Wyoming 19.2%
Nevada 18.8%
Oklahoma 18.3%
Montana 18.2%
Arkansas 18.0%
Kentucky 17.8%
Tennessee 17.8%
Oregon 17.7%
Florida 17.4%
Mississippi 17.4%
Alaska 17.4%
Arizona 17.2%
Alabama 17.2%
New Mexico 17.2%
Missouri 17.1%
Louisiana 17.0%
Washington 16.8%
Vermont 16.8%
Maine 16.7%
Indiana 16.7%
West Virginia 16.5%
Ohio 16.4%
Georgia 16.3%
South Carolina 16.2%
Idaho 16.1%
Colorado 15.8%
Texas 15.7%
North Carolina 15.7%
Kansas 15.3%
Michigan 15.3%
Rhode Island 15.2%
New Hampshire 15.1%
Delaware 14.9%
Maryland 14.6%
Iowa 14.6%
Virginia 14.5%
South Dakota 14.4%
Wisconsin 14.1%
Nebraska 14.1%
Pennsylvania 13.9%
California 13.8%
Utah 13.5%
Illinois 13.3%
Minnesota 13.2%
Connecticut 13.0%
North Dakota 13.0%
Hawaii 12.9%
New York 12.9%
Massachusetts 12.6%
New Jersey 11.3%

Yep, them crazy people of Massachusetts sure hate that institution of marriage. Obviously.

(The figures for “ever divorced” are also of interest, except to someone pushing a barrow of manure about marriage. The figures above need to be read alongside figures for the revolving door of second+ marriages, something that goes hand-in-hand with a higher divorce rate.)

One thing seems reasonable to take away: the culture of marriage in Massachusetts is one that comparatively:

1) encourages people NOT to rush into marriage. Wait. See something of life first. Get your study out of the way, and career on the way. Co-habitat first, if you wish. Bay Staters marry later.

2) when, and if, you do get married: have RESPECT for the VOWS you make. Bay Staters divorce less.

And you know what… apparently if YOU commit to YOUR marriage, rather than to some airy-fairy belief about the ‘institution’ of marriage and what is demanded of (other) people… the well-being of the institution will take care of itself.

What’s not to like about that?

*2005-2007 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates (U.S. Census Bureau)

No your comments weren’t being delayed because of that. And unfortunately, yours weren’t the only ones being delayed. I still don’t know what that was happening.

I just upgraded the blogging software (WordPress) and some associated plug-ins. Hopefully your comments and others’ won’t be misdirected to the Spam filter. But we’re still keeping a close eye out on that.

As if his name didn’t give him away as an anti-gay person (“Richard Wood?” as in, “Dickwood?” yah know, cuz teh gheys are obsessed with penile erections and his screenname is supposed to mock this, I guess.) Then we get the circle-talk about “this statistic means this – oh wait no, THAT statistic really means THIS instead,” whenever he’s proven wrong.

Now we get talks about how marriage is also being ruined by NEGROES!! Oh, NOEZ!! OH, and don’t forget FEMINISM. all those vagina-possessing human beings are just crazy to think they’re worthy of the same respect a male gets.

And when it all fails, blame the 60′s. Because really, that’s all the 60′s were, just one big orgy of protests, drugs, counter-culture, and free sex. And every act being carried out was so effective that nobody could recover from it. Please. My parents were barely coming of age during that time and even I know what a ridiculous caricature that is to project onto that period of time. Lest we forget that “Gay is Good” and “Brown v. Board of Ed.” happened in the 50′s, feminism as a movement has roots in the turn of the century (what happened in the 60′s is called the Second Wave), and “Roe v. Wade” didn’t happen til the 70′s. But they did all those drugs and all those people were protesting and having orgies, destroying the “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” ideals of the era! So that must be it, right??

You know, I was kinda wondering what his thoughts were going to be on us dirty K!kes next.

Richard Wood pulls the race card. So now that he’s pulled it, let’s just see how ignorant he really is concerning demographics. It turns out that he is very deeply guilty of the very sin he accuses me.

So what about demographics, which he thinks I don’t know the first thing about and wants to lecture me on?

Mississippi is actually 36% African-American. He thinks that has something to do with that state’s very low marriage rate of 5.4 per 1000 population, compared to Massachusetts’ 5.9, which is only about 8% African-American. And so he blames it on blacks’ bad marrying and divorcing habits.

But let’s at another state with a very large AFrican-American population. South Carolina is 30% African-American, but their marriage rate is 7.9 per 1,000.

So Richard, you don’t get to blame it on blacks. But you did get to reveal not only your own ignorance, but the depth of your biases.

There’s a reason we have you on moderation, but we just had to let this one go out for everyone to see. But I think we’ve all seen enough of what you’re all about.

Bye now.

Richard Wood
September 6th, 2009

wow.

just wow.

But it appears that the “it’s them Negras thets a causin’ all the problems” mindset doesn’t exactly explain all of differences.

I haven’t yet identified marriages and divorces by race by state, but I’ll turn again to unwed births. And there we see something interesting.

Yes, there is a much higher rate of black children born out of wedlock – and that is a serious issue that has many many causes and which our society should address. But within the black community, such rates vary wildly per state.

