I’m not so sure that mainstream Christian ministers, as a whole, insist on waiting until marriage for sexual relationships. That is expected from fundamentalist pastors and Catholics I assume, but not necessarily the mainstream. That was fifty years ago.
jtgain, you seem to be the only one on your side who has mentioned that it is forced prayer that is banned in school. Thank you for acknowledging that prayer itself has not been banned. If some school official or activist says otherwise, she or he is wrong. A person can always pray silently. And it doesn’t have to be to the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God. You are not supposed to interrupt official school proceedings and business with a prayer to anyone.
My mother worked outside the home much of my lifetime. We lived almost a mile out of town beyond the city limits. We had about three or four acres of land and our neighbors on each side had land between us. Our closest neighbor was across the highway. When I was three, my babysitter was my eight year old sister.
Not all mothers are the more nurturing parent. But eight years of age is too young to babysit. And my father had his own business where he worked over seventy hours a week. I know lots of working mothers from the Fifties.
We were a thriving little town with two blocks of stores on both sides of the street. When I
went “home” a year ago, there was one very small pharmacy still open on the corner. That was all. Except for that, it was a ghost town. Even the movie theater where I watched westerns about ghost towns had collapsed. Houses in the nicest parts of town had been abandoned and torn down. I don’t think this had to do with a lack of family values. It had more to do with Wal-mart, a by-pass, and a mall. It breaks my heart.
The social-rightist use of this argument is a classic example of the Politician’s Fallacy, which boils down to:
Something must be done.
My proposal is something.
Therefore, my proposal must be adopted.
In this case, the term “traditional values” (like the word “something” in the template) shifts meaning. When rational people argue that traditional moral values help society as a whole, they are referring to values such as thrift, self-reliance, diligence, etc. The social-rightist Newspeak definition of the term, however, is all about getting rid of teh gayz, teh uppity wimmenfolk, etc. Part of the damage done by the social-rightists is to taint the former by association with the latter.
It is hard to reconcile a love for America that allows personal freedom, modernity, and adaptability and a longing for an American full of traditional mores.
Societies known for having strong traditional values steeped in religious morality tend to be scary places to live in.
Secular societies tend to be more prosperous than religious ones. They are places where people from other societies flock to because they recognize their superiority.
We can’t stand in judgment of all those backwards Muslim nations for wanting to keep their traditional values, while simultaneously pounding the podium about bringing back ours. Our traditional values include a history of female submission, domestic abuse (“spoil the rod…”), compulsory religious activities, poorhouses, and censorship of science. Not to mention vigilantism, xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and ableism. I do not believe that all morals are the same, but when social conservatives complain about women not being in the kitchen, kids learning about sex, and people getting divorced…it’s hard not to think of some of these societies that have actually restricted these things. And they tend to be the Muslim countries that we are supposedly better than.
That’s why I’m asking someone to provide concrete examples of the kind of traditional values 1) that we have lost, 2) the absence of which is strongly linked to the current economic crisis, and 3) that would not involve a totalitarian government to bring “back”. Because all I can think of us is “Leave It To Beaver”, and I can’t imagine that people REALLY think that crap was anything other than an extremely romanticized version of the past.
Give me some parameters because I don’t know which “traditional values” you are taking to that proved to work so well in which era. The 1870s? The 1890s? The 1910s? The 1930s? The 1950s? The 1970s? I’ll assume you are talking about “traditional Judeo Christian Western values.”
The Victorian era was a time when the cult of motherhood peaked and the family was held sacrosanct. Religion was an essential part of most people’s daily lives. It was also a time of opium addictions, alcoholism and unwed motherhood. (The porn is also interesting). Poverty reached crisis proportions driving a wave of people to fix the human misery problem - in the U.S. Jane Addams, Jacob Riis…The Bowery Boys terrorized Five Points.
OK, then, the 1950s. In addition to the U.S. housewife’s fondness for valium and the lack of civil rights - we have an economy tooling along mostly due to the fact that we have the only remaining significant first world infrastructure. Still, we had gangs and violence, an apparent huge problem with Catholic priests abusing children in both the U.S. and Ireland, a traditional culture that involved a hell of a lot of booze to maintain for the middle and upper class man (maybe not the horrible drug of meth, but it did plenty of damage to plenty of families) and kicked off the international adoption movement because U.S. soldiers in Korea were leaving “love children” behind - unwanted and unaccepted by the culture. We have a huge organized crime issue in the Mafia - which had really started long before but didn’t really ever go away (although the Mafia as a crime ring in the U.S. has lost influence to other criminal organizations).
