Word: wedlock
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...decided against Bill Clinton because of the character issue. Says she: "I think he is crooked, more so than I'm willing to put up with." (She was somewhat bewildered at TIME readers who assumed that "because I smoked pot [in high school] and had a baby out of wedlock, I'm voting for Clinton.") It took her longer to decide in favor of Dole, and went with him largely because she thought him trustworthy. On exiting the voting booth, however, she suddenly wished she had pulled the lever for Ross Perot...
Several years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested that Americans were "defining deviancy down," arguing that out-of-wedlock births, for example, had reached such epidemic proportions that Americans had lowered the threshold of acceptable moral behavior. When it comes to the highest office in the land, voters have defined the presidency down. Richard Nixon's crimes, John Kennedy's infidelities, Lyndon Johnson's ballot rigging, Ronald Reagan's and George Bush's involvement in Iran-contra--these disclosures have so eroded the moral capital of the highest job in the land that Americans expect less from the man who holds...
...people of the same sex who pledge to love each other in a legally recognized union are going to destroy marriage and by extension, society [NOTEBOOK, Sept. 16]? What is it about same-sex unions that heterosexuals find so threatening? Will more children be born out of wedlock? Will happily married couples call it quits because two men or two women are recognized as married? MARK F. PETERSON New York City
...hard to complain about a bipartisan consensus in favor of goodness. Certainly its premises are too grave to dismiss. Rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth are indeed appalling, as are the related rates of child abuse and neglect. Songs celebrating rape and murder are not the hallmark of a healthy culture. Still, it's fair to ask whether something as ideologically jumbled as the new politics of virtue can ultimately prove coherent. Can liberals and conservatives so easily embrace the same ideas without surrendering bedrock beliefs? Or, in fact, might a real moral recovery entail some bitter medicine...
...fair to say that there's a crisis of family in America. It's impossible to draw any other conclusion from the divorce rates, out-of-wedlock birth statistics and juvenile and spousal abuse cases. This crisis is feeding anxiety about the future of the nation...