God I hope this gets on the ballot.

I’m sure it doesn’t have a shot in hell of passing, but it’ll be fun to compare the “anti-gay marriage” and “anti-straight marriage protection” maps come 2011.

Actually, the fastest way to end California amendments would be to get some truly scary shit on the ballots.  Maybe an amendment to declare Mormonism the state religion (in tribute to the brave souls that helped pass Prop 8).  Maybe an amendment that requires you to present proof of citizenship before being named CEO of a California based company.  Hell, how about a law against speaking any language but the King’s Ye Olde English inside state lines?  (Conservatives want everyone to speak English, right?)

I mean, people can’t tolerate this forever, right?

You know, I don’t like Bazelon’s line, “If kids don’t have enough chances to deal with the world on their own, in all its complications—and yes, Amanda, I agree this includes catcalls—then they grow up fragile and timid and brittle. ” It’s a vague comment of the sort that tends to induce parental angst and panic and second- and third- and fourth-guessing. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I really hate the cacophony of child-rearing messages spewed at women- you’re going to goddamned DESTROY your child if you don’t find just the right line. Why not put forth her own arguments without cheap shots at strawmen? Amanda managed to handily enough.

Actually, the fastest way to end California amendments would be to get some truly scary shit on the ballots.

How about no marriage for anyone under thirty? You know, to make sure they have enough time to mull over the decision. Wouldn’t want to rush it, would we?

Unfortunately, I’m not in CA. I would love to sign the petition…..and to vote for the damned thing.

It’s hard for me to understand the driving-kids-to-school thing, because doesn’t almost every place offer bus rides for free?  If you’re really paranoid about your kid walking a few blocks, why can’t they just take the bus to and from school?  Sorry if I’m being very naive here, but I actually lived less than a mile away from my school in seventh grade, and I was still offered a bus ride, along with some kids who were even slightly closer.  I usually walked, but the bus was always available during bad weather.

I walked five blocks to school; when I started the first grade someone walked with me the first few times, but after that I was on my own. There was a crossing guard at the busiest street, but for the others I was on my own.

This was, of course, almost five decades ago. I doubt if it would be any more dangerous today.

The walking thing gets to me.  Of all my students, there is one who walks to the afterschool class I teach.  All the other are driven, even if they live very close by.  And with the one who walks, his mom is being effected by this paranoia that’s going around, because when he walks, she calls to make sure he got there.  Honestly, all this panic about kids not exercising gets aimed at video games, but it seems to me if there’s a decline it’s because kids are being driven everywhere.

Are you related to John Marcotte?  Or do you know if you are?

That’s really cool.  Even if you aren’t closely related to him.  The only downside is that I honestly see no chance of such a measure getting passed, but as a political tool, I would hope that it makes people in the middle really think about who it is that they empowered when they voted against gay marriage last year.

We’re never gonna win the people on the right, and frankly, who cares, but we need to sway the mushy middle to the morally correct side of this debate.  They’re coming along slowly but surely, I just wish they would hurry up.  Gay marriage should have been legal in all 50 states yesterday.

I grew up in the Chicago burbs in one of the most paranoid and overwrought towns I’ve ever come across. I lived within a mile from the school and did not have a bus available to me, even though my daily walk involved crossing two of the major thoroughfares in town.

I’m inclined to ascribe this whole ‘driving your kids to school’ thing as more about generational issues than a societal attempt to chain women to the home. Frankly, as someone raised in the 50’s driving your kids to school and all the other micromanaging of kids lives is nuts. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons pretty accurately reflected the experience I and most of my cohort (both male and female) knew—you knew the adults were around, you just seldon saw them. My mother’s famous last words to me were “Go out and play!” And if I whined I was bored, she’d threaten me with a chore to do, which got my to flee the house. And judging by the fact I saw all the rest of the neighborhood kids outside, that seemed to be the mom partyline then. Our gathering spot was the paved playground with monkey bars, swings, merry-go-round and seesaw for all sorts of derring-do by both boys and girls. It also served as the base for hide-and-go-seek in the evenings, when we’d venture far afield.

We all walked to school (only those over a mile away got bused) (dad had the car, after all) and my mom told me her pride in seeing my older brother standing at the bus stop by himself while she and my dad brought newborn me home from the hospital. Which meant he also dressed himself, but then we only had one or two sets of school clothes.

When my mom went to work when I entered 3rd grade. I walked home alone to our house, changed and went out to play with neighborhood kids. But I was also responsible for starting supper (putting a roast in the oven or turning on the gas for the pressure cooker or making hash from the leftover roast (which meant cutting up the meat and an onion and running them through the hand-powered meat grinder). A few years later, I made curried chicken and rice in an electric frypan.

