...North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students. ...

Students interviewed here said they believed their mating rituals reflected those of college students anywhere. But many of them — men and women alike — said that the lopsided population tends to skew behavior.

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Labels: culture, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, men, universities, women

posted by Eve at 11:22 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...In Dr. Jemmott’s research, only about a third of the students who participated in a weekend abstinence-only class started having sex within the next 24 months, compared with about half who were randomly assigned instead to general health information classes, or classes teaching only safer sex. Among those assigned to comprehensive sex-education classes, covering both abstinence and safer sex, about 42 percent began having sex.

Dr. Jemmott’s research followed 662 African-American students at urban middle schools, who were paid $20 a session to attend the classes, plus follow-up and evaluation sessions. The abstinence-only classes covered HIV, abstinence and ways to resist the pressure to have sex.

“Because African-Americans tend to have a higher rate of early sexual initiation than others, we thought that within two years, a reasonable number would start having sex,” Dr. Jemmott said. “If we went younger, we couldn’t show that intervention works.”

The research, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, appears just as the Obama administration is eliminating federal financing for abstinence-only programs, and starting a pregnancy-prevention initiative that will finance programs that have been shown in scientific studies to be effective. ...

Ms. Brown noted that the abstinence-only classes in the Jemmott study centered on people with an average age of 12 and that unlike the federally supported abstinence programs now in use, did not advocate abstinence until marriage.

The classes also did not portray sex negatively or suggest that condoms are ineffective, and contained only medically accurate information. Dr. Jemmott’s abstinence-only course was designed for the research, and is not in current use in schools.

Labels: abstinence, culture, sex

posted by Eve at 9:01 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...How does marriage benefit children? The answer is not that marriage confers general respectability or practical benefits. If that were true, then children in remarried families would do better than children with unmarried parents. And they don't, on average.

Marriage benefits children to the extent that it keeps the child's own mother and father in a permanent, not-too-high-conflict union. ...

I do not think same-sex marriage will serve child well-being in any appreciable way, and I don't think there is much sign that that is the goal. The gay community is by and large supporting same-sex marriage as a right, not as a norm at all. Relatively few same-sex couples enter same-sex marriages [PDF] and the dissolution rates (at least in Sweden, where we have hard data) are extraordinarily high (roughly 50 percent higher for gay men, 100 percent higher for lesbian couples [PDF]).

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay parenting, gay/straight differences, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage

posted by Eve at 12:11 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education. The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication. On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate. The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor. ...

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless. But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy. Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

Labels: abstinence, culture, premarital sex, sex

posted by Eve at 12:07 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

When Rio and Ray married in 2008, the Bay Area women omitted two words from their wedding vows: fidelity and monogamy.

“I take it as a gift that someone will be that open and honest and sharing with me,” said Rio, using the word “open” to describe their marriage.

Love brought the middle-age couple together — they wed during California’s brief legal window for same-sex marriage. But they knew from the beginning that their bond would be forged on their own terms, including what they call “play” with other women.

As the trial phase of the constitutional battle to overturn the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage concludes in federal court, gay nuptials are portrayed by opponents as an effort to rewrite the traditional rules of matrimony. Quietly, outside of the news media and courtroom spotlight, many gay couples are doing just that, according to groundbreaking new research.

A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest relationships. And while that may sound counterintuitive, some experts say boundary-challenging gay relationships represent an evolution in marriage — one that might point the way for the survival of the institution.

New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.

That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”

The study also found open gay couples just as happy in their relationships as pairs in sexually exclusive unions, Dr. Hoff said. A different study, published in 1985, concluded that open gay relationships actually lasted longer.

None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, open relationships

posted by Eve at 12:38 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

An image from a TV ad for gay marriage, reproduced in the January 18 New Yorker, provides a Rorschach test for reactions to America’s ongoing revolution in family structure. Two men in black suits stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a group of people, looking into each other’s eyes. In their arms are two newborns in white baby clothes and blankets. Though it’s not immediately apparent from the photo, the men are at a baptism for their infants. The ad, still being test-marketed, is called “Family Values,” and is intended to emphasize the “conventionality of gay couples,” explains The New Yorker.

If your reaction to the image is: “Where’s the mother(s)?” you may not yet be fully on board the “conventionality” bandwagon. If your reaction to the foregoing question, however, is: “Why does it matter?” then you are keeping pace with the revolution. “Why does it matter?” may ultimately prove the more appropriate response, but no one should pretend that it represents anything other than a radical revision of the traditional relationship between parents and children — one whose consequences no one can predict.

Every time a homosexual couple conceives a child, there is another parent offstage somewhere whose sperm or egg has allowed conception to occur (and, in the case of male homosexuals, whose womb has allowed gestation to occur). In some homosexual families, that parent will be involved in his child’s life; in others, he will remain completely anonymous and unknown. Parental identity and responsibility for children in a homosexual family do not flow from biology; they result from choice and intent. To the extent that a gay couple wants to retain the traditional number of parents in the home, it must exclude one biological parent from inclusion in the family unit. To the extent that a gay couple wants to preserve the traditional connection between that biological parent and his offspring, however, the adult side of the family becomes more of a non-traditional threesome. ...

These are not easy questions. The deprivation to gays from not being able to put the official, public stamp of legitimacy on their love is large. If one were confident that gay marriage would have at most a negligible effect on the ongoing dissolution of the traditional family, I would see no reason to oppose it. And fertility technology is hardly the only source of stress on families; heterosexual adults have been wreaking havoc on the two-parent family for the last five decades in their quest for maximal freedom and choice. The self-interested assumption behind that havoc has been that what’s good for adults must be good for children: If adults want flexibility in their living arrangements, then children will benefit from it, as well. Perhaps children are as infinitely malleable as it would be convenient for them to be. But if it turns out that they thrive best with stability in their lives and that the traditional family evolved to provide that stability, then our breezy jettisoning of child-rearing traditions may not be such a boon for children.

The facile libertarian argument that gay marriage is a trivial matter that affects only the parties involved is astoundingly blind to the complexity of human institutions and to the web of sometimes imperceptible meanings and practices that compose them. Equally specious is the central theme in attorney Theodore Olson’s legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8: that only religious belief or animus towards gays could explain someone’s hesitation regarding gay marriage. Anyone with the slightest appreciation for the Burkean understanding of tradition will feel the disquieting burden of his ignorance in this massive act of social reengineering, even if he ultimately decides that the benefits to gays from gay marriage outweigh the risks of the unknown.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, donor conception, gay marriage, gay parenting, single parenting

posted by Eve at 12:27 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

It is evident that neither side of the fight over same-sex marriage is prepared to yield. This is unfortunate. Far too many individuals who strive for recognition of their committed relationship are being accused of undermining society; far too many individuals who genuinely care about marriage are being accused of bigotry. ...

At one time, determining the role of government in marriage might have been easy. In years gone by and based on the mores of the time, people could envision government fostering long-term, heterosexual marriages for the purposes of promoting a stable environment for offspring. The Maine statute on marriage states that Maine “has a compelling interest to nurture and promote the unique institution of traditional monogamous marriage in the support of harmonious families and the physical and mental health of children.”

However noble and worthy the sentiment, numerous heterosexual marriages end in divorce. Quite appropriately, there are no punitive measures for unwed mothers. Even government social assistance is not geared toward ensuring the stated interest of promoting heterosexual marriage and may actually encourage single parentage. In many respects, heterosexual couples have done a great deal to weaken the justification for government’s role in marriage. And yet, the current debate is whether to extend that role to same-sex couples. Citizens are caught in battle over a governmental status designation that may no longer have a meaningful function.

Is there a way to resolve the dispute? While at first blush the solution may appear radical, the answer seems quite clear — marriage should no longer be a governmental function. All couples, heterosexual and homosexual, should register as under the current Maine statute for domestic partners. This would allow couples, whether heterosexual or of the same sex, to obtain the benefits of health insurance, inheritance, hospital visitation, etc.

Labels: beyond marriage, culture, gay marriage

posted by Eve at 12:21 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: abortion, culture, France

posted by Eve at 8:26 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Beagy Zielinski is a German-born 28-year-old stylist who moved to New York to study fashion in 1995 and stayed. Just before Christmas, she broke up with her blue-collar boyfriend, who repaired Navy ships.

“He was extremely insecure about my career and how successful I am,” Ms. Zielinski said.

An analysis of census data to be released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center found that she and countless women like her are victims of a role reversal that is profoundly affecting the pool of potential marriage partners.

“Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women,” said Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center. “In recent decades, with the rise of well-paid working wives, the economic gains of marriage have been a greater benefit for men.”

The analysis examines Americans 30 to 44 years old, the first generation in which more women than men have college degrees. Women’s earnings have been increasing faster than men’s since the 1970s. ...

The education and income gap has grown even more in the latest recession, when men held about three in four of the jobs that were lost. The Census Bureau said Friday that among married couples with children, only the wife worked in 7 percent of the households last year, compared with 5 percent in 2007. The percentage rose to 12 percent from 9 percent for blacks, among whom the education and income gap by gender has typically been even greater.

“I’m not married, I would like to be married, and my friends are all in a similar situation,” said Dr. Rajalla Prewitt, a 38-year-old psychiatrist in New Jersey. “We’re having difficulty finding someone where there’s a meeting of the minds, where we can have the same goals and values.”

“Particularly, African-American men who are educated want a traditional home where they are the breadwinner,” said Dr. Prewitt, who is a black woman.

Labels: culture, gender differences, Marriage, men, race, women

posted by Eve at 4:39 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...But then my eyes lowered and I became transfixed by the sight of the boy’s tiny pink fingers gripping his father’s huge, workman-like fist. And I almost wanted to burst into song.

I think my life changed at that moment.

That’s love, folks. Simple really. A proud dad, an adored little boy and a beautiful display of dependence and responsibility. It was the epiphany I had needed and I emerged with a dashing new haircut and a desire to procreate.

Gays have children these days, of course they do, and not always to accessorise an outfit. Some gay couples adopt; others follow twisting paths to biological parenthood, often quite expensively, with the involvement of test tubes and cash changing hands. It is, really, a sort of snook to the system of nature. Shooting for the net without the chore of running with the ball. It’s just not for me.

And lately I have, almost imperceptibly, been laying the groundwork to make parenthood happen in the old-fashioned way. I have been flirting with someone at my local pub, thinking about her at odd times, making excuses to call her and wondering if she likes me. It’s rather strange.

This will come as a shock to — among others — my male former partner of ten years, gay pals from my former media career, my rabidly heterosexual chums in the aviation industry and, not least, my family (who rather hoped I was going through a phase — albeit for about 20 years). Well, it’s come as a shock to me, too.

I once attended the nuptials of a gay male friend to a girl with whom he had unexpectedly fallen head over heels in love. It was a curious affair: the wedding party was peopled with his ex-lovers — including me, the best man and even the vicar. There is a risk that a wedding guest list of mine could have the same casting issues.

Labels: culture, Fathers, homosexuality, United Kingdom

posted by Imapp Staff at 3:48 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In a matter of seconds 27 years ago in a crowded New York City hotel ballroom, David Moffitt's parents went from total strangers to an engaged couple after being divinely matched by Unification Church founder the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. It was the 1980s, when thousands of young people like them ditched their educations, careers and families to live out of vans, sell flowers at airports and follow a Korean who calls himself a messiah.

Flash-forward to a Bowie living room on a recent weeknight, when Moffitt and a few dozen other "blessed children" of Moon-arranged mass weddings were discussing something perhaps as revolutionary: going mainstream.

"Our parents' generation were much more all-out. . . . You could say they were fighting a war," said Moffitt, a 24-year-old University of Maryland junior who works part time as a personal trainer. "Our generation is more focused on happiness and prosperity, going to college, getting jobs. It's important to be part of the culture. If you're above the culture, you can't change the world."

Their quest for a less-radical version of their faith comes during great uncertainty and change within the Unification Church. With Moon turning 90 in February, how the movement will survive beyond him is unclear. Moon's children are at odds over how to run the church's business empire, including the money-losing Washington Times, which laid off 40 percent of its staff this past week.

For church members, figuring out how to stabilize the movement has a feeling of urgency, particularly for Moffitt and others his age. Church officials estimate there are 21,000 active Unificationists in this country, including 7,500 blessed children, who members believe were born free of original sin and have a special spiritual status. A significant number of blessed children live in the Washington area, long a hub for Moon businesses and church lobbyists.

The church's future lies with this second generation, who were born into a religion some view as a bizarre cult. Their own beliefs run the gamut from those eager to follow in their parents' footsteps to those who haven't attended a Unification worship service for years.

Labels: arranged marriage, culture, DC, Marriage, religion, Unification Church

posted by Eve at 12:21 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

New Hampshire performed its first gay marriages this past week. New Jersey lawmakers vote on gay marriage today. Even so, advocates are shifting strategy to focus on having same-sex relationships legally recognized in other forms.

The reason: Despite those victories for gay rights, the end of 2009 saw momentum on the marriage issue stall.

Two states rejected same-sex marriage, reflecting the fact that most Americans do not support it, says John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron. No other state is actively considering legislation.

As a result, Green says, advocates will push for states to grant civil unions or domestic partnerships, which allow similar rights to those of married couples. Americans are more likely to support those relationships, he says.

An August survey by the Pew Research Center found that 53% of Americans oppose allowing gay men and lesbians to marry legally, but 57% favor allowing them to enter into civil unions, arrangements that give them many of the same rights.

"By picking away a little bit by little bit, advocates hope to create a trend and shift public opinion, as people see it's not as pernicious as they may have thought," Green says. "The ultimate goal is same-sex marriage."

Labels: civil unions, culture, domestic partnership, gay marriage

posted by Eve at 2:53 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Still, law professors Adam Candeub and Mae Kuykendall are arguing that what worked for the Ferschkes and other couples should be able to work for anyone, gay or straight.

The two Michigan State University professors argue that no couple should have to be physically present to be married and that any two adults should have the freedom to take advantage of another state's marriage laws, whether or not the pair resides in that state.

How exactly? With the help of the Internet, in what Candeub and Kuykendall are dubbing "e-marriage."

"Building on deeply rooted but overlooked precedent in both ancient and modern law concerning marriage by proxy, telephone, and mail, we propose `e-marriage,"' Candeub and Kuykendall write in their proposal, "E-Marriage: Breaking the Marriage Monopoly" for the Social Science Research Network.

Candeub and Kuykendall contend that "e-marriage" could help extricate states from the controversy surrounding same-sex marriage.

With "e-marriage," an Alabama gay couple, for example, could easily take advantage of Vermont's same-sex marriage laws though Alabama itself wouldn't necessarily recognize that marriage.

