Rudy on Divorce

In today's New York Post:

". . . He said that such matrimonial baggage wouldn't hurt his bid to become the 2008 GOP nominee.

"It's happened to some people, it hasn't happened to others," he said. "But I think most people can relate to this kind of thing happening in your life. . ."

Interesting construction. Rudy is right: sometimes divorce just happens to people. I think it just happened to Donna. I know it just happened to Andrew and his sister. But Rudy, didn't you have something to do with this divorce happening? (And BTW, very few American couples outside of Hollywood have the record you and Judith have compiled between you). Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
posted by maggie at 6:36 PM | Link | 0 comments

"FAMILY RESPONSIBILITIES DISCRIMINATION" LAWSUITS: From the American Prospect

The backlash against the reigning "ideal worker" construct -- long hours away from home, 24/7 availability, always ready to travel -- has been mounting for some time now. It's self-evident not just among working moms and work-life analysts but among rebellious elites and working-class men, too. These painfully outmoded assumptions about how to work are based on 1950s-era men with stay-at-home wives. Today more women are in the workforce than ever; fathers want to be more involved in the domestic sphere; people are living longer and are more dependent on their children as they grow infirm. Yet in spite of all this flux, the workplace has remained stagnant, with a "this is just the way things are done" mentality.

But some workers who see these outdated policies as discriminatory are seeking recourse in the courtroom. Employees who were denied that promotion, faced hostility at work, or were fired because they had to care for family members are stepping up to sue. And 50 percent of their cases, known as Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD) suits, are winning. These lawsuits put the workplace on trial, wrote Mary C. Still in "Litigating the Maternal Wall: U.S. Workers Charging Discrimination Against Workers with Family Responsibilities," a paper published by the Center for WorkLife Law. FRD lawsuits document the struggle between iconoclastic employees and conventional employers over what the ideal worker looks like. Now the question is whether these lawsuits will actually spark change in the workplace. And if so, how much?

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posted by Eve at 2:27 PM | Link | 0 comments

EVANGELICALS AND THE D-QUESTION: Terry Mattingly

...No, my point is that Newsweek seriously buried the lede in this report. There is some amazing material in the second half of the story that is hooked to one of the major stories in American life and politics right now — the blurring of evangelical Protestant beliefs on issues linked to marriage and divorce. ...

So, let’s see. What else might be going on here in this story? Clearly the issue of evangelicals and divorce is a complex one, but it seems clear which way things are evolving.

I am haunted by something I started hearing in the mid-1990s from leaders in the “True Love Waits” movement. What was the biggest hurdle when it came time to get congregations to take part in this save-sex-for-marriage project? Often, it was the weak support of pastors afraid to offend divorced church members (including deacons) and parents who were nervous about the project, because of their own sexual histories.

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posted by Eve at 3:09 PM | Link | 18 comments

WHO SPEAKS FOR THE CHILD?: Mirror of Justice blog discussion

starts with this post:

Ultimately, the tension created by the children’s rights movement is captured in a single question: Whom do we trust to care for the child? Once the state assumes the authority to speak for a child, what happens if the parents fall into a category of people-for example, drug abusers, prisoners, the mentally incompetent-who tend not to act in a way that is most supportive of a child’s future autonomy? Under Dwyer’s prescription, these parents would bear the burden of proving their worth before the state permitted them to act as parents. It is not difficult to imagine future calls to expand the category of those presumed to be unfit parents to include individuals who would threaten their child’s autonomy by passing on misogynist or homophobic religious beliefs. When parenthood exists as a creation of the state, the boundaries of state power become difficult to discern.

The state must tread lightly and cautiously whenever it seeks to enlarge its regulatory presence within the family, even when its motivation is noble and its aims laudatory. We cherish the family because it is the social foundation of human experience -- the community where the human person loves most deeply, sacrifices most nobly, and relates most authentically. It is much more than a mere training ground for the future exercise of autonomy, and its value is not readily captured in the language of public norms and legal rights. We would do well to recall the perspective of Catholic social teaching, as expressed in chapter 5 of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church: “The family,” it reminds us, “does not exist for society or the state, but society and the state exist for the family.”
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posted by Eve at 2:46 PM | Link | 0 comments

IN SECRET, POLYGAMY FOLLOWS AFRICANS TO NEW YORK: From the NY Times

...But the Magassas clearly are not an isolated case. Immigration to New York and other American cities has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali, where demographic surveys show that 43 percent of women are in polygamous marriages.

And the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with African immigrants, officials and scholars of polygamy is of a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.

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posted by Eve at 2:44 PM | Link | 0 comments

From a NY Times article on a gay wedding expo

...Marcie Horowitz and Margaret Maloney of Westfield, partners for 22 years, stood near a display of tiaras and flower girl dresses as they discussed their upcoming ceremony. Ms. Malone noted that no one at the convention hall was referring to the ceremonies as civil unions.