I was not unusual. My best buddy at the time had to come home to take care of his mom who had muscular dystrophy. And meanwhile, a gal friend from childhood told me she routinely wandered our city until 10 o’clock at night.

I think this all has more to do with the reaction many of today’s parents to the chaos of their own anything-goes childhoods of the 60’s and 70’s where there was a complete abdication of parental authority.

In my (NY) school district, you didn’t get a bus if you lived less than a mile or so from school.  Perhaps for elementary school, you got a bus closer than that, but in any case, I didn’t get a bus in high school.  My dad usually dropped us off on his way to work. 

On thing to consider, is that if it’s not a huge inconvenience for parents—such as my dad, who was going that way anyway—it means the household runs smoother in the morning.  If we’d walked to high school, which started 7:30, we’d have to leave around 7 to get there on time.  AND!  It was uphill both ways.  A really big hill.  And across a major road during rush hour.  With getting dropped off, we could get out the door around 7:20 and be on time.  Getting several people awake, through showers and breakfast, finding stuff, and so on, is tough early in the morning, and those extra 15-20 minutes were golden.  It’s like one of the reasons women do more housework—it’s easier to do the work yourself than to badger someone else into doing it; it’s easier to drive a kid to school than get them out of bed any earlier than absolutely necessary. 

Of course, I agree on principle, and if your kid gets a bus, especially if that bus ride is not very long, there’s no excuse or reason to drive them.

It’s hard for me to understand the driving-kids-to-school thing, because doesn’t almost every place offer bus rides for free?  If you’re really paranoid about your kid walking a few blocks, why can’t they just take the bus to and from school?

Actually, where I went to high school, there was no busing within city limits, which would have meant for me a walk of 1.5 to 2 miles, about half of it on heavier-traffic roads with spotty sidewalks.  My folks drove us for a year, until I got my driver’s license.  The middle school wasn’t any closer, so my sister and I were responsible for picking up my brother.  For the kids who lived “out by the lake,” the walk would have been longer, more difficult and with fewer sidewalks.  And this is before you factor in the winter difficulties of snow, temperatures below zero, wind chills, etc. 

When we lived in a town that was much more pedestrian-friendly, we did walk.  I was bullied and hit once while walking home, but for the most part my siblings and I either walked together or with other kids from the neighborhood.

I live in a walking district. We live 3/4 of a mile from the elementary school. My kids are some of the few who walk. If it’s a day off and raining or snowing, I’ll drive them. If I have to be somewhere, I’ll drop them. But most days? I leave for work at 5 AM. They never see me in the morning. My jr high student walks 1.5 miles and my high schooler walks 2.

Most of the other kids? driven.

My parents left for work before I left for school, and came home after I did.

Same here, though the school bus was a necessity (25 minutes of bus = lots and lots of walking). I think we turned out okay… mostly.

“In this world today there ain’t nobody to thank
Just blame it on the kids and toss ‘em into the tank
And if they yell for justice we’ll hide them from the light
So that when they learn the truth they won’t be scared of the night

Put the key in the hole when you get home from school
I’ll be home by 8:30 your father will too
If you cause any trouble then I don’t want to see
‘Cause you’ll go straight to bed and you won’t have no TV”

- Bad Religion, “Latch Key Kids”

I definitely feel that the whole walk v drive debate is informed by more than just Abduction Fears and Mommy One-Upsmanship.

The biggest reason is simply that sprawl has ballooned out faster than the American gut. The average in-town suburban yard used to be a pretty small thing, but with suburbs and exurbs, the average yard is growing exponentially to the point where unless the school is sitting right at the entrance to the neighborhood, it’s too far for little legs to walk too and from.

Another problem with sprawl is that it isolates us from our neighbors and we don’t know who they are anymore, not only do we not know if the guy at the end of the street might take up snatching, but also that we don’t know anyone on the street to tell the kid to run to if there’s a problem.

Combine this with the fact that sidewalks have become passe. Most neighborhoods don’t install them, cash-strapped towns don’t maintain the ones that are there, and if you have weather that’s even the slightest bit variable, most kids are going to find themselves walking in the street when things get wet or snowy.

Oh right, and backpacks and textbooks are getting heavier, and the expectation that a kid has to shuttle the entire library of textbooks back and forth from school every day means that they’re really taking a credit in trail backpacking to haul all that crap along with them (esp. if they can’t use special wheely-backpacks because of the lack of sidewalks).

Add to that worries about bullies, who will often target kids on their way to and from school so that they can avoid getting in trouble during school hours, problems dressing kids appropriately for inclement weather (if your kid has to walk to school in 20 degree weather, it may be hard for them to figure out what to do with their layers when the school furnace is making sure all the classrooms are 78), unleashed attack dogs, and of course, abduction fears and the occasional “keeping up with the joneses” mentality.

