Alcohol dependency not only affects people who drink excessively, but also spouses, friends and family. Now a new study in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research finds that alcoholism has a strong connection to when people get married and whether those marriages are successful.
“For young adults who are drinking, if their drinking continues to levels of problem use, it could impact their likelihood of marriage as well as likelihood of having a really lasting marriage,” said study author Mary Waldron, assistant professor in human development at Indiana University. “What we found is yes, it’s true that alcohol dependence is a strong predictor of separation and we’ve known that for quite a while, it was really the predictor of delayed marriage that was surprising to us.”The study looked at 5,000 Australian twins, ages 28-92, all of whom reported a history of alcohol dependence sometime over their lifetime.
The researchers found the association between alcoholism and getting married for the first time at a 23% lower likelihood for women. For men it was 36% lower only after age 29. For both sexes, the researchers concluded that the chance of separation was twice as likely and earlier. They also found that genetics played a role.
“What we found by using both fraternal and identical twins is that genetic influences appear to contribute to the association … but the processes underlying the genetic effect, we really don’t know yet and that will be a focus of future research,” Waldron said.
The reason I am worried about this is that there seems to be so much drinking that goes on on university campuses. It’s like the young people are really getting addicted to it, and there seems to be a lot of peer pressure on everyone to drink and drink and drink. I think alcohol is very interesting (I was recently visiting friends and got to try whiskey for the first time – it was horrible!) and it makes people feel at ease when you are having a good serious conversation. But I am not so sure about drinking it all the time. It’s expensive, and it alters your moods. How can you be good at making sense when you drink too much? So I think in moderation it’s OK, but not too much.
I think that reading articles like this are important to me. It’s good to know WHY the Bible says things are right and wrong. If being drunk is “wrong” then why is it wrong? Why does God not want us to do this? With a little study and some good research, we can find the answers. And then when we talk to non-Christians about right and wrong, we can explain the reasons for the moral positions we hold using scientific evidence. It’s a lot easier to talk about morality in public when you have solid evidence that doesn’t assume the Bible.
This analysis from the Wall Street Journal nails it. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
For many liberal women, Palin threatens their sexual identity, which is bound up with their politics in a way that it is not for any other group (possibly excepting gays, though that is unrelated to today’s topic).
An important strand of contemporary liberalism is feminism. As a label, “feminist” is passé; outside the academic fever swamps, you will find few women below Social Security age who embrace it.
That is because what used to be called feminism–the proposition that women deserve equality before the law and protection from discrimination–is almost universally accepted today. Politically speaking, a woman is the equal of a man. No woman in public life better symbolizes this than Sarah Palin–especially not Hillary Clinton, the left’s favorite icon. No one can deny Mrs. Clinton’s accomplishments, but neither can one escape crediting them in substantial part to her role as the wife of a powerful man.
But there is more to feminism than political and legal equality. Men and women are intrinsically unequal in ways that are ultimately beyond the power of government to remediate. That is because nature is unfair. Sexual reproduction is far more demanding, both physically and temporally, for women than for men. Men simply do not face the sort of children-or-career conundrums that vex women in an era of workplace equality.
Except for the small minority of women with no interest in having children, this is an inescapable problem, one that cannot be obviated by political means. Aspects of it can, however, be ameliorated by technology–most notably contraception, which at least gives women considerable control over the timing of reproduction.
As a political matter, contraception is essentially uncontroversial today, which is to say that any suggestion that adult women be legally prevented from using birth control is outside the realm of serious debate. The same cannot be said of abortion, and that is at the root of Palinoia.
To the extent that “feminism” remains controversial, it is because of the position it takes on abortion: not just that a woman should have the “right to choose,” but that this is a matter over which reasonable people cannot disagree–that to favor any limitations on the right to abortion, or even to acknowledge that abortion is morally problematic, is to deny the basic dignity of women.
To a woman who has internalized this point of view, Sarah Palin’s opposition to abortion rights is a personal affront, and a deep one. It doesn’t help that Palin lives by her beliefs. To the contrary, it intensifies the offense.
