Marry Young, Be Happy? New Study

The full data is here. Well worth taking a look at. And Norval Glenn is one of ourmost distinguished family sociologists. Maggie

"Marry young, be happy? Early to wed may make marriage happy, survey says"

By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY

Americans are waiting longer to get married, but they shouldn't wait too
long: The odds for a happy marriage may favor those who tie the knot between
the ages of 23 and 27, says a survey out Thursday.

The average age at first marriage in the USA has been inching upward; it's
now 26 for women and 27 for men.

The survey asked a variety of questions about marriage and divorce,
including attitudes toward cohabitation and raising children. Eighty-eight
percent of respondents said marriage should be a lifelong commitment.

The survey was designed and analyzed by University of Texas sociology
professor Norval Glenn for the National Fatherhood Initiative, which
advocates marriage and family values.

To determine marital satisfaction and success, Glenn says, the answers to a
series of questions were calculated according to a statistical index,
including adjustments for the length of marriages as well as the age at
first marriage.

Findings shouldn't create panic among those approaching 30, he says. "Those
marriages turned out better but maybe not because of the age," he says.
"Some people may be just too picky or too choosy or not extremely
desirable."

Other researchers worry that the findings, based on a 15-minute national
telephone survey of 1,503 men and women ages 18 and older in late 2003 and
early 2004, may alarm those unattached and marriage-minded.

"The last thing you want is to have them take this as a rule," says
Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history and family studies at Evergreen
State College in Olympia, Wash. "If you're in a good relationship and if you
want to marry, there's no reason to postpone it."

Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, says marrying too young or too old carries a
greater risk of divorce. But now, "as people wait longer and longer to
marry, the definition of what's too old keeps changing." . . .
posted by maggie at 11:50 AM VOTE 0 comments

No Marriage for You!

"Wedded Bliss for All Or None: To Protest Ban on Gay Unions, Arlington Pastor Refuses to Conduct Marriages"

By Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 15, 2005; Page B04 here

"Clarendon Presbyterian Church Pastor David Ensign has an alternative air about him. He wears an earring and has been known to pick up his guitar to play a few hymns during Sunday services.

But he surprised even some of Arlington's die-hard progressives Nov. 3 at the county's annual human rights awards ceremony, where his church was honored. He used the occasion to announce the church's new wedding policy:

"What we're saying is that in the commonwealth of Virginia, the laws that govern marriage are unjust and unequal," says Pastor David Ensign of Clarendon Presbyterian Church.

Traditional marriages are out. "Celebrations of commitment" are in.

To protest Virginia's laws banning same-sex marriage, Ensign and the church's governing council decided recently that Clarendon Presbyterian will no longer have any weddings, and Ensign will renounce his state authority to marry couples.

Any heterosexual couple who has their union "blessed" in a "celebration ceremony" at the tiny church will have to take the extra step of being officially wed by a justice of the peace at the courthouse."
posted by maggie at 10:04 AM VOTE 1 comments

New Study: 760,000 Women Seeking Child to Adopt

More women want to adopt; few do
By Cheryl Wetzstein
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 17, 2005 here.

More women say they are interested in adopting children but fewer are taking steps to adopt, a study shows.

About 18 million women expressed an interest in adoption in 2002, a 38 percent increase from 13 million in 1995, said the National Adoption Day Coalition's study, released yesterday.

The "mystique" of adoption has dissipated, said Maxine Baker, coalition co-chairwoman.
The coalition promotes adoption, especially of the 119,000 children in foster care who are in need of adoptive families.
Government and private groups across the nation have done a good job raising awareness about the benefits and joys of adoptions, said Ms. Baker, an adoptive mother of two and president and chief executive of the Freddie Mac Foundation.
Now it's time for the "call to action," moving from talking about "the concept" of adoption to "how to do" it, she said.
The coalition's study, conducted by researchers with the Urban Institute, compares data from the 1995 and 2002 National Surveys of Family Growth (NSFG). It found that of the 18 million women interested in adoption, Protestants and blacks were the most interested, with more than a third of each group saying they had considered it.
Of the 760,000 women who indicated they were "currently seeking to adopt" in 2002, many said they would consider adopting children with "special needs." For instance, 97 percent said they would consider a child of an ethnic or racial minority, 90 percent would consider a child with a mild disability and 75 percent would consider a sibling group.
About a third said they would consider adopting teenagers or children with severe disabilities.
However, between 1995 and 2002, the number of women who took steps to adopt declined significantly.
In 1995, 16 percent, or 2.1 million, of women who expressed an interest in adoption started the process by contacting someone -- an agency, lawyer or other adoption source -- about adopting. In 2002, 10 percent, or 1.9 million women, took such action.
Prospective adoptive families probably need more information about services, tax benefits, employer assistance and changes in adoption policies, Ms. Baker said. For instance, it used to be that to adopt, "you had to quit your job and stay home," she said. But today, single parents and working mothers can adopt, she said.
On Saturday, about 3,100 adoptions will be finalized in hundreds of courts across the nation, including 30 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
posted by maggie at 9:43 AM VOTE 1 comments

A New Pro-Family Agenda?/Maggie Gallagher

This week's column:

IT'S THE VALUES, VOTERS

Just a year ago, Democrats were pulling out their hair. As the Pew poll reported in its most recent "political typology" analysis, "Coming out of the 2004 elections, the American political landscape decidedly favored the Republican Party."
Now President Bush's tanking poll numbers are stimulating a new sense of possibility: Politics seems up for grabs in a new way. For the first time in recent memory, a strong economy does not seem to be lifting an incumbent president's political fortunes.

