I was catching up on my “magazine reading” last night and came across my Vanity Fair. James Wolcott’s article, Red State Babylon had some interesting statistics. Seems the party of family values don’t really live by those values. They’re real good at talking about them……. but do they live them? Seems not! Some of the statistics:

The 10 states in the union with the highest divorce rates in 2004 (among the 45 states for which figures are available) were all red.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, of states with the highest percentages of births in 2003 to unwed mothers, 9 of the top 10 were red.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the 10 states with the highest number of total inmates per 100,000 residents in 2003, 9 were red.
Of the 10 states with the most female inmates per 100,000 residents that same year, all were red.
Red States tend to be the most violent places to live.… Red States dominate the rankings of violent crimes despite their emphasis on judgment and incarceration.
It’s never fun having your ass shot off, but the odds of that occurring seem higher in the red states, which account for all of the top 15 states in rates of death by firearms (2003).
Of the 15 states with the highest adjusted rates of suicide (2003), 14 are red.

In contemporary lore, the good people of the red states walk in Jesus’s sandals while the rest of us are following Satan into the licking flames. Twenty-plus years of conservative propaganda have convinced millions of Republicans and their pet Beltway pundits that they inherited the legacy of frontier values and dwell in baptismal light, unlike modern Democrats, who crawled out from under rocks and prefer the ambiguous dark, where there’s no right or wrong, only “personal choices.” Newt Gingrich once spouted that Susan Smith’s murder of her two children in 1994 was a sign of the evil that liberal Democrats had wrought: “I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things…. The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” According to the gospel of Saint Newt, William J. Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and similar blowholes, the dying raptures of Sodom and Gomorrah can be found in the cultural duchies of the blue states. Here sin and moral sloth have set up shop, and venereal outbreaks of trendy ideas go unchecked.

Full article here

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