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The Silence of the Wedding Bells
Am I the only one who is worried about the collapse
of the traditional American family right before our
very eyes?
Census Bureau bureaucrats are not in the habit
of making apocalyptic pronouncements, but last year
Mark Mather reported that the “dramatic
decline” in the married population is
“one of the biggest demographic stories of the
past several decades.” Now, married couples
now account for a minority – 49.7% to be exact
– of all U.S. households.
The cause of this extraordinary demographic
shift is two-fold. First, Americans are getting
married only half as often as we used to. Second
since 1960, the share of divorced Americans rose
from 2% to 10%.
African-American communities have been
especially hard-hit. In 1960 four-fifths of all
Black families had fathers and mothers at home.
Three decades later, that number had plummeted to
38%.
As a result of the decline of marriage,
illegitimacy is on the upswing. Just last week the
National Center for Health Statistics announced
that almost four in 10 babies were born
out-of-wedlock in 2005.
All this is very bad news for kids, since
children raised only by mothers are more likely to
be poor, suffer from a host of behavioral and
academic problems, and get in trouble with the
law.
For sure, the great majority of young women say
they plan to get married and have kids some day. So
why has Cosmo replaced Bride magazine in the
supermarket check-out lines?
Some experts cite the “greater economic
independence of women,” as if a single mom
scraping by on a welfare check is what female
liberation is all about. Others argue that
Americans are simply delaying the age of marriage,
suggesting that women who are nervously watching
their biological clocks just need to be a little
more patient.
But there’s one fact that’s hard to
dispute: our country faces an acute shortage of
marriage-minded men.
Two years ago Barbara Whitehead and David
Popenoe of Rutgers University did a national survey
of single heterosexual men, ages 25-34. To
everyone’s shock, they found 22% of the men
declared no interest in finding their One and Only.
[marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/SOOU/TEXTSOOU2004.htm
 ]
That means two million American women will likely
never see the inside of a wedding chapel.
Now, hooking-up is replacing that quaint
courtship ritual that used to be known as
“dating.” When Norval Glenn and Elizabeth
Marquardt surveyed college senior women, they found
that one-third of the women had been asked on fewer
than two dates.
And this past August the New York Times
ran a piece on “Facing Middle Age with No
Degree, and No Wife,” which revealed the
reluctance to wed runs especially deep in less
educated men.
There is overwhelming research that shows
marriage benefits both men and women in terms of
their financial and emotional well-being. Plus,
married folks live longer. So what do we need to do
to entice men back into the courtship ritual?
The Nasty Nellies have been giving marriage a
bum rap for years, so sadly there are no quick
fixes. But this is what we need to do.
First, we need to dispose of the boogeyman of
the patriarchal ogre lording over his beleaguered
wife. If that image was ever true, it certainly
doesn’t apply to any couple that I know of. In
fact, the reverse now seems to be more commonplace:
the harried, henpecked husband who’s hectored
to keep his feet off the furniture during the ball
game.
Second, we need to consider the effects of the
1992 Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v.
Casey decision that banned fathers from
participating in decisions to keep the unborn baby,
thus leaving them biologically disenfranchised.
Third, we’ve got to do more to help boys
excel academically. Trash the Title IX quotas,
provide special help for boys who are lagging, and
tell teachers to stop expecting boys to act like
girls.
Fourth, we need to do a major overhaul of our
nation’s domestic violence laws, which allow
any woman to plunder her husband’s assets and
steal his children by merely claiming
“abuse.”
And fifth, reform of our divorce laws is long
overdue, so fathers are encouraged to remain
involved in their children’s lives as parents,
not every-other-weekend visitors.
Sadly in low-income Black communities, marriage
is essentially a dead institution. And there are
groups in our country that now want to extend their
agenda of family destruction to society at
large.
The family is the very building block of a
civilized and prosperous society. What will it take
to bring back the exuberant peal of June wedding
bells?
See Books,
Issues
Carey
Roberts probes and lampoons political correctness.
His work has been published frequently in the
Washington Times, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com,
ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and
elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media
Network. You can contact him at E-Mail
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