Hotel/New Think Tank/Af Am Couple/Tolstoy/DC Conference-9/03

[Smartmarriages ®]

subject: Hotel/New Think Tank/Af Am Couple/Tolstoy/DC Conference-9/03

from: Smart Marriages®

- DALLAS HOTEL: WRONG 800 NUMBER!
- GALLAGHER'S NEW MARRIAGE THINK TANK
- THE LANCE
- AFRICAN AMERICAN COUPLE FOR ESSENCE
- DESIRE GAP
- TOLSTOY ON MARRIAGE
- REAFFIRMING MARRIAGE CONFERENCE, NOV 14 -15.

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- DALLAS HOTEL: WRONG 800 NUMBER!

> Dianne,
> Could you send the number again for the Adam's Mark, the number you sent on
> the e-mail was incorrect, you get some reference to a nationwide talkline and
> then a dead line.  Thanks, Vivian

This time it wasn't a typo - the Hotel gave me the wrong 800#.
The correct # is 800-444-2326 or, if you're calling from outside the
country, call 214-777-6534 (8:30am - 5pm Central time) or FAX: 214-777-6532
(24 hrs). We strongly encourage international registrants to fax their
reservation requests - cuts down on miscommunications if it's in writing.
Those in the states will probably do best calling the 800#.

There were also some glitches last week with the hotel reservation clerks
telling some of you that the special rate was only good through the night of
the 11th. The bugs should be worked out now. The special conference rates of
$79 single/$89 double - are good from July 3 - July 17.
 
If you misplace this email, the info is all at smartmarriages.com, including
Airline and rental car discounts.

I encourage you to reserve early.  It's a large hotel, but we're not the
only conference in the hotel over these dates and the rates at nearby hotels
are double our rate.

- diane 
######################

- GALLAGHER'S NEW MARRIAGE THINK TANK

Maggie Gallagher has left the Institute for American Values and opened up
her own think tank, The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.  Go to
www.imapp.org to join her marriagedebate.com BLOG or to read articles like
this one: 

GOOD NEWS ABOUT MARRIAGE

For marriage nuts, the big question lately has been: Are things getting a
little bit better, or are they still getting worse and worse?For years,
family diversity advocates preached the gospel of despair: In a nation
dedicated to the progressive drama -- each generation better off than the
last -- elite voices counseled, for reasons of their own, that this one
problem was intractable, stubborn, impossible to reverse. Best (they urged
us) just to ignore the fact that half or more of our children grow up in
fatherless homes, and get on with the business of making the world a better
place for single moms.

But in the last few years, there have been unmistakable hints of a marriage
turnaround. Divorce rates have dropped modestly. Illegitimacy, while still
inching upward, has leveled off. Married people today may be less committed
to lifelong marriage than they were 50 years ago, but recent studies suggest
they are more committed to marital permanence than their parents were 20
years ago. Has the marriage movement made a difference? Are more children
today growing up in intact families, with their very own married mothers and
fathers?

Some studies say yes, others no. The reason the debate has gone on so long
is that the Census Bureau, despite repeated pleas from scholars and
reformers, refuses to analyze and release the data it collects in this form.
The Census Bureau will tell you how many kids live in a "two-parent" family.
But officially the census refuses to address the question: How many children
are living in intact families, with their own married biological or adopted
parents?

At a fascinating Health and Human Services-funded conference last week in
Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Poverty Center, we finally got
the answer. And the news is good. The analysis of the National Survey of
America's Families (a survey of 40,000 nationally representative families)
was done by Urban Institute scholars Gregory Acs and Sandi Nelson:

Between 1997 and 2002, the proportion of children under 6 living in intact
married families actually increased. So did the proportion of all children
in low-income households (the bottom quarter) by close to 4 percent.

It's encouraging evidence that the apostles of despair are wrong: The
decline of marriage is not inevitable. Social recovery is possible. In fact,
it is under way 

The less good news is that part of the shift away from single mothers was
into cohabiting rather than married families. A study by Sara McLanahan and
colleagues, also reported at this conference, suggests "children born to
cohabiting mothers are reportedly more aggressive, more withdrawn, more
anxious/depressive, and have more overall behavior problems at age 3 than
children born to married parents." Part, but not all, of this difference can
be explained by characteristics of the mother (including age and mental
health status). 

The last afternoon of this groundbreaking conference was devoted to public
policy implications: What can government do? Professor Steven Nock of the
University of Virginia has new research suggesting that the counseling
requirement in covenant marriage helps deter divorce. Professor Frank
Furstenberg, skeptical of the possibility of encouraging unmarried parents
to marry, urged a new focus on divorce interventions among high-risk
low-income families.

Professor Ron Mincy at the Columbia School of Social Work urged including
more African-Americans among providers of pro-marriage interventions. He
made a strong case for focusing on discouraging unmarried childbearing as a
necessary prelude to building a stronger marriage culture among the poor.
When unmarried childbearing is common, spouses bring children from multiple
partners into the marriages, complicating enormously the task of building
stable, healthy marriages.

New ideas, new criticism, new energy, new initiatives. Whether or not it
ever passes the Congress, we have a lot for which to thank President Bush's
marriage promotion proposal. Now that the marriage turnaround has started,
the question becomes not, is it possible to strengthen marriage? But how do
we keep the good news going?