“Everyone’s saying marriage or wedding,” she said.

Ms. Horowitz laughed, recalling how people had been congratulating her on her engagement, which is not a term she uses. The right language, however, is hard to come by.

“You say to people, ‘I’m getting ...’ what?” Ms. Horowitz said.

“Civil unioned,” “civilly united” or “unionized,” perhaps?

“Now we say to people we’re getting married,” Ms. Maloney said. ...

And companies that make up the marital industrial complex are beginning to notice. Ms. Drozd also noted that Bloomingdale’s, which had a spot at the expo, has renamed its bridal registry as a gift registry because, she suggested, “not all couples include brides anymore.”

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posted by Eve at 2:41 PM | Link | 0 comments

Pro-Marriage Tax System?

The British debate in the March 22 U.K. Independent:

"Marriage is likely to be a political battleground in the run-up to the next election.

The Conservatives want to use the tax system to encourage married couples to stay together, but children's charities showed in their reaction to yesterday's Budget that they prefer Gordon Brown's approach of channelling benefits and tax breaks towards homes where children are growing up in poverty, whether or not their parents are married. But they said he had not gone far enough.

The Chancellor rubbished the Conservative plan of a special tax allowance for married couples. He told MPs: "Such a proposal would penalise three million widows and their children who would be denied the allowance, and would also penalise wives or husbands left by their spouse."

He added: "It is right to recognise marriage in the tax system in ways that do not penalise children through the arrangements we make for assets to be transferred free of tax between husband and wife in inheritance tax and capital gains tax."

posted by maggie at 2:00 PM | Link | 0 comments

Cousin Marriage and Islamic Assimilation in Europe

More from Stanley Kurtz:

"Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs marry outside the clan, but they must also marry inside the caste. In Punjab, members of a patrilineal clan tend to live together in the same village. This means that eligible marriage partners of the same caste, but a different clan, can only be found in another village. So the rule of clan exogamy forces Punjabi Hindu and Sikh brides to leave their home villages to move in with husbands who live elsewhere. Hindu and Sikh brides therefore enter their husband’s joint family as strangers. The early years of married life for a Hindu or Sikh bride are thus famously stressful, since she is not only living with and learning the ways of strangers, but also works under the difficult and unfamiliar authority of her new mother-in-law. Over time, Hindu and Sikh brides often press their husbands to leave the joint family and strike out on their own.

In contrast, when Muslim brides are cousins to their husbands, they remain in their home village, living with relatives, and often working under the supervision of a mother-in-law who is also a beloved aunt. One of the reasons Muslim cousin-marriage helps cement such intense in-group solidarity is that it builds upon and magnifies the already immensely powerful emotional bonds of early family life. . ."

I actually wonder if there isn't some other symmetry at work here. If Islam as a religion didn't solve some of the problems cousin marriage typically poses for cultures that adopt it (lack of wider group ties).
posted by maggie at 1:54 PM | Link | 0 comments

SSM Updates: Massachusetts and Maryland

The new senate president promises a vote on the marriage amendment, story here. And the Maryland House Judiciary Committee voted against a state marriage amendment 12-8 (but the amendment also tried to ban teaching about same-sex relationships in schools), story here. The Connecticut legislature is holding hearings on a bill to create SSM on Monday, btw. . .And here's a story on the progress of the Indiana state marriage amendment (they, like Massachusetts have a system wehre the legislature must vote on the text two years running. The legislature has voted favorably once.
posted by maggie at 1:19 PM | Link | 0 comments

SAME-SEX HONEYMOON IN NIAGARA FALLS?: Andrew Koppelman

An ill-strategized lawsuit by the religious right has produced a decision that could pave the way to legal recognition of same-sex marriage throughout New York.

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posted by Eve at 9:32 PM | Link | 3 comments

Last Ditch Efforts to Block U.K. Discrimination Regs Fails

The focus on this story is adoption (as in "No Catholic Agencies Need apply"), but my understanding is these regulations also forbid private religious schools from teaching that homosexual acts are wrong:

"The Government has fought off an attempt by religious leaders, judges and Tory peers to block regulations laying down equal rights for gay and lesbian couples over adoption and services such as bed and breakfast accommodation.

