Rachel’s Musings

I just sent the Obama campaign the following note:

Did you know that the support from women for Obama is about 14-percentage points higher than that from men? Probably. Everybody is keenly aware of the gender gap. But did you know that the martial status gap is more than twice that gap? That’s right! Unmarried folks support Obama by a whopping 34-percentage points more than married folks. In fact, the marrieds prefer McCain. Yet, I am not hearing anything from the campaign that shows your support of this large and growing segment of the U.S. population. For more background and some ideas, please also see this post.

I look forward to hearing Barack Obama reaching out to the single and unmarried people!

I am afraid that the only result of this message will be that I’ll end up on their emailing list again. But maybe, just maybe, someone sees these numbers and realize that there is huge potential!

Women’s Voices. Women Vote. recently reported on the marriage gap among young women: Among 18-29 year old women, the marriage gap is an astonishing 36 points. (The marriage gap is the difference between the difference - compare the difference between Obama and McCain preference percentages for married and unmarried women).

WVWV only reported the gap for young women. I was curious what it would be in the general population. Gallup provides data by marital status and by marital status and gender.

Crunching the data, I get the following:

So, the marriage gap is anywhere from 30 percentage points - for men - to 36 percentage point - for young women. Is Obama taking note? It doesn’t seem so. The gender gap, which is only about 14%, pales in comparison to this gap. But if the Obama campaign would like to change this, they can start reading up on how to reach unmarried women at Women’s Voters or on Bella DePaulo’s blog (she has a new post here that wonders why the press & the blogs seem to be ignoring this huge gap.).

As I’ve pointed out before, there are lots of reasons to vote, actually I can’t really think of any reasons not to vote if you think democracy is a good idea. Edward Tabash eloquently argued that another reason sits on the Supreme Court: One of the justices is 88 years old! Now, you don’t have to be an actuary to figure out that his putting off retirement might be undermined by a biological process… Okay, so what, you might say, the next President will appoint someone to the Supreme Court. That’s been the fear-mongering of the left for a long time to get people to vote. True enough. But right now there are 4 out of 9 justices who have demonstrated that their religious beliefs influence their decisions. And these beliefs are pretty right-wing. Add to that a new appointment influenced by the religious wrong and you’ll have 5 out of 9 - a majority who could, if they had the opportunity, overrule Roe v Wade, the ban of creationism from science class, roll back even further LGBT rights, etc etc. Just watch this to get an idea… Separation of state and religion would clearly be violated by the highest court in our country. And there’s only one way to stop that: By a part of the electorate that is as active as the religious wrong when it comes to going to the polls but can counter-act their imposition of religion on all of us. So, if you care at all about the country you live in: Vote!

The scene was eerily familiar. Instead of “we don’t want a smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” this time the total collapse of the US economy was the fear specter raised. And again, Congress fell for it. They didn’t want to risk being blamed for anything that might happen. They hastily passed a bill that should have been carefully thought out and influenced by experts instead of special interests. Now, slowly, the problems are emerging. Some of them are probably good, like the ability for the Treasury to buy parts of banks that was apparently snuck into the bill to the delight of many economists. More disturbingly, though, is the lack of transparency that is starting to creep into the whole bailout effort. As Planet Money reported, Mark Cuban, none less as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has decided to start investigating. And as soon as he started looking, he found blacked out pages on contracts with the Treasury department. That sounds a lot like the no-bid contracts that went to Halliburton. These are signs that the Bailout is turning into what many of us feared: A way to shift money from the average taxpayer to the Wall Street financiers who got us into this mess in the first place. Cuban and his investigative team as well as other journalists will be watching, often brought together by the Planet Money team.

That Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State under George W. Bush who lend credibility to the Iraq saber-rattling the Bush administration did prior to the invasion, has endorsed Obama is worthy of celebration. But his endorsement speech on NBC is incredibly thoughtful and well worth watching. It is clear that he made his decision carefully. The decision is grounded in what he sees as a further move to the right of the Republican party and his concerns about McCain’s uncertainty about dealing with the economic crisis. He is also concerned that Palin is not at all ready to be President. What I liked most about his endorsement, though, was that he finally said what should have been the response to the “Obama is a Muslim” smear: First, of course, he set the record straight that Obama is a Christian. But then he added his thoughts on why it really shouldn’t matter whether Obama is a Muslim or not! Exactly! Powell points to a soldier who died in Iraq fighting for his country who happened to be a Muslim. I think, though, that it shouldn’t matter what religion a person subscribes to but what their personality is, how they’re address important issues etc. While I personally cannot understand subscribing to any religion, I do know enough people who are religious but who do not let their religious beliefs drip all over their decisions. So, the religion of a candidate should not matter much. Rather how much they let that religion influence their decisions and policies is what matters. Clearly, McCain/Palin let religion drive their politics to the right. And even Obama has too much religion in his campaign for me to be completely excited about him, yet, it seems to matter less than it does to the Republican ticket, especially Palin.

I just came home from the Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp. Unlike the (younger) women in my carpool, I thought it was good but not awesome, which is the word they used. I actually was a bit disappointed. Maybe I led myself expect too much - influenced by words like “empower” and “inspire” on the Boot Camp website. Yes, it was a good resource. Yes, I learned a bit more. But, no, I don’t really feel more inspired. I heard a lot of “build coalitions” today - but nothing about the how. And I think that’s where the crux of the problem is. As Frank J. Omowale Satterwhite put it: The difference between the 1960s and now is that during the 1960s, there were 5 gatherings with 10,000 people; today there are 10,000 gatherings with 5 people. We are spread too thin; we ignore the interconnections. And we are encouraged to do that. Emmett Carson, one of the keynote speakers, suggested that we need to do the thing we do best over and over again and not try to do too many things. But if we find just a little niche, we cannot affect social change on the big scale we need right now. Of course, we are more likely to have a successful nonprofit if we focus on one issue. For example, I was advised to focus on singles by choice to build advocacy amongst singles rather than trying to organize all singles. That is probably a wise approach but it’s only chipping away at one tiny issue. The danger, though, is that while I wait for the inspiration to find that One Big Issue that unites us all, nothing will change. Maybe it really is a matter of chipping away at one issue. Yet, social change occurs when many groups and people come together to move society in one direction: the movement to abolish slavery included very diverse set of people; so did the movement to get women the right to vote. The Wall Street Bail Out was initially defeated in the House because conservative Republicans built a coalition with liberal Democrats. Their reasons were different but their goal was the same.

Another thing a key-note speaker stressed (I can’t remember if it was Carson) was not to run out and start our own nonprofit without looking around if someone is already doing what we want to do. There seem to be a lot of organizations that essentially do the same thing with a slightly different slant (the Center for Inquiry and the American Humanist Association come to mind; or even more similar are the Skeptics Society and CFI). How much more powerful would we be if we’d stop splintering and unite? There’s that coalition building idea again…

So, where does this leave me? I would like to empower singles by choice to come out and let it be known that being single is a valid lifestyle choice that doesn’t say anything about us other than we’re single. That is a topic very close to my heart for very personal reasons. But it is certainly not an overarching issue. Maybe that is okay as long as I don’t focus so much on overcoming internalized singlism that I miss coalition building opportunities. Change starts somewhere. One of the most important things we need to work on is rebuilding community because the need for connections is being subverted into consumerism. Advertisers suggest to us that the need for happiness and fulfillment can be filled by product X. And a community can be the basis for a strong movement that takes the power back from the consumer-side to the citizen-side of our brain. Aside from consumerism, the idea of a nuclear family has contributed to our decrease in connections, to the deterioration of community. By emphasizing other ways of living - including choosing to be single - we can counteract that trend and promote valuing all relationships.

Maybe I got more out of this Boot Camp than I thought. If nothing else, it helped me clarify what I want to advocate for and why. I feel like I need to roll up my sleeves and get started!