The American dream has been aborted.

Washington and state leaders of both parties have jettisoned our fundamental rights–rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Our founders fought hard for these rights and enshrined them in our Constitution and first ten amendments. For two centuries, realizing this vision was our nation’s dream and the light of hope for all the world.

Over the past three to four decades, our leaders have driven the nation into economic bondage to China, the largest and most totalitarian nation in the world. Leveraging the slave wages of 1.4 billion Asian peasants, our government has borrowed trillions from the Chinese government to maintain our broken systems on life support while positioning the statist machinery of population control into place.

Don’t believe it?  Why is the Executive cabinet populated with abortion enthusiasts and traditional marriage antagonists?  Why is the President and the Congress rushing legislation to nationalize another 20% of the American economy, all of health care, with a plan that promotes and mandates abortion services and incorporates measures to facilitate euthanasia and withdrawal of services for ailing elderly?

Why treat unwed pregnancy with abortion when the safest, most effective approach for mother, child and society is to deliver the baby and promote strong marriages and motherhood.  Mothers who are married or have a support network keep their babies. Women who do not wish to be mothers have many options including giving their babies to couples who want to adopt, a win-win approach for the unborn child, the expectant mother, the adopting family, the economy and all of us.

As in every other Marxist nation, God has been forced out of our homes, schools and communities. In the name of individual freedom, our laws and governing systems have been jerry-rigged to destroy our family lives and our values. New statutes promise to criminalize matters of faith and compromise our civil liberties even more. We must wake up to this systemic deceit imposed by ersatz leaders from the right and the left and maintained by the barons and barristers of commerce.

It is time to reclaim the vision of our founders and reestablish mankind’s biological institutions: marriage, parentage and kinship, the gifts of true wealth bestowed by our Creator.

Marriage is the answer for America and for the world.

Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” was exactly right, but in a cynical way. The primary purpose of an economy is to serve the human race—to allow men and women to conceive children, raise a family and nurture children into healthy, productive adults to serve the next generation. This is the common good.

No other human institution serves mankind better than marriage and the traditional family. Statistics abound to show that marriage is the safest place for women and children, indeed, for all human beings. .  For example, 2005 Department of Justice and Census data on domestic violence show that in intact marriages, the domestic violence rate for married women is 0.9%  – less than 1 in 1,000, the lowest by far of any category! The risk of a separated woman is more than 50 times greater!

So, we must ask how our leaders of both political parties conspired to dismantle traditional marriage and all of its safeguards for children and families.  Why do our laws offer incentives to keep rich and poor people from marrying?  Why are there benefits to leave marriage without cause?   Why are people who wish to remain married forced into divorce by the state?  Why does the state separate children from one parent when the other opts to violate marital vows?  Why is the state against marriage and parents?

Tragically, the probability that a young man and woman in America today will be able to marry and establish a family that serves their children and their children’s children is dwindling precipitously. Despite our modern science and technology only 44 percent of today’s children reach adulthood living with both biological parents.

Consider these alarming facts. Marriage has plunged 50 percent since 1970 representing a loss of 1.1 million marriages a year. Since 1970, divorce has terminated over 44 million marriages affecting 129 million parents and children, 42.3% of the US population, not to mention grandparents and other relatives in these families. Abortion has effectively eliminated 57 million young people creating a profound revenue crisis in our social security and taxation system.

In 1964 when LBJ began his war on poverty, approximately 7.7 percent of children were born out of wedlock and seventy percent of the African American population was organized in families.  Within three decades, by 1996, the federal government had spent 7 trillion dollars fighting poverty and out of wedlock births had soared to 32%, more than a 400 percent rise. Nationally, seventy percent of African American children are now born out of wedlock, over 75% in Detroit.

By 2008, 40% of all American births were out of wedlock with a 700 percent greater risk for poverty amongst these children as compared to those born to two married parents, according to Census Bureau data. Few children born out of wedlock grow up living with both biological parents.

By 2005, Welfare programming had expanded to include 70 million middle and upper class families through Title IV-D or Child Support Enforcement, a program designed to provide funding for parents leaving their marriages or conceiving children outside marriage.

Economist Edgar K. Browning estimated that by that same year the federal government was spending over 1 trillion annually on various programs to combat poverty and income inequality. Despite the skyrocketing proliferation of human pathologies arising from government intrusion into family life through welfare programming for groups at every income level, our new president along with state leaders have borrowed trillions more from China while proclaiming a messianic mission to end American suffering.

Government meddling has made marriage so risky that cohabitation has soared 16 fold since 1960 from 430,000 to 6.8 million today. Still, cohabiting couples are just as likely to have a child under 18 as married couples (41% vs. 46%). Ninety percent of cohabitating relationships eventually separate according to Cornell University researcher, Daniel Lichter, in his 2006 report in the journal, Demography.  Seventy five percent do so without marrying, a form of premarital divorce that is every bit as painful and traumatic to the couple and to their children. Those cohabitating couples that eventually marry are 90 percent more likely to divorce than couples that remained apart before marriage.

Cohabitation itself has become such a negative experience that it has diverted tens of millions from marrying at all resulting by 2005, along with high divorce rates, in a nation with more households headed by unmarried parents, 50.3 percent, as compared to 1995 when 60 percent of homes had a married head of household.  Census data also show that the percentage of family households has decreased from 85% in 1960 to 68% in 2003 with a corresponding 310% rise in families headed by a single parent.

In response to data such as these, our lawmakers, public officials and legal community insist that divorce is a fundamental liberty right, that you cannot force, encourage nor incentivize people to fulfill their contractual marital vows.  This is, of course, just not true. Anyone who has tried to leave a car lease, a relationship of far less importance than a marriage with minor children, knows that it would be far easier to leave the spouse and children. The US Constitution requires that contracts be upheld as a matter of law.

Serious marital conflict is a normal part of life for two people living in such an intimate relationship and it can be helped. Research shows that 85% of people who are very unhappy in marriage will be very happy in marriage five years later. So why, when 80 percent of divorced spouses want to remain married, did the American Bar Association engineer the fall of marriage by establishing unilateral, no-fault divorce on demand?

This somber picture of modern American family life is yielding to mounting clamor for truth, transparency and accountability from our nation’s leaders. Renewed efforts to strengthen marriage assure us of great hope for the American dream.

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Dr. Ross, an emergency physician, is Chief Editor of The Michigan Family Defender and Co-founder of the Family Rights Coalition of Michigan.