Like so many things, I think driving kids to and from school is a much more calculated choice than just trying to show off to the neighbors or being paranoid about perverts. I suspect that a lot of thought goes into the decision for pretty much every parent.

I actually loved walking to school as a kid (elementary & high school.Middle school was way too far even in nice weather). And in High School, I was gone before my parents left & home way before they were. Which left plenty of time to smoke pot and/or have a little fun w/my girlfriend (her mom was a STAHM, so we always went to my house after school).

Jesus…I lived over a mile from my elementary and jr. high schools after moving to Kansas. I walked to school every morning and home every afternoon and it wasn’t some rural area either. I rode my bike when it was warm.

When I got in fights my parents still made walk home.

Just a note about the “let them walk in groups” theory.  There is a famous case of a murdered child, and I cannot recall his name, who was with two other boys.  The abducter forced all three to lay down and then told the other two that if they turned around he’d kill them.  He took the boy he wanted, and he abused and murdered him.

Let’s not fool ourselves or anyone else into believing that children walking in groups is any kind of protection against stranger abduction.  Yes, it’s rare, very rare.  But if it’s going to happen, having three 10 year olds walking together isn’t going to stop it.

“I think this all has more to do with the reaction many of today’s parents to the chaos of their own anything-goes childhoods of the 60’s and 70’s where there was a complete abdication of parental authority. “

I disagree.  I think it has to do with the fact that in today’s media environment, every time there is a stranger abduction of a child, the grisely details and horror of it are gone over and over and over on tv.  And they are horrifying.  A 3 year old girl kidnapped, raped and strangled to death.  A nine year old girl kidnapped, raped, and then buried alive, later found dead, clutching her stuffed penguin.

There is no way a parent can help being horrified and terrified by these stories that are more than stories - they are events.  They happened.  They happened recently.

Yes, they are rare.  But if you are the parent of one of those children, what comfort is that to you?  It is very difficult not to feel terror when you watch these news reports when one of these cases occurs.  And I think that there are real concerns about stunting children’s growth, and mocking and holding in contempt the fears of parents while trying to find the right way to navigate this, is not only cruel, but it absolutely does nothing to advance the debate and the outcome.

“It’s hard for me to understand the driving-kids-to-school thing, because doesn’t almost every place offer bus rides for free?  If you’re really paranoid about your kid walking a few blocks, why can’t they just take the bus to and from school?”

No.  In my suburban Chicago area, you need to be at least 1.5 miles away to get busing.  1.5 miles doesn’t sound like a lot, but it would involve crossing major streets that would simply be inappropriate for elementary children.  In another suburban Chicago area, I know that taking the bus costs $700 / year.  Yes.  You read that correctly.

When Ralph Klein cut education in the 90s in Alberta, my mom started driving me to school because she refused on principal to pay to have me bussed - she thought bussing should be free, part of public education. Since I was in French immersion, the nearest school was far further away than anyone could reasonably walk every day (I could make it one way in about an hour and a half as an adult, I’d wager), so it was really bus or drive.

Also: This

Oh right, and backpacks and textbooks are getting heavier, and the expectation that a kid has to shuttle the entire library of textbooks back and forth from school every day means that they’re really taking a credit in trail backpacking to haul all that crap along with them (esp. if they can’t use special wheely-backpacks because of the lack of sidewalks).

This reflects my elementary school experience pretty well - it actually improved in Jr. High School and High School, but when I went to elementary school, I had at least one backpack tear from the weight of all the books each year. No wonder I’ve got a bad back now, at 23.

How about no marriage for anyone under thirty?

We could remake “Logan’s Run” with Logan desparately trying to conceal the flashing jewel in his plam and make it to the border before his fiance realises that it’s his birthday and that they can tie the knot…

(we just watched Logan’s Run last night, in celebration of Death Panels. It was the first time I’d seen it)

What freaked me out here is that Bazelon’s article is titled:  The Disappearance of Annie Le Makes Letting My Kids Walk Alone Harder.  Does she intend to drive her daughters to work when they are adults?  This stuff is really out of hand.

Am I the only one who feels a little squicky about the whole “no divorce” as an ironic thing?  I mean, the right wing has sort of been trying to establish the same thing with covenant marriage.  Besides, the reight wingers aren’t exactly, um, gifted in the irony/sarcasm appreciation.

I may agree with his trying to force people into realizing how ridiculous Prop 8 was, but I really can’t celebrate the ironic creation of Gilead any more than the earnest one. 

/killjoy

@ catgirl#6:

Granted this is an extreme example, but this is one of the reasons:

http://www.keepingourcommunitiessafe.us/The Monitor 04-2009.pdf

Buses in general are not supervised.  One adult, who must drive the bus should not be expected to supervise, too.  There is usually a 4 year at least span of age ranges on the bus, and it’s a captive “audience.”  A kid can’t walk away from the bully, and the only adult around is the one driving, who generally tells the kid they shouldn’t leave their seat.  A real no win situation.

