Pet Are Man's Best Friend – But Woman's Practice Children

Today's guest blog is from Taylor McGovern who wrote a wonderful journal entry for my family life class that I thought should be shared.

We haven’t talked about gender differences in quite a while but I noticed one recently that I have to talk about. Women treat their pets as their children and men treat them as their friends. My boyfriend’s brother, Ben is dating a girl who just got a new puppy. The dog is absolutely adorable but she talks to it like it is her new-born child. She says things like, “Now, mommy says don’t bite. Listen to mommy.” Of course, the dog has no idea what she’s saying and continues to bite her and everything else in sight because it is a DOG not a child. And she also calls Ben the dog’s “daddy” but they’ve been dating for less than a month. I assume it doesn’t freak him out but I know it would freak Brian out. This is an extreme case and I’m being rather hard on this girl but Brian and I have been laughing about it all week. I just got a new cat at Christmas and I’m just as guilty as she is with the baby talk – although I never said anything about being it’s “mommy” or Brian being it’s “daddy.” My mom, however, would say things like “Come here to your grandma” which is just hilarious. Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that women get pets and it’s like they are getting children.

But men treat animals as newfound friends. My dad talks to my cat in a normal voice and feels sorry for him when we are coddling him. He’ll call him by saying, “OTIS, my man!” which is very friendly and masculine. Ben will play with his girlfriend’s dog instead of cuddling with him and he uses his normal voice. My dad makes fun of anyone who talks to an animal in any abnormal voice. The pets for men are new friends, companions. I guess that’s why they call dogs man’s best friend – although I think they were speaking of mankind with that phrase.

It’s interesting because these two views on pets are totally different and I wonder how many couples (like Ben and his girlfriend) get pets thinking one thing about them and then find out that their mate is thinking another thing. What a mean is – if a girl gets a dog and thinks it’s going to be a tester child while the guy thinks it’s going to be a new friend, there could be some problems

GPS Monitoring for Batterers: Yes

Several states are beefing up their restraining orders on potential girl-friend beaters by making them wear global positioning system (GPS) bracelets. When these guys get within a restricted zone, such as near the potential victim's house or work, she gets a quick warning message.

In the early studies, none of the bracelet wearers has violated the order to stay away. The researchers think that this excellent result is due, in part, to the restrained guys knowing that someone is watching them, that the object of their obsession is not alone in the world.

This seems to me to be a good thing. The barrier so far is cost -- about $10 per day. I think this cost could be driven down dramatically through further automation. And this is the sort of ounce of prevention that pays for itself in avoided law-enforcement costs, pain, and death.

Where Gangs Are a Step Up

I have a student from the Hyde Park slum of Boston. He said he was the only young man not in a gang. Each day his grandmother prayed for him when we went out the door, and he prayed thanksgiving when he got home safely. He now has a scholarship to study a world away in lovely Danville. He should be able to graduate and do good things in the world.

His part of town is not the worst section of Boston. Another student of mine had a cousin shot to death in Dorchester. It was the third cousin she had lost that way in a year. When I asked her if she knew why it happened, she sighed and said "Just ... stupidness." The dead man may have said something at some earlier time about a girl. A group of guys walked up as the young man was talking to his pregnant girlfriend and her mother. They beat him up, then shot him. Even with all that information, this murder may remain unsolved, like the others in her family. She said the police and the press are likely to report this as a gang killing, but gangs, she said, are old news in her neighborhood. There used to be gangs, as there still are in Hyde Park. They provided a measure of protection for those in them and order in the neighborhood.

Dorchester has fallen below even the level of gangs. Now there is no order -- all the young men can be assumed to be armed ("have hammers"), and are likely to "roll up" on anyone for any reason or no reason. Dorchester wishes it still had gangs. Now it is just anarchy.

One Cheer for Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell died today. I disagreed with him on most political positions, and many of his religious positions. In his later years he said some truly reprehensible things.

Jerry Falwell changed the definition of fundamentalist Christianity to include political involvement. Before the "Moral Majority," fundamentalists were separated from the world, especially on political matters. They were waiting for the end, and expected God to sort out this sorry world, and that soon. Fundamentalists differed from evangelicals, their post-war, college-educated cousins, precisely over whether it was worth trying to save this world.

