Thread by @Doc_0

Interesting coda to the marriage wars: there's no longer much doubt that declining birth rates are closely linked to the decline of traditional marriage. That's not how it was "supposed" to work, according to all the fashionable social theories.

mother.ly/life/news/news…

We could argue over the timing of cause and effect: did traditional marriage lose its appeal because marriage was redefined, or did it become politically possible to redefine marriage because it had lost much of its power and appeal among young people?

But whatever the root causes, the results are undeniable. After decades of mad-scientist social tinkering, we've got studies piling up that prove what our grandparents knew all along. It turns out that tradition and common sense were right after all.

Married couples have more children. We already knew, after decades of unbelievable carnage unleashed by social engineers and the welfare state, that marriage is the healthiest environment to raise children - but marriage means MORE children too, across all social groups.

It's pretty clear that healthy societies have a major interest in encouraging young men and women to get married. Large, young families are the only way to ensure demographic growth. And our gigantic, rickety, insolvent "entitlement" system absolutely depends on growth.

But we no longer have any means of encouraging young men and women to get married. They've been told - "programmed" would not be too strong a word - to believe there's nothing special about that arrangement. They see no reason to put marriage ahead of career.

Indeed, young people have some pretty solid, dollars-and-cents reasons to put work and income first, not least being their titanic student loans in the post-Obamacare nightmare of higher education. Marriage is a boutique good to be enjoyed by older, successful people.

No young married couples means no healthy large families with children raised in a stable environment, with the attendant educational benefits and boost to starting their own families and careers. No generational wealth accumulated and passed down a growing family tree.

We're setting ourselves up for a horrific societal and fiscal crash, all so we can enjoy a hideously painful lesson in how our forefathers were right all along about the importance of marriage to the social and economic strength of a nation. /end