PRESIDENT Bush and Vice President Cheney make reference to "Massachusetts liberals" as if they were referring to people with some kind of disease. I decided it was time to do some research on these people, and here is what I found.
The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.
But don't take the US government's word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates.
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that "the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
How to explain these differences? The following factors provide a partial answer:
* More couples in the South enter their first marriage at a younger age.
* Average household incomes are lower in the South.
* Southern states have a lower percentage of Roman Catholics, "a denomination that does not recognize divorce." Barna's study showed that 21 percent of Catholics had been divorced, compared with 29 percent of Baptists.
* Education. Massachusetts has about the highest rate of education in the country, with 85 percent completing high school. For Texas the rate is 76 percent. One third of Massachusetts residents have completed college, compared with 23 percent of Texans, and the other Northeast states are right behind Massachusetts.
The liberals from Massachusetts have long prided themselves on their emphasis on education, and it has paid off: People who stay in school longer get married at a later age, when they are more mature, are more likely to secure a better job, and job income increases with each level of formal education. As a result, Massachusetts also leads in per capita and family income while births by teenagers, as a percent of total births, was 7.4 for Massachusetts and 16.1 for Texas.
The Northeast corridor, with Massachusetts as the hub, does have one of the highest levels of Catholics per state total. And it is also the case that these are among the states most strongly supportive of the Catholic Church's teaching on social justice issues such as minimum and living wages and universal healthcare.
For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry's home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the "blue" states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. And they have been among the nation's leaders in promoting a living wage as their goal in public employment. The money they have invested in their future is known more popularly as taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane society. Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values.
William V. D'Antonio is professor emeritus at University of Connecticut and a visiting research professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
BOSTON --- If blue states care less about moral values, why are divorce rates so low in the bluest of the blue states? It's a question that intrigues conservatives, as much as it emboldens liberals.
As researchers have noted, the areas of the country where divorce rates are highest are also frequently the areas where many conservative Christians live.
Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas, for example, voted overwhelmingly for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. But they had three of the highest divorce rates in 2003, based on figures from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics.
The lowest divorce rates are largely in the blue states: the Northeast and the upper Midwest. And the state with the lowest divorce rate was Massachusetts, home to John Kerry, the Kennedys and same-sex marriage.
In 2003, the rate in Massachusetts was 5.7 divorces per 1,000 married people, compared with 10.8 in Kentucky, 11.1 in Mississippi and 12.7 in Arkansas.
"Some people are saying, 'The Bible Belt is so pro-marriage, but gee, they have the highest divorce rates in the country,' " said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. "And there's a lot of worry in the red states about the high rate of divorce."
The Barna Group, a California organization that studies evangelical Christian trends, has produced two studies about divorce that found that born-again Christians were just as likely to divorce as those who are not born-again Christians.
One of the reports, a survey of 7,043 people in 2001, said that: "Residents of the Northeast and West are commonly noted for their more liberal leanings in politics and lifestyle. However, the region of the nation in which divorce was least likely was the Northeast."
The other study, published two months ago, said that even though the Northeast probably had a higher rate of couples living together rather than marrying, the divorce rate would be essentially similar even if the cohabiting couples got hitched. And it said that "relatively few divorced Christians experienced their divorce before accepting Christ as their savior."
George Barna, the head of the organization, said that "a lot of really nice Christian people try to shoot down the research by saying 'Oh, they got divorced and then they became born again.' That's just not true."
What accounts for the nation's divorce dichotomy is the subject of much speculation.
Some people, like Bridget Maher, an analyst on marriage and family issues at the conservative Family Research Council, attribute it almost entirely to the religions in the different regions. "The Northeast and Midwest have high populations of Catholics and Lutherans and they have lower divorce rates than other Christians," she said.
Others, like Patrick F. Fagan, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, say it has nothing to do with differences between faiths.
"People who worship frequently no matter what their faith tend to divorce much, much, much less," said Mr. Fagan, making an argument that might unwittingly suggest that Northeasterners are more devout than other people. "All this talk about this faith, that faith, born again, not born again, to me is irrelevant."
Many experts believe the explanation to be more multidimensional, with high divorce rates tied to factors like younger age of marriage, less education and lower socioeconomic status.
"The higher the educational level, higher the occupational level, higher the income, the less likely you are to divorce," said William V. D'Antonio, a sociologist at the Catholic University of America, pointing out that Massachusetts has the highest rate of high school and college completion. "Kids who drop out of high school and get married very quickly suffer from the strains of not being emotionally mature and not having the income to help weather the difficulties of marriage."
Theodora Ooms, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, said that a recent Oklahoma study found that when Oklahomans marry, they are on average two and a half years younger than the national average.
Ms. Whitehead, who lives in Amherst, Mass., said that New England is a region that has "more stability" than other regions. "People stay here, their families stay here, and there's more social and family support for people, a more communal versus individualistic culture in New England compared to the cowboy states."
She said religion may underscore those regional differences.
"In states with lots of evangelicals, the more individualistic Protestant religious faiths may actually also encourage more go-it-alone attitudes than communal ones," Ms. Whitehead said. And these are also states where the culture encourages sexual abstinence before marriage, she said.
"If your family or religious culture urges you not to have sex before you get married," she said, "then one answer is to get married, and then you're more likely to divorce."