What does the future hold? The key election may be the Dover, Pa., school board election, in which all eight school board members who had voted to include a brief mention of "intelligent design" lost.

I doubt this political rejection was fundamentally ideological. Overwhelming majorities of Americans say they support teaching creationism alongside of evolution in public schools. (In the Pew poll, even a narrow majority of liberals favored teaching creationism alongside of evolution in public schools). It's a typically American live-and-let-live response that drives scientists, The New York Times, the courts, certain Democratic elites and George Will stark raving mad.

The Dover election loss reveals the limits of symbolic politics. Say the words "intelligent design" in public school, and hordes of New York Times reporters and ACLU lawyers will descend, stimulating angry confrontations between erstwhile friendly neighbors. As a values issue, most Pennsylvanians are likely content with a small nod to intelligent design in their public schools. But as a practical matter, a small symbol like that is not worth upsetting the principal aim of schools: educating the kids.

"I think the people of Dover are tired of the attention over such a minuscule thing, and they want a change," one former board member, Lonny Langione, told the Times. "A lot of the people I talked to were upset because the school board came to using taxpayer money to advance their own agenda."

The GOP faces a political crisis for a variety of reasons, but one looming problem is that so many of its coalition voters are in fact "values voters" drawn to the GOP for largely symbolic reasons. In the Pew poll, social conservatives (including the less affluent "pro-government conservatives") outnumber the pro-business, low-tax "Enterprisers" in the GOP base by a margin of 2-to-1.

Yet so far, few GOP political or intellectual leaders have even tried to translate values concerns into an agenda that also serves voters' interests, the usual basis of a stable governing majority. Tax cuts used to serve this unifying purpose, but Republicans got so good at cutting the taxes of the middle class that the issue no longer packs the same widespread punch.

In the Weekly Standard essay "The Party of Sam's Club: Isn't It Time the Republicans Did Something for Their Voters?" Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam make a serious attempt at translating values into interests.

"A "pro-family" economic agenda would begin with the recognition of a frequent left-wing talking point -- that over the past few decades, returns to capital have escalated while returns to labor have declined, and that the result has been increasing economic insecurity for members of the working and middle classes," they write.

Douthat and Salam suggest two practical solutions: new financial supports for parents (a la increasing the child tax credit) plus the equivalent of a "veteran's benefit" providing scholarship money for moms home with their kids. They also urge the GOP to address widespread health insecurity. Among all the political typologies in the Pew poll, only the "Enterprisers" (10 percent of registered voters) oppose government-guaranteed health insurance.

Easier said than done, of course. But it's an important insight: Values pack a punch at the polls (ask John Kerry). Over time, merely symbolic values alone won't substitute for an agenda that makes a difference in voters' lives.
posted by maggie at 12:36 PM VOTE 1 comments

Are Babies Bad?

So maybe people who don't need people are the luckiest people after all, Maggie.

Maybe None: Is having a child -- even one -- environmentally destructive?

Gregory Dicum, Special to SF Gate
Wednesday, November 16, 2005, here.

"We can't be breeding right now," says Les Knight. "It's obvious that the intentional creation of another [human being] by anyone anywhere can't be justified today."

Knight is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, an informal network of people dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth. Knight, whose convictions led him to get a vasectomy in the 1970s, when he was 25, believes that the human race is inherently dangerous to the planet and inevitably creates an unsustainable situation.

"As long as there's one breeding couple," he says cheerfully, "we're in danger of being right back here again. Wherever humans live, not much else lives. It isn't that we're evil and want to kill everything -- it's just how we live."

. . . So if fewer people means less destruction, wouldn't no people at all be the best solution for the planet?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because my wife and I have been talking about having a child. We're the kind of people who reduce, reuse and recycle. We try hard not to needlessly fritter away resources. We think globally and act locally in our day-to-day decisions. So while the biggest quandary of most couples in our shoes might be what color to paint the nursery, we have to ask ourselves, Is the impact of a new person justified?"
posted by maggie at 10:44 AM VOTE 1 comments

IS CHILDBIRTH NATIONAL SERVICE?: Will Wilkinson replies to Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam

...More importantly, the ways in which military service and parturition advance the continued existence of societies tangles in the nation-state are, well, different. Members of the military, ideally, preserve our right to life and self-government by protecting us from agressive interlopers who would kill or rule us on terms not are own. Furthermore, being a state is about having a monopoly on force over a region. A defense force is in some sense constitutive of having a state. Now, no babies, eventually no state. True. But the real worry here is not no babies, but too few babies to support our our massive middle class entitlement programs. That is, babies-as-public good is predicated on the idea of babies-as-tax-base. ...

