Not Walking the Talk

Instapundit links to a Washington Examiner article based on an Institute for Farmily Studies report. The title of the IFS study explains the finding.

State of Contradiction: Progressive Family Culture, Traditional Family Structure in California

The Washington Examiner extracts the ironic findings.

When it comes to their own families, California elites with kids overwhelmingly ‘live right’ in private, giving their children the benefit of growing up in a two-parent family.

Among Californians aged 18-50, the college-educated were far more likely than those with no college degree (85% to 69%) to agree that we should celebrate the diversity of family structures, including single parenthood, unmarried parents, and other alternative family structures.

That’s how they feel about others. How do the elites feel about their own lives? “It’s very important for me, personally to be married before having children,” 68% of the college-educated sample agreed. That number was only 59% for those who never went to college.

So the elites are more "tolerant" than the working class ideologically, but they are much more conservative about how they plan to live.

My reading of these findings: elites say they are okay with diverse lifestyles but their behavior belies those stated values. They learned in college how they are supposed to answer the question and so they give the socially approved answer, which they don’t really believe.

In addition, perhaps they are closet libertarians, holding that of course you are free to screw up your lives just as we are free to not do so with ours. Data from CA only sharpens the contrast.