Lately, we have read about some high-profile infidelities (Spitzer, Edwards, Sanford, Gosselin). The church teaches the need for fidelity in marriage. It is refreshingly surprising to read an article in the MSM do the same. As read at Time.com: "Is There Hope for the American Marriage?" by Caitlin Flanagan. It is worth reading (unfortunatley, the very good article is surrounded by some garbage). Click here.
Here are some quotes:
- There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers' financial security....
- ...on every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration — if you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.
- Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father at home.
- It's dismissive of the human experience, says Blankenhorn, to suggest that kids don't suffer, extraordinarily, from divorce: "Children have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here. To lose that connection, that sense of identity, is to experience a wound that no child-support check or fancy school can ever heal."
- A lasting marriage is the reward, usually, of hard work and self-sacrifice.
- ...the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives — that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old.
