From Focus on the Family's Today's News:
Despite dramatic changes over the past 30 years in the way Canadians think about themselves and their society, they “still tend to aspire to very traditional lifestyles,” Maclean’s magazine reported earlier this month.
That finding is one of the many revelations contained in a new survey by University of Lethbridge sociologist and author Reginald Bibby.
Bibby found that while Canadians have grown increasingly tolerant, for example, of homosexuality and different family structures, most still aspire to “belong to a traditional nuclear family” – where couples marry, have children, and stay together for the rest of their lives. As he told Maclean’s, “what is changing are the outcomes – not the aspirations.”
In fact, the poll suggested that many parents desire something better for their children than perhaps they may have experienced.
Although 73 per cent of respondents said they approved of unmarried couples living together, that level of support fell to only 53 per cent when asked how they would feel about their own children co-habiting. The same was true of divorce. Seventy per cent said they approved of divorce in general, but only 41 per cent said they would approve of their own child getting a divorce. And while 57 per cent saw nothing wrong with women having children out of wedlock, only 33 percent said they would approve of their own daughters becoming unwed mothers.
Even Canadians’ approval of same-sex relationships – rising from 28 per cent in 1990 to more than two-thirds today – does not necessarily mean that they approve of same-sex marriage. As Maclean’s reported, it “remains a contentious issue,” with Canadians still about equally divided. In fact, only 39 per cent of men approved of same-sex marriage in 2005, compared to 56 per cent of women.
Bibby’s polling also revealed that many young people have no desire to carry on the “sexual revolution” of their parents’ generation. For example, only 12 per cent of young adults are accepting of extra-marital affairs, compared to 26 per cent in 1975. Acceptance of premarital sex has similarly fallen, from 94 per cent in 1975 to 77 percent currently. “Bibby theorizes that more youth today may be willing to follow their churches’ values than at the height of the sexual revolution,” said Maclean’s.
And while younger men and women appear less concerned than older Canadians about the harmful effects of pornography, the survey nonetheless found that a third of all men and 49 per cent of women now favour an outright ban on its distribution.
One area where attitudes have apparently changed little is abortion. Today, 43 per cent of adults support abortion upon demand, up from 37 per cent in 1985. But what has not shifted since 1975 is the variations in the levels of support for the reasons given for wanting an abortion. These range from 58 per cent approval because the mother cannot afford more children, to 86 per cent in cases where there is a strong likelihood that the baby will be born with a serious defect, to 92 per cent where a pregnancy seriously endangers the mother’s health.
“When you get into these specific kinds of areas, it seems like people are just locked into them,” said Bibby. “Obviously the religious factor is an important one, but other people who are not necessarily actively involved in religious groups are still very much anti-abortion.
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