Blue states vs. red ones: Does the New York Times team get why the two are parting?

Recently I was talking with a friend who is homeschooling her daughter in the eastern part of Washington state, which is far more conservative than the Seattle area, where I live. She was agonizing over whether to return her child to public school.

She’s not afraid of Covid; Washington state was one of the most careful states on that score, and masks were mandated longer here than most other places. What she really feared was the state’s liberal sex ed law, passed when Covid was beginning to ravage the local population. Washington state was the first place in the nation to have Covid, but what was our governor, Jay Inslee, doing at the time? Pushing through a graphic sex ed curriculum. The floor debate on it went on until 2 a.m., as I described here.

A recall election to zero out the curriculum failed.

Which is all to say that when the New York Times ran a piece headlined, “New Laws Moves Blue and Red States Further Apart,” it didn’t mention some of the more obvious reasons why people are walking away. Guess what? Many of these reasons are linked to issues are linked to morality, culture and religion.

SACRAMENTO — After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.
When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from out-of-state.

The Idaho ban is slated to begin April 22, unless some federal judge knocks it down. Abortion clinics in Oregon, particularly Bend, are expecting a deluge, as the central Oregon clinic is the nearest one to Boise that has easy abortion access. (Other nearer cities, like Walla Walla, Wash., have a Planned Parenthood clinic, but that clinic doesn’t do abortions after 10 weeks. And clinics in Salt Lake City require a 72-hour waiting period.)

So, now the culture warriors at The New York Times Magazine have gifted us with a piece titled “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?” This was followed by an umpteen-word piece about couples for whom one of the major sacraments of Christianity (and most other world religions) is now a three-some, four-some or whatever radical individualists want it to be.

I can just hear some folks screaming: “We knew it was going in this direction! Say 'yes' to same-sex marriage, single parenting and it’s down the slippery slope.” I don't quite follow that line of logic, but here we are. You know many people do think that and you also know that many journalists know that there are red-zip-code people who think that.

There's even a movie out called "Open Marriage", but the results of this social experiment aren't as rosy as the magazine imagines they could be.

The article started out with a couple named Daniel and Elizabeth and, how several years into it:

Daniel would think about a radical possibility: opening up their marriage to other relationships. He would poke around on the internet and read about other couples’ arrangements. It was both an outlandish idea and, to him, a totally rational one. He eventually even wrote about it in 2009 for a friend who had a blog about sexuality. “As our culture becomes more accepting of choices outside the norm, nonmonogamy will expand as an acceptable choice, and the world will have to change as a result,” he predicted.

He was in his late 30s when he decided to broach the subject with Elizabeth gingerly: Do you ever miss that energy you feel when you’re in love with someone for the first time? They had two children, and he pointed out that having the second did not detract from how much they loved the first one. “Love is additive,” he told her. “It is not finite.” He was not surprised when Elizabeth rejected the idea; he had mostly raised it as a way of communicating the urgency of his needs.

Then Elizabeth gets Parkinson’s disease; she meets another man with similar symptoms and their relationship turns physical.

Now up to this point, the couple has a light relationship with religion.