I like the idea of pro-family policy (as long as that includes a non-bigoted notion of the family). I truly believe that families are a foundational social institution, and that we would all be a bit better off if families were stronger, and even bigger. But the family is the private institution par excellence, and you cannot protect or advance the integrity of the family by eroding the distinction between the public and the private. I worry, and I think many others would worry, that when the state starts rewarding us for childbearing, that effaces the public/private distinction, and opens up a crack into the private sphere that the state is bound to try to squeeze through. The agents of the state will see themselves as having a legitimate interest not only in the quanitity of children, but in their quality, and start shaping policy meant to tell us HOW we should raise our children, and, worse, start shaping policy meant to tell us WHO should have them. Let's stay away from that.

more
posted by Eve at 5:24 PM VOTE 1 comments

THE GRAYING OF ASIA: Nicholas Eberstadt

Over the past decade, an ocean of ink has been spilled over the problem of population aging in the world's richest societies (Western Europe, Japan and North America). Low-income regions have attracted relatively little attention: Yet over the coming decades a parallel, dramatic "graying" of much of the Third World also lies in store, and it promises to be a far uglier affair than the "aging crisis" facing affluent societies. The burdens of aging simply cannot be borne as easily by the poor; low-income societies and governments have far fewer options, and the options available are considerably less attractive.

For some poor countries, the social and economic consequences could be harsh indeed: Graying could emerge as a factor directly constraining long-term growth and development. In fact, rapid and pronounced population aging may represent one of the most least appreciated long-term risks facing many of today's developing economies.

Population aging is driven mainly by low birth rates rather than by long life spans--and since fertility levels in poor regions continue to drop, the momentum for Third World population aging continues to build. Not, to be sure, in sub-Saharan Africa, where the median age is likely to remain a mere 20 years some two decades from now. And certainly not in those parts of the Arab/Islamic expanse where total fertility-rate levels still apparently exceed five births per woman per lifetime (viz., Yemen, Oman, Afghanistan). But in much of East Asia, South Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, sub-replacement fertility is already the norm.

more
posted by Eve at 4:55 PM VOTE 0 comments

Going Dutch: Less than 1 out of 8 Gay Couples Choose to Marry

"50,000 gay couples in the Netherlands"
14 November 2005, from expatica.com here

AMSTERDAM - The number of gay couples in the Netherlands has risen sharply in recent years.

There were 53,000 gay and lesbian couples living together in the Netherlands at the beginning of 2005, according to Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Ten years ago there were less than 39,000 gay or lesbian cohabiting couples.
Almost a quarter of the gay or lesbian couples are married or in a registered partnership. Of these, 12 percent are married and 10 percent are in a registered partnership.

The CBS said there are 29,000 all-male couples and 24,000 lesbian couples. Despite the significant increase in the number of gay and lesbian couples, the group is equal to just over 1 percent of the total number of cohabiting couples in the Netherlands.

About 9 percent of the gay or lesbian households in the Netherlands include one or more children. Lesbian couples are more likely to have a child; 18 percent of cohabiting lesbians have a child, compared with just 1 percent of gay couples.
Gay and lesbian couples seem to have a preference for big cities. About a quarter of these couples live in one of the four big cities in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Rotterdam). And 13 percent of all gay and lesbian couples lives in Amsterdam.
[Copyright Expatica News - ANP 2005]
posted by maggie at 10:31 AM VOTE 1 comments

Gay Marriage and God/San Francisco Chronicle

Gays push to recast marriage on morals: Meeting for gays focuses on God
It's time to reclaim moral values debate, speakers tell crowd

Carrie Sturrock, San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, November 14, 2005

The reverend's words drew affirming nods and loud applause at the Sunday morning gathering.
"God is on our side, and God has been on the side of those who struggle for right and righteousness from the very beginning," thundered Dr. Yvette Flunder, founder and senior pastor of City of Refuge United Church of Christ in San Francisco.
It sounded like she was offering a sermon to a congregation of churchgoers, but Flunder's voice rang out in a ballroom full of activists gathered for Creating Change, the 18th annual conference of the nation's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement.
Attendees did not hear much spiritual, God-heavy talk in years past. But gay rights leaders say new times require them to think and speak in new ways about the struggles in their community.
"Only people of faith can demand the religious right repent from its homophobia," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C.
He said the movement needs "to reclaim the moral values debate." The movement should shift from talking about getting "our rights -- as if we get a better dental plan -- into what this is really all about, and that's our basic humanity." . . .
posted by maggie at 10:51 AM VOTE 4 comments