Married to the Wrong Plan
Jan. 20th, 2004 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdMarried to the Wrong Plan
January 16, 2004
From Newsday
Holy Britney Spears!
Here's a fact I couldn't find anywhere in George W. Bush's $1.5-billion plan to prop up American marriage.
The pro-Bush red states, especially those in the rural South, have a far higher divorce rate than Al Gore's blue states.
This is the Bible Belt?
Actually, it's more like the Divorce Belt, where the pro-marriage president's staunchest supporters tend to congregate.
For this little nugget, we are indebted to the insightful research of George Barna, who is probably America's leading pollster of religious attitudes. The Barna Research Group of Ventura, Calif., has spent the past 18 years tracking various church and cultural trends.
Trends like Baptists (29 percent) and nondenominational Christians (34 percent) getting divorced more frequently than do atheists/agnostics (21 percent).
Forget all that family-values talk from the Religious Right.
"Divorce rates among conservative Christians were much higher than for other faith groups," Barna says flatly.
And to think: I'd always heard that godless relativists in places like New York were undermining marriage.
Well, not so you'd notice on the marital-political map.
The five states with the highest rates of divorce - 50 percent more divorce than the national average - all went for Bush in 2000. There's the quickie-divorce capital of Nevada, of course. But Nevada is joined as a Bust-Up Champ by pro-Bush Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma.
These people will soon be telling us how to run our marriages?
January 16, 2004
From Newsday
Holy Britney Spears!
Here's a fact I couldn't find anywhere in George W. Bush's $1.5-billion plan to prop up American marriage.
The pro-Bush red states, especially those in the rural South, have a far higher divorce rate than Al Gore's blue states.
This is the Bible Belt?
Actually, it's more like the Divorce Belt, where the pro-marriage president's staunchest supporters tend to congregate.
For this little nugget, we are indebted to the insightful research of George Barna, who is probably America's leading pollster of religious attitudes. The Barna Research Group of Ventura, Calif., has spent the past 18 years tracking various church and cultural trends.
Trends like Baptists (29 percent) and nondenominational Christians (34 percent) getting divorced more frequently than do atheists/agnostics (21 percent).
Forget all that family-values talk from the Religious Right.
"Divorce rates among conservative Christians were much higher than for other faith groups," Barna says flatly.
And to think: I'd always heard that godless relativists in places like New York were undermining marriage.
Well, not so you'd notice on the marital-political map.
The five states with the highest rates of divorce - 50 percent more divorce than the national average - all went for Bush in 2000. There's the quickie-divorce capital of Nevada, of course. But Nevada is joined as a Bust-Up Champ by pro-Bush Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma.
These people will soon be telling us how to run our marriages?
