“Young Americans Are Killing Marriage” reads the headline. But it’s not exactly true. It’s more accurate to say that Millennials are picking up where their elders left off, as they put yet another nail in marriage’s coffin.
At issue is a new study from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green State University showing that, as Bloomberg puts it, “Millennials are lagging behind on the traditional markers of adulthood.”
For starters, young people are far more likely to be living with parents or grandparents than they were 35 years ago and to delay acquiring a house and having children. Of course, other research has shown that when they do have kids, a majority (57 percent) have them out of wedlock. This brings us to the point here: The percentage of married 25- to 34-year-olds has dropped from 67 percent in 1980 to a mere 20 percent today.
It’s unsurprising that Millennials are lagging behind in these areas. Permissive modern parenting stunts children’s moral, spiritual, and emotional development, which is why so-called ADHD — in which 10-year-olds have the emotional control of two-year-olds — is so prevalent today. (Note: Family psychologist John Rosemond has called ADHD the indefinite extending of toddlerhood.) And with politics downstream of culture, it’s why ObamaCare allows “children” to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26.
Even the pluses the NCFMR puts in Millennials’ column are suspect. Bloomberg writes that less “than half of Boomers started college, compared to two thirds of millennials” and writes that in general there is an “Education Gap.”
But it’s more correct to call it a Schooling Gap.
And to paraphrase writer Grant Allen, “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.”
The issue is that education has been dumbed-down, partially because of cultural decline and partially because businesses (i.e., colleges) don’t make money by turning away customers. The result: One study showed that a university degree today is the equivalent of only a 1947 high-school diploma.
Bloomberg states in addition, “There’s also no sign that young people today are lazier than three decades ago. In 1980, 74 percent of baby boomers reported that they had worked in the past week, the Census data show. In 2015, slightly more millennials, 77 percent, said they’d been to work in the past week.” Here I’ll only note that there’s a difference between being “to work” and “working.”
This isn’t to say the young ‘uns are the sole authors of our civilization’s decline, and this brings us to this article’s subject.
Those agitating for faux marriage’s acceptance have long put forth the following argument: “Heterosexuals shouldn’t complain about homosexuals destroying marriage — they’ve done a good job of that themselves!”
Of course, they’re referencing divorce. In answering, we should first point out that the notion that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce is a myth. More significantly, however, the above line of reasoning is like saying, “My parents have already damaged my health with a junk-food diet, so why should I worry about drinking and smoking and making it worse? It’s a stupid argument.
Yet since those professing it are getting at a real point, it’s important to explain it better than they understand it.
In illustrating how atheism correlates with amorality, I’ve often pointed out that what we call right and wrong can only be determined by one of two things: man or God. If the latter, then we can say Absolute Truth exists; we can say it’s unchanging, universal, eternal, and non-negotiable. We can say that right and wrong are real.
If it’s all a matter of man’s preference, however — if man has made it — man can unmake it. (For a more complete explanation, click here and scroll down to the 14th paragraph.)
Is it any different with marriage? Not only does our age’s prevailing moral relativism dictate there can be nothing “wrong” with divorce or anything else, but note that Western churches traditionally considered marriage a Sacrament. This means it is God’s power, not man’s, that joins a groom and bride in Holy Matrimony. And as the Bible states, “What God hath joined, let no man put asunder.”
But what if we come to believe that spouses are joined only by man? As with right as wrong, if humans have made it, they can unmake it — they can put it asunder.
And so it has happened. An increasingly godless West believes in only godless institutions. Once a church domain, the government eventually got involved in marriage, and “civil marriage” was born. Now all U.S. states require a marriage license issued by local civil authorities, and we may hear at the end of a ceremony, “By the power vested in me by the State of _______, I now pronounce you…”
Power? Sacraments are instruments of divine power. Has that power now been devolved from God to government?
Of course, what they will pronounce you has become negotiable. First there was divorce, then no-fault divorce; thus may you be pronounced an ex-wife. Then five black-robed government lawyers said in 2015 that states must recognize faux marriage, and people have long claimed to have “married” animals. An engineer now says he has married his robot, and while a Stepford wife she ain’t, give it time: A few experts predict human-robot “marriage” will be legal by 2050.
So it’s no wonder that in the 1960s already counter-culture types would say they didn’t need “a piece of paper” to confirm their love. If marriage is just another man-made contract, a piece of paper is all it is.
The reality is that, as I’ve often pointed out, marriage has been “undefined” — by he who we consider it’s definer: man. Army veteran Chris Sevier is making this point by having filed suit to be allowed to “marry” his laptop. Combating the acceptance of faux-marriage, he’s illustrating absurdity by being absurd and apparently recognizes a truth: If marriage can mean anything, it means nothing.
And that’s why marriage is dying in the West. People generally don’t make sacrifices — or take vows — for nothing.
