I haven’t read Dinesh D’Souza’s new book blaming the "cultural left" for
9/11, but in an interview in Crisis it is clear that he is very right about some things and very wrong about
others.
A native of India, he is familiar with everyday Muslims in a way that few
Americans are and he decries the demonization of Islam.
He emphasizes that the new Islamic militancy is an aberration and not
representative of traditional Islam. I agree with him very much that we could do
worse than pray for a revival of traditional Islam.
Mr D’Souza rightly points out that much of Islamic ill will toward America
stems from the tawdry culture we export, though I think he underplays the
importance of American foreign policy, which he appears to support. He has no
sympathy for the Americanist mantra that "they hate us because we are good; they
hate us because we are free."
He points out that ordinary Muslims, while loathing terrorism, are also
loathe to condemn Islamic militants lest they be seen as supporting decadent
Western culture. As I have pointed out here, it is akin to Ireland in the Time
of Troubles: most Irish Catholics had no use for the IRA, but hesitated to say
so for fear of appearing to support British occupation of their country.
So far, so good.
Where Mr D’Souza goes awry is identifying the decadence of American culture
with "the left". We have discussed this on this blog, and nothing Mr D’Souza
says makes me question my criticism of the identification of tawdry culture with
"the left" or with the (overhyped) notion of the "red state/blue state"
divide.
It is a commonplace among conservatives to blame "the 60s" for modern
sexual deviance and for the erosion of sexual immorality in general.
This is an oversimplification. The lid may have blown off during the 60s
but the pot had been simmering for a long time. The Kinsey report was issued in
the late 40s, and the first issue of Playboy was issued in 1953. Hugh
Heffner was no hippie. Heck, he wasn’t even a beatnik.
And Sayyid Qutb, the grandaddy of modern Salafi jihadism, was radicalized
by the oversexed America he encountered in 1948.
1948.
There is a tendency among conservative baby boomers to exaggerate the
innocence of the world they knew as children. Some of this is because they were
protected more than children today are. And some of it is because much that was
unhealty was over their heads (I am not denying that things have gone downhill
badly since then, only that what we see today is not a radical departure from
the post-war culture but rather the sordid end of a logical sequence).
A while back I was at the library, looking for a suitable film to watch
with my children. I ran across an old Bob Hope movie; I forget the title. I was
not crazy about Bob Hope when I was young, but I thought the children might
enjoy it, so I checked it out.
I was shocked: the thing was pretty much uninterrupted salacious innuendo.
True, it wasn’t graphic, in-your-face crudeness like we see in modern media, but
the leering, nod-nod wink-wink tone was just as obscene.
We didn’t get far in the film at all.
For that matter even the Shirley Temple movies my mom gave us recently are
not free from suggestive elements; the tough guys and hardnosed dames in some of
them give one pause.
So is Bob Hope a "cultural leftist"?
Is Shirley Temple?
Nor is the simplistic liberal=decadent/conservative=clean paradigm accurate
in today’s world.
Anyone who has driven cross country can tell you that porn shops and strip
clubs are more common in the South than in New England. And I doubt that a
survey of the patrons of such places, or the users of online porn, would show a
disproportionate number of liberals among them.
The state with the highest divorce rate is Oklahoma, followed by other
Bible Belt states. Massachussetts has the lowest divorce rate.
A number of celebrity representatives of oversexed American culture-
Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Beyonce Knowles- come from Evangelical
backgrounds, and at one time made a big deal about their faith. They went from
being Public Virgins to Celebrity Sexpots almost overnight.
A survey of conservative pundits and politicians will show little or no
difference in personal morality. I mean when Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh are
the champions of traditional values you know we are in trouble.
And let us not forget that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have
greeted the news of Cheney’s lesbian daughter’s pregnancy with gushing
congrats.
It may be hard for conservatives to admit, but the problem is not leftist
culture but American culture.
I’m glad Mr D’Souza resists the demonization of Muslims. Shame he couldn’t
resist demonizing his fellow Americans.
–Daniel Nichols
I too have not read Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, but I did see him interviewed on EWTN recently. What struck me was that when he discussed U.S. foreign policy (and yes, he is very supportive of it), he seemed totally oblivious to the negative impact the blind U.S. support for Israel has had not only in the Middle East, but all over the world. While Bush cries for the spread of democracy, I never hear him mention that it might be a good idea for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
I think this post is half-right. :-)
That is, I agree with many or maybe most of the details, but I think it misses the main point about what the term “cultural left” means. Or at least what I mean by it–I can’t vouch for Mr. D’Souza. I think it’s no more and no less accurate to speak of the cultural left than to speak of the religious right.
