"Le pacte civil de solidarité" sounds so much better than "domestic partnership."
Michael Pollak wrote later:
>On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > MARRIAGES & DIVORCES PER 1,000 PEOPLE, 2001
> >
> > marriages divorces div/mar
> >
> > Massachusetts 6.4 2.4 37.5%
> > New York 7.9 3.0 38.0%
> >
> > Alabama 9.6 5.3 55.2%
> > Mississippi 6.7 5.4 80.6%
> > Texas 9.4 4.1 43.6%
> >
> > Mass has a marriage rate almost equal to Miss's, but a divorce
>rate less than
> > half as high. New York has a higher marriage rate and a much lower divorce
> > rate. They like to get married in Ala & Tex, but the divorce rates are also
> > much higher.
>
>I'm not sure this disproves the artifact theory. In Ala & Tex, it
>seems to fit perfectly. And in Massachusetts and Mississippi, I'm
>willing to bet the average age of marriage in the former is
>considerably older -- and that on average people have had one
>practice marriage and uncounted divorce before they hooked up.
>(And let's not even get into having to marry the first person you
>get pregnant with.)
Conservative "family values," by encouraging marriage at early ages, end up raising divorce rates, but they do succeed in raising fertility rates higher than liberal or socialist "family values" do as well.
<blockquote>Fertile Red States By NOAM SCHEIBER
Published: December 12, 2004
After this year's presidential election, pundits agreed that George W. Bush won by turning out conservative voters in greater numbers than Democrats turned out liberals. According to Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, that feat will only be easier for Republican candidates in the future. Instead of having to rely on the same conservative voters, Republicans may benefit from the fact that there simply will be more voters in conservative states. The reason, Longman argued in The Washington Post this summer, is that voters in red states are having children at much higher rates than their counterparts in blue states. Advertisement
The numbers that Longman revealed were striking. In 2002, Utah, where Bush made his strongest showing this year, had the country's highest fertility rate (the number of births per thousand women of child-bearing age). By contrast, liberal Vermont had the lowest fertility rate that year. Furthermore, 15 out of the country's 17 most fertile states went for Bush in 2000. The Gore states today have an average replacement rate of 1.89 births per woman -- far below the rate of 2.1 necessary to prevent the population from shrinking. (The average rate of the Bush states is 2.06.) These trends are particularly meaningful when you consider that political convictions are often inherited. As Longman notes: ''It's a truism of social science that people wind up having the political and religious orientation of their parents.''
You might object that state fertility rates are a crude unit of measurement, since states are not politically uniform and since people move in and out of them over time. But the evidence became even more compelling when Longman broke it down by demographic group. The fertility rate among Mexican-Americans, who tend to lean Democratic, is high but rapidly declining. Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican and African-American fertility rates are now only slightly higher than that of white America. But rural and religious white voters -- voters who went disproportionately for Bush -- seem to be reproducing at a rate far above the national average.
What accounts for the differences? Two factors, according to Longman. First, raising a middle-class child today is expensive. ''People don't have an economic reason to have kids,'' Longman says. ''They need another reason. God may provide that.'' Second, the cost of raising a child is much higher in urban areas than it is in rural areas. If Longman's math is right, then the slide from an evenly divided electorate in 2000 to a 51-48 split this year could be the beginning of a depressing trend for Democrats.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12FERTILE.html></blockquote>
As long as women stay barefoot and pregnant, conservatives don't care if they stay married. Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>