You can bet after this incident that lots of parents in the area drove the kiddies.

Isn’t this a both/and blog? Seems to me all these factors work together. When you cut funding for buses and crossing guards, and build neighborhoods with no sidewalks and/or serpentine streets that multiply walking distance to get anywhere, you diminish neighborhood cohesion just at the point when people need to know and trust their neighbors to let their kids walk (and heaven forfend—cut through other people’s yards).  And once you’ve made it physically more difficult for kids to get to school without being driven, parents will be more than willing to seize on fears of abduction or bullying to justify their decision not to fight city hall. (And once all that has happened, of course it will be the women who do the work, because our society is set up for women to do all the extra work…)

That’s a glib version, but it probably covers a lot of cases.

For another data point: walked to school sometimes, a little more than half a mile, but up one of those hills that cars sometimes slid down in winter. And much shorter if you could cut through a few yards.

I grew up in a town where busing started at 6:30 AM.  That’s why I had to get up at 6:00 every morning.  My mother was a stay-at-home mom, but it never occurred to her that driving us to and from school every day would be a reasonable use of her time.  Also, for years we only had one car.

Most of my mother’s friends were a few years younger than she was, and even as a kid I noticed a huge difference in parenting styles.  The younger moms were extremely protective, micromanaged every minute of their kids’ lives, did tasks the kids could easily have done themselves (doing their homework for them, for instance), and wanted their kids to be their pals.  There was a constant, unspoken best-mommy competition going on.  My mom loved telling stories about what a handful my brother and I were, and her friends would invariably be shocked that she admitted her kids were less than perfect.

My parents kicked me out of the house on nice days or if I was annoying them, and I’d wander around the neighborhood and the adjoining woods and fields.  Not until years later did I realize the only other kids I ever saw on these jaunts were local delinquents with absentee parents.  The “good” parents kept their kids in the back yard or, preferably, indoors.  This was in a secluded suburban housing development surrounded by Ohio farmland, not exactly a hotbed of danger.

The idea of what a middle-class woman has to do to be a “good mom” began changing radically in the 1980s.  I saw it start to happen, and it’s just gotten more extreme since then.

I’m not sure that parents tending to drive their kids to school is such a problem for women by itself.  I could add my own experiences with that stage of life, but they’d be redundant to the great examples already present above.  There are plenty of legitimate reasons to take your kid’s transportation into your own hands, and plenty of reasons not to.  They depend on things like distance, environment, kids’ maturity, and parents’ comfort level.  Parents often make sound decisions in contexts where other sound decisions are also possible.

The problem, as I read it, is that women are the ones chastised when their family’s decisions go against the norm.  School administrators, neighbors, police officers, and other parents seem to be scolding moms in every story that article cites.  What those stories don’t appear to cite is evidence that the kid in question demonstrated an inability to get him/herself to and from school alone, or that there was any reason to believe that these mothers were solely responsible for the decision to let their kids walk or “should” have had time to drive them.  Those assumptions were made by people outside the family, who saw fit to scold mothers exclusively.  Can you even imagine scolding another adult?  I can’t.

That’s a problem, and trends that give more people an opportunity to police women’s behavior like this are therefore a problem.  These high demands on parents’ time, commitment, and possession of supernatural powers have the effect of burdening mothers (at the very least with the judgment of their communities) at a greater rate than fathers.  That’s a real concern even if the parents in question aren’t thinking about it in their decision-making.

What those stories don’t appear to cite is evidence that the kid in question demonstrated an inability to get him/herself to and from school alone, or that there was any reason to believe that these mothers were solely responsible for the decision to let their kids walk or “should” have had time to drive them.

Exactly.  It’s still our assumption as a society that the mother is solely responsible for a child’s welfare and behavior even if she is not physically present where the child is.  If a child gets abducted and murdered while walking two blocks to school, it’s not the fault of the creepy molester.  It’s the fault of the mother for not handcuffing the child to her side.

Though it probably barely needs to be said, child abduction and murder rates are actually down considerably from the days before we had national news.  We watched Changeling the other night and were a little startled to discover that it’s actually a serial killer movie, not (just) a drama about a woman being treated like crap by the authorities.  Not exactly how it was sold by the studio.

Combine this with the fact that sidewalks have become passe. Most neighborhoods don’t install them, cash-strapped towns don’t maintain the ones that are there, and if you have weather that’s even the slightest bit variable, most kids are going to find themselves walking in the street when things get wet or snowy.