I had heard of this book and been curious about it, but the subtitle made me think it’s probably an unhelpful polemic. The interview kind of confirms that. Right off the bat he distinguishes between the cultural and political left, which is fine by me, but then he immediately conflates them. And trying to pin 9/11 on the left or any subcategory thereof is kind of a waste of time. At best.
Mr. Nichols said, “I agree with him very much that we could do worse than pray for a revival of traditional Islam.”
Not me. I wouldn’t even say that about Protestantism. I will gladly pray, “Lord may my Islamic brethen, through their incomplete and flawed religion, still find their way to You,” or something like that, but I’m not going to pray for a rivival of a religion that has built into it the easy tendency toward violence, inequality, and old-covenant style social systems. I’m praying for a revival in Catholicism under the authority of Rome, thank you, and for those outside the true faith, I will pray that if they can’t bring themselves to convert to Catholicism, that they can be devout, holy within their circumstances, and follow a path that leads them to Heaven somehow.
I entirely agree with Dan’s comment, “It may be hard for conservatives to admit, but the problem is not leftist culture but American culture.” And what Daniel said about the salacious elements in the media well before the 60s is likewise true.
As for his other point, though, I’m not willing to pray for a revival of Islam, not primarily because of its violent aspects, but because it is false (i.e., false as a whole. Obviously it teaches some truths). I would not pray for a revival of Quakerism, for that matter. And while I don’t deny the possibility of a Moslem attaining salvation if he follows his conscience, still the only revival I could pray for is of the Catholic Church, and for the conversion of everyone to that Church.
Dear Daniel,
I’m not too familiar with Qutb, but I bet his horror in 1948 had more to do with women than sex. During the crusades, Muslim commentators never ceased to disapprovingly note the freedom that western women were permitted by their husbands.
What is my point? I’m not sure a Muslim, as someone outside western culture, is at any time a good measure of changes in morals standards.
As for your overall point, sure things started earlier than ’68, but don’t you think it’s gone downhill a little quicker recently?
Of course we should pray for the conversion of the Muslims. On the other hand, that has always been notoriously difficult. My comment about traditional-as opposed to aberrational- Islam is simply that if the traditional prohibitions against suicide, killing fellow Muslims, and killing civilians in warfare were reclaimed, and the Wahabbists were clearly denounced as apostate the world would be a more peaceful place.
As for Qutb, he was propositioned by a half-clad, drunken woman on the ship coming over to America, and he ran into free-love collegiate types when he got here, so I think it was not so much a rejection of the relative freedom of American women in general.
And of course the culture has gone downhill, which I noted in my post.
What I take issue with is the idea that this was some sort of radical mutation instead of the logical conclusion to what was already stirring.
What I take issue with is the idea that this was some sort of radical mutation instead of the logical conclusion to what was already stirring.
I agree with this part (have never thought otherwise, actually).
You can choose your words as you will, Dan, but I’m with Mr Ellis on praying for the conversion of Muslims, from what is essentially an outgrowth of Arianism, to the True Faith. If nothing else, they’ll finally have something worth dying for.
Points taken.
The more I think about it, I think you’re essentially right.
Wasn’t it Kinsey’s work that found all sorts of men cheating on their wives in the ’40s?
Boy, I agree with this very much. We had the same experience with a Bob Hope movie. And a Red Skelton rerun from the 1950s. And all kinds of “light entertainment” from the b & w era of innocence. Even old Ozzie and Harriet episodes ahve a lot of cheesecake and other sexually charged humor. I kid you not.
I think Kinsey’s work has been partially discredited. He was a pretty sick puppy and seems to have been “working out his issues” by trying to prove that everybody else was corrupt, too. (That’s probably an exaggeration, but not without truth.) Which doesn’t mean that a lot of people weren’t committing adultery, but probably not as many as he said.
Y’all may be expecting a little too much in the way of entertainment without bawdiness. It’s not only not a post-’60s phenomenon, it’s not even a modern one. I mean, popular art, not to mention high art like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dante, has very often had a big element of bawdiness and crudeness. (“Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things…”)
I think the problem with modern mass media, at least up until the point where it went completely over the top, was not so much the innuendo and stuff as the sheer mass-ness of it, the inescapability of it, and the way it became a steady diet once motion pictures became widely available (those risque W.C. Fields/Mae West movies were basically products of the ’30s). But then that gets off onto the whole “Amusing Ourselves to Death” tangent.
