Growing Pains

There’s a world of hurt and confusion in this story, as well as the de rigeur Tennessee connection:

Federal authorities last week arrested and charged a Tennessee pastor with aiding in the “international parental kidnapping” of a girl who has been missing since late 2009 and is at the center of a lengthy custody battle between her two mothers — a onetime lesbian couple who were in a civil union.

The two had a bitter falling-out after one became an evangelical Christian and denounced the other’s continued “homosexual lifestyle.”

[...]

Lisa Miller, the girl’s biological mother and a newly fervent Baptist, was championed by conservatives for her efforts to shield her daughter from homosexuality. A Vermont court had granted her primary custody of the daughter, Isabella Ruth Miller-Jenkins, after Ms. Miller split with her partner, Janet Jenkins, in 2003. But the court also declared Ms. Jenkins to be a legal parent with liberal visiting rights, and Ms. Miller, who had moved with the girl to Virginia, defied repeated orders to permit the visits.

The case took a turn in late 2009, as the Vermont family court, citing Ms. Miller’s noncompliance, shifted primary custody to Ms. Jenkins. Ms. Miller and Isabella, who is now 9, disappeared. A warrant was issued for Ms. Miller’s arrest, and they have not been heard from since.

I’ve always said that the reason we need to have legal gay marriage is so we can have legal gay divorce. Even under the best of circumstances, divorce is an ugly business but if you’re gay, breaking up really is hard to do. Gay divorce is truly a legal nightmare for lots of reasons related to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, differing state laws, and all sorts of complications.

The Miller-Jenkins case is a perfect example of this. As I read the story in Sunday’s paper, I thought about how this whole situation reflected the cultural shifts of the past few decades -- changes we’re still coming to terms with in society at large. The issues at play are those same cultural issues which surface every election and are a major factor in our politics.

Once upon a time in America a situation like this would never exist: there would be no doubt as to whether a court would award custody or visitation rights to an avowed lesbian, there would be no question as to who was right or wrong in this scenario. For that matter, it would be pretty much a given that a same-sex couple would be infertile. But the past 30-40 years have seen major cultural changes, not to mention medical advances. Not all of these changes have been embraced by the totality of our religious and legal institutions. We're still sifting through it all, and I'd say it will take about a generation for all of this stuff to finally settle out.

And I have no doubt which way it will go. The culture wars are over and the right has lost; they just don't know it yet. Throughout its history America has always expanded its table to invite ever more groups of people to democracy's banquet; we've never taken seats away. That doesn't mean it's been an easy or effortless thing, far from it. And I think a lot of the knee-jerk legislation we see in places like Arizona and Tennessee attacking GLBT citizens and immigrants and the poor are all just a response to this societal shift we're going through right now.

We live in a post-Christian, post-racial, post-Roe-v-Wade, post-internet, post-biomedical engineering, post climate change, post-you-name-it age, and that's a lot of change for one society to handle. It's inevitable that we've splintered as we have, it's a predictable response by a large group of people to a lot of change. But I have great expectations for the next 20 years.

We're just going through some growing pains, that's all.

Marriages Of Political (In)Convenience?

Hey, Roger Abramson: sometimes women care about celebrity news because of the larger issues in question.

Case in point: Last night WSMV reported that Lorrie Morgan and Sammy Kershaw are getting divorced. The news comes just three business days after Kershaw lost his bid to become Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana. Coincidence? Er, maybe.

So far WSMV is the only news outlet to report on the split, and they don’t even have a link posted, so keep the salt shaker handy. But if it’s true, count me as not surprised: I seem to recall the couple headed to splitsville earlier this year, then miraculously reunited right before Kershaw announced his political aspirations this summer.

Meanwhile, across the pond French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Cecilia announced they are divorcing. The Sarkozys waited six months after the French election to end their marriage, though the union was in trouble pre-election:

The couple’s marital difficulties first became public knowledge in 2005 when Mrs Sarkozy had a relationship with Richard Attias, a public relations consultant, with whom she was photographed in New York.

