Marriage Rate Falls to Record Low - Gays No Part of Cause

The shrill professional Christian set and the Christianists have spent millions of dollars opposing same sex marriage under the disingenuous banner of "protecting marriage." A new Pew Research Center report shows that these liars, hate mongers and charlatans have been fighting the wrong foe. It's not the gays who pose a threat to marriage but rather the heterosexuals and societal trends to marry later and, for the elderly, an inability to re-marry without losing vested benefits. Not that these facts will prevent Maggie Gallagher, Tony Perkins and their like from disseminating untruths and lining their pockets with cash in the process. Indeed, because of the efforts of such hate-filled Christianists, nowadays, the term Christian and liar have almost become synonymous in the minds of many. The Washington Post looks at the Pew report results. Here are some highlights:

The proportion of adults who are married has plunged to record lows as more people decide to live together now and wed later, reflecting decades of evolving attitudes about the role of marriage in society. Just 51 percent of all adults who are 18 and older are married, placing them on the brink of becoming a minority, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census statistics to be released Wednesday. That represents a steep drop from 57 percent who were married in 2000.

They are a byproduct of a steady increase in the median age when people first marry, now at an all-time high of older than 26 for women and almost 29 for men.

The marriage patterns are a striking departure from the middle of the 20th century, when the percentage of adults who never wed was in the low single digits. In 1960, for example, when most baby boomers were children, 72 percent of all adults were married. The median age for brides was barely 20, and the grooms were just a couple of years older.

The decline in marriage rates has affected people in every age and ethnic group, but it has been steepest among the young. A Pew survey last year determined that more than four in 10 Americans younger than 30 consider marriage passe. “They see it as an obsolete social environment,” said D’Vera Cohn, a Pew researcher who co-wrote the analysis. “People say they want to get married, but Americans are much less likely to actually be married than in the past.”

The slide has worsened with the economy.. . . .last year that 7.5 million couples were living together without being married, a 13 percent jump in just one year. Many had a partner who had lost a job, or they could not afford to maintain two homes.

W. Bradford Wilcox, head of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, said marriage is fading fastest in communities with many residents with the least education. “Half the births to high school-educated moms are out of wedlock,” he said. “Among that group, we’re at a tipping point. Marriage is losing ground among middle Americans.

“Living together, that’s a safer first step,” he said. The generation born during a time of rising divorce rates in the 1970s and 1980s say that watching their parents split convinced them not to rush.

The irony is that if the Christianists truly wanted to keep marriage from seeming passe to they younger generation, then they should be encouraging same sex marriage to slow the obvious societal trend away from marriage. Happy same sex married couples raising children might actually burnish the image of marriage.