"Every type of e-marriage will not be enforceable everywhere," Candeub and Kuykendall write. "We argue, however, that marriage satisfies a unique human need for socially sanctioned commitment, which a simple contract cannot satisfy ... E-marriage can more efficiently distribute the `status good' of marriage, even if it cannot provide a legally enforceable relationship in every state."

Labels: culture, gay marriage, Marriage

posted by Eve at 2:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Regardless of their politics, Americans owe Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins gratitude for this: that their 23-year relationship unraveled, and ended, far from the public eye.

The couple separated over the summer, and apparently no fire hydrants were harmed in the process, no emergency medical technicians were summoned. It was late December before word of the break-up trickled out to the tabloids, and two weeks later the actors are still not talking, except to confirm through a publicist that they split. ...

Capisce, we do. Ms. Sarandon, whose seemingly golden "domestic partnership" with Mr. Robbins was the stuff of Hollywood legend, is desirous of preserving marriages on screen, but not so much in real life. She famously declined to wed Mr. Robbins, the father of her two sons, because she worried such a stuffy and archaic ritual might harm their relationship.

"I won't marry because I am too afraid of taking him for granted, or him taking me for granted," she once said. "Maybe it will be a good excuse for a party when I am 80."

Of course, many married people have a good excuse for a party when they're about 80--they're called golden anniversaries, and they're great. A pinnacle of married life, the 50th-anniversary party is a joyous celebration of love, perseverance and forbearance, virtues no less noble because they are lightly enforced by the state. The marriage certificate, surrendered at a divorce hearing, does not guarantee a happy union, but neither does the absence of one, as Ms. Sarandon learned.

Labels: culture, divorce, domestic partnership, Marriage

posted by Eve at 2:38 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Jay Sekora isn’t actively looking for an additional relationship, but he admits to occasionally checking a dating site to see who’s out there. Sekora’s girlfriend, Mare, who does not want her last name used here for professional reasons, said she is not pursuing anyone, either, but is “open and welcoming to what might come along.” In the three-plus years they have been together, a few other people have come along, like the woman whom Sekora, a 43-year-old systems administrator from Quincy, met online and dated briefly until she moved away. There was also a male-male couple that Mare and Sekora, who identifies as bisexual, dated for several months as a couple. Other than that, it has been the two of them. Well, sort of. ...

It’s complicated, as the poly catch phrase goes. It’s also still surprisingly closeted. Nonetheless, Valerie White, executive director of Sexual Freedom Legal Defense and Education Fund in Sharon, says we are ahead of the curve in Massachusetts, particularly compared with the South, where teachers have lost their jobs and parents have lost their children for being poly. But she notes there is no push in the poly movement to legalize these relationships, largely because there’s no infrastructure for it. “It was easy to legalize gay marriage. All you had to do was change bride and groom to person A and person B. But we don’t know what multi-partnered marriage looks like,” White says.

“The gay struggle is a larger struggle, and as poly people we don’t have to be political,” says Amoroso, who, like many poly people, does see the need for a clearer legal recognition of relationships that aren’t marriages. (If one of his partners were to fall ill, for example, he would want legal visitation rights.) ...

Then there are the kids, who in this case, according to Alan, understand as much about their parents’ lifestyle as they want to. The two boys have attended several Boston Pride Parades, and they know and interact with their parents’ partners as they would with any other close adult friends. But the Wexelblats have not yet explained the specifics of their lifestyle to their sons. “Kids deal well with things they think are normal,” says Alan. “To the degree that we can help them be comfortable with this, then they will treat it as normal. That’s the theory, anyway.”

That theory is starting to get support from research. In 2006, Elisabeth Sheff, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University who had been collecting data on poly families since 1996, launched the first long-term study of children raised in such families. While her findings are not yet conclusive, Sheff says her initial generalization is that kids raised in poly families have access to many resources, such as help with homework, rides when needed, and the additional emotional support and attention that comes from having other, nonparental adults in their lives. Sheff adds, however, that “kids in poly families also sometimes feel extremely upset when their parents’ partners leave, if it means the end of the relationship between the kid and the ex-partner.” She says that poly families often pass as mundane, blended families from divorce and remarriage and therefore easily fly below the radar.

Labels: culture, parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 10:33 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The original punishments — including standing on the gallows for an hour with a noose around the neck — have been softened to a $1,200 fine, yet some lawmakers think it's time for the 200-year-old crime of adultery to come off New Hampshire's books.

Seven months after the state approved gay marriage, lawmakers will consider easing government further from the bedroom with a bill to repeal the adultery law.

"We shouldn't be regulating people's sex lives and their love lives," state Rep. Timothy Horrigan said. "This is one area the state government should stay out of people's bedrooms."

Horrigan, D-Durham, and state Rep. Carol McGuire, R-Epsom, have teamed up on legislation to repeal the law.

Horrigan signed on because he believes it continues New Hampshire's efforts toward marriage equality. In June, lawmakers voted to legalize gay marriage — a law that takes effect Jan. 1.

"We shouldn't be in the business of regulating what consenting adults do with each other," Horrigan said. ...

McGuire, the prime sponsor, believes the moral battle over adultery should be fought under the state's civil divorce laws. The bill would leave adultery as a cause in divorces not filed under the no-fault provision of the statute.

Labels: adultery, culture, divorce, gay marriage, Lawrence v. Texas, New Hampshire

posted by Eve at 4:32 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Which is the greater evil – higher TTC fares, or TTC-endorsed extramarital affairs?

For the folks at AshleyMadison.com – a controversial website that helps married people cheat – it would be the first scenario. According to CEO Noel Biderman, however, TTC staff would rather lose out on his site's advertising dollars and are now backpedalling on a deal that would let the company promote itself on city streetcars.

"They're making moral judgments and that's not the role of the TTC," Biderman said Thursday, shortly after learning TTC staff had decided against recommending his ad campaign. "They're basically saying `We don't like your business and so we're not going to let your business advertise.'"

As far as Biderman is concerned, the TTC had given him the green light on the $250,000 deal, which would see six city streetcars wrapped in his signature slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair."

The plan, Biderman said, is to roll out the text-only ads in January, with possible future ads placed on buses.

He said he's been dealing with CBS Outdoor – a company contracted to secure advertising for the TTC – who sent him an email Wednesday acknowledging the TTC's approval of the ads. CBS Outdoor also sent a contract to Ashley Madison, as well as subsequent emails clarifying the ads had been signed off by the ad review committee.

But TTC spokesman Brad Ross said Thursday the ads had yet to clear the transit commission's review committee, which ultimately gets the final say.

Calling it a matter of "taste," he said TTC staff was not recommending the ads.

"We don't feel it is appropriate for a streetcar to be running around on the streets of Toronto advocating that people have affairs," Ross said.

Labels: adultery, Canada, culture

posted by Eve at 2:28 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) said more than half of the respondents to its latest survey among its 1,600 members had cited a drop in divorce filings during the current recession which has cut jobs, salaries and house prices.

In total, 57 percent of the attorneys noted fewer divorce filings since the last quarter of 2008. Only 14 percent noted an increase in filings during these difficult times.

Labels: culture, divorce, economics

posted by Eve at 2:26 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Pity the man whose wife writes a memoir.

Consider Elizabeth Weil's husband, Dan. On Sunday, in the New York Times Magazine, Ms. Weil previewed a memoir she is writing about their effort to improve their marriage. She doesn't stint on the frisky bits—or rather, what she proclaims to be the insufficiently frisky bits. The conjugal part of their equation is apparently "not terribly inventive." Ms. Weil derides their "safe, narrow little bowling alley of a sex life" and tells us that she and her husband "hadn't been talking to each other while having sex. And not making eye contact either." One thing's for sure: If that hesitation to make eye contact suggested a certain reticence, Ms. Weil has overcome it.

Dan's wife is just one of the legion of women scribblers eager to divulge the intimate details of their marriages. The hot new genre is the tell-all of sexual disappointment written by women having their Peggy Lee moment: "Is That All There Is?" Male writers are well behind this curve, retaining some vestigial hesitation to expose their wives in print. This reflects a basic social norm: No husband I know speaks out of school about his wife. You wouldn't trust any man who did. Say what you will about the male half of the species—famous for its promiscuous and predatory proclivities—but they can be remarkably discreet about the intimate aspect of marriage. Whether this is stoicism or a residual chivalry, it is a core part of the male code. Consider Tiger Woods's alleged transgressions: Perhaps the most appalling of them is the report that he prattled on to one of his cookies about how she connected with him in a way his wife did not. As if cheating weren't bad form enough.

Women, by contrast, seem to be at somewhat greater liberty to share private matters.

Labels: adultery, culture, Marriage

posted by Eve at 9:38 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Judging by recent press reports, the family fallout associated with the Great Recession has been severe. Take the Bachmuth family, profiled last month in the New York Times. After Paul Bachmuth lost his job at a Texas electric consulting firm in December of last year, his life and marriage took a turn for the worse. Often dejected, he would spend hours surfing the Internet or watching television.

Paul and his wife, Amanda, fought over money. She also resented the part-time job she had to pick up at a day-care center to keep the family solvent, especially since she continued to shoulder the bulk of the family's cooking, cleaning and laundry. "She kind of had something in the back of her mind that it was partly my fault I was laid off," Mr. Bachmuth told the Times. The couple is now seeing a counselor.

The Bachmuths' experience is by no means unique, according to "Money & Marriage," a report released this week by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values. As the report notes, the financial pressures associated with the Great Recession can lead to a downward spiral of marital recriminations, tension and conflict as spouses struggle to pay bills, adjust to the loss of a job or find themselves forced out of their home. This downward spiral is especially likely to unfold when a husband loses his job—a particularly salient reality in the current recession, where more than 75% of the job losses have fallen on the shoulders of men.

In some cases, this spiral leads directly to divorce court. In recent years, couples who report disagreeing about money matters once a week are about twice as likely to divorce compared with couples who disagree about money less than once a month, according to the report.

But there may be a silver lining in all this financial pain. For most married Americans, the Great Recession seems to be solidifying, not eroding, the marital bond. The divorce rate is actually falling. It declined to 16.9 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2008 from 17.5 divorces in 2007 (a 3% drop), after rising from 16.4 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2005 (a 7% increase).

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, National Marriage Project, W. Bradford Wilcox

posted by Eve at 9:29 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The State of Our Unions monitors the current health of marriage and family life in America. Produced annually, it is a joint publication of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

The 2009 State of Our Unions makes clear that money matters for contemporary American marriages. In particular, this edition of The State of Our Unions answers the following questions:

* How is the Great Recession affecting the institution of marriage, as measured by changes in marriage and divorce rates in the U.S.?
* How do family finances—especially credit card debt and family assets—shape the quality and stability of contemporary married life in America?
* What do evolutionary psychology and the contemporary study of finance have to tell us about the best division of financial labor for husbands and wives?
* Is the Great Recession likely to foster egalitarian relationships between husbands and wives?

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, gender, gender differences, Marriage, National Marriage Project

posted by Eve at 4:59 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Here’s the glass half-full take on the National Marriage Project’s annual “State of Our Unions” report, which tackles the Great Recession’s impact on American wedlock. As it turns out, the strain of the downturn hasn’t pushed the divorce rate higher; instead, economic stress seems to have made American marriages slightly more stable overall, as couples develop a “new appreciation for the economic and social support that marriage can provide in tough times,” as the study’s lead author, Brad Wilcox, puts it. ...

Here’s the pessimistic take. Yes, divorce rates are dropping, but marriage rates are down as well. People aren’t getting divorced because they can’t afford it, not because they’re suddenly happier with their spouses. Meanwhile, the recession’s job losses have been heavily concentrated among working class men, who aren’t necessarily equipped to make a smooth adjustment to playing stay-at-home dads while their wives support the family. (Whelan’s essay acknowledges that “flexible or egalitarian gender roles may be more attractive to well-educated, affluent Americans than less-educated, working-class couples,” and Wilcox notes that his own research suggests that “husbands are significantly less happy in their marriages, and more likely to contemplate divorce, when their wives take the lead in breadwinning.”)

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, Marriage

posted by Eve at 4:56 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

You know it in your gut, and you’ve seen it in the splintered marriages around you. Finance-related tensions — however you define them — raise the risk of divorce.

A new study, by Jeffrey Dew at Utah State University, attempts to quantify that risk. His finding: Couples who reported disagreeing about finance once a week were over 30 percent more likely to get divorced than couples who reported disagreeing about finances a few times a month.

Labels: culture, divorce

posted by Eve at 4:53 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

I have a pretty good marriage. It could be better. There are things about my husband that drive me crazy. Last spring he cut apart a frozen pig’s head with his compound miter saw in our basement. He needed the head to fit into a pot so that he could make pork stock. I’m no saint of a spouse, either. I hate French kissing, compulsively disagree and fake sleep when Dan vomits in the middle of the night. Dan also once threatened to punch my brother at a family reunion at a lodge in Maine. But in general we do O.K.

The idea of trying to improve our union came to me one night in bed. I’ve never really believed that you just marry one day at the altar or before a justice of the peace. I believe that you become married — truly married — slowly, over time, through all the road-rage incidents and precolonoscopy enemas, all the small and large moments that you never expected to happen and certainly didn’t plan to endure. But then you do: you endure. And as I lay there, I started wondering why I wasn’t applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this. Dan, too, had worked tirelessly — some might say obsessively — at skill acquisition. Over the nine years of our marriage, he taught himself to be a master carpenter and a master chef. He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine. Yet he shared the seemingly widespread aversion to the very idea of marriage improvement. Why such passivity? What did we all fear?

That night, the image that came to mind, which I shared with Dan, was that I had been viewing our marriage like the waves on the ocean, a fact of life, determined by the sandbars below, shaped by fate and the universe, not by me. And this, suddenly, seemed ridiculous. ...

Still, Dan was not 100 percent enthusiastic, at least at first. He feared — not mistakenly, it turns out — that marriage is not great terrain for overachievers. He met my ocean analogy with the veiled threat of California ranch-hand wisdom: if you’re going to poke around the bushes, you’d best be prepared to scare out some snakes.

Labels: culture, Marriage

posted by Eve at 9:50 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

True love may be the key to a long and happy marriage – but being a dentist or an agricultural engineer helps, too, according to new research.

A paper that correlates occupations with divorce and separation rates, to be published in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, reveals that those employed in extrovert and stressful jobs are highly likely to divorce, as are those who work in the caring professions.

Dancers, choreographers and bartenders have around a 40% chance of experiencing a relationship breakdown. But also at high risk are nurses, psychiatrists and those who help the elderly and disabled. Conversely, agricultural engineers, optometrists, dentists, clergymen and podiatrists are all in occupations which carry a 2-7% chance of family breakdown. ...

Dr Michael Aamodt, an industrial psychologist at Radford University in Virginia, invented a formula to work out the likelihood of success of a marriage based on the occupation of one of the partners. The formula (separated plus divorced) divided by (total population minus never married) was used to establish the percentage of people in 449 occupations who were once in a marital relationship.

