This is scary: according to USA Today, the US government has moved from promoting abstinence to teenagers to pushing it at grown adults. The reason? Too many single women having kids, apparently. But these are adults, not children, and so there's no educational purpose to provide cover here. Instead, this is a naked exercise in promoting a conservative Christian agenda of trying to recreate Victorian morality - an example of the theocratic leanings of America's Christian Taleban.
Here's a suggestion: maybe they should get the fuck out of people's bedrooms and let them decide for themselves how they will live their lives?
[Hat tip: Broadsheet]
23 comments:
I can't believe that they're going to institute the death penalty in the USA for women having unmarried sex.
They're not? Then I think there might be a typo in your title.
Posted by Graeme Edgeler : 11/01/2006 05:16:00 PM
Darn! Graeme got there before me.
Posted by Muerk : 11/01/2006 06:34:00 PM
Seems unlikely to work, but suppose a bit of advertizing preaching the gospel of no sex outside marriage did have some impact, leading to a serious reduction in one-parent households. That would be good, right?
Posted by Anonymous : 11/02/2006 12:11:00 AM
Anon: No. Or rather, its none of the government's business what consenting adults do in their bedrooms, or what sort of households they live in. Those things are for individuals to decide for themselves, not the government, no matter how "good" they think the results will be or how much money it saves them.
Posted by Idiot/Savant : 11/02/2006 12:28:00 AM
I can understand that argument. Not sure I accept it, but I can understand it. Quite how you get from there to the Taleban, I'm not sure.
Do you also oppose Government "don't smoke" advertising (not don't smoke in the house, while pregnant etc advertising but "every cigarette is doing you damage" advertising).
How about compulsory wearing of seatbelts/bicycle helmets by adults?
Posted by Graeme Edgeler : 11/02/2006 12:40:00 AM
You _seriously_ do a disservice when you compare the Taleban and their atrocities to American abstainence programs. The comparison is just specious.
Posted by Muerk : 11/02/2006 02:13:00 AM
So there could be (i) literally mountains of evidence that some ways of life are better for adults to choose (both for themselves and for their children let's say) than others, and (ii) evidence that if you informed them of those facts many of them would in fact make those much better choices for themselves, yet *still* for anyone to pass on these core recommendations would be some form of illegitimate coercion as far as you are concerned?
And if there were further mountains of evidence that it's predominantly the poor and bedraggled who'd benefit most from the advice/recommendations/exhortations, so that the costs of your scruplous not-advising/-exhorting fall most heavily on them, that too makes no difference to you?
Posted by Anonymous : 11/02/2006 03:06:00 AM
you can't overlook the threat to personal liberty offered by one religion just because it doesn't share the most extreme tenets of another. that's comparing apples with oranges.
so that tempts me say that american 'taleban' is a little angry, considering the assault on personal liberty is not as great in the US (although these nutters seem to be the thin end of the wedge).
but in terms of the threat that holy-book literalism offers liberal democracy, absolutely. no government has the right to circumscribe personal action above what is necessary for the maintenance of good social order and personal safety.
perhaps a better comparison is "american wahabbists". they proselytize an angry, vengeful and one-eyed form of religion world-wide, and see other versions of the truth as a visible threat.
evangelicals are a pretty crazy bunch though, and the US already is happy to execute people, and as happy to torture them. there's the future potential for some pretty screwed up behaviour from that country.
Posted by Anonymous : 11/02/2006 07:46:00 AM
I'm not overlooking it. I'm not using the Taleban as some sort of straw man in a "yes you've made a point, but they're not as bad as the Taleban"-way, but because it was asserted they were as bad as the Taleban. Had I/S not mentioned the Taleban no-one else here would have.
But arguably government abstinence advertising is as dangerous as government "don't smoke" advertising, or government "make it click" advertising.
In a country with basically completely privatised healthcare, government "don't smoke" and "make it click" advertising make less sense, but given that is it the government that picks up the pieces of social dysfunction they have an interest in ensuring it is diminished - just like the New Zealand government has an interest in ensuring its health budget is less-strained by serious injury from car accidents and smoking-relatd illnesses. Just because our anti-smoking campaigns are a secular fundamentalism doesn't mean they're less of a threat to liberty.
