Ross and Reihan are right!

Oral contraception undermined the patriarchal family whose stability depended upon keeping women bare foot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. Just so, civil rights legislation undermined the South's apartheid society.

Why even mention it? What's the point?

While I generally agree with Ross and Reihan that absentee fatherhood and divorce negatively effect children, I believe the authors vastly overstate these trends as factors contributing to working class economic malaise.

Hello! Two one income households are much worse off economically than one two income household. The number of wage earners in a household and household income are strongly correlated. How this correlation could be vastly over stated is hard to understand.

Twenty years ago I left an emotionally abusive husband and remade life for myself and my children. I can't begin to tell you how happy I am that during the marriage I had access to birth control; leaving a bad marriage with 2 children was difficult - leaving with 4 or 5 would have been impossible.

I've often thought back to the women from my neighborhood that I knew when I was a kid in the '50s and wondered how many of them were probably trapped - unable to leave because they had no education or work experience and 3 to 5 children. Or the occasional 'divorcee' who was suspected of sexual impropriety simply by virtue of her marital status.

I had a college education and a 20 year resume, it was 15 years into the second wave, and still it was a struggle.

I saw Ross Douthat on Bill Moyers last Friday - before I knew anything about this book he struck me as arrogant and spoiled. He had no compassion or understanding for anyone outside of his orbit - whenever Moyers asked about the problems faced by so many people, he blew off the question to make his conservative point. I thought he was a big jerk and I quit watching before the end of the show because he pissed me off (a rare occurence with Moyers.)

This silliness is actually pretty old. When the Reagan administration was promoting marriage for young African American women as the Solution to All Our Problems, Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out that at the average wage for a young African American male, our young mother would require four husbands to achieve a moderate income for her household. But I don't think that this is what these men have in mind when they talk about stable families. And why does the right wing get to repeat the same old tripe over and over?

Goldstein often seems even more naive than the typical Mount Pleasant intern/entry level professional and this is true here. Yes, many studies suggest that children are better off in two-parent families. And, yes, because this is based on averages, it means that despite this general tendency, lots of kids are not so well-off in two parent households. The effort to promote marriage has been moronic at best. Marriage among African-Americans increased only when long stagnanted wages increased. Better family environments will come only from better economic consitions. promoting unions would accomplish more than the kind of family values claptrap promoted by Douthat.

I don't want to be too aggressive in saying this, but Douthat is a conservative Catholic. He doesn't like birth control pills to begin with, so they are a natural bogeyman.

Since working class people want, need, and are entitled to active sex lives, the truth is, you get rid of the birth control pill and you get MORE single motherhood (along with more women in abusive marriages). The birth conrol pill, far from being a bad thing, is a good thing in terms of reduce the incidence of something Douthat doesn't like. Indeed, legal abortion, which Douthat thinks is murder, also reduces the incidence of single motherhood.

I think we need to press Douthat to be honest. What he wants is for unmarried working class people to give up sex. Because he believes in a supernatural being who has decreed that unmarried people placing their penises into other unmarried people's vaginas is a wrong on the same level as what is happening in Darfur. THAT, and not unwed motherhood, is the reason he opposes the birth control pill.

Re: There may be some positive aspects about divorce on the family but it is simply beyond question that any benefits accruing from divorce are outweighed by the fact that it impoverishes workers and their families and either impoverishes (at worst) or lowers the living standards (at best) of middle class families.

It's my observation that divorces which occur when people are young and childless (and I think these are the majority of divorces) may leave some emotional scars, but they have few to no long term effects otherwise. The problem is mainly with divorces that occur when there are children in the mix.

Re: She doesn't have any sense at all of what kind of life working class people lead or how utterly devastating, economically, divorce is on them.

Grossly overstated. I am from the working class (my father was a truck driver) and I have working class friends. For most of them divorce was not a catastrophe. They had some war stories to tell after, a few had permament lingering bitterness, but most went on with their lives and eventually found more suitable and workable marriages. As I noted above, major problems occured only when there were children.

flextime and telecommuting. Such pro-labor and pro-parenting policies have long be
bag factory.

Thank you for the article was very useful article facebook video

Madison believed that we should have separation of church and state throughout the land, federal and local. There was a fascinating moment during the congressional debate over what became the First Amendment. How could the beloved First Amendment be harmful to religion?

Huntington feared that it would overturn or interfere with Connecticut’s approach, which was to have state-supported religion.
Chat | Chat

This information is very useful! Thanks!
Best regards, Katya, CEO of backup exec hyper v, iscsi initiator for windows