Alone Together: Trends in Marital Quality 1980-2000

Bottom line p. 50: "There was no significant changes in the mean levels of marital happiness or divorce proneness between 1980 and 2000." Two other measures--the amount of marital conflict and marital problems (like excessive drinking or adultery) dropped modestly. Good news. But the amount of marital interaction (time spent together eating, shopping, visiting friends etc.) dropped even more. An age effect I wonder? In 1980, Baby Boom kids were marrying. By 2000, Baby busters were, meaning fewer newlyweds, more of us old married folks in the pool? Amato and company point out the divroce rate was relatively stable over this period, meaning selection out of marriage wasn't a factor. But selection into marriage may be another matter. . .

UPDATE: on p. 93, authors note the average marital duration (13 years) was unchanged, but that because the average age at marriage was up, people were overall older, "[T]he decline in positive as well as negative dimensions of marital quality is consistent with research showing that as indnividuals age, they tend to report fewer positive as well as negative emotions. . ."
posted by maggie at 8:10 PM | Link | 0 comments

Painful

No other word. From today's NYT:

"Andrew Giuliani has been at his father’s side in campaign commercials and inaugurations since he was a toddler, famously bounding across the stage in a rambunctious manner and mimicking his father’s rhetorical flourishes during Mr. Giuliani’s 1994 mayoral inauguration.

But Mr. Giuliani's relationship with Andrew has grown strained and distant since his very public and bitter divorce from Andrew’s mother, Donna Hanover, and his marriage to Judith Nathan, according to Andrew and others familiar with the relationship.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Andrew, a sophomore and member of the golf team at Duke University, acknowledged having had difficulties with Ms. Nathan, and said that he and his father had recently tried to reconcile after not speaking “for a decent amount of time.”

"There's obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife," the younger Mr. Giuliani said. "And we’re trying to figure that out. But as of right now it’s not working as well as we would like."

UPDATE: Rudy defends his new wife and asks for family privacy. . .hard to do when it's your son who wants to share his point of view with the NYT:

"Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani asked for privacy Monday to deal with strained relationships within his family, and defended his wife as a "very loving and caring" mother and stepmother.

The Republican presidential candidate came to Southern California to speak with sheriffs about gang violence, but found himself answering questions about his family after his son, Andrew, publicly said their relationship had become distant after Giuliani's messy divorce from Andrew's mother, Donna Hanover, and his later marriage to Judith Nathan.

"My wife Judith is a very loving and caring ... mother and stepmother. She has done everything she can. The responsibility is mine," Giuliani told reporters gathered outside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's headquarters.

"I believe that these problems with blended families, you know, are challenges -- sometimes they are," he said. "The more privacy I can have for my family, the better we are going to be able to deal with all these difficulties."

posted by maggie at 7:37 PM | Link | 0 comments

New Book: Alone Together (cont.)

p. 15: "In 1939, of 18 characteristics [in a spouse], women ranked love in fifth place. But by the 1970s. . .women ranked love as the most important characteristic. Similarly, men's rankings of love rose from fourth place to first place during this period." (CORRECTED March 5, thanks to my readers).
posted by maggie at 1:21 PM | Link | 3 comments

Wally Olson on Miller-Jenkins

The problem as Olson points out, is that Lisa Miller voluntarily left Virginia and filed in a Vermont court for dissolution of her Vermont civil union and related legal matters, including custody, subjecting her and her child to Vermont law. Very bad (or possibly no?) legal advice from soneone early on. Wally's take here.
posted by maggie at 10:06 AM | Link | 0 comments

New Book: Alone Together

Some book blogging. I'm reading "Alone Together: How Marriage in America is Changing" by Amato, Booth, Johnson and Rogers. Its basically a report on two marriage surveys they did, one in 1980 and a second in 2000. Let me start by saying they've done a very good job of summarizing the two basic positions in the family structure debate.

