Want to stay married?
Bole, William
explored by both bishops and Catholic politicians, as well as by voters, Catholic and otherwise, who must decide for themselves whether the views endorsed by the bishops in Catholics in Political...
...Rather, it is rightly saying that the arguments offered in such an address are worth considering...
...A university that invited Catholic politicians with prochoice records to deliver public address-es would risk violating the bishops' prohibition...
...SCHWADRON Kurtz propped up with Scandinavian data indicating "marriage has virtually disappeared in the most gay-marriage friendly districts of Norway" (Kurtz's words...
...Sullivan could have chosen more alarming contrasts to Massachusetts, like Arkansas and Wyoming, where divorce rates average seven per thousand residents, a few points above the national average...
...Kurtz and others have sought refuge in their belief that the demographic mystery can be explained by the "strong presence" of right-minded Catholics in the Northeast...
...And these divorce facts have made for entertaining argument in the debate about gay marriage...
...During the ill-fated struggle to keep marriage licenses out of homosexual hands, a cavalry of family-values advocates, hailing from organizations with constituencies chiefly in the South, camped out in Boston and GOD'S MISSIONARY PEOPLE A call to the Church in the United States to refocus on mission October 3-6, 2004 / Louisville, Ky...
...By arguably the leading measure of family vitality, Massachusetts repeatedly ranks at the top of the nation...
...So Sullivan is actually holding up the marital behavior of Catholic opponents of gay marriage as a model" ("Death Blow to Marriage," February 5, www.nationalreview.com...
...The divorce gap between the states has become a public curiosity in recent years...
...Not unreasonably, these groups are dedicated to promoting wholesome values derived from religious wisdom, yet the evidence suggests that these values alone are not enough to save marriages and shore up families...
...The questions raised in Catholics in Political Life are timely and of great importance...
...And then even if the election is held and won, the results can be contested and tied up in court for years...
...The public in Massachusetts is split on gay marriage, and the large Catholic population generally opposes it...
...A second way for Catholic universities to facilitate dialogue would be to invite Catholic politicians and Catholic bishops to do in 2004 what Mario Cuomo did in 1984: de-liver public addresses to university audiences defining and defending their positions...
...In March, I tagged along with the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice on fact-finding visits to Cintas plants in New Haven and Chicago...
...On questions such as these, careful consideration of the arguments on all sides is more intellectually responsible than unwavering solidarity...
...Nonetheless, polls show that most Americans think unions are good for their members and for the economy...
...William Bole is a freelance reporter in Massachusetts and co-author of Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace, written with Robert Hennemeyer and Drew Christiansen, SJ...
...But there's more going on than that...
...Paul Weithman is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame...
...Catholics tend to divorce at significantly lower rates than other religious groups...
...William Bole WANT TO STAY MARRIED...
...I would argue that a university that sponsors an address of the sort that Cuomo delivered in 1984 at Notre Dame is not endorsing such views...
...Demographically, the Unite-HERE merger makes sense...
...The campaign has sought to develop support among students, politicians, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, and the religious community...
...They can do so in two ways...
...If nothing else, they certainly invite questions about the politics of conservative organizations like the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, both of which will encamp in Boston later this month...
...Unfortunately, neither the Democratic convention in Boston nor the Re-publican convention five weeks later in New York is likely to showcase such a refashioned family agenda...
...Such talks would have to be measured and well reasoned, and audiences would be required to observe reasonable standards of decorum...
...In pro-gay Massachusetts, the divorce rate is 2.4 per thousand and the percent unmarried is 26.8 percent...
...Northeasterners tend to have relatively high levels of household income and education, and these two social advantages are strongly associated with family stability...
...Or contact Father Wil Steinbacher at 615-256-1905 or wsteinbacher@glenmary.org...
...Tom Smucker JOINING A UNION Why it's hard to organize workers intas is the largest industrial laundry business in North America...
...Census Bureau and National Center for Health Statistics...
...Just why a janitor might be likelier to fail at marriage than an engineer is a tougher question...
...Yet the bishops' Denver statement would seem to make the possibility even less likely...
...Colleges and universities offer a unique place for such explorations...
...In the past twenty years the percentage of workers in unions has fall-en from about 20 to 13 percent...
...One reason is that it is much harder to unionize an unorganized workplace than most of us realize...
...The economics of marital dysfunction is especially confounding: divorce is at once a scourge of the less affluent and a creature of modem affluent society (Popenoe and his colleague Barbara Dafoe Whitehead would underline the latter point...
