I read the article. I can't say if it captured red state attitudes well but it certainly did capture attitudes well among my blue-state upper-middle class, Jewish-but-not-super-religious upbringing.

There is nothing wrong with sex before marriage and it is perfectly acceptable to have sex for pleasure. I was taught this and I think many of my peers were as well. It was certainly covered this way in my junior year health class.

However there is something very wrong about getting pregnant before finishing graduate school and/or being firmly settled in a career and on the path to upper-middle class socio-economics and professionalism. My parents were in their 30s when I was born. So were the parents of many of my peers. And it does seem that young pregnancies happen most in areas with the least amount of educational and economic opportunity. Whether it be Harlem or Appalachia. Mainly Appalachia.

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*nods* Coming from a fairly similar background the issue with teen pregnancy amongst my peer group and our parents was that starting a family that young pretty much screws any other plans you might have had for yourself (at least for a good 20 years or so).

It's not a moral issue, it's a quality of life issue.

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Well, to me it makes some sense. In a community where higher education is perceived as valuable, the pressure not to get pregnant and/or married is going to be less.

One of the reasons that "liberals" don't want their teenagers getting pregnant is that they feel it will disrupt the options for their future - i.e. derail college and graduate school.

In a community where there is less of a value placed on education and more of a value placed on family, of course starting a family at any age is going to be seen as a less bad option.

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One of the reasons that "liberals" don't want their teenagers getting pregnant is that they feel it will disrupt the options for their future - i.e. derail college and graduate school.

Yup. This would describe the attitude of my parents and my blue-state, professional class suburb. When I was growing up it seemed that almost all parents had graduate degrees, we were all expected to go to college and also probably graduate school.

It took me a while to realize that this is not the norm.

Then again people are also shocked when I tell them that my parents expected my brother and I to get graduate degrees and my parents are proud that I will probably have two graduate degrees. It doesn't even matter if my graduate degrees don't lead to employment, what matters is gaining a degree in a highly concentrated field for the sake of knowledge.

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Interesting. Of the five girls who made up our conservative church's youth group (Church of Christ, if anyone is wondering), 4 that I know of have had sex before marriage. Two got pregnant and gave the babies up for adoption; one was personally liberal, the other conservative, and neither slept with a future husband. The other two of us, me personally liberal, my friend moderate, had/are having premarital sex using contraception every time, my friend condoms, me hormones. If I were to get pregnant I would have an abortion. I'm in a relationship of 3 years with the man I intend to marry, she's already married the guy she lost her virginity to and had 2 children firmly within the boundaries of marriage. The other two girls started having sex earlier than we did -- 16 compared to our 18 and 20 -- and appeared not to use contraception. Was it because of religion? I don't think so... honestly, I think we were just more honest with ourselves about how close we were getting to our boyfriends and what we decided our personal worth for waiting was.

Interesting read, though... it would never have been an option for me to keep the baby at 16, and my parents, more liberal, would have felt it was horrifying. I wonder if the divide comes from evangelicals tending to see pregnancy/motherhood as one of, if not the highest station for their daughters, no matter when it's reached; whereas liberals feel that getting pregnant too young will be taking other, more important personal opportunities for career and education away from their daughters. Sure, most liberals think it's important to have kids, if you want 'em... eventually. But at 15 it's a death sentence, not a cause for celebration to liberals, at least it seems that way.

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Very interesting article! Thanks for posting it. Sadly, it reiterates a lot of what I've seen with the conservative idea that it's essentially OK for teenagers to get pregnant and have kids as long as they weren't out looking for sex, using contraception, and are willing to try to be parents before they're adequately educated or mature enough to do so well...mainly in the name of virtue. That's a sad, sad statement IMO, especially when they don't seem willing to look at the long-range consequences to the girls having children so young or their children who may or may not be raised all that well.

It's one of the major problems I see with relying on a book written in the culture of two millennia ago in the world we have now. We CAN manage pregnancy. We're not dying off anywhere near as fast as we used to. Wars aren't anywhere near as common to mean we need to have a consistently self-replicating population to just maintain. Property and resources aren't so scarce that we NEED to know who the parents of a child are. A single individual can raise a child (not always as well as two parents, but it's definitely possible).

