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A majority of Americans still support same-sex 'marriage,' but a new poll reaffirms a notable decline over the past few years.

One of the most worrying trends in Western societies is the failing institution of marriage. Not only are divorce rates high, but increasingly young people are opting out altogether. A generation ago, 80 to 90 percent of the population in the United States would have been married by the age of 35; the number is now closer to 60 percent and has been falling over the past 10 years. That number matters because marriages are less likely to produce children after 35. In virtually all Western countries, the birth rate is now below replacement, which is almost certainly linked to...

For years we've been told there are certain issues that are simply too controversial to decide. So what do organizations do? They create a committee. Study it. Delay it. Hope the controversy cools off before anyone has to take a position. That's exactly what happened this week. The only problem? The organization wasn't a Fortune 500 company trying to navigate corporate politics. It wasn't Congress trying to avoid a difficult vote. It was a Christian denomination trying to decide whether its pastors should be... monogamous. Yes, you read that correctly. The Presbyterian Church (USA) postponed debate over a proposal that...

Americans age 50 and older are getting divorced—with almost half of all broken marriages in recent years coming from aging Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. Gray divorces doubled between 1990 and 2010, until they comprised about one in four of all divorces nationally... And though divorce has been dropping in most age groups across America, it has not among people 50 years and older. Michael Stutman, a top New York City divorce lawyer, thinks a “popular culture” shift around modern marriage expectations, coupled with staring down the barrel of mortality, could be playing a part. “The thing about people who...

Couples who marry before conceiving their first child are 50% less likely to break up than those who conceive outside of wedlock, findings of a new study show.... Benson analyzed data on 3,324 couples and tracked their children born in the early 2000s until their 14th birthday. He found a significant “marriage effect” regardless of socioeconomic background, race, religion, education, region, and several other control variables.

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The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible and less than a real man.Ehrenreich understood that marriage was...

It's a bit weird to think of dating or marriage as a market — but this is a newsletter that tries to make sense of the world through economics. And, like any market, shifts in supply and demand can reshape romantic outcomes in pretty profound ways. First, a dating story that illustrates this dynamic. Then we'll get to a fascinating new study that may help explain why getting married has become harder for many American women. But first, the story. If you haven't heard of him, Jack Antonoff is a musician and super-producer. He, for example, produced a slew of...

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.Democrats rarely mention our nation’s fertility crisis, but when they do, they always offer the same solution: more immigration. Here is former President Bill Clinton stumping for Vice President Kamala Harris in the most recent presidential election."We got the lowest birth rate we've had in well over 100 years,” Clinton told Harris supporters less than a...

Elisabeth “Betty” Broderick, who in 1989 infamously murdered her ex-husband and his new bride as they slept in the bedroom of their California home, has died at 78 while serving a life sentence. Broderick died on Friday at the California Institution for Women of natural causes, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed to People.

As the U.S. birth rate continues to plummet to record lows, data shows that a significant percentage of liberals are deprioritizing the importance of marriage and having children, especially among teens. Among conservatives, however, the phenomenon does not appear to be occurring. In an article published last week by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), sociologists Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey highlight how the aspirations that many liberals claim to have about marrying and having children are not lining up with their real-world behavior, which appears to be heavily influenced by negative media narratives. They note that mainstream media outlets...

The data are in, they’re not looking good, and the implications for America’s future are dire. Recently, a report was released on the latest fertility rate numbers for the United States, and they are alarming. For several years, they’ve been low enough to cause worry about American replacement rates, but in 2025, they hit a new low:AdvertisementThe United States is experiencing a demographic shift that could reshape the nation’s future. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows America’s total fertility rate has plummeted to a historic low of 1.6 children per woman—well below the 2.1 replacement level...

Raise your hand if someone close to you – friend, relative, co-worker – has been personally touched by divorce. Sadly, I’ve been able to raise my hand for all three at certain points of my life, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you can as well. Perhaps you’ve even been divorced yourself. The prevalence of divorce in our culture is likely why so few say anything against it. Afraid of stepping on toes, we dance around the topic, telling divorcees that they’re “so brave” for separating from their partner, or that they did the right thing to get out and...

I used to be entirely in the camp that said you should kick your kids out at 18 and force them to live independently and make their own way in the world. I don’t feel that way at all anymore. I want all my kids to live with us until they get married. Even after they’re married, if they want to live on our property, or close by, my wife and I would love that. The important thing is to teach your kids responsibility, which we’re doing. They need to contribute and help around the house, which all of our...

Modern women are at a crossroads. There seems to be an irreconcilable difference between a career-driven woman…and the opportunity to approach womanhood and traditional goals as a life of their own. But when you look into these two paths online, they are actually far more similar… Infatuated by the haze of traditional influencers like Nara Smith, Erika Kirk and Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, those replicating these lifestyles have fully lost the actual degree of agency and success these “trad-wives” have achieved. Look no further than Erika Kirk, who is the current Chief Executive Officer of Turning Point USA…She has a...

A Catholic bishop in Belgium has announced plans to ordain married men to the priesthood by 2028, despite the Roman Catholic Church’s requirement of clerical celibacy.Bishop Johan Bonny of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Antwerp recently released a pastoral letter claiming that “the consensus on this question is almost total” among Church leaders.“The question is no longer whether the Church can ordain married men as priests but when it will do so, and who will do it,” wrote Bonny. “Any delay comes across as an excuse.”The bishop said he “will make every effort to ordain married men as priests for...

ABC has scrubbed the upcoming season of “The Bachelorette,” starring Taylor Frankie Paul, three days before its planned premiere, citing a newly released video from 2023 in which she appears to punch, kick and throw chairs at her former partner as her young daughter watched and cried. Thursday’s cancellation of the already filmed 22nd season of the reality show is unprecedented. While ABC parent company Disney cited the older video, the move comes amid a current domestic violence investigation involving Paul and Dakota Mortensen, father to a son who is the youngest of her three children.

Zarqawi Associate Charged with Lying to FBI Friday, June 25, 2004 By Catherine Herridge and Anna Stolley A Lebanese national with ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (search), the most wanted terrorist in Iraq, was picked up in Minnesota and charged Friday in a New York court with lying to the FBI about his ties to terrorists, Fox News has learned. According to a federal complaint obtained by Fox, Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi (search), attended jihad training camps in Afghanistan in 1988 and ‘89, where he first met Zarqawi — who is believed to be directing the current attacks against U.S. and...

Donald Tusk’s government has replaced the words “woman” and “man” in key official documents with gender-neutral terms so that same-sex marriages conducted elsewhere can be recognised in Poland. This follows the European Court of Justice’s November ruling that Poland must recognise a gay couple’s foreign marriage despite the country itself forbidding same-sex marriage. But a host of politicians and legal experts have argued that Warsaw was not obliged to introduce this change of language. Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski, however, appeared to concede that the move was voluntary, saying his team “wanted to” recognise same-sex marriages. In a statement released...

America spent the last decade insisting that redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would never open the door to anything else. Opponents were dismissed as hysterical, warned that slippery slopes weren’t real. But marriage did not stop evolving at “two people.” A new frontier is forming — not directly from the LGBTQ movement, but from two radically different cultural currents now converging on the same legal question.On one side is a revival of biblical polygyny, championed by figures such as Missouri pastor Rich Tidwell and author and cultural commentator Rob Kowalski. On the other is Gen Z’s normalization of polyamory,...