...Catholic Mission Association Symposium presenters: Father John Fuellenbach, M. Shawn Copeland...
...By Kurtz's Norwegian logic, if you want to save marriage, adopt Massachusetts values, not Texan ones...
...The company, meanwhile, has fought back in the courts, the media, and through the political establishment...
...Workers have the right to join a union if they wish, but over the last fifty years that right has been narrowed by Congress and the courts until it is now amounts to the right to request a union recognition vote...
...According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, it has the lowest divorce rate among the fifty states...
...Do these empirical realities shed light on current campaigns to rescue the American family...
...The party's national convention is sure to spotlight not just the senator from Massachusetts, but the politics of his home state and perhaps the wider "liberal" Northeast...
...These are anxious times for defenders of traditional family norms, and Massachusetts is serving as a national magnet for profamily angst...
...Such gatherings would allow for the contact and the counsel the bishops say they want, while offering Catholic politicians the opportunity to speak to the bishops directly and openly rather than through the media...
...They merit discussion outside the political arena, in a setting that universities can provide...
...and the percent of people unmarried is 32.4 percent...
...T Commonweal I I July 16, 2004 demonstrated at the statehouse...
...George Hunsberger...
...Holding the church to high standards of intellectual responsibility is one of the tasks of Catholic colleges and universities...
...But, if we think it's such a good idea, why aren't more of us in unions...
...The latest Labor Day Gallup Poll found the union approval rating at 65 percent, up from 58 percent the year before...
...In a 2001 survey by the Barna Research Group, 29 percent of Catholics reported having been divorced and remarried, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 34 percent of all adults (the margin of error was two percentage points...
...The best explanation is surprisingly straightforward and uncontroversial among people who study the social patterns...
...What would be ideal is a profamily alignment that aspired to both a broad moral consensus in America and a more equitable sharing of social goods, such as livable wages...
...Jousting back, Kurtz purported to set the record straight on why liberal Massachusetts would be far less divorce-happy than conservative Texas...
...For more information: Visit www.glenmary.org and search "Mission Symposium...
...Leslie Hollon, Aminah McCloud, Sister Dianne Bergant, Edwina Gateley, Jack Jezreel, Father John Rausch, Father Derek Simons, Michael Warren...
...These [markers] also happen to be the same characteristics that correlate with liberalism, which is why the low divorce rate in Massachusetts has to do with the fact that Massachusetts is the most liberal state in the union," says David Popenoe of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey...
...Unite and HERE are run by high-profile leaders eager to reverse organized labor's nearly fatal decline...
...In Canada, on the other hand, union participation has remained around 30 percent...
...Catholic universities can and should play a vital role in facilitating this dialogue...
...While 40 percent of public employees are organized, the portion of private employees in unions has dropped from a high of 33 percent in 1955 to less than 9 percent today...
...Perhaps the family-values coalition should be as preoccupied with finding solutions to child poverty as they are with nailing the Ten Commandments to every courthouse door...
...I think it's more complicated than that...
...Not only can Catholic universities facilitate dialogue in these ways, I believe they are uniquely suited to do so...
...There, the law limits managerial interference in union drives and "card check" recognition is common...
...Gleaning insights about human behavior from aggregate social data is a dicey undertaking, and when it comes to divorce data, official collections and correlations are some-what crude and sporadic...
...If conservatives have often closed their eyes to the role of economic hardship in family breakdown, liberals have generally been slow to acknowledge the massively documented role of family breakdown in economic hardship...
...News headlines have restyled the Bible Belt as the "Divorce Belt," though the articles usually cast dim light on reasons for this North-South divide...
...It is true that Catholics usually come out ahead in these matrimonial scorings, but not by much...
...Of the other regions, the West—including the traditional divorce mecca, Nevada—is more divorce-prone than the Midwest...
...A shortage of self-identified Catholics is not the reason why Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi regularly rack up divorce rates twice those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York...
...the Rev...
...Catholic institutions of higher learning can better discharge that responsibility by fostering serious, frank, and informed dialogue than by enforcing the bishops' prohibition broadly and leaving such vital discussion issues to venues that are far less appropriate...
...First, the bishops pledge in Catholics in Political Life that "we commit ourselves to maintain communication with public officials who make decisions every day that touch issues of human life and dignity...
...Popenoe reasons that the better-off are more successful in marriage because they are more successful in life, and that this probably explains more about the divorce disparities than the economic travails of struggling families...
