A recent article in the Washington Post discusses how members of the clergy, who have traditionally been courted by presidential candidates, are now liabilities, furhter complicating the role of religion in politics.

Washington Post staff writer, Michelle Boorstein writes,

“First it was Republicans, and now Democrats, scrambling in recent presidential elections to snuggle up closely to men of the cloth, seeking the endorsement of well-known clergymen and campaigning with preachers, all in an effort to demonstrate how godly they are.”

“But a curious thing has happened in this year’s contest for the White House. Candidates are having to distance themselves from preachers, almost as quickly as they had sought their embrace. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) denounced his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who was videotaped asserting that the federal government had brought the AIDS virus into black communities and that God should “damn” America.

Sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau weighs in…

“The chickens are coming home to roost,” said Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University sociologist who writes a religion and politics blog called “The God Vote.” A post that got 50,000 hits called “Huckobama” asked why Democrats who have criticized President Bush’s overt faith expressions aren’t more critical of Obama.

“That’s the new Faith-and-Values friendly liberalism of the Democratic Party in 2008. And that’s something that might make it hard for secularists to live their lives in peace,” he wrote.

Among the speeches Berlinerblau cited was one Obama made in February, preaching at length about Jeremiah 29, saying, “God has a plan for his people.” The separationist group Interfaith Alliance has been sending out alerts about candidates for months, including when Clinton said last June that she’d like to “inject” faith into policy and when McCain said in September that the Constitution established “a Christian nation.” The group also included an Obama speech in October in which he told an audience that, with prayer and praise, “I am confident that we can create a kingdom right here on Earth.”

The Wall Street Journal reports on how high school proms have now ‘landed’ in England, to the dismay of many. The article describes how middle-class kids in England are ‘moved by American tv’ and push for their own proms, which often end up being over the top and ‘gaudy,’ according to the authors

The article draws upon the expertise of sociologist Amy Best.

“Proms in the U.S. began in the 1930s, the invention of teachers trying to help young people make the transition to adulthood, says Amy Best, a sociologist and expert on youth culture at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. The dances largely fell out of fashion in the 1960s but came back in the 1980s and remain popular, she says.”

The trend…

“Proms began crossing over to the United Kingdom several years ago and keep growing in popularity. Ricky Turrell, a photographer in southeast England, has 54 proms booked this year. Proms are practically a daily occurrence somewhere or other in England from May 1 till well into July.”

“Tom Kendall, 16, says American TV shows such as ‘The O.C.’ and MTV’s ‘My Super Sweet 16’ provide a ‘fairy tale’ view of dances and parties that British teens like. ‘The O.C.,’ a Fox show now in reruns on Britain’s E4 channel, chronicles the life of affluent teens in Orange County, Calif. ‘My Super Sweet 16’ airs nearly every day in Britain, showing teens preparing for lavish birthday parties.”

A recent article from the Christian Science Monitor, “How Clinton and Obama Boost Feminism, Civil Rights,”  seeks to understand how the primary season may have helped to advance these “historical causes.”

The Christian Science Monitor writes,

“The race between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton may be over, but its effects on the broader movements for racial and sexual equality in America are likely to be felt – and debated – well past the fall.”

“Senator Obama’s victory roused blacks who never thought they would see an African-American this close to the presidency, not in a country with a shameful history of slavery. Senator Clinton embodied the aspirations of millions of women, many of whom saw in her defeat a culture still rife with sexism.”

But they did consult a sociologist…

“Some critics say it was less voters than the news media, obsessed with firsts, that reduced Obama to his race and Clinton to her gender. ‘It’s an element that got inflamed in the course of the campaign because of the premium on differentiation,’ says Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and an expert on social movements. ‘It didn’t start out that way. When this campaign started, Hillary was the favorite of black voters.'”

Today’s edition of the Los Angeles Times reviews Australian sociologist Anthony Elliott’s new book, “Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery Is Transforming Our Lives.” Elliott, chairman of the sociology department at Flinders University, seeks to “examine how cosmetic surgery is at once a driving force and a result of the new, international, techno-speedy, obsolescence-included economy — an almost perfect model of how capitalism not only meets consumer needs but creates them as well.”

LA Times reporter Mary McNamara writes,

“Quoting experts as disparate as Pamela Anderson and Sigmund Freud (surely this is a first), citing cultural events as diverse as reality television and various corporate scandals, Elliott makes the case that millions of people are getting cosmetic surgery not because they are narcissists but because they are afraid. Not just of losing a job to a younger colleague or a spouse to a younger competitor, but of losing the chance to engage in what has become the hottest hobby in America: reinvention.”

