Posted on 01/20/2014 1:02:17 PM PST by xzins
A Leftist is someone who advocates marriage for homosexuals but opposes it for heterosexuals.
Recently, Ari Fleischer, a press spokesman for George W. Bush, responded to the current administration’s newfound desire to fight the plague of “income inequality”—which has spread more under Barack Obama than under any other recent president—by stating the obvious: that marriage is good economic medicine.
“`Marriage inequality’ should be at the center of any discussion of why some Americans prosper and others don’t,” Fleischer said. “According to Census Bureau information analyzed by the Beverly LaHaye Institute, among families headed by two married parents in 2012, just 7.5% lived in poverty. By contrast, when families are headed by a single mother the poverty level jumps to 33.9%.”
The response from the Left has been predictable. Carol Gilligan, a New York University professor, asked sarcastically, “Does anybody know the word patriarchy?”
Stephanie Coontz, a contributor to the liberal Center for American Progress’s “Women’s Nation” report, suggests that conservatives want to force women into bad marriages. “Trying to shoehorn women whose expectations of equal treatment have been rising into marriages with men whose economic prospects have been falling is no solution to contemporary work and family dilemmas,” Coontz says. “Women are far less likely than in the past to put up with the kind of behavior that so often accompanies economic loss and chronic employment stress—such as drug or alcohol abuse and domestic violence—and we should not encourage or incentivize them to do so.”
Yet even liberal critics, so suspicious of the motives of those who advocate heterosexual marriage, can’t deny the correlation between it and economic well-being. “The social science literature is quite clear,” writes CAP senior fellow Ann O’Leary, “that children of single-parent families, particularly those living in low-income households, do not fare as well as their peers living in two-parent families, and that these poorer outcomes persist, even when you control for socioeconomic differences.”
Those outcomes are even clearer for married couples. “The statistics tell an awkward truth,” writes Emma Green in The Atlantic: “Financially, married women tend to fare much better than unmarried women.” Columnist Kathleen Parker acknowledges that “marriage creates a tiny economy fueled by a magical concoction of love, selflessness and permanent commitment that holds spirits aloft during tough times.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, a possible presidential candidate, is one of the few national politicians willing to speak up clearly for the economic benefits of marriage. During a recent speech, the Florida Republican acknowledged the seriousness of income inequality, and also the existence of factors other than marriage in the problem, such as the lack of educational and economic opportunities. But he didn’t back away from the social factors, either.
“One of the greatest eradicators of poverty... is marriage,” Rubio said. “When a kid is being raised in a married family, [his or her] likelihood of being in poverty drops dramatically.”
And while marriage makes dollars and sense for women and children, it also helps the overall economy, which continues to struggle. According to a survey last fall by Gallup, “Married Americans report a daily spending average of $102, followed by $98 among those who are living in domestic partnerships, $74 by divorced Americans, $67 by those who are single and never married, and $62 by those who are widowed.”
Yet despite all the clear economic benefits to marriage, the marriage rate in the United States continues to languish. The National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University reports that the marriage rate has fallen to its lowest level in nearly a century. In 1920, there were about 92 marriages for every 1,000 married women. Today, it’s only about 31—a huge drop of two-thirds. Married couples are now, for the first time, the minority among U.S. households, according to the Census Bureau.
“Marriage is no longer compulsory,” says Susan Brown of the NCFMR. “It’s just one of an array of options. Increasingly, many couples choose to cohabit and still others prefer to remain single.”
The current economic decline, as many have noted, has been harder on men than on women—and the damage to families has been incalculable. Many couples delay or reject marriage because of their poor economic prospects, making matrimony increasingly the privilege of a few at the top of the economic ladder. Many women generally do better in colleges and grad schools than men, making marriage problematic to say the least. Many blue collar male occupations are disappearing, leaving many men as the modern equivalents of vestigial organs in the new economy.
Even some feminist observers are concerned that this devaluing of the male has dire implications for Western civilization. “What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” says Camille Paglia. Marriage can help men every bit as much as women.
No one advocating the role of marriage in poverty and income inequality, to my knowledge, is calling it a panacea. There are many other factors in this multifaceted problem—poor schools, a lack of jobs, and so on. But to ignore the pivotal role of marriage, or the lack thereof, is to deny reality and to preclude finding meaningful solutions.
“One of the differences between the haves and the have-nots,” Fleischer notes, “is that the haves tend to marry and give birth, in that order. The have-nots tend to have babies and remain unmarried. Marriage makes a difference.”
If it were as simple as the so-called "feminists" make it out to be, then women would fill every position in every company (and government office), and we'd all be better off because our labor costs would be 20% lower.
The link you posted is not research, it’s propaganda. To further your education, you could start here.
Strictly from a business sense, workers will get paid for what they bring to the table. On average, women work fewer hours than men and take leaves more often. This leads to fewer promotions. You could say that’s discriminatory to women, but it’s also discriminatory to pay the same wage and deny promotions to someone who puts in more uninterrupted hours year after year. It’s not just discriminatory to men but also to the family who depends on that income.
If you’re ready to do more research, check out this carefully documented book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0814472109
If you’re a women that thinks you’re getting the short end of the wage gap, the author will spell out exactly what men tend to do on the job that gives them higher pay and women can do the same things.
I have to agree with you there; American men need to take their lives back, discover and maintain their masculinity and grow up. Even conservative men are getting too mixed up in the ‘metrosexualism’ that is plaguing the culture of men. As for intimacy, don’t do it if you don’t’ want a kid with this woman.
I can't imagine her having to look after him on her own and earn money at the same time. Even looking after a kid requires two people. It's difficult
I’m not the one reading propaganda. The official research sites all agree with about women earning 80%-82% of what men earn:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Pay_Act_of_1963
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/09/17/male-female-pay-gap-hasnt-moved-much-in-years/
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
Just remember “garbage in - garbage out”
Enough said!
