This is a brief presented on April 29th, 2003 before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Canada. Margaret Somerville is Samuel Gale Professor of Law and Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University's Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law.
Stephen Baskerville explains how the government actually encourages divorce.
Young men and women have accepted the message from their culture a message that is not supported by the data that cohabitation is a good way to prepare for marriage. Data from the University of Wisconsin provides a painful bottom line: couples that cohabit before marriage increase their odds of divorce by 50 percent.
Teddy Roosevelt a big-game hunter who pioneered the National Park system, built the Panama Canal, and won the Nobel Prize for Peace packed "more into one life than any ten men of average metabolism." What many commentators fail to notice about this man of noble passions is that his greatest passion was his family.
Recently, I had the opportunity to review the scientific evidence on the consequences of marriage for adults. What I found surprised me. Quietly, with little fanfare, a broad and deep body of scientific literature has been accumulating that affirms what Genesis teaches: it is not good for man to be alone no, nor woman neither. In virtually every way that social scientists can measure, married people do much better than the unmarried or divorced: they live longer, healthier, happier, sexier, and more affluent lives.
The recent push for high school marriage preparation is encouraging. But it would be more effective if the leaders of the marriage preservation movement saw marriage education in its broadest light, as an introduction to the history, cultural richness, social utility, and civic meaning of marriage as an institution. Unfortunately, what passes for marriage preparation in the thousands of schools and churches around the country that currently offer it to teenagers is not marriage preparation at all.
Jennifer Roback Morse, an economist by trade, was captivated by laissez-faire theory...until she became a mom. It was then she realized that a self-interested approach to family life does not result in personal happiness or the common good of a free, democratic society.
Cohabiting is far from harmless, said Father Vic. Did you know that sociological studies show that living together before marriage increases the risk of divorce by as much as 50%? Former cohabiters have higher levels of conflict, abuse and violence, plus overall lower levels of happiness. He called cohabitation training for divorce.
Today thanks to a myriad of sociological studies showing that men, women, and children are better off, not worse off, in committed two-parent families, the campaign against marriage has metamorphosed once again. Increasingly unable to make the case for the sexually liberated single life or the superiority of the single-parent household, the antimarriage warriors now celebrate what they call family diversity.
Mans sexual energies are of extraordinary power and complexity. Is this energy something we can use however we wish, or is there some objective standard to which this energy should be conformed? The Western tradition, like many other traditions, has consistently held that there is such an objective standard, and it is the reality called marriage.
