[durasell]

Oh, yeah, married parents who actually raise their own children are so '50s.



I didn't say that or intend to say that -- but note, in the last 120 years we've gone from multi-generational extended families in rural communities to the nuclear family of the suburbs and exurbs, to single parent families and blended families and back to multi-generational families.

Likewise, we've gone from extended families within a single community where it was unusual for someone to travel 500 miles from home during their lifetime (except in cases of military service) to families scattering thousands of miles apart in an age where it is not unusual to live in four or five different communities over a lifetime.

Some of this change was due to technology, some to economics, and some to educational levels. But the changes took place.

Families did not start in the 1950s -- in fact, the nuclear family with a single wage earner is/was an anomaly in human history.

[madprof98]

Sounds like you belong to the school of Stephanie Coontz, one of the academics who try to trash marriage by demonstrating that male-female relationships down through the ages have taken so many different forms that just about anything would be (a) perfectly normal and (b) very much OK. Meanwhile, the best exemplars of her way of thinking continue to drop in and out of casual no-commitments relationships, leaving behind kids the rest of us are expected to raise (and later expected to incarcerate, if we know what's good for us).

Ever read Myron Magnet's book, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass. President Bush has said that it is his favorite book after the Bible. Every real conservative should be familiar with its thesis.