Not at all. Cross-country phone calls cost several dollars (1950s dollars!) for a few minutes. Social networking costs nothing if you already have the computer and net access for other reasons. It’s quite reasonable to be interested enough to do the latter but not the former.
Really? I read him as implying that poverty is no big deal unless we try to address it by policy. But either way, it’s a fucked-up argument.
Hey, no fair. You’re supposed to quote the Bible, and draw conclusions directly from the words. What you’re doing is reasoning, which is an act of bad faith.
I never went to church, ever, and I somehow figured this out. I did go to shul, but they never told me not to kill or steal, because by third grade they knew I had figured it out already. Are you saying that Christians are so fucking stupid that only church gives them this message? Hint: look up the correlation of murder rates and church attendance by state.
And, as I said before, please tell me how we are going to get people to all of a sudden be moral? To paraphrase Rummy, we need to develop laws for the population we have, not the population we wish we had.
Conservatives are so far removed from reality that people who think they are Napoleon step slowly away when they run into them.
Bull cookies is putting it mildly, given that I never claimed that we should cut off all public assistance or that doing so would eliminate the drag on the economy. And the reason is that all these people, who are the victims of the “progressive” attitudes and policies of the last fifty years, would still be uneducated, undisciplined, ignorant of the values and philosophies that make for successfully lived lives, and therefore still a drag on the nation’s productivity.
What we have in this country is a huge underclass that has been created by the harmful ideas and practices of liberalism. These people didn’t just fall from the sky needing to be taken care of all their lives. They have been created by the very same people who are now insisting that as a humane country we have no choice but to provide for them. And this is true, but if not for your failed and selfish notions of how people should be “free” to live, that needy underclass wouldn’t exist…or at least not in anything like the numbers we have today.
What needs to be done is not the passage of laws to enforce the adoption of 50s values, but for people to begin to recognize fact that your way of thinking is what has made this country the hot mess it is today and that things are only going to get worse unless we grow up and start to return to the types of values family and educational values we had in the days before this country started going down the drain. And if there’s any one way to unquestionably contrast the 50s with today, it’s that no one then thought the country was going down the drain, a sentiment that almost everybody recognizes today no matter which side of the political aisle they’re on.
So, is the claim that there was no underclass before 1960? No poor? That dire poverty is the invention of liberal policies? You might check out the effect of the very unliberal Poor Laws on early 19th century London.
If I remember correctly, people in general were pretty happy in the late 1990s. Unemployment was below what was thought possible, while the rich got richer so did everyone else. Crime was falling. We were pretty much at peace. Well, not everyone was happy - Republicans were outraged that the country was prosperous under a liberal president.
What made us go into the crapper? You and yours. The right yells and screams about personal responsibility, but as for taking responsibility for the effects of their economic policies - not so much.
Why, of course! I’m surprised you were able once again to immediately spot the absolutes I thought I had so cleverly hidden simply by implying no such thing. Certainly there were poor people in the 50s. Uneducated ones too. The problem is that their numbers have exploded exponentially as a result of our “progressiveness.”
You seem to have forgotten the Republican landslide that occurred during that liberal’s first term in office which wrenched control of Congress for the first time in some fifty years or so and which is in fact responsible for the balanced budget and surplus that people around here love to give Clinton all the credit for.
I’ll agree that the Republicans as politicians have not always performed as I’d like in terms of the economy. But I’m not talking about what politicians do, because what they do right or wrong ebbs and flows. I’m talking about how conduct ourselves as a society, and the generations of poorly educated ne’er-do-wells, criminals and drug addicts that we’ve created are a far more permanent and difficult problem to contend with than machinations of whichever party happens to be in control at a particular time.It only stands to reason that the more well-educated and well-adjusted people a society has, the more productive and prosperous it will be, and that to the degree a society goes about creating an underclass that is poorly educated, ill-behaved, lacking a good work ethic and prone to crime and/or permanently in need of public assistance, the more its productivity and prosperity will suffer, in addition to the countless other ways that the underclass suffers as a result of its privation, and the rest of us suffer by having to both support it and be preyed upon by it.
Cite, please? And not absolute numbers, percentages please. Now, the number of poor have exploded recently, but as a result of Republican economic policies, not social policies of anyone.
Irrelevant. The fact remains that the number of poor decreased, and not because of the balanced budget, but because of the economic boom. Start hiring people, and tax revenues go up, welfare expenses go down, and balancing the budget is much easier. That the number of poor was reduced with no magical change in people’s personalities falsifies your claim. It also falsifies the claim that the poor don’t want to work. Make jobs available, and they took them.
I have yet to see a liberal supporting drug addiction, unless you count marijuana use as drug addiction. Plenty of people got addicted before liberals took over. How is drug addiction fundamentally different from alcoholism? I hope you don’t blame that on liberals also.
The liberal view of education seems to be more of it, earlier. The conservative view seems to be cutting the hell out of education budgets, supporting private schools (which get to reject underclass kids, making their situation worse,) or home schooling, which would work really great for a teenage single mother.
Crime rates were pretty damn high 110 years ago, before public assistance. Crime rates have actually been falling, and in fact are a lot lower than predicted given the economic distress. However, since you are making a lot of claims about how bad things are getting, why don’t you go out and find some data supporting your opinion, data for the past century or so, so that we can find a time before liberals to compare to. Look at crime versus unemployment, drug use, and welfare.
The big drug problem in the last 30 years or so was crack, and that was due to basically a new product, and not the fault of whoever was in the White House and Congress, no matter what party.
There are always going to be some people with bad work ethics, of course. But the unemployment level today shows that there are lots of people with good work ethics who are looking for work. Don’t blame liberals, blame the bankers and the opponents of regulation who screwed the economy.
Actually my point was that they aren’t Christian-only beliefs, not that they were Muslim-only. But you can look to conservative Muslim countries to see what happens when religion and government are not separate like they are in the US.
The funny thing is that if you compare liberal areas of the United States with conservative areas the rates of divorce are lower, people have greater wealth, more education, and are healthier. Conservative values, whatever that means, seem to be pretty much a failure.
The liberal, non church going families that I know have well behaved children that managed to graduate college and not get knocked up.
Of course, that’s the entire thread…“the economy did better (not defined) in an unspecified time when we had family values (not defined), therefore, family values are responsible for a healthy economy.”
Well, it isn’t quite that simple. Although you are correct that it depends on how you define “family values”.
The syllogism can be understood to run:
[ul][li]A healthy economy requires productive citizens[*]Children from intact, two-parent families are more productive citizens.[/li][li]Therefore, policies and mores that encourage the formation and preservation of intact, two-parent families benefit the economy. [/ul]I think the stuff about gay marriage is sort of a red herring - very few people oppose gay marriage because it is bad for the economy. [/li]
The number of poor has increased because of the recent recession, and the recession was not the result simply of Republican economic policies. That’s a fairly bad over-simplification.
I’ve been saying for years and years that if nothing else, gay marriage is sound social and economic policy for this very reason.
There is a mountain of evidence that marriage is good for the economy. Telling some people they can’t get married is equivalent to setting fire to money.
But it may be just as possible that “children from multi adult housholds” make better citizens. And that what we should be doing is encouraging the formation of multi adult support systems that may or may not involve marriage. For instance, if a woman with children divorces and moves in with her widowed or divorced mother.
Moreover, I’m not sure that in this case correlation follows causation. It may be the people who are more likely to remain married make for better parents. But if you are the type to divorce when you have children, you may be more selfish - and that may impact the kids whether you stay married or not. There is some data that supports the idea that “staying married for the kids” doesn’t end up with a better outcome for the kids.
Well, it isn’t quite that simple. Although you are correct that it depends on how you define “family values”.
The syllogism can be understood to run:
[list][li]A healthy economy requires productive citizensChildren from intact, two-parent families are more productive citizens.[/li][li]Therefore, policies and mores that encourage the formation and preservation of intact, two-parent families benefit the economy.[/li][/QUOTE]
And what part of that do you think liberals disagree with? Too many marriages happen when a girl gets pregnant at a young age; sex education and access to birth control have been shown to reduce the rate of teen pregnancy. Sex education appears to not only lower teen pregnancy rates, but to delay the age at which people begin to engage in sex.
I really don’t understand where conservatives get the idea that liberals are opposed to intact, two parent households. The only people that I know of who have tried to limit marriage are conservatives. Not only did they oppose interracial marriage until the Supreme Court stepped in, now they oppose same sex marriage.