Which of the following would you choose to end if you could?
- Homelessness
- Human trafficking
- Overcrowded prisons
- Suicide
- Poverty
- Teen pregnancy
- Childhood obesity
- High High School Dropout Rates
Couldn’t pick one? What if there was an ALL OF THE ABOVE option? Every one of these devastating and complex societal ills have one thing in common- every single one of these injustices can be traced back to a breakdown in the family.
- 90% of homeless and runaway youth- a common gateway to trafficking- are fatherless.
- 70-85% of prison inmates grew up without a father.
- 63% of teenagers who commit suicide have absent fathers.
- Fatherless children are four times more likely to live in poverty.
- 71% of pregnant teenagers come from fatherless homes.
- Kids whose parents lived separately before their birth were almost twice as likely to be overweight compared to those whose parents were living together.
- 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes.
The one ingredient missing in these recipes for disaster, is marriage. Marriage is not just some outdated religious concept. It’s simply the combination of three things that children need to thrive- mother, father, and stability. These are the three staples in a child’s social and emotional diet. When one of these three are missing, children are disproportionately at risk physically, mentally and emotionally. With today’s soaring rates of extra-marital birth, cohabitation, divorce and reproductive technologies which deprive children of one or all of these, we have the society-wide wreckage to prove that kids need all three. If we don’t fortify the foundation of our society by strengthening marriage, any effort toward social justice will merely be a Band-Aid over a festering wound. Conveniently, if you are deeply concerned about anything on the list of aforementioned heartaches you need not trouble yourself with picking just one on which to concentrate your crusade for justice. The way to have a real, profound, lasting effect on future generations is to become an advocate of just one thing – marriage. Championing marriage and children rights is an all-encompassing battle against every societal ill and the devastation it visits upon all of us. That’s why it’s the greatest battle of our time- the outcome of the marriage battle will determine all others. Join us.
I absolutely agree and there is a mountain of social science studies that testify to the importance of marriage and family fidelity.
100% agree!! The greatest gift you can give your children is a strong, healthy marriage.
All of the above “problems” with society has nothing to do with gay sex or religious “sin.”.
She said it has to do with fatherlessness. Where did you come up with gay sex and religious sin?
Because if you go to their website, it’s apparent that ‘marriage’ means ‘NOT gay marriage.’ This is basically the beginning of an argument against gay marriage. That’s why these people exist.
news flash, champ. some of “these people” are gay themselves. some were raised by gay couples. i personally donate to “these people” every month, and i’m a card-carrying lezzer and an agnostic Jew. WE exist because we’re free-thinking humans of all stripes who strongly believe in prioritizing the rights and well-being of children over the desires of adults. hence the name.
normally, i would end this with a detailed and graphic description of what you can do with your straw-man. but out of respect for those scary religious Christians among us, i ask that you use your imagination instead.
Mother, father and their offspring; i.e. the authentic family may be justifiably considered as the archetypal form of all other larger viable political structures.
When the State seeks to dismember its own authentic archetype, the family in the name of “progress”, the State will ultimately succeed in cutting off its own feet: It will leave itself with a populace more intent on violence and anarchy than communal harmony, justice and good order.
I didn’t come from a overly happy family environment, but dispite the severe mental sickness of my father, my mother kept us all together and tried her hardest to normalize our home life, of which I can appreciate greatly now, but not, always as a young child, it was sometimes very lonely and sad. Often today, people are too eager to live together, which never brings stability and can create generations of single mums in the process, of which, boys as well as girls are left with no self esteem or a mother/father relationship, as within a marriage. As hard as it can often be within marriage we need to support those families and stick together, so the children being raised are brought up within a loving and healthy environment.; a environment that is passed on to the next, only to improve on. All children deserve a mother and father who will give them support and esteem to take them into healthy adulthood.
See I really feel like this whole marriage thing undermines the equal rights of people who have unmarried parents. Marriage is great but it does not always work out. We need to strive to ensure parents take good care of their own offspring whether they are married to the other parent or not. That creates equal rights for every person born. What if a man has a child with a woman he’s not married to while married to someone else? Doesn’t his child deserve him to be named father on their birth certificate regardless if their father happens to be married to a woman whose not his mother? What if his mother is married too? Does her child have to be forced to have his stepfathers name on his birth certificate forever tying him to the wrong family? People will always have kids outside marriage so we need laws that protect people when their parents are unmarried which are the same as the rules for married parents.
I’m still married to my husband but we have not lived together for 6 years because living together was horrible for our child. I hang on to the idea that staying married is good for her but now as a teenager she tells me the opposite. Marriage really is not good for kids. Parents who are involved with their kids are good for kids. If the parents get along and are married great. Marriage has not existed as long as parenthood. there is no such thing as fatherlessness. Absent fathers need to be held accountable whether married or not and marriage won’t hold them accountable. Marriage itself does not compel them to provide financial support. Marriage alone does not make a father be present or involved. Lots of people are married to people who are totally out of the picture. It’s weak logic. Marriage is meaningless.
It’s not a surprise that someone who is separated not have much respect for marriage. It’s not others fault your marriage didn’t work out.
Her point is true regardless of her respect for the institution. The fact is, just strengthening the institution of marriage does nothing to force fathers to stay in the picture. A child can be the child of two married parents and still be “fatherless” as this website puts it.
Marriage is actually the only institution that is found in every human society for which we have any written or archaeological evidence. However, not every society has defined it as between one man and one woman. In any case, during the Middle Ages in Europe, marriage was a sacred institution between one man and one woman. All of the problems listed existed then far more than they do now, fairly conclusively proving that “marriage” is not the solution here.
In fact, it has almost nothing to do with the solution for these problems. Parents being present for their children is part of the solution. But how do we get more parents to be present in their children’s lives? As campaigns help, the availability of *well-paying* jobs (so parents have the means to support their children), sex education (so people don’t have children until they are READY to be parents), general education, a properly incentivized welfare system that encourages people to work (rather than encouraging them to remain unemployed), widespread access to good and affordable healthcare…
Stop over-simplifying these problems and pretending like laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman are going to magically solve all these human problems for the first time in all of history.