Sunday June 12, 2011

FAMILY VALUES, NEXT PHASE. When Naomi Cahn and June Carbone put out Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture last year, showing red states had more teenage mothers and more divorces than blue states, conservatives didn't have a lot to say about it. Ross Douthat was pleased to hear that the teen moms of Fritters, Alabama weren't having abortions; NewsBusters revealed damning evidence that Cahn and Carbone are liberals; and Eve Tushnet thought it was snotty and elitist of Cahn and Carbone to point these disparities out. But in the main they were quiet.

At least Kyle-Anne Shiver seems to have gotten the message and even taken a clever angle, as revealed by her article at American Thinker, "Morally-Schizoid Liberal Women and Their Weiner Husbands."

After informing us that liberal women are sluts prone to "running to the OBGYN with neurotic frequency, to make sure their alley-cat lifestyle has not resulted in any of the dreaded, fertility-destroying sexually transmitted diseases," Shiver explains that it is futile for them to expect their spouses to be faithful.

Certain that one of the men with whom she has copulated without strings will suddenly morph into a faithfully monogamous creature the minute she can convince one of them to say "I do" in front of a few witnesses, the liberal woman marches blindly down the aisle towards near-certain, adulterous doom. Yet, no amount of honest reason can dissuade liberal women from this self-destructive, moral myopia.

I admit, at first I was too caught up in the ridiculous caricature to see where she was going. But further down Shiver spells it out:

Any woman, who still believes that males are naturally monogamous and that a wedding ring is anything more than a little band of gold, needs to take a long, hard look at the sham of a marriage on display between Congressman Weiner and his wife of less than one full year. Afterwards, if said woman still does not see the lifelong value in chastity before marriage and a pair of shredder scissors in the kitchen drawer afterwards, she needs to take a very large bucket of ice cold water and dump it upon her own head.

The lifelong chastity bit we may dismiss as a tic, since even Shiver can't possibly believe that will be the result. But I take her expression of contempt for the notion of elective marital fidelity as a cry from the heart. And given her point of view, she may also see the copulating conservative-region youth as refreshingly wised-up compared to neurotically cautious liberals. No running to the OBGYN for the red-state kids, except to get help with their numerous pregnancies. And if their divorce rates are also great, it may be that experience has simply given them more modest expectations of marriage than have the ladies of Massachusetts and New York, and they take the forsaking-all-others charade less seriously.

I would advise conservatives to grab this and run with it. If tradition prevents them from endorsing sexual freedom outright, they can at least let their constituents know that they understand them, and consider them more enlightened than the stuck-up Yankee bitches who think they can hold a man forever with their fancy birth control and delayed marriages. What a vote-getter that might be! They can start on it as soon as they've finished milking the Scandal of the Century.

I must note one other fragment from Shiver's article:

I've seen some of these women nearly go completely insane as they receive one of those now-common, "So sorry I may have infected you" love notes from a former "lover."

Now-common! And yet Hallmark hasn't created cards for the occasion. It's enough to put you off your faith in capitalism.

UPDATE. Comments are choice, with lots of Hallmark STD poetry. Some commenters, such as Cato the Censor, wonder, "If she hates lib women, why does she hang out with them so much she's usually around for the VD mail?" Regular readers will know that culture warriors often pretend to have liberal friends, so they may report back to their readers the things these liberals say and do, most of which are, in a literal sense, unbelievable. Ripe examples here, here, here, and here. All fine efforts, but not as good as the totally true story of my encounter with Jeane Kirkpatrick and a backwoods preacher.