Mr Sarkozy responded by having an affair with a political journalist, and they bought household goods with the apparent intention of setting up home together. However, Mr Sarkozy was soon back with his wife.

The reconcoliation barely lasted until May 2007, when Mrs.Sarkozy didn’t even bother to vote--for her husband or anyone else.

And then let’s not forget Bill-and-Hill, and all of the gossip about the state of that union.

I grant that it’s speculation to assume these were (are) marriages of political convenience, but it does have me wondering about divorce in political campaigns. I’m sensing there’s a feeling among strategists that voters think it’s okay if a candidate is divorced, as long as they are married to someone at the time of the election. Even if it means dragging out a marriage long past its expiration date, the general wisdom among the political establishment seems to be that a candidate should be married, if at all possible.

But I wonder how much any of that really matters to voters. Divorce is so common these days, and we’re already familiar with divorced politicians -- Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and John Kerry, to name just a few.

Do voters really care about that wedding band? Are voters suspicious of an unmarried candidate? I wonder if being a bachelor really hurt Harold Ford Jr.? He certainly wouldn’t have been vulnerable to the now-famous "Call Me” ad, but then Fred Thompson was single when he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

So far, Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, is the only bachelor to be elected to the White House, (though he married while in office). I honestly wonder if strategists worry that being unmarried sends a subliminal message of some kind?

Family life is changing in modern society; people put off getting married until later in life, and those who are marreid get divorced. Is that really an issue in choosing a political candidate? Does this really matter?

Divorce American Style

One of those widely accepted assumptions that never gets questioned is
that “about half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce.” We hear it all the time from “pro-family” groups like James Dobson’s Focus On The Family (which even claims that "evangelicals who attend church regularly divorce at a rate 35 percent lower than secular couples.” I wonder how that rate compares to non-evangelicals and couples of other faiths who attend worship services regularly? Sadly, Dr. Dobson doesn’t tell us.)

But an Op-Ed in Saturday’s New York Times by the Wharton School’s Betsey Stevenson and Justine Wolfers says divorce rates are actually at historic lows:

The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those marriages that do occur are increasingly more stable. For instance, marriages that began in the 1990s were more likely to celebrate a 10th anniversary than those that started in the 1980s, which, in turn, were also more likely to last than marriages that began back in the 1970s.

But, the authors note, last week the New York Times ran with 25th Anniversary Mark Elusive for Many Couples:

More than half the Americans who might have celebrated their 25th wedding anniversaries since 2000 were divorced, separated or widowed before reaching that milestone.

Stevenson and Wolfers blame a statistical glitch on the erroneous report, which got picked up by papers all around the country. I’ll let you click through to read their explanation of the statistics involved -- nothing bores me more than reading about statistical methodology. They also point out that counts of divorce certificates “show the divorce rate as having peaked at 22.8 divorces per 1,000 married couples in 1979 and to have fallen by 2005 to 16.7.”

This interests me because this story shows the tenacity of certain American myths. On a more cynical note, it also shows the willingness of our news media to publish virtually any juicy human interest story that crosses the wires because some editor thought it felt plausible, based on that tenacious American myth. The 25th anniversary story appeared everywhere from Townhall.com to the Chicago Sun-Times to the Houston Chronicle to the Christian Post. The Post's story generated a comment spouting the predictable BS about divorce being the product of sinful behavior, premarital sex, cohabitation, etc.

This is why this story bothers me. These erroneous beliefs eventually manifest as public policy: covenant marriage laws, for example, or the ridiculous notion that society’s acceptance of GLBT relationships has weakened heterosexual marriages because "gee, nearly half of all marriages end in divorce!" I wonder how many papers that published the “fewer 25th anniversaries” story will print the Stevenson and Wolfers piece? Probably none. Will the Christian Post? Doubtful.