Coffin Corner

Nicholas Kristoff in today’s New York Times, entitled “The White Underclass.”  Aside from highlighting other social issues, Kristoff writes about marriage:

Persistent poverty is America’s great moral challenge, but it’s far more than that.

As a practical matter, we can’t solve educational problems, health care costs, government spending or economic competitiveness so long as a chunk of our population is locked in an underclass. Historically, “underclass” has often been considered to be a euphemism for race, but increasingly it includes elements of the white working class as well……

…..Then there’s the eclipse of traditional family patterns. Among white American women with only a high school education, 44 percent of births are out of wedlock, up from 6 percent in 1970, according to Murray.

Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree: Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor (more so than in the lives of the middle class, who have more cushion when things go wrong).

One study of low-income delinquent young men in Boston found that one of the factors that had the greatest impact in turning them away from crime was marrying women they cared about. As Steven Pinker notes in his recent book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”: “The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology….”

….. The pathologies are achingly real. But the solution isn’t finger-wagging, or averting our eyes — but opportunity.

Calling for a national movement of marriage education,

Yours for marriage,

Sheila Weber

Executive Director, National Marriage Week USA

www.NationalMarriageWeekUSA.org

sheila@nationalmarriageweekUSA.org