I see a lot of value in what's in the Bible (and other spiritual texts), but I can't help thinking that it does need to be filtered for the place and time when it was written.

*sigh*

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are willing to try to be parents before they're adequately educated or mature enough to do so well

As far as they're concerned you learn by doing, supported by your family. You only need to wait if you're going to support yourself...

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That's an excellent article, and it says what I've been thinking and saying regarding sex and teaching about it.

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That is so frigging depressing. I am sad for all of those people.

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The culture of the Religious Right is one where what you preach (including what you have the government force on everyone) is much more important than what you practice.

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Yes, but . . .

As I think about and study things, I start to have sympathy for that concept. Except for the part in parentheses.

I'm starting to think that, if you can ALWAYS, 100% of the time, live up to your principles, maybe it's time to raise your personal standards.

I once heard a very smart man, Dr Jack Cohen say, "If you succeed at more than 80% of the things you attempt, you should be trying more difficult things."

That resonated so strongly with me that I take that into other realms of life, too.

If you are living up to your own standards of who you should be more 100% of the time, maybe you should be trying to hold yourself to higher standards. Now, for me, I don't see anything morally wrong with sex, so that's not a factor, but the standards I attempt to hold myself to in terms of kindness, charity, honesty, and so forth are high enough that I often fail.

If you believe that the standards to which you aspire are high enough that they are not actually achievable, then there's less stigma to failing. The important thing is what you aspire to, not what you achieve.

From that point of view, if you believe that premarital sex is bad, but tempting, well, if you TRY but fail to avoid it, then at least you tried, and your heart is in the right place. But if you don't even TRY? What's THAT all about?

The idea that people might just plain not consider premarital sex wrong at all -- that sounds like merely an excuse from that point of view.

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And that failure to practice what they preach makes them bigger failures than the liberal sexpots they're failing to avoid becoming.

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Teenage sex is just part of the difference between the "red" and "blue" families. It comes down to the question of whether people have inherited duties to their families (such as getting married and having kids) or if they should only make commitments they've agreed to. My take on it is that there's a real difference, it's driving a lot of our political conflicts, and neither version is holding up for the long run.

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It can go both ways.

My mother wants my brother and I to have families and children so she can be a grandmother. A lot of Jewish mothers do. However having a family comes after finishing graduate school and being settled in a career. My parents taught me that a person should not have children until they reach emotional and financial maturity stability.

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I think the article glosses over one of the huge disconnects between the right and left on "family values."

While the author talks about the new middle class attitude as being "pro-family", it also apparently considers a baby to be a derailment of life plans, like a tragic car accident or unexpected bankruptcy. That very attitude is a large component of right-wing anger at liberal attitudes. Part of the right's accepting nature of teen pregnancy has to do with an accepting nature of motherhood as a priority over and above college and/or career.

The author provides comparisons on pre-marital sex, teen pregnancy, and STD transmission in comparison between Red and Blue states, but never gives numbers in context (More teen pregnancies in Red than Blue States, but how does that calculate as a percentage of total pregnancies ?).

Overall, it's an interesting article, but quite clearly from the New Yorker - written with more than a little disdain for the odd attitudes of flyover space and breezing over the comparative value of children versus careers.

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Treating conservatives and Christians as if they're some other species that needs to be studied seems to be a trend these days. Makes me think of the "What's Wrong With Kansas?" or "Why Do People Vote Republican?" and so forth.

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(More teen pregnancies in Red than Blue States, but how does that calculate as a percentage of total pregnancies ?).

I'm trying to figure out why that would matter. In more populous areas, you're going to have more of any X percentage as a matter of course, so that statistic would prove little to me.

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Part of the right's accepting nature of teen pregnancy has to do with an accepting nature of motherhood as a priority over and above college and/or career.

It would seem that making a woman's status as a potential childbearer a priority over her self determination is a common cause of friction between people on the right and left.

