Ab_Normal

On a (vaguely) more related note: My family, and most of the people I know, fall somewhere in the lower middle class, at best. The sacrifices made by my friends who are keeping a parent at home aren't just luxuries. At least two of them are receiving food aid from the government so their children can have good nutrition, and I know families that live in neighborhoods they would otherwise avoid for reasons of safety, because they really cannot afford to live someplace safer.

I find that folks that I talk to who equate two working parents with selfishness are thinking about families with higher incomes, where if one parent stayed home, they'd have to lose some luxuries. They aren't thinking about the choice between working swing shifts at Walmart and not having a place to live.

fatherphil

on a side note, why have we accepted the reality that the safety of a neighborhood is a factor of its income level?

Ab_Normal

I don't necessarily accept it, but I find I have to live with it. There's only so much a neighborhood watch can do.

Opera Nut

Blacks are targets of social experimentation? Huh? You talkin' bout welfare or sumthin?

People started deciding back in the 60s that marriage was meaningless? Huh?

Boy that's a sweeping statement. The higher divorce rate now means that people don't have to STAY TRAPPED in bad marriages. This has been thrashed out, and "staying together for the sake of the kids" tends to make EVERYBODY miserable.
Most everyone in my parents' generation (the ones who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s) had miserable marraiges but they didn't leave. They just nagged each other to death and made us kids miserable and insecure.

I have been divorced twice. In both cases, I took marriage very seriously, and my husbands did not. A piece of paper just made for an expensive, hellish divorce, and me spending money on incompetent lawyers, that's all.

Why do conservatives NOT get the idea that a marriage certificate CANNOT make your spouse care about you, CANNOT make your spouse treat you decently, CANNOT turn a bad marriage into a good one?

What is so difficult about the concept that a marriage license does NOT make a father stay around and support his children, nor does it make a mother stay around and support her children. It does nothing except make it much harder and far more expensive to get out of a bad relationship.

A Marraige Certificate DOES NOT make anyone responsible. People will do what they want to do, and a marriage certificate maeks NO difference to some one who really doesn't want to be married, and does not honor their vows.

WHY IS THAT SUCH A DIFFICULT CONCEPT??

BTW, having a car is not a luxury in Texas. We have NO reliable mass transit, even in the cities, and it's too damn hot most of the time to stand outside and wait for a bus (which may be late or not come at all and are driven by retarded mutants) without getting life threatening heat exhaustion. A car is a necessity in Texas, and many other places, to GO ANYWHERE.

Houston is so big that having two working people and one car, and having one person drop the other one off at work, is practically impossible unless both work at the same place, due to the incredible size of the city and the constant traffic jams.