Posted by Graeme Edgeler : 11/02/2006 09:27:00 AM
I'm pretty sure that there are a large number of research studies that show that married couples are, on average, better parents in terms of thing like the likelihood of their children to drink underage, do well in school, take illegal drugs, get arrested etc.
Posted by Graeme Edgeler : 11/02/2006 09:53:00 AM
Graeme: go find the research then and drag it back, or stop insulting me and my mother. And if you can't do that, perhaps you could explain how being MARRIED would make a difference to my day-to-day parenting, because I don't see it.
Raising kids on your own is hard enough without being stigmatised as a bad parent.
Posted by Anonymous : 11/02/2006 10:13:00 AM
I'm not saying I agree, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even be debating in this thread had I/S not thought that public advertising was akin to state-sanctioned murder, but please re-read what I said - I have insulted neither you, nor your mother.
Statistics are always about averages - and there is rarely if ever someone who actually is that average. A simple google search highlighted the following stats for me - I don't know whether they are accurate or robust - but research is there, and there are news reports on it:
*Children in stepfamilies and single-parent families are almost three times more likely to drop out of school than are children in intact families.
*Children living with a single mother are six times more likely to live in poverty than are children whose parents are married.
Here is one paper (which collects various international research):
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/marriage/children.cfm
- maybe it's BS - I don't know - perhaps it's skewed, but it's not the only research.
Why would this be the case? I don't know. Perhaps people who have children with people whom they are married to are more likely to stay around to raise them. There are many possibilities. I really don't know. But there is research that shows there are issues.
Posted by Graeme Edgeler : 11/02/2006 10:41:00 AM
Actually, Graeme, partly I was trying to make you see that 'averages' are 'people', individuals who might be struggling and have a HARDER time when you add social stigma on top of that.
However, you've talked about step-parents and single parents, neither of which has any relation to whether marriage in and of itself is better than two birth parents who aren't married. And you said 'married couples' not couples.
My own suspicion is that poverty and the level of education are much stronger influences on parenting than a piece of paper from a Registry office. I'm much more committed to the man I didn't marry than the one I did.
And I'm very aware that you're talking about averages. But how many bad marriages and good not-marriages does it take before you start to suspect that marriage per se isn't the defining factor?
Posted by Anonymous : 11/02/2006 11:31:00 AM
Maybe it's time to bring back those illuminating and apt descriptions for offspring of unmarried parentage: "bastards" and "illegitimate" would do nicely to stigmatise those loose women who don't bother to get hitched (or even get artificially inseminated). Any social opprobrium on their offsrping would far outweigh and be far more effective that any Taleban moves against them.
On the other hand, the Taleban epithet is too narrow: any member of the Coalition of the Circumcised (catholic, evangelical protestant, muslim or judaic) gladly makes it his core business to busybody in people's sex lives and reproduction
Posted by Hans Versluys : 11/02/2006 12:07:00 PM
It's not necessarily social stigma - by recognising that people in groups with defined characteristics are more likely than those in groups without those characteristics state and non-state assistance can be better targetted.
Thus we have "don't smoke" advertsiements, as well as "don't smoke if you're Maaori" advertisements.
I am happy to concede that for any couple the existence or otherwise of a piece of paper makes no difference.
Marrital status is a symptom of a number of things - financial position, employment, education, ethnic background, family background etc. Other symptoms of various combinations of the above result in tendencies toward parenting that, for a variety of reasons, results in poorer social outcomes for the children. By recognising that two symptoms such as lack of marital status, and raising socially disadvantaged children stem from similar backgrounds, by dissauding those with one symptom (lack of marital status) from the other symptom societal disfunction can be decreased.
Analagously, being Maaori means you are more likely, on average, to smoke. Being Maaori also means that, on average, you are more likely to die younger, and of lung cancer. Smoking and early mortality stem from similar backgrounds (poverty, education etc. as above), yet we target specific "don't smoke" programmes at Maaori. To avoid one symptom (early Maaori mortality) we attack another symptom (Maaori smokers). It's probably poverty and the other factors that are the greatest cause of early Maaori mortality, but one way of trying to close the gap is to discourage Maaori in particular from smoking.
The American abstinence initiative is similarly based. One way to close the gap between the social outcomes of the children living with married parents and children living without married parents is to encourage women who are not married to lessen their risk of having children at present (through abstinence, or through other means). On average, when a person has settled down enough to be in a position to marry it is more likely, perhaps, that they are in a better position to bring children into the world without leading to social disadvantage.