Aamodt rated professions and trades according to their likelihood of a successful marriage. "I looked at the divorce rate for each given occupation after controlling for gender, race, age and income characteristics," said Aamodt. "By controlling for demographic variables that might be related to divorce rates, we also obtained race, gender, age and income information for each occupation."

However, shift work, overtime and weekend work made no significant difference, he said.

Labels: culture, divorce, Marriage

posted by Eve at 9:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Counselors and those who study dating, marriage and divorce say plenty of couples get married when they shouldn't. And their numbers may be increasing, because more couples are casually living together, which can complicate decisions about whether to marry, says Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver.

Stanley says his research on couples who cohabit before marriage has found that "some of those wouldn't have married if they hadn't been living together."

"People have committed themselves before talking about the commitment to the future, and that can get you walking down the aisle not being sure that's the right thing, or what you want to do," he says.

Stories of people entering marriages they felt were doomed from the start intrigued Carl Weisman of Torrance, Calif., whose book, So Why Have You Never Been Married? 10 Insights Into Why He Hasn't Wed, arrived last year. He says a divorced woman he knows said something he thought was quite profound: "I didn't listen to my inner voice. I knew I was going to divorce him before I even married him." That led Weisman to thinking about others who went into a marriage knowing it wouldn't last. But he couldn't find any academic research on the subject.

So Weisman, 50, who recently married for the first time, surveyed 1,036 people across the country and conducted in-depth interviews with dozens more for his new book, Serious Doubts: Why People Marry When They Know It Won't Last.

Those surveyed had one thing in common: "They all ignored their inner voice," he says. "They knew it wasn't going to last." ...

Donahue, who cohabited before her 11-year marriage (which ended five years ago), says she didn't heed some early signals, including religious differences. Her parents also didn't approve of their living together without being married, which Donahue says encouraged her to wed. "I was thinking that we were in love and we're going to make it work. I believed in this whole fairy-tale thing on marriage."

Other reasons for proceeding in the face of doubts may also sound familiar – like pregnancy.

That's why Neumann, 26, a non-profit market researcher from Chicago, says she went ahead with it. "I had some concerns in the relationship, but I thought if I got married, we would grow together," she says. "I was 18 at the time and thought it would all work out in the end."

Others may think a partner is too good a catch to pass up – even though there's no spark.

Rasmussen, 51, an office manager in Boise, says she tried to convince herself that she and her second husband were a good match. They enjoyed many of the same activities, including travel. She had financial resources, yet he offered to help her with her kids' college expenses.

She wasn't head over heels, but he was attractive and generous, so Rasmussen told herself "You can learn to love this guy."

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, Marriage, pregnancy, premarital sex

posted by Eve at 5:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

What does government have to do with marriage?

I was brought up to believe that we had a constitutional separation between church and state — intentionally designed by the founding fathers so they could not tell us what our churches, synagogues, and mosques could and could not do. If that is the case, why are legislators across the country, and most recently in New Jersey, agonizing over bills to define marriage?

Wouldn’t it be better if government’s only role were to recognize the legal relationship between two consenting adults — something that occurs when you get your marriage license? Let’s call that license something other than a “marriage” license and leave the government’s role there.

If a couple wants to declare their lifelong commitment in a religious setting, and a church, mosque or synagogue will perform the service — whether heterosexual or same-sex — so be it.

Critics will claim I do not have an appropriate view of the institution of marriage. Quite the contrary — I see marriage as a sacred commitment that I have happily upheld in the 35 years I have been married to my husband. Similarly, as an elder in my church, I have a deeply held view of houses of worship: I believe this country was founded with the intention of providing, and should continue to protect, our freedom to practice the religion of our choice without the intrusion of the state.

Nowhere is this liberty more important than in the fundamental structure of life and family — the lifelong commitments that undergird our society.

Labels: beyond marriage, culture, New Jersey

posted by Eve at 5:37 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Leland Traiman, who runs a sperm bank in California, worries about his lesbian clients in more conservative parts of the country when he hears fellow gay rights activists talk about winning the right to wed.

With 34 states lacking any legal recognition of same-sex relationships, Traiman wonders if all the emphasis on matrimony is misplaced.

"When I speak to women from Florida or Wisconsin or Minnesota, they are like, 'I don't care what it's called, I just want to be able to visit my wife in the hospital and cover my children with my health insurance,'" said Traiman, who helped pass the nation's first domestic partnership law a quarter-century ago in Berkeley. ...

Activists like Traiman point to the success of efforts to extend spousal rights and other civil rights protections to same-sex couples, even as the passage of gay marriage bans grab headlines.

On the same day that Maine rejected a gay marriage law approved by its Legislature, for example, voters in Washington state approved a law giving same-sex couples or straight older couples who register as domestic partners all the state rights and responsibilities of marriage. Washington's so-called "everything but marriage" law passed by the same margin as Maine's gay marriage rebuff, 53 percent to 48 percent. ...

This month, more than 150 Christian conservative leaders published a 4,700-word declaration, pledging to fight any legislative efforts to equate same-sex unions with traditional marriages. In theory, though, the Manhattan Declaration would not oppose extending legal protections to two people in a nonsexual relationship, such as two sisters or even a same-sex couple that abstained from sex, said Robert George, a Princeton law professor who serves as board chairman of the National Organization for Marriage.

"What you couldn't have is ... an explicit reference to partners in intimate relationships because 'intimate' is an euphemism for 'sexual,'" George said. "In that case, all a civil union scheme is a semantic substitute for marriage, or same-sex marriage by another name."

Labels: civil unions, culture, domestic partnership, gay marriage

posted by Eve at 5:32 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Mohammad, a 40-year old Lebanese Shiite who lives in Hezbollah's stronghold in Beirut's southern suburbs, was holding forth on the virtues of resistance, loyalty, and sex. "You could create the most loyal army by providing political power, social services and fulfilling the desires of your men -- namely, sexual ones," he declared.

"And Hezbollah has been very successful in this regard," Mohammad continued. It is hard to disagree. Hezbollah liberated South Lebanon from Israeli occupation, expanded the Shiite community's political power within the country, and has provided social services, such as health care and education, to its constituency since the 1980s. Today, it is also working to fulfill the sexual needs of its supporters, though a practice known as mutaa marriage.

Mutaa is a form of "temporary marriage" only acceptable within Shiite communities, one that allows couples to have religiously sanctioned sex for a limited period of time, without any commitments, and without the obligatory involvement of religious figures. In conservative Muslim societies known for their strict sense of propriety, mutaa offers an escape clause. The contract is very simple. The woman says: "I marry myself to you for [a specific period of time] and for [a specified dowry]" and the man says: "I accept." The period can range between one hour and a year, and is subject to renewal. A Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim man, but a Muslim man can temporarily marry a Muslim, Christian, or Jewish woman, as long as she is a divorcée or a widow. However, those interviewed for this article confirmed that Hezbollah-the "Party of God"-has allowed the practice to spread to virgins or girls who have never married before, as long as the permission of her guardian (father or paternal grandfather) is obtained.

Temporary marriage has long been practiced by Shiites around the world. However, it has recently become more commonplace in Lebanon, notably within Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut's southern suburbs and in southern Lebanon after the 2006 war with Israel[.]

Labels: culture, Islam, Lebanon, Marriage, sex, temporary marriage

posted by Imapp Staff at 7:16 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

WHEN Kimberly Spring-Winters told her mother she was in love, she didn’t expect a positive response — and she didn’t get one.

“It’s wrong, it’s taboo, nobody does that,” she recalled her mother saying.

But shortly after the conversation, Ms. Spring-Winters, 29, decided to marry the man she loved: her first cousin.

Shane Winters, 37, whom she now playfully refers to as her “cusband,” proposed to her at a surprise birthday party in front of family and friends, and the two are now trying to have a baby. They are not concerned about genetic defects, Ms. Spring-Winters said, and their fertility doctor told them he saw no problem with having children.

The couple — she is a second-grade teacher and he builds furniture — held their wedding last summer on a lake near this tiny town in central Pennsylvania. But their official marriage took place a month earlier in Maryland, at Annapolis City Hall, because marriage between first cousins is illegal in Pennsylvania — and in 24 other states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures — under laws enacted mostly in the 19th century.

While many people have a story about a secret cousin crush or kiss, most Americans find the idea of cousins marrying and having children disturbing or even repulsive. The cartoonish image of hillbilly cousins giving birth to cross-eyed, deformed and mentally disabled children has endured in the national psyche. But even in the United States — one of the few countries in the world where such unions are illegal — marriage between first cousins may be slowly emerging from the shadows.

Although it is still a long way from being widely accepted, in recent years cousin marriage has been drawing increased attention, as researchers study the potential health risks to children of cousins. And the couples themselves have begun to connect online, largely through a Web site called Cousincouples.com, which bills itself as “the world’s primary resource for romantic relationships among cousins,” and is trying to build support for overturning laws prohibiting cousin marriage.

For the most part, scientists studying the phenomenon worldwide are finding evidence that the risk of birth defects and mortality is less significant than previously thought. ...

Historically, marriage between cousins has been seen as desirable in many parts of the world, and even today, slightly more than 10 percent of marriages worldwide are between people who are second cousins or closer, Dr. Bittles said. In the United States, the percentage is thought to be much smaller, although it is difficult to estimate, since such marriages have long been an underground phenomenon, because of laws forbidding them and because of the lingering incest-related stigma.

Labels: cousin marriage, culture, Marriage

posted by Imapp Staff at 7:11 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A new report by the British think-tank Demos has hit the headlines, with its claim that ‘Parents are the principal architects of a fairer society’. Based on research from the Millennium Cohort Study, the report argues that how children are parented has a more significant impact upon their future life chances than just about anything else, including poverty and the social class into which they are born (1).

You might wonder whether the world really needs another report blaming particular parenting styles for every evident problem in late capitalist society. Across the British political spectrum, policy continually seeks to clobber parents over the head with the assertion that the future of Britain rests or falls according to whether they feed their children too many sweets or read to them for the requisite number of minutes at bedtime.

So when Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves, authors of the Demos report, respond to concerns about interference by the ‘nanny state’ by arguing that ‘if there is one area where government intervention is justified, it is in precisely the area of life signalled by the term “nannying” – the development of children’s capabilities’, they are pushing at doors opened by New Labour, and held open by the Tories. Nothing new there.

However, Lexmond and Reeves at least try to go beyond the emotional blackmail that informs most parenting policy, which simply asserts that if you don’t adopt the right kind of parenting behaviours with your children they will die of obesity or end up on the social scrapheap, with no qualifications and a million mental disorders. Their report, Building Character, is an attempt to wrestle with the problem of how we bring up children with a sense of self and agency, who can achieve things in life and develop a responsibility to people and projects outside of themselves.

This is an important question, and one that preoccupies parents as much as policy-wonks. I have often found myself ploughing through the latest piece of official parenting advice and wondering to what end it all leads. The idea that rearing children is just about maximising their ‘happiness’, or stopping them from becoming fat, or enabling them to take a few calculated risks, might all make some sense on a personal, daily level, but it seems thoroughly inadequate in terms of a generational project.

When we say ‘children are the future’, we don’t just mean that they will outlive us, but that they will be the ones running society and making history. To that extent, it really is not enough that they are happy or that they have high self-esteem – they have to be able to cope with adversity and think outside of themselves, in order to shape the world around them. This is where character comes into play, and where adults’ role in helping to ‘build character’ is crucially important.

Unfortunately, while Demos’ enthusiasm for addressing this issue is refreshing, its narrow focus on parenting styles and outcomes among young children means that the report ends up peddling the same old mixture of common sense and nonsense.

Labels: children, culture, parenting, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 4:10 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...These are the kinds of questions asked by anxious parents and, increasingly, academic researchers. Boyhood studies—virtually unheard of a few years ago—has taken off, with a shelf full of books already published, more on the way, and a new journal devoted to the subject. Much of the focus so far has been on boys falling behind academically, paired with the notion that school is not conducive to the way boys learn. What motivates boys, the argument goes, is different from what motivates girls, and society should adjust accordingly.

Not everyone buys the boy talk. Some critics, in particular the American Association of University Women, contend that much of what passes for research about boyhood only reinforces stereotypes and arrives at simplistic conclusions: Boys are competitive! Boys like action! Boys hate books! They argue that this line of thinking miscasts boys as victims and ignores the very real problems faced by girls.

But while this debate is far from settled, the field has expanded to include how marketers target boys, the nature of boys' friendships, and a host of deeper, more philosophical issues, all of which can be boiled down, more or less, to a single question: Just what are boys, anyway?

Labels: adolescence, boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, gender differences

posted by Eve at 4:05 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

TRADITIONAL family supporters raised the alarm yesterday after Government research claimed that lesbians made the best parents.

Campaigners said that research paid for with taxpayers’ money to pander to same-sex couples only succeeded in marginalising fathers to the detriment of society.

The National Academy for Parenting Practitioners struck a blow to the heart of the conventional family after it said the latest research showed that children prospered when raised by two women. ...

But the research showed that children brought up by lesbians had higher aspirations to become ­doctors or lawyers and were more confident to fight for social justice.

Speaking last week, director of the research Stephen Scott said: “Lesbians make better parents than a man and a woman.” Campaigners Fathers4Justice attacked the study for failing to promote the role of fathers and laid blame for a pending “unprecedented social ­crisis” at the Government’s door.

Labels: culture, family structure, Fathers, gay parenting, lesbians, parenting, professional associations, Scotland

posted by Eve at 3:07 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...It is striking, then, how comparatively rarely children are mentioned as an argument in favor of gay marriage. The issue is framed as a debate over equality and justice, of personal freedom and the relation of church and state, not about what is good for kids.

That’s partly because, until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the children of same-sex couples. The earliest studies, dating to the 1970s, were based on small samples and could include only families who stepped forward to be counted. But about 20 years ago, the Census Bureau added a category for unwed partners, which included many gay partners, providing more demographic data. Not every gay couple that is married, or aspiring to marry, has children, but an increasing number do: approximately 1 in 5 male same-sex couples and 1 in 3 female same-sex couples are raising children, up from 1 in 20 male couples and 1 in 5 female couples in 1990.

This growth, coupled with the passage of time, means there is a large cohort of children who are now old enough to yield solid data. And the portrait emerging tells us something about the effects of gay parenting. It also contains lessons for all parents. ...

In most ways, the accumulated research shows, children of same-sex parents are not markedly different from those of heterosexual parents. They show no increased incidence of psychiatric disorders, are just as popular at school and have just as many friends. While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay.

More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families. ...

