A Thing That Marriage is For: Fatherhood and Why the Battle for Marriage is So Important

Stephen Baskerville in "Why We're Losing the Battle for Marriage":

Marriage exists to attach the father to the family. It is not a gender-neutral institution. Marriage breakdown produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. (Motherlessness often follows, but fatherlessness begins the process.) The father is the weakest link in the family chain, and without enforceable marriage bonds, he is easily discarded. This is glaringly obvious: American inner cities, native American reservations, northern England, Parisian banlieues, Africa – all are impoverished, crime-ridden and drug-infested matriarchies. Fatherlessness – not poverty or race – predicts social pathology among the young. Without paternal authority, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos.

It is only very rarely the prospective husband is the one who comes to me to arrange a wedding or the father comes to me to arrange a child's baptism. A milder symptom of whatever the malaise is described above?

Read the whole article over at The Ruth Institute here.