Deace: Screwing up marriage has led to chaos. Now the only way to save the future is to save the family.

Well before we got into solving the riddle of what a woman is, we failed terribly at answering yet another fundamental question and thus guaranteed our current descent into madness.

What’s a marriage?

And this isn’t me looking back now and trying to figure out where it all went wrong. I made the claim that gender would go the way of the dodo more than a decade ago when the Iowa Supreme Court’s cataclysmic endorsement of so-called “same-sex marriage” took place. Because when marriage is no longer a union of one man and one woman, you have poisoned the most significant place where the primacy and definition of the parts of that union are codified, generation after generation — the family.

The notion of two mommies or two daddies drifts very quickly into a chaos that strips all uniqueness from the separate callings of man and woman. Reality itself becomes nothing but whim. And so why on earth should we expect the children who are products of such a world to respect gender at all in such a context, or for that matter truth of any kind, when those who raised them consistently modeled that one plus one equals cucumber?

Tragically, the new math is based on notions of faux equality for adults that not-so-ironically will cause far more inequality for children in the end, because it ignores absolutely everything we should already have learned from decades' worth of consequences from the out-of-wedlock and divorce culture.

Men and women are different, with unique contributions to the lives of one other and the life of the children they produce together. Nothing can change that. And only ruin will follow if we ignore it, as we are living through firsthand as a society at this very moment.

According to research pulled together by Lisa Britton in 2021 about single motherhood being dangerously described as “glamorous and empowering”:

• The poverty rate for single-mother families in 2018 was 34%, which is nearly five times higher than the rate for married-couple families.
• Almost one-third of single-mother families are food-insecure.
• 93% of our inmates are male, and more than half of the youth in prison grew up without their fathers.
• Children who live in a single-parent home make up 63% of suicides compared to children who live in two-parent homes.
• 85% of children who exhibit some type of behavioral disorder come from fatherless homes, 90% of youth who decide to run away from home come from fatherless homes, and children from fatherless homes account for 75% of adolescent patients being treated in substance abuse centers.
• Children from fatherless homes are twice as likely to drop out of school before graduating than children with fathers in their lives.
• Daughters from fatherless homes are four times more likely to get pregnant as teenagers.

The data is so powerful, says Brad Wilcox, professor and director for the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, that it even overwhelms common notions about racism and its place in creating modern-day inequalities.

“Blacks raised in intact families are doing better than whites in broken families,” said Wilcox, who has studied marriage and family issues for 20 years.

What obviously follows from that is no matter what notion of social justice we choose to make fashionable at any given time — race, gender, etc. — none of it can escape the cosmic gravitational pull of the truth of families made up of one man and one woman bonded to one another through marriage and to the children they produce together.

It’s almost as if it is a destiny we were designed for.

“Journalists and academics step around this elephant in the room and want to talk about other issues,” Wilcox said. “They are wedded to the notion that history is unfolding in a progressive direction, a faith in diversity and tolerance and acceptance that makes it difficult to push back against.”

But no matter what the present views as glamorous or empowering, the data doesn’t lie. If we are to have a future worth having, the road map to get there is in a past where everyone knew which swimming pool they belonged in, because they first knew the dignity and purpose of the roles they were ultimately called to as husband and father, wife and mother.

It’s the only way.