P. 4: "The Marital Decline Perspective" i.e. Blankenhorn, Glenn, Popenoe, Waite and Gallagher, Whitehead, and Wilson:

"1. The institution of marriage is weaker now than in the past.
2. The most important cause of this change is the growing and excessive individualism of American culture.
3. The declining status of marriage has had negative consequences for adults, children, and society in general.
4. We should initiate steps to strengthen the institution of marriage."

I might quibble a little with 2, which is Wilson's hypothesis certainly but not so much a necessary part of the marital decline perspective. More generally I would say "a change in attitudes, values, and norms about marriage are a significant cuase of this decline. . .i.e. it is a change in "culture." But I quibble.

The competing perspective (described on p. 6) is dubbed "The Marital Resiliance Perspective" advocated by Bengtson, Biblarz and Roberts, Coontz, Demo, Hackstaff, Scanzoni, Skolnick, and Stacey:

"1. The institution of marriage is changing, but it is not necessarily in a state of decline.
2. Americans have not become excessively individualistic and selfish during the last few decades.
3. Recent changes in marriage and family life have had few negative consequences for adults, children or the wider society.
4. We should support all types of families, not just married heterosexual couples with children."

A pretty good summary of the two sides. When they say "4." of course they don't seem to mean simply we should support all types of families in some way, but that we should never single out married families for special support.
posted by maggie at 10:40 PM | Link | 0 comments

SSM Update: D.C., Rhode Island

A curious little story in the Washington Blade on plans, with the Dems in control of Congress, to recognize Massachusetts gay marriages in D.C. , Rick Rosendall's insistence that even the Dems would reject this in D.C., alongside an account of both the D.C. Mayor and the Rhode Island attorney general's refusal to release his legal opinion authorizing recognition of Massachusetts's SSMs:

"Fenty backs off campaign promise on marriage memo

By LOU CHIBBARO JR
Friday, March 02, 2007

Mayor Adrian Fenty has no immediate plans to release a legal opinion written by the city’s former attorney general that reportedly says Washington has the legal authority to recognize same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts.

"Mayor Fenty does not intend to release the opinion at this time," said Traci Hughes, a spokesperson for the current city attorney general, Linda Singer.

Shortly before taking office in January, Fenty said he and Singer would review the opinion, written in the form of a memorandum by Robert Spagnoletti, and decide whether to release it to the public. During his campaign for mayor, Fenty told the Washington Blade that he would release the opinion if elected.

Mafara Hobson, Fenty’s deputy press secretary, said she would make inquires to find out when Fenty might consider releasing the Spagnoletti memo. She did not get back to the Blade by press time.

Fenty’s decision to back off from his campaign promise to release the memo after his election comes at a time when Rhode Island’s attorney general issued his own legal opinion stating that, based on that state’s existing laws, it should recognize same-sex marriages from Massachusetts.

Rhode Island’s public policy bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and it lacks any laws denying marriage rights for same-sex couples, said state attorney general Patrick Lynch, a Democrat.

"Taken together, these favorable conditions support the argument that Rhode Island does not have a strong public policy against homosexuals or same-sex relationships," Lynch said in his five-page opinion.

"It is our opinion based on all of the foregoing that … Rhode Island will recognize same-sex marriages lawfully performed in Massachusetts as marriages in Rhode Island," he said.

Republican Gov. Donald Carcieri said he and his legal advisers were reviewing Lynch's opinion. Carcieri has said he opposes same-sex marriage.

Spagnoletti wrote his memo on the subject three years ago for then-Mayor Anthony Williams. At the request of some local gay activists, Williams decided not to release the memo to the press or the public, saying to do so at that time would antagonize the Republican-controlled Congress.

Unlike Rhode Island, D.C. is subject to control by Congress. Under the District of Columbia’s limited home rule charter, Congress has final authority to pass laws on behalf of the city as well as repeal any laws passed by the D.C. City Council and signed by the mayor. . .

With Democrats winning control of Congress in the 2006 election, some activists have called on Fenty and the Council to move ahead with a D.C. same-sex marriage bill. A majority of Council members, along with Fenty, have said they support same-sex marriage in principle and would vote for a same-sex marriage bill at an appropriate time.

