The beginning of the article in the New York Times says it all: “It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal.” More than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage. The fastest growth in the last 20 years has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree. This data comes from Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

The article points out that “the economic and social rewards of marriage” are going towards those with college educations, a group that still has largely resisted the trend towards out-of-wedlock births. Remarkably, the New York Times — “the newspaper of record” — recognizes that marriage provides “economic and social rewards,” a fact that is consistently lacking the mainstream media.

They go as far as to say that children are suffering from the trend, facing elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school and suffering emotional and behavioral problems. Another key fact is that almost “all of the rise in non-marital births has occurred among couples living together.” The social stigma of cohabiting before marriage fell first, and now the stigma of out-of-wedlock births has followed.  In the United States, a cohabitation relationship is more than twice as likely to dissolve than a marriage.

The bottom line: God’s institution of marriage — a father and a mother — not the government, is the ideal environment to raise the next generation of healthy and productive members of society.  Moreover, upholding and encouraging natural marriage is the best way to guard against the ever expanding role of, and need for, the nanny state.