For example, down in Mississippi where the “blacks marry far less frequently and divorce more frequently”, the rate of out-of-wedlock black childbirth is 79.1% while in Massachusetts it is 60.1%. (Whites are 28.4% and 23.5%, respectively).

So we can’t just dismiss the results we don’t like by pointing to African Americans. Well, not if we “know the first thing about demographics”, we can’t. It seems that those who are in that liberal immoral bastion of pro-gay evilness known as Massachusetts respect marriage as the family structure they want to raise kids in than do those in the Bible Belt, regardless of whether they are black or white.

The truth is that the subject is complicated. But if there is anything that can be gleaned from all this, it’s that in Massachusetts, there seems to be a greater respect for marriage and what it means than there is in states that have demonstrated a greater anti-gay bias.

Do you know what all the research indicates is the reason for those phenomena? The weakening of the institution, which has been a central political issue for the cultural left since the 1960s. Let’s get no-fault divorce, let’s encourage people to devote themselves to their jobs and to their own materialist desires to own a lot of stuff and stay 20 years old forever rather than to their spouses and children, let’s turn marriage into some watered-down version of a friendship pact instead of seeing it as a sacred institution that must be preserved.
…
MA, like almost all the other states that have okayed homosexual friendship pacts/marriages, has been experiencing massive deterioration of the marital institution for a few decades now, and low marriage rates are only one indicator of this.

Geez, if it’s no-fault divorce to blame, then I guess the divorce rate actually is the right measure by which we look to see if Massachusetts has experienced massive deterioration of the marital institution. Oh lookie, actually Massachusetts is the best in the nation.

Ergo, presto, everyone allow marriage equality and bingo, you have fewer divorces.

Of course, I’m being sarcastic. Changing marriage law won’t change the culture.

And it is MA’s culture about marriage that gives such stability to marriages there.

It is the recognition of what marriage is and what it means that causes Massachusans to value that institution so much that they choose to delay marriage until they have the right person, causes them to avoid bringing children into the world without a stable family, and causes them to want to hold that standard out to all of their citizens, gay or straight.

If you want to see a culture that has no real respect for marriage, look for one in which teenage pregnancy leads to automatic marriage, where such coupling results in poverty and children brought up by children, which naturally leads to high divorce rates, and ultimately the dissolution of the family structure. And we all know where to find those states.

I wonder just what that might be? Do Massachusans have disregard for marriage? Are they just living life without the benefit or sanctity of the institution?

Well… it’s hard to know, exactly. And it would take quite some work to look at all of the factors and come up with a complete picture. But there are, perhaps, some hints we might look at.

For example, using 2006 statistics (pdf) we find that only six states have a lower rate of births to unwed mothers (CO, ID, MN, NH, ND, UT). There may be reasons for this other than a respect for marriage and a desire to make sure that children are born within such confines, but it certainly does not say something negative about the “culture of marriage” there.

We might add a note on why black marriages are so relatively rare and unstable. In fact, post-Civil War, they weren’t any less stable than white marriages, until the cultural revolution of the 1960s I just alluded to above. The corrosive effects had on the family by this cultural moment were felt by all families, but especially by those at the bottom of the economic ladder, which is clearly where blacks were then. Feminism and the ‘I-me-mine’ culture of the 1960s have helped to keep black poverty rates up by encouraging blacks (and esp. black women) to jump into the ‘who needs marriage?’ culture with the same avidity whites did.

Constantly talking about what he thinks I’m doing, and let the evidence of what I have actually written be swept into the dustbin. Now apparently I want to defend divorce rates in Mississippi, even though I haven’t said a single word about that.

Marriage rates are lower EVERYWHERE, and divorce rates are higher EVERYWHERE, than they were 40 years ago, Mr. Burroway. That’s a fact I’m very interested in. How about you?

Do you know what all the research indicates is the reason for those phenomena? The weakening of the institution, which has been a central political issue for the cultural left since the 1960s. Let’s get no-fault divorce, let’s encourage people to devote themselves to their jobs and to their own materialist desires to own a lot of stuff and stay 20 years old forever rather than to their spouses and children, let’s turn marriage into some watered-down version of a friendship pact instead of seeing it as a sacred institution that must be preserved.

Those are the facts that serve as the backdrop for everything you and your compatriots write here. You can invent claims you think I’m making all you like; the real world has a funny way of sticking its head up among all the obfuscation and misdirection you folks try.

MA, like almost all the other states that have okayed homosexual friendship pacts/marriages, has been experiencing massive deterioration of the marital institution for a few decades now, and low marriage rates are only one indicator of this. The fact that states decide to do something practically guaranteed to weaken hat instituion some more is only evidence of the existing weakened state–legislators who themselves look forward to no-fault divorcing someday (or have already done so, maybe a few times) are the voice of the people in those states, and they do their destructive bidding.

I have little doubt that marriage (and the biological mother/father family) will disappear altogether within another century, and the homosexual friendship pact activists have only some of the blame to bear. The heterosexuals who started the destruction back in the 1960s are even more responsible, and the world you crow about as an achievement (*comparatively* low divorce rates in a state where fewer people can conceivably divorce anyway b/c they no longer marry in the first place) is in fact a ship on its way to the bottom of the sea. As anyone who was paying attention would have already noticed.

Jim Burroway and his Box Turtlers are sure doing their part to sink it. How about you?