Others, including gay D.C. Council-member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), have called for city recognition of same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts as a first step toward full legalization of same-sex marriage in the District.

'Why not now?'

Heated disagreement over the direction D.C. should take on the issue surfaced at a gay community town hall meeting here on Feb. 20, which was sponsored by the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. Gay Democratic activist and blogger Lane Hudson challenged the views of local activists who have opposed pushing for a D.C. same-sex marriage bill now, saying the city should move ahead with such a bill during the "window" when Democrats control Congress.

Hudson said he believes Democratic leaders in Congress would block any attempt by anti-gay lawmakers to interfere with a same-sex marriage bill passed by the D.C. Council. But he and others noted it was uncertain whether the Democrats would retain control of Congress in the 2008 elections.

Rick Rosendall, former president of the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance, said the time was not right for such action, saying Congress would 'crush us' by overturning such a bill, even under the control of Democrats.

Rosendall's comments prompted others in the audience to shout their objections, saying they did not believe the Democratic Congress would intervene.

"Why not now?" several people shouted. "If not now, when?" asked gay activist Michael Crawford, a former staff member with the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay political group. . . .

Rosendall and veteran D.C. gay activist Frank Kameny said they strongly support the right of same-sex couples to marry but believe gays would be worse off if Congress stepped in to overturn a same-sex marriage law here.

The two said the Democrats gained their majority in 2006 through the election of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House and Senate, and that nearly all of these new Democratic lawmakers oppose same-sex marriage. . ."

posted by maggie at 3:05 PM | Link | 0 comments

Ohio Incest Case

Since the issue of incest was raised earlier, readers might be interested in a court decision on the subject released yesterday by the Ohio Supreme Court. It involved a man convicted of incest for a consensual sexual relationship with his adult stepdaughter. He appealed, arguing that the incest law was unconstitutional as applied to a consensual relationship between adults. The court said that there is no fundamental right to engage in consensual sexual relations with stepchildren and that the law “serves the legitimate state interest if protecting the family unit and family relationships.” This is true, explains the court, because a “sexual relationship between a parent and child or a stepparent and stepchild is especially destructive to the family unit.”

One judge dissented, arguing that the incest statute was meant only to protect children and that the “consent of the alleged victim should remain a valid defense in cases involving adults.”

MAGGIE UPDATE: Jonathan Adler discusses the case on Volokh Conspiracy.
posted by William Duncan at 3:56 PM | Link | 17 comments

Utah Marriage Preference in Adoption and Foster Care

Yesterday night, on the last day of its session, the Utah legislature approved a bill that would provide a preference in foster care and adoption placements for married couples. This is an idea IMAPP has discussed previously. The vote in the state House was 61-12 and in the Senate was 28-1.
posted by William Duncan at 1:18 PM | Link | 0 comments

New Study: The Happiness Gap

Economist document the mid-life crisis. . .and declining rates of happiness in America. Abstract from the National Bureau of Economic Research:

"Recent research has argued that psychological well-being is U-shaped through the life cycle. The difficulty with such a claim is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). Hence the apparent U may be an artifact. Using data on approximately 500,000 Americans and Europeans, this paper designs a test that makes it possible to allow for different birth-cohorts. A robust U-shape of happiness in age is found. Ceteris paribus, well-being reaches a minimum, on both sides of the Atlantic, in people's mid to late 40s. The paper also shows that in the United States the well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time. In Europe, newer birth-cohorts are happier."

posted by maggie at 9:30 AM | Link | 0 comments

NEW BOOK LOOKS AT PARENTS WHOSE CHILDREN DIVORCE: From the Baltimore Sun

here
posted by Eve at 8:15 PM | Link | 0 comments

Hawaii Declines Civil Unions

Feb 28 AP story. Hawaii does have a "reciprocal beneficiaries" option for gay couples though:

Hawaii Civil Unions Plan Goes Nowhere

(Honolulu, Hawaii) Hawaii lawmakers effectively killed a proposal to create civil unions for gay couples by declining to vote on the legislation.