“Elliott argues that people, at least the old definition of people, i.e. creatures whose bodies go through a predictable set of changes called “aging,” are increasingly perceived as not only a drag on the new capitalism, with its enjoyment of downsizing and corporate shake-ups (the former CEO with the bags under his eyes is probably tired, the woman with the pooching belly might have children who require her at home some of the time), but also a sign of woefully limited imagination.”

“Elliott seems particularly disturbed by the young people who seem to view cosmetic surgery as an accessory, something to be purchased, used for a season and upgraded (the pages about surgical tourism are particularly hilarious, in a horrifying way).”

“For better or worse,” Elliott writes, “globalization has given rise to the 24/7 society, in which continual self-actualization and dramatic self-reinvention have become all the rage.”

The latest edition of Newsweek reports that among those serving in the military, minorities and women report the highest job satisfaction.

Newsweek reporter Sarah Kliff writes,

“Any list of the best places to work is sure to include cool favorites like Google. The U.S. military? The sacrifices and risks required of its members seem to make it an unlikely pick. But new research suggests that it may well belong on such a list, particularly for minorities and women. The members of those two demographics in the military consistently rate their jobs as more satisfying than white males do, according to new research in this month’s American Sociological Review. Much like Manning’s military experience, the study of over 30,000 active duty personnel suggests that the armed forces‘ social hierarchy—explicitly based on rank—overrides many of the racial or gender biases in civil society, which tend to act as barriers for women and minorities in career advancement.”

“Whites are far and away the least satisfied [in the military],” says Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts and the study author. “Black females tend to be the most satisfied. It’s a direct opposite and complete reversal of what we know about civilian job satisfaction.”

“It’s not that the military environment treats white males less fairly; it’s simply that, compared to their peers in civilian society, white males lose many of the advantages that they had,” Lundquist says. “There’s a relative deprivation when you compare to satisfaction of peers outside of the military.”

The latest issue of the New York Times Magazine has a cover story titled “When Mom and Dad Share It All” about the division of labor in American families and how childcare and housework are balanced by working mothers and fathers.

This article notes recent findings from Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and features commentary from University of Buffalo sociologist, Sampson Lee Blair.

Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women. Any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.

But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.

“And the most sadly comic data is from my own research,” he adds, which show that in married couples “where she has a job and he doesn’t, and where you would anticipate a complete reversal, even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.” — New York Times Magazine

A press release this morning reports on new research published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, which conclude that steep employment gains for women disprove the idea that more women are ‘opting out’ of full-time employment in favor of staying home.

Sociologist Christine Percheski studied employment trends among college-educated women, born between 1906 and 1975. She found that women’s employment levels had sharply increased and has especially changed for mothers with young children and women employed in traditionally male fields. She also concludes that the gap between childless women and mothers has diminished over time.

And debunking the ‘opting out’ myth…

“Despite anecdotal reports of successful working women returning to the home to assume child care responsibilities, less than 8 percent of professional women born since 1956 leave the workforce for a year or more during their prime childbearing years, according to the study.”

Full summary.

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A recent article in the New York Times alludes to a recent trend in social science research towards studying committed heterosexual couples for insights into what makes marriages healthy.

The Times reports:

“A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

The findings offer hope that some of the most vexing problems are not necessarily entrenched in deep-rooted biological differences between men and women. And that, in turn, offers hope that the problems can be solved.”

Although this article deals mostly with the findings from psychologists, many well-documented sociological trends are also discussed in this piece.

Read more.

A recent piece from the Week in Review by the New York Times included commentary on the upcoming elections and the racial divide. Times reporter Marcus Mabry writes, “whether Mr. Obama captures the White House in November will depend on how he is seen by white Americans. Indeed, some people argue that one of the reasons Mr. Obama was able to defeat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was that a large number of white voters saw him as ‘postracial.'”

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson was asked to comment.

“Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that the one arena where black grievance is acceptable is in music, particularly in hip-hop, where an estimated 70 percent of listeners are white. But the generation exposed to hip-hop, mostly under 40, are part of what Mr. Patterson calls a growing “ecumenical” American culture that is unselfconsciously multiracial.

This Obama Generation came of age in the post-civil-rights age when color, though still relevant, had less impact on what one read, listened to or watched. It was the common crucible of popular culture, he said, that forged a truly American identity, rather than the “salad bowl” analogy cherished by diversity advocates.

Mr. Obama’s campaign so de-emphasized race that for most of the 17-month nomination contest much of the news media became obsessed with the question of whether he was “black enough” to win black votes.

Most African-American Democrats were for Hillary Clinton early on, until voters in Iowa proved to them that whites would support a black candidate.”

Full story.