The Moral Majority as an organization was mostly the creation of political conservatives who were not themselves fundamentalist Protestants, but who saw that they needed someone out front who was. Falwell, an independent Baptist of great entrepreneurial zeal, took that role and ran with it. The organization that he created was mostly made of fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants. A greater wonder is that it got them to work together with conservative Catholics, Orthodox, and Jews -- often for the first time.

I believe that when groups get involved in electoral politics, they can't help but be drawn toward the center. They learn something of the humanity of their opponents by engaging them. More effectively, they learn that they have work together with people who oppose them on one issue but agree with them on another. This moderates conflict and helps hold the body politic together. If electoral politics were possible in Iraq, the civil war would diminish. Electoral politics is happening in Iran, and moderates are emerging within an extreme cultural revolution.

So let us give one cheer for Jerry Falwell, may be go to his reward.

The Queen Has a Terrible Job

I commend Stephen Frears' excellent film, "The Queen." Helen Mirren won a well-deserved Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth trying to cope with reality when ex-Princess Diana died. I have never favored monarchy, and few monarchs grow on me up close. Still, I have to feel for Elizabeth Windsor (or whatever of her many last names she might pick) who was supposed to be a minor royal, when all of a sudden she was stuck as a young woman with being princess, then queen. She has been truly dutiful for decades, stuck in an endless round of official tasks, few of which are intrinsically important. And the difficult kids. And the ungrateful press. And snippy foreigners who don't like monarchy anyway.

At one point in the film, Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip, says that Diana should have done her duty as a royal wife and overlooked Charles' inevitable mistress. The Queen gives her husband a small pained look. That is another ugly requirement of the job.

Queen Elizabeth has a terrible job.

Invested Motherhood is Not a Feminine Mistake

A Mother's Day defense, supplied by Mrs. G.

At the Family Scholars Blog, I read a brief quote from Leslie Bennetts’ The Feminine Mistake:

“It’s nice to be at home when your child loses her fourth tooth, but is it worth the price you might pay if your breadwinner dies or divorces you, and you end up losing that home entirely?”

Well, yes, it could be worth the price.

I’m thinking of my mother, who spent more than a decade at home with kids, chose divorce, quit a satisfying job to move her kids closer to extended family, changed jobs to move in with her aging mother, and stopped working in order to provide hospice care when cancer attacked her older sister.

In a life full of ideas and art and humor and books and talent and wisdom and affection, my mother has also handled quite a few cramped apartments, unreliable cars, and struggles to make ends meet.

So no, Ms. Bennetts, I can’t fear having to work harder or live more cheaply in the future because I loved energetically yesterday or today.

My feminist mama made sure of that.

I Have Body-Image Issues ...

... I think I'm good looking.

(This drew a good scrunch-face from Mrs. G.)

Two Cheers for a Lower Divorce Rate

The divorce rate in the United States is at its lowest point since 1970, when the current divorce boom began with the passage of no-fault laws. The annual rate dropped from 5.1 per 1000 people in the worst year, 1981, to 3.6 last year.

Why only two cheers? The good news is that the marriage success rate is rising among college-educated couples. They really are learning how to hold it together better. Likewise, there has been some revulsion at easy divorce, especially among young people, who are "being the change they wish to see in the world" by staying married.

On the other hand, one reason the divorce rate is down is because the marriage rate is down in the first place. The proportion of couples who just cohabit, even after they have children, has been rising. Many children of the '70s divorces are so afraid of making the same mistake that they don’t marry at all. I predict that the cohabitation rate will start to go down among college educated people as more people learn that cohabiters who marry are more likely to divorce than are couples who don't live together before marriage.

The other not-so-good fact is that the divorce rate has not fallen among the least educated. The growing marriage divide is becoming a class divide. This divide cuts both ways: poor people are more likely to divorce (or have children without marrying), but also people who divorce are more likely to end up poor.

So let's build on the positive. And educate the poor and the cohabiters about what their real odds of happiness are.