Not totally related to the discussion at hand, but:
I totally agree with the overhyped red state/blue state divide. Although the town in Alabama where I went to college didn’t have any kind of clubs at all, much less of the strip variety, I have to say that the DC suburb where I live now is significantly more conservative than the small town on the Gulf Coast where I grew up. I mean, I have never been to a place where you cannot even buy a bottle of wine in a grocery store, or where you see so many people wearing exactly the same thing–dark suit (not black or gray, just dark), bland tie, hair combed to the side, etc. And I just thought it was a given that a city of more than say 250,000 people would have some kind of independent music radio station, but I have stopped listening to the carbon-copy top-50 stations here and am now streaming Mobile’s own WZEW over the internet.
I guess politically the red state/blue state thing holds up, but in social/cultural terms south Alabama is way more funky than DC.
Red county/blue county makes more sense than red state/blue state. But even in my county I’m in a red municipality, but the main city is quite blue.
As for bawdy, my point is not that suddenly entertainment had it, but mostly that we thought of Red Skelton as family entertainment, but it was pretty adult at times. And although I didn’t understand it as a kid, I certainly didn’t miss it. I knew cheesecake when I saw it and leering when I saw it even when I was seven, even if I have a significantly different understanding of it now.
I think even in politics the red-state vs. blue-state thing is such an over-generalization that it’s pretty much useless, partly because the election results on which it’s based were a product of extremely
small margins in some states. Broadly speaking, obviously some areas of the country are more politically and maybe culturally conservative
than others, but parceling it out by state boundaries doesn’t really work. As Robert says, the granularity is much finer.
I don’t know that “funky” and “conservative” are in opposition. Indeed, conservatism rightly understood (to borrow a pompous phrase from George Will) is all kinds of funky. (Yes, I am in semi-jest here.) Or to put it another way, blandness also comes in both liberal and conservative flavors.
I’m having trouble posting comments–wondering if anyone else is. Anyway, this was supposed to be part of the above:
I’m very doubtful of Daniel’s observation about strip clubs etc. in the South. Maybe if you’re only including Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire in New England (Massachusetts and Connecticut are also part of NE.) Those clubs are surely an urban thing, and those are pretty rural states. I’ve never seen one in Alabama outside the four sizable cities (Mobile, Montgomery, Birmingham, Huntsville). There are maybe three or four in Mobile (pop. around 400,000 in the metro area).
And finally, re Red Skelton et. al.: maybe that fits with what I was saying about the mass media. I think many or most of the comedians of that generation got their start in vaudeville or similar live venues, where the audience would have been adult. I’m thinking it was the piping of that stuff into every living room that was the big change.
Daniel, so far as I can tell, divorce rates are measured per 1000 population, so of course the red states have higher divorce rates than the blue states, because they have higher marriage rates. If you’re aware of any study that shows red state marriages are more likely to end in divorce, please share. (though even that wouldn’t be conclusive, for a couple reasons)
The strip club thing is anecdotal. The pop tarts are anecdotal. So is cherrypicking a few Republican partisans. Not that GOP elected officials are exactly pillars of conservatism, but I’ll bet that if we could get some really good private detectives to dig up all the dirt on all 535 Congressmen, the Democrats would be far dirtier.
If Newt was ever accused of being a “champion of traditional values”, I’ve forgotten it. Rush probably once called himself one, but not since his third divorce/drug scandal/viagra scandal.
Cheney is of course not the slightest bit conservative. Bush is “conservative on some issues, but he isn’t a conservative”, as Rush put it the other day (gee Rush, it would’ve been nice if you’d described him that way back in 00 and 04).
You say “the problem is not leftist culture but American culture”. I’d say the problem is that American culture has become leftist culture.
JPG: Ah yes, the old “they are not really conservative” defense. Reminds me of when leftists were confronted by evidence of communist oppression: “Well they are not true Marxists.”
And yes, Maclin, I was thinking of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine vs West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. Anecdotal, yes, but telling.
And I doubt that Oklahomans are more likely to marry than residents of Massachussetts. I believe the stats were as percentage of married adults, not population,anyway.
As for Newt Gingrich being a champion of traditional values, his latest book is about God in America. Got to give it to him, the guy has a lot of nerve.
Of course Maclin is right about ribaldry being nothing new; I was commenting more on the boomer conservatives’ nostalgia for an innocence that wasn’t there.
