By Randy Rossi -
I just read a new Gallup poll that broke my heart and reconfirmed the accelerating decline of our culture. Titled “Is Marriage Becoming irrelevant”, that Gallup poll showed the rapid decline of the importance of marriage in connection to having children. To me and I suspect to most of our ancestors, getting married and having children was one of the most important things in life. It has been a core element of civilizations for thousands of years. But apparently, not any more to a growing number of Americans.
In that Gallup poll, only 29% of Americans think that it is very important for a couple to get married if they have a child. That was shocking to me. To make it even worse is the rate of decline of that moral value. In 2013, 38% of Americans thought that getting married was important if they had a child. That’s a 24% decline in a core value in just 7 years. In 2006, 49% of Americans thought it was very important to get married if they had a child. That is an incredible 41% decrease of a core civilized value in just 17 years.
How could we fall so far so fast?
It appears that morality and common sense are dying at an increasing rate. Back a million years ago when I was studying criminology in college (OK 50 years ago!), we were taught that a child being raised without a father had a 70% chance of living a life of crime and/or poverty. That alone should remind us of why being married if a child is born is so critical. Back in the “good old days”, if an unmarried woman got pregnant; there was often a “shotgun wedding” in which social pressure was put on the father to marry the pregnant woman to preserve one’s honor and dignity. Today, that concept of honor and dignity appears to be dying as it is very common for unmarried men today to have multiple children by multiple women without marrying any of them. How did this happen?
Here are a couple of clues provided by that Gallup poll that explain this decline in our culture. 67% of Americans who frequently go to church still strongly believe that a couple should be married if they have a child while only 22% of people who don’t go to church agree. The accelerating decline in religion and a belief in God in America is seriously hurting our culture and morality. On top of that, 55% of conservatives feel that being married when having children is very important while only 23% of liberals do. Conservatives believe in traditional American values and being married when you have kids has been a traditional American value from the day our nation was first settled. Added to that, providing welfare to unmarried women with children signals that having kids out of wedlock is just fine which has dramatically increased the number of children raised out of wedlock. This decline in our culture is also causing massive damage to our kids and their futures.
Liberals like to talk about science so let’s use science for a minute to help prove that being married if you have kids is critical. I already mentioned that I was taught that 70% of kids raised without a father live a life of crime and/or poverty. On top of that, science proves that human beings are the smartest species on Earth and having an intact family is critical for that success. Only 3% of mammal animals (humans are mammals) on Earth are “monogamous” which means they are essentially “married” and devoted to one “partner” for life. And many of those monogamous animals don’t stay together to help raise their children, they just mate with each other. Humans on the other hand have been getting married and raising their children together for thousands of years. That was the moral norm of humans and civilization and it was built in to our religions and civilizations for thousands of years. Getting married was a lifetime vow of fidelity and love. Until now.
Many of those in our new liberal culture don’t like the idea of lifetime vows of loyalty, fidelity, responsibility, and love. Too cumbersome! Suddenly thanks to liberal Hollywood, political correctness, constant attacks on religion, and other destructive patterns of our liberal culture; thousands of years of morality, science, and logic are being attacked by the “Woke Crowd” of liberals who don’t want to follow any rules and instead want the freedom to act like those barbaric animal species that don’t practice monogamy or follow any rules. Sadly, we are turning into a herd of feral hogs at a very scary pace and that does not bode well for our kids, our grandkids, or America.
