Remember last month when the media noted that the divorce rates in supposedly conservative “red” states was higher than in purportedly liberal “blue” states? That seemed peculiar to Mark Richardson—an Australian!—so he took a closer look at the data :
So I went back to the original source. And to my surprise I found that the divorce statistics had been misrepresented in most of the mainstream media. It turns out that what was being compared was the number of divorces per 1000 people in each state rather than the number of divorces per 1000 married couples:
Rates throughout this report count the marital events reported in the past 12 months per 1,000 men or women in the population 15 and older. (p.2)
That wouldn’t be significant if roughly the same number of people got married in each US state. But that’s not the case. There is a much lower rate of marriage in the liberal north-east of the US:
. . . the states with the lowest marriage rates for men in 2009 tended to be in the Northeast. Maine and New Jersey were among the states with low marriage rates with 13.5 and 14.8 marriages per 1,000 men. Maine and New Jersey also had low marriage rates per 1,000 women, with 12.2 and 13.3 marriages, respectively. (p.4)
. . . Twelve of the thirteen states where men had marriage rates below the U.S. average were located east of the Mississippi River. (p.5)
In comparison, a state like Wyoming had a marriage rate of 28.7 – that’s more than double the rate in Maine.
So you might expect states with a higher rate of marriage to also have a higher rate of divorce. And that’s how a representative of the Census Bureau explained the statistics:
Divorce rates tend to be higher in the South because marriage rates are also higher in the South,” said Diana Elliott, a family demographer at the Census Bureau. “In contrast, in the Northeast, first marriages tend to be delayed and the marriage rates are lower, meaning there are also fewer divorces.”
That is the key quote. The demographer responsible for the statistics is explaining in the plainest of English why the divorce rate is lower in the north-east. It is because in the liberal north-east people are less likely to be married in the first place.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
