Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution and Adam Thomas of Georgetown University have found that much of the growth in child poverty from the late 1960s to the 1990s can be attributed to the growth in single parenthood, and that “child poverty rates would drop substantially” if more low-income parents were married. My research with the Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman suggests that about one-third of the growth in family-income inequality can be linked to declines in marriage since the 1970s. Economic stagnation among ordinary American families would also be lower were it not for the retreat from marriage: We estimate that the “growth in median income of families with children would be 44 percent higher if the United States enjoyed 1980 levels of married parenthood today.”
.. At least in the United States, Francis is indeed right to argue that the “evidence is mounting” that the retreat from marriage is “associated with increased poverty and a host of other social ills.”
.. The figure above shows that Catholics without a college degree are about one-fourth less likely to regularly attend Mass, compared to Catholics with a college degree.
The Supreme Court’s Lonely Hearts Club
In granting same-sex couples “equal dignity in the eyes of the law,” Justice Kennedy throws everyone under the “just married” limo. Dignity — the state of being worthy of honor or respect — is undeniably appealing. One reading of the majority opinion suggests, however, one isn’t dignified unless one can be married. But some of us can’t or won’t ever find that special someone. We might not have the luck or the timing or the inclination.
If dignity is predicated on being lucky in love, then what happens when your luck runs out?
.. But singleness includes everyone at some point, even those who are married: love ends; spouses cheat; someone dies first. To be in a marriage, no matter how strong, is always a precarious condition, which means that the dignity you’ve been given can be taken away at any moment.
.. It’s as if the words of Justice Kennedy and my grandmother, who, on her deathbed, begged me to get married, have melded together in my head, declaring my life lacking — emotions meet law and then throw me into a state of emotional insecurity.
.. What Justice Kennedy, and everyone else too, needs to remember is that simply being yourself — your single self — is already the fundamental form of dignity. Founding your dignity on something as flimsy and volatile as a sexual connection insures dignity’s precariousness as it enshrines your inherent unworthiness as a single individual.
Woe to You Who Are at Ease in Zion
Graham announced that he was transferring the association’s accounts to the BB&T Bank, “a good solid bank that’s very good at banking.”
.. Graham’s failure to find a bank opposed to gay marriage points to the accelerating isolation of unreconstructed cultural conservatives.
.. The South now suffers the highest rates of marital dissolution, nonmarital childbearing and father absence. Five of the 10 states with the highest numbers of women murdered by men are in the South.
.. Survey data that Wilcox cites in his 2004 book, “Soft Patriarchs, New Men,” indicates that family disorder in the South has been notably evident in one specific group: those born into conservative religions but who have since abandoned or neglected their ties. In contrast, those who remain religiously engaged show strikingly low levels of family dysfunction – in some cases well below national averages.
.. Along similar lines, wives among active, church-going conservative Protestants reported a significantly higher level of happiness with the husbands’ “love and affection” than wives in families that have only nominal religious ties.
.. But, she said, “the highest rates of divorce occurred for church attending conservative Protestant wives married to non-attending husbands.”
The North-South Divide on Two-Parent Families
That conventional wisdom stems from the fact that politically conservative states, for all their emphasis on family values, have long had high divorce rates. In the Northeast, California and Illinois, divorce is notably low. As a result, some researchers have argued that families in blue states are more stable than families in red states.
.. So, however, has marriage, while single parenthood — and the number of children who never live with both parents — has risen sharply. Marriage and single parenthood don’t break down along the same red-blue lines that divorce does.