Presbyterians Pro-Life
Restoring a Healthy Society through a Recommitment to Marriage:
The policy recommendation from ACSWP won't get us there
This year’s General Assembly will receive a request for policy on Families in Transition from the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP).* The policy, if adopted, will put the PC(USA) on record officially sanctioning every deviant form of family, thus redefining family altogether. It will erase the significance of marriage to healthy family life.
A report on marriage in America, "Marriage in America: A Report to the Nation,"1 takes a very different view of the relationship between marriage and family in modern society. It summarizes the devastating effects of forms of the family that ACSWP seeks to have the church affirm. Plentiful research shows, for example:
The rate of child poverty is five times higher for children living with single mothers than for children in intact families.2
Children of divorce, when they become teenagers, have two to three times more behavioral and psychological problems than do children from intact homes.3
Seventy percent of juveniles and young adults serving in long-term correctional facilities did not live with both parents while growing up.4
Divorce in the background contributes to as many as three in four teen suicides and four in five psychiatric admissions.5
Family fragmentation is not limited by race, class, and ethnicity, but its most dramatic effects are within the African-American community. Today 68 percent of all black births are to unmarried mothers. Two-thirds of all black children are not living with two parents. Only 15 percent of black children living with their married parents are in poverty, compared to 57 percent of those living with their mother only.6
The Marriage in America report finds that "marital instability and non marriage have thus become dominant characteristics of our era.... In 1960, only 9 percent of all children lived in single-parent families; today, the percentage has increased to 27 percent. More than one third of children today are living apart from their biological fathers, an increase from 17 percent in 1960."
These dismaying statistics lead the report’s writers to issue a challenge to young Americans to resist the cultural norms and rebuild the institution of marriage. It says,
As a foundation for family life and raising children, marriage is better than its fast-growing alternatives. It is our society’s most important institution for bringing up children, for fostering high parental investment in children, and for helping men and women find a common life of mutual affection, care, and sexual intimacy.... The challenge for your generation is to make marriage stronger.
* The complete ACSWP document will not be available in the reports sent to commissioners for the General Assembly. Commissioners will receive the recommendations and a summary rationale only. The full text is on the web:
www.pcusa.org/ga215/business/commbooks/comm07.pdf. It is listed under "Full Text Rationales" for item 03-02. (You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the file. Click here for the free download)Endnotes
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