This is one thing, at least, that we can have some influence on.  Get thee (and all of us in the ‘burbs) to the town plan commission meetings.  Protest any development until they put in sidewalks and/or bike paths.  It is amazing how quickly developers would spring for them to get developments passed - and many towns have now gone to a standard of requiring them foal new subdivisions.  If you happen to have any spare time (haha, I know) most exurb plan commissions are appointed, no prior knowledge necessary and you just need to fill out an app, usually this time of year.  A great way to really have soem constructive input in town growth and planning.

I know people who drive their kids to school because the alternative is letting them walk in areas where they’re likely to get hit by a stray bullet, offered drugs or physically assaulted. I guess those folks are just clingy, classist morons who need to get over the helicopter parenting, huh?

Of course, if they do, and the kid wanders off or gets abducted or simply falls and breaks an ankle, the same fucking people who are wailing about Overprotective Parents will spin around and start scolding Mommy (never, never Daddy) for being an uncaring parent who was probably home fucking strange men, shooting drugs and watching TV simultaneously when she should have been watching her kid.

Our school district canceled buses - they announced this a week before school started. God forbid they actually give parents enough notice to scramble for alternate arrangements.

Mythago, not to mention that many kids do not live within walking distance of school.  My boys now take the bus because they go 3 miles away to middle school.  We bike sometimes ... but then they have to bike home, and there are no bike lanes or paths or even decent sidewalks for them to use.

The high school is best accessed via the woods behind our home.  My 8th grader can’t wait.

All this, and we live in an area settled in the 1920s ... and that’s a newer part of town!  We did walk to grade school - about 2/3 of a mile - and then I would walk or bike to the train that is 1/3 mile further on.

I would like to divorce my car ... but it is damn useful sometimes, such as when hauling 5 kids or groceries for two weeks with an eating machine of a teen around, or when I need to bring my coaching bag along.

Just make the school day a bit longer than the work day, let kids leave at whatever time works, and the problem goes away.  The problems are that schools are scattered: magnet schools, charter schools, suburban and exurban sprawl, and the school funding issues related to having longer hours.

Everybody wins if there is both the ability to keep children at the school beyond the arbitrary deadlines set up by schools (that charge outrageous fees because your child can’t sit near a curb, apparently) and the schools actually get funded for a full workday at the least.  Those students who finish up should be able to leave (on their own, or however desired,) those with extracurricular activities should be able to fit those into a nine-hour time period, and the rest should just figure out how to get it done.

The length of the school day is the easiest thing to fix, will solve the most problems, and it’s something that wouldn’t require a great deal of additional funding.  The benefits would be huge for most people.

As for abductions, the child molesters I know (it’s odd whom you meet while working in a prison) all say that they don’t want a one-time thing but a relationship.  So they became trusted friends, coaches, teachers, and tutors (and a priest.)  They all did say that if they wanted to grab a child, it would have always been easy to do.  But why would they want to risk that?  It wasn’t (for them) about just the sex, they wanted the child to like them like they liked the child.  I hate that such evil fucks have a (twisted, but still recognizably) human side, but I’m glad most of them do because otherwise our children would all be dead by attrition.

Oh good grief. This “no divorce” movement is an extremely good example of why liberals can’t or won’t understand fundamentalists.

Do you know why a “no divorce” law is a fucking bad idea? Because the same fundnuts who want to outlaw gay marriage and abortion ALSO want to outlaw divorce. It’s next on their fucking list! I mean, I understand not wanting to have to pull out the brain bleach, but am I the only one who’s read anything by Dobson in the last 30 years?

The fundies would be THRILLED to have a “no divorce” law. Knock up a woman, convince her to marry you so you can support the baby she’s being forced to have, and presto - she’s yours for eternity.

There’s some kind of weird cognitive dissonance on the part of the Left that since Christians get divorced, they must necessarily be FOR divorce, and it just doesn’t work that way. They get abortions, too, but they still want abortions to be illegal. And they know that these laws will really only affect the poor and disenfranchised.

Putting a law like this up for votes is stupid and dangerous. Stupid because it’s not going to mean anything EXCEPT to the people who are already for gay-marriage, stupid because it will turn off moderates, stupid because it might just PASS if the sane people stay home that day and ignore it and the fundnuts drive out to press the ‘yes’ button.

And, really, are we now trying to disenfranchise women on paper to make a point about gay marriage? Why not put up a law that brings slavery back to make a similar “point”? Why should women’s rights (and divorce is primarily a women’s issue, due to DV, pregnancy issues, etc.) be cosidered a toy to play with for political points?

I would have expected Pandagon to get that in the past.

I grew up in wingnuttia and have encountered too many people who would like to ban divorce for real. Every time I hear people who’ve never come into contact with that particular strain of religious conservatism saying that they wish the wingnuts would be consistent in their views and try to ban divorce as well, I can’t help thinking “No you don’t wish that, because I’ve seen where it leads and it’s not pretty.”  But I realize that for most people, the very idea of banning divorce seems absurd, so I think I’m just kinda sensitive on that issue.
... OR what Essie Elephant just said. Yeah, I grew up with those people. They’re scary.

