Blue Mass Group

Discuss

1. Santorum for Vice-President

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   This is just like begging Romney to make Santorum his Vice-President or Cabinet Member in charge of sweater vests, IMHO.

   mike_cote   @   Fri 11 May 4:09 PM
   

2. It just so happens...

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   …that once upon a time same sex unions were a Christian rite!

   christopher   @   Fri 11 May 5:36 PM
   

3. Re: #9

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   Don’t give anybody any ideas now!

   dcsohl   @   Sat 12 May 8:55 AM
   

4. Ask ANY single father in Massachusetts about item 9

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   It has been virtually impossible for any single father to play a significant role in raising his young children in Massachusetts for decades.

   The “presumption” has always been that the mother gets sole physical custody, with occasional “visitation” provided to the father — and even that minimal access requires multiple court appearances and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees (which most single father’s can’t afford because they are paying FIFTY PERCENT of their net salary in child support) to enforce.

   A divorce lawyer explained to me in 1998, as graciously as he could manage, that The Court ruled that a mother with an admitted cocaine habit who admitted buying and selling cocaine in the children’s home was nevertheless judged to retain sole physical custody because she did not do her illegal acts in the presence of the children.

   The bias against fathers, especially of young children, in Massachusetts is profound and far-reaching. It permeates our culture (how many of the fathers among us have tried to attend an elementary school “parents day” at 11:00a in the morning? How many other fathers were there?) and our courts.

   somervilletom   @   Sat 12 May 10:42 AM
   

5. How same-sex marriage IS threatening

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   Social conservatives just sound unfathomably stupid when they assert that gay marriage can harm heterosexual (or “traditional”) marriage. Maybe there’s something we don’t understand here. And here’s another mystery that can cast some light. Why didn’t conservatives condemn Bristol Palin?

   Jonathan Rauch offers us a key to both these mysteries working off of Chan’s and Carbone’s recent book:
   

   For decades—if not centuries, argue Cahn and Carbone—American family and economic norms were framed by two realities, both taken as givens.

   One: sex makes babies, and a core purpose of marriage and of many other conventions is to regulate sexual and social behavior so as to provide for the formation of stable, nurturing families.

   Two: a low-skilled man, if he apply himself, can get a job, make a living, and support a family.

   Fact One gave rise to a strong linkage between sexual activity, marriage, and procreation. They were seen as three aspects of the same thing. After all, it was (and still is) pretty hard for teenagers and young adults not to have sex. So one important norm was not to have sex before marriage. A second important norm was that, if you did have premarital sex and conceived a child, you had to marry.

   Under those rules, families formed early—sometimes by choice, sometimes at the point of a shotgun. That was alright, however, because the man could get a job and support his wife and kids. The woman could probably stay at home and raise the kids. Neither member of the couple needed an extended education in order to meet their obligations as spouses or parents.

   This model of marriage still exists in the redder parts of the country even if birth control has made sex without procreation possible and globalization has made supporting a family on a single income with unskilled work near impossible. In red states, they marry earlier. The kind of “accident” or “trouble” that Bristol got into is typical of those social norms. The trouble is traditionally redeemed by marrying the father — which Bristol and Levi were willing to do.

   In the Early Marriage World of Red America, marriage has to be a clearly and strictly defined institution in which immature people can grow up. In our part of the world, marriage is an institution for mature people; sex is not entwined with procreation but it requires responsibility.

   The acceptability of same sex marriage is a clear signal that a red-state-style marriages are a thing of the past, that marriage is not for the immature.

   kbusch   @   Sun 13 May 1:42 AM
   

   • The accessibility of college...

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     … has do a lot too to move the norms for when marriage is desirable (and even appropriate in some eyes I’d suspect). When you think about it, the age at which it is socially permissible for a woman (or girl) to get pregnant has moved in a ‘later’ direction (pretty consistently). Interestingly enough, simultaneously the age of reproductive puberty for girls has moved in a ‘sooner’ direction. (I don’t have a cite but that’s my understanding from sociologists and pediatricians.) This means the window of ‘danger’ with regard to pregnancy and marriage has done nothing but grow wider. Also noteworthy is that this doesn’t speak at all about the additional issue of a woman’s desire to have a career (especially in the modern context of the necessity of a two income household), and how that also impacts the window of desirability for pregnancy.

     mr-lynne   @   Sun 13 May 9:18 AM
     

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   http://10reasonstobangaymarraige.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/10-reasons.jpg

   http://10reasonstobangaymarraige.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/10-reasons-to-ban-gay-marraige/

   suzyquesa   @   Wed 16 May 5:24 PM