Funny how you would reference a foreign look into American marriage and use the words he did about success and strength of marriage in America. Especially since the US is ranked something ridiculous like 12th in the world for divorce percentages. But at least we beat out such powerhouses as Moldova, the Ukraine, Latvia (the fact that I've only heard of one of those countries causes me to doubt the reliability of that page, but...). Further, The Barna Research group (whoever the hell that is) released their study on divorce which, funnily enough, reported:
The margin of error is within 2 percentage points. The survey found:
11% of the adult population is currently divorced.
25% of adults have had at least one divorce during their lifetime.
Divorce rates among conservative Christians were significently higher than for other faith groups, and for Atheists and Agnostics.
Now, I know all this is statistics and that it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and I know that this is running on for a post from me, so I'm going to stop on the divorce train.
As far as laws being based on tradition...what? I was under the impression that laws should be based on REASON which does not necesarily mesh with tradition. In the spirit of quoting philosophers (if that's what tocqueville is/was?) I'd refer you to the ideas of Plato (and Socrates by default, I guess) as well as Aristotle (who, interestingly enough argued that a large amount of what is considered law is also locally variable and arbitrary). As a bonus, I've used the grandaddies of philosophy since you seem to like tradition and what better traditional philosophers than they? I think Hume has a diatribe somewhere that deals with laws being more along the lines of arduous adherence to custom, so maybe you can delve through that and pull some quotes out to support you there. Either way, law should be based on reason not tradition since tradition isn't a uniform template on which to balance the issues governed by law. This would seem especially true in a nation such as ours, which hosts such a wide variety of people that it's not even possible to argue that tradition is in some way uniform among the residents. Unless we are picking and choosing which traditions are going to be used in the law-making? If your going to be objective in the passing of a law, you have to base it on reason, not tradition.
"The big brain am winning again! I am the GREETEST! Now I am leaving Earth for no apparant raisin!"