...In 1988, the first President Bush waged a winning rhetorical campaign against his Democratic rival, "the Massachusetts liberal," then-governor Michael Dukakis...
...both unions represent lower-paid, often newly immigrated workers in the service sector...
...One could peel back his argument and ask why people with resources are better at keeping their families intact, why working-class couples are less able to work it out, why marital chaos and child poverty are close cousins...
...There is at least one thing askew in this picture...
...1111(1 (l/rrisll --101fil nut° 0/ 1001 r/C(r(Ilti t(1 /)C10171C it '/rrr u,rlrt...
...In antigay Texas, the divorce rate is 4.1 per thousand people...
...Northeasterners also tend to put off marriage until a later age, a habit likewise associated with lower divorce Commonweal 12 July 16, 2004 rates—and higher socioeconomic status...
...In the United States, card check was C Commonweal 13 July 16, 2004...
...After mentioning what he saw as incidental factors having to do with income and education levels, he wrote: "But probably the most interesting and important factor at play in the Massachusetts/Texas contrast is the strong presence of Roman Catholics in Massachusetts...
...Farmer's personal wealth is estimated to be $1.5 billion...
...I wanted to see how the organizing campaign was faring on the ground...
...A witty if not so enlightening exchange took place between (gay) conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan and Stanley Kurtz, contributing editor at National Review...
...For the last year and a half, Cintas's seventeen thou-sand employees have been the focus of an organizing campaign by Unite-HERE, the new merger of the old garment and hotel workers unions, in alliance with the Teamsters...
...Social rootedness" is also often mentioned as discouraging divorce in places like New England, where people tend to be less transient...
...At least, this is not the role of Catholic universities when the position taken is as far removed from doctrinal essentials as is the bishops' position on the duties of officeholders in a representative democracy...
...Such an election can then be postponed while management pressures and proselytizes on the job, usually with the aid of professional union-busting consultants...
...Neither will the idea that Mississippi merely preaches what Massachusetts practices, or that families more likely to pray together are not necessarily more likely to stay together...
...Many will return for the July 26–29 Democratic National Convention, undoubtedly hoping to highlight the contrast between Kerry and George W. Bush, between the (divorced) liberal from a presumably antifamily state and the Texas champion of time-honored values...
...This year, partisans of the second President Bush may favor the taunt that the Bay State, which recently legalized same-sex marriage, should now be called "the Gay State...
...During a debate that seesawed in print and online for months, Sullivan played with Kurtz's contention that gay marriage will wreck marriage altogether—an argument that "1)11 1/ull /n'nmi,i' to 1(1U'1 11011(0...
...To find the most profligate rates of marital breakdown, one must look first to the southern Bible Belt, as is made clear in periodic tabulations by the U.S...
...Take two states with very different cultural attitudes to-ward gay equality, Massachusetts and Texas," Sullivan re-joined in his blog The Daily Dish ("Norwegian Death-Match," " February 3, www.andrewsullivan.com...
...explored by both bishops and Catholic politicians, as well as by voters, Catholic and otherwise, who must decide for themselves whether the views endorsed by the bishops in Catholics in Political Life are the right ones...
...Furthermore, it is not the role of Catholic universities to fall into line with positions the bishops have staked out...
...The statistics are sheer fun for liberal ironists, who can amuse themselves with the idea that self-avowed atheists are statistically less likely to throw in the marital towel than Baptist fundamentalists who take their vows before God...
...In those days, Republicans were fond of branding Massachusetts as "Taxachusetts...
...All the same, the steady link between marital implosion and economic insecurity cannot be explained away...
...The notion that moral relativists in New York are more faithful to their marriage vows than religious fundamentalists in Alabama will not be an easy swallow for some...
...According to Forbes, it is the 417th largest corporation in the United States and is run by Richard Farmer, the 140th richest American...
...Move to Massachusetts he Democrats will convene in Boston late this month to officially pronounce John Kerry their man-who-would-be-president...
...Father Robert Schreiter, Bishop William Houck, Joel Shorn, Rabbi Herman Schaalman, Father Frank Ruff, Dr...
...Presented by Glenmary Home Missioners In cooperation with the U.S...
...Card check is a process in which only a majority of employees have to sign cards saying they want a union in order to have one...
...They should therefore sponsor conferences that bring together bishops, politicians, and intellectuals who have thought about the political, philosophical, and theological questions raised by Catholic participation in political life...
Vol. 131 • July 2004 • No. 13