##########################

- THE LANCE

>> What's sad is that there is no way to measure the damage done by the
>> divorce message from this powerful role model - it's especially harmful when
>> he says that he and his wife have "never been happier" than since their
>> recent split.  oy. - diane
> > 
> Diane: Let's not forget that the "we've never been happier" testimonial will
> soon be followed by the "children are resilient" assertion....oy plus.
> Kitty Wojcik

P.S. I'm also told that the Armstrong's were quoted as saying they'd never
been "closer" (not that they'd never been happier.)  Closer??  - diane

##################
- AFRICAN AMERICAN COUPLE FOR ESSENCE

> Dear Ms. O'Neal Parker:
> 
> I have the perfect suggestion of a couple for you to interview.  Several years
> ago, Essence Magazine ran a full-page story on Marriage Savers and the type of
> marriage preparation we train Mentor Couples to provide.  A young woman named
> Terri Lucas called my wife, Harriet.  Terri said he wanted to take the "test"
> (a premarital inventory), but did not want the mentoring.  Harriet replied she
> could only get the inventory as part of a mentoring process.  Further, she had
> to agree to come to 10 classes at our church.
> 
> Terri replied that her friend, Philip Cofer, did not want to go to any white
> churches.  Harriet said, "We have talked 45 minutes.  Do you feel you can
> trust me?"  Terri replied that she could.  "The problem in relationships is
> the big difference between men and women, not between the races.  Mike will
> understand Philip.  Trust me."
> 
> Terri did, and even though it meant driving 45-60 minutes around the Beltway,
> came to our home six evenings and to ten classes.  At the time they began,
> they were not even engaged, though they had dated 5 years (and were aged 27).
> We mentored them, and they became engaged and have now been married about 2
> years. The Washignton Times interviewed them for what became a full page
> story.  They testified with us before a House Ways & Means Subcommittee
> considering welfare reform, with a special provision to fund marriage
> education programs.  They were stunningly articulate.
> 
> Call them 301 xxx-xxx or xxx-xxx-xxxx.
> 
> Mike McManus 
> Marriage Savers 

###################
- DESIRE GAP
> I would like to see the prime time show concerning "desire gap" when it
> airs.  I hope you can let us know when that is to happen if they give
> you that information.
> Kevin Jones

I WILL definitely know when it airs and I PROMISE to let the list know in
plenty of time....expecting it sometime in early Oct.  In the meantime, I
encourage you to read the book that the producers are using as the basis for
the program: Sex Starved Marriage by Weiner-Davis on amazon for only $16.80
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743227328/smartmarriages

- diane 

###################

- TOLSTOY ON MARRIAGE

> It's the birthday of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, born on his family's estate
> in the province of Tula, near Moscow (1828). Both of his parents died when he
> was a boy, and he was raised by a series of aunts. As a young man, he loved to
> drink and gamble, but he always felt guilty about it. He started keeping a
> diary, and wrote his first diary entry about his fear that he had contracted a
> venereal disease. He wrote pages and pages wondering why he couldn't help
> breaking all the rules that society had made for him, and he became fascinated
> by the idea that people are always trying to stop themselves from doing what
> they really want to do. He volunteered to fight in a war against the Chechen
> mountain tribes, and went on to fight in the Crimean War. He wrote stories
> about the battles he witnessed and he described military battles as
> realistically as possible. He was one of the first writers to describe battles
> as chaotic and insane and meaningless. In the 1850s, Russia was still
> operating under a medieval economic system with most of the peasants enslaved
> as serfs. Tolstoy opened a school for peasants on his family's estate, and
> helped open more than 20 schools in surrounding villages. He believed in
> complete freedom in the classroom and let his students study whatever
> interested them. He also edited an educational journal, and wrote that the
> upper classes had as much to learn from peasants as peasants had to learn from
> the upper classes. Tolstoy got married in 1862, and it was the best thing that
> ever happened to him. He wrote, "Domestic happiness has swallowed me
> completely." His wife had 13 children, and she helped him copy out and edit
> all his manuscripts. She copied by hand the huge manuscript for War and Peace
> (1868) four times. During the first years of his marriage, free love was
> becoming fashionable among the Russian upper classes, and everyone started to
> think of marriage as old fashioned and silly. Tolstoy was disgusted. In 1872,
> he heard about a woman who had thrown herself in front of a train after the
> end of an affair, and it gave him an idea for a novel about a woman whose life
> is destroyed by adultery. That novel was Anna Karenina (1875). He wrote it as
> a defense of marriage as the most important foundation of society. When it was
> published, most critics said it was inferior to War and Peace, but it is now
> considered one of the greatest novels ever written. After publishing Anna
> Karenina, Tolstoy fell into a deep depression. He was healthy, and he had
> plenty of money, but he felt that life had no purpose. He noticed that the
> peasants on his estate wore ragged clothes, lived in leaky huts, and had no
> way of improving their lives, but they were happy. He came to believe that
> they knew the meaning of life, so he renounced all his property and became a
> peasant. He learned to make his own food and clothes, and lived in a hut. He
> started to write theology and philosophy and founded his own form of
> Christianity. He became a kind of prophet, and people from all over the world
> visited him and wrote to him, including Woodrow Wilson and Mahatma Gandhi. Leo
> Tolstoy said, "In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around
> you."  - Garrison Keillor from his daily Writer's Almanac to subscribe:
http://www.writersalmanac.org/

####################
- REAFFIRMING MARRIAGE CONFERENCE, NOV 14 -15.

 "Reaffirming Marriage in a Post-Marriage Culture," an interdisciplinary
conference sponsored by The Marriage Law Project, Columbus School of Law and
Catholic University, will be held at Catholic University, Nov 14-15, in
Washington, DC. Presenters will include Katherine Spaht, Norval Glenn, and
Maggie Gallagher on panels to include:

**The Public Purposes of Marriage
**A Post-Marriage Culture: Comparative Studies Around the World
**How Can Marriage Be Reaffirmed?
**Do Children Need a Mother and Father?
**Eros and Civilization: Sex, Love, and the Culture of Courtship

$75. For information: www.marriagewatch.org/conference  or  202.319.6215.


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