Amid the slosh and sleaze of the Letterman awfulness the Institute for American Values steps forward with a report whose unspoken implication is, come on, who's one bit surprised when a 62-year-old celebrity Tells All on national TV because a guy allegedly wants to extort $2 million from him as the price of silence?
We wouldn't have seen it, say, in 1970, which is the point, if not intended as such by IAV's previously commissioned, newly issued report on American marriage. We have indexes (or indices, if you prefer) of leading economic indicators. Bill Bennett some years back gave us an index of cultural indicators. IAV's idea -- in a collaboration with the National Center on African American Marriage and Parenting -- is to see what the statistics tell us about marriage.
Cover your eyes, I guess we might say, except we need to know these things. I mentioned 1970. That's the base for looking at where we've gone. It may not have been much of a year, connubially speaking, but it beat what followed. IAV points to a "dramatic decline" since 1970 "in the health of marriages."
Whereas in 1970, 78.6 percent of adults aged 20 to 54 were married, the same was true of just 57.2 percent in 2008. Percentage of intact first marriages (ages 20 to 59): 77.4 percent in 1970, 61.2 percent last year. Births to married parents: 89.3 percent then, 60.3 percent now. Not good -- not good at all, for reasons we intuit without difficulty. If the married relationship is the seedbed of human culture, severe drought is creeping up on us. We've known as much for several decades, but usually we can't be bothered to stop and ponder the parlous state of marriage.
IAV president David Blankenhorn and Linda Malone-Colon, founder of the African American marriage center, have 101 ideas for making things better. All strike me as fine; e.g., more marriage mentoring, comprehensive youth programs, character education in textbooks, and better tax treatment of stay-at-home parents. Churches are counseled to require marriage preparation courses for engaged couples and to critique media images of marriage. Let's go!
What churches need first to do, though, as I see it, is to recover and assert the normative Christian-Jewish view of marriage as a sort of sacred partnership with God the -- remember? -- Father. That's not going to be easy. The cultural view of marriage and sex -- the Letterman view -- is one of indulgence first, responsibility second, maybe third, fourth, or fifth.
Letterman, unmarried to his longtime "partner" until recently, took a low view of his obligations toward women -- the same view so many Americans take after years of exposure to the liberated culture so evident among us since the '60s. You do, so often, what you hear it's OK to do. When indulgence rules, you indulge, at no small cost to the cohesion and prospects of the holy estate of matrimony.
Long story here. I'll bet you know most of it. It's good to have the particulars laid out so clearly as the IAV has attended to them. I recommend the report, for better for worse, as people still say and mean, just not with the frequency they did in a (pardon me) sounder, saner time.
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