Heterosexual couples might want to pay attention to these results. While the gay-marriage debate is playing out on the public stage, a more private debate is taking place in kitchens and bedrooms over who does what in a heterosexual marriage (takes out the trash, spends more time with the kids, feels free to head out with their friends for a beer). The philosophical underpinnings of both conversations — gay marriage and equality in parenting — are similar, in that both focus on equality for adults (in the case of heterosexuals, mostly wives). But even if parents who seek parity do so for their own sanity and in pursuit of their own ideals, might it not also be better for their children?

Labels: culture, gay parenting, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:15 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Will Phillips isn't like other boys his age.

For one thing, he's smart. Scary smart. A student in the West Fork School District in Washington County, he skipped a grade this year, going directly from the third to the fifth. When his family goes for a drive, discussions are much more apt to be about Teddy Roosevelt and terraforming Mars than they are about Spongebob Squarepants and what's playing on Radio Disney.

It was during one of those drives that the discussion turned to the pledge of allegiance and what it means. Laura Phillips is Will's mother. “Yes, my son is 10,” she said. “But he's probably more aware of the meaning of the pledge than a lot of adults. He's not just doing it rote recitation. We raised him to be aware of what's right, what's wrong, and what's fair.”

Will's family has a number of gay friends. In recent years, Laura Phillips said, they've been trying to be a straight ally to the gay community, going to the pride parades and standing up for the rights of their gay and lesbian neighbors. They've been especially dismayed by the effort to take away the rights of homosexuals – the right to marry, and the right to adopt. Given that, Will immediately saw a problem with the pledge of allegiance.

Labels: Arkansas, culture, gay marriage

posted by Eve at 11:36 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Most of us know people who are in love, plan to marry and currently live together. It’s sort of the new premarital counseling program. I visited a church out West that had a “pre-marriage” ceremony for a couple living together. No license. No wedding dress. Just a prayer of blessing to hold them over until the couple walked down the aisle—a kind of marital “appetizer,” I guess. I asked the pastor why they did it. He said, “The couple believes they are married in the eyes of the Lord, and we just wanted them to feel affirmation in our community.”

Labels: cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

posted by Eve at 4:45 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A licensing complaint against Nokomis High School guidance counselor Don Mendell about his appearance in a TV commercial opposing gay marriage has sparked a political fight as voters go to the polls.

The complaint was filed by Ann Sullivan, a social worker at Newport Elementary School, according to the Yes on 1 campaign, which supports the effort to repeal the state's same-sex marriage law in today's referendum vote, and the Alliance Defense Fund, whose lawyers now represent Mendell.

Messages left for Sullivan on Monday at Newport Elementary School were not returned.

The Morning Sentinel obtained the complaint last week. It has been filed with the state Department of Professional and Financial Regulation. ...

Citing Mendell's opinion as expressed in the TV commercial, the complaint seeks to revoke Mendell's license because "he does not have the right as a licensed social worker to make public comments that can endanger or promote discrimination."

The complaint cites a code of ethics set by the National Association of Social Workers. The cited sections state that social workers should "treat colleagues with respect and ... should avoid unwarranted negative criticism of colleagues in communications" and they "should not practice, condone, facilitate, or collaborate with any form of discrimination" on the basis of several factors, including "sexual orientation."

In the commercial, Mendell describes Gould as a "gay activist" and says repealing the law will "prevent homosexual marriage from being pushed on Maine students." Mendell later said in an interview that he wanted people to know "at least one experienced educator, counselor, thought at stake here was something that would have a profound effect on the raising of children," because children should have equal opportunities to be raised by a mother and father, if possible, he said.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, Maine, professional associations, schools

posted by Eve at 4:51 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A recent profile in the New York Times of the marriage between President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle had a great deal to say about how the Obamas have balanced their desire for public influence and personal privacy. The article had nothing to say about one of the most simple and remarkable facts about the first family: for the first time in recent memory, the family in the White House is not a nuclear family.

The White House has played host to its share of unusual marriages, but the Obamas have broken new ground by bringing in Michelle’s mother, Marilyn Robinson, to help care for their children. The Obamas’ stated reason for inviting Robinson to live in the White House was so that she could assist in the care of Sasha and Malia, the Obamas daughters. As baby boomers age and America becomes what the President’s Council on Bioethics called the “mass geriatric society,” more and more elderly Americans may begin to live with their adult children. As with the Obamas, the desire for improved care-giving will be the main motivation. But in this case, the elders, not the children, will be the ones receiving the care.

Our society has not always been very clear about what obligations grown children have toward their aging parents. But in the case of the Boomers, the question becomes exceedingly complex. Taking advantage of the rise of no-fault divorce laws, they sought flexibility and happiness through more negotiable romantic and sexual attachments. They had fewer children than their parents’ generation, but those they did have were buffeted by the chaos of divorce, remarriage, custody battles, and multiple Christmases.

Now, the balance of dependence is tipping. As boomers enter their second childhood, we may witness the historical irony of aged parents experiencing some of the chaos and uncertainty felt by their children. What responsibilities of care does one have toward a stepfather? Toward a parent with more than one set of children? It’s no longer a question of who gets to keep the kids but rather of who gets stuck with the grandparents.

In such an environment it is easy to see why the public provision of medicine and end-of-life care is becoming especially important. Complicated family arrangements matter less when the main caregiver for the elderly is the government. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that only 12% of parents age 65 and older report depending more on their children than their children do on them.

Labels: culture, divorce, extended family, family policy

posted by Eve at 4:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A new analysis of Census data shows that same-sex couples who identify as married are similar to opposite-sex couples in age, income and even parental status, regardless of whether they are legally wed. ...

It also found that Utah, Wyoming and other states that don't offer any legal recognition of gay relationships had some of the highest percentages of same-sex couples who describe themselves as husbands or wives.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, Marriage

posted by Eve at 4:37 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Hollywood has always been preoccupied with that most exciting, most mercurial of human emotions: romantic love. There's nothing particularly surprising about this obsession, of course: Filmmakers have long been drawn to those moments when human emotions run highest and most transparent, and if that isn't a textbook definition of eros, I don't know what is.

But despite the miles of celluloid dedicated to the rosy beginnings of mankind's seminal institution, Hollywood generally pays little more than lip service to married life itself. It may be called "happily ever after," but it's so heavy on the "happy" as to verge on the giddy -- and there's really no "ever after" to speak of.

While the film industry as a whole may focus on the silver linings at the expense of the clouds, there remains a small-but-powerful stable of films that offer a more complex, more realistic view of marriage. It's not always pretty, but it is profoundly important and deeply meaningful. And for those few films willing to recognize these facts, viewers should be deeply grateful.

A quick sampling of some of those films, classic and recent, that are particularly noteworthy....

Labels: culture, Marriage

posted by Eve at 1:20 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Buoyed by $1.9 billion in government funding since 1997 ($1.5 billion of that federal money), abstinence-only education grew from a niche market to a booming industry, with hundreds of curriculums for teachers to choose from. But if the 2000s were abstinence's boom years, the next decade may well be its bust. With Obama's budget for 2010 dropping all abstinence-until-marriage funds from the federal budget, past grantees are left uncertain. Congress could restore funding; the Senate Finance Committee voted to do so, 12–11, last month. But the measure must still pass the full Congress, where chances are slim. So abstinence-only groups are left hoping private donors will step forward to at least partially fill the gap. "The open question is whether these organizations will continue to thrive when federal funding is no longer available," says Alesha Doan, author of The Politics of Virginity: Abstinence in Sex Education (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008). "What is the underlying support in society for this?"

Abstinence education came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It began with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which dedicated an annual $50 million in Title V abstinence-education grants. The money had to be spent on programs that teach "abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children." When George W. Bush took office he created a new program: Community Based Abstinence Education, or CBAE, grants. While only states could take the Title V funds, CBAE grants went directly to community groups, including faith-based organizations. During the Bush administration, funding for abstinence education more than doubled, from $80 million in 2001 to $200 million in 2007, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office.

In the beginning, the public-health community was open to the programs. The United States did, after all, have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world. "There was open-mindedness then, that it might work" says John Santelli, of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "Everyone is willing to give new ideas a trial period." By 1999, one study estimated a third of American students were receiving an abstinence-only education. But as funding grew, so did a body of research showing that abstinence didn't change the sexual behaviors of students; pregnancy and STD rates did not go down, the age of initial sexual activity did not go up. "Each evaluation came along ... and each showed it didn't work," says Santelli. The articles appeared in peer-reviewed journals, many in the Journal of Adolescent Health, and in government-commissioned reviews. In 2007, a federally funded study of four abstinence programs found its students no more likely to abstain than those in a comprehensive program. At the same time, comprehensive programs that discuss contraceptives and their use received better, although by no means perfect, marks. Researcher Doug Kirby's 2008 review of 48 studies of comprehensive curriculums found that two-thirds either reduced frequency of sex or number of sexual partners. By time Obama cut Title V abstinence-education funds from his budget, 25 states had already begun rejecting the money, 16 because they didn't agree ideologically or weren't seeing results, the others for administrative reasons.

Labels: abstinence, Barack Obama, culture, sex education

posted by Eve at 1:13 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Abstract: Supporters of Proposition 8 in California have been subjected to harassment, intimidation, vandalism, racial scapegoating, blacklisting, loss of employment, economic hardships, angry protests, violence, at least one death threat, and gross expressions of anti-religious bigotry. Arguments for same-sex marriage are based fundamentally on the idea that limiting marriage to the union of husband and wife is a form of bigotry, irrational prejudice, and even hatred against homosexual persons. As this ideology seeps into the culture more generally, individuals and institutions that support marriage as the union of husband and wife risk paying a price for that belief in many legal, social, economic, and cultural contexts.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, Proposition 8

posted by Imapp Staff at 1:07 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In a San Francisco courtroom two weeks ago, a prominent lawyer opposed to same-sex marriage made a concession that could mark a turning point in the legal wars over the purpose and meaning of marriage.

The lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, has studied the matter deeply, and his erudite briefs are steeped in history. He cannot have been blindsided by the question Judge Vaughn R. Walker asked him: What would be the harm of permitting gay men and lesbians to marry?

“Your honor, my answer is: I don’t know,” Mr. Cooper said. “I don’t know.”

Labels: culture, gay marriage

posted by Eve at 12:46 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The California Secretary of State announced last week that the proponent of an initiative petition to amend California's Constitution to ban divorce in the state may begin to collect signatures. The proposed amendment would still allow annulments, but would completely eliminate the ability of married couples to get divorced in California. Proponents will need to collect the signatures of 694,354 registered voters to qualify the initiative for the ballot.

According to Huffington Post last month, the proponent, John Marcotte, introduced the amendment to mock the proponents of Proposition 8 who focused on protecting traditional marriage as a reason to oppose same-sex marriage. Last month, Cockeyed.com published an interview with Marcotte. Here is one exchange that gives the flavor of his remarks....

Labels: California, culture, divorce, gay marriage, Proposition 8

posted by Eve at 12:37 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Libertarians traditionally have viewed coercion, especially when institutionalized in the form of government, as the main threat to freedom. But cultural pressures outside the state also can restrict people’s ability to live as they please. Is that another limit on liberty worth criticizing, or is it a function of voluntary choices?

In the first essay below, Contributing Editor Kerry Howley argues for a wider vision of human liberty, one that acknowledges government is not the only threat to freedom. In a reply, Todd Seavey says fighting for property rights is difficult enough without taking on cultural baggage. In another response, Daniel McCarthy agrees that culture and liberty are linked but suggests that freedom demands a more pluralistic view of acceptable cultures than Howley’s vision might allow.

Labels: culture, libertarianism

posted by Eve at 5:53 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Living alone is on its way to becoming the new norm in parts of the Washington area, as the proportion of households headed by married couples has declined and one-person households have jumped.

Population statistics released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday, based on samples taken from 2006 to 2008, reflect national trends that have accelerated since the 2000 census. The Washington area figures were particularly stark.

Every jurisdiction in the region showed a leap in single households. In most places, they now make up 20 to 30 percent of all households. In the District and Alexandria, almost half of all households have just one person. ...

Lisa Neidert, a researcher with the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, said young people going through that stage are less likely to live with roommates than they were two decades ago. And people who divorce are less likely to remarry.

"It's the idea that if you're not in a married relationship, that's okay," she said. "You definitely have young people feeling more independent. On the other hand, strong family ties have faded a bit. In 1940, a 70-year-old was going to live with a 40-year-old son. Now, they're not even living in the same community." ...

The Census Bureau survey also showed an increase in the number of households headed by single parents. In Prince William County, 11 percent of households are headed by single parents, up from 7 percent in 1990. Fairfax and Loudoun counties stayed the same, about 6 percent. The District also stayed roughly the same, about 10 percent.

Labels: culture, DC, demographics, single parenting

posted by Eve at 3:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government's target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.

And if that makes sense, why not start cutting population everywhere? Are condoms not the greenest technology of all?

World population is forecast to peak at 9.2bn by 2050. According to a report by the LSE for the Optimum Population Trust, the lobbying body currently asking parents to "Stop at Two", it would cost $220m to provide the family planning that would reduce the 2050 population by half a billion, preventing the emission of 34 gigatonnes of carbon. Introducing low-carbon technology for the same result would cost more than $1 trillion. ...

So the richer a country gets, the more pressing the need for it to curb its population. The only nation to have taken steps to do this is China – and the way it went about enforcing the notorious one child policy is one of the reasons the rest of us are so horrified by the notion of state intervention. Yet China now has 300-400 million fewer people. It was certainly the most successful governmental attempt to preserve the world's resources so far.

But lowering birth rate need not be so draconian. Experience shows it is most effectively done by ensuring women's equality and improving their education, while providing cheap contraception. Birth rate, gender equality, education and poverty are inextricably linked.

Labels: contraception, culture, demographics, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 9:15 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert slammed lampooned same sex marriage opponents in his "The Word" segment Monday night, turning the arguments against "outing" on its head by farcically arguing that the signers of an anti-gay marriage petition should be allowed to stay in the closet.

Opponents of gay marriage in Washington state are trying to keep the signers of an anti-gay marriage petition private. Protect Marriage Washington got enough signatories to mount a referendum against a provision allowing gay couples to enjoy the same benefits as straight couples, but refuses to disclose the names of the signers.

"God knows what would happen to our names if they end up in China," Colbert remarked. "If those names are released, we would all then know the signers. By which i mean their orientation about other people's sexual orientation. and that's a very personal thing.

"Some say 'too bad, they chose to sign this petition,'" Colbert continued. "But, folks, I don't believe it's a choice. I believe you're born thinking gays don't have the right to get married. Or even be joined in union."

Labels: culture, domestic partnership, Washington (state)

posted by Eve at 9:10 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The fierce fight over same-sex marriage in California and elsewhere is creating pressure to recognize a new free-speech right that could keep petition signatures secret.