What is the difference, if any, between the obscenity of First Avenue in Minneapolis and the strip clubs on May Avenue in Oklahoma City? I’m missing the point, here. I mean, Oklahomans are divided into two types of people; those that think strip clubs are okay things and might go to one and those that wouldn’t be caught dead in one. I think most of the born again Baptists would fall into the second, unless they were backsliding. This isn’t hypocracy as far as I can tell. Not that there isn’t some hypocracy among born again Baptists who might secretly frequent a strip club or watch internet porn. What is the point being made here? Southern cultures are more hypocritical than Northern ones? Conservatives are hypocrits? I don’t get this.
I think Daniel is saying that the idea of a “cultural left” is wrong because conservatives are just as or more likely to be immoral in their personal lives as liberals. The topic first (I think) came up a while back, in this thread.
This is bugging me because that’s not what I mean, and I think not what most people who use the term mean, by “the cultural left.” I’m going to have to lay it out in another post, just so I can make my position clear, whether or not anyone agrees with it. But the basic distinction is that the term refers to beliefs, not behavior. More another time.
Daniel, I didn’t say Rush and Newt aren’t conservatives, just that they are not “champions of traditional values”. Newt might be trying to position himself as one (I don’t pay any attention to what he is doing these days), but does anyone take him seriously?
Cheney is not a conservative, but a career Republican. If you’re going to misapply labels like that, might as well call Hitler a Marxist too.
As for Bush, his six-year record on domestic policies can most generously be described as “convervative in some areas”.
So, no, this isn’t the “no true Scottsman / communism hasn’t really been tried yet” argument. Picking out a few partisan Republicans who have sordid personal lives, or who are only tepidly conservative, does not establish moral equivalence between conservative and liberal culture.
Where did you see stats showing a higher percentage of red-state marriages ending in divorce?
Robert Gotcher makes a good point. The flaw with the red-state/blue-state model is that 40%-49% of the people in nearly every state vote for the other “color”. Strip clubs already have a somewhat limited clientel; I can easily belive that their patrons are not the same people who [try to] vote against porn, abortion, gay marriage, etc.
I saw the study in the papers a couple of years ago; I don’t remember much more than that.
Are you really saying that you think political liberals are more immoral than conservatives? Do you really think most patrons of porn and such are liberals? I can tell you, based on my anecdotal experience of being a mailman and seeing who gets what political mail and porn mail that it ain’t so. My point is not that one side is more or less moral or hypocritical, but that sin is human, pretty evenly distributed, and to get back to the original point, that Mr D’Souza oversimplifies when he demonizes the left when Muslims are scandalized by the sordidness of American culture.
It reminds me of back in the 90s, when The Wanderer ran an article about a DC priest who had been arrested for molesting boys. According to the paper, this was a case of liberalism run wild, that the offending priest was a wild-eyed progressive.
Well, I had gone to the seminary with the guy and nothing could have been further from the truth. He was conservative politically, theologically, tempermentally, even sartorially.
It was a case of projecting evil onto one’s enemies so one did not have to deal with the reality of things, and the complexity of the human soul.
Here is a link to some divorce statistics by state.
http://www.mdp.state.md.us/msdc/State_Rank/Abstract06/Divorces06.pdf
One will see that in 1990 Nevada ranked first, Oklahoma second, Arizona third, Arkansas fourth. Massachusetts ranked 49th, New Jersey 48th, New York, 47th. 2004 data is also there, but not all states reported. So go see for yourself.
And as for Maclin’s claim that by “cultural left,” he does not mean any particular (political?) beliefs – Then why call it “left”? By implication you are saying that “left is bad.” (Not that I think left is good.) If it really has nothing to do with what is normally called the Left (i.e., a certain loosely-defined socio-political viewpoint), why use the term “left” at all for them? Why not just call them libertines?
Other way around, Tom–I said it does refer to beliefs, not behavior.
I think this statistical war between the states is kind of a waste of time, unless we have some serious researchers here who can comment on it. There are a lot of factors that don’t get reflected in broad numbers–for instance, does a lower number of divorces mean more marriages and more permanent ones, or does it mean people are simply skipping the whole marriage deal altogether? It’s hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison. People who do this kind of research full-time still have trouble figuring out what the numbers mean. At a minimum, you would have to compare liberals to conservatives, not just one state to another–as Robert G points out, most likely the average churchgoer is not the average strip-club-goer.