As for the busing thing, just because you’re “too close” to the school to be bused doesn’t mean that there’s anything like a decent pedestrian route to the school. I was too close to be bused to my high school in Texas and it was either
a)walk ~1.25 miles along a small but busy street with no sidewalks in either the dark or 90-105 degree temperatures, depending on time of day and season
b) add a full mile to the walk by going through the surrounding suburbs, which also didn’t have much in the way of sidewalks, but which had slightly less traffic
or c)drive
(Tried biking but there was nowhere to put my bike at the school and dealing with the school traffic was a huge pain, so that didn’t work out.)
Yeah. I drove. Hated it but all the other options were even worse.

Most of my mother’s friends were a few years younger than she was, and even as a kid I noticed a huge difference in parenting styles.  The younger moms were extremely protective, micromanaged every minute of their kids’ lives, did tasks the kids could easily have done themselves (doing their homework for them, for instance), and wanted their kids to be their pals.

isn’t it funny. as a young mum, i have had the exact opposite experience—it’s the older mums around me that tend to be hyper-invested in their kids, having waited so long to have them (and often having spent significant sums of money on fertility treatments). i always got the nasty looks because a) when the girls were small, i looked about 16 and b) i let them do all kinds of things the other mommies thought were dangerous, like letting them climb monkeybars and go down slides by themselves.

i’m a huge believer in laissez-faire parenting. but i will confess that i drive my kids to school. there are no buses here, and my kids go to out-of-cachement schools. they could walk, but don’t really have the time as they are both super-busy out of school, and i insist that they eat a hot breakfast. (my oldest has this crazy-high metabolism, and needs to eat in the morning, but doesn’t like cold food at all).

My mother didn’t go back to work until I was about 15 or so, but no one in my family would have even imagined that my brother or I would be driven to school on a regular basis.  When I was very young, Mom walked with me, and by second grade or so I walked with other kids who lived nearby.  My elementary school was maybe six blocks away, but my junior high was almost a mile—it was a good twenty-minute walk, if not longer on a snowy day.  Of course, we lived in a relatively small and safe community, but I don’t think I knew anyone whose parents drove them to school if they lived within walking distance.  Walking or biking was just how you got to school.

The fundies would be THRILLED to have a “no divorce” law.

I had a creepy boss once who arranged a weekly Bible study at work, although at the time he was dating Wife No. 2. I asked him about the whole Moses + “hardness of your hearts” thing, but he was able to tap-dance around it. He was on his third wife when I lost contact with him.

The school nearest me draws students from a one mile by half mile area. Built out 50 years ago, all the streets have sidewalks. The conga-line drop off started within the past ten years. Before then, you would see some moms and the occasional dad walking with their kids to school. Four elementary schools feed one middle school, which does have school bus service for the kids living beyond a mile.

Just make the school day a bit longer than the work day, let kids leave at whatever time works, and the problem goes away.

From what I understand from my mom’s days on the school board, there are two main problems with this.  The first is funding, obviously.  The second is actually the companies that run the buses.  They’re the ones that really control a lot of the school start and finish times, because they’re the ones who control how many buses and how many drivers they have available.  Want to have your high school and middle school start at the same time?  Tough crap.  The busing doesn’t have the capacity to drive for that many kids at the same time.

Which again, goes back to funding, because I’m sure the busing companies could have the buses and drivers, if the schools could pay for them.  Ach, what a mess.

I had a creepy boss once who arranged a weekly Bible study at work, although at the time he was dating Wife No. 2.

I’m sure he’ll be equally comfortable in our Pandagon-endorsed Gideon where he can go on having mistresses. It’s a win-win because ( A ) his wife can’t divorce him and take half his stuff and ( B ) he no longer has to pretend that he’s going to leave his wife for his new mistress (and then make good on that promise when Wife 1 hits the road).

Of course, there will be anti-adultery laws, but those will - as always - only be enforced against women.

“Yes, they are rare.  But if you are the parent of one of those children, what comfort is that to you?  It is very difficult not to feel terror when you watch these news reports when one of these cases occurs.  And I think that there are real concerns about stunting children’s growth, and mocking and holding in contempt the fears of parents while trying to find the right way to navigate this, is not only cruel, but it absolutely does nothing to advance the debate and the outcome.”

Y’know I feel you here, but…

You could replace every mention of child abduction in your comment with “eaten by a bear” for my childhood. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in a pretty rural area (the U.P. has few of anything else). There were occasionally black bear attacks you’d hear about on the news, including one that’s always stayed with me where a young girl (8 or so?) was killed by a black bear because she tried to save her Oreo cookies from the picnic table.

