It”s wedding season. A week from now I will be in England on a hen do, what we call a bachelorette party, celebrating before one of my best friends, Luce, gets married.
Another one of my best friends, Callie, just got engaged and will marry her love next summer.
My two cousins who are the same age as me married years ago. And my good friend Sara tied the knot about two years ago and will have her first child in about a month.
For all of my married and engaged friends and family, I”m crossing my fingers in hope that the conclusions leveled in “Red Families v. Blue Families” apply to them.
“Today, couples with college and, especially, graduate degrees tend to cohabit early and marry late, delaying childbirth and raising smaller families than their parents, while enjoying low divorce rates and bearing relatively few children out of wedlock,” the New York Times reported.
“This is one of the themes of ?Red Families v. Blue Families,” a provocative new book by two law professors, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone. The authors depict a culturally conservative ?red America” that”s stuck trying to sustain an outdated social model. By insisting, unrealistically, on chastity before marriage, Cahn and Carbone argue, social conservatives guarantee that their children will get pregnant early and often ? see Palin, Bristol ? leading to teen childbirth, shotgun marriages and high divorce rates.
“This self-defeating cycle could explain why socially conservative states have more family instability than, say, the culturally liberal Northeast. If you”re looking for solid marriages, head to Massachusetts, not Alabama.”
While my friend Luce lives in England and a conservative prime minister was elected in May, I would still argue the country aligns more with blue states than red. My other friends and cousins got married in California. All of my married or affianced friends also have a bachelor”s degree or more.
“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,” according to the National Journal magazine.
Living in this blue state for my entire life, getting an education and waiting to get married and have children was always the path I envisioned for myself.
While blue norms are well adapted to the Information Age with late family formation and advanced education, red norms create a quandary, the New York Times reported.
“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.
“In any case, for a lot of people, a graduate education or even a bachelor”s degree is unrealistic. The injunction to delay family formation until you are 24 and finish your master”s offers these people only cold comfort.
“The result of this red quandary, Cahn and Carbone argue, is a self-defeating backlash. Moral traditionalism fails to prevent premarital sex and early childbirth. Births precipitate more early marriages and unwed parenthood. That, in turn, increases family breakdown while reducing education and earnings.”
Though painting the states blue to improve families is unrealistic, I think we can learn from the happily-ever-after results liberal states produce.
“Whether it”s attainable for most Americans or not, the “blue family” model clearly works: it leads to marital success and material prosperity, and it”s well suited to our mobile, globalized society,” the New York Times reported.
Katy Sweeny is a staff reporter for the Record-Bee. She can be reached at kdsweeny@gmail.com or 263-5636, ext. 37.