Tony Blair: An Appreciation

Tony Blair has announced that he will step down as Prime Minister in Britain. This was long expected. His support has sunk lower than President Bush's. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor to the Exchequer (finance minister) will likely succeed Blair as Prime Minister.

My closest British friends are leaders in the Liberal Democratic Party, the third party of British politics for which there is no American equivalent. I have done door-to-door canvassing -- "knocking up" in the wonderful British expression -- for the Lib Dems.

Nonetheless, I have always appreciated Tony Blair for bringing the great Labour Party, the counterpart of my Democratic Party, back to the center (that is, the centre). New Labour, as Blair calls it, broke the socialist stagnation into which Labour had fallen, and shook off the persistent Loony Left.

Reagan had an excellent counterpart in Thatcher. Bush One, the sequel to Reagan, was matched in many ways by Major, the sequel to Thatcher. Clinton and Blair were so well matched in their style, their approach to party leadership, and their finding a middle way between the left and right of the moment that it was eerie.

Then came the election of 2000, which broke the pattern. Blair and Bush don't match. Yes, Blair has been a strong war ally (leader, really) for Bush Two, but they do not match in any other way. If Gore had won the 2000 election (as I think he did in all but the crucial technical sense), then the balance would have been maintained. And with dour and wonky Al Gore in the White House, perhaps Tony Blair would have given way to dour and wonky Gordon Brown five years ago. Blair would have preserved his legacy, Labour would be in a stronger position than it is now, the balance between Mother Country and Eldest Child would have been maintained. Oh, and the United States and Britain would be leading the world in fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, instead of fighting alone in someone else's civil war in Iraq.

"Prom Babies" Feels Like an Urban Legend

"Dear Abby" ran an urgent fear story today about a "national trend" of teenage girls deliberately getting pregnant at their senior prom in order to avoid having to deal with college. The writer reported that her daughter's friends from the lacrosse team, some of whom had been accepted at several Ivy League schools, wanted to have "prom babies" because they just couldn't handle the stress of academic success. The writer thought this must be a national trend, because she heard a similar story in another state.

Neither Snopes.com nor the Urban Legends page at About.com has anything on this one. The story has all the earmarks of an urban legend, though. The story is third-hand to begin with (the mom overheard some girls talking about something they had heard other girls had actually done). Furthermore, Abby says she has never heard of it before either (and she surely hears some doozies daily), though she advises, of course, that having a prom baby would be a bad idea.

I will send this to the good folks at Snopes. I would welcome any intelligence on this matter.

Cheater-Chasing Shysters in Chicago

Chicago's "viagra triangle" promotes sleazy hook-ups. It is the natural place for the family law equivalent of ambulance chasers, the Fetman and Garland law firm, to place their billboard.

In any service business, law-status firms often resort to cheap sex in their ads to get noticed. The two women who run this firm have gone one step lower: get a divorce through us, and you can get cheap sex in real life.

Ironically, Corri Fetman, who dreamed up the ad, said she left her previous firm to set up her own because she experienced sexual harassment and a "demeaning environment." She invented their advertising campaign to "target business professionals who are informed about litigation and can appreciate the specialized, strategic services we offer."

The Faithful Inherit Society By Default

This is the conclusion of Philip Longman, a researcher at the New America Foundation. He wrote The Empty Cradle, about fertility decline across the world. In an excellent interview with Longman in Books and Culture, Brad Wilcox asked Longman what difference religious faith made in the future demography of the world. Longman argued that the people who do have larger families – enough kids to replace themselves, and then some – where much more likely to be religious.

One of Longman's most remarkable numbers is that the fertility gap between believers and nonbelievers in Europe is up to 15 or 20% now. Even in places where non-religious people are dominant in society today, they will have a harder time reproducing their power in the future because they are not reproducing in the most basic sense. Among the liberal educated elite, more than a third have no children or only one.

Fertility is indeed rising a little in Europe, and several European governments are pushing pronatalist policies for the first time in generations. Longman is skeptical that government programs can really nudge the birthrate much. He thinks the short-term financial advantages of no or few children will keep the birthrate down, especially for the educated. It is getting to the point where it takes a strong pronatalist family life – not public policy – to actually get people to bear the costs of kids. Religious people are most likely to value having a bunch of kids, despite the cost. And thus they inherit society, by degrees, and by default.

