The death of marriage is killing America
The Daily Wire outlines the way the decline of marriage has been killing America.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections — a shocking overperformance by Democratic candidates given the fact that Republicans won the national popular vote by upwards of 4.5 percent — President Joe Biden celebrated with his followers. One group in particular, he said, ought to receive credit for the Democratic victory: women. “As I said,” Biden rambled, “women in America made their voices heard, man. I said last year one of the most extraordinary things about the Dobbs decision is what was about to challenge American women when the justice said they have it in their power to basically say let’s see what they’re going to do. Well, guess what? Y’all showed up and beat the hell out of them.”
Buried in this garbled syntax was the genuine kernel of a point: Democrats’ victory was achieved largely on the back of female votes. But not all female votes — one particular type of female votes: those of single women. According to an Edison Research Network Exit Poll, married men voted Republican at a 59-39 percent clip; married women voted Republican 56-42; unmarried men voted 52-45; and unmarried women voted Democrat at a rate of 68-31.
This makes single women a more reliably Democratic voter bloc than Asian-Americans (58 percent Democrat) or Hispanic-Americans (61 percent Democrat). They’re also a far larger voter bloc than either: there are about 41.8 million never married women in the United States, another 15.1 million divorced women in the United States, and some 11.6 million widowed women in the United States. While single women vote at a lower rate than married women, they vote as a political bloc — and as they grow as a percentage of the population, this would make them the single most powerful political bloc in America.
And their constituency is growing. As marriage scholar Brad Wilcox points out, marriage rates have dropped more than 60 percent since 1970, and fertility rate is down to 1.7. The conclusion: “more than a third of today’s young adults will never marry, and about one quarter will never have children.” And generation upon generation, the percentage of girls who will marry is dropping.
The death of marriage in America is part of a broader narrative about the death of marriage in the West. America still has the highest marriage rate among other Western countries other than Hungary and Israel – but the marriage rate among all Western countries has declined markedly over the course of the last century.
So, what happened?
What Marriage Meant
To understand why so many fewer people are getting married, we must begin with a simple fact: the very definition of marriage has changed dramatically over the course of the last century. Marriage was, for nearly all of human history, predominantly built around child-bearing and child-rearing; as the Bible suggested in Genesis 1 and 2, a man would leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they would become one flesh; by doing so, human beings would be fruitful and multiply.
This was not merely normative — it was descriptive of the natural state of mankind. Virtually every known human culture has socially-approved marriage — the joining of a man and a woman. Historically speaking, many cultures showed tolerance for polygamy; almost none showed tolerance for polyandry. This is because even polygamy functions on the basis of a single man and a single woman procreating and a child being raised in the context of that dyad; the fact that the man might have several such relationships with women does not obliterate the fact that each individual dyad is indeed a dyad. There is no known culture historically that treated male-male or female-female dyads as on a societal plane with male-female couplings.
Because marriage was built around the idea of family formation, this meant that the chief attribute of marriage was duty; family was not a “voluntary association.” As historian Gertrude Himmelfarb states:
It has been a “given” of life, an immutable fact, starting before birth (in the lives of parents and grandparents) and persisting after death (in the lives of children and grandchildren). Because the family has had this involuntary, mandatory character, it has also been assumed to have the authority to carry out its primary functions: the rearing and socializing of children and the caring for its weakest and most vulnerable members, the old and the young.
(Read more at the Daily Wire)
Now we face the Respect for Marriage Act that criminalizes dissent of gay marriage by private citizens
With the Supreme Court’s decision to use the Obergefell versus Hodges case to override the Church and the decisions of 26 state legislatures that codified Defense of Marriage laws, the Left again used the courts as a bludgeon to force all of us into conformity with its agenda.
Now, with a previous bludgeon having failed in the courts (that being Roe), the still-Democrat-controlled Senate had 12 traitorous Republicans provide their support to a bill that will make it illegal for private citizens to not provide assent to the gay agenda. Therefore, the Jack Philips, Melissa Klein, Elaine Huguenin, Barronelle Stutzman, and a number of other Christians will find that their lives have been made illegal by waffling politicians.
I say “now;” however, there is still time to head this off at the pass. This bill has gone back to negotiations between the House version and the Senate version. Therefore, everyone who believes in free speech and the ability to express personal beliefs should do what I have done and contact their Senators and Congress member.
