Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture.

• Author: Huntington, Clare
• Position: Book review

RED FAMILIES V. BLUE FAMILIES: LEGAL POLARIZATION AND THE CREATION OF CULTURE. By Naomi Cahn & June Carbone. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. 288. $29.95.

INTRODUCTION

It takes only a glance at the headlines every political season--with battles over issues ranging from abortion and abstinence-only education to same-sex marriage and single parenthood--to see that the culture wars have become a fixed feature of the American political landscape. The real puzzle is why these divides continue to resonate so powerfully. In Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, Naomi Cahn (1) and June Carbone (2) offer an ambitious addition to our understanding of this puzzle, illustrating pointedly why it is so hard to talk across the political divide. In a telling anecdote in the conclusion of their book, Cahn and Carbone recount how, upon hearing that the rate of nonmarital births had risen to 38 percent of all births in the United States, a conservative commentator attributed this shift to the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage. (3) Cahn and Carbone relate their astonishment at this, given their certainty that the increase in nonmarital births was due to the prevalence of abstinence-only education, the inaccessibility of contraception and abortion, and the poor economy (pp. 206-07). They readily admit that they had no more evidence to back their conclusion than did the conservative commentator. Instead, both sides resorted to strongly felt, though unproven, intuition. As Cahn and Carbone sum it up, "[s]uch is the nature of the culture wars" (p. 207).

As a starting point for understanding this intractable state of affairs, Cahn and Carbone paint a map of American families that tracks familiar political divisions. Cahn and Carbone contend that families in politically conservative red states embrace family values that center around the "unity of sex, marriage, and procreation" (p. 2). Families in blue states, by contrast, accept premarital sex as a given and educate their children to use contraception (and abortion, if necessary) to ensure that teens and young adults do not start families until they are emotionally and financially mature (pp. 1-2).

The great irony of this divide, Cahn and Carbone note, is that family practices do not follow family values. It is blue families that embody (at least some) red values, tending to get divorced at a lower rate and have fewer teen births (pp. 20-29). In tension with their espoused values, red families have relatively high rates of divorce and teen births (pp. 20-29).

Although their map of red families and blue families has its limits--as I elaborate in Part I, the divide may be better understood to run along class rather than electoral lines--it still provides new insights into American families. More than unearthing the ironies of ideology and practice, however, Cahn and Carbone offer intriguing insights into the deep resonance of the culture wars. Drawing upon the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale and the work of scholars such as the linguist George Lakoff, Cahn and Carbone convincingly argue that the red and blue filter will continue to distort the views of anyone who dares to cross the color barrier.

Cahn and Carbone offer two central solutions to this distorting lens: changing the subject and devolving policymaking to the states. These solutions, however, are unsatisfying. In many contexts it simply is not possible to change the subject, particularly when it comes to emotional issues at the heart of political divisions over the family. And for many issues, only a national solution will work, because devolution will tend to exacerbate the very parochialism that gives rise to such deep divides about the family in the first place.

Accordingly, this Review builds on the insights of Cahn and Carbone to develop a pragmatic program for bridging the divide that neither avoids true differences nor retreats to balkanized localism. Part I provides an overview of the book, both describing its central contribution and critiquing the red-families-versus-blue-families frame. Part II presents an alternative approach to defusing the culture wars that would involve learning to talk from red to blue and blue to red and crafting acceptable compromises in values and goals--truly finding purple.

1. MAPPING AMERICAN FAMILIES

   In the first third of Red Families v. Blue Families, Cahn and Carbone present a rich description of family values and family practices, arguing that these break down largely along electoral lines. Their categories are both under- and over-inclusive, but the red and blue paradigms they describe are helpful in understanding why the culture wars continue to rage over the family in American politics.

   1. Hues of American Family Life

      The central descriptive claim of the book is that American families fall into two groups--red families and blue families. Red families espouse what are often called "traditional family values"--the ideas that sex should not precede marriage, that children should be born only within marriage, that marriage is reserved for opposite-sex couples, and that sexuality should be controlled. The strongest marker of a red family, then, is early family formation. (4)

      By contrast, blue families are more liberal in their attitudes towards family matters, believing that women should participate in the paid workforce and have the control over their fertility necessary to facilitate this participation, that men and women should play equal roles in the family and workplace, and, perhaps most importantly, that childbearing should be delayed until a couple is financially and emotionally ready (p. 1). Blue families, as a result, delay family formation until after completing college or graduate school.

      The "aha" moment in the descriptive portion of Red Families v. Blue Families is the revelation by Cahn and Carbone that family practices seem almost inversely related to family values. Blue states, with their liberal approach to family law, tend to have more traditional families, with low rates of divorce and teen pregnancy. Massachusetts, with its acceptance of same-sex marriage and relatively easy access to abortion, has the lowest divorce rate in the country (p. 28) and relatively few teen births (pp. 21-22). By contrast, Arkansas, with its opposition to same-sex marriage and dedication to abstinence-only sex education, has the second-highest divorce rate (p. 28) and a high rate of teen births. (5) And--perhaps providing liberals with a dose of schadenfreude--the majority of evangelical teens become sexually active earlier than their peers who are members of religions with less strict attitudes towards sexual activity (pp. 4, 41-42).

      As longtime family law scholars, Cahn and Carbone are too familiar with their subject to attribute a causal relationship to family structure and family law regimes. Instead, they carefully note that levels of income and age of marriage are the best indicators of divorce. For example, because men and women in Idaho marry at the second-lowest median age, it is no surprise that their divorce rate is among the highest in the country (pp. 25-28). By contrast, Connecticut has the fourth-highest median age of marriage and has a divorce rate among the lowest in the country (pp. 25-28).

      Although the frame is engaging, it ignores segments of the American public--most notably lower-income African Americans and middle- and upper-income supporters of Republican candidates--for whom family form does not necessarily follow voting patterns. The book thus elides several distinctions: class (non-college versus college graduates), voting patterns (Republican versus Democratic candidates), family form (early versus delayed family formation), and family values (sex in marriage versus sexual freedom). The conflation of educational attainment and voting patterns, in particular, tends to hide important variations in the red-blue families paradigm.

      A look at a few statistics not cited by Cahn and Carbone illustrates this point: according to exit polls, 52 percent of college graduates voted for Bush in 2004, (6) and 48 percent voted for McCain in 2008. (7) Do these individuals fall within the red paradigm because they voted Republican, or the blue paradigm because, as college graduates, their families are more likely to be founded on marriage, have delayed family formation, have low divorce rates, and so on? (8)

      Similarly, the frame does not accurately depict nonwhite Americans, particularly lower-income African Americans, whose voting patterns are overwhelmingly blue, (9) but whose family form is more red, with, for example, higher rates of teen births (pp. 21-22). To maintain their frame, then, Cahn and Carbone control for race. For example, they cite statistics showing that the teen pregnancy rate for whites is lowest in the blue states of New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, and highest in the red states of Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee--but this is only true when African American and Latino teenagers are exluded (pp. 21-22).

      Cahn and Carbone admit these limitations, noting that "neither the family practices of minority communities nor the internal divisions within them translate automatically into the same construction of red and blue paradigms, nor do they necessarily carry the same political salience" (p. 11). Their solution is to acknowledge that the book is really about a particular segment of America, stating that "It]he world views we are constructing in this volume, while they overlap with the views of many individual minorities, do not adequately address either the way the debate is framed within minority communities nor the way minority communities might prioritize their own family needs." (10)

      Although these omissions are troubling, it is unlikely that any overarching descriptive claim about an institution as varied as the American...