The family is a dangerous institution.

Which is why the forces of evil are aggressively targeting it. The family—consisting of one man and one woman in lifelong wedlock, and their children—is God’s ordained means of filling the earth (Genesis 1:28, 2:24, 4:1, 9:1). This poses a threat to those who worship nature, and thus want to reduce world population. Not only that, the family is also a reflection of Christ’s relationship to the church (Ephesians 5:22-33). This poses a threat to those who worship themselves, and thus reject the concepts of self-sacrifice and submission.

Further, the family is the nuclear institution for raising up the next generation in righteousness (Deuteronomy 6:7, Ephesians 6:4). This poses a threat to those who worship power, and thus want young minds to be left exclusively to themselves and their indoctrination. All in all, if you are looking to wreak maximum havoc on the earth, then one of the most dangerous institutions you will ever encounter is the family. And those who are looking to wreak havoc on the earth are doing their best to get rid of it.

However, an all-out assault on the family structure would be a bit too obvious. People have a God-given desire for the joys of family built into their souls and trying to convince them that they shouldn’t start families might not gain very much traction. As is the case with many contemporary strains of leftist strategy, it’s a lot easier to just slip in “alternatives” to God-given structures and paint them as a liberating, fulfilling, alternate norm.

A recent Bloomberg report did just so, by exploring the lives of successful, single, childless women, showing how avoiding marriage and childbearing improved their careers and personal wealth. According to Bloomberg, a rising cohort of women is choosing to delay or skip motherhood.

“As a result, many are advancing further in their careers than prior generations and entering a new frontier of wealth.”

While single mothers only made a median wage of $7,000 in 2019, single women without kids made a median of $65,000. Bloomberg explains that one woman interviewed

“relishes all of the lifestyle and financial freedoms that come with being a single, child-free woman in a well-paying job. That includes an apartment in New York City, a new beach house on the Jersey Shore, and frequent travel for pleasure as well as work.”

Further,

“she has a message for women just like her: You can still have it all. . . . ‘I love my life and feel very fulfilled.’ ”

Another successful, single woman highlighted her freedom to travel at will without a family holding her back and boiled her thinking down to

“I’d rather regret not having kids than regret having them.“

Such anecdotes may seem to support the idea that a family-free life is more advantageous than—and can be just as fulfilling as—a married one. However, as a general rule, neither the claim to financial advantage nor the claim to life satisfaction turn out to be true. As Brad Wilcox (sociology professor at the University of Virginia) and Alysse ElHage (editor of Family Studies) Newsweek retort,

“There’s just one problem with this kind of anti-nuptial and anti-natalist reporting: It’s completely false. In fact, the Bloomberg story is based on data derived only from single Americans, meaning there is no basis for comparison with married women.”

While single childless women may indeed make significantly more than single mothers, neither comes close to married mothers’ mean household income—$133,000. As for life satisfaction, Wilcox and ElHage point to data from the 2022 American Family Survey:

“Thirty-three percent of married mothers ages 18-55 say they are ‘completely satisfied’ with their lives, compared to 15 percent of childless women 18-55 . . . What’s more, single, childless women are about 60 percent more likely to report feelings of loneliness compared to married mothers.”

While the mainstream narrative shouts that a career without an encumbering family is the secret to a happy life, the stats show the opposite.

Very few people will believe the outright lie, “the family is bad,” but many might believe the more subtle temptation, “the family is a waste of time; you could live a better life without one.” However, attacks on the family that paint singleness to be just as fulfilling and even more financially advantageous don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. As happens so often when man thinks he has found a better plan than God’s, man’s grand ideas splinter against the solid realities of God’s world.

The Institute for Family Studies sums it up well:

“Too many [liberals] have embraced the false narrative that the path to happiness runs counter to marriage and family life, not towards it. They think independence, freedom, and work will make them happy, which is why significant portions of the popular media are filled these days with stories celebrating divorce and singleness. . . . The secret to happiness, for most men and women, involves marriage and a life based around the family.“

Rolling Stone Magazine just issued a public apology for the shoddy journalism of writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely whose name may sound vaguely familiar to regular IFI readers. More on that momentarily.

Rolling Stone has apologized for Erdely’s failure to adequately fact-check a University of Virginia co-ed’s allegations of a brutal gang-rape that she claimed took place at a fraternity. Erdely’s article titled “A Rape on Campus” led to an investigation, campus protests, suspension of all fraternities, and public vilification and vandalism of the fraternity where the alleged crimes took place. The entire mess resulted from Erdely’s failure to interview any of the alleged perpetrators before publishing her essay–an essay that comports so perfectly with “progressive” notions about oppressive white men and privilege.

It appears that almost every detail in the accuser’s story is false, and now even the accuser’s friends, who according to the Washington Post are “sexual assault awareness advocates,” doubt her story.

The Washington Post describes Erdely’s dubious investigative efforts:

“I reached out to [the accused] in multiple ways,” Erdely said [in a Slate Magazine interview], “They were kind of hard to get in touch with because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated. But I wound up speaking…I wound up getting in touch with their local president, who sent me an e-mail, and then I talked with their sort of, their national guy, who’s kind of their national crisis manager. They were both helpful in their own way, I guess.”

Sean Woods, who edited the Rolling Stone story, said in an interview that Erdely did not talk to the alleged assailants. “We did not talk to them. We could not reach them,” he said in an interview.

However, he said, “we verified their existence,” in part by talking to [the accuser’s] friends. “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real. We knew who they were.”

Once again, liberals, always eager to rush to judgment on events related to their favorite ideological causes, have harmed real people.

When asked hard questions by the Washington Post about her investigation, Erdely whined that “’I could address many of [the questions] individually . . . but by dwelling on this, you’re getting sidetracked.’” Yes, let’s not get sidetracked by facts or evidence. They tend to get in the way of ideology.

In 2012, I wrote a two-part criticism (here and here) of another troubling Rolling Stone article written by Erdely titled “One Town’s War on Gay Teens”  in which she accuses “evangelicals” of being the cause of the bullying and suicide of nine teens (presumably the “gay teens” referenced in the title) in the Anoka-Hennepin school district in Minnesota. She took particular aim at a conservative parent group that was fighting to establish a curricula-neutrality policy that would prevent teachers from using their classrooms to promote Leftist assumptions about homosexuality. But just like Erdely’s most recent journalistic debacle, her claims in the 2012 article suffer from a remarkable lack of evidence and misrepresentation of facts.

Here are just a few of the problems with her flawed and destructive 2012 story:

1.) In an article about a purported Evangelical “war on gay teens,” Erdely mentioned nine suicides, while in reality only one of the teens self-identified as homosexual and three others were called anti-“gay” epithets.  That means that only four of the nine suicides, which took place over two years at six different schools, had any connection to homosexuality. Five of the suicides had nothing to do with homosexuality, perceived homosexuality, or even “anti-gay” epithets.

2.) Though Erdely suggested that “Christian activists” were responsible for the suicides, she didn’t produce one piece of evidence that the school bullies were Evangelicals or motivated by Evangelical beliefs about homosexuality.

3.) Not once did Erdely provide evidence that the curricula-neutrality policy caused the bullying of the one homosexual student or the three who were called anti-“gay” epithets.

4.) Erdely did not tell her readers that one of the students she included in the nine, TJ Hayes, was enrolled in a “progressive” charter school that was not covered by any of the school policies on which Erdely blames the suicides.

5.) Erdely did not mention that another of the students she included in the nine, Kevin Buchman, was not enrolled in any Anoka-Hennepin high school. He was, in fact, a student at the University of Minnesota. Kevin, a bright, good-looking, popular athlete, had graduated from an Anoka-Hennepin high school 8 1/2 months before his suicide. He committed suicide during the second semester of his freshman year at the University of Minnesota. His family wrote this about Kevin’s suicide.

A situation happened his first year of college, that caused Kevin to question his character. He began a spiral downward into the dark cave of suicidal depression. He treated with a doctor [sic], was on medication, and seemed to be doing better. He kept his despair hidden and ended his life.

6.) Erdely wrote that the mother of one of the students who committed suicide “acknowledges that her daughter….likely had many issues that combined to push her over the edge, but feels strongly that bullying was one of those factors.”  This mother’s “feeling” that bullying was one of multiple contributing factors to her daughter’s suicide led Erdely to conclude with utter certitude that the school’s curricula- neutrality policy and Evangelicals were the ultimate cause. Erdely never explained precisely how the neutrality policy or Evangelicals were the ultimate cause.

7.) Erdely cited 10th-grader Sam Pinilla who said he was pushed to the ground and called “faggot” while a teacher stood nearby and did nothing. Erdely also described a 10th-grade girl who said she was called a “‘lesbo’” and “‘sinner” within “earshot of teachers” and that when she reported the incident to an associate principal, he told her to “lay low.” Did Erdely verify those incidents? Did she track down the teacher or teachers who supposedly heard and did nothing? And again how did Erdely connect curricula-neutrality policy to the teachers’ purported failure to properly enforce existing anti-bullying policy?

8.) Did Erdely talk to the bullies? Did Erdely look into the beliefs and backgrounds of any of the purported bullies? Did she ask if they were Evangelicals? Did she inquire into the motives for their bullying? Had the bullies come from dysfunctional families or single parent homes? Had they experienced violence in their homes? Did they have academic problems or psychological disorders? Had they watched a lot of violent television or played violent video games?

9.) Did she talk to any teens who had deeply held Evangelical beliefs to find out what their thoughts were about homosexuality and bullying?

