Posted on 05/06/2010 10:00:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
Two law professors have waded deep into the minefields of the culture war and come up with a doozy of a hypothesis: We Americans are not just divided politically into red states and blue states, our very families are colored-coded red and blue.
Oh, and the blue family is beating the red family, hands down.
"Blue family champions celebrate the commitment to equality that makes companionate relationships possible and the sexual freedom that allows women to fully participate in society," say Naomi Cahn and June Carbone in their book "Blue Families v. Red Families." "Those who have embraced the blue family model have low divorce rates, relatively few teen births, and good incomes."
What is a "blue family," you ask? On the individual level, blue families appear to be progressives who marry late -- often after finishing grad school -- and have relatively low rates of divorce or unwed childbearing. This is the blue family paradox: Blue families may talk liberal, but they end up living bourgeois lives.
The red family paradox, according to Cahn and Carbone, is that socially conservative red states have higher rates of divorce and teen childbearing. "Are 'family values' undermining the family?" as one reviewer put it.
The more you look at this provocative thesis, the more improbable it becomes.
The elephant in the room is the one issue Cahn and Carbone want to avoid because they wish to tone down the culture wars around the family: abortion.
The five states with the highest abortion rates, they note, are all blue family states: New York, Delaware, Washington, New Jersey and Rhode Island. By contrast, the states with the lowest abortion rates are mostly red or at least purple: Utah, Idaho, Colorado, South Dakota and Kentucky.
Could attitudes toward abortion be the real source of the red family/blue family divide?
Fueling this suspicion is the data that Cahn and Carbone provide on the out-of-wedlock birthrates. For here, the neat red/blue lines break down, especially once race is taken into account. In 2004, the five states with the highest white out-of-wedlock birthrates were a politically mixed lot: Nevada, Maine, West Virginia, Indiana and Vermont. States with the lowest rates of unwed childbearing were also mixed by party dominance: Utah, New Jersey, Connecticut, Colorado, Idaho and the District of Columbia. The authors note this fact but never integrate it into their theory.
The data that do not fit are usually the most important data.
The blue state/red state family divide appears to be largely driven by different values regarding abortion. Red states have more opposition to abortion politically (which makes them red), which would tend to result in more early childbearing, earlier ages at marriage and a more mixed record with regard to out-of-wedlock births. (More traditional commitment to marriage would drive down the out-of-wedlock birthrate, but greater moral objection to aborting unexpected pregnancies would drive up a state's out-of-wedlock birthrate.)
The marriage gap has a great deal to do with social class. People with graduate degrees may be more sexually liberal in theory, but end up surprisingly conservative in actual practice. They tend to discount the importance of public moral norms around sex and marriage because they see their families flourishing under postmodern conditions, and because they and their children have the most access to "private" social, human and moral capital.
Nonetheless, in spite of their theoretical imperfections, if Cahn and Carbone can convince progressives that reducing divorce and early unwed childbearing are not traditional family values at all but postmodern blue ones to be embraced as the happy fruit of liberal social values, they will have done a service to our country.
Yow, the Red Family says. JUNIOR...YOU´RE GOING TO GET TO THE TOP.
THE Blue Family says. Junior. Threaten lawsuits, gov´t quotas, racism, and count on ACORN to be there to make sure you get your share.
“and the sexual freedom that allows women to fully participate in society”
That right there is why we have legal abortion. Women decided that they needed the “right” to f*ck like bunny rabbits without being “punished with a baby.”
Mine has had 3 democrat defections this year. Out of 5 people.
Republican victories were marked with BLUE until the last couple election cycles. Communist Revolutionary states will always be known for their Red Stars and Red Flags.
And the “red” families encourage their kids to join the military, police, and fire departments, protecting the “blue” faimily kids who are busy doing drugs while in college studying women’s issues and environmental science.
Because if you have an abortion you can pretend that you never got preggers in the first place.
All pregnancy statistics should include the number of pregnancies that did not come to term either because of health issues or because of induced abortion. Our infant mortality rates (50+ million babies dead from abortion since 1973) are shockingly high.
Don’t paint with a broad brush. If you look at rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and violent crime, they are higher in the South than they are in the very blue northeast and upper midwest.
Blue Families tell their children, not to worry, everyone gets an equal share of the pie; The result is equal poverty for all!
We're crazy to let our enemies set the terms of the debate.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
“Don’t paint with a broad brush. If you look at rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and violent crime, they are higher in the South than they are in the very blue northeast and upper midwest.”
I don’t believe that I said anything about divorce rates.
Yes, higher in the South than in, say, Minnesota or North Dakota. But the difference is demographics. For example, over 70% of black children are born out of wedlock. Hispanic rates of bastardy are almost as high. Consequently, the more blacks and hispaqnics in an area, the higher the rate of illegitimacy. Comparing geographic areas is meaningless for this purpose unless everything is carefully disaggregated for demographic differences and some other factors.
NO ONE ever referred to such victories as “Red States” or “Blue States” until the Pravda Media flipped the colors.
Luckily, this guy held his ground and refused to calculate all of his maps. His site is a great resource:
http://www.uselectionatlas.org/
Why are Republicans in blue and Democrats in red (while most other news organizations have the opposite)?
Elephants have a blue hue and donkeys have a red hue :)
(Actually, as a visitor pointed out, elephants are actually gray - but they appear to look more blue than red :)
Red and blue are chosen for the maps because they both are primary colors and because they both are incorporated in the flag. The choice of which party is represented by which color was somewhat arbitrary. I was perhaps influenced by maps that I had seen in the distant past (I still remember the solid blue field of Ronald Reagan’s re-election in my hometown newspaper in 1984 - I was 14 at the time). Also, internationally, red typically represents parties on the left side of the political spectrum, i.e. the Democrats here in the U.S.
I think he’s revised this statement but I seem to recall a remark that he wasn’t going to spend the effort to redraw the maps to suit the latest whims of the networks and press.
My “red” kid kicked your “blue” kid’s ass!
I'm sorry, I see no reason to analyze this issue by race. The data provided are for whites only. One might hazard a guess that this is because the results contradicted their desired conclusion when all races were included.
Last time I looked DC had more abortions than live births. Fit that into this demagoguery.
Let's also not forget that upper middle class teens are less likely to get knocked up than those from lower middle class families, who are in turn less likely to get knocked up than the poor. Rates of abortion are indeed higher in places like California and New York than they are in Alabama. However, as a native New Yorker, I can also tell you that the largest group of young women getting abortions are African American.
As a Political Science major in college a number of years ago, we were taught that socio-economic status (SES) largely determined party identification.
I no longer think this is the case. I think the more religious a family is and the more often they attend religious services, more often than not, is a better indication of that family’s political leanings.
I think it was Whittaker Chambers who once characterized the struggle best as a battle between those who place their faith in God versus those who place their faith in man.
I look at it a little differently. I love red, it’s a great color, I’m not willing to concede it to the commies just because they think they own it, so I’m glad that the political symbolism of red has been somewhat neutralized. As far as I’m concerned, let the commies and far left use brown as their symbolic color, just like the fascists have done, because there’s so little difference between all of them.
Blue was for the incumbent.
Red for the challenger.
The 2000 election changed the meaning in the media.
...And the percentage of college grads, and whether the degrees actually mean much, is partly a reflection of demographics.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.