Oh, boy. Mitt Romney gave a speech at Liberty University, and made it clear what side he’s taking.
The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family. The power of these values is evidenced by a Brookings Institution study that Senator Rick Santorum brought to my attention. For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2%. But, if those things are absent, 76% will be poor. Culture matters.
Wait, what? Has this man never heard of cause and effect? So if you’re a high school graduate and get a good job, you aren’t poor. If you’re poor, you’re less likely to graduate from high school and get a good job. Sure, culture matters: so why are the Republicans trying to perpetuate poverty?
I don’t see where getting married before having children has a causal relationship to the problem, either, or where it’s relevant to gay marriage.
As fundamental as these principles are, they may become topics of democratic debate. So it is today with the enduring institution of marriage. Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman. The protection of religious freedom has also become a matter of debate. It strikes me as odd that the free exercise of religious faith is sometimes treated as a problem, something America is stuck with instead of blessed with. Perhaps religious conscience upsets the designs of those who feel that the highest wisdom and authority comes from government.
What’s the probability that a gay married couple are poor? I think if he’s going to try and justify a particular pattern of relationships by correlating them with socioeconomic status, I suspect the lesson might be that the god of the prosperity gospel actually favors gay couples.
I expect that this is going to be a major talking point on the Republican side in the coming months. I hope Obama is ready to sharpen his rhetoric and come out a lot more strongly on the issue than he did in his tepid announcement.
Maaaaybe. Or, perhaps secular conscience upsets the designs of those who feel it their business to turn the government into an instrument of their non-existent god’s “wisdom” and “authority” rather than letting this supposedly supreme and all-powerful being enforce his own shit.
Translation: Every man for himself.
Translation: Cheap labor.
Translation: Religious indoctrination, and enough other stuff to train cheap labor.
Translation: See above.
Translation: Deference to those with greater monetary wealth.
Translation: Pump out more offspring for the mills and don’t even think about enjoying any other kind of sex.
Rey Fox pretty much nailed the translation.
“It strikes me as odd that the free exercise of religious faith is sometimes treated as a problem…”
Translation – the religious should be able to enforce their will on anyone at anytime. Whatcha plaining bout?
According to an article in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/12/romney-marriage-man-woman Republicans might be making a mistake by thinking this is a winning issue.
“Jan van Lohuizen, the pollster for President George Bush in his successful 2004 re-election bid, has circulated a memo warning the Republican party that support for gay marriage is growing across America’s electoral landscape.
The memo reported that up to 2009 support for the issue grew at an average of about one percent a year but that that rate had increased to 5% a year since 2010.
While more Democrats support gay marriage than Republicans, support levels among Republicans are increasing over time.”
Let’s hope van Lohuizen is right.
That brings back memories of 1964, when people were parodying Barry Goldwater by saying that in America, everybody has the right to inherit a department store.
Translation: Refusing to marry same-sex couples is an exercise of religious freedom. Choosing to marry same-sex couples is a restriction of other people’s religious freedom.
Or something. I can’t really follow the logic.
Sounds like Romney is warming up his election violin to play a tune called “Them gays is all rich so whadda they need marriage for?” Rather clever as this exploits two prejudices at once, homophobia and envy of the rich, with undertones of rural envy of those living in big cities.
That meme is, however, simply false. More precisely, a lie. (No surprise there.) There are plenty of poor gays around. They’re just not very visible because (ta-da!) they’re poor. They don’t have the money to go to clubbing or to buy a wardrobe of leather or anything else showy. For many, just as for the population at large, it’s a struggle to provide the basic necessities of life: food, clothing, housing, medical care.
You go to the right kind of gay hookup site and you’ll see profiles by dirt farmers in Arkansas, for example, and many many gay men living in out of the way, backwards places far from the bright lights of major cities. Places that tell you “this guy isn’t rich.”
And gays are disproportionately represented among homeless youth and, I strongly suspect, the older homeless.
Moreover, for Mr. Silverspoon to talk about personal responsibility, working hard, or anything else along those lines is simply an evil joke.
Or if you have a steady job, you can afford to get married?
Or if you don’t graduate from high school, you have trouble finding any job that will both feed you and put a roof over your head?
Oh, come on! Don’t downplay his struggle! After all, he started at vice-president and worked his way up!
And, on the roof of the car, the pre-eminence of the family dog.
