortion. She said that there was no moral difference between killing a plant, an animal, and a human, and since we kill plants there's no reason not to kill humans (both unborn and born!). I did not keep in touch with her after graduation, but I can't imagine she got much better at Evergreen.
How can we forget Evergreen's most famous alumna, Miss Lewinsky?
SD
actually, I believe Monica went to Lewis and Clark College - which consistently tops the Princeton Review's list of least religious colleges.
Stephanie Coontz is an aging 60s Marxist, a former member of SDS at the University of Washington. I remember her well.
SDS??
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