Black bears are really not so bad (I don’t have the experience of dealing with other species) and usually will run off after just a bit of yelling, but they will occasionally take it into their heads to attack and kill people. My parents knew this, but they still let me and my sister roam the woods and fields around our old farmstead basically unsupervised. The black bear population in the U.P. is high enough that you never know when one might be around.

They explained the rules of dealing with bears and, in effect, hoped for the best. I only ever encountered a bear twice. The only time I was frightened was when I was 11 or so and playing army in the woods. I heard a crash and saw over 25-30 yards that a cub had fallen out of a tree and made the crash. I never saw the mother bear, but I ran like fuck because my first thought was that I was going to get blamed for the cub falling out of the tree.

The second is actually the companies that run the buses.

Which are now being consolidated into a small number of national conglomerates that screw over school districts in every way they can. (In the next town over, a conglom headquartered in Ohio got the contract, with a hefty price increase, based on a promise to get new buses, then a month or so before school started the local rep said, “oops, we used the wrong form to order the buses from headquarters, maybe next year.”)

So starting and ending times (which also have to do with issues about putting drivers on split shifts) are only a part of it. And of course the more the buses cost, the fewer students can be eligible for a bus, or the more streamlined a route the bus has to travel (in our neighborhood the kids walk or are driven a quarter-mile plus to/from the nearest school-bus stop).

First, the school bus thing - lots of schools now have before and after school programs (which serve breakfast), but no bus to get there early - so, if one works longer hours, then yes, driving is the only option.  And nope, increasing funding isn’t the option.  For those of us who have found the public school to be inadequate from an academic standpoint, and have opted to trade some wages that could be gained by working longer hours for personally overseeing the kids education, while still paying for public ed through taxes, don’t expect me to fund the daycare of those who have chosen the wages route, too.

And, there are still some schools that own their own buses and employ the drivers.

@ Essie and Ira,

But that’s just the point; let them shoot themselves in the foot.  I mean look at all the prominent conservatives who are divorced.  And the many more who want to be.  It might be the thing that would finally bring conservative women out into the thinking world. I imagine they, like other women, heck, like other spouses, have uttered the line ” If I catch you fooling around it’ll be divorce and I’‘ll take you for child support, house etc…and if they’re prominent, publicity, too.  They’d actually have to think about what it would be like tied to x FOR LIFE.  The divorced ones and that’s what 50% of Americans? would have to imagine what their lives would be like without divorce—hmmm Maybe Mr. Marcotte should try to make it retroactive. 

Personally, I think the show would be fun.  I mean, can you just hear Newt (4xer)  or Rush (3xer) (and the list goes on, since conservative Christians divorce at a much higher rate than other religious groups) giving the speech FOR the bill?  And if they won’t, then it would show to all what hypocrites they really are about causes the uberfundies hold dear, and how they’re really just using the fundies to get the #‘s.

It might be the thing that would finally bring conservative women out into the thinking world. I imagine they, like other women, heck, like other spouses, have uttered the line “ If I catch you fooling around it’ll be divorce and I’’ll take you for child support, house etc…and if they’re prominent, publicity, too.  They’d actually have to think about what it would be like tied to x FOR LIFE.

No offense, but you are an idiot if you think that ANY woman, let alone women trapped in wingnuttia, go into marriage with an exit strategy. You don’t get up in a church or before a justice of the peace and say “till death do us part” just because you were bored that way. Speaking from experience, you literally, truly mean “I will stay with this person until I die”.

It’s only AFTER he’s beaten you, cheated on you, or otherwise hurt you that those words seem stupid in retrospect and you decide that there was an asterisk footnote to the whole thing. And, even then, it’s damned hard to get any of your friends, neighbors, or family to not giev you crap for breaking the god-damned bonsd of god-damned wedlock. Not that he gets any crap, oh no. He gets counseling. From the pastor. Maybe.

No woman in fundie land thinks “oh, divorce should be legal because my perfect snowflake husband might be abusive” any more than any woman in fundie land thinks “oh, abortion should be legal because my perfect snowflake pregnancy might be ectopic”.

So, seriously? You don’t know what you’re talking about, you can’t think like a fundie, and you’re playing with fire in a really stupid way that could get women killed.

Oh, and also:

I don’t like the victim blaming I’m hearing from you about conservative women not living in “the thinking world” like they’re stupid or something. Most of them were raised from a baby to not think for themselves, that Daddy and Hubbie and God would take care of them IF they were good and if they weren’t good they’d be “lovingly reprimanded” and piles of shit.

