Ruminations

Selecting Statistics : Take Your Pick

"Red regions of the country have higher teen pregnancy rates, more shotgun marriages and lower average ages at marriage and first birth."
"Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families."
Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, "Red Families v.Blue Families", 2010

"Child marriage is happening at an alarming rate across the United States, but available marriage-license data show more parents, judges and clerks in red states than in blue states seem comfortable with this human-rights abuse."
Fraidy Reiss, founder, Unchained at Last nonprofit

"Individual religious conservatism is positively related to individual divorce risk."
American Journal of Sociology 50-state study

There are always statistics that can be handily selected that will advance preferred theories. It isn't that the statistics are not necessarily reliable in demonstrating the reality of issues, it's that there are often complicating issues within the subject that tend to tilt outcomes in one way or another. Which goes a long way to repeating that the devil is in the details.

Take, for example, political ideologies and how they differ, what their premises are and their values and how they're upheld and what the consequences are. Conservatives, for example can be relied upon to cite their foremost value as being one that upholds the status of the traditional, conventional family: "Family values" has sanctity status; a phrase very familiar to voters in particular, most especially during election times.

In the conventional sense, family values are fairly precise; no premarital sex, children only within the sacrament of marriage, and children raised in two-parent families for optimum outcomes. Despite which, conservative areas reflect high rates of teenage pregnancies, divorce and rates of prostitution, whereas liberal areas, while abstaining from insisting on "family values" because they pride themselves on being more "socially progressive", end up with fewer teen births, divorces and prostitution.

Mississippi, Delaware, West Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas high school students self-reported having had sex in responding to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 32 states. Delaware was the only state among them that voted Republican in the last presidential election. Whereas New York, California, Maryland, Nebraska and Connecticut all reported the lowest proportion of high school students who experienced sex encounters, with Nebraska among them having voted Democratic.

In 2015, nine of ten states surveyed with the highest teen birth rates had voted Republican, and nine of the ten states with the lowest teen birth rates had voted Democratic. Liberals boast they are relaxed about strict moral codes while in their personal lives they teach their children the inappropriateness of high school students engaging in sex. On the other hand evangelical students who have sex are unlikelier to use birth control and have a lower rate of abortions.

While averse to pre-marital sex, conservative positions sometimes lead to early marriages, even where the principals are considered to be children. Hundreds of thousands of child marriages take place in the United States. The dozen states ranking with the highest rates of child marriage had all voted Republican in 2015. Divorce too tends to be higher in red states as opposed to blue; Arkansas leading the pack.

A large international survey discovered that Ashley Madison's most numerous group of clients were evangelical Christians. According to a major study from 2013, men in the Houston and Kansas City metro areas were likelier to call on sex advertisers, while men in San Francisco and Baltimore were less likely to indulge. And then there are Mormons, the ultra-conservative conservatives where Utah stands alone for low teen birthrates, low divorce and low abortion rates.

Utah also has the greatest number of teenagers living at home with their married, biological parents. Interestingly, when Mormonism was founded one of the guiding principles and beliefs was that men were ordained by god to have multiple wives. Due to Federal government pressure, the mainstream Mormon church dropped that major plank in its religion, and now it is the breakaway faction, the Church of Latter-Day Saints that pursues multiple wives in a single marriage with illegal gusto.

Statistical analysis indicates that religious conservatives more commonly divorce in response to early marriages where the partners come from disproportionately poor backgrounds and are poorly educated. It is not, therefore, conservative values themselves that inevitably lead to premarital sex or divorce.