How to explain marriage.

The videos on this post are worth watching.



And:

If only we permitted unmarried families to move out of high poverty areas!!!

There seems to be some kind of connection:

//People who are unmarried or separated are most likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty, especially single mothers and their children. About 38 percent of all families headed by a female householder with no husband present lived in a high- poverty area, the largest proportion among all family types.//

Because the determinant for living in a high-poverty area is where you live, not whether you are married.

How to have a good marriage...

...develop the habit of kindness and generosity.

Or what Thomists would call "charity."

The two phases of history - "What's the worst thing that could happen?"...followed by, "How were we supposed to know?"

Monsignor Charles Pope points out that we will not have lost marriage when the Supreme Court discovers a long-dormant right to gay marriage in the Constitution. We lost it - we destroyed it - a long time ago:

Welcome to the whirlwind. Yes, we heterosexuals have misbehaved for over fifty years now, and, in process dispensed widespread confusion about sex and distorted its purpose. We have loved the darkness, and now the darkness deepens with the obvious absurdity of homosexual “marriage” a misnomer before it is even uttered. But so is contraceptive marriage. 

Is Homosexual activity disordered? You better believe it. But so is contraceptive heterosexual activity since it is no longer ordered per se to procreation. In fact, it is rightly argued that contraceptive sex is really just mutual masturbation, it is not true or ordered human sexual activity at all. It is disordered, for it is not ordered to its proper end.

And:

The faithful Catholic is right to be dismayed and angry. But allow this anger to fuel commitment to living and speaking the truth. Do not direct it merely to wrath or scapegoating. Let this anger fuel your commitment to speak the truth about human sexuality to your children and grandchildren, to be silent no more, embarrassed no more. Speak plainly and boldly, clearly and with charity. But let your anger fuel commitment to the truth, by what you say and how you live. Be angry, but do not sin (Eph 4:26).

If only there was some social institution that we could use to foster the idea that having children is a good and desirable thing. 

Something that would pair men and women up in a permanent relationship oriented toward having and raising children in a way that is most likely to ensure their social, intellectual and physical health.

Nah, crazy idea.

Wall Street Journal - A California Drought: Not Enough Children

Ever since the Gold Rush, the majority of Californians has been born elsewhere. That pattern began to change in the 1990s, when migrants were attracted by the lower cost of living and rapid growth in other Western and Southern states. Then, the housing bust and 2008 financial crisis hit California harder than most states. By 2010, more than half of all adults 25 to 34 years old were born in California.

At the same time, the state's birthrate fell to 1.94 children per woman in 2010, below the replacement level of 2.1 children, according to the study. California's rate is lower than the overall U.S. rate of 2.06 children in 2012, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The shrinking pool of youngsters coincides with a bulging population of older people. Nationally, "we are approaching a period of very large retirement, something like two million people a year for the next 20 years," said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, an independent research group.
In 1970, California averaged 21 seniors for every 100 working-age adults. By 2030, that ratio is expected to rise to 36 seniors per 100 working-age adults, according to the report. That retirement wave will place "massive pressure on institutions and programs for an aging population," the report said.

Today's children will be the workers who pay for those programs and who take jobs vacated by boomers in the state's high-technology hub in Silicon Valley, its entertainment industry in Los Angeles and its farm belt in the Central Valley.
"Unless the birthrate picks up, we are going to need more immigrants. If neither happens, we are going to have less growth," said Mr. Levy. The report wasn't optimistic, saying that "with migration greatly reduced…outsiders are much less likely to come to the rescue."

Investments in the state's education system will be vital to meet labor-force needs and prevent the economy from contracting, said Mr. Levy. With less migration to the state, the skills and human capital necessary to keep California's economy afloat will need to be homegrown, both Mr. Levy and Mr. Myers said.

With more than 90% of the state's children under age 10 born in the state, "the majority of the next generation of workers will have been shaped by California's health and education systems," Mr. Myers said. "It's essential that we nurture our human capital."
Many of those future workers, however, will have grown up in poverty. More than 20% of children in California now live below the federal poverty level
 

Notice how the word "marriage" doesn't show up in this discussion, which after all concludes with the idea about "nurturing" California's "human capital"?

So the problem is not enough children and the children that we do have growing up in poverty?  Social science has proven repeatedly that marriage - healthy, Western-style, lifelong, companionate, monogamouse marriage - is the answer to both problems, and it doesn't cost a thing.

And, yet, we are driving a stake through the heart of that kind of marriage.

We are insane.

The New York Times Discovers that Marriage Matters.

"Two Classes divided by 'I do.'"

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.

Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but no four-year degree.

While many children of single mothers flourish (two of the last three presidents had mothers who were single during part of their childhood), a large body of research shows that they are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of school.

Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist, warns that family structure increasingly consigns children to “diverging destinies.”

Married couples are having children later than they used to, divorcing less and investing heavily in parenting time. By contrast, a growing share of single mothers have never married, and many have children with more than one man.

“The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” Ms. McLanahan said. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.”