The Supreme Court voted last week to block release of the names of more than 138,000 people in Washington state who signed petitions seeking to repeal a same-sex domestic partner law in a ballot scheduled for Nov. 3.

The Supreme Court's intervention set off a broad debate among election-law experts and 1st Amendment scholars over what is private and what is public when it comes to politics.

Is signing a petition and delivering it to the government a public act, like voting on a bill in the legislature or contributing money to a campaign? Or is it more like casting a secret ballot at the polling place? ...

Signing a petition is more akin to a lawmaker's vote, which is usually required to be made in public so the citizenry can monitor the progress of the laws that will govern them, legal analysts say.

But Richard Hasen, a Loyola law professor, noted that the Supreme Court in the past has protected civil rights groups and socialists from revealing the names of their members because of fears they could be harassed and intimidated.

"The court would not necessarily construe signing a ballot measure as a 1st Amendment-protected activity," Hasen said. "But if it is, in fact, true that signers face harassment, I think that's troubling."

Labels: culture, gay marriage

posted by Imapp Staff at 2:46 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Ross Douthat, conservative op-ed columnist for the New York Times, was made visibly uncomfortable for a moment while onstage last night at the New School's Tishman auditorium. Having sailed through a discussion titled "Meet the Neo-Cons: They're Young, They're Bright, They Tilt to the Right" alongside his friend and co-author Reihan Salam (Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Save the Working Class and Save the American Dream), moderated by Marco Roth of n+1 magazine, Mr. Douthat became suddenly fidgety when asked to respond to a question from the audience on gay marriage.

The question came from Christopher Glazek, a fact-checker at The New Yorker, who wanted to know whether Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam believed that former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, who has apologized on behalf of his party for the Southern Strategy, should also apologize for the Republican party's gay politics.

At first Mr. Douthat seemed unable to get a sentence out without interrupting himself and starting over. Then he explained: "I am someone opposed to gay marriage who is deeply uncomfortable arguing the issue in public."

Mr. Douthat indicated that he opposes gay marriage because of his religious beliefs, but that he does not like debating the issue in those terms. At one point he said that, sometimes, he feels like he should either change his mind, or simply resolve never to address the question in public. ...

Labels: culture, gay marriage

posted by Eve at 2:34 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

On the season finale of “Entourage” this week, one of the characters, Eric, proposes to his girlfriend, Sloan, only it wasn’t a romantic get-down-on-one-knee proposal, so much as it was a seemingly spur-of-the-moment declaration of his commitment to her. “You’re never going to be able to commit — not to anyone,” Sloan accuses during a heated argument. “I’ll get in that car right now, drive to Vegas, and commit to you for the rest of my life,” Eric shoots back before pulling an engagement ring out of his pocket. It’s not exactly the kind of grand proposal women dream of, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s more than most of us get these days ... and if maybe that’s OK.

Marriage is such a huge, life-altering decision, it’s only natural that it be a choice two people make together, after much discussion and personal soul-searching. And if the decision is made mutually, is there really any need for a proposal to be made — a question to be asked — for which both parties already know the answer? For a lot of people, the answer is “no.” They make the decision, perhaps they go ring-shopping together (that way, the woman’s sure to get something she likes), they make the announcement to their friends and family, and then they change their relationship status on Facebook. Done and done.

Labels: culture, Marriage

posted by Eve at 7:37 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

It is a Chicago public school full of energy and spirit. It has about 800 girls, and 115 of them have something in common – something you might find disturbing.

CBS 2's Kristyn Hartman reports.

All those young ladies are moms or moms-to-be at Paul Robeson High School. It's not a school for young mothers, it's a neighborhood school. And all of the pregnancies have happened, despite prevention talk.

If you want to know why, the people closest to the situation say there's no simple explanation.

Chicago Public Schools says it does not track the overall number of teen moms in the district. But Robeson Principal Gerald Morrow knows the count at his school in Englewood: 115 young ladies who are either expecting or already have had children.

To put it in perspective, their school pictures would fill roughly six pages of their high school year book.

Why is it happening at Robeson?

"It can be a lot of things that are happening in the home or not happening in the home, if you will," Morrow said. Absentee fathers are another factor, he said. ...

One thing they might not know about their principal: His mom had him when she was 15. That's why accepting the problem -- and working through it -- is so important to him.

Labels: culture, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 7:12 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so. ...

As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates," do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: "Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category." Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness -- well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report -- somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine -- "contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006]." Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple.

...Our research is simply about documenting a fact: since the 1970’s, women’s self-reported happiness has fallen, relative to that of men. This seems paradoxical, given the tremendous strides made by the women’s movement. We report this fact, test that it is a robust finding, and suggest that future research may help sort out whether it reflects how the women’s movement affected women’s hedonic state; whether it reflects the differential impact on women of some broader social trend; or if instead it is telling us something about the (un)reliability of happiness data. ...

Oh, and she forgot to mention something else: The same trend that is evident in these data is also evident in the Virginia Slims Poll, the Monitoring the Future Survey, and in Europe, in the Eurobarometer. Last week, Chris Herbst reminded us of another dataset, the DDB Needham Life Style Survey. And guess what? Those data also show a significant trend decline in women’s life satisfaction.

Now, there’s still a real debate to be had about whether this trend is important. Ehrenreich says,

Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness — well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

This is a judgment call, but one best made with some knowledge about the determinants of happiness. It turns out that average happiness in a population is a rather stubborn thing and that this is a very large shift, relative to other things that affect average happiness.

For instance, the relative decline in women’s happiness that we document is about equal to what you would see if the unemployment rate rose from 4-1/2 percent to 13 percent, or if women’s incomes had fallen by over 30 percent. (See more, here.)

Ehrenreich is a fine rhetorician though, and she doesn’t miss a beat. She suggests that our study “purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972.” Purports? No, Barbara, we demonstrate that in half a dozen separate datasets, women’s reported well-being has fallen relative to men.

Here’s a challenge: find a single dataset that points in the opposite direction, and we’ll donate $1,000 to your favorite charity. And we’ve made it easy for you — start by downloading all of our raw data here.

Labels: culture, feminism, gender differences, men, mental health, women

posted by Eve at 3:36 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that "spatial mobility" would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams." In 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the "civic malaise" he saw gripping the country. In Putnam's view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called "the growth of mobility."

Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people. The stay-at-home trend appears particularly strong among aging boomers, who are largely eschewing Sunbelt retirement condos to stay tethered to their suburban homes—close to family, friends, clubs, churches, and familiar surroundings.

The trend will not bring back the corner grocery stores and the declining organizations—bowling leagues, Boy Scouts, and such—cited by Putnam and others as the traditional glue of American communities. Nor will our car-oriented suburbs replicate the close neighborhood feel so celebrated by romantic urbanists like the late Jane Jacobs. Instead, the we're evolving in ways congruent with a postindustrial society. It will not spell the demise of Wal-Mart or Costco, but will express itself in scores of alternative institutions, such as thriving local weekly newspapers, a niche that has withstood the shift to the Internet far better than big-city dailies.

Our less mobile nature is already reshaping the corporate world. The kind of corporate nomadism described in Peter Kilborn's recent book, Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s Rootless Professional Class, in which families relocate every couple of years so the breadwinner can reach the next rung on the managerial ladder, will become less common in years ahead. A smaller cadre of corporate executives may still move from place to place, but surveys reveal many executives are now unwilling to move even for a good promotion. Why? Family and technology are two key factors working against nomadism, in the workplace and elsewhere.

Labels: culture, extended family

posted by Eve at 3:31 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A ground-breaking series of studies, published next month, show liberal attitudes towards the make-up of the family, religion and cultural integration among the modern generation of girls and young women.

The survey, which questioned a representative sample of 1,109 seven to 21 year-olds across the UK, found that a third of girls in the younger age group thought they would be "grown up" by the age of 15, while 90 per cent of 16 to 21-year-olds regarded themselves as "grown up".

Girls were generally positive about marriage but less than half thought it should come before parenthood. One in four thought it was "OK to get married several times", rising to a third in the 16 to 21 age range.

One finding suggested that some teenagers actively plan to become single mothers. Of the girls questioned who had left schools and were unemployed, almost half (45 per cent) expected to have a baby before they were 21.

Labels: adolescence, childhood, children, culture, family structure, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, remarriage, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 3:28 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

I started the Polyamory in the News site four years ago... it now has 338 articles, TV shows, radio interviews, magazine stories -- and most of them coming in nowadays are surprisingly good. It's unusual these days for the media to miss the basic concepts behind what we're doing, and why. That's a wonderful change from how it used to be.

But let's drop back for a bit and take a longer view. ...

Poly relationships have always been around. But until recent years they were little-known — secretive, ashamed, underground — accepted only among small private elites with no interest in gaining attention — and elsewhere, such relationships were dismissed as insignificant or a joke at best, or an awful crime at worst. A lot like how gay and lesbian relationships existed 50, or 100, or 200 years ago. The great emergence of gay relationships and gay culture into wide recognition in the last 40 years — the normalization of the gay alternative — marks a permanent change in the world. And this change will be recognized as having come about during our time, for centuries to come.

The same is starting to happen with polyamory. There aren't very many of us yet. The largest poly get-togethers in any one place since this movement began have numbered about 200 or 250 people as best as I can determine 1. Newsweek just reported estimates that there are a half million poly households, in a nation of 300 million people. And yet, we've already had a head-turning impact throughout the Western world.

Labels: culture, polyamory

posted by Eve at 3:00 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births. By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and 5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. …

Most of the state and private programs responding to nonmarital births over the last 40 years have poured their energies into “taking the baby out” of the sexual encounter via birth control. Abstinence programs, which are less common, try to teach young people how to avoid nonmarital sexual involvement. “Big-picture” efforts have aimed to boost young people’s educational and job attainments, in order to steer them toward a different future. While occasionally, policy experts have referenced the need to help young people think more healthfully about the meaning of their lives, including about the importance of their heterosexual relationships, no extensive efforts have ever been directed to addressing the intertwined issues I have surfaced above. For brevity’s sake, I would say these issues might be identified as: the moral weight of heterosexual relations; the public nature of heterosexual relations; the intrinsically parental orientation of heterosexual relations, and the crisis of fatherhood.

Also for brevity’s sake, as well as to get at the conceptual nub of my proposals, I would suggest that any response to these issues must “put the baby back into sex.” By this I mean that men and women need to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of heterosexual relations’ orientation to the procreation of children – helpless creatures who require decades of intensive labor, a lifetime of interaction, and who apparently come into the world with an inbuilt desire to remain connected to both their father and their mother. No matter the heights and depths of couples’ romantic aspirations and experiences, these can never be divorced from the crucial reality that heterosexual relations are procreative. The law has always known this. Most churches did or still do. And now couples must acknowledge it too, with help from every possible governmental, religious and other social institution. Once the baby is re-introduced into couples’ sexual consciousness, they can better understand that nonmarital sex has its own intrinsically public significance; the door is also opened for women and men to understand the “giftedness” of the other precisely in connection with procreation. They might further be open to the realization that men and women were literally “meant for each other,” meant for “communion,” and that what they can do together is more than the sum of its parts. This is a fundamental approach to helping men and women internalize a view of one another that is more respectful, more elevated, than what obtains today, especially among the most disadvantaged. Motherhood and fatherhood have not lost their fan base in these communities; were each sex to be helped to see the other, beginning in adolescence, as potential mothers and fathers, leaders of their children, of the next generation, and of their community, this might help to transcend current gender mistrustful stereotypes. Tantalizing indications of the possible beneficial effects upon young men and women of learning about their mutual procreative capabilities have come from “fertility awareness” programs like TeenStar.[6]

Who might act on the goal of “putting the baby back into sex”? And how might they proceed? The most likely actors are of course families themselves, churches and governments.

Labels: babies, culture, Helen Alvare, heterosexual couples, out-of-wedlock births, pregnancy, premarital sex

posted by Imapp Staff at 1:23 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...The study’s participants indeed were university students; 353 undergraduates (61 percent of whom were female) answered a questionnaire that asked them about their alcohol use, impulsivity, religiousness, spirituality, and sexual practices. The statements on spirituality, which were ranked by level of agreement, included “In the quiet of my prayers and/or meditations, I find a sense of wholeness,” and “Although individual people may be difficult, I feel an emotional bond with all of humanity.”

The study found that spiritual men weren’t sexually affected — in fact, their frequency of sex decreased. The researchers figure men might not view spirituality as sexual because they biologically don’t think of sex as a gateway to emotional intimacy.

For women, however, spirituality was the strongest predictor for the number of sexual partners, the frequency of sex, and the tendency to have sex without a condom.

“It is possible female young adults yearn for greater connectedness with other humans,” Burris writes. “Spirituality, at least for women, could be considered a risk factor.” ...

But is it really spirituality that makes women more sexual, or does spirituality just imply an open-mindedness that manifests itself through sex?

“Research suggests that spirituality provides predictive utility over and above personality traits such as conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness,” Burris told LiveScience. “So while it may be the case that spirituality is correlated with other variables that show similar relationships with human sexuality and sexual practices (such as openness to experiences), the relationship we observed, in my opinion, cannot simply be explained away by other variables.”

Labels: culture, gender differences, men, religion, sex, women

posted by Eve at 5:34 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A law professor nominated by President Obama to become a commissioner for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was a signatory to a radical 2006 manifesto which endorsed polygamous households and argued traditional marriage should not be privileged “above all others.”

Georgetown University Law Center professor Chai R. Feldblum, nominated as a commissioner for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), is listed as a signatory to the July 26, 2006 manifesto “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships.”

The manifesto’s signatories said they proposed a “new vision” for governmental and private recognition of “diverse kinds” of partnerships, households and families. They said they hoped to “move beyond the narrow confines of marriage politics” in the U.S.

Describing various kinds of households as no less socially, economically, and spiritually worthy than other relationships, the Beyond Marriage manifesto listed “committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner.”

Same-sex marriage, the manifesto said, should be “just one option on a menu of choices that people have about the way they construct their lives.”

“Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others,” the manifesto continued. “While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal ­– for some, also a deeply spiritual – choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationship, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.”

The manifesto listed as one of its principles “freedom from a narrow definition of our sexual lives and gender choices, identities, and expression.”

Labels: beyond marriage, culture

posted by Eve at 12:01 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

At first glance, the forum didn’t seem to belong among the weighty discussions of the day, which included surviving the recession, increasing minority businesses, caring for homeless veterans, and decreasing deaths from cancer.

But examining the state of Black marriages and families was as integral to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 39th Annual Legislative Conference as the other workshops, said its sponsor, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton.