10.) If Erdely were really concerned about preventing suicides, why did she spend virtually no time exploring all the factors that experts identify as contributing to suicidal ideation, like mental illness, family dysfunction and divorce, family financial problems, and substance abuse?

11.)  Did Erdely talk to any conservative teachers to ask if they thought that either the neutrality policy or Evangelicalism caused bullying? If so, how? If not, what do they think causes bullying? Did she ask them if they have ignored bullying?

12.) Did she ask liberal teachers who opposed the neutrality policy to provide evidence that the neutrality policy causes hatred or bullying?

13.) Erdely employed a deceitful modus operandi throughout her screed. She tried to make the case that the curricula-neutrality policy caused bullying without providing a single piece of evidence. She simply describes bullying incidents and then mentions the neutrality policy or conservatives who support it. Apparently in Erdely’s irrational world, geographic proximity within her article proves that the neutrality policy caused bullying.

Erdely has a nasty professional habit of promoting ugly accusations without interviewing those accused and of making claims for which she fails to provide evidence. She evidently has no regard for the damage that follows in her reckless rhetorical wake. Erdely’s newest piece of shoddy journalism will make it even more difficult for victims of campus sexual assaults to be believed.

Please support the work of Illinois Family Institute.

Written by Kathleen Parker

As politicians compete to prove who loves the middle class more, they’re missing the elephant and the donkey in the room.

The middle class needs not just tax breaks and jobs but also marriage.

This is the finding of a new University of Virginia and Institute for American Values report, “The State of Our Unions,” which tracks the decline of marriage among the nearly 60 percent of Americans who have high school but not college educations. This has far-reaching repercussions that are not only societal but economic as well. By one estimate cited in the report, which was written by five family scholars, the cost to taxpayers when stable families fail to form is about $112 billion annually — or more than $1 trillion per decade.

Obviously, marriage or the lack thereof isn’t the only cause of our deficit spending, but neither is it irrelevant. Consider that in the 1980s, only 13 percent of children were born outside of marriage among moderately educated mothers. By the end of this century’s first decade, the number had risen to 44 percent.

That we seem unfazed by these numbers suggests a lack of attention to the reasons marriage matters in the first place. It isn’t so that wedding planners can bilk daydreamers out of $50 billion a year or so that bridezillas can have reality TV shows. Marriage matters because children do best when raised in a stable environment with two committed parents, exceptions notwithstanding.

For whatever reasons — a fear of appearing judgmental or hypocritical, perhaps — no one makes a peep. Many of us, after all, have divorced. But this fact doesn’t mean that marriage is no longer important or that children’s needs have changed. Furthermore, this report isn’t concerned with the well-educated, who are typically better equipped to cope with dysfunction, financial or otherwise.

What happens to the other 60 percent? And what happens to a society upon whose beneficence the offspring of these broken or never-formed families ultimately may depend? Why isn’t anyone talking about this?

In the past, dramatic family changes have prompted calls to national action. The Moynihan Report of 1965 focused attention on the alarming rise of African American children born out of wedlock. In the 1990s, rising divorce rates and single motherhood spawned a fatherhood movement and welfare reform. Recently, same-sex marriage has dominated our interests.

The hollowing out of marriage in middle America cries out for similarly impassioned action. As lead author Elizabeth Marquardt writes in the report:

“Marriage is not merely a private arrangement; it is also a complex social institution. Marriage fosters small cooperative unions — also known as stable families — that enable children to thrive, shore up communities, and help family members to succeed during good times and to weather the bad times. Researchers are finding that the disappearance of marriage in Middle America is tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same communities, a change that strikes at the very heart of the American Dream.”

Our current debate about the fiscal cliff and entitlement spending can’t be separated from the breakdown of marriage. In the absence of stable families, economic and societal need increases. And while most good-hearted souls wish to help those in distress, we are essentially plugging holes in leaky boats. Shouldn’t we build better boats?

The report’s scholars suggest doing this with a series of federal and state proposals. One is to change the tax and welfare system, which frequently imposes financial penalties — up to 20 percent of family income — on low-income couples who choose to marry.

Another suggestion is to triple the child tax credit for children under age 3, which would have the added benefit of encouraging married people to have more children — much needed in the longer term to support the nation’s elderly.

These are but two of many, which can be viewed online at stateofourunions­.org, along with an urgent plea that President Obama include some of these thoughts in his State of the Union address next month. It insults no one to encourage couples to marry before having children, thus making a public as well as private commitment to love and care for them.

Perhaps most important, to ignore the marriage deficit among America’s middle class is essentially to be complicit in perpetuating a society of winners and losers. Those born to married, well-educated parents are more likely to prosper, while those born to fragmented families are more likely to repeat the patterns of their parents.

Therein is a national tragedy worthy of our attention.

(Re-posted from the Washington Post website.)