Well, you know, Mitt, most of those things are actually morally neutral concepts. What are you personally responsible for? What sort of purpose are you devoting yourself to? We need to debate the definitions of these things.
Of course, in Mitt’s world, the “highest authority” doesn’t have to worry about debates or votes or any of that pesky shit that Mitt doesn’t care for.
Okay, let’s add the history of his own religion to the list of things he doesn’t know anything about.
Killed By Fish
WTF’s the link between paragraph #1 and paragraph #2 ?
Apparently Mr. Romney was too busy assaulting kids and old professors in high school to learn logic.
Don’t be unfair. He means American marriage. Not Mexican marriage like that disgusting Milès Parque el Romneyon (no relation).
teen pregnancies alone probably skew the fuck out of that correlation alone; plus, single mothers really are a disproportionately large proportion of the poor.
Nothing that access to contraception and abortion as well as taxpayer funded childcare services couldn’t fix better than shotgun weddings and abusive marriages.
“at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family”
And this is why the United States will crumble to dust *. The families and marriages of about 97% of the population are so weak, so tenuous, that the prospect that marriages and families might exist in the other 3% of the population will destroy them utterly. With the foundation, so goes the building. That is what you are saying, isn’t it Mitt?
Maybe it is time for a massive rebuilding of the foundation. Dissolve all of the existing marriages, and let everyone start over with new ones that aren’t so fragile. Come up to Canada for a look at how it’s done. We seem to made of much sterner stuff.
* Of course it doesn’t help that the country is put together with wingnuts – not the most secure of fasteners.
I think it is a good thing to get the republican candidate and hopefully the whole reactionary base really wound up about the “culture wars” . the louder they become the better that is all they got any way. the longer they talk about these issues and the more vitriolic they become the clearer the choice becomes. It is not so good for the right wing. In the past the liberal have acted defensive when confronted with these types of hot button issues of the conservative’s. That has proved a mistake, by avoiding the controversy the agenda has just been controlled by the conservatives and has as has been noted before moved further to the right. Quiet but not to quiet resistance is often enough to get the radical right upset the resistance just has to be as public as possible not in the halls of congress but on the 6 o’clock news
if you are going to have to fight a bull(y) do what a matador does, he enrages the bull so as to make him easy to control and thus kill.
this mittens has proven to be tone deaf and totally lacking in empathy or understanding of what reality is.
uncle frogy
Romney is either an utter fool for promoting some crap study as if it were even true (or perhaps he’s misrepresenting a decent study) or he’s simply a Liar for Joseph Smith. I think I’d concentrate on telling those good ol’ southern folk that Mitt Romney doesn’t believe in their Jesus – he’s the serpent telling Eve what she wants to hear, not the truth, and sweet-talking her into eating that apple.
Wait a minute — he was directed by Rick Santorum to a study pointing out the value of a college education? What a snob!
Now that Obama has “come out”, this is going to be the primary issue for Republicans at all levels all across the country. As much as they’d like to blame it on Obama, the economy is really pure poison for them.
high-school education
It’s all sooooo simple for Mitt. Come over and try to cut my hair, Mitt – you fukker.
yep. which is why I still think he could and should have skipped the “states-rights” BS and just come right out with support for gay marriage, since it didn’t weaken the attacks on him any, but would have alienated fewer progressives in the process.
Are you sure about that? And as marriage is encouraged through various benefits (some of them they fought for *), why would it be surprising to conservatives that married straight couples are better off?
* They also fight for disadvantaging single moms as seen with TANF.
This is the guy whose Mormon grandfather fled the USA after the feds pressured the Mormons into “suspending” polygamy on earth.
The one whose god on Kolob is married to a whole fleet of goddess wives who are so important no one even knows our celestial mothers’ names.
IIRC, to progress to godhood in the highest Mormon heaven, you have to be a postlife polygamist.
Clearly Romney is both a flaming hypocrite and judging that his audience, probably correctly, doesn’t know anything about his kooky cult.
“I don’t see where getting married before having children has a causal relationship to the problem, either, or where it’s relevant to gay marriage.” – PZ
I think I know the answer to this one!
Kid’s born out of wedlock are seen as “bastards”.
Women who give birth to bastards are deemed “whores”.
Yup, too much Game of Thrones in one sitting.
