StickWithANose

I was recently reminded of the hypocrisy of the “traditional values” crowd the other day as my progress through a narrow street was halted by a fellow in a large truck covered in bumper stickers proclaiming his belief in “traditional marriage” who was stopping to drop off a prostitute after services had been rendered. In a Foucaultian sense, conservative types do not “repress” sexual discourses but, instead, talk about the subject constantly. Perhaps this is because the subject is never far from their minds… NYT

According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.

Conservatives touted abstinence-only education, which was a flop, when real sex education was needed, most desperately in red states. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates.

And, a study titled “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” that was conducted by Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor of business at Harvard Business School and published earlier this year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that subscriptions to online pornography sites were “more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality” and in states where “more people agree that ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.’ ”

Ol’ Carl Jung sure knew what he was talking about, no? More seriously, a better explanation for the teen pregnancy and high divorce rates may have more to do with poverty measures than being a reflection of simple hypocrisy. Looking at the graph accompanying the article, it is clear that the states that lead each of the three categories have high poverty rates.