Third Way Dispatch

Four years ago, Congressman Tom Tiahrt (R-Neanderthal) ambled into an appropriations committee markup with a piece of paper containing legislative language. Tiahrt rose and sought the recognition of the chairman: “I have an amendment at the desk,” the fifth term congressman said. That was to be one of only two intelligible sentences that he would say on that day in that committee.

NOTE: Though my name and picture appears next to this post, I’ve asked my colleague Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., a religion scholar and consultant on our Culture Project, to write this Dispatch. Dr. Jones was principal researcher on The American Values Survey and is currently working on a book on progressive religion entitled Progressive AND Religious: The New Face of Religion in American Public Life (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming June 2008). RL

When I hear complaints about the “liberal media”, the additional adjective “secular” is usually a part of the phrase or not far behind. For example, last summer at the so-called “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, DC, speaker after speaker referred to how the “secular liberal media” has neglected religion and distorted coverage of religion and conservative values. A new study by Media Matters, however, documents two key findings that debunk this tired mantra: 1) since 2004, coverage of religion by the media has increased significantly; and 2) this coverage has actually been biased in favor of conservative religious leaders by a factor of nearly 3 to 1.

For six years, we have lived in a through-the-looking glass world of faith-based governance. The President and his administration have led the country on a hunch and a prayer. Just yesterday, the Director of NASA (presumably a rocket scientist!) was suggesting that it was “arrogant” to presume that our present climate is “the optimal climate,” or that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.

In the past week, US-Iran relations have gone from a slow simmer to a roiling boil. Is this posturing and positioning in the run up to the May 28 bilateral talks in Baghdad, or is this the road to open warfare? Let’s look at the evidence.

The United States needs to get out of the war in Iraq. We should have never, never been in it in the first place. This war was a stupid idea, not just a badly executed idea.

That is my position. It is – and always has been – the position of Third Way. Well, actually Third Way did not exist when we got into this war. But I certainly know it was my position, and that of all four founders of this group. One of them, Matt Bennett, moved to Little Rock, Arkansas to work for Wes Clark’s campaign because he thought Clark was the best anti-war candidate. So let there be no doubt that Third Way’s team has opposed this war from the very beginning.

My father-in-law is 77. My son is almost 2.

Thirty years ago, having this combination of aging parents and very young children would have been unusual. Today, it’s increasingly the norm. A number of demographic trends are driving this rise in “sandwich generation” families. On one end is the fact that women are marrying and bearing children later in life; on the other is that people are living longer in retirement. In 1975, the average birth mother was 24; today she’s 28. In 1989, fewer than two in three adults between the ages of 41 and 59 had at least one living parent. Today, it’s nearly three in four.

In our report, The New Rules Economy, we noted that one of the most significant new challenges faced by modern families is the challenge of balancing work and family. Adding to this complexity is that a growing number of families are caring not only for young children but for aging parents. And because public policy has yet to catch up with this phenomenon, sandwich families are largely making do on their own.