Reality Check 101

It is easy assume that families who are in crisis are somehow failures within a successful culture.  The reality is that the last several generations have passed down a cultural and legal heritage which predisposes families to fail.  The evidence is in the demographics and in the news.

 In 1960, just beforeAmerica’s so-called sexual revolution, there were less than half-a-million couples cohabiting.  By 2007, the number had risen to over five million.  As of 2008, over half of first marriages began with couples living together first.

 This has been a sadly destructive development.  Cohabiting couples have a separation rate five times that of married couples.  Indications are that around 40% of all American children will live in these uncommitted relationships and the vast majority of them will endure a parental break-up before they turn fifteen.  During these relationships, women are sixty-two times more likely than married couples to be assaulted and rates of depression are three times higher.

 During the 1960’s and 1970’s, it was not unusual for many psychologists and sociologists to sing the virtues of trial marriages.  The truth is that has failed miserably.  In the 1950’s the divorce rate was 20%.  Only 11% of children born to married couples ever had to suffer the trauma of family dissolution.  By 1970, both rates were at 50%.  One study estimated that if the United States still enjoyed the family stability of the past, there would be 750,00 fewer children repeating grades, 500,000 less acts of delinquency, 600,000 fewer kids in therapy and 70,000 fewer suicide attempts.

 The most recent news stories reveal cases of registered sex offenders gaining custody of their children.  There are stories from over the last few years such as the one inCook County in which a Circuit Court judge barred the father in a divorce case from taking his daughter to any non-Jewish activities.  InNew Hampshire, a mother was ordered to submit her daughter to public education and stop home-schooling, even though the daughter had been excelling.  Last month, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (R) signed on to a proposed bill that would effectively close the doors of hundreds of Christian adoption and foster-care agencies who prefer sending kids into stable marriages above cohabitations and into heterosexual homes before homosexual ones – this despite the well documented pathologies of non-traditional .

 Foundations are crumbling.  For two centuries, family law and the structure of American society rested firmly on the centrality of the classic family as expressed throughout ages by Judeo-Christian western civilization.  Marriage was viewed as the most primary of all institutions.  It was the vehicle through which new generations were expected to gain the discipline, security, virtue and vision necessary to form a bright future.  

 Beginning in the 1960’s and early 1970’s that changed.  Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 removed generations of spiritual foundations from public schools.  The first no-fault divorce statute was signed into law in 1969 and Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.  With these and other decisions, perceptions of marriage and family began to drastically shift.  The institution of marriage became a mere alternative among a growing list of ways to seek fulfillment and avoid children while taking advantage of marriage privileges.

 We now live in a time when sacred marriage and precious children serve mainly as instruments of self-gratification.  Genuine marriage stubbornly persists, but is victim to a final stage of corruption – total redefinition.  We should not be surprised by the rapid decay of our nation after having deserted the one solid cornerstone of civilization.