This past weekend a brouhaha developed across the nation over remarks Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) made in 2008 about then-candidate Barack Obama, as reported in the book “Game Change” by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Putting aside whether his vocabulary was appropriate for a senator, in private or public, there is an interesting case being made in his defense. It essentially goes like this: Harry Reid’s rhetoric is excusable because of his voting record. As Harold Ford said on the Today program on Monday: “If his voting record raised …
A new report -The 2009 “State of our Unions”- out of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values, reports that divorce fell during the first full year of the Great Recession, the first annual dip since 2005. “Tough times foster real family solidarity and encourage many couples to stick together,” says UVA sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project. “Many couples are rediscovering the longstanding sociological truth that marriage is one of society’s best social insurance plans.”
“Optimism is important for anything in life-to realize that our condition is never final.” [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLEJ-HyIMcM[/youtube] With unbridled and infectious optimism, Jack Kemp (1935-2009) championed hope, growth, and enterprise to overcome poverty and social breakdown in America and around the world. In his roles as U.S. Congressman, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and passionate proponent of the free market, Kemp’s efforts highlighted the powerful combination of great ideas joined with the good works of neighborhood leaders. Jeff Kemp, son of the late Jack Kemp and President of Stronger Families, pays tribute …
Visiting the complicated world of emerging adults (young people between the ages of 18 and 29, with data now available up to age 23), Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker report back with findings that raise challenges for the future of marriage as an institution. Some of their findings, which will appear next year in a volume from the Oxford University Press titled Premarital Sex in America, were presented last week at a Heritage Foundation conference on what scholarly research says about religious practice in America. The good news is that …
You should talk about money before jumping into it, a story in The New York Times says. You can spice it up by doing more housework, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. And this just in: Your strong commitment to it is a sign you’re trying to practice what you regularly hear preached. “It,” of course, is marriage. Marriage and its connection to religious involvement will be one of the themes highlighted Thursday during “Religious Practice and the Family,” a conference sponsored by The Heritage Foundation at the Ronald Reagan Building and …
This week’s TIME magazine cover story, Unfaithfully Yours, dramatically laments the collapse of marriage: “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, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass,” writes Caitlin Flanagan. Flanagan’s clarion call is backed by demographic trends that have now reached a point where nearly four of every ten babies is born out of wedlock …
The Washington Post’s Liza Mundy had a cute take on the recent divorce of reality TV stars Jon and Kate Gosselin: Poor Jon and Kate. Their marriage is over, their show on hiatus, their domestic ordeal entering a new phase of acrimony. Possibly nothing could have saved this marriage, but one thing would have made it less fragile: a mandate for health insurance to cover in vitro fertilization. If the Gosselins, whose efforts to raise eight kids have been chronicled over five seasons on cable television, had enjoyed, and availed …
Speaking at Heritage, Rebecca Hagelin, author of 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family, shared some startling news with us about the decline of families in America. A point that she brought up is that when people can’t depend on their family, they turn to the government for dependence. A report from CNN started that 40% of children are born outside of wedlock. This is an alarming trend. According to our FamilyFacts.org web site’s Top 10 findings for December 2008, married families are much better off financially than …
This past Friday the Iowa Supreme Court rewrote the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. Justifying their rejection of the argument that “the optimal environment for children is to be raised within a marriage of both a father and a mother,” Justice Mark Cady wrote: “The research … suggests that the traditional notion that children need a mother and a father to be raised into healthy adjusted adults is based more on stereotype than anything else.” First of all, the court is just wrong on the facts. Children whose …
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report Wednesday on preliminary data for 2007 birth rates in the United States. Among those statistics, a new historic high — 39.7 percent of babies born in America are to unmarried women. Even worse, 71.6 percent of out-of-wedlock births are to African American women. This should be alarming to read considering the negative societal implications for children born and raised in single parent households. It is well documented that compared with children born to married couples, those born outside of marriage …
