[Peace-discuss] er, Naomi *Cahn* on AM-580 10am Monday: "Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture"

[Stuart Levy]

I misspoke at today's AWARE meeting -- wasn't Naomi Klein speaking tomorrow,
but one Naomi Cahn -- I'd misheard the announcement.

*Cahn* will be on Focus 580 tomorrow (Monday) at 10:06am, 
talking about a book she co-authored with June Carbone:
"Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture"

Among other issues, they talk about how family values have fueled
increasing disparity in US society.  Sounds interesting.



There was a discussion with both authors about the book on FireDogLake:

   http://firedoglake.com/2010/04/18/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-naomi-cahn-and-june-carbone-red-families-v-blue-families-legal-polarization-and-the-creation-of-culture/

Some quotes (follow the above page's link to the discussion thread):


We started on this in response to the 2004 elections and the op eds that
indicated that red states had higher teen pregnancy and divorce rates. But once
we started looking into the statistics, we realized that the most surprising
thing we found was how well college-educated women had done. We also realized
that our own lives had turned out quite well. When I was a teenager, ambitious
women had a strong sense that it would be difficult to have a career and a
conventional family. But Naomi and I are both very happy with how our family
lives have turned out.

[...]

For some families, the more they feel threatened - and today’s Great Recession
is quite threatening - then the greater importance they place on adherence to
the traditional values that have given them better lives than their hard living
cousins and siblings.

Blue families generally approach social issues in terms of equality and
autonomy. To those who see their families in peril, however, equality and
autonomy sound altogether too much like license and promiscuity. Ironically,
those states that, for example emphasize abstinence only education, limit
public subsidization of contraception, restrict access to abortion (and, yes,
oppose gay marriage) have HIGHER teen birth and divorce rates. Yet, the failure
of the family values movement simply produces another round of moral panic and
calls for more draconian restrictions.

[...]

Blue areas (but not all the people in them) are wealthier, and the leadership
in these states tends to be more liberal. Poorer people in all states tend to
be Democrats and social conservatives. They are Democrats in large part because
they are voting their pocketbooks. The group that shifts from red to blue
states is what used to be called the white working class. Today, this group,
which makes between $50,000 and $100,000, has shifted toward the Republican
camp. And what tends to be invisible at the national level is that this is the
group experiencing the greatest rise in non-marital birth between the late
eighties and the year 2000.

[...]

We were surprised among other things with how the relationship between the age
of marriage and divorce has changed.  We assumed - of course, later marriages
will be more stable. But we found that if you look at the marriages of 1980, it
didn’t matter much whether you were 23 or 28 so long as you didn’t marry as a
teen.  Today, the marriages at 28 weather the test of time better than the
marriages at 23.  We realized that this is not about age; it’s about the support
that exists for marriage.

[...]

We were also surprised by some of the legal issues that we examined. It is not,
for example, surprising that the states most likely to accord legal recognition
to same-sex relationships are blue (all of those that recognize same-sex
marriage are blue). On other issues, however, where state courts are working
issues out on their own, there is more consensus and less division. For
example, most states have moved towards a similar position when it comes to the
effect of post-divorce sexual relationships on custody decision making.

And we were also delighted to find places of potential agreement. One of the
reasons that we focus on contraception is that 90% of women will use some form
of contraception during their lifetimes. While abortion has been defined as a
red/blue issue, contraception need not be.

[...]

Education is important, though in complicated ways. We start with the
observation that the real “sex” revolution was the one in the fifties. The
number of women who had sex by age 21 increased from 40% to 70%, the average
age of marriage for women fell to 20, and the number of brides giving birth
within 8 and 1/2 months of the marriage grew to 30%, the highest number since
1800. These trends were on a collision course with the growing opportunities
for women, which required more education. Marriage at 20 derails that. So we
see the big changes as starting with those that affected the college educated.

We see the challenge for those who continue to hold traditional values as the
difficulty of encourging abstinence until the late twenties combined the lack
of support for early marriage. When I talk to my Mormon friends, who still
marry early, they describe the tremendous family support they received that
helped them to stay in school even after they married.  But for most of the
country, marriage signals independence.  Bristol and Levi both quit school once
she decided to have the baby.

What really changed is the lack of good paying jobs for young men.

African-Americans are on their own trajectory. The big push into the middle
class came with the jobs that opened up during the War and then the relatively
prosperous fifties. The black family, however, has been losing ground since at
least 1955, and the latest studies indicate that family form and marriage are
less important for African-American children than for white children.

