Janet Folger, president and founder of Faith2Action, said unmarried women tend to be more focused on themselves. "Married women, on the other hand," Folger said, "are more concerned about their children and the future and what (that) future might hold." ... Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, said it may also be about a need for security. "When (a woman) doesn't have a husband to help her support the family," she said, "she looks to government to fill in the gap."There you have it -- married women are properly dependent on their husbands and caring, and that's why they're Republicans, while single women are lazy and selfish (after all, why else would any woman be single?), and that's why they're Democrats.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Good women and bad women
Single women are more likely to vote for Kerry, while married women are more likely to vote for Bush. That's from a USA Today/Gallup poll.
Focus on the Family (how I love them!) got ahold of this data and published the following proposed explanations for it:
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Not only is this offensive, but it's explicitly refuted by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7, where he says that married women tend to be less spiritually advanced than single women because they worry about earthly material things instead of devoting themselves to the things of the Lord. I'm not saying I agree with Paul, but you'd think Focus on the Family would check with the Bible before making this sort of statement.
ReplyDelete-Savannah
Guys, this is reality - single people are more selfish and less focused on the future than those who are married with children. And if you don't have kids, you can't understand. I know, you think you can, but imagine this - your future self appears, having traveled back to now in a time machine. What does he say? "Dude, shut up about kids until you have some." Good advice.
ReplyDeleteTo the other commenter person: OK, imagine this-- your future self appears, having traveled back to now in a time machine. What does he say? "Bow down and worship the mighty Savannah, who is all wise and all powerful."
ReplyDeleteDone imagining? Convinced in any way? Me neither.
-Savannah
Savannah, my goal of course was not to convince you, you're beyond convincing until your own personal experience catches up. But the more open-minded can see my point. Ciao.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I'm confused. Clarify, please:
ReplyDeleteSavannah and I don't understand that single women are more selfish because something about us makes us kind of dense in this respect. Is it (1) because we're not mothers? Or is it (2) because we're closed-minded?
So far, all we have seems to be a claim like this: "People of type X are better than other people, but you can't recognize their superiority unless you're of type X."
You'll forgive me for being skeptical.
First of all, when an organization produces a news story that reports a number of competing explanations for a poll result, it's a little unfair to criticize them for holding one of those views themselves when they never said they as an organization hold any of those views. All they did was report a few explanations.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I think we need to distinguish between selfishness and self-interest, and then I think the point Anonymous probably intended to make becomes more clear. Single people who do not have kids really do tend to be more self-interested than married people, simple because they aren't as attached to anyone else in terms of daily responsibilities (except maybe pets if you count them), and this difference is strongly increased between singles without kids and marrieds with kids. I think that's just obvious. When you tie this together with the fact that most people who are tending toward Kerry with this election are doing so for domestic issues and most tending Bush are doing so for national security reasons, then it sort of makes sense that you might think married people are more worried about their families and thus placing national security as a higher priority than having more material possessions. This is just placing two polling trends together.
I don't actually think it's a good explanation, because I believe that I as a poor person am more likely to do better financially if Bush has another term, and there are people who prefer Kerry because they think his foreign policies will keep them safer. So I'm not sure it's a good explanation, but it's not as if there's nothing to it.
As for not understanding it until you have kids, I think that's true. There's nothing I can do to communicate to someone without kids what it's like to have kids anymore than my wife can communicate to me what it's like to give birth. There are so many elements of it that would have been impossible for me to anticipate no matter what people with kids could have told me beforehand.
Hmm.. i'm going to go against the grain here. I actually don't really have a problem with the statment that single women are more concerned about themselves only. I am a bit more offended at the second part of the statement, that women who don't have a husband to take care of them turn to government to take care of them.
ReplyDeleteI do think if I had kids, i'd be more inclined to worry about issues than would affect them in the future... education, whether there is going to be a draft, etc.. than I am now, more concerned with issues which immediately concern me personally. That's all I really take from the first statement.
My problem is more with the conclusion that people worried about the future prefer Bush while people worried only about themselves prefer Kerry. This makes all sorts of assumptions that aren't even remotely proven.
I may not have kids, but I can definitely say i'd hesistate to bring any children into this world if Bush achieved the dictatorship he'd love to get.
-comeondieyoung