The Sexual Orientation Discrimination order caused a furore over claims that it would lead to Catholic adoption agencies being forced to close down. But last night peers rejected an attempt to force the Government to rethink the measure by 168 votes to 122, a majority of 46 . . "

posted by maggie at 1:39 PM | Link | 3 comments

New Book: Baby Love

By the estranged daughter of Alice Walker. Very interesting from many viewpoints, such as urging young women to take their desire to have children as seriously and with as much respect as their desires for career achievement. . .her willingness to report that biological motherhood is a profoundly life altering experience, and that lesbian coparenting isn't the same experience. The March 18 NYT profile:

"REBECCA WALKER — the daughter of Alice Walker, the author of “The Color Purple,” and Mel Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer — was a nascent feminist when she laid bare the details of her freewheeling, lonely adolescence in her 2001 book, “Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self.”

The memoir, like the 20-something Ms. Walker, was impassioned, poetic and occasionally messy. But it hit a nerve with many critics who considered it a poignant meditation on race and sex.

It also chronicled the author’s efforts to cope with being hot-potatoed from city to city in the wake of her parents’ divorce and what she perceived to be her mother’s ambivalence about her existence.

Left to her own devices by parents she thought were preoccupied with their careers, Rebecca Walker experimented with drugs, had sexual encounters with men and women, and had an abortion at 14.

But by the time she was an adult, she was writing about intergenerational feminism (her godmother is Gloria Steinem), and had helped found the Third Wave Foundation, a philanthropic group for women ages 15 to 30, becoming a symbol for young women who may not have considered themselves feminists.

Symbol though she was, Ms. Walker also cultivated a private life, and in her 20s was in a serious relationship with another woman.

Today, however, Ms. Walker, 37, has become what she called a new Rebecca, one who has a male partner, a child and some revised theories about the ties that bind, which she explores in a new book, “Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence” (Riverhead), to be released on Thursday. A review appears in The Times Book Review today.

Its inspiration? Her son, Tenzin, 2, who is named after the Dalai Lama. (Ms. Walker’s father voted for Chaim and lost.) . . .

Motherhood, she writes in “Baby Love,” is “the first club I’ve unequivocally belonged to.” . . .

“I keep telling these women in college, ‘You need to plan having a baby like you plan your career if it’s something that you want,’ ” she said. “Because we haven’t been told that, this generation. And they’re shocked when I say that. I’m supposed to be like this feminist telling them, ‘Go achieve, go achieve.’ And I’m sitting there saying, ‘For me, having a baby has been the most transformational experience of my life.’ ”. . . .

The most incendiary notion in “Baby Love” may be that, for Ms. Walker, being a stepparent or adoptive parent involves a lesser kind of love than the love for a biological child.

In an interview, Ms. Walker boiled the difference down to knowing for certain that she would die for her biological child, but feeling “not sure I would do that for my nonbiological child.”

“I mean, it’s an awful thing to say,” said Ms. Walker, who in a previous relationship helped rear a female partner’s biological son, now 14. “The good thing is he has a biological mom who would die for him.”

Ms. Walker acknowledged that her idea of blood being thicker than water runs contrary to her own philosophy in “Black, White and Jewish,” in which she writes that “all blood is basically the same.”

In a 2001 Curve magazine article she said, “the bonds you create are just as important and just as powerful as the bonds that you are born into.”

When asked about this incongruity, she explained: “To grapple with how my parents raised me I had to come up with a philosophy that could sustain me. Having my own child gave me the opportunity to have a completely different experience. So hence a different view.” . . ."

posted by maggie at 1:21 PM | Link | 0 comments

German Judge Cites Koran to Justify Marital Violence

For a Moroccan couple. . .story here.
posted by maggie at 1:16 PM | Link | 0 comments

Gay, Married, Parents, Catholics

National Catholic Reporter, reports.
posted by maggie at 10:25 AM | Link | 41 comments

Swedish bishops agree to church weddings

Not sure whether they will call them "marriages" (Sweden has a civil union law)Story here.
posted by maggie at 10:00 AM | Link | 0 comments

Too Marry, or Not to Marry?

Seven Seattle single women dish, e.g.:

"Barbara: I've never been married. I do have a 16-year-old daughter. When I was younger, (marriage) was this fairy tale. You had this man who was going to love and honor you, who was going to rescue you. ... I look at my parents and my girlfriends' parents who have been married 38, 40, 45 years and I think, during that time that was a beautiful thing because that's something people did. They knew that one person, they married them ... of course they've had their ups and downs.

But I think as peoples' worlds and viewpoints are expanding, you realize certain things you will tolerate and you won't, things you will compromise with and you won't.

So now that I'm older, I realize I don't have to be married. I think it's a nice ideal. I want really more of a companionship rather than to say I'm legally bound to someone ... Many times it seems very one-sided. I think that's been my biggest turn-off about marriage: I've seen a lot of women sacrifice themselves and lose their identities. ...

I kind of do want to be married, but I'm also scared to commit myself because it's like, "what am I going to give up?"

posted by maggie at 9:56 AM | Link | 1 comments