It used to be a trope for liberal interviewers to try to unmask hypocrisy by asking antiabortion politicians–male ones, of course–what they would do if their single teen daughters got pregnant. It’s a rude question, but Palin, whose 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy coincided with Mom’s introduction to the nation, answered it in real life.
Let me explain what I think the problem is in plain English. Feminists want to blame their failures on the men. They have invested everything in the belief that the world is inhospitable to women. The only way for women to succeed according to feminism, is to whine and complain and be a victim, and to make yourself into a man and deny your femininity and kill your own offspring. Sarah Palin didn’t do any of that. Yet she was very nearly Vice President. She doesn’t hate men, and she doesn’t kill babies. Her success is the counter-example that shows that all of feminism is just self-serving lies that feminists invent in order to blame men for their own failure to succeed, marry and have children. THAT is why they hate Sarah Palin. They hated Bush because he was a Christian, and they hate Palin because she is pro-male, pro-marriage, and pro-life.
And as you all know, I do not want Palin to be President in 2012. I want Michele Bachmann to President in 2012, who, as a homeschooling mother, is the stronger purer form of what Sarah Palin represents. She’s 100% feminity wedded to 100% conservatism. She is a walking refutation of feminist griveance-mongering. You don’t have to be a feminist in order to succeed as a woman. You don’t have to hate men. You don’t have to hate marriage. And you don’t have to kill children. You can love men, love marriage, and love children, and you can still go straight to the top.
Taranto is very close to something here, and I wonder if he doesn’t push the argument to its logical conclusion because he is afraid that he would be denounced by hysterical women — yes, even Republican women, even some “conservative” women — if he spoke the blunt truth.
One of the necessary consequences of the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman Lifestyle is that it tends to limit women’s procreative capacity. It isn’t merely that feminism’s embrace of the Culture of Death elevates abortion to sacramental status. Rather, it is that feminist notions of Progress require that women foresake (or at least postpone) the love-marriage-motherhood model of happiness in pursuit of careerist equality. Even if a woman does not actually go all-out in following the anti-phallocratic ideology — “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice,” to quote Ti-Grace Atkinson — her pursuit of the career woman lifestyle inevitably restricts her reproductive opportunities.
By the time she finishes college and grad school and establishes herself firmly en route to an upper-middle-class socioeconomic future, the the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman is 30 or older. Even if she could meet Mister Right, she’s not going to abandon her career — for she has been taught to consider life meaningless without a professional career — in favor of domesticity. Ergo, even if she marries and decides she can afford a baby, she’ll have to hire someone to raise it for her while she returns to the job from which she derives her sense of purpose and identity.
He’s one of the few bloggers who gets deep into these moral issues. All my Christian readers should bookmark his blog.
In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.
If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.
If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.
Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goes up from 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.
[…]In short, if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife’s devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife’s devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.
A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of two-thirds of her children ending up at church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the church door. If his wife is similarly negligent that figure rises to 80 percent!
[…]A mother’s role will always remain primary in terms of intimacy, care, and nurture. (The toughest man may well sport a tattoo dedicated to the love of his mother, without the slightest embarrassment or sentimentality). No father can replace that relationship. But it is equally true that when a child begins to move into that period of differentiation from home and engagement with the world “out there,” he (and she) looks increasingly to the father for his role model. Where the father is indifferent, inadequate, or just plain absent, that task of differentiation and engagement is much harder. When children see that church is a “women and children” thing, they will respond accordingly—by not going to church, or going much less.
I think that women need to really not leave it to chance when it comes to choosing a man to be the father of their children. If women want to serve God by raising godly children, then they’d better use the most effective courting techniques available to put each candidate through his paces. Just looking at wedding pictures, wishing, and hoping, is not really going to work. There may be more work involved in it – because to test a man’s faith and abilities, you have to know what you are looking for in the first place.
WINTERY KNIGHT 