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{"id":789,"date":"2010-04-10T01:18:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-10T01:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2010\/04\/789\/"},"modified":"2010-04-10T01:18:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-10T01:18:00","slug":"789","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2010\/04\/789.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

THANK GOD FOR MISSISSIPPI<\/a><\/span>: There is a fun meme called \u201cred families vs. blue families.\u201d This Seussian formula may not be especially based on the book of the same name, which I haven\u2019t read and which I therefore don\u2019t want to assimilate to the sins of its followers. But the meme itself is not really new.<\/p>\n

The idea is that families in \u201cblue states\u201d are relatively adept at transmitting some aspects of a marriage culture to their children. Massachusetts, e.g., is home to families where the children mate for life. Meanwhile \u201cred states\u201d produce children (they produce more<\/span> children, usually, by the way) who marry in haste and repent in somewhat-delayed-haste, lots of divorces and out-of-wedlock births and similar signs of family-values hypocrisy. When I say \u201cthis isn\u2019t new,\u201d I mean, \u201cI got 10 cents off my Caribou coffee by knowing that Mississippi has an extraordinarily high rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies more than a year ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are facts, and there are a lot of ways of responding to these facts. You can explore ways in which the contemporary economy and culture, by (for example) prioritizing postsecondary education and stigmatizing living with one\u2019s parents, has made it extraordinarily difficult to sustain a culture of more-or-less postponing sex until marriage. You could criticize the notion of marriage as the capper on life\u2019s to-do list, to be sought only once all the other boxes are checked and you\u2019re \u201cstable,\u201d rather than a foundation for a later stable life. You could, in other words, ask why a consumerist culture is so hostile to a communal and marriage-based way of life.<\/p>\n

You could maybe talk about Protestantism! Catholic states tend to have very different problems from Protestant ones: They tend to be aging states\u2013whether we\u2019re talking about Massachusetts or Italy\u2013where divorce is rare but birthrates are low. What can the competing Christian cultures teach one another?<\/p>\n

You could look for institutions and traditions within so-called \u201cred state\u201d cultures which promote lifelong marriage and serve to more-or-less-okay manage the problem of intercourse. You could find heroes and show how \u201cred state\u201d life works<\/span>, when it works, and which conditions need to be in place for it to work.<\/p>\n

These are all things you could do.<\/p>\n

The other really fun thing you could do, though, is blame \u201cred state\u201d families for being Not Our Kind, Dear. It is just so sad that their pathetic religious delusions make them slutty hypocrites. (Yum, by the way; I think hypocrisy makes your breasts bigger.) You could argue that they\u2019re really promoting abortion<\/a>, \u2019cause it\u2019s their fault they haven\u2019t adapted to the contracepting, college-educated ways of the elite. It\u2019s not about poverty, or the fatalism it breeds, or the terrifying knowledge of how close you really are to falling off the ladder. It\u2019s about Baptists suck<\/span>.<\/p>\n

You could wage class war, in other words, on the side of the privileged. You could focus on shaming people who are really different from you, and not on figuring out how marriage and family life can be strengthened across a variety of religious and moral beliefs and a variety of class and cultural backgrounds.<\/p>\n

Of course, if the (for example) Catholic view of marriage is simply doomed and pathetic, then I guess it\u2019s just ripping off the Band-Aid quickly to say so. But I really think if you spend any time with actual humans actually trying to make decisions about their sexual lives, their unborn children, their religion, and their relationships, you will not sound the way a lot of the \u201cred vs. blue families\u201d commentators sound.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"