Thank you...’metrosexual’... that was the word I was trying to think of when I said ‘fluffy socialist society’. It is sad that we even have to have a word for effeminate male behavior. “Too many mothers and not enough wives”, I guess.
As for the intimacy I am the female, but I know what you are saying....its true. I also believe we have ‘babied’ our children to the point that the boys do not want to ‘grow up, or establish that masculinity, with which comes responsibility for the family.
I was a tomboy myself, climbing trees and working on the farm....overhauls and catching night crawlers, but I had a feminine side that developed normally in the teen years. I was in the military reserves for many years, yet in a rate more suited to my gender. That of course explains my fearless, strong, and opinionated posts.
Strong women attract weaker men and that is the downside, imho, of the changes over the past few decades. Which may explain the billions of dollars raked in for romantic movies, books, and the female escape to a more appropriate male-female relationship era fifty to one hundred years ago, etc.....falsely reclaimed through entertainment.
I can’t speak for the males, and what they are thinking.
And to that, I add:
1) Here’s [Walter] Williams’ roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.
Yes but...... that is rejecting the leftist freedom to do what ever you want. Freedom from restraint is what liberalism is all about.
The restraints are systematically being destroyed or rendered ineffective. A million years of human history boiled down to rules must be trashed to provide ACLU like complete freedom of action.
Pay for equal work has been at at least 97% for at least a couple of decades. Even NOW has acknowledged that. Where you get the 70% figures is when you look at all working women compared to all working men without regard to what they are doing. That climbs to the high 80s when you look at the types of jobs each select; into the low nineties, when you look at continuous experience; and into the high nineties when you look at the subcategories within jobs - like did they take the hard math side of sociology, or the “let’s talk about it” side.
This part is pretty well established. What is open for debate is what is the cause of that last 3%, as well as the trend since the 1990s for women to be (slightly) overpaid in large businesses, and in organizations which have been traditionally male dominated. The first appears to be a combination of actual difference in abilities, and a difference in negotiating aggressiveness. The latter appears to be lawsuit protection in a de facto quota system.
Generation B... (astard)
Well, it IS “culturist”, stating the superiority of traditional Western, Judeo-Christian based culture...
Which, of course, IS demonstrably superior to the other subcultures that the left promotes as foils in order to shake their little fists in the face of God.
The primary restraint that the left attempts to circumvent is the restraint of natural consequences.
Natural consequences are REALITY, ie, the way the universe was created. It’s, as others have said, it was DESIGNED AND INTENDED to be this way.
One of the feminists said something like “do you know the word patriarchy” when she was confronted with this information.
That’s a sound bite. I hope she’s proud of it.
But what is being said here has nothing to do with partriarchies or matriarchies. It has to do with simple logic.
Here’s the logic to all the liberals out there: 2 heads are better than one; 2 sets of eyes watch better than one set of eyes; 2 sets of ears; 2 sets of arms. You name it.
This is not any desire to demean widows, widowers, the divorced, and others who find themselves single parenting. In fact, God has a special place in His heart for widows and orphans. But it is a recognition that in most cases, other things being equal, in a game of 2 on 1, the 2 will generally win.
Good decisions. Don’t turn back.
“No one advocating the role of marriage in poverty and income inequality, to my knowledge, is calling it a panacea.”
It’s pretty darned close to one.
“There are many other factors in this multifaceted problem—poor schools, a lack of jobs, and so on. But to ignore the pivotal role of marriage, or the lack thereof,...”
And each of these ties back to the breakdown of the married nuclear family as the basic social unit in society.
“...is to deny reality and to preclude finding meaningful solutions.”
Marriage, broadly speaking, is the solution.
Chastity and continence before marriage. Education (at least finish high school). THEN marriage. THEN children.
Folks who do it in that order AND STICK WITH IT nearly always prosper.
Amen, sitetest. Good post.
Is it really too hard to read the research from official sources, and stop talking out of your hat....the 80% is certainly explained in details, and does not lend itself to interpretation, it is interpreted to you. Maybe you are agreeing with the research but the premise statement is true as I made it, period. Closed discussion...I do not make the statistics.
Every single one of those sites is talking about a very rudimentary comparison that does not take into account type of work, experience, hours worked per week, leave time, etc. When these are taken into account, the gap disappears. From the beginning of this conversation, I have noted this difference. You have chosen to keep ignoring the more finely tuned statistics while accusing me of not doing my homework. None of the articles you posted refute this.
For example, people who work 44 hours per week instead of 40, make 44% more than those who work 40. It also happens that men tend to put in the extra hours more than women.
I see you are an argument oriented person, so let me say this....I do not give a rat’s rear end now. Ignore the research...claim victory, just go away. I’ll stick with the facts I know.
I don’t argue, period. Enjoy life, it’s short. Your spouse must be exhausted. Some people are predisposed to the negative and having to be right, oy veh!
“Strong women attract weaker men and that is the downside, imho, of the changes over the past few decades.”
Truth be told, I have seen that too and frankly the flip side is that men who have everything going for them, choose women that are all wrong. I’m tough is a tiger and I too have oddly attracted not the strong masculine men, but the emotionally and psychologically weak. I’ve never believed that it’s the fault of women alone, it’s not easy being a woman in a society where easy early sex is considered a given in society and expected after just a couple of dates. Women, nice women, can’t win anymore.
AS for divorce, there’s little safety for women as well. A man might support the wife after, but it’s little consolation to a woman who has dedicated herself to her husband’s life and home and kids for so long, to then suddenly be traded in for someone else.
It’s odd how the new pattern seems to be that the tough and smart and responsible are expected to pair themselves with losers instead of fellow winners.
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