Anyway, those designations have been around for so long that they are unspoken disqualifications during the hiring process since they are seen to be “failures of character”. A corporation with “high moral standards” (ha) would consider those individuals to be of a lower class and therefore unworthy of executive position within the corporate framework.
Fuck you, fundies!
Fuck you and your feudalistic mentality that keeps a young girl with a high IQ who decided NOT NOT TO HAVE AN ABORTION from being allowed into your Magic Club.
I notice that there are few coins-of-phrase that describe the fathers of bastards.
I see “Playas” and “Kings”.
I despise both.
A high school education will get you an entry level job. In my company, every supervisory and managerial job requires at least a bachelor’s degree. I doubt my company is unique in this regard.
Every woman and every child for every man.
Like… putting stuff on supermarket shelves.
Not flipping burgers. That’s mostly occupied by poor university students.
</snark>
true enough.
I don’t know shit about this study, but given the nature of such studies, these high-school diplomas that resulted in well-paying jobs would have been happening at least a decade ago. And I do think that in the 90’s, it probably was still possible enough to get a decent job with only high-school to make the stats come out the way they did.
Plus, it’s likely that the stats work out that way because it’s very likely not the category of “highest education level: high-school” being compared to those who didn’t finish high-school, but rather “at least high-school” being compared with those that didn’t even get a high-school degree.
–>take with a massive grain of salt, since I am just speculating<–
Mitt:
I agree. Access to sex education and birth control decreases poverty and makes for a better society.
…I get the feeling “cause and effect” is one of those sinful heresies. Poor folks are poor because they didn’t try hard enough to graduate school and get a good job; it’s inconceivable that they might not have graduated or got a good job BECAUSE they’re poor. Kids turn gay or have sex because of non-demonizing talk about sexuality; it’s inconceivable that kids might be LGBT or have sex ANYWAY and therefore deserve humane treatment. And let’s not forget that gay kids commit suicide because they weren’t bullied and punished ENOUGH, because bullying is totes healthy and natural and couldn’t possibly cause permanent damage in its victims.
Naw… can’t have cause and effect as a real thing in the world, noway nohow.
These days in the high population centers even a bachelor’s is barely enough to get work. I work as the token woman on the local (sorta…) Geek Squad. All my computer knowledge is self-taught BTW; the degree is in geology.
The bachelor’s has become the new high school diploma in many places, the key difference being you don’t need to go into decades of debt for the HS diploma. More and more I think we need to instate “tracking” in this country; Calvinist as it sounds, a good 50% of the population isn’t cut out for higher education and we need to honor construction workers and ditch diggers as much as, say, civil engineers.
Now if only we could implement it in a way which wouldn’t end up being horrendously racist and classist…ugh ><;
And to get those positions, you need to be willing to mortgage your future by putting yourself into unspeakable debt for the rest of your life.
Making sure we understand Mitt and Ann Romney’s struggles:
Mitt Romney and Ann: the students “struggling” so much that they had to sell stock.
Is this a false dichotomy? It appears he’s posing the choices for “wisdom and authority” as either “religious conscience” or “government.” But he’s forgetting reason, empiricism, science, common sense, intelligence…oh, but wait, he’s an idiot isn’t he?
And as an atheist, I’m not opposed to anyone’s free expression of religion. What I’m opposed to is religion being expressed through the authority of government, being imposed on us who don’t want it, and getting special deals from our secular government. But, of course, in this Orwellian world, the perps have to play the victim.
of course; one based on the fact that for authoritarians, there always has to be a higher authority: they cannot imagine societies functioning in any way other than by being managed top-down, hierarchically. bottom-up*, much less wholly egalitarian, societies are anarchy, chaos, and liberal pinko phantasies (that end up in stalinism, or alternatively Sharia, inevitably)
– – – – – –
*tea-party rambling about being grassroots individualists notwithstanding, since they’re still jingoists and/or fundies, and have shown no compunction in stuffing government into other people’s lives.
I remember a video that ran the web a while back where the guy did a parody on “one man one woman” by using “marriages” defined strictly within the bible.
anyone still have the link to that?
it was hilarious.
ah, never mind, found it:
BIBLE BASED MARRIAGE
I get the feeling “cause and effect” is one of those sinful heresies.
yup, if you accept cause and effect, it just leads to *gasp* MATERIALISM!!
<blockquote.“We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.
“The stock came from Mitt’s father.