More than 100 people packed the House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday night, many waving pink signs reading, "Civil Unions. Equal protection, justice for all." At least 400 people submitted extensive written or oral testimony. After five hours of testimony, though, the committee declined to vote. Representatives offered little explanation to the public, but it was a sign that the bill lacked enough support to become law. Civil unions had been suggested as a way for the state to sidestep a controversy over gay marriage, but they proved to be nearly as contentious.. . .

"This is essentially a re-examination of the same-sex marriage issue except with a different title," said Kelly Rosati, a spokeswoman for the Hawaii Catholic Church and executive director for the Hawaii Family Forum. . .

"For me, it's very clear cut that it's gender discrimination," said Scott Orton, who is gay. "I would like to take on a partner in the future and have the same rights as a married person."

posted by maggie at 2:26 PM | Link | 21 comments

A Book and a Movie

The endless struggle against ancient sex taboos (cont.). P.S. If they agreed to be sterilized and/or to abort any children diagnosed with disabilities, what would the state's interest be?:

"German Brother, Sister Who've Had 4 Children Together Fighting Incest Laws
Tuesday, February 27, 2007

A German brother and sister who have four children together are calling for the country's incest laws to be abolished so that they can continue their sexual relationship.

Patrick Stubing and his sister Susan — who grew up separately — have had three of their children taken into foster care.

Two of the children have disabilities although it is not known if these are due to inbreeding or because they were born prematurely.

Stubing spent two years in prison for incest and faces another jail term unless the legislation is overturned.

The couple's supporters said the law is archaic and harks back to the Third Reich's obsession with racial purity.

They want Germany to follow the example of countries such as France, Belgium and the Netherlands where incest is no longer punishable.

The siblings were born into the same family but Patrick was not living with them when his sister was born.

They met for the first time in 2000 shortly before their mother died of a heart attack.

Soon they fell in love and had their first child Eric in 2002. Sarah, Nancy and Sofia were born over the next four years.

Stubing told a German newspaper that they decided to have more children after the authorities took Eric away.

"The younger children might not have been born had they not taken the first one from us," he said.

A film and book are planned about the Stubings and their fight against one of Western society's oldest

UPDATE: A German court holds off on jailing the brother to consider his arguments that criminalizing incest violates his civil rights. . .plus a few more personal details here.
posted by maggie at 2:16 PM | Link | 12 comments

GLBTQ2IA

The new PC, from In These Times:

". . .Today, on both the left and the right, being PC is no laughing matter; three decades of culture wars have generated a bewildering thicket of terminology.
To help me parse what’s PC and what's not, I had help from people attuned to the nuances of words, particularly those that describe race, ethnicity and sexual identity. Rinku Sen is a 40-year-old South Asian woman. She is the publisher of Colorlines, a national magazine of race and politics, for which she has developed a PC style manual. Tracy Baim is a 44-year-old white lesbian. She grapples with the ever-evolving nomenclature of sexual identity and politics as the executive editor of Windy City Times, a Chicago-based gay weekly. Lott Hill is a 36-year-old white gay male who works at Center for Teaching Excellence at Columbia College in Chicago. He interacts with lots of young people—the font from which much new language usage flows.. . .

Bitch: A word, says Baim, which is “absolutely being reclaimed by a younger generation of women who are asserting their sexuality and control of their sexuality.” Successfully repurposed by Bitch magazine over the past decade, ‘Bitch’ is now becoming passé as less edgy writers like Cathi Hanauer, author of The Bitch in the House, adopt it. Similarly, though more slowly, “slut,” “whore” and “cunt” are being reappropriated. “The young people use those terms all the time teasingly and sometimes to even refer to themselves,” says Hill. “It is more common to hear someone say ‘I am a slut’ than ‘I am a whore.’ ” “Cunt” is gaining currency among some young lesbians, though Baim says it is a word that gets stuck in her throat. “While it is a reclaimed word, it is one I can hardly say, the same way some older blacks have trouble saying the n-word.” . . .

