marriage inequality

A great piece by the last center-left Democrat in America, Prof. William Galston: Of the many barriers to equal opportunity for African-Americans, differences of family background may well be the most consequential—and the least likely to yield to public policy. This is the gravamen of research made public in recent weeks, much of it collected in the fall 2015 issue of the academic journal the Future of Children. Although there were signs of trouble to come in the 1960s, racial differences in marriage rates remained modest until 1970, when 95% of white women and 92% of black women had been

The Democrats like to talk about every kind of inequality, except the most devastating: marriage inequality. No I am not talking about the fact that non-marital unions aren’t treated as marriages (whether it is same-sex unions, or the latest progressive complaint over “singlism”). The most important marriage inequality in America is that 42 percent of children are growing up apart from their own mom and dad joined by marriage, according to the Census data (Current Population Survey) analyzed by respected family scholar Nicholas Zill. Of course the half-full good news in that is marriage is showing persistent and surprising strength: overall almost 6 in