“I’m not having a forum on the kinds of things that as a policy wonk you might expect me to have,” the Washington, D.C. Democrat told the overflow crowd gathered for a discussion titled “Single Women, Unmarried Men – What Has Happened to Marriage in the Black Community.” “[But] the kind of policies I’m dealing with in Congress... are at least significantly tied to what is happening to the African-American family.”

Having a substantive conversation on the matter has been difficult, the longtime lawmaker said.

“Ever since the Moynihan Report, people didn’t want to talk about single-parent households,” Norton said. “That’s because, first of all, the Moynihan Report didn’t come out of us. And it came out just after the civil rights bills had passed and it made people angry because White America hadn’t taken responsibility for its huge part of what had torn the African-American community apart. So nobody wanted to hear it.”

The Moynihan Report, officially called, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” was a paper published in 1965 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would go on to become a U.S. senator.

“At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family,” Moynihan said in the report.

According to Moynihan, an increasing number of single-mother, welfare-dependent homes and the matriarchal design of Black families diminished the male’s authority, one sign of a crumbling family structure. He predicted that “so long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.”

Despite criticism of the report as racist and unfounded, Norton said Moynihan was “prescient.”

Rates of incarceration, drug use and trade, high school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, poor health outcomes and other social ills have increased, it seems, with the breakdown of Black families.

Statistics show that in 2008 only 34 percent of Black children lived in homes with two married parents and 3.7 million Black children live in single-mother homes with mothers who have never been married, more than any other demographic.

“If you think the Black nation can survive whole if only Black women are raising their children, I want you to show me how ,” Norton said. ...

The proliferation of incarcerated and unemployed Black men are among the reasons for the paucity of partners. ...

District resident Alphonso Coles said young people have to be counseled and prepared for marriage and parenthood. “Crucial conversations are needed before sex, before marriage and after marriage,” he said.

Girls must be trained to assess their partners wisely and to look beyond the outer trappings of wealth, beauty and possessions in choosing a mate.

“Is he kind to you, does he make you smile—those are far better questions,” Perrault said, adding that like first lady Michelle Obama, women must be willing to nurture the potential in their partner. “Ten years this woman was the [main] breadwinner…I was touched by Michelle’s ability to look at his [Barack’s] trajectory rather than his current circumstances.”

Labels: Barack Obama, culture, DC, Marriage, men, motherhood, poverty, race

posted by Eve at 11:44 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In an official proclamation this afternoon, President Obama declared today Family Day 2009.

What is significant is the way he defined "family."

The president gave a nod to the gay community when he praised all families, "whether children are raised by two parents, a single parent, grandparents, a same-sex couple, or a guardian." (Emphasis ours.)

His shout-out to same-sex couples is sure to draw heat from some social conservatives. Interestingly, it has been met with some hostility from gay rights activists too.

Labels: Barack Obama, culture, gay parenting

posted by Eve at 11:35 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

You gotta admire her pluck.

Jenny Block, author of Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (see my review) will march into the most hostile situations to speak up for honesty in open relationships and the possibilities of poly in marriage. She went on Fox News during Fox's mini-jihad against triad relationships last May. And last night, as broadcast by ABC's Nightline, she went onstage at the enormous Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, for a Nightline-sponsored "Face-Off" with the church's pastor — about adultery and the Ten Commandments. In front of several thousand of the pastor's charged-up, cheering followers. On national TV. ...

Nightline's half-hour edit of the debate aired 11:35 p.m. (Sept 24, 2009). Watch it here. Nightline also put a video of the entire debate on its site.

Jenny didn't get time to say much. But when she was on she handled herself very well. Nightline also put up a short introduction clip in which she has a chance to explain herself excellently.

Labels: culture, polyamory

posted by Eve at 12:55 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Recently, I discovered that one of my best friends had ditched me after I logged onto Facebook and found her profile had disappeared from my page. We’d been having problems that had culminated in a huge argument the day before, but I figured we’d get through it. I figured wrong. ...

We had been close for well over a decade. We supported each other through parental deaths, and together we’d bitched and moaned about men for untold hours. I loved her amazing daughter—buying that little girl Christmas presents was the highlight of my holidays. Suddenly, that was all gone. Suddenly, I wasn’t laughing. I was crying.

We know what to do when boyfriends dump us: sob. We eat everything in the house or take to our beds and refuse all sustenance. Usually, there’s yelling--at least at my house. We purge them from our lives. We delete all their emails and erase their number from every electronic device we own.

But when you break up with a girlfriend, things are murkier. For one thing, people don’t feel sorry for you the way they do when a romantic relationship bites the dust. You can’t blame them; it’s not like you were in love or planning a future with your friend. (Even though you assumed she’d be part of it.) So, getting wound up about the loss seems somehow, I don’t know, less legit.

Labels: culture

posted by Eve at 1:44 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

FARGO — The case is unusual: A Fargo father accused of trying to kidnap a 14-year-old Kentucky bride-to-be for his teenage son.

But a variety of area agencies have contended for years with a custom among some local immigrants to marry daughters and sons very young. The practice springs from the culture of Roma immigrants from Bosnia and other Balkan countries.

Efforts by Fargo police and other groups to stress the legal repercussions of keeping that custom alive in America have had mixed results: Some families are holding off until their children are 16, when the couple can wed legally with their parents’ consent. Others are keeping traditional ceremonies under wraps. And, in rare cases, girls are rebelling against the custom.

Many Roma do not agree with the practice of early arranged marriages. In any case, snatching a girl with-out her parents’ consent — as was allegedly the case in the Kentucky incident — is uncommon. ...

Hatidza Asovic, a coordinator at the Metro Interpreter Resource Center, says these marriages are rooted in customs dating back centuries.

Asovic explained that at the heart of the custom is a powerful stigma attached to a girl who has sex outside of marriage and a sense that early marriage protects girls against a life of promiscuity and ruin.

“They don’t want to have a little Britney Spears running loose,” she said. “At least these Roma teens have parental supervision.”

Fargo police and the Interpreter Resource Center both try to impress upon parents that they can run afoul of the law. They also tell girls they can choose their spouse in this country and urge them to stay in school.

In 2004, the Cass County state’s attorney charged two sets of parents with encouraging the deprivation of a minor because of sexual relations between their married children, ages 15 and 20. That case and education efforts have made an impression. Some families have become more patient, others simply more discreet.

“Now they fully understand it’s illegal; they’re more savvy about being quiet about it,” said Jacobsen. “So in some ways, you could say our education is having an effect, just not necessarily the effect we hope.”

Immigrant advocates are especially concerned about the custom because young brides tend to drop out of school. A few years ago, the Fargo Public School District tracked graduations by ethnicity. Virtually no Roma Bosnian girls graduated, said Assistant Superintendent Lowell Wolff.

“They were marrying much younger and dropping out,” he said.

Labels: arranged marriage, culture, Marriage, North Dakota, Roma, sex

posted by Eve at 5:28 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton had to "sweet talk" the fire marshal because so many people packed her Congressional Black Caucus forum, "Single Women, Unmarried Men: What has happen to Marriage in the Black Community?"

"In order to stay married you have to be willing to be committed to each other," said Alice Carter, a resident of Northeast, during the forum that featured relationshp author and radio host Audrey Chapman and psychologist Shane Perrault.

"Sometimes nothing is better than too little," said Perrault, who added that some women are better off alone than in a bad relationship.

Labels: culture, DC, Marriage, race

posted by Eve at 5:25 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Boston College law prof Scott Fitzgibbon has caused quite a ruckus by appearing in an ad opposing same-sex marriage. I don't have anything new to say about the ad itself, but I was struck by a post at the popular Above the Law blog:

According to his bio, Professor Fitzgibbon teaches jurisprudence, corporations, securities regulation, and contracts. Are gay and lesbian BC Law students comfortable learning about these subjects from an anti-gay marriage professor?

This is an ominous road to go down. Unless we're ready to chalk up all opposition to SSM to nothing more reasonable than "disgust," Professor Fitzgibbon's views on the subject should not detract from the learning environment for GLBT students -- in fact, it could enrich the environment, even if he taught a course such as family law.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, universities

posted by Eve at 5:17 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

ISLAMORADA, Fla. -- It's easy to see why bookkeeper Linda Mortimer moved to the Florida Keys 20 years ago: the impossibly blue water, the year-round sunshine, a lifestyle so laid-back that every day is like a Jimmy Buffett lyric.

What Mortimer didn't anticipate was falling in love - and then getting divorced less than two years after taking her wedding vows.

"I discovered after we got married that my husband had been divorced four times," said Mortimer, as she finished a noontime burger while sitting at the bar at the Ocean View, a local party spot and Mortimer's place of employment.

"I was his No. 5. He didn't understand why I got so upset."

Divorce is as common in the Florida Keys as fresh grouper and cold beer. Census statistics released this week show that Monroe County - which includes the cluster of 1,700 islands floating off South Florida - has the second-highest proportion of divorced residents. A little more than 18 percent of the people living in Monroe County are divorced, second only to Indiana's Wayne County, which had 19 percent. Nationwide, 10.7 percent of people over 15 are divorced.

Three of the top 10 counties the divorced call home are in Florida - rural Putnam County in Northeast Florida and urban Pinellas County on the Gulf Coast are the other two. Indiana had a total of three counties in the top 10 as well. Along with Wayne County, Floyd and Madison counties made the list.

Newly released census figures show that while the number of unmarried people continued its 10-year climb, the ranks of married people in the United States rose by nearly 6 million last year, bucking a decade-long decline. The number of divorced people rose, but only slightly.

Among the other marriage- and divorce-related findings from the census data:

- The number of unmarried people climbed to about one-third of all Americans over 15.

- Oklahoma has the highest rate of people who have been married three times or more.

- Utah and Idaho tied for the youngest median bride age, at 23.5 years old.

Residents of Wayne County, Ind., don't see why their home should be the divorce capital of America. The water tower in Richmond, Ind., the county's largest city, welcomes visitors to "A Great All-American City." ...

Indiana is one of a handful of states that don't track divorce statistics. So it's hard to tell if the percentage is caused by a large number of divorces or a large number of young single people moving out of the county to attend college, or if it's just a statistical anomaly.

Divorce counselors say the economy could be partly to blame for adding more stress to marriages. Indiana has been hit hard by the collapse of the auto and manufacturing industries. Wayne County had an average annual unemployment rate of 6.8 percent in 2008 - when the census data was collected - a rate above the state average at the time but still below many other areas of the state and country. ...

Some folks in the Florida Keys are quick to say that it's not that people are actually divorcing in droves there - it's that divorced people come to the area to start new lives.

Labels: culture, divorce, Florida, Indiana

posted by Eve at 5:07 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The Special Committee to Study Issues of Civil Unions and Christian Marriage has acknowledged what has been clearly demonstrated in debates, governing body votes and judicial decisions throughout the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.): Presbyterians are not of one mind on the role of same-gender relationships in the church.

The special committee, authorized by the 2008 General Assembly, unanimously approved its preliminary report to the 2010 Assembly here Sept. 17, answering the central question before it -- What is the place of covenanted same-gender partnerships in the Christian community? -- with a three word response: "We cannot agree." ...

The complexity of the relationship between church and civil law is particularly troublesome, said special committee member the Rev. William Teng of National Capital Presbytery.

"I believe we have to address two issues," he said, "Practical help on how to deal with ministers and sessions in states where same-sex marriage is legal and the whole relationship between church and state. Personally, I think we should encourage ministers not to serve as agents of the state [in formalizing civil marriage contracts] as a practical solution."

The report states, "We acknowledge that current law, in which clergy act as agents of the state, is a source of confusion. On behalf of the state, ministers are granted the authority to officiate at marriages, and yet no authority is granted them to dissolve such unions. Some argue the church should relinquish its state-sanctioned power to marry. Others feel that, even in confusion, it should be retained to further the cause of the gospel."

The report poses three prevalent perspectives it says are held in the church, with
"proponents of each view believing that their position is rooted in Scripture":

* That "laws that fail to give benefits equal to marriage to same-gender couples and their families violate the standards of social justice/equal protection," noting "the different cultural settings between modern society and biblical times ..."

* That differences in benefits don't violate social justice/equal protection norms because "traditional marriage is foundational" and that it's not true that "all family formations are equally stable and nurturing for children ..."

* That the church should not be complicit in "further separating appropriate sexual activity from marriage between a man and a woman" because such sexual activity is "explicitly proscribed by Scripture."

Labels: culture, gay marriage, homosexuality, Marriage, Presbyterian Church, religion, sex

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:59 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A California-based fertility company is offering prospective parents a range of celebrity 'look-a-like' sperm donors. Cryobank, which is also planning to offer services in New York, allows customers to search through a database according to characteristics such as ethinicity and eye colour without revealing donors' photographs. In addition, the company has now added features that resemble celebrities such as David Beckham and David Blaine. ...

Scott Browne, a spokesman for Cryobank said that 'the intention is not to suggest the child will look like one of the celebrities. It's just to personalise the donor. I think in their heads they know the medical history is most important, but ultimately we're all interested in what someone looks like. It's what we do when we're dating or meet someone. I didn't ask my wife her medical history before I decided to marry her.'

Labels: culture, donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Will same-sex marriage be taught in schools, if it becomes legal in Maine? No — nothing in law, or curriculum, mandates any Maine student be taught about marriage, same-sex or otherwise.

Should same-sex marriage be taught?

Again, the answer is no. Marriage should not be part of a curriculum. Either as a secular tradition or a religious sacrament, marriage is better left to families to teach, or provide examples of.

A school is not responsible for teaching marriage to kids. What should be taught is respect and tolerance for all peoples, a founding tenet of our society. Schools would do our children and civilization a disservice if they couldn't perform this function.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, Maine, Marriage, schools

posted by Eve at 4:12 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: adultery, culture, Marriage, parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 4:09 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

MTV just aired its much-anticipated "True Life" documentary titled "I'm Polyamorous," which has been in the works since last spring. The 1-hour show (which will be rebroadcast many times in the next ten days) is told through the voices of two groups of young polyfolks putting their lives and thoughts on camera.

The show alternates between the two groups' stories. One is told by Kerry, 21, the tentative new girlfriend of young New York lawyer and poly activist Diana Adams. Diana introduces her to the concepts, the problems, the joys, her own main-squeeze boyfriend Ed, and the New York poly crowd. We see Kerry and Diana discussing where this relationship is going, what it means to Ed and vice versa... and talking through the issues when Kerry decides to invite a new boy on a date. Diana was her first lesbian relationship. We see them at their best when they are sitting face to face and working through a difficult topic: Diana's gut reaction to Kerry joking that if Diana were a guy everything would be perfect -- and what Diana asks of her to help get through it. Watch carefully; this is how it's done.

Eventually, New Date becomes happily integrated into the whole squiggle and Kerry is at bliss. But read the followup-story screens at the end.