Feminist: "A word that the younger generation doesn't always embrace," is how Baim, 44, describes it. A lot of young women, she says, are "feminists but they don't want to be pigeonholed." "Feminist somehow became a tainted word along the way," says Hill. "I have heard a lot of people say, 'this sounds feminist' or 'I used to be a feminist.'". . .

GLBT: Shorthand for GLBTQ2IA.

GLBTQ2IA: The acronym for Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgendered, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Allies. "This is coming from the youth movement, the college campuses, it has not seeped into the whole community at this point," says Baim, who at the Windy City Times uses GLBT, an acronym the New York Times has not yet seen fit to print.

Guys: Very controversial. Used, especially in the Midwest, when referring to a group of people. "In Chicago that word gets used a lot," says Hill. And Baim says, “I use it all of the time." Some feminists, like Andi Zeisler, the editor of Bitch, find “guys” problematic. "We assume the descriptor 'guys' denotes a quality of universality,” she says. "It would be hard to imagine a group of men being addressed by their server as 'hey you gals' and not taking offense, but the reverse happens all the time."

Hir (hirs): Gender neutral for him and her. At Wesleyan University, incoming freshmen are instructed to use gender-neutral pronouns in campus correspondence. As one person wrote on the university’s online Anonymous Confession Board, "I am usually attracted only to people of hir original gender, rather than hir intended gender. As such, I’m afraid that I'm, like, viewing hir wrong, or not respecting hir wishes or something." . . .

Lesbian: "The younger generations are less connected with the terms 'gay' and 'lesbian'," says Baim. "Lesbian is out of favor as a self-identifying label, it means something political, something more rigid than the younger generation is comfortable with."

Queer: Anyone who falls outside the lines of straight. "It has been reclaimed far ahead of faggot or dyke," says Baim. "It is our buzz word,” says Columbia College's Hill. "It is how we avoid saying all of those letters [GLBTQ2IA]." REM lead singer Michael Stipe, for example, is queer, not gay. "For me, queer describes something that's more inclusive of the gray areas," he told Butt, a pocket-sized Dutch "fagazine." "It's really about identity I think. The identity I'm comfortable with is queer because I just think it's more inclusive.". . .

Ze: Gender neutral for he or she. As Mary Boenke writes on the PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) Web site: "When talking with Leslie Feinberg, noted transgender author, I asked Leslie which pronouns to use. Ze shrugged hir shoulders and said ze didn’t care."

posted by maggie at 1:41 PM | Link | 20 comments

Divorce & Home Schooling in New Jersey

Last week, a trial court in New Jersey handed down an interesting decision involving divorcing parents who disagree about whether the children should continue to be home schooled. The seven children who live with the mother have been home schooled to date. The court says the father consented to the schooling but is now challenging its continuance. The court eventually says it will not rule on the father’s request to end the home schooling, but only after a startling opinion.

The court first orders that the children be tested for the grades they would be in if they were in public school (this portion of the opinion is very confusing since it is not separated from a discussion of an earlier case). The court then opines at length about the perfidy of the school district allowing the children to be home schooled without state intervention. Noting that the school district had not sent officials to the home to check on the children’s progress, the judge said: “This is shocking to the court.” The court characterized the children as being “left unsupervised” solely because of the lack of state intervention. (I suspect children who are at home with their mother would not describe themselves as “unsupervised.”) The judge also found it shocking that the state Department of Education allows parents to home school without state intervention.

The court expresses the opinion that home schooling is fine if parents who home school are required to (1) register with the school district, (2) file curriculum with the local district and be involved in a “training seminar” (with strange specificity, the court says “a four hour video would suffice”) and (3) have their children tested annually.