Myself, for the record, I think the programme is a stupid idea. I would oppose it in NZ. Were I in the US I would oppose it there too. But that doesn't mean that it can't quite possibly be validly defended on a statistical basis.
Posted by Graeme Edgeler : 11/02/2006 12:09:00 PM
Ghet: marriage is somewhat irrelevant to this discussion. i/s regards govt (and presumably anyone else either) having any view at all about better and worse household structures and sexual choices as illegitimate. Promotion of an ideal of "Abstinence before marriage-like", even on the basis of superlative evidence, would be just as abhorrent to her.
Tibby: Telling/advising/exhorting even under conditions of superlative evidence "circumscribes personal action"?
Posted by Anonymous : 11/02/2006 12:33:00 PM
I know you all hate the Maxim Institute, and I'm sure these stats are cherry picked but hey... you wanted "proof".
New Zealand has the developed world's highest rate of births outside of marriage (44%), and the third-highest teenage birthrate (after the USA and UK). Nearly a third of all children grow up in fatherless homes.
Research in Christchurch revealed that 65% of youth offenders were not living with their father.
Examination of English court records between 1982 and 1988 found that children living with their mother and her cohabiting boyfriend were 33 times more likely to be abused than those living with their married, biological parents. In turn, the risk of abuse for children whose mothers were cohabiting was five-and-a-half times greater than for children with remarried parents.
Out of 52,000 child abuse cases reviewed for the US, 72 percent involved children in a household without one or both biological parents, even though these households comprised roughly a third of all households with children.
In Australia, the rate of sexual abuse of children in de facto couple families is more than three times the rate in natural or adoptive families. A high proportion of child killers are either step fathers or the mothers' boyfriends.
Fatherless children are worse off in terms of health, educational attainment, work ethics, income and lifetime wealth. They are more prone to crime, drug addiction, divorce, unemployment, illness, truancy, suicide, poverty and depression.
Go to the link to see where this information was gathered.
http://www.maxim.org.nz/main_pages/about_page/about_nzintrouble.html
Posted by Muerk : 11/02/2006 01:22:00 PM
>Statistics is all about averages.
That statement is almost exactly wrong, if you mean statistics the formal science rather than "quoting random numbers on the internet and calling them statistics".
Posted by Chris : 11/02/2006 01:37:00 PM
Having been dispatched not too long ago on fact finding missions to Kansas, Missouri, and the Dakotas, I can report with confidence that there is no evidence of Conservative Christians using gridiron stadiums to execute women after church is finished on sunday. In Utah, however, rumours persist...
Posted by Anonymous : 11/02/2006 02:03:00 PM
Trouble - well said. I was also led to wonder about the number of "sole parent families" in the US where the reason for sole parenting is the death of the other parent in dubious foreign wars. Dubya's ill-conceived invasion is creating plenty of sole-parent families, I'd wager.
As for teenage mothers (Muerk) I would have thought that many on the Right would be in favour of anything that contributes to higher fertility rates among the resident NZ population (as opposed to, say, immigration - especially Muslim immigration).
Posted by dc_red : 11/02/2006 02:58:00 PM
123: "In Utah, however, rumours persist..."
LOL
Trouble and dc_red:
Good points that I won't refute. And it's an interesting point re: muslim immigration. Personaly I don't mind muslim immigrants, but many seem to think it's going to be a return to Lepanto. That's not only an exclusive rightwing thing either. Gay activists aren't exactly thrilled with the moral conservativism that muslims bring to the democratic process.
Posted by Muerk : 11/02/2006 03:57:00 PM
Fair call Muerk. I was just thinking of those on the Right who are (increasingly?) fixated on fertility rates (which, rather ironically, seems to lead them to spend even more time at pouring over their keyboards).
There was also Brash's speech re: immigrants needing to accept "kiwi values" - values which weren't necessarily shared by some of his evangelical/fundamentalist supporters.
Anyway, I know teenage motherhood has been constructed as a "bad thing" but I think that's not necessarily the case in all or even most circumstances. I certainly think it shouldn't be the case.
Posted by dc_red : 11/02/2006 04:42:00 PM
I/S is giving the Nanny State a kick, and more power to him.
Come over to the Light side of the Force, I/S.
M'lud
Posted by Anonymous : 11/02/2006 06:32:00 PM
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