The other group is a triad of cute-as-buttons gay boys in Charlotte, North Carolina... with issues. They're much less experienced or skilled in poly. Jim, Thomas, and Chris fell into a three-way polyfi relationship and moved in together before they knew there was a word for it, or knew that others have navigated and charted these waters. They go out on the town together, shower together, make love all around... and hit a serious crisis in sleeping arrangements. They have two small rooms with two overly-small beds. Jim, a Christian, is perennially left out at bedtime because one of the others has a phobia against sleeping alone and, we're left to guess, the third guy would be jealous if he wasn't the bedmate. Lonely prayerful agony ensues. Jim decides the group needs a fourth to keep him company at night -- and has a first date with a New Guy in secret. He then brings it up to the others guiltily and awkwardly, saying the three of them need a fourth for balance. Jealous guy erupts.

We see them visiting a counselor, who gives them a Poly 101 lesson on the fallacy of "Relationship in trouble? Add more people." Nevertheless, New Date gamely agrees to befriend the three of them to see how it goes. And go it does. They become comfortable as a group. They buy a copy of The Ethical Slut together and read aloud from it. They four-way kiss. Read the followup screens at the end; no spoiler here from me.

Labels: culture, polyamory

posted by Eve at 4:03 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Insisting on their religious and academic freedoms, Catholic educational institutions are seeking exemption from a provision in the new Magna Carta of Women banning the dismissal of unwed mothers from employment or school.

Monsignor Gerardo Santos, national president of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP), said the CEAP would ask that a provision on such an exemption be inserted into the new law’s implementing rules and regulations. ...

Women’s rights activists have said that under the new law, unwed mothers who are kicked out can file a civil case and sue for damages while government officials who dismiss them can be sanctioned under administrative and civil service laws.

Santos insisted on the Catholic schools’ right to have an unwed pregnant student or employee go on leave “after due process,” or to enforce other disciplinary action.

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, discrimination law, gender differences, out-of-wedlock births, Philippines, religion, religious liberty, single parenting

posted by Eve at 3:54 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Former members of a polygamous church are offering outsiders a guided tour with promises to answer questions about the history and traditions of the community.

Richard Holm and his brother Heber Holm are among those who are launching "The Polygamy Experience: A Guided Tour of Colorado City." The first tour is Saturday.

Labels: culture, polygamy

posted by Eve at 5:28 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...The critical question is one of consent: who owns the story of a child? British author Julie Myerson has had to face this question twice, and has been savaged both times for claiming she does. First she wrote a popular column for The Guardian, Living With Teenagers, under a pseudonym but based on her children. Once their identities were uncovered, the teasing began: her son was nicknamed "Mr. Three Hairs" after a piece about her kids sprouting pubic hairs. The column was stopped.

Undeterred, Myerson went on to write a darker, more dramatic and awful book about her teenage son's drug use, Lost Child, just released in the U.S. In it she claims that her son Jake became addicted to skunk, a particularly potent form of marijuana. She was forced to kick him out of the family home when he was only 17, she writes, after he lied, stole, got a girl pregnant (his parents paid for the abortion), and hit his mother so hard that he perforated her eardrum. The subtitle is A Mother's Story.

For this, Myerson has become one of the most vilified women in Britain. Her son says he feels betrayed, and told one reporter he wants to change his last name to Karna, after a Hindu warrior who was rejected by his mother. Although he read the draft and told Myerson he understood why she felt compelled to write it, he claims he consulted lawyers to try to halt publication. He insists his drug use is casual and that his parents are naive.

It's awkward, messy, and ugly.

Myerson is optimistic that what she did will be good for her son—and others, who will learn of the dangers of skunk. She told me it was an intervention, a form of public shaming: "It made him face himself, big time."

Labels: children, culture, parenting

posted by Eve at 3:49 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

"The Newlywed Game" is bringing on its first gay couple.

It's a celebrity duo for the long-running game show, now on the GSN cable network. George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu on "Star Trek," will appear with his partner, Brad Altman. They just celebrated their first anniversary after being married in Los Angeles.

Labels: culture, gay marriage

posted by Eve at 12:42 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Til death do we part" wasn't such a big deal when the life expectancy was 30. When it's 80, marriage becomes a tall order. So you can imagine how surprised I was recently to learn that marriage is becoming more resilient, not less. America's divorce rate is down to 36% — the lowest since 1970. That means nearly two-thirds of those getting married today are likely to fulfill their lofty wedding-day promise. ...

Robert Money, a well-respected family therapist in my home state of Tennessee, says Americans are staying married because we're getting better at it. And consequently, we're enjoying it more. Money's 40 years in the business tells him that intimacy is the key.

"Intimacy is one of our deepest needs and greatest pleasures. And one cannot experience intimacy in marriage except from a position of mutuality. Some religious groups may not get this, but the secular culture does. Men and women now perceive themselves as mutual partners, and this is transforming our marriages," he says. ...

And when married couples experience problems — as they inevitably do — they're turning to trained professionals, rather than preachers, for help. They're no longer willing to settle for pious platitudes even when they come from the Bible.

Finally, our secular culture also is steering couples toward delaying marriage. The early 20s used to be the norm; now it's the late 20s or early 30s. Couples who marry later stand a better chance of staying married, and again, it's the secular culture — not organized religion — that encourages sexually active adults to hold off on tying the knot.

Labels: culture, divorce, Marriage, marriage counseling, religion

posted by Eve at 6:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In a cynical review of a sensationalistic book, The New York Times featured--front page--the thesis that there is nary a difference between men who must wine and dine women before they fork over sex, and johns who pay for prostitutes. In a discussion that would (or at least should) embarrass a bunch of fraternity boys, the New York Times argues, "Money is the elephant in every bedroom." Toni Bentley's review ("Meet, Pay, Love") of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys, a collection of essays written by sex workers, finds nothing problematic about equating sex between romantic partners and sex between clients and prostitutes, asking "Why is sex supposed to be free? It never is." Ms. Bentley complains that "it is still taboo to regard sex and money as inextricably interwoven" and quotes approvingly British artist and author Sebastian Horsley, who asserts, "The difference between sex and money and sex for free...is that sex for money always costs a lot less." (The book itself is concerned only with straight-up money-for-sex transactions and has little to say about role of money in personal, intimate relationships.)

Labels: Amitai Etzioni, culture, sex

posted by Eve at 9:55 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

NEWBURG, Pa. -- Rachel Esh, owner of an Amish dry-goods store here, was giddy as customers kept arriving. Cars spilled out of the dirt parking lot onto the hay and potato fields, crushing a few of her neighbor's potatoes.

She ushered the crowd of 40 people swarming in front of her cash register into a line that snaked out the door of Rachel's Country Store. The cause of the commotion: novelist Cindy Woodsmall, who had stopped by to autograph books.

The plot of 'When the Heart Cries,' revolves around Hannah, a young Amish woman who falls in love with a Mennonite and hides her plans to marry him from her strict parents. The lovers kiss a couple of times in 326 pages.

Ms. Woodsmall writes "bonnet books," or Amish love stories, which are a booming new subcategory of the romance genre. The books, written by non-Amish writers, are aimed at a mainstream audience. But Ms. Woodsmall researches her stories among the Pennsylvania Amish, and she has a loyal Amish following. ...

Beverly Lewis, who sets her novels among the Amish in Pennsylvania, has sold 13.5 million copies of her books. Wanda Brunstetter's novels take place in Amish communities in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania, and have sold more than four million copies. Publishing house Thomas Nelson plans to release five Amish novels this fall, and six more in 2010. ...

"This is one of those questions I hate to ask," said Ms. Woodsmall. One of her characters, a schoolteacher, wants to modernize some aspects of Amish education. "What are some things she might want to change?" Ms. Woodsmall asked.

The Flauds' 13-year-old daughter, Amanda, piped up. "The bathrooms," she said, explaining that many students at her school wanted to replace outhouses with indoor plumbing.

Some of her inquiries drew a blank. The Flauds couldn't come up with Amish expressions for the word "quirky" or the phrase "women's rights."

Labels: culture, religion

posted by Eve at 4:07 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: culture, gender, sex

posted by Eve at 10:19 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Meet Mitch McCabe, a filmmaker who dives deep into the allure of the anti-aging industry in Youth Knows No Pain. She attempts to answer the question: why are we so obsessed with turning back the clock?

The confessional-style documentary, which premiered on HBO last night (schedule of upcoming screenings can be found here) follows McCabe (who narrates the film) n her quest to uncover why so many people will subject themselves to injections, surgeries, and peels to regain the appearance of youth. It is a siren song that McCabe is well aware of: At the age of 38, she reveals she has been scrutinizing her body ever since she came across her father's slides from his plastic surgery practice. ...

I found it amazing to watch her dollar costs unfold. McCabe, a smart woman who acknowledges up front that she is not making a wise decision, still cops to being close to $70,000 in debt, makes about $30,000 a year as a temp, yet finds $200 every six weeks to keep her gray hairs at bay.

As the viewer is reeling from the cost, McCabe says, "I may drop my health care coverage, but I'd never stop covering my gray. It may be insane, but it's the truth." ...

Youth Knows No Pain was engrossing, depressing, and thought-provoking, made even more poignant by the candid self-examination of its creator. After chronicling her memories of her father and her longtime fascination with mortality, she ends the film with an astonishing admission: after all that she's seen during filming the documentary, McCabe decided to take the plunge and start on injectables like Botox herself.

"What about spirituality? Inner peace?...Well, that didn't work." After struggling to make sense of why women subject themselves to beauty treatments instead of aging gracefully, she succumbs to the promises of younger looking skin and a small chance at cheating time.

Labels: culture, gender

posted by Eve at 5:09 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...As I see it, we won't talk about the crisis in black marriages because of:

• The unfortunate politicization of marriage. Marriage-strengthening efforts have been associated with a conservative political agenda. Also, conversations about marriage in the public square are often diverted to or focused on same-sex marriage. While this is an important issue in its own right, the urgency of the black marriage crisis and the 72 percent of black children who are born out of wedlock demands our unqualified and focused attention. ...

• The concern that efforts to strengthen black marriages devalue single-parent and extended family households. This is due in part to the propensity in the past of some to define as deficient and unacceptable legitimate and functional aspects of African-American family life. This resistance also stems from concerns about stigmatizing large segments of the black community (particularly single parents) and devaluing their adaptive strategies and those of their extended families. However, noting the value of married family homes does not deny the value or the integrity of a variety of family forms.

• The concern that marriage-strengthening efforts give blacks false hope. There is an implicit suggestion by some that to inspire African-Americans (particularly low-income women) to have healthy marriages gives them hope that they can achieve something that is likely to be unattainable. After all, there simply aren't enough African-American men available to marry. Fewer available men does present a major but surmountable challenge and demonstrates the need for black women to consider other options (including marrying outside of the race).

• The personal relationship challenges and failures and associated pain, guilt and anger experienced by many Americans (including public leaders). These experiences cause many leaders to feel incapable of (or less credible in) identifying solutions and reluctant to approach a topic that requires personal reflection and self-honesty to be addressed adequately. In fact, our greatest solutions will be birthed from those who have experienced and overcome significant relationship challenges and failures.

Labels: culture, Linda Malone-Colon, Marriage, men, race

posted by Eve at 5:57 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Many DoubleX readers seem incensed by Katie Roiphe’s story, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic." But Roiphe is absolutely right that the intense love between mothers and newborns is a very neglected subject in both literature and philosophy and yes, also feminist writing. (Compare it to the enormous literature on the profundity of sexual and erotic love.) So it might be helpful to see what the science has to say about Katie’s experience, and to think about what the science means.

I write about this at length in my new book, The Philosophical Baby. In short, the scientific literature shows that the mechanisms behind our love of babies is remarkably similar to the mechanisms involved in sexual love. There are clear hormonal and chemical changes that come with pregnancy, labor, and birth, which affect the way we feel, just as there are with sex. In natural labor and the period following, the body produces large amounts of both oxytocin and endorphins (in fact, they use oxytocin to induce labor). It’s too simple to call oxytocin the “bonding” chemical, but there is a lot of evidence that it plays a role in close attachment, trust, and love. If you give people a whiff of oxytocin they’re more likely to cooperate in a game. Endorphins are the natural chemicals that are mimicked by drugs like opium and morphine. (I remember thinking as I held my own first newborn and the flood of warmth and happiness overcame me, “Gee, if this is what opium is like, I’m sure glad I never tried it.”)

Labels: children, culture, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 5:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...When the baby was four weeks old, I had to do a reading at Barnes and Noble. I had written the introduction to Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, and I was scheduled to do a reading with Talese. On the night of the reading, I left the baby with someone I trust completely and absolutely. I managed to put on a dress and look something like the person who gave readings who I used to be. But when I walked out onto the street, I felt like I was missing a limb. Even though Talese was riveting by any objective standard, my concentration faltered. During the reading I thought about the baby. As people asked questions, I calculated how long the taxi ride home would take. Afterward, there were people who wanted to buy one of my books. The manager of the bookstore held out a pen, and I apologized and told him that I couldn’t sign books, that I had to run home. The manager looked a little bewildered. This was, after all, a book signing at which the authors traditionally sign books.

On the escalator I panicked slightly because the person in front of me wasn’t moving, and I couldn’t pass her to get out of the store quickly enough. During the taxi ride down the FDR highway, I looked out at the water and cried. It was insane, sentimental, out of proportion, and I was aware that it was insane, sentimental, and out of proportion. But only when the baby was back in my arms did I feel OK again.

I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby's hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not.

People often compare having a new baby to the early days of a love affair, which is true as far as it goes, but one’s physical fixation on, and craving for, a newborn is much stronger and more intense that that. How often in a love affair can you literally find yourself in tears because you were away from a man for three hours?

Labels: children, culture, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 5:34 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Here is an experiment you don’t want to try at home.

Show a toy — a doll, say, or a model boat — to a toddler and explain that it it’s something special you’ve had since you were little. Ask the child to be “very careful” with it. Hand over the toy, which appears to be in fine condition, except that you’ve secretly rigged it to break spectacularly as soon as the child handles it.

When your precious toy falls apart, express regret by mildly saying, “Oh, my.” Then sit still and observe the child.

The point is not to permanently traumatize anyone — the researchers who performed this experiment quickly followed it with a ritual absolving the child of blame. But first, for 60 seconds after the toy broke, the psychologists recorded every reaction as the toddlers squirmed, avoided the experimenter’s gaze, hunched their shoulders, hugged themselves and covered their faces with their hands.

It was part of a long-term study at the University of Iowa to isolate the effects of two distinct mechanisms that help children become considerate, conscientious adults. One mechanism, measured in other experiments testing toddlers’ ability to resist temptations, is called effortful self-control — how well you can think ahead and deliberately suppress impulsive behavior that hurts yourself and others.