However, to add more highly questionable numbers and waste even more time: I did some “research” on the strip club question. I found a state-by-state directory of strip clubs (which I am not going to link to, as it includes pornographic ads). Counting strip clubs by state for New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama, and dividing the population of the state by that number, I got the following ratios of citizens per strip club (the lower the number, the more clubs):
Connecticut: 70,000
Kentucky: 77,000
New York: 87,000
Tennessee: 105,000
Alabama: 122,000
Massachusetts: 151,000
Vermont: 152,000
Maine: 159,000
New Hampshire: 411,000
Assuming–and it’s a big assumption–that the libertine’s vacation guide is correct, these are pretty weird rankings. New England is indeed low, except for Connecticut, which leads all the others. I’m at a loss to explain this, but I think it would indicate that many factors are at work. New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts are all famously “blue” states, so something else is involved that puts Connecticut and NY at and near the top and Massachusetts near the bottom. Since Boston once had a notorious “adult” sleaze district, I’m guessing that the city must have taken Guiliani-style action to clean it up at some point.
Anyway, I have never said that I think political liberals in general are more immoral than political conservatives in general. People are complicated.
Maclin,
Sorry I misread what you wrote. I see you said the opposite.
It might be said that D’Souza indulges that popular methodology of post-60′s America: blame others for one’s own victimhood.
It’s good to see many in the blogosphere putting some sacred cows to rest on liberal morality, or lack thereof.
If Cheney is a cultural Republican, then lots of media-heads are cultural liberals. The notion that popularity and profit should drive the show is pretty much not a liberal idea. We have no use for the strip clubs, the leering, and other Western expressions. The right doesn’t claim them either? Hmm, it must be something other than a left-right thing, then.
Maclin- I am not here arguing with you but with D’Souza, who does us all one better and -in spite of his disclaimers- names names. Michael Moore? I imagine he shares the general leftist consensus on gay rights and such, but his passion is blue collar populism. And Nancy Palosi? Whatever her political shortcomings the woman has been married to her first husband for decades, and has borne way more children with him than Gingrich and Limbaugh have borne with their collective six wives.
So is a leftist who lives a conventionally moral life a “cultural leftist”? And is a conservative who professes traditional morality but has serial adulteries and marriages a “cultural conservative”? I suggest that Tom’s terms are more accurate: call a libertine a libertine, and call one who professes morality a hypocritical libertine.
Oh- and Maclin, thanks (?) for the exhaustive research on the geography of the strip club industry, which more or less confirmed my anecdotal observations about upper New England vs the upper South. I think Connecticut’s high numbers can be explained by the fact that Guiliani pretty much shut down the sex clubs in NYC in the 90s. I’d guess they simply migrated to the suburbs. I know that many of you no doubt have an image of Connecticut as a leafy green suburban landscape but in recent decades large swathes of the state have gotten pretty gritty…
There was a ‘keep New York clean’ campaign there when I was a child in the 1960s. My brother and I used to say, ‘keep New York clean, dump your trash in New Jersey.’
I am not here arguing with you… Yes, but I’m arguing with you. :-)
Because I can’t remember where I’ve seen the term “cultural left” over the years, although I know I’ve seen it, I googled the term. I got pages and pages (and pages and pages) of stuff about D’Souza’s book. I think I agree with you that he’s about half right, although I might lay out the map of right & not-right differently. I also think he’s very exasperating. I’m sure he makes some very good points, but like so many polemicists he seems to insist on overstating, both in content and in volume, his case. Don’t think I want to bother with the book.
So is a leftist who lives a conventionally moral life a “cultural leftist”? Quite possibly. Depends on what he believes and agitates for. Like I keep saying, the term refers to bad ideas, not bad behavior. I have to say I’m a little puzzled that you don’t see this. Ideas have consequences and all that. As I mentioned a few comments back, I’ll try sometime in the next week or two to lay this out more completely, just for my own satisfaction.
By the way, the strip club thing may just mean that Southerners are more hot-blooded than New Englanders. :-)
Not to mention trashier. (I can say that.)
Thomas, the divorce numbers are per 1000 population, so by themselves they aren’t much use. But we can find the marriage rates, also per 1000 population, at http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/02statab/vitstat.pdf Table 117, and compare.
The general tendency is for each state to have twice as many marriages as divorces. But there are exceptions. For instance, Nevada has (in 2004) ten times as many marriages as divorces. Clearly they are the most moral of Americans! …oh wait, most people who get married in Nevada don’t live in Nevada. Furthermore, nearly all marriages last more than one year, so almost none of the 2004 divorces correspond to 2004 marriages. We aren’t measuring a true divorce rate, but merely comparing marriages from this year to divorces by people who got married in past years and chose to divorce this year. This problem is known to sociologists; according to http://www.divorcereform.org/nyt05.html , “The method preferred by social scientists in determining the divorce rate is to calculate how many people who have ever married subsequently divorced. Counted that way, the rate has never exceeded about 41 percent, researchers say.”
This presents another problem — how many of the divorces in state X are of people who were living in some other state back when they got married three, five, ten, or twenty years ago? (we cannot assume that inter-state moves tend to even out.) I don’t know of a study that addresses this.
ANYWAY, we’d still only be comparing red states (55% GOP votes, 45% Dem) to blue states (45% GOP, 55% Dem). Better would be a study that tracks the political views and affiliation of particpants, so we could directly compare the cultural conservatives to the cultural liberals.
PS: Table 95, same publication, has abortion rates per 1000 childbearing-age-women, by state. You may want to consider that one, Daniel.
Maclin, I see four problems with the strip club data (and I’ll suggest that when researching such things one should toggle off image loading one’s browser, a trick I learnt back when I perused hacking/cracking sites, which also tended to have such ads. These days you probably need to turn off scripts too, to prevent movies and sounds from loading.)
1. As you pointed out, the “libertine’s vacation guide” may not be very accurrate.
2. You’re looking at the number of stipclubs, but not at their size or the number of customers. Maybe a big-city establishment is the equal of five or ten truckstop joints. Whatever.
3. You’re cherrypicking the states. Let’s add MD, Cali, and Nevada (don’t forget to count whorehouses as strip clubs) to the blue state list, add Utah, Nebraska, and North Dakota to the red states, and see how things look then.
4. Cultural differences between the states (as you also noted). Go back to a time when 95+% of Americans, regardless of region, would agree that abortion and homosexuality are evils, and you would probably still find Southerners to be hot-blooded and maybe a little trashy.
In regards to divorce statistics, the data doesn’t tend to norm around political philosohpy. It tends to norm around the religion you were raised. Catholic regions have always had a lower divorce rate than the Bible Belt, because the Bible Belt does not make divorce a taboo like the Church does.
JPJ: I have seen the abortion statistics, which superficially seem to indicate that NE states have a higher rate. However, if one factors in the higher rate among urban blacks, disproportionately represented in NE states, it is not clear that the stats mean anything.
Returning to the anecdotal, I have a lot of aquaintance with evangelical culture; there is little stigma to divorce, as Mr Forrest says.
Thanks for the tip about turning off images, JPG–I’ve gotten so used to high-speed net that I’d forgotten that was even possible. I don’t plan to pursue that particular line of inquiry any further, though.
Re evangelicals & divorce: that’s an interesting instance of how rapidly things can change. I think Daniel is right in that it isn’t stigmatized, nor is it seen as an obstacle to a second marriage (although it is considered a tragedy, a disaster, etc.). Of course Protestantism in general caved on that matter to a great extent long ago. But–and here’s my point–at least as recently as the 1970s there was still a stigma attached to it, at least among Southern Baptists. I knew a Baptist minister who was more or less expelled when he got divorced. I don’t know if that was a rule, or just a sort of consensus, or what the case is now.
Probably depends upon the sect; I knew a Primitive Baptist preacher who had been married three times and still pastored a church in the 70s.
(No, “Primitive Baptist”- pronounced “Babdist”- is not a sect of Protestants with bones in their noses; the name derives from the practice of baptizing in “living”, ie, moving water instead of a pool. They were a sect in Appalachia, and a lot of them lived in my part of Michigan.)
Well yes, Daniel, that is true. And if we factor in the disproportionate rate of liberals in northeastern states, maybe the entire difference in abortion rates goes away!
I’m not sure why blacks somehow “don’t count” in this discussion. And why just “urban” blacks? Plenty of red states in the south are disproportionately black *without* having sky-high abortion rates. Example: Georgia is 30% black (the USA as a whole is 12% black), yet has a lower abortion rate than the national average.
I would guess that Northern urban blacks are dealing with a whole different dynamic, especially since the industrial base has crumbled. Southern blacks, I would guess, are a lot less disoriented and not so crushed by the forces of modernity.
Interestingly, though, all blacks poll as more opposed to abortion than whites.