Marriage, Parenthood, and Public Policy

Ron Haskins of the Brooking Institution has an excellent piece in the Spring 2014 issue of National Affairs. He begins by reviewing the current state of marriage and the rising rate of single parenthood in the United States. Furthermore, he looks at the impact single parenthood has on children, including the increased risk of poverty. He then looks … Read more

College that Opposes Gay Marriage Loses Accreditation

The first caveat is that this story comes from Canada, and of course legal systems vary greatly from country to country. I don’t know how their religious liberty protections compare to those in the United States. But this story definitely has some of my fellow Mormons worried, because they can’t help but note the parallels … Read more

The Interracial Marriage Analogy

The Atlantic has a recent piece contrasting the claims that to opposition same-sex marriage is just like previous opposition to interracial marriage. This allows those favoring gay marriage to see their cause as similar to that of the Civil Rights Movement, while simultaneously painting their opponents as bigots on par with the Jim Crow South. … Read more

(Neo) Traditional Marriage

Over at The Atlantic, Brooking’s Richard Reeves argues that “the most affluent and educated Americans…are creating a new model for marriage—one that is liberal about adult roles, conservative about raising children.” Reeves calls these “high-investment parenting” marriages or HIP. “The central rationale for these marriages,” explains Reeves, “is to raise children together, in a settled, … Read more

Gay Marriage and Levels of Abstraction

Adam Greenwood has a pretty insightful look at one of the commonly confused aspects of arguing about gay marriage over at Junior Ganymede. A lot of time gets wasted in arguments that are really about what the proper unit of analysis is, without any of the participants quite realizing that is what their argument is … Read more

Rivalry and Marriage

Not that kind of rivalry, but the kind spoken of in economics. GMU economist Bryan Caplan has a fascinating blog post in which he examines how rivalrous a married couple’s consumption bundle typically is with some aid from equivalence scales. Caplan takes an imaginary couple with the high earner making $60,000 and the low earner … Read more

Will Gay Marriage Ever Be Settled? Lessons from Duck Dynasty

The American Left has been instrumental in past decades at advancing the cause of equality, but their track record has been mixed. On the one hand, no one questions the morality of the Civil Rights campaign to end segregation and Jim Crow. In the 21st century racial debates tend to be about the nature of … Read more

Federal Judge’s Decision Strikes Down Utah Gay Marriage Ban

I think most Utahns, for or against, anticipated this would happen at some point. While Judge Shelby’s decision does not at first blush smell of blatant activism, decisions made by “the people” being rendered moot by a imperious federal government is a sore point for many across the nation, especially in a conservative stronghold like … Read more

Another Post On Marriage and Social Mobility: This Time With Graphs

The Atlantic has a number of new articles jam-packed with data on marriage, divorce, and economic mobility. Drawing on a recent BLS survey, Derek Thompson points out that marriage is common across all levels of educational attainment. However, marriage remains unequal across racial divides, with whites marrying at higher rates than Hispanics and blacks. “In … Read more

Marriage and Social Mobility

A post at the conservative The Weekly Standard does a nice job of bringing together some recent articles–from The Atlantic, Brookings, and Public Discourse–on marriage and social mobility. The importance of marriage for social and economic well-being cannot be stressed enough. Check it out.