Family Values: Red State vs Blue State

The following is just a small part of a fascinating article by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone.  I strongly encourage you to click through and read the rest of this fine piece that examines the cultural difference between Red State and Blue State families.

Families are on the front lines of the culture wars. Controversies over abortion, same-sex marriage, teen pregnancy, singleparenthood, and divorce have all challenged our images of the American family. Some Americans seek a return to the “mom, dad, and apple pie” family of the 1950s, while others embrace all of our families, including single mothers, gay and lesbian parents, and cohabiting couples. These conflicting perspectives on life’s basic choices affect us all—at the national level, in state courts and legislatures, in drafting local ordinances, and in our own families.

In our new book, Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, we go behind the overblown rhetoric and political posturing of the family values conflict. What we have found is that the new information economy is transforming the family—and doing so in ways that create a crisis for marriage-based communities across the country.

The “blue families” of our title are on one side of the cultural controversy. These families have reaped the handsome rewards available to the well-educated middle class who are able to invest in both their daughters’ and sons’ earning potential. Their children defer family formation until both partners reach emotional maturity and financial independence. 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. Those who have embraced the blue family model have low divorce rates, relatively few teen births, and good incomes. Yet, the ability to realize the advantages of the new blue family system appears to be very much a class-based affair. Women who graduate from college are the only women in American society whose marriage rates have increased, and they and their partners form the group whose divorce rates have most appreciably declined.

The terms of the successful blue family order—embrace the pill, encourage education, and accept sexuality as a matter of private choice—are a direct affront to the “red families” of our title and to social conservatives who see their families in peril. Driven by religious teachings about sin and guilt and based in communities whose social life centers around married couples with children, the red family paradigm continues to celebrate the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation. Red family champions correctly point out that the growing numbers of single-parent families threaten the well-being of the next generation, and they accurately observe that greater male fidelity and female “virtue” strengthen relationships. Yet, red regions of the country have higher teen pregnancy rates, more shotgun marriages, and lower average ages at marriage and first birth. What the red family paradigm has not acknowledged is that the changing economy has undermined the path from abstinence through courtship to marriage. As a result, abstinence into the mid-20s is unrealistic, shotgun marriages correspond with escalating divorce rates, and early marriages, whether prompted by love or necessity, often founder on the economic realities of the modern economy, which disproportionately rewards investment in higher education. Efforts to insist on a return to traditional pieties thus inevitably clash with the structure of the modern economy and produce recurring cries of moral crisis… [emphasis added]

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This article confirms what I have known for some time.  The hallmark of red state ideals is ignorance.  Often time we impugn the morality of these people, and I confess to joining-in, but for the most part, those who hold red state views are good people.  They want the same things we want.  They work too hard for too little.  They are just too ignorant to understand that they are trying to carry 19th century ideas into the 21st century.  They have been brainwashed to believe that the very ideas, needed to achieve the happiness and stability for their families that they seek, are a threat to them.  The irony is that people, who hold views opposite to theirs, are far more likely to achieve the family values they espouse than they are.  The true villains in this are the purveyors of the lies that imprison them, not the red staters themselves.  The true villains exploit their labor for slave wages.  The the true villains demand their obedience to Supply-side Jesus (the GOP invention, not the real one) and his gospel of war, greed and hate.  The true villains undermine their education to keep them ignorant enough to enthrall.  The true villains are the Republican party and their corporate masters.