[Mb-civic] Family Values

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http://www.sacredchoices.org/News_Tracker/walking_the_walk_on_family_values.h
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WILLIAM V. D'ANTONIO 
Walking the walk on family values
By William V. D'Antonio |October 31, 2004

PRESIDENT Bush and Vice President Cheney make reference 
to "Massachusetts liberals" as if they were referring to 
people with some kind of disease. I decided it was time 
to do some research on these people, and here is what I 
found.

The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is 
Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 
2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 
4.1.

But don't take the US government's word for it. Take a 
look at the findings from the George Barna Research 
Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose 
company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts 
does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 
states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again 
Christians have among the highest divorce rates.

The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US 
Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are 
to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that 
"the divorce rates in these conservative states are 
roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per 
thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of 
the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, 
Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, 
Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine 
states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest 
divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New 
Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode 
Island, and Vermont.

How to explain these differences? The following factors 
provide a partial answer:

More couples in the South enter their first marriage at 
a younger age.

Average household incomes are lower in the South.

Southern states have a lower percentage of Roman 
Catholics, "a denomination that does not recognize 
divorce." Barna's study showed that 21 percent of 
Catholics had been divorced, compared with 29 percent of 
Baptists.

Education. Massachusetts has about the highest rate of 
education in the country, with 85 percent completing 
high school. For Texas the rate is 76 percent. One third 
of Massachusetts residents have completed college, 
compared with 23 percent of Texans, and the other 
Northeast states are right behind Massachusetts.

The liberals from Massachusetts have long prided 
themselves on their emphasis on education, and it has 
paid off: People who stay in school longer get married 
at a later age, when they are more mature, are more 
likely to secure a better job, and job income increases 
with each level of formal education. As a result, 
Massachusetts also leads in per capita and family income 
while births by teenagers, as a percent of total births, 
was 7.4 for Massachusetts and 16.1 for Texas.

The Northeast corridor, with Massachusetts as the hub, 
does have one of the highest levels of Catholics per 
state total. And it is also the case that these are 
among the states most strongly supportive of the 
Catholic Church's teaching on social justice issues such 
as minimum and living wages and universal healthcare.

For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is 
the people from Kerry's home state, along with their 
neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these 
values. Indeed, it is the "blue" states, led led by 
Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to 
invest more money over time to foster the reality of 
what it means to leave no children behind. And they have 
been among the nation's leaders in promoting a living 
wage as their goal in public employment. The money they 
have invested in their future is known more popularly as 
taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is 
their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane 
society. Family values are much more likely to be found 
in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream 
liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true 
conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family 
life through the way they live their family values. 

William V. D'Antonio is professor emeritus at University 
of Connecticut and a visiting research professor at 
Catholic University in Washington, D.C.



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