PhoboQuotable - David Frum (this one makes my skin crawl)

[WillParkinson]

PhoboQuotable - David Frum

"Bristol Palin is exactly the type of girl who would have been pushed into a shotgun marriage in 1964: Her parents were leading citizens first of their town, then their state, now the nation. Their position and reputation would have absolutely precluded an unwed mother in the family. Their friends and neighbors (and maybe more important, their daughter's friends and neighbors) would have enforced the expectation: marriage first, children second.

"Not any more. Today, nobody expects it -- quite the contrary, when Levi reveals himself to be a jerk again, every People magazine reader in the country fully sympathizes with Bristol chucking him out, again. Get married for the sake of the children? Unwed motherhood as a disgrace? What is this, the Middle Ages?

" Walker's decision was a twist in a complex legal story that stretches back to the 1990s. Many more twists lie ahead. The judge's decision will almost certainly be reversed on appeal. (Walker seems to know it, too: He suspended his own decision from going into effect until after the appellate court had its say.) But we don't have to wait for the courts to finish their work to know the answer to the big question. The harm feared from same-sex marriage has already arrived: Whether same-sex marriage is accepted or not, opposite-sex marriage as a norm and expectation has already collapsed." - Conservative columnist David Frum, writing for CNN.

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/08/phoboquotable-david-frum.html

[Enrique]

1. he doesn't believe a word of that

of course most of them are fake, but the fakeness really stands out with Frum.

[dsc]

2. actually reading the whole column

it appears he is saying at this point it doesn't matter marriage has been fucked anyhow.

[PDJane]

3. Frum is a reasonable-sounding fake,

A man with an overinflated opinion of his own intelligence. I personally think he was praised too much as a child.

[NMMNG]

4. What a crock of shit

He's actually defending "shotgun weddings", which typically result in either lifelong misery or divorce? Getting someone knocked up during a fit of teenage lust is not a foundation for a stable marriage. And same-sex marriage has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the effed up relationships between heterosexuals. It's not our fault Levi screwed Bristol and twice left her high and dry. It's not our fault Rush, Newt and others participate in revolving-door marriages. It's high time they stop blaming us for their failures.

[PanoramaIsland]

5. Even if you buy arguments that opposite-sex marriage is collapsing,

which is debatable and very complicated but probably to some extent true, the arguments that conservatives make trying to pin that to some obvious source - usually a demon of the Culture Wars coming from the left, such as feminism or Teh Gay - are more than a little specious and systemically naive. Something like the survival rate of heterosexual marriages is necessarily a confluence of many factors, ranging from a changing culture around sexuality to rising standards of living, change in the status of women, changes in divorce laws, economic changes of many kinds, attitudes towards parenthood and child-rearing, attitudes towards abortion, number of children being born, and on and on.

Of course, the central conservative talking point on this issue, more often implied than stated, is that a marriage that stays together is a good marriage. This is obviously not true; if the central goal of marriage is human happiness, then a marriage which is producing more misery than happiness, has been for some time, and has little chance of being resuscitated should be broken. Therefore, more divorce is not necessarily bad, and it may actually be driven by marriage becoming more about love and family, and less about a contract of economic and parental necessity. This may also drive the lowering of marriage rates, as people don't feel that they -need- to marry as much, and are more likely to wait until the right person comes around instead of getting hitched young and on impulse.

This false equivalency - between marriages staying together and healthy partnerships and families - is not unlike the neoliberal market fundamentalist equivalency between GDP and the overall health of a nation's economy. Just because the number is rising does not mean that the situation is necessarily good - with high marriage rates and low divorce rates, a huge number of those marriages could be dysfunctional, and with high GDP, a huge amount of that wealth could be going to a tiny elite while the vast majority starve.

It just ain't that simple.