Evangelicals Adopting Foster Kids: Putting Their Care Where Their Mouths Are

There are half a million kids in foster care. More than 100,000 want to be adopted. Focus on the Family, Rick Warren, and other evangelical leaders are encouraging evangelical Christian families to see foster kids as, in effect, the orphans that the Bible instructs us to care for.

I think this is a great idea. We have had speakers in our family life class talk about the desperate state of foster care, and the truly life-saving help a good foster family – and even better, an adoptive family – can be to kids with no reliable families of their own.

There are, naturally, some people who object, and some who are just suspicious. Leaders of the movement are sensitive to the charge that evangelicals care about kids until they are born, so this is an effort to complete the pro-life agenda. I think the charge is mostly false, but even if it were true, adopting orphans is still a good thing to do. Foster agencies forbid corporal punishment, which many conservative religious families use. I can see the case that kids assigned to foster care have probably already had a bad experience with hitting at home, so corporal punishment would be worse for them than for other kids. Some are concerned that evangelical placement agencies would not work with homosexuals who wanted to be adoptive parents, but that is really about the agencies, not about the evangelical families. And to those who worry that Christian families would take their adopted kids to church – I can only hope so. Evangelicals invite everyone in their household to church – that is what makes them evangelical. Whether they can convince the kids is another matter, but any family might face that problem no matter how they came by their children.

An evangelical Christian movement to care for the orphans of our day seems to me a very good thing.

Derby Hats

Today is the high holy day of the civil religion of Kentucky, Derby Day. One of the many charming and goofy features of the day are over-the-top women's hats. This year Chrysler had a competition for Derby hats suitable to wear in a convertible -- such as the Chrysler Sebring. These are the three finalists. The three designers will go to the Derby, where the winner will get a Sebring. I like the middle one, myself, but the whole thing is so hugely silly that any of them on a real woman would be amusing. It does look aerodynamically impractical for a convertible going more than ten miles an hour, though.

Still, these relatively practical models are not a patch on the great icon of hilarious headgear for race day, Eliza Doolittle's rig at the Ascot Opening Day in "My Fair Lady."

For my part I enjoy the crowd shots as much as the race itself. Enjoy.

Up Next: Legal Incest

There is a serious debate, in this country and in Europe, about whether incest should remain illegal as it has from time immemorial. When the Supreme Court declared all state laws against sodomy an unconstitutional intrusion on a citizen's right to have consensual sex in the Lawrence case, alarmists claimed that bigamy, polygamy, incest, and bestiality would follow. The alarmists were right.

I have written about the coming polygamy crisis. Incest is next.

Of course, nothing is inevitable in social life. We could have a new social movement to restore a public standard of sexual morality. But the movement to make sex, even marriage, a matter of private choice is well advanced. The Supreme Court has pretty nearly dropped the last legal defense. It would be possible to amend the constitution to prohibit incest, but it would be horrible. Liberals would feel obliged to go way out on a libertarian limb, from which it would be difficult to come back. My reading of the present political moment is that the movement toward social conservatism has run out of steam for this generation, and is not likely to be renewed soon.

One of my favorite college professors caused a wonderful scene during a polite dinner with some visiting evaluators. He grew increasingly frustrated as he tried to get them to draw any practical judgments from their philosophy. Finally he rose, and in a carrying voice, demanded to know if they could offer some reason why he shouldn't have sex with sheep - though he put it a bit more graphically than that. Not, mind you, that he wished to do any such thing; rather, he wanted them to explain if their philosophy had any conception of what was good, of how people should live.

We are not quite to the "sex with sheep" stage in the debate over the complete privatization of sex, but we are only a step away.

