Another North-South divide
There is an interesting report out this morning concerning family life in the United States. The information comes via a new geographic analysis from a University of Virginia sociologist, W. Bradford Wilcox, and a psychologist, Nicholas Zill. They did the analysis after reading recent information about upward mobility and marriage and realizing that the geography of the American family differed from the standard perception of it. In spite of the lip service that they give to family values, in general, politically conservative states have some of the highest divorce rates. On the other hand, bastions of liberalism like California, the Northeast, Illinois, for example, have notably low divorce rates. What Wilcox and Zill found in their analysis, though, is that two-parent households are not just a blue state/red state issue. Rather, it seems to be more a North-South divide. An arc of states right across the northern half of the country make up the high-percentage states, while the s...