I myself stayed with an abusive husband for far too long because I was fed a shit-load of “Dr.” Dobson saying that if a wife is nice to her husband, the husband will be nice back. So if I was getting smacked around, I just wasn’t trying hard enough. And, yeah, it’s one thing for me to call myself an idiot in retrospect, but I was in a tight community where that was the norm and there were no other options.

I got out because I was rich enough to escape, bottom line. Most people don’t have that luxury. So kindly STFU about conservative women failing to think about divorce. Thx.

Most of my life I’ve lived in too rural ares that buses didn’t go to, and my dad took me to school on his way to work, and picked me up from aftercare after work. When I did live close enough however (for a bus, but not to walk), i was in HS, which started at 7am (also because of buses… all the schools shared the buses and for some reason they decided teenagers could get up earliest?). I was at the end of the route, which meant being first to be picked up. I would have to get on the bus at 5am. And the bus stop itself was about a half mile walk from my house. Getting a teenager up at 4 am is completely ridiculous (frankly, i couldn’t do it now…), so my dad still drove me to school, until I was able to drive myself. There was no after school program for HS, though, so my mom (who at this point didn’t have a job… not sure what we would’ve done if she did) picked me up after school.

Even if I could walk, I live in the NW, and during the school year at 6:30 it’s COMPLETELY DARK out, like midnight dark, not to mention no sidewalks or streetlights. That seems kinda scary to me, especially if we’re talking kids younger than teenagers. In college I walked from school to work at 9am and needed a flashlight to do it.

Essie, I’m looking at the stats, which are either the same as for the general populace and higher than atheists/agnostics.  My point never was that women go in with an exit strategy - though I think any marriage would be better for it, just like any other contract.  What I’m trying to point out is that many of those conservatives have HAD a divorce previously, or certainly know someone who has, thus, being able to have the thought process of, “that’s crazy, why if my sister Essie, for example, hadn’t been able to get divorced from that no good wife batterer, for example, she’d probably be dead.

No one wants to live without a safety plan, even if they never have to use it or never intend to.

Oh and Essie, that “thinking world” was meant in the way that some philosophers use the term “limit situation.”  Most humans are content to go along in life with the status quo, (yes, even if one is active in one cause, due to our own finitude, we can’t pursue all causes) until a situation pushes them into a dilemma where they HAVE to make a choice.  It’s more an understanding of the human condition in general,  but in this context, applied to the specifics of conservative women and divorce.  Hopefully that will assuage some of your ire.

What I’m trying to point out is that many of those conservatives have HAD a divorce previously, or certainly know someone who has, thus, being able to have the thought process of, “that’s crazy, why if my sister Essie, for example, hadn’t been able to get divorced from that no good wife batterer, for example, she’d probably be dead.

Riiiight.  Which is why so many fundie women turn out to be pro-choice, right?

Fundies seem to have a highly exaggerated sense of “I’m the exception to the rule.”  Therefore, they’re perfectly capable of voting to make divorce illegal while having divorced their own spouse, or protesting abortion while slipping their teenage daughter in.  Or worse, the martyr complex, which allows them to have made “mistakes” in the past, but now that they’re saved, no one else should ever ever ever ever be allowed to make those same “mistakes,” because abortion or divorce ruined their lives.

What I’m trying to point out is that many of those conservatives have HAD a divorce previously, or certainly know someone who has, thus, being able to have the thought process of, “that’s crazy, why if my sister Essie, for example, hadn’t been able to get divorced from that no good wife batterer, for example, she’d probably be dead.

phylosopher, I’m going to say this again, and maybe you’ll listen this time: You don’t know what you’re talking about. Period. You can’t or won’t think like a conservative. You sound like the liberal equivalent of a Christian insisting that an atheist refuses to admit that they KNOW God exists because they’re pissed at Him.

Here is what a conservative fundie-raised woman is allowed to think and believe:

“It’s a shame… that my sister Essie was stupid enough to marry a wife beater. I won’t make that mistake. MY Justin is a good man.”

“It’s a shame… that my sister Essie wasn’t a good enough wife to keep her husband from getting upset and exasperated. I won’t make that mistake - I’m much less difficult than her.”

“It’s a shame… that my sister Essie wouldn’t go to counseling for another year after the last time Bob broke her jaw. If she’d just stuck with it, then he would have gotten better. I wonder if she was even really trying?”

“It’s a shame… that my sister Essie made up such awful tales about Bob. I can’t believe she would blame her broken leg on him when she clearly just slipped down the stairs. I will pray for her that she stops being so spiteful.”

“It’s a shame… that my sister Essie was sent this abusive husband by God to test her devotion to him. It’s a double shame that she failed the test by breaking up her family rather than trusting God’s will.”

And so on. It’s a form of brainwashing, do you GET that? And you want to try to bring Gideon back, and they’ll happily help you put the yoke on their yecks. I can’t decide if that’s stupidly evil or evilly stupid.