Quote:
Originally Posted by naturalist.atheist
I agree that children need a good home. But I am afraid that the laws that apply to marriage have little to nothing to do with providing children with a good home. Besides the trend seems to be that children are more likely to be raised by a single parent then they are by a married couple. So the whole marriage law thing for the protection of the family is a red herring.
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I'm having trouble getting this paragraph straight in my mind. First, you say "children need a good home" which no one can dispute. Then you claim that "laws that apply to marriage have little to nothing to do with providing children with a good home." Are you trying say that assigning two adults to be responsible for the raising of children does *not* provide children with a good home? Or are you referring to the end of a marriage, i.e., "laws that apply to
the end of a marriage have little to nothing to do with providing children with a good home"? I can understand the latter statement, but not the sentence as you wrote it.
I think one might make the case that complicated divorce law can contribute to the stability of families because the mere thought of having to navigate through them is a dis-incentive to divorce.
The seond part of the paragraph makes even less sense to me: "Besides the trend seems to be that children are more likely to be raised by a single parent then they are by a married couple. So the whole marriage law thing for the protection of the family is a red herring."
The fact that an increasing proportion of children are being raised in single-parent homes is *not* a result of marriage law. In many cases, the parents were never married to begin with, and in others, the parents chose to
end their marriage. I think it's not marriage law you're talking about; it's divorce law.
I personally feel that the biggest threat to society today is the fact that so many children are not being raised in stable two-parent families. I have a whole theory about the causes of the current situation, but I have no answers. I think Hillary said it best when she said it takes a village to raise a child (and that the foundation of that village should be the family, be it by blood relation or neighborhood proximity), but that kind of environment just isn't a part of society's makeup these days.