Oh my god. I see that was published in January. Why didn’t it get more press? That deserves to be spread far and wide.
Translating what Mitt R. says to the Walking Dumb that are being taught the benefits of eating flaing lead paint is simple: “I will tell you whatever you want, and what I perceive – or have been told by my advisors – you want is any excuse to fear and hate those who not only disagree with your narrow minds and empty hearts but have the nerve to not particularly care about your fear or hatred, unless it actively harms them and those they love. Oh, and don’t expect, should America decided to commit suicide and elect me, more than the weakest possible fufillment of anything I say to you here, because I do not give a shit about you stupid, un-rich tools.”
Romney is perhaps the worst human being ever to become the candidate for either of the major parties, and so towers as a colussus above the inhumans that contested the primaries. If the nation allows him, though money or fraud, to become President, it certainly deserves him and the collapse he will lead.
Also from Lynna’s linked article (the original, 1994 interview is behind a paywall):
Y’know… just… *headshake*
No income – except stock. Important to stay home with the kids instead of working. Rent too high for crap housing? Buy a house instead! And… dare I ask how they waited four years to space out their children? Pure thoughts?
Some good links in the comments there, too:
And this is from Taibbi in Rolling Stone, also via comments: link
*CORRECTION: – the Rolling Stone article I linked isn’t the notorious Taibbi, it’s by Rick Perlstein. That’s what I get for not double-checking the byline myself. *headdesk*
let me guess; that was ages before the housing bubble?
there may still be parts of ND where such a cheap house was to be had in the last decade (maybe even again now), but no city or town of any size (that isn’t Detroit) has houses that cheap.
you know, my boyfriend has been wanting to be a “kept man” for forever. Somehow me being in school and working isn’t making that particularly possible though; don’t foresee it being any more possible if I spawned on top of that. So bite me with your delight at having the means not to work.
Oh c’mon.
Can’t you just sell some stock or something? Surely, your parents must have given you a few million dollars worth of Intel or Apple stock to tide you over the lean times while you go to school and have a few kids.
I’m just casually following this thread. I have a quesy stomach already and… well, no point in getting any sicker.
I notice that the accounts of Romney’s poverty years as a student doesn’t mention the dollar value of the stock which seems to have been enough to pay for two college degrees, a Harvard and Stanford postgraduate education, a few kids, and a house in Boston.
I’m guessing that it was in the millions of dollars at least back when a million US dollars was real money and not the North American peso.
In a sense it is no big deal, an accident of birth. But it’s really nauseating for them to pretend they were poor. The vast majority of Americans know what poor it, they are either poor, working like mad to stay out of poor, and/or see poor every day and know poor people.
@Raven
No you don’t understand.
THEY THINK THEY WERE POOR.
That is why they act like they do, they literally think everyone else had it as “hard” as they did.
Quoting again from the blog post that Lynna linked (this is the blog author, not the 1994 interview):
From comments there:
Given that the majority of USians approve of homosexual marriage, it may have been an astute move on the Democrats’ part to do this. Yes, they will lose votes in some states, but would they have won those states anyway?
I take it that others can follow the link in the article? It redirects for me and leads me to 404ville. No matter, CNN tells of how Santorum gave Mitt marching orders on this point. Who really won the leadership of that party? (It wasn’t the best candidate.)
For those who are from a stable family with a steady income, the probability that they will be poor is extremely low. For those who aren’t, most will be poor.
If you didn’t want to be poor, you should simply have had rich parents. So really, this is your own fault, poor people.
Why in the hell is Romney babbling on about this stuff anyway.
What is he going to do as President about it? Round up all the high school dropouts, unemployed, and single parents and gas them to death in concentration camps?
Or just take away their comprehensive sex ed, access to birth control, and access to abortion so we have even more single parents dropping out of high school? (Which is exactly what Santorum wants to do and what the Tea Party is doing right now.) Make the single parents wear a Scarlet “A”.
Or maybe just cut public education, another target of the christofascists. Or the taxes to actually pay for it.
Bill Clinton had it right long ago. It’s the economy, stupid!!!
I don’t see the cult god babble as a winning strategy. We have some real and serious problems in the USA right now.
This.
Somehow, every time Mitt or Ann try to relate to the average American, I just hear “If they have no bread, why don’t they eat cake?”
Why didn’t it get more press?
good question.
