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Friday, September 2, 2011

The Impact of Divorce

An article by Cheryl Wetzstein in The Washington Times makes the case that divorce is extraordinarily expensive for a society and tragically hard on children. Here are some highlights:
The average split costs a couple $2,500. A new single-parent family with children can cost the government $20,000 to $30,000 a year. That’s $33 billion to $112 billion a year total in divorce-related social-service subsidies and lost revenue.

If the U.S. “enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960,” there would be 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, about 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 few children receiving therapy and 70,000 fewer suicides every year, writes W. Bradford Wilcox in a 2009 paper, referring to research by Pennsylvania State University professors Paul Amato and Alan Booth.

Children of divorce have shorter life spans - by an average of five years - compared to children whose parents didn’t divorce, according to a new study by Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin.

That longevity data is “the most devastating analysis that we’ve seen … of the impact of divorce on children. They don’t ‘get over it,’ ” said Mr. Gersten, who was a Department of Health and Human Services official in the George W. Bush administration.
None of this should come as a shock, certainly not to those who've gone through the ordeal of divorce, but it shows yet again the social disaster which was the sexual revolution, one major consequence of which was the weakening of marital commitment and, eventually, no-fault divorce. Now we're all paying for society's sexual "liberation" in a host of social programs designed to meliorate its consequences.

Marriage and divorce are not just personal issues between the principals. They're moral matters in which the entire society has a stake because the entire society is affected.

Burning Sunshine Is Evil

I know this snapshot doesn't mean much, if it means anything at all, but it's still pretty funny. I mean, wouldn't you think that if people were going to take the trouble to show up to protest something they'd at least know a little bit more about what it is they're protesting?

Maybe they did and maybe the video was edited to make them look silly, but, then again, maybe they managed it all on their own: