Posted on 06/28/2011 5:37:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
If only lower income heterosexuals were as keen to marry as some homosexuals, the United States would be a much stronger country.
Supporters of gay marriage (most prominently The New York Times, which reported New York's legalization of such unions last week with about as much hoopla as it did the Japanese surrender in 1945) are ecstatic.
Actually, the first sentence of this column might be misleading. While it might seem, from the intense activism on the subject, that gays are impatient to reach the altar, it may not be true. Surveys in countries that have legalized gay marriage have found comparatively small numbers of homosexuals seeking marriage (between 2 and 5 percent in Belgium, and between 2 and 6 percent in Holland). It's quite possible that legalizing same-sex marriage is sought mostly for symbolic reasons -- as a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on homosexuality. (Just by the way, the funniest sign at a recent Obama speech was held by a gay-marriage advocate irritated by the president's claim that his views on the subject are "evolving." The sign read "Just Evolve Already.")
Imagine if even one-twentieth of the attention we devote to gay marriage were turned to the state of heterosexual marriage -- we might begin to see the true emergency.
Writing in The Weekly Standard, Mitch Pearlstein, whose book "From Family Collapse to America's Decline" is due out in August, outlines some of the connections between family breakdown and economic decay.
The statistics are familiar. In 1970, 85.2 percent of children under 18 lived in a two-parent family. In 2005, it was 68.3 percent and dropping. Forty percent of births in America are to unwed parents. Broken down by ethnic group, the figures are 30 percent among whites, 50 percent for Hispanics and 70 percent for blacks.
Single mothers (and occasionally fathers) find it much more difficult to be the kind of autonomous, self-supporting individuals that our system of government was designed for. Single parents turn to the government for assistance in dozens of ways. Pearlstein cites economist Benjamin Scafidi, who has offered a rough calculation of how much family breakdown costs American taxpayers annually. Scafidi considered TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), Food Stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid, S-Chip, child welfare services, justice system costs, WIC, LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program), Head Start, school breakfast and lunch programs, and foregone tax receipts. The annual bill to taxpayers: $112 billion.
But Scafidi was being conservative, Pearlstein argues. He didn't include the Earned Income Tax Credit, the costs to schools that accrue from additional discipline problems, the special education costs that increase in lock step with chaotic family environments, and the added burdens on Medicare and Medicaid that result from more unmarried older Americans. Scafidi explains that "high rates of divorce and failure to marry mean that many more Americans enter late middle age (and beyond) without a spouse to help them manage chronic illnesses, or to help care for them if they become disabled."
The flight from marriage is transforming the complexion of American society -- increasing inequality and decreasing self-sufficiency. As Kay Hymowitz has written (soon to be joined by new books by Charles Murray and the above mentioned Pearlstein), marriage patterns are creating a caste system in a country that had traditionally enjoyed relative equality. Among the well-educated, marriage rates have remained very stable over the past several decades. College graduates are thus (mostly) rearing their children in orderly, supportive environments in which kids are taught to study hard, delay gratification and plan for the future. But 54 percent of the children of high school dropouts are illegitimate. Their parents' lives are marked by financial stress, conflict and turmoil.
Since income and education are so closely linked, the outlines of a permanent caste system become visible, with the educated raising children who have the tools to become successful themselves and the poor and lower middle class continuing to give birth under circumstances that virtually condemn their children to poverty.
Much has been made by Democrats of the increasing inequality of income distribution in America. That inequality is real. But it's not the result of tax cuts. It's an artifact of family structure. And unless we find a way to discourage unwed childbearing and revive marriage, the chasm between classes will continue to grow.
Gay marriage is a distraction. The country depends on traditional marriage.
Maybe we need a national campaign to re-criminalize adultery? No jail time, of course, but a small fine perhaps? Just a little something to restore some of the backbone into the tradition of marriage.
I wouldn't do that but you are on the right track. "Gay marriage" is the end result of 40 years of society taking a sledge hammer to traditional marriage, starting with the relaxing of divorce laws. We haven't had "traditional marriage" in this country since the early 60s. Its disgusting. The institution, so weakened, falls easy prey to other perversions. And "gay marriage" won't be the last. After that something else will come to weaken marriage further.
People don’t listen to reason. They have to see it all play out.
In the 50s, when conservatives warned that sexy rock’n’roll lyrics and rebellion against religion would unleash teen pregnancies and stds, liberals rolled their eyes and hooted in derision.
In the 60s, when conservatives warned that widely available birth control, permissive childrearing, rebellion against parental authority and sex’n’violence in movies would lead to social breakdown, Time magazine wrote: “Is God Dead?”— meaning, of course, “What a Crock.”
In the 70s, when SCOTUS passed Roe v. Wade and campuses started letting boys and girls stay over together and stopped letting parents “interfere” in the “education of young adults”, liberals sneered.
I’d go into the other decade low lights, but I have to get to work.
It’s so sad. We have lost our country.
Divorce Easier as New York Law Ends Need to Lie
Easy divorce is an even greater threat to the institution than gay marriage.
I don’t know the answer but we have got to improve the number of unwed mothers among the lower classes especially. For them it is an economic dead end and the children are not only economically worse off, they are more likely to be behind academically and more likely to be involved in criminal activity. And it’s a drain on the tax payer in every way.
Tackle that problem, and many of the problems in society would be greatly reduced.
No, we need a culture change to re-STIGMATIZE adultery, and to re-STIGMATIZE slutty behavior among teens, and to re-STIGMATIZE illegitmacy. These things have been glamorized in the last generation and especially by the entertainment culture. Taking back the culture will not come through legislation, so we need to focus our efforts where we can win the culture war.
When the country goes further into lawlessness, our freedoms will also go further away.
I was thinking about a sideways effort to expose their attempts to “redefine” traditions in our society, such as marriage.
We know their definition of marriage has nothing to do with two people being exclusively committed to each other for life. It might be useful to expose that.
The best way to do what you ask is to eliminate the social safety hammock. I don’t think we’ll be able to eliminate a lot of programs outright, at least not quickly, but we can certainly make it much more difficult to qualify for them. Why would a single mom on welfare marry? The system incentivizes sloth. Seriously. Get married? Lose benefits. Get a job? Lose benefits. It’s a big leap to take, and you risk health care, food, and a roof over your children’s heads.
Yes we need stigmas again.
That’s a major issue right there. We as a society have become non-judgemental about the “baby mama” culture which has taken root. We’re supposed to be liberal, and non-judgemental about so many having babies out of wedlock. We actually encourage that with certain social policies, such as public assistance, and nurseries in high schools nowadays. It’s as if young girls are expected to have babies while in high school.
Can you imagine a nursery in a high school 50 years ago? The school administrators of the day would be saying that girls should not be having babies in the first place. But nowadays, it’s just something that is expected to happen. We’re not allowed to say that teenage girls should not be having babies, because that would be making a moral/social judgement. Instead, we are supposed to be silent about any judgements.
Well, it seems that the primary argument was right for the most part after all. That is, why is marriage so important to liberalism? After all, to them, it’s primarily a superstitious institution, which is plagued by divorce. I would be willing to believe that similar to the rest of society, homosexuals follow a similar pattern. That is, cohabitate or get a civil union without serious need for an official marriage.
“Easy divorce is an even greater threat to the institution than gay marriage.”
Bingo.
The author seems to imply that heterosexuals just mysteriously soured on marriage, without ever touching on the reason why. Until something’s done about no-fault divorce laws, and rampant false child abuse and domestic violence allegations during divorce cases, why would any man want to put his foot in that bear trap?
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