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Monday, November 20th, 2017

Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Preach

Author:     Nicholas Kristof
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     NOV. 18, 2017
 Link: Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Preach
Stephan:   Everything is in this column by Nicholas Kristoff will be familiar to SR readers. I have been writing columns making this point for at least 10 years. What interested me, and helped me decide to run this piece was that the awareness of the failure of Republicanism to produce good government is attracting the attention of others who have, it must be said, larger platforms than me. On the basis of social outcome data, forget about political partisanship, Republicans can't govern, and societies based on christofascist culture values produce a notably inferior quality of life. I used to feel bad for the people who live in Red value states, but the truth is they do this to themselves. Look at Alabama and Roy Moore, or Wisconsin and Scott Walker, or Kansas and Sam Brownback.

Liberals and conservatives have different views of strict moral codes, but their philosophies don’t match their behavior.
Credit Daniel Arnold/ The New York Times

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach.

This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast, people in blue states don’t trumpet these family values but often seem to do a better job living them.

According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 32 states, those with the highest percentage of high school students who say they have […]

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1 Comment

  1. Mark R on Monday, November 20, 2017 at 10:21 pm

    Religion has failed, government has failed, politics is utterly corrupt & failed, media has failed, the environmental movement failed. It’s time to start reclaiming our communities and work together to bring a new decentralized, local cooperative model of living into being.