The other mechanism is less rational and is especially valuable for children and adults with poor self-control. It’s the feeling measured in that broken-toy experiment: guilt, or what children diagnose as a “sinking feeling in the tummy.” ...

In Dr. Kochanska’s latest studies, published in the August issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she and colleagues found that 2-year-olds who showed more chagrin during the broken-toy experiment went on to have fewer behavioral problems over the next five years. That was true even for the ones who scored low on tests measuring their ability to focus on tasks and suppress strong desires to act impulsively.

Labels: childhood, children, culture, parenting

posted by Eve at 4:30 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The fight over healthcare took the most interesting turn last week. President Obama briefly switched from wonkish frippery about bending cost curves to speaking of faith. Reaching out to progressive faith leaders in two massive conference calls, Obama insisted that God was on his side. Expanding healthcare fulfills a "core moral and ethical obligation that we look out for one another ... that I am my brother's keeper, my sister's keeper." ...

Of all the silly arguments that have been passed off as deeply profound in American politics, the notion that politicians can't "impose" their personal morality on others has to top the list.

Labels: Barack Obama, culture, religion

posted by Eve at 4:24 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Proposition 8

posted by Eve at 3:20 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, heterosexual couples, sex

posted by Eve at 8:07 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 9:17 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...A survey out today from the Pew Research Center finds two-thirds of Americans 16 and older see an age divide in every one of the eight areas listed. Among the biggest gaps:

•Technology: 73% call tech use "very different."

•Music: 69% say tastes are "very different."

•Moral values: 80% call them "very" or "somewhat" different; 80% said the same for work ethic.

But can these kinds of differences be called a real generation gap? That depends, demographers say. ...

The Pew survey of 1,815 people in July and August found that although differences were clear, respondents didn't believe they created much trouble in their own families or in society overall. Just 26% say there are strong conflicts between generations. ...

As president of Generation Why, a consulting firm, he says misunderstandings in the workplace come from different expectations. "They may have skills and are techno-savvy and book-smart and streetwise, but they don't understand what the big deal is if they're five minutes late," he says of young people today. About half of those surveyed (53%) call the generations "very different" in the respect they show others.

"The classic thing is they show up on Day One and want to tell you how to change your business," says Bruce Tulgan, 42, founder of Rainmaker Thinking, a research and management training firm in New Haven, Conn., and author of the 2009 book Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y.

"It leads older people to think they have a radically different work ethic, but Gen Yers said 'I thought you want me to care about this place.' "

Galston says such attitudes aren't just about work but rather about hierarchy. "These young people have grown up in very flat, horizontal relationships. So, the idea of deferring to someone older, simply because that person is there, is not part of their makeup."

Labels: culture, parenting

posted by Eve at 3:08 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

What's in a name? Apparently a lot, especially if it's your last name.

About 70% of Americans agree, either somewhat or strongly, that it's beneficial for women to take her husband's last name when they marry, while 29% say it's better for women to keep their own names, finds a study being presented today at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco.

Researchers from Indiana University and the University of Utah asked about 815 people a combination of multiple choice and open-ended questions to come up with the findings. ...

Hamilton says that about half of respondents went so far as to say that the government should mandate women to change their names when they marry, a finding she called "really interesting," considering typical attitudes towards government intervention. "Americans tend to be very cautious when it comes to state intervention in family life," she says.

Labels: culture, gender, gender differences, Marriage

posted by Eve at 1:30 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Last October, Bill Meezan, my cousin, left his home in Columbus, Ohio, for a business trip to Philadelphia. Bill is the dean of Ohio State University's College of Social Work, and he travels quite a bit. In Philadelphia, he thought he felt an old cold coming back. Then he developed a nasty cough. On October 31, he went to the hospital.

He remembers nothing of that day, but Mike Brittenback recalls sharply how doctors in Philadelphia called him in Columbus to say they suspected pneumonia. Mike, an organist and choirmaster, is Bill's partner of 30 years. A few hours later that Friday, they called back to confirm the diagnosis. Mike was concerned but not alarmed.

At 3 a.m. the next day, the phone woke him up. It was a doctor in Philadelphia. Mike needed to come to Philadelphia immediately. Bill had gone into septic shock and might not survive more than a few hours.

* * *

"Here's the key principle," Peter Sprigg, a gay-marriage opponent with the Family Research Council, said in an April radio interview on Southern California's KCRW. "Society gives benefits to marriage because marriage gives benefits to society. And therefore the burden of proof has to be on the advocates of same-sex marriage to demonstrate that homosexual relationships benefit society. Not just benefit the individuals who participate but benefit society in the same way and to the same degree that heterosexual marriage does. And that's a burden that I don't think they can meet."

Can't they?

Labels: culture, gay marriage, government interest in marriage, Jonathan Rauch

posted by Imapp Staff at 1:26 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: culture, polyamory

posted by Eve at 1:55 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Terisa Greenan and her boyfriend, Matt, are enjoying a rare day of Seattle sun, sharing a beet carpaccio on the patio of a local restaurant. Matt holds Terisa's hand, as his 6-year-old son squeezes in between the couple to give Terisa a kiss. His mother, Vera, looks over and smiles; she's there with her boyfriend, Larry. Suddenly it starts to rain, and the group must move inside. In the process, they rearrange themselves: Matt's hand touches Vera's leg. Terisa gives Larry a kiss. The child, seemingly unconcerned, puts his arms around his mother and digs into his meal.

Terisa and Matt and Vera and Larry—along with Scott, who's also at this dinner—are not swingers, per se; they aren't pursuing casual sex. Nor are they polygamists of the sort portrayed on HBO's Big Love; they aren't religious, and they don't have multiple wives. But they do believe in "ethical nonmonogamy," or engaging in loving, intimate relationships with more than one person—based upon the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. They are polyamorous, to use the term of art applied to multiple-partner families like theirs, and they wouldn't want to live any other way. ...

Researchers are just beginning to study the phenomenon, but the few who do estimate that openly polyamorous families in the United States number more than half a million, with thriving contingents in nearly every major city. Over the past year, books like Open, by journalist Jenny Block; Opening Up, by sex columnist Tristan Taormino; and an updated version of The Ethical Slut—widely considered the modern "poly" Bible—have helped publicize the concept. Today there are poly blogs and podcasts, local get-togethers, and an online polyamory magazine called Loving More with 15,000 regular readers. Celebrities like actress Tilda Swinton and Carla Bruni, the first lady of France, have voiced support for nonmonogamy, while Greenan herself has become somewhat of an unofficial spokesperson, as the creator of a comic Web series about the practice—called "Family"—that's loosely based on her life. "There have always been some loud-mouthed ironclads talking about the labors of monogamy and multiple-partner relationships," says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a polyamory library at the Indiana University-based Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. "But finally, with the Internet, the thing has really come about."

With polyamorists' higher profile has come some growing pains. The majority of them don't seem particularly interested in pressing a political agenda; the joke in the community is that the complexities of their relationships leave little time for activism. But they are beginning to show up on the radar screen of the religious right, some of whose leaders have publicly condemned polyamory as one of a host of deviant behaviors sure to become normalized if gay marriage wins federal sanction. "This group is really rising up from the underground, emboldened by the success of the gay-marriage movement," says Glenn Stanton, the director of family studies for Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian group. "And while there's part of me that says, 'Oh, my goodness, I don't think I could see them make grounds,' there's another part of me that says, 'Well, just watch them.' "

Conservatives are not alone in watching warily. Gay-marriage advocates have become leery of public association with the poly cause—lest it give their enemies ammunition. As Andrew Sullivan, the Atlantic columnist, wrote recently, "I believe that someone's sexual orientation is a deeper issue than the number of people they want to express that orientation with." In other words, polyamory is a choice; homosexuality is not. It's these dynamics that have made polyamory, as longtime poly advocate Anita Wagner puts it, "the political football in the culture war as it relates to same-sex marriage."

Polys themselves are not visibly crusading for their civil rights. But there is one policy issue rousing concern: legal precedents concerning their ability to parent. Custody battles among poly parents are not uncommon; the most public of them was a 1999 case in which a 22-year-old Tennessee woman lost rights to parent her daughter after outing herself on an MTV documentary. Anecdotally, research shows that children can do well in poly families—as long as they're in a stable home with loving parents, says Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist at Georgia State University, who is conducting the first large-scale study of children of poly parents, which has been ongoing for a decade. But because academia is only beginning to study the phenomenon—Sheff's study is too recent to have drawn conclusions about the children's well-being over time—there is little data to support that notion in court. Today, the nonprofit Polyamory Society posts a warning to parents on its Web site: If your PolyFamily has children, please do not put your children and family at risk by coming out to the public or by being interviewed [by] the press! ...

The child, meanwhile, has his own room. And he's clearly the most delicate part of the equation. Matt and Vera have asked NEWSWEEK not to use their last names—or the name of their child—for fear, even in liberal Seattle, they might draw unwanted attention. Though Terisa doesn't have children—and doesn't want them—she adores Matt and Vera's son, who calls her Auntie. Recently, the child asked his father who he loved more: Mommy or Terisa. "I said, 'Of course I love momma more,' because that's the answer he needed to hear," Matt says. He and Vera say they are honest with him, in an age-appropriate way. "We don't do anything any regular parents of a 6-year-old wouldn't do," he says. For the moment, it seems to be working. The child is happy, and there are two extra people to help him with his homework, or to pick him up or drop him off at school. They expect the questions to increase with age, but in the long run, "what's healthy for children is stability," says Fischer, the anthropologist.

Labels: culture, family structure, polyamory

posted by Eve at 10:12 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Amidst all the high-level news about terrorism, the internal war in Swat Valley, and various military/foreign-policy questions, other topics in the news sometimes get overlooked.

To wit, Basim Usmani has an informative column up at Comment is Free on a recent ruling by Pakistan’s recently re-constituted Supreme Court, regarding Hijras:

Pakistan’s supreme court recently ruled that all hijras, the Urdu catch-all term for its transvestite, transgender and eunuch community, will be registered by the government as part of a survey that aims to integrate them further into society. The ruling followed a petition by Islamic jurist Dr Mohammad Aslam Khaki, who said the purpose was to “save them from a life of shame”.Khaki’s petition was prompted by a police raid on a hijra colony in Taxila, an ancient city filled with some of the oldest Buddhist ruins in Pakistan. Two of the three judges on the bench that ruled in favour if the hijra petition, chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry, were under house arrest for
the better part of the past three years. This, coupled with the clobbering the police gave the lawyers during their demonstrations against the suspension of the judiciary in 2007, makes it easy to regard the hijra ruling as being directed against the police. (link)

...It’s intriguing to me that until just a couple of weeks ago, homosexuality was a crime under Section 377 in India; meanwhile transgendered individuals had, for at least a short while before that old law was overturned, a level of official recognition that few other countries could match. The disparity is of course understandable — Hijras are an endemic part of South Asian culture, while the concept of homosexuality is only recently gaining visibility. Still: does anyone know whether transgender or intergender individuals in any western countries have the equivalent of an “E” (or better, “T”) designation?

Labels: culture, hijra, homosexuality, India, Pakistan, transgender issues

posted by Imapp Staff at 5:18 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Still, we are at our wits' ends about what to say next, impervious as the gay marriage juggernaut is. We know biblically and instinctively that "male and female he created them," and that these complementary sexual beings are designed to become one flesh. We know that this spiritual instinct and biblical argument will not make much headway in the public square. So what do we say?

We can make secular arguments, of course, but the more we look at the strongest secular arguments we can muster, the more those arguments cut two ways. And one of the edges of those arguments will make evangelicals bleed, I'm afraid.

Labels: Christianity Today, culture, evangelical Protestantism, gay marriage, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Why are we getting married? ask commenters. Why not simply live together, and avoid the tax hit?

Well, it's outre, I know, but I sort of believe in marriage. I believe in the act of committing for life to another person. I believe in the power and the joy of facing your life as a team. I think you can have a very happy, fulfilled life without being married, and before I met Peter, I was preparing to. But my life is even happier and more fulfilled with him. So naturally, I want to start building that life as Team McSudelman.

There's a reason for the social role of "spouse". And there's a reason for all of the legal and social systems that have grown up around that role: they reinforce and strengthen it. It would be much harder to do many of the things we want and intend to do, for and with each other, without that useless little piece of paper.

But more to the point, once we'd decided to do what spouses do, why wouldn't we, well, become official spouses? Just because I enjoy akward five-minute conversations about how my "partner" is a he, not a she, and you know, we really love each other, but we just don't believe we need society's ratification . . . I don't, I assure you. And I'm happy to have society's ratification. Celebrating our marriage will be one question upon which society and I agree 100%.

Labels: beyond marriage, culture, Marriage

posted by Eve at 3:12 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

PRINCETON, NJ -- A Gallup analysis of more than 29,000 interviews conducted in June highlights a continuing and significant marriage gap in party identification. The percentage of all Americans who identified as Republican in June was 28%, but is higher at 33% among those who are married, and a lower 21% among unmarried Americans. On the other hand, Democratic identification in June was at 35% overall, but 31% among married Americans, and 41% among those who are not married. This marriage gap in party identification is evident across races as well as age groups.

This marriage gap in American politics today is not new, but the current analysis underscores the fact that marital status remains one of the most reliable predictors of party identification among major demographic variables in the U.S. in 2009.

Being "unmarried" in America today encompasses a number of different life situations -- including those who are single and have never married as well as those who are separated, divorced, widowed, and those living in a domestic partnership. The large sample size for this data set allows for a detailed subdivision of unmarried Americans into each of these specific categories.

As can be seen in the accompanying graph, the particular circumstances of being unmarried do not appear to make a great deal of difference in terms of party identification. Democrats have a significant identification advantage over Republicans across each of these segments.

Labels: culture, Marriage

posted by Eve at 12:12 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

TOKYO: Dressed to the nines on a balmy summer night, a crowd of young Japanese filled the reception area of a Tokyo wedding hall, a white mansion with Greek columns romantically festooned with fairy lights.

The setting may have seemed a little gaudy, but the 100-odd men and women there, clutching their cocktails and scanning the room, were seriously focused on their goal -- finding the love of their life.

The twenty to forty-somethings are part of a new fad sweeping Japan: "konkatsu" or "marriage-hunting", a word play on "job hunting", that suggests finding Mr or Mrs Right is a matter of good research and thorough planning.

An expert in the field had some advice for the assembled lonely hearts.

"Try not to make that instant decision," said Helen Fisher, a US anthropologist and special guest at the Match.com party in Tokyo's upmarket Nakameguro district. "Go up and talk to them and find out about them.

"The whole point of this evening is to try to fall in love."

This year Japan has gone konkatsu-crazy, with the trend spawning countless magazine articles, a weekly TV drama and a best-selling book.

Labels: Asia, culture, demographics, Japan, Marriage

posted by Eve at 12:09 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT