You would blame Reagan and no-fault divorce for the reason that marriage is largely viewed as unnecessary?
I’d say it had more to do with the notion that took hold during and after the counter-culture revolution that marriage itself was unnecessary; that people didn’t need “a piece of paper” to legitimize their love; that it was better to live together first anyway to find out if the couple were compatible; and that living together made it easier and less messy to leave (negative effects on children produced in the meantime notwithstanding).
Not necessarily— rather, it glosses over and hides the stain. This obfuscation being aided and abetted by much of society, perhaps on the “there but for the grace of…” principle.
It seems reasonable to interpret **SA’s **various pronouncements on this subject to refer to moral degeneration. As mentioned upthread, this should shift the discussion to the morally weighted issue of premarital sex as the obvious and necessary precursor to premarital pregnancy. I have seen zero evidence that the rate of sexual activity has actually increased. The only changes are in the after-the-fact realms of how many get caught at it, and what options are available to those who are.
Call me biased since I’ve been here to witness it, but nothing stated by **SA **or others demonstrates to me any general moral decline since the 50’s.
Really? Conservative mores were much more in evidence in the fifties, in fact predominating, and yet there was a lower teen pregnancy rate then, even by your own admission.
There wasn’t. There was a lower unwed teen pregnancy rate. The total teen pregnancy rate is currently almost 50% lower.
ETA: I would really appreciate it if you would like to comment on the fact that the US currently has almost 8 times as many teen pregnancies as the Netherlands.
Again, poor choice of words. Whether or not old ladies are tssking behind their hands at the child is, for all intents and purposes, immaterial - being “a bastard” does not present any innate problems, aside from societal disdain, which can hardly be blamed on liberalism.
I don’t know that evidence of a statistical kind even exists. I do think it’s reasonable to assume that in a society that puts far less negative social disapproval, if any, on teen sexual activity, and that surrounds them with music, movies, television and magazines that promote sexual activity, and that makes birth control easily available to them, is, ipso-facto, going to be a society in which teen sexual activity is much greater.
I also think that the easy availability of birth control and the large number of girls that are on it also speaks loudly to much higher rates of teen sexual activity. One can only try to imagine what the teen pregnancy rate would be like without it.
I’m going to take the above exchange as strong support for the idea that SA’s thesis pertains to unwed teen copulation more than to unwed teen pregnancy or unwed teen childbirth.
I think you’re the one that needs help here. As Superfluous Parentheses explained number 2 has already been shown to be true. Can we agree on that?
You will agree that the Netherlands now has a lower rate of unwed teen pregnancies than America in the 1950s, right?
Okay, as for number one in your cite request, I can’t really believe that any thinking person thinks American sex education is keeping down teen pregnancy. But here you go:
Liberalism is helping to heal the damage caused by Social Conservative stupidity.
Good grief! Is it really necessary to parse things that finely? Do you or anyone else really not realize that unwed teen pregnancy is what I was talking about.
Only a guess, but I would imagine that the Netherlands has a far more mature and less politically driven attitude toward the promotion of sexual activity than we do here. But like I said, that’s only a guess.
I said as much and explained why around a dozen or so posts upthread. The posting window doesn’t show post number but it was in the post I wrote to Bricker.
Yes it is important, because half the posters in this thread confuse the figures based on that distinction.
Are you suggesting that there is a politically driven promotion of sexual activity in the US? I can’t deny it, I don’t live there, but it would surprise me.
As far as maturity wrt sexual activity, we tend to give schoolchildren correct information about sex and reproduction and everybody who wants can have easy access to birth control, no parential notification required nor is anyone outside the hardcore christian parties crazy enough to suggest abstinence only as a government policy. We still get MTV here. And (for Americans probably shocking levels of) of nudity and sex on public and non-public broadcast TV. It seems to work for us.
Birth control does not make kids have sex. Kids were having sex without it in your day, and they were having sex without it 1,000 years ago.
In any case, birth control is often now prescribed to control extreme menstrual cramps, irregular periods, hormonal imbalances, and all sorts of other female issues not related to sex.
In other words, they’re more liberal about it. Bingo!
Well, to paraphrase a conservative hero, “There you go again!” It would be nice if you could keep your own assertions straight.
Can we now return to my thesis that all this moralizing should be directed to sexual activity, not to the (greatly reduced) rate of teen pregnancy, or the rate of forced wed versus unwed teen pregnancy?
Even if you assume that all 11 of the Netherland’s pregnant teens were unmarried, that is still less than the 12 unmarried 1950’s pregnant teens that you derived from Jsgoddesses’ numbers. Plus the 12 ignores whatever abortions happened in the 1950’s, making Netherland’s advantage even greater. If the Netherlands have a similar 80% unmarried rate, that’s 9 to 12, a 33% increase for the 1950s
Yes. The thrust of liberalism in this country has been to defend and promote rampant sexuality at every turn. Women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan promote casual and freewheeling sexual activty on the cover at every convenience store magazine rack; rap music is full of references to sucking dicks and fucking; movies and television, particularly cable television, are rife with R-rated images, and in the case of cable TV, X-rated programs are readily available. Whether people want to admit it or not, kids are exposed to all this on a regular basis. Liberalism in this country seems determined to shove sexuality at people from every angle, and to ridicule anyone who objects. Look at the scorn and laughter aimed at Tipper Gore simply because she wanted to put warning labels on music with sexually explicit lyrics.
It sounds to me like sexuality is open there but not rabidly promoted. There is a current of resentment and a determination to rub conservative noses in sexuality that underlies much of the promotion of sex in this country. As the result, a mature, common-sense approach, such as it sounds like exists in the Netherlands, is non-existent. To the degree that they can get away with it, it’s full-bore, anything goes sexuality coming from the left here, and it is the reason why we have so many kids getting pregnant, getting STDs, and having sex years before they’re emotionally able to deal with the consequences of it…all of which is not to mention the lives ruined when these kids try to raise children in single-parent homes, where the parent’s life is nothing but a struggle to get by and the child’s life is almost pre-determined to be one of deprivation, substandard education, and crime.
Now, having said that I’m going to bow out of here for now. I had originally determined not to enter this thread and to just let it play out on its own, but as usual I find it difficult to keep quiet when I see things said about me or my positions that are incorrect. My apologies, Bricker, for taking the thread off topic to whatever degree I have, but hopefully things can progress now with a clearer understanding of what my position actually is.