[...]


In the fifties and sixties, young men could get jobs and stay there. They were
in workplaces with other married men who were role models.  Today, my children
are spending their twenties in internships that prepare them for grad school.
Then, they switch cities when they graduate, conclude they need more education
and go back to school.  This doesn’t support family life.  For those who don’t
go to college, it often means starting your own business or having a variety of
not very stable part-time jobs.  In the meantime, young husbands have friends
who aren’t married and want to party and their wives, who often make at least
as much as the men, won’t put up with that.

[...]

We have been taking a close look at Hispanic families. We try hard not to
generalize in the book because there is such a difference between recent
immigrants and families who have been in the US longer, and between Puerto
Ricans in the Northeast compared to Mexican-Americans in the southwest. But we
do find several striking trends. First, Catholics generally tend to be more
moderate than many other religious groups. This is true in part because
Catholics still tend to attend neighborhood churches rather than find the
church where they agree with the priest. This means Catholic churchs still
include people of diverse viewpoints.

Second, we find we find that the structure of Hispanic families is changing
very rapidly, but we can’t always tease out how much is the effect of
immigration. For example, in the nineties, the group whose non-marital birth
rates was changing most rapidly were whites between the ages of 20 and 24.
Today, it is Hispanic women in their twenties. When I was in CA, the statistics
I saw suggested that as Mexican-American women became more Amerianized, they
become more likely to have non-marital pregnancies, but their birth rates also
started dropping very quickly. We can’t tell whether the recent increase in
non-marital births, which has accelerated over the last five years, is more
concentrated in American born Hispanic women or women who were born abroad.

[...]

We found a lot of suggestions in our research that gender roles were changing
even in conservative parts of the country. What struck me the most was Paul
Amato’s new book, Alone Together, that finds that the most divorce prone
couples are those with traditional gender expectations who can’t realize them
because the husband can’t earn enough to support the wife, while she is very
unhappy about having to work full time.

[...]

So as I say in the blog entry, the emergence of stay-at-home dads has created a
new role for laid-off dads, which I think is nothing but positive. In today’s
context, it just gives a man more dignity to be able to say that now he’s
focusing on his kids instead of just being an unemployed bum. The secret weapon
here is the wife. If she can see that as a positive thing, that will help the
family get through the rough patch. But many women are filled with fear at the
prospect of being the sole breadwinner for any length of time; controlling that
fear is crucial.

So to answer your question directly, I think (this will sound odd to many
people) that men are indeed making the transition (they’re about a quarter of
the way there, I’d guess) but that moms thrown into breadwinner roles face
profound challenges, in part because the role of woman who supports her family
still lacks visibility -- I’m actually quite annoyed that stay-at-home dads get so
much attention in both academia and the media.  I’d love to see more about
breadwinning moms -- Canadian sociologist Andrea Doucet is currently running a
study of moms whose results I’m looking forward to seeing.  Aaron Rochlen at UT
has also been looking at the mommy half of the equation.

[...]

[w]e are very pessimistic about abortion. The new trend over the last decade is
that now, if you are a conservative Rep., you will be anti-abortion even if you
don’t attend a church that takes that position.  The right has really dug in on
the abortion issue because it works so well politically.  They get away with it
because all the indications are that middle class women are having fewer
abortions because they have much more effective access to contraception.
67% of abortions are by women of color.

When we write about this, we get attacked by those who say — you see poor women
are either already using contraception and it doesn’t work and they really want
the babies. What they are missing is that contraceptives have improved —
if you have a doctor. So the disparities in unintended pregnancies have gotten
worse.  The result — a lot more poor babies, and with the end of welfare
in the nineties, less support for their mothers. It’s tragic.

[...]

We’ve found that the big changes are the availability of injectibles, and the
safer use of IUDs, both of which require access to doctors.  Health care is
critical.

I find it appalling how little discussion there is of the fact that the current
system exists because of a massive government subsidization of health plans for
the wealthy (by not taxing them and giving employers tax breaks). The lack of
health care makes it harder to insure that uninsured women have the right forms
of contraception and follow up care.

In addition, what abstinence education has done is to increase the likelihood
that the poorest women will have NO information about birth control when they
start sex. Evangelicals may still get information from the internet or a
college counselor, but the poorest teen do not.

Fixing this is easy — and we can see the way Europe has done so. High school
education should take about contraception within marriage as well as without.
The information should be there. Clinics should be available for everyone.
There is no excuse for this.

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