-
sponsorship
A guest post from Linda Hirshman:
With a cover story by working mother scourge Caitlin Flanagan, next week’s Time Magazine takes the occasion of South Carolina
Governor Mark Sanford’s staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that
“Marriage Matters.”
Why does marriage matter? Not of course because of the harm to the
deer-in-the-headlights brigade—Silda Wall Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, etc. That
would put Flanagan on the side of the adult females.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'midarticleflex',false,'')
Marriage matters, because single parent families are bad for children, the
only people who count ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
Jessica,
my husband and I have been married for 15 years. Last weekend, we drove from
Maryland to New Jersey and during the many hours of crawling in traffic we wrote
a rap song together about the Delaware Toll Plaza. We stay up too late talking
to each other. We hold hands at the movies. Since we're in our fifties,sure
we've talked about who's going to get to pull each other's plug—but eventually
being able to do this honor is not why we're together. So do not despair that
marriage is an enterprise devoted to raising children, fighting over litterbox
scooping duties, and holding the horror of fidelity over each other's heads ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
It's been a rough couple of weeks for marriage. First, Sandra Tsing Loh came out
swinging against the
institution in the Atlantic (and we discussed it ad
nauseam), and simultaneously Mark Sanford and
John Ensign and the Gosselins paraded their broken relationships in front of the
nation. In Time, Caitlin Flanagan takes up for long-lasting unions in
an essay called "Why
Marriage Matters." Flanagan's defense of marriage can be boiled down to: The
reasons to get married are to raise children and not die alone ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
Can we talk about Caitlin Flanagan's underminer-y commentary on Michelle Obama's hostessing? Flanagan contributed a short essay to New York Magazine's cover story package on Mrs. O, and the entire thing is a litany of backhanded compliments:
Michelle Obama cuts a pretty figure in her big-and-tall gal ready-to-wear, and she has Joe Kennedy’s understanding of the power of family photographs to advance a political career. Like Hillary she lacks taste; her consumer preferences seem to have been rendered into being by the Mall at Short Hills. But ours is not the moment for taste. Or, for that matter, for a Nancy Reagan/Candy Spelling hyperattention to “gifting.”
Is Flanagan just a clear-eyed Obama observer, ignoring the swoons over Michelle's style and telling it like it is? Or is she just being contrarian to get our attention?
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?