I posted this originally just as a quicklink on my serendipity blog, but decided I wanted to note it here on elf-reflection, too.

As the president prepares to unveil in his State of the Union speech tonight his administration’s election-year $1.5 billion dollar plan to “rescue marriage,” and as the push for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage continues to gain steam, a columnist in Newsday notes that research shows that the four states with the highest divorce rates in the country (50 percent more than the national average), outside of Nevada, are Tenessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma, all Bible Belt states that went for Bush in 2000. Moreover, divorce rates are higher among Baptists (29 percent) and nondenominational Christians (34 percent) than among atheists/agnostics (21 percent). In the “legendarily devout South,” 27% of adults are divorced, while the lowest divorce rate of 19% was in the “liberal Northeast.”