Since it is not ruling on the father’s request, the court gives him suggestions to accomplish his aim. First, the court says he can take the children’s test scores to the local Board of Education so they will sue the mother for the children’s non-attendance. If this does not satisfy the father he can file a complaint of “educational neglect” against his wife with the state Division of Youth and Family Services.

This decision illustrates the reality that in many, perhaps most, divorce cases, the state aligns with one party against the other (this is true where one spouse seeks a divorce when the other spouse does not want to divorce)—here, with the parent who does not want the children home schooled. To the degree the state inserts itself into family life, whether as the agent of dissolution of family ties or the creator of new kind of families, the state’s values will trump those of individual families.
posted by William Duncan at 1:39 PM | Link | 3 comments

"Normal Day"

I want to buy this book, for this line alone: ". . .the ugliness of want, when the desire is legitimate but the satisfaction of it impossible." From the March 2007 SELF magazine (no link unfortunately):

TOGETHER,FOREVER
When your parents are divorced, happily ever after is the stuff of fairy tales. Here's how one skeptic stays true to love.
By Martha McPhee

"I married the same man twice in four months, and over the span of 18 months we went on seven honeymoons. . . After learning that Mark did not have cancer, we sat together at a table, a piece of paper between us. . .Somewhere in the midst of all this, we had an enormous fight. I don't remember what it was about- probably my worrying--but I do remember how it ended.

Mark said, "When I married you, I thought I was about to die."

"So divorce me," I shot back, throwing out those three words so easily.

. . .I was not unfamiliar with divorce; my parents began their separation when I was 5 years old. Suffice it to say that I would not wish the suffering of divorce on anyone. My parents were not fated to remain together, and as an adult I can see the reasons clearly. At the time, I could not understand and felt simply the yearning for something that could not be--the ugliness of want, when the desire is legitimate but the satisfaction of it impossible. I longed throughout my childhood, and into my young-adult years, for my parents to fall in love all over again, as if somehow that would make me whole. Of course, that did not happen. As a small girl, I became withdrawn. I didn't care about school. I skipped it when I could and stayed close by my mother's side. Whenever I wasn't with her, I worried constantly about the chaos at home.

Details of the divorce included a vocabulary that was entirely new to me: _Custody_, _alimony_, _child support_, _visitation rights_, _lover_, _affair_, _adultery_. My three sisters and I would lie in bed at night and throw these words into the darkness, where they'd hang suspended for a while, until one of the older girls would translate the words, one at a time, for the rest of us. We played a game called "normal day," a variation on house in which we were paired off with various movie stars--Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, O.J. Simpson, even. We married and divorced, took lovers, charged mightily on the credit cards of the lovers who spurned us. Normal day.

Our love ricocheted between our parents like pinballs. We were afraid to favor either one for too long lest we hurt the other. My parents didn't have the vocabulary to talk about what was happening to their marriage. At this time, in the early 1970s, divorce was not common. In our town, our parents were essentially the first to split up. Many couples later followed suit, but at first, divorce instilled a certain terror, and people stayed away, as if our situation might be contagious.

How, with this experience, could I possibly imagine anything good coming from the heartbreak of divorce? Indeed, though I definitely believe now that my parents made the correct choice, the decision has haunted each of them ever since. "Not a day goes by when I don't think about it," they have both admitted from time to time.

* * *

I often wonder who I would have been had my parents stayed together.
Would I have been a confident and self-possessed girl? Would I have grown
up to expect and demand love, to earn it and deserve it? Would the model
of their love have showered me with a sense of belonging to something
large and beautiful? I see my daughter and son. I watch them with a
careful eye. From the time they were young, it has been clear to me how
Mark and I and our love is one thing for them: everything. In some ways,
my daughter reminds me of the girl I always wanted to be. How could I
wreck her world? . ."

[Excerpted from _The Honeymoon's Over: True Stories of Love, Marriage and
Divorce_, edited by Andrea Chapin and Sally Wofford-Girand (Warner
Books). Copyright 2007 by Martha McPhee.]
posted by maggie at 12:14 PM | Link | 1 comments