Premarital Education Discounts Are a Good, Feasible Policy

About a third of married couples take part in premarital education or counseling. Married couples who get premarital education reduce their divorce risk by about a third, among many other benefits. Communities with Community Marriage Policies, in which the town's clergy agree to require all the couples they marry to get premarital counseling, have reduced their divorce rate by an average of 2%, or about 30,000 divorces prevented so far. Most religious marriage counseling is free, and there are free or inexpensive options in most communities. Better marriages and fewer divorces are in the public interest, so most public-minded groups and agencies are very supportive of premarital education.

States can encourage couples to get premarital education by reducing the wedding license fees. The five states that have such policies so far – Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee – give a discount of $20 to $50. This discount is as much a symbol of the state's commitment as it is a serious incentive to get premarital counseling, but it does have an effect.

Alan Hawkins, a family studies professor at Brigham Young, has helpfully reviewed the benefits and costs of state policies encouraging premarital education. He concludes that such policies save money, are politically feasible, and, most importantly, that premarital education improves marriages and reduces the divorce rate.

In Kentucky marriage license fees run about $35. To offer a discount for premarital counseling that would make a difference, we would probably need to raise the initial fee. If the license fee were $50 and the discount were $25 – that is, 50% off for getting an education that will help your marriage – this program could make a difference at almost no new direct cost to the state.

Encouraging premarital education and counseling through a voluntary program and a modest discount from the state is a feasible, helpful, centrist approach to improving marriages – and thus improving public life.

The Perfect Pill?

British researchers are working on a pill that would increase women's sex drive and help them lose weight. I predict that a giant fortune could be made.

So far they are only using it on monkeys, which has led to rump-shaking.

Scary.

Less Committed Marriage

Sometimes economists can see the trees of marginal individual advantage, but miss the forest of the human costs that seeking individual advantage imposes on others. A case is point is a new study by Penn economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson reported in the New York Times. Wolfers and Stevenson report approvingly that weakening marriage means that individuals don't lose so much if their "investment" doesn't bring all the rewards they wanted. They report that no-fault divorce has produced less committed marriages. They also calculate that no-fault also makes it 6 percent less likely that a couple will have a child. Overall, marriage rates are down.

Wolfers and Stevenson, themselves an unmarried and (I believe) childless couple, do not see these developments as weakening society, but as strengthening individuals in getting what they want.

The Upper-Middle Class Have More Options Than Harvard

There is a fine piece in the New York Times about all the amazing smart kids desperate for Harvard who won't get in. The author, a Harvard alumnus and interviewer, does not lament that his kids are not determined to get into Harvard as he, a blue-collar kid, was at their age. For him, an elite college was the one way up. For his kids, who start out in the upper-middle class, they have many more options than he did -- because they know that there a many paths to success.

You Want the Book of Order to Be Your Essential Tenets? Be Careful What You Wish For.

Several presbyteries are considering overtures based on the idea that the standards in the Presbyterian Church (USA) Book of Order are "essential tenets of the Reformed faith," and therefore are binding on all candidates for ordination in the church. Such a declaration would help solve the problem of what, exactly, church officers are bound to when they pledge to be bound to the essential Reformed tenets. However, this solution would create an even bigger problem: it would also drag in the entire Book of Confessions as necessary standards for all church officers.

At the heart of this debate is the "fidelity and chastity" amendment to the Book of Order, G -6.0106b. It says:

Those who are called to this office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage of a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the Confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

I believe that what most proponents of a rule that "the Book of Order standards are essential tenets" want is contained in the first, "fidelity and chastity" sentence. However, what they have not fully reckoned with is that such a rule would also make the second sentence equally binding and universal.

Is any presbytery seriously ready to examine every potential officer of the church on "any practice the Confessions call sin?" Is any presbytery even ready to examine every potential officer on whether they have read and understood every practice the Confessions call sin? Is there any examination committee that is willing to have that same standard applied to itself?

Now, I have long argued that the Book of Confessions was a mistake. Adopting it meant that we have no confession, because we take none of them as a constitutional rule of the church. That is why we only fight over the Book of Order – it is the only really constitutional part of the constitution. The overture under discussion is part of that same shift to treating the BOO as the only really binding part of the constitution. The proposers of the overture, though, have not looked carefully enough at what is in the Book of Order. Declaring the BOO standards "essential tenets" will open more than a can of worms – more like a barrel.