The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : Why Gay ‘Marriage Equality' Is Bad for America and Hurts Children

The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : Why Gay ‘Marriage Equality' Is Bad for America and Hurts Children

Goldberg's marriage isn't under threat, but the institution of marriage is -- so much so that marriage rates in America have plummeted and out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed.

National Review's Rich Lowry notes, for instance, that the number of Americans in intact first marriages has dropped from 73 percent in the 1970s to 45 percent today. And the poorer and less educated you are, the more likely you are to suffer from the political and cultural degradation of marriage.

Just 45 percent of moderately educated, middle-income Americans are in intact first marriages. For the poorest and least-educated Americans, the corresponding figure is 39 percent.

Why does this matter? Because the best and most effective way to avert crime, poverty, drug abuse and other social pathologies is to have strong, intact families. "Being raised in a married family reduces a child's probability of living in poverty by about 80 percent," writes the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector.

....

But what does this have to do with gay "marriage"? Everything. Sure, this breakdown in the family has occurred independent of the push for "marriage equality." But it is still part and parcel of an overarching effort to undermine and deprecate traditional marriage and the traditional family.

It is still part of a broader political and cultural movement to decouple marriage from its principal purpose, which is the care and raising of children.

Instead, marriage must become (as it has become) mainly about personal self-fulfillment -- and it must mean whatever each of us wants it to mean, and it must be culturally optional. No one's marriage and no one's family (or the lack thereof) is better (or worse) than any other. These are all individual lifestyle choices.

That would be fine, perhaps (or at least less of a problem), if we all lived in isolation and were wholly self-dependent and self-sufficient family units, but we're not. We live in communities, and we make demands upon the state for family "assistance" and other remedial, governmental actions.

And we do this because there really is no substitute for the traditional family, with a mother and a father. So when our new and more modern "families" fail, the state must intervene. So it is that the seeds for the bureaucratic welfare state, the redistribution of wealth, and economic liberalism are sown in social and cultural libertarianism.