I'm getting married....soon.

I know I promised you a continuing post on Stand for the Family and all that...but I want to interrupt this regularly scheduled boring program for something more interesting.

Last weekend, when I was in DC at the Values Voter Summit, my co-worker Rachel and I got to staff the Heritage booth for a few hours on a Friday morning. Of course, being the marriage and society nut that I am, rather than recruiting new Heritage members, I ended up having long conversations about the marriage movement and educating the rising generation on the public goods of marriage, and sending most patrons to the National Organization for Marriage and the Ruth Institute booth across the way. I'm sure Heritage appreciated that. But they know. Pretty much anyone who knows me becomes a casualty to one of these conversations about marriage and society if I've known you for longer than about...one day.

So I'm talking to one of the Heritage interns at our booth about the cultural impact on the way we view marriage. He's 22 years old, just graduated in Guitar Performance, and is working in the Strategic Planning department as an intern for a semester. He's asking me questions about marriage and society and what I think is important and fanning the flames of my verboseness with the kinds of questions I love to hear.

Then he says, "These things are good for me to know because I'm getting married soon." I say, "Oh, congratulations! Are you engaged then?" to which he replies, "No."

....

Cricket, Cricket.

No further explanation followed. The implication was that he wasn't even dating anyone currently. To which I reply (after awkward silence), "Oh yeah, I'm getting married too. So is Rachel. In fact we're all getting married soon! Yay!"

In case you're wondering, no, none of us is dating anyone.

After we all had a good laugh about it, I began to think that, in all seriousness, that is probably the most optimistic and correct attitude I've heard about marriage in a long time from a single twenty-something in my generation.
And probably one of the best ways to create a marriage culture by talking about marriage as important and present in our lives, even when we are not married.

We don't study about, talk about, think about, read about, research about, and care about marriage only because it is imminent in our lives, or even because it is our life or our spouse or children that we care about. We care because it is the future. And we must all care, as if our lives depended on it, because in fact they do. Marriage is the future. Without it, our society and nation will decline and ultimately die.

At the Heritage Foundation, for one of the projects I work on I've had the privilege of working with Robert Rector studying demographic trends of marriage, child bearing, and drudging up statistics and reports from the US Census Bureau. This has been fascinating research, not because I enjoy digging through archives of data. But because it is enlightening to see the trends of how Americans marry and mate in the US over the last 100 years.

Pay attention because what I'm about to say is really important. When the Census Bureau started taking record, the unwed (back then it was called illegitimate) birth rate was about 3%. That means 97% of all children were born to a married mother and father. The unwed birth rate in America in 2009 is over 40%. For African Americans the rate is 72.5% and for Hispanics it is 52.5%. That means that of all the children born in the United States, only 60% are now born to married parents.

Children born to unwed or single parents are significantly more likely to be born into poverty, struggle in education, become incarcerated, struggle emotionally and inter-personally, and experience a reduced quality of life compared to their peers.

In social science, gallons of ink have been spilt and trees worth of paper have filled books about the negative outcomes of a child raised without both a biological mother and father in a married household. Now I understand there are many extenuating circumstances and many unpreventable situations that are out of control, and single parents do the best job that they can. But this is bigger than individual and personal circumstances. This is a sociological and demographic trend that is becoming the norm. We must not confuse compassion for the exception and tragic circumstance with embracing it as the ideal. It is time to recognize this as a damaging social trend.

I know these are strong words, but the research I have done on marriage, attachment, and child outcomes has caused me to feel that having a child outside of marriage and without a committed mother and father is near unto a form of child abuse. The chances that child has of having the same kind of success in life as a peer from an intact family are very slim. The collapse of marriage casts a long shadow on the next generation and I feel, even more than a massive debt and financial disaster, that this behavior is mortgaging our children's future. I don't believe we have the right to do this to the next generation.

This last week, the new poverty numbers for America came out as well. 17.3% of Americans are living in poverty (for a single person, less than $10k per year, for a family of 4 less than $22k per year). That is 1 in every 7 persons in America. What is worse, children make up the largest demographic in this group. Now 1 in 5 children in America is considered living in poverty. This is not just due to the recession. The bulk of these children live with unwed and single parents.

A child that is born to an unwed parent is 8 times more likely to live in poverty for a substantial amount of time, and be dependent on government programs, compared to a child born to a married household. Now while my colleague is stronger in his words I'm not naive enough to think that these relationships are strictly causal or that there's not a broad chain of events and circumstances that lead to child outcomes and parent situations. But I also do not think I'm being overly-optimistic to say that the most effective tool we have in strengthening our nation, the next generation, and reducing national poverty, is marriage. We must do better.