I try not to be a judgmental person. Especially of late, I typically prefer to leave the obnoxious moralizing, shallow virtue-signaling, and hysterical hand-wringing to the Leftists, who after decades of godlessness finally seem to have what’s ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ down pat, being high priests and priestesses of their own invented ‘religion,’ after all. But I try to live and let live, respecting other people’s viewpoints and understanding that, though I may see the world through a particular lens, others may see things in an entirely different way.
So yeah, I get that the “but” that’s about to come will, in some people’s view, cancel out any of the above sentiments, BUT I still feel compelled to ask - What on earth happened to marriage? Even for those who don’t believe the practice to be God-ordained as prescribed in the Bible, it’s hard to deny that following the “success sequence” of finishing school, getting a job, getting married, THEN having children leads to a remarkably strong bulwark against poverty.
And yet, has anyone else noticed that ‘traditional’ families - i.e. a husband, a wife, and a child or children who are actually at least nine months younger than the total time their parents have been married - are about as rare as a liberal who tips?
I know I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Talk about it with anyone you trust of a traditional bent and they’ll tell you in a whisper, if they’re honest, that they’ve noticed it too. Taking divorce and split families out of this analysis entirely (a whole other issue), chances are a shocking percentage of young couples with kids you spot at a grocery store, an amusement park, at work, or even your church will either be unmarried or have been married at some point after their children were conceived or born. Talk to the ones you know in a non-judgmental way, and you’ll discover a variety of reasons - one or the other is just not ready to “settle down” (though they already have children and are living together); one or the other is just not “responsible” (though they have a HUGE responsibility between them); one of the other or both just needs to be a little more financially stable (though that didn’t stop them from - ahem - procreating). You get the picture. There’s always a reason to justify not adding ‘commitment’ to what one’s life essentially already is.
In fairness, it’s not entirely their fault. Why has marriage, an institution as old as humankind itself, fallen out of such favor with the masses? Although marriage has for millenia been the building block of families, indeed of civilization itself, in 2014 only 46 percent of adults agreed with the statement, “Society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority,” according to PEW Research.
A building block that is crumbling fast. But why? Could it be by design?
Fox News host Tucker Carlson got into some trouble after this Wednesday night “Tucker Carlson Tonight” segment (take 15 minutes and watch it - it’s one of his all-time best) in which he blamed the decline of marriage - and consequently of society itself - at least in part on the lack of male income opportunities and the elites’ utter disregard and even contempt of the plight of the American blue-collar male. Because, well, despite all the hyperventilating about the nonexistent ‘glass ceiling’ and the mythical ‘gender pay gap,’ women, even liberal ones, tend to not want to marry men who make less money than they do. Among the many critics of Tucker’s segment was Joy Behar and the hosts of “The View,” who ridiculed it, but as Carlson noted the next night, never attempted to dispute the facts behind his argument.
Probably because the facts are all too easily provable. The same PEW study quoted above says: “Never-married women place a great deal of importance on finding someone who has a steady job—fully 78% [compared to 46 percent of men] say this would be very important to them in choosing a spouse or partner. For never-married men, someone who shares their ideas about raising children is more important in choosing a spouse than someone who has a steady job.”
Of course, as we all know, liberals never let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
So on one hand, you’ve got women not wanting to marry men who can’t find good jobs. On the other, a generally anti-male, anti-father court system that makes marrying the wrong woman among the most tragic life decisions a man can make. Add no-fault divorce, the decline of traditional morals and the “marriage penalty” tax into the mix, and it’s almost like marriage these days is set up to fail.
Yet Tucker also noted how, interestingly, marriage is alive and well among rich people, and the actual facts bear this out as well. In a New York Times article titled, “Marriage Is for Rich People,” Catherine Rampell (a lib) writes, “The rich are different from you and me: they’re more likely to get married. A new report, by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, looked at the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years and found a strong connection to income. Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor — the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income.”
If you’re a leftist and your goal was to destroy, then remake society into whatever twisted image you had in your head of what it should be, you’d likely first go after its foundation. Could this explain why leftists have been going after marriage as an institution - and by extension the family - for decades? Destroy the means by which humans raise stable, functional, healthy members of the next generation, and you strike at the root of society itself. If you believe that traditional society (a.k.a. Western civilization) is evil at its core, as today’s leftists do, it’s a strategy that makes sense, at least in their own warped minds.
It’s not about being ‘judgy’ or intolerant or in any way looking down on people who make bad or unwise decisions, because we all make bad or unwise decisions from time to time. However, the facts show that the “success sequence” mentioned above isn’t just a path to financial success, it’s one to success as a society as well. To save it, we must save marriage as an institution. In order to have any hope of doing that, we must recognize, expose, then reverse the forces that are tearing it apart. The next generation literally hangs in the balance.