Who said that? The Family Research Council? The Heritage Foundation? American Interprise Institute? Nope. Try Time magazine:
There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass. . . .
The reason for these appeals to lasting unions is simple: on every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration — if you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.
Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father at home. ‘As a feminist, I didn’t want to believe it,’ says Maria Kefalas, a sociologist who studies marriage and family issues and co-authored a seminal book on low-income mothers called Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. ‘Women always tell me, “I can be a mother and a father to a child,” but it’s not true.’ Growing up without a father has a deep psychological effect on a child. ‘The mom may not need that man,’ Kefalas says, ‘but her children still do.’ . . . .
The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it — given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized — simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it? If so, we might as well hold the wake now: there probably aren’t many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness.
Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation’s own safe passage into adulthood? Think of it this way: the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can’t be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children’s lives — that’s the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old.
(via GetReligion)
July 17th, 2009 | 12:17 pm
[...] Via First Things. [...]
July 17th, 2009 | 3:19 pm
Yesterday, my wife, Martha, and I celebrated thirty-eight years of wedded bliss. I can not understand how those years went by so quickly.
July 17th, 2009 | 5:17 pm
Time magazine is asking their questions from a secular viewpoint and asking what is the utility of marriage? This will always lead to an incomplete set of responses.
Marriage and family has as its foundation a theological orientation. The example of marriage and family that the world should turn its attention to for instruction is that of the Holy Family. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It is understanding who we are as children of God and looking to the example of the Holy Family that we learn how to orient our lives while we are on pilgrammage here on earth. All other analysis is secondary to this truth.
July 18th, 2009 | 3:36 am
This trend has been observed for years. It was well known to Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights leaders in the 60′s that the more significant cause of poverty was the breakdown of the family. However, he was reluctant to champion this theory. Why? His own infidelities, perhaps?
I have seen it myself in working with poorer populations. But what will our society do with this information?
July 18th, 2009 | 3:27 pm
And what has doomed marriage is the loss of it’s foundation in Faith (i.e. man and woman joined in the transcendent God Who Blesses their life commitment to each other). This has caused it to lose the appearance of having any intrinsic and inalienable worth. For most who enter it now its value is determined by calculation of potential gains and losses.
July 19th, 2009 | 12:16 pm
Those of us with faith must not only listen and agree to act in support of marriage for whatever reason–be it faith in Faith, or desire to contribute to the common good. We must also grasp the root causes of the problem of marriage and begin, with ourselves and our own marriage first, to attack the root causes. Otherwise, our efforts will amount to putting bandages on wounds too deep to be healed by them.
One root cause is contraception. Contraception runs absolutely against the ethos of marriage in Christ, contradicting the total gift bespoken by the marriage vows. When we are not true to the vows, in whatever way, the marriage is undermined.
Note that there is evidence of the truth of this, in practice. The divorce rate for those using Natural Family Planning is, insofar as we can tell, less than 5%.
July 20th, 2009 | 3:34 pm
New virtue-ethic foundation for marriage:
The first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Christ is on the web. Redefining all primary elements including Faith, the Word, the Trinity and the Resurrection, this new interpretation questions the validity and origins of all Christian tradition; focusing specifically on marriage, love and human sexuality, it overturns all natural law ethics and theory. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history and moral teaching, and will certainly impact other fields of intellectual inquiry.
What first appears a counter intuitive and utterly preposterous challenge to the religious status quo rewards closer examination, for it carries within its pages ideas both subtle and sublime, what the theological history of religion either ignored, were unable to imagine or dismissed as impossible. An error of presumption which could now leave ‘tradition’ staring into the abyss and humble the heights of secular, scientific speculation. This new teaching has nothing whatsoever to do with any existing religious conception known to history. It is unique in every respect. What science and religion have agreed was not possible, has now become an all too probable.
Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the worlds great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle offering the promise of its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds to an act of perfect faith with a direct, individual intervention into the natural world; correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries. Intended to be understood metaphorically, where ‘death’ is ignorance and ‘Life’ is knowledge, this experience, personal encounter and liberation by transcendent power and moral purpose is the ‘Resurrection’, the justification of faith. An entirely new dimension to human existence begins here!
If extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and rightly so, here then is the first ever viable religious conception capable of leading reason, by faith, to observable consequences which can be tested and judged. This new teaching delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition, that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable, evidence based truth embodied in action. However unexpected or seemingly implausible, for the first time in history, a new moral tenet exists, offering access by faith, to absolute proof for its belief.
This is ‘religion’ without any of the coventional trappings of tradition. An individual, applied virtue-ethical conception all in a single moral command, this new interpretation defines the foundation of all moral conduct and the single Law finds expression within a new covenant of marriage. It requires no institutional framework or hierarchy, no churches or priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, dogma or doctrine and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single moral imperative and the integrity and fidelity to the new reality.
If confirmed and there appears both the means and a growing, concerted effort to test and authenticate this material, this will represent a paradigm change in the moral and intellectual potential of human nature itself; untangling and resolving the greatest questions of human existence: consciousness, meaning, suffering, free will and evil. And at the same time offering real solutions to the most profound problems of our age.
And therein lies its attraction. While from every television screen, newspaper, radio and web, the limitations of mankind are become more obvious every day by the failure to successfully address and resolve the most pressing problems facing the modern world and threatening the earth itself. The emperor has no clothes!
Offering the ‘means to ends’ this new teaching is asking humanity, choose the future you prefer? The status quo, where existing religious tradition, mired in its own corruption and contradictions offers little but divisiveness and its own pretensions, while politics offers only the growing chaos of more war, terrorism, conflict, environmental degradation, spin and whitewash, economic turmoil and division, sectarianism and natural disasters. Or learning to accept that human nature and natural reason, chained to evolution, exists within ethical limits, and by taking new personal and moral responsibility, in a single change of mind and conduct, by faith, transcend those limits and blow the status quo strait to hell.
While trials of this new teaching are under way in several countries, colloquial evidence from discussion forums already suggest confirmations are taking place and probably increasing. For those individuals who can imagine outside the historical cultural box, who are willing to learn something new and stand against the stream of fashionable thought and spin, an intellectual and moral revolution is already in progress, where the ‘impossible’ becomes inevitable and with the most potent Non Violent Direct Action any human being can take to advance peace, justice, change and progress.
Published [at the moment] only on the web, a typeset manuscript of this new teaching is available as a free [1.4meg] PDF download from a variety of sites including:
http://www.energon.org.uk
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