…
Democrat “rules for thee, not for me” in the FTX failure
The Daily Wire digs into the ways that the watchdogs (or at least the foxes) did not do a job of watching the chicken coop.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes tale, “Silver Blaze”, the detective investigates the case of a murder of a horse trainer. At first, investigators presume that the murderer of the trainer must have been a stranger to him. But Holmes cracks the case with the revelation that a watchdog remained silent the night of the murder — a “curious incident,” as Holmes puts it, if the watchdog had been confronted by a stranger. No, Holmes concludes, the murderer must have been known to the watchdog.
We would do well to keep Holmes’ “curious incident” in mind when discussing the complete meltdown of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange run by Sam Bankman-Fried, a man who looks like he emerged from a laboratory dedicated to the manufacture of charlatans. Bankman-Fried was, at one point, worth some $26 billion; his exchange was the second largest in the world. But he also bragged about never reading books (“I think, if you wrote a book, you f—ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post”); he lived in a “polycule” — a polyamorous semi-colony — along with nine of his executives; he wore gym shorts and T-shirts to important company events with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair; he placed at the head of human resources the girlfriend of the director of engineering and as chief operating officer his own intermittent girlfriend and as head of his associated hedge fund yet another intermittent girlfriend.
The red flags were endless.
And yet the scam continued.
In the coverage of FTX’s meltdown, many in the media have been rather slow to ask a simple question: why didn’t anybody notice that SBF was one of the most obvious scam artists of all time? Perhaps it’s the insanity of the digital age, in which those fresh out of college can be assessed as billionaires without actually showing a balance sheet. But there’s something else going on here: SBF was a key cog in a political machine dedicated to the proposition that a coalition of like-minded Left-wingers can seize the reins of capitalist enterprise and then work with friends in government to reconstruct the world.
That, after all, was what SBF was publicly attempting to do. He dumped $40 million into the midterm elections in support of Democrats; he donated $5.2 million to then-candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 election cycle. He had pledged the FTX foundation to hand out $1 billion in 2022. He did all of this in the name of supposed “effective altruism,” a philosophy in which Left-wingers seek to use capitalism in order to enrich themselves, then dump the money into favored causes. “I wanted to get rich, not because I like money but because I wanted to give that money to charity,” SBF told one interviewer.
(Read more at the Daily Wire)
Democrat fundraisers, like Democrat lawmakers, want “rules for thee, not for me”
As I noted from the data provided by the Washington Free Beacon, we found that (in addition to bankrolling a large part of the Democrat dreams of 2022), Bankman-Fried had devoted a large amount of effort to keeping cryptocurrency from being further regulated.
If you are sick of the prosecution of conservatives (like the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the continued political persecution of Donald Trump) while Democrats go free (like the “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” against Hillary Clinton), then step up here.
…
After being forced to stay home by Democrat COVID mandates and tasted free money, many in America have lost the drive to work
The Daily Wire interviews Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) for his view on how America’s men have lost their will to work.
Mike Rowe told Fox News this weekend that men are becoming soft and lazy in part due to how much time they are spending on screens instead of working.
Rowe made the remarks during a brief interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson during the network’s “Patriot Awards.”
“So, I’m wrong about as much as I am right. And it’s for that reason, I hate to say, ‘I told you so,’ out loud, ever,” Rowe said. “But for 15 years, my foundation has been talking about this slow, sort of, unraveling of what we loosely call work ethic, whatever that means.”
“And I mean, last week, there was an article in The New York Times called something like how to combat the assault on modern work, and I thought it was gonna be an article about coal miners or crab fishermen or, you know, big tough jobs where the danger is real. It wasn’t. It was an article about everything from paper cuts to the non-existent pet bereavement policies that are being deemed harsh, I’m not making it up,” he continued. “And so we are, we’re in a place where 7 million able-bodied men are not only not working between the ages of 25 and [inaudible]. 7 million able-bodied men are not only not working, they’re affirmatively not looking for a job. That’s never happened in peacetime, ever.”
Rowe said that people are focusing on the wrong thing by looking at the unemployment rate when they should be looking at the number of able-bodied people who do not want to work.
(Read more at the Daily Wire)
While work was never meant to take first priority, work did come before the curse of thorns
There must be a redemptive nature to work, since work preceded the curse of thorns (Genesis 3:17-18). Although there can be extremes of too much work, maybe we need to get back to tapping that redemptive source.
…
The 2022 midterm elections didn’t exactly go as expected for Republicans, but there was some good news in the data collected in exit polls.
Mark 1:1 
You must be logged in to post a comment.