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I wonder how much care was given to correcting for other demographic factors here. For example, they cite divorce and unwanted pregnancy rates in red and blue states, stating that "the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red and blue families" but fail to explore the reason behind the age. It seems presumed that it is strictly due to evangelical attitudes towards sex when race and education level have well established correlations as well.

As for wondering why Palin's daughter didn't cause a scandal I would argue that most liberals have a severely distorted view of what deeply religious people are like. There seems to be this idea that evangelical parents are all like the mother in Carrie when the reality is that forgiveness and redemption really are central to the belief system.

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I consider it to be not about attitudes toward sex but attitudes toward ideal roles in life. If you believe that forming families is the primary purpose of adult life, then there's really no reason to be upset at people doing that earlier. If you believe that forming careers (not only "money" careers, but things that are directed toward the non-family community as a whole) are the primary purpose, then forming a nuclear family early derails the chance to form a career more connected to the stuff OUTSIDE the family.

Family-centric vs. community-centric, I guess.

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I'd take that to heart a lot more if those same evangelicals didn't keep pointing to Bill Clinton's affair as the ultimate result of all evilness. In my personal experience, which is admittedly limited to family members I don't care for much, that forgiveness and redemption only matters when it's your kids or your friends - all the other people can, and are expected to, go to hell.

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Put another way: If Bill Clinton had had an affair and got divorced in the White House, I doubt any of that forgiveness and redemption would be there. And if Chelsea had gotten pregnant, I also doubt it would be there.

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Did you see the Daily Show's take on this? Where they showed that Bill O'Reilly and crew were blaming the parents of Jamie Lynn Spears and the media when she got pregnant at 17. Whatever happened to forgiveness and redemption?

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"There seems to be this idea that evangelical parents are all like the mother in Carrie when the reality is that forgiveness and redemption really are central to the belief system."

Really? Then I don't get the minimum sentence/justice as punishment/death penalty vibe of the religious right. Or does the forgiveness only extend to the venal sins of one's family?

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IMO: I don't believe it's confined to 'red' or 'blue' as far as the issue of how teen pregnancy is viewed. A lot of what the youth of today is bombarded with as far as morals, ethics and socio-economics has no definite political or cultural boundary. It's just plain scary, forget politics entering into it.
Growing up, I had one side of the family that routinely pressured the girls to be pregnant and married by age 18 and one side of the family that firmly believed you must have gone to college and had at least 5 years in a career before you even thought of settling down. Talk about skewed perceptions by the time I was 18.
I can safely say that having a child when you are a teen cuts you out of a lot of options otherwise open to you as far as education and careers go. Not to say there aren't programs out there that make it a bit easier to go to college if you have kids. However, for most of us, we can't afford to work full time, pay a sitter, go to school, pay a sitter, ect.
It is my firm belief that politics should stay out of sex education values. We as parents can talk to our kids until we are blue in the face about "the birds and the bees", but, once they step outside the household, it's what they are bombarded with outside of our supervision that makes or breaks the deal. If they were "bombarded" with the ideals that sex before marriage, if practiced, can result in a kid and, gee, here's how you make sure you don't have a kid, and if you are a guy and the girl gets preggers, here's what you are going to be facing for 18-21 years financially, and the "powers that be" stopped interferring, citing "moral/ethical/religious" viloations, may be there'd be a decrease in teen pregnancy.
Then again, it's been my firm belief that any girl that reaches childbearing age ought to have the right to have access to the contraceptive of her choice, irregardless of her parents' protestations. Simply because of what she is going to be "bombarded" by once she leaves home for school and after school activities.
It's also my firm belief that if more parents practiced "in your face" parenting tactics, then, less kids would be having kids. (And yes, I have teens, and they bemoan the fact that I have no concept of "privacy invasion" when it comes to knowing about thier lives)
Politics and relgion aside, the issue of teen pregnancy is a by-product of how desensitized our society has become to what would have been considered depraved and debauched 20 years ago. Naturally, if they are bombarded by the ideas that it's okay to do, then they are going to do it.
Monkey see, monkey do.
And it's ulimately our fault, not the fault of politicians, rebublican or democratic.
ME

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