From Jacobin: http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/kitchen-sink-socialism/?utm_source=Daily+Digest&utm_campaign=1643905b73-DD_4_9_134_9_2013
by Andrew Fogle
4.8.13
A curious thing happened in the Beltway last week: for the 48 hours surrounding two landmark gay marriage Supreme Court oral arguments, the millennial political class’ collective Facebook feed blushed bright red. Obama-handshake profile pictures gave way to a sharp crimson square designed by the Human Rights Campaign’s marketing department.
Between torrents of memes and legal commentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s skim milk analogy, Samuel Alito’s rusting Burkeanism, and Elena Kagan’s “batting average,” another item, a report about adults turning to cooperative households to save money, passed without remark in liberal circles.
Two million Americans over the age of 30 now live with a housemate or roommate, and shared households make up 18 percent of U.S. households – a 17 percent increase since 2007.
One group of women sold their homes and bought a house together in Mount Lebanon, Pa., after they all got divorced.
“It made amazing economic sense,” said one of the women, Jean McQuillin. McQuillin, Louise Machinist and Karen Bush call their home a “cooperative household.” Each woman has her own bedroom and bathroom, and they share the common areas of the house, chores and expenses.
The suspicion of a generation of queer leftists is at last confirmed: the lifestyle upending Western Civilization’s social cornerstone looks less like committed gay and lesbian families and more like the Golden Girls.
Tellingly, the piece went viral on the Drudge Report. Just one reason to think that petit bourgeois paranoiacs have better eyes for social decline than the average Tumblring anthropology major.
Reactionary as it is, reading the original article is a useful exercise. It emphasizes the women’s dire financial straits, ensuring us that they are normal, monogamous schoolteacher-types who’ve just happened upon bad times — and not, God forbid, the sort of Wiccan lesbian coven that keeps a herd of cats in common. We’re told that they are “really busy,” “hardly ever [at home] at the same time” and that they, “share values in order to make things work.” The single advocate cited makes her argument in language that wouldn’t be out of place in a Family Research Council pamphlet: “Taking the stress off of parents in having to do everything for their kids and not sharing the load is really to me the heart of the American dream.”
Continue reading at: http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/kitchen-sink-socialism/?utm_source=Daily+Digest&utm_campaign=1643905b73-DD_4_9_134_9_2013
