I’m going to lead off with one of your mistakes as it is a perfect example of what is going on here. You have invented a fictional time period and are comparing it unfavorably to today, even if things are significantly better now.
Ahhh yes, the school systems. I often find, myself, that my administrators rebuke me for not advising the girls in my classes to fuck.
And, no, you are wrong. In fact, you have it exactly backwards. From a preliminary report that actually overestimated the data for 2000:
“The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000”
And before you object: “Among teens in the United States, at least in recent years, declining birthrates are not the result of more pregnant teens opting to have an abortion.”
You can note that if we look at total pregnancies rather than births: statistics confirm this. In 2000 there were 821,810 pregnancies among 15-19 year olds and 235,470 abortions out of 9,826,000 girls/women of that age. That gives us roughly 83 pregnancies per 1000 women. So even with abortions still factored in as pregnancies, the number of total pregnancies is still lower than the 96 births per thousand in 1957, a number that would be even higher if we included miscarriages as during each year in the data set we have, miscarriages make up roughly 1/8 to 1/10 of the total pregnancies for that year.
In short, you have created an idealized version of a past that didn’t actually exist, in order to denigrate the present.
Racist, misogynistic, McCarthyistic… not a nasty place?
The KKK kidnapped and murdered three voter registration volunteers in 1964 as a message to anybody helping blacks, a terrorist gesture if ever there was one. This happened in Mississippi, the same place where black churches homes and businesses were firebombed and civil rights workers were beaten.
That’s just a snippet of one single state. Deliberate, terroristic, brutal and societaly sanctioned violence. The Klan was quite active in the 50’s and 60’s. No, they didn’t always lynch people. But the necessity for the Deacons for Defense didn’t arise out of thin air. And I’d wager if you were black in any of the towns that the Klan terrorized, it wouldn’t matter to you whether or not you had first hand knowledge of lynchings.
While I’m at it I could mention the ‘internment’ camps we created for Japanese Americans. Maybe that marital rape was still legal until 1976?
Not a nasty society to live in? Concentration camps for law abiding citizens based on ethnicity alone was civil behavior? Legally raping your wife was more polite back then than it’d be now?
Well, first, you’ve provided an excellent argument that shows just why the whole ‘family values’ schtick is a very bad idea.
Second, no, I wasn’t alive then but that’s not exactly relevant. To start with, women were still systematically discriminated against (but politely!) even if they felt perfectly free to divorce. Yes, a large number of people felt that divorce was wrong, but that didn’t change the fact that a woman didn’t have much chance at all of getting a decent paying job and being well off without a man’s help. As I said, it was partially a factor, not the only or the deciding factor.
And a look at how the ‘better’ more ‘civil’ and more ‘polite’ nation treated women:
Women didn’t even gain suffrage until 1920. It wasn’t until 1936 that information about birth control could be distributed through the mail or classified as ‘obscene’. minimum wage laws for women. In 1961 the SCOTUS upheld Florida’s rules making it harder for women to serve on juries due to their reasoning that “woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.” It wasn’t until 1964 that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created. It wasn’t until 1965 that states were finally prohibited from making birth control illegal. It wasn’t until 1969 that institutions like Yale College started admitting women. It wasn’t until 1970 that employers weren’t legally able to simply change a woman’s job title in order to pay her less than a man for doing the exact same job. It wasn’t until 1972 that Title IX was created. It wasn’t until 1975 that states were prohibited from barring women from serving on juries. The Equal Rights Amendment which specifically made denying equal rights based on sex failed to be ratified by the nation. It wasn’t until 1986 that sexual harassment was found to be illegal.
But because they’d have called her Miss or Mis, I suppose it was better than today, what with its gangsta rap and such?
They may be called ‘bitches’ and ‘hoes’ by some rappers, but in 1945 they’d only been allowed to vote for 25 years. A 45 year old woman in 1945 would have spent virtually her entirety of her formative years legally restricted from full United States citizenship. She’d have to wait another 25 until she could be assured that her boss wouldn’t just change her title while she did the same work, and pay her substantially less than men doing the same job.
Stonewall was in 1969. In New York. In the freaking Village.
That a celebrity who happened to be a homosexual wasn’t beaten doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a truly ugly and shameful time in American history wrt our treatment of homosexuals. Up until 1962 homosexual sex acts were still criminal in every state in the US. Up until the 1974 DSM homosexuality was still listed as a mental disorder. In the 50’s the American government underwent a purge in order to find and fire homosexuals.
The fact of the matter is that until 1975, the US didn’t even have a commission to monitor and document discrimination based on sexual orientation. As such, obviously, reliable figures won’t be had. Even today, there are still a disturbingly large number of anti-gay hate crimes in America per year, and that should give you a good idea of what things were like before being gay was anywhere near socially acceptable.
Also confusing things is that vastly more gays were closeted in the 1940’s-50’s than today largely because it was not a socially viable option.
Damn those liberal revisionists! Damn them!
Those pesky liberals didn’t invent the Lavender Scare, however.
The reality of McCarthyism, the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare show that such attitudes did in fact penetrate society and government and informed their character.
Cite?
You claim sounds quite similar to your assertion that teen pregnancy is up from the 1950’s.
We also have you, doing the same exact thing.
Traffic laws are about safety.
What you want to do is akin to making flame decals on cars illegal.
And yes, everybody is free to decide what they want to do as long as they don’t break the law.
It’s the job of families to teach morality and codes of behavior, not government. Your earlier evident confusion over how you could raise your own daughters not to get pregnant or to get STD’s, and blaming that on society itself, is not without irony. I’d remind you that Consevativism is the philosophy of personal responsibility, not government helping raise/shelter your children because they might be exposed to other viewpoints or aesthetics.