TTSR Is The Family Becoming Extinct?

"The Thomas Sowell Reader" by Thomas Sowell, pg. 14,  Is The Family Becoming Extinct?

     For the intelligentsia, the family ---or “traditional family” as they say--- is only one of many lifestyles.  They seem to enjoy periodically announcing that the traditional family is in a decline, but is it?

     A recent census showed that traditional families--- a married couple and their children--- are just a little less than one fourth of all households.  That is no huge decline being that a decade ago they were a little more than one fourth.   So the doom and gloom reports on the traditional families declining are greatly exaggerated.
     Something to consider is that families never stay the same.  Kids grow up and move away.  Newlyweds usually wait to have children, if they have them.  Even if everyone got married and had kids, it still would  not add up to 100% of households.  

     These days, marriages are occurring later in life and many people choose not to get married at all.  Still, 53% of all households today contain married couples without in-house children.  

     Regardless of popular opinions, there are more benefits to marriages than to “domestic partners”.  Married people generally have longer lives, better health, less violence, less alcohol, higher incomes, and less poverty.  These are all stats that can be looked up, one place of which is the book “The Case for Marriage” by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher.  Although this is only one example of many, you don’t hear a lot about the positives of marriage because they are not considered to be “politically correct” by the media, academia, courts, and politicians that are trying to make everything sound equal.  

     A new census report on “America’s Families and Living Arrangements” shows statistics on just about every aspect of family, but not the basic data on the average income of married-couple families vs. “other family households” or “non-family households”.  Looks like the Census Bureau didn’t want to seem “politically incorrect”.

Family Statistics:

A woman that is shacking up is four times more likely to become a victim of violence.  Her children are 40 times more likely to be abused by live-in boyfriends as by their parents.

Family Income Statistics:

“The bracket with the largest number of men who are unmarried partners is the bracket between $30,000 and$40,000.”

“The bracket with the largest number of husbands is between $50,000 and $75,000.”

“Among married-couple households, the bracket with the largest number of households is $75,000.”

“Among “other family groups,” the bracket with the largest number of households is under $10,000.”

Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader.  United State of America: Basic Books, 2011.

Hebrews 13:4  “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”

1 Corinthians 7:38  

“So then he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better.”

Jeremiah 33:6

“Behold, I will bring to it health and healing, and I will heal them and reveal to them abundance of prosperity and security.”

Matthew 9:3-6 

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?  So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together let not man separate.”

     There is no real marriage outside what God brings together.  When you marry someone, the oaths you make are to God, not man.   And that is what keeps two people so strongly united.  In Hebrew, the first letter of the words bride (כלה) and bridegroom (חתן) make the word כח , which means ‘power’.  God will give power (success) to the two that are made one.  Outside His marriage, there is no blessing of power.