After links from both Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan, I left the confines of my usual filter bubble and read a piece in (lord help me) the National Review, about poverty in Kentucky, and commentary on it in The American Conservative.
And if I’m looking for thoughtful writing with which I disagree, those are reasonable places to find it. More so than, say, RedState, which I won’t even link to.
The article overall is worth reading and wrestling with, and it brings up problems in both right- and left-wing solutions to the serious problems of rural poverty.
Still, none of the blogs I’ve read on the article, and none of the (often thoughtful, generally well-moderated) comment threads, noted this throwaway line:
Kentucky is No. 19 in the ranking of states by teen pregnancy rates, but it is No. 8 when it comes to teen birth rates, according to the Guttmacher Institute, its young women being somewhat less savage than most of their counterparts across the country.
I’m sorry, did you just call the women of the more prosperous portions of the nation savages? Because they are willing and able to control their fertility in a variety of ways?
Poverty indeed.
Secretly Ironic 