Everyone knows about...

...the hypocrisy of the Republican Party. The GOP for years has branded itself as the party of "family values" while its members have shown themselves to be no more or less human than the rest of us. Mark Sanford is just the latest example. As a Congressman, Sanford voted to impeach Clinton and was an outspoken critic of Bob Livingston. I could go on and on, but this posting isn't about hypocrisy.

In today's New York Times, Charles M. Blow (not a good name) has a piece on the subject that mentions, among other things, that 8 out of the top 10 states in rates of divorce and teenage births voted Republican in the last presidential race. The accompanying chart makes it look even worse and he talks about the GOP's hypocrisy problem. But again, this post isn't about that.

It's about a book I read called Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. It was recommended by David Brooks in one of his columns. I won't say it was the greatest book I've ever read or that it changed my life or any of that, but it did give me a new perspective on the Republican hypocrisy question. And that is that rather than being hypocritical, the states with the highest divorce and teenage pregnancy rates are actually being perfectly consistent. "Huh?" you might ask. But as Douthat and Salam explain it, it makes sense.

Divorce and teenage births have highly negative impacts on a society. If you live in a state like Massachusetts, say, which ranks 49th and 48th in those two categories, you may not think those are such pressing concerns and you might not understand a candidate who talks about the importance of "family values." But if you lived in a state like Arkansas, for example, which ranks second and fourth, you would know all too well about the dangers of those two social ills. The difference, of course, is in how you tackle those two problems. In the red states, candidates and voters prefer to focus on an individual's behavior. Makes sense; if they could change it, maybe they could lower those rates a little and improve the quality of their lives. Strengthening marriage and delaying childbirth would go a long way to improving those societies. People in places like Massachusetts don't have those concerns and so don't need to focus on them as much.

I don't pretend to have the answers to these questions (shocking!), but after reading this book I understand that the people in red states might not be as hypocritical as some of us in the blue states may have thought. They are just trying to earnestly deal with some real problems in their societies. How to best accomplish that is another question.