GOOD NEWS FOR MARRIAGE: Maggie Gallagher

The good news on marriage is that a lot of Americans are not taking the bad news lying down.

Under the leadership of David Blankenhorn and the influential Institute for American Values, a new Marriage Movement statement signed by more than 100 scholars, therapists, policymakers, church leaders and marriage activists (including me) calls for a "marriage renaissance" in the United States:

"We unite around a vision of America where more children are raised in nurturing homes by their married mother and father, and where more adults enjoy mutually fulfilling and lifelong marriages."

The good news on marriage is that the destructive increases in family fragmentation, which conventional wisdom 10 years ago predicted could not be stopped, have been stopped. According to the Marriage Movement statement:

"Divorce rates are now modestly declining. Rates of unwed childbearing, after increasing sharply year after year for decades, have changed very little since 1995. Teen pregnancy rates have declined dramatically. Rates of reported marital happiness, after declining steadily from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, have stabilized. Perhaps the more encouraging news is that, from 1995 to 2000, the proportion of African American children living in married-couple homes rose by about 4 percent."

Remember all those voices of despair who told us high rates of divorce and unmarried childbearing were inevitable, part of the postmodern condition? Reports of the death of marriage have been premature.

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posted by Eve at 3:02 PM VOTE

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