I bet the answers really, really, would make me depressed though.
That too. :)
What hypocrisy on the part of Liberty University to invite a man whose religion they considered a demon inspired cult. The school leadership is well aware of the doctrinal differences between their Evangelical faith and Mitt Rommey’s Mormon religion.
Franklin Graham has claimed President Obama is shaking his fist at god because he now supports gay marriage. Wonder if Mr. Graham thinks the evangelical base is shaking its fist at god for choosing a Mormon over a sound evangelical like Rick Perry?
The Southern Baptist death cult does have an official position on Mormonism. Here it is:
Mormonism is a false cult and they are all going to hell. Mohler is the head of the largest SBC seminary in the world (and one of the eviler humans on the planet). Noliberty U. is an offshoot of the Southern Baptists.
Oh well, hate and hypocrisy beats theology any day.
Ohh FFS, the secular definition of marriage is to do with economic rights. It leaves everyone free to celebrate marriage in any way they wish. The fuckwits on the right can have their one man, one woman only and everyone else can have whatever suits them.
Over and over again we get this reversal of “if you don’t let me tell you how to live you are oppressing me”.
The teabaggers are not at all against having a higher authority. They’re just unhappy with the one they have, so they want another – which would (claim to) be based on an even higher authority, namely tradition, , God.
Except when it leads to the . Then cause & effect are suddenly totes obvious and undeniable.
I have nothing to add, I’m out of words.
Oh, for a basic-income guarantee.
BTW, I was introduced to that idea, along with the rest of my class, by the religion teacher. He only brought it up once, but clearly liked it a lot.
your confusion is understandable, but that’s not what “religious freedom” has stood for over the last few months. Recently, it was code for “women shouldn’t be able to afford BC if they work for me”.
Also, code for “freedom to bully gay-looking kids”, “freedom to deny life-saving healthcare to women”… you get the idea.
Oh well, hate and hypocrisy beats theology any day.
No, hell, if seeing the religious arm of the political RWA manipulation machine selecting Mitt Romney, FFS, doesn’t convince you this has fuck all to do with attitudes and beliefs, and everything to do with manipulating rwas as a voting bloc, I have little hope anyone will get the clue.
*sigh*
It is my firm belief that instead of jumping into trigonometry and calculus, which plenty of high school kids cheat their way through without understanding, after (or possibly even before) basic algebra, the next math class should be probability and statistics. If they really get it, it will make the more advanced math subjects more interesting since they can be related to real world uses, and more importantly, for fuck’s sake we need people to have a fundamental understanding of probability and statistics so that when they hear crap like what Romney is spewing they realize that he’s (or whoever he got this statistic from has) just cherry picked variables until they could make the relationship they wanted. We have no knowledge of the influence on the results of the marriage before children variable.
I’m quite convinced that for people to be good citizens and voters in a scientifically and technologically advanced age they simply have to have a solid, early training in probability and statistics, and it’s far more important than a lot of what they’re getting in math class in the U.S. And frankly, easier. No one should graduate high school without understanding the basics of stats.
Mormons wanting to define what constitutes a legally recognized marriage makes me laugh. Of course there’s the aforementioned history of Mormon polygamy, but even now Mormons maintain their own religious definition of marriage that is completely separate from legal marriage. You are not married as a Mormon until you have a temple wedding. They, of all religious people, ought to recognize that what your church recognizes as a marriage is between you and your church, and legal marriage is an entirely separate matter of a legal contract between two parties and overseen by the state as a matter of law. There is no reason for one to ever have anything to do with the other. We should really make this split more clear by removing the need that many states maintain to have some form of official solemnization of marriages. By doing so, states could get out of the business of deciding who can and cannot solemnize marriages, and your religious ceremony would be completely unnecessary from a legal standpoint.
Fixed that for you, Mitt.
* Removed in the 1970s
Gaaah, that reminded me of another idiocy from my fundie upbringing – anything involving chance was gambling and therefore evil, such as cards, dice, flipping coins, drawing colored stones out of a bag… which made teaching the basics of statistics all but impossible. I vaguely remember getting in trouble for flipping a coin during study time to decide which math problems to work on; and we weren’t allowed to play any board games involving dice, or even CARRY dice. (Instead I rolled my six-sided pencils. <_< )
I wouldn't be surprised to find that fundie schools ban statistics for just this reason.