It's surely an error resulting from the publishing process, but I couldn't help chuckling at the ending of the version of his latest Sunday Times piece that Andrew Sullivan has posted on his Web site:
These contradictions are not the exceptions. They are the American rule. And if you love this tortured and fascinating country, one more reason to be thankful it still exists.endit.
Or should that be chill-inducing? I suppose I'm inclined to give Sullivan the benefit of the doubt, because he's begun to make the lives of his busy critics much easier. He spends the first half of his piece talking about divorce in Red States and Blue States, especially Texas versus Massachusetts. I recently addressed aspects of this over on Anchor Rising, and both Stanley Kurtz and I addressed it when Sullivan tried the trick back in February. His latest piece doesn't appear to take our arguments into consideration.
As for that latest piece, there are some new instances of the same old trick, but I won't bother going through the motions. You know the game by now.
Posted by Justin Katz at December 5, 2004 1:27 AMI've done some numbers hunting but I haven't found an answer to this one: might the lower divorce rate in states like Massachussetts also have to do with people cohabiting without marrying more frequently in such areas?
Posted by: Dean Esmay at December 6, 2004 10:12 AMThat would bear out what I believe is Stanley Kurtz's estimation of part of the problem in Scandinavia. It would seem to fit in the case of New England also. People with conservative ideals are more than likely the majority, or at least the mainstay of the marriage numbers that those states have. What the numbers don't account for, given the higher difficulty in attaining living quarters in New England, is how many marriages break up with out the divorce statistic being generated. I've heard of at least one case where the one spouse would carry on an active social life with an outside partner even in front of the other spouse. Isn't it also getting more likely that even no-fault divorce is too expensive for some people, so they just carry on their lives being married to somebody they don't live with? I know to ordinary people, that might sound like a tax nightmare, but I think this is a possibility.
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