It’s surprising what you can get used to . . . but I would be a bad Doper if I did not disclose that I am slightly exaggerating for effect. Only slightly!
Ulfreida writes:
> . . . Arlington VA . . .
Are you just throwing out random guesses? Arlington isn’t dominated by a college or university. The largest college in it is Marymount University, which isn’t particularly liberal at all. If there is any suburb of Washington D.C. which is known for being particularly liberal, it’s Takoma Park, Maryland, which has, for instance, declared itself to be a nuclear-free zone:
Also, Greenbelt, Maryland, where I live, has probably the second clearest reputation for being liberal in the metropolitan area:
Greenbelt was created during the Depression and still considers itself an exemplar of New Deal liberalism.
Not random, I googled up “most liberal towns in US” and Arlington consistently came up. Chapel Hill, I’ve visited and although I find it hard to believe, it seems to be an atoll of liberalism in a deep red sea. But the second list is more guess-like.
Yeah, look for the nuclear free zones, that’s probably an excellent indicator right there.
So let’s talk about the desert itself instead of the occasional oasis.
From another thread:
That’s 3 in 10 Americans, not just Chrtistians.
Could you provide a link to a website that claims to show that Arlington, Virginia is one of the most liberal cities in the U.S.? I think that that’s blatantly false. Here’s a website that gives some actual research on the subject:
http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/statesman/metro/081205libs.pdf
It gives a list of the twenty-five most liberal cities in the U.S. Note that only a few of them fit your image of liberal oases being mostly college towns with hippyish, free-thinking reputations. Most of the really liberal towns have large percentages of black and somewhat poor people in them. Dressing like a liberal doesn’t mean that your political opinions are liberal. Arlington may be somewhat liberal, but it probably isn’t even in the top four most liberal towns in the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area.
That refers more to Democrat versus Republican voting patterns than actual liberal values. It’s legal for women to go topless in Eugene, OR. Is it legal in Detroit, MI?
By the way, Oregon has the only state constitution without mention of god in its preamble.
starts looking for real estate agents in Eugene
I’d argue that there’s a huge population of people who will self identify as believers, and who may occasionally go to church on Easter, or Christmas, but who don’t otherwise set foot in church except for weddings and funerals.
Growing up (suburban western Houston, 1970s-1980s) , that seemed to be the default for most kids and their parents. The people who went to church every weekend were either bible-thumpers of some stripe, or didn’t bring it up at all.
It also depends on where you live- since moving to Dallas, I’ve found that public displays and discussions of religion are much more common than in Houston. People put religious crap on their cars, and talk about church and even go so far as to ask what church I go to on occasion.
There is definitely an assumption that if you’re white, that you’re Christian, but there’s no real obligations or expectations that come with that from what I can tell.
Everyone seems to believe in evolution from what I can tell, although my circle of friends and acquaintances is pretty educated, so that may not be true in other groups.
Not quite the same thing, but Durham votes way more Democrat than Chapel Hill. By a wide margin (based on the last election) it’s the outlier at the blue end, in NC.
I suppose someone should point out that “liberal” and “secular” are two different things. Some areas that vote Democratic have sizable Black or Hispanic populations and those two groups don’t stand out for their atheism.
As someone who has spent a lot of time in the city in question (though I’ve never actually lived there, technically), I am saddened to tell you that it occurs only rarely.
ETA: And when it does occur, it isn’t always such a good thing, as hard as that may be to believe. Unless you’re like Creed Bratton, i.e. “swing low, sweet chariots.”
Mike Huckabee: “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be surprised that schools would become places of carnage?”Cite.
That someone such as Mike Huckabee can appear on a major news network and be repeated on media nationwide, as if he were a credible source for, well, anything at all, and say something like that–and furthermore that there are huge swaths of people who seem to agree that this is a legitimate concern–would seem to suggest that, yes, this is an overwhelmingly, irrationally religious country.