Ezra rounds-up various charts from a report on the consequences of delayed marriage. Among them:
Frum spells out other advantages of marriage:
Children born to single parents face much longer odds in life than children born to married parents. (A new study by ThirdWay.org suggests that the harms are especially intense for boys, less so for girls.) “Odds” are not rules, of course. There are always exceptions.
On average, however, children born to married mothers and fathers are more likely to finish college, more likely to avoid prison and more likely to form marriages themselves than children born to single parents. And precisely because the harms of single parenthood tend to be self-replicating, the breakdown of marriage threatens to harden into a caste divide, with some families launched into cycles of downward mobility because of the unstable relationships of parents or grandparents or great-grandparents.
Which helps us see the other group of people directly affected by what is being argued in the Supreme Court as I blog this: children. Do not the children of gay couples deserve not to be stigmatized by having their parents deemed inferior to their heterosexual peers under the law? And does not civil marriage itself operate as a core mechanism for the stability and longevity of relationships? Why would we not all want to support gay couples as well as straight ones? Marriage is always work. But it matters.
The Dish 