I responded to your original comment because you said "and in my area the working class is very Catholic, black, or both. YMMV, not valid in California." which you say is a joke. What's the joke? Now I don't want to accuse you of contributing to this because I have no way of knowing where your beliefs about CA came from by (I'm going to go off on a tangent here) but what I've seen when it comes to California is that people now use it as a negative example for almost every comparison, often without evidence. It's done so much that there's now there's a negative connotation to the state itself that certainly isn't valid in all cases. It's so insidious how a belief / stereotype can just appear out of no where if it's just causally spread out.