Products of Massachusetts Liberalism
Written by Sam on June 21st, 2008If you want to see firsthand the moral decay and societal break down created by left wing extremism look no further than to the Peoples Republic of Taxachusetts, about the most liberal state in the country. 85% of the state legislative seats are held by Democrats. The entire Congressional delegation to Washington is Democrat as are the two U.S. Senators and the Governorship is held by a Democrat. Not to mention that this is the home of the first homosexual marriages and the first Marxist health care system.
I bet their parents are so proud.
GLOUCESTER, Massachusetts (AFP) — Locals in this small seaside town on the Atlantic coast are used to drawing attention to themselves by the size of their fishing catch or the rugged beauty of Goodharbor Beach.
But this week, Gloucester, one of the oldest towns in the United States, was thrust into the spotlight for an entirely different reason, as it emerged that a sizeable group of teenage girls from the town’s high school had fallen pregnant — many of them after reportedly making a pact to do so.
Education officials first noticed something was amiss when a group of girls went to the clinic at Gloucester High School for “repeated pregnancy tests,” schools superintendent Christopher Farmer told Fox News in an interview Friday.
“When they became pregnant, they appeared to believe that was a satisfactory outcome for their behavior,” he said.
Media reports on Friday said 18 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies.
“Certainly, it is far more than the norm,” said Farmer.
On Thursday, the principal of Gloucester High, Joseph Sullivan, was quoted by Time Magazine, which broke the story this week on the national and international stage, as saying nearly half the expectant girls, none older than 16, had “confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.”
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I have to say your argument about Mass. has little merit for two reasons.
First, the divorce rate in Mass. is lower than the national average and lower than almost every single “red” state.
Second, the out of wedlock birth rate in Mass. is also below the national average and lower than almost every single “red” state. Yet again another example of moral decay.
Third, the teenage pregnancy rate in Mass. is also below the national average.
Tell me how the state is morally bankrupt again? By those standards, the state is more morally sound than most of the “red” states. I guess the “red” states must be bastions of moral decay.
Fundamentally, this appears to be a socioeconomic related problem. The more economically depressed an area, the more likely they will feature these social ills. It has little to do with ideology, but income and affluence.
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Ryan:
First, that’s because the MARRIAGE rate is lower in Massachusetts than almost every other state. You can’t get divorced if you never get married.
Second, that’s because the abortion rate is HIGHER in Massachusetts than almost every other state.
Third, Massachusetts is 12th lowest in teen pregnancies but 3rd lowest in births by teens. How is that possible? Oh, I remember…see #2.
Do you really believe your own argument? Surely you knew which stats you were omitting? Shame on you.
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Sam, I saw this story a couple of days ago and I’m truly flabbergasted. That’s the only word I can come up with to describe my reaction. What are these girls thinking?? Wow, like this is totally going to be a forever slumber party…except instead of dolls we’ll have real live babies! If Jamie Lynn can do it, so can I!! And what’s the protocol on prom, anyway? Do you hire a sitter or does junior come with. And what happens to all these boys who were, frankly, “used” just for their fertilization capabilities? Were they in on the plan or are they just chumps? Do they get parental rights? Are they going to have to support these kids that the mothers deliberately conceived?
The whole thing is more bizarre than anything Hollywood could have conceived. (Pardon the pun.)
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Barbara you are falling for statistical farce for several reasons:
First, a higher percentage of the marriages in northeast last longer than the unions in the south/Bible Belt. This explains why the marriage rate is lower. Essentially people in the northeast do not view marriage as an institution that you can throw away like their southern counterparts if you purely look at the statistics. They walk to the alter and do not go to the divorce court as much as their counterparts who run to the alter and then often run to the divorce court.
Second, yes the abortion rate is higher in Mass and the northeast in general, but the average number of teenagers getting pregnant in the first place is lower. Considering this statistic factors in even aborted pregnancies, it still does not make up for the fact there is a substantially higher pregnancy rate in the south.
Fundamentally as I said before, I think this in many respects deals less with values than with socioeconomic factors. I suspect if you looked at the wealthiest counties regardless of region you would find similar statistics for them.
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Maybe they read Mark Steyn’s “America Alone” and took it a little too seriously…
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I can’t help but wonder if you’re just making these stats up. I can’t find any evidence that the Census bureau (or anyone else for that matter) has released numbers on state-by-state marital longevity.
And I still suggest that your reasoning is circular. Northeasterners may not rush to the altar, but they engage in serial monogamy (common-law marriage) and jump from partner to partner, with the average cohabitation several years shorter than a marriage. How this is a more noble form of noncommitment than that of the Southerners who divorce at the first sign of trouble is something I fail to understand.
It’s absurd to try to rank the states on some sort of morality scale, and I think it’s simplistic to suggest that socioeconomic factors alone can account for social ills, as you call them, or for the news story cited by Sam.
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The statistics can be obtained from government reports on the CDC and Census Bureau websites. Some you have to dig for though. Most of the information is also available at most public or any college library in hard cover form.
I would argue socioeconomic factors have a lot to do with the success or failure of marriages. It is well known that the higher the level of education and income someone obtains, the more likely they are going to get married and stay married. These people are less likely to run into financial trouble so that lessens a potential cause of friction in a relationship: money.
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Ryan, this has nothing to do with divorce rates and abortion statistics. Where did these girls get the idea to do this? The media. The media is constantly focusing on and marketing sex to kids. It’s been doing it for years and it’s no surprise that so many teenagers and young adults today have an attitude that sex is no big deal. I can’t even count how many people I know today who have one child or more from a woman or man they were never married to. They just “accidentally” got pregnant (It’s never an accident).
The media and all of its counterparts are overwhelmingly left wing and what I describe above is a very left wing attitude, the very ideology that overwhelms places like California, Vermont, and Massachusetts. So I think my accusation is quite accurate.
And I’ve been to Gloucester. It’s not an economically depressed community.
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Ryan, which Census report? I’m a research librarian and I’ve already been to the Census and CDC databases. I may be missing something, but I don’t see anywhere that they’ve released numbers on marital longevity, other than that nationwide the average first marriage lasts eight years.
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Barbara… well to figure out the ratio between the marriage rate and the divorce rate you just have to subtract the marriage rate from the divorce rate. Few people are ending marriages if the number is relatively high after you do the math.
Yes when people start giving qualifications I become skeptical. I worked in a library for a number of years as an assistant researcher and now am finishing up working as a researcher for a professor before going to law school.
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Sam… I never buy this media influenced the kids to do this nonsense. If the kids were influenced by the media, its because the parents are defective in raising children with backbone.
Yes Gloucester is poor by New England standards. Remember these reporters are probably from the region so they would naturally view such a place as poor. In the grand scheme of things, its not poor.
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I will be curious to see if there is follow-up coverage on this story. These kids, by virtue of their idiotic and hare-brained scheme, together have the potential to educate millions of young women on the difficulties of teenage pregnancy/motherhood.
Ryan, I’m starting law school, too.