Scott Morefield Laments a Lack of Suckers

I generally like most of the columns carried by conservative Townhall, but you can often find stuff there encouraging men to sacrifice themselves for what we're currently calling marriage. Scott Morefield is the latest writer to go there (please note that you can go there and comment):

What on earth happened to marriage?

Our laws and culture have changed. Women have changed a lot. Or, at least, they've tried to. That's what happened.

Even for those who don’t believe the practice to be God-ordained as prescribed in the Bible, it’s hard to deny that following the “success sequence” of finishing school, getting a job, getting married, THEN having children leads to a remarkably strong bulwark against poverty.

I wonder what happens when a man gets a job, INTENTIONALLY AVOIDS marriage/shacking up/spending money on women and remains child-free. Guys like that are unlikely to be poor.

And yet, has anyone else noticed that ‘traditional’ families - i.e. a husband, a wife, and a child or children who are actually at least nine months younger than the total time their parents have been married - are about as rare as a liberal who tips?

Yeah, ain't diversity grand?

Taking divorce and split families out of this analysis entirely (a whole other issue),

No, it's really the same issue. Many guys are avoiding getting into a Mexican standoff with the state and a woman, precisely because of divorce.

chances are a shocking percentage of young couples with kids you spot at a grocery store, an amusement park, at work, or even your church will either be unmarried or have been married at some point after their children were conceived or born.

Yes, and one big reason for that is women keep getting knocked up by deadbeats and then wait until they're so desperate they marry Poindexter.

There’s always a reason to justify not adding ‘commitment’ to what one’s life essentially already is.

Well if it already is that, why bother signing a terrible contract? And let's remember that the commitment is for the spouse who earns more to pay the other, since divorce is unilateral and people can be rewarded for divorcing.

Why has marriage, an institution as old as humankind itself, fallen out of such favor with the masses?

Why oh why? It's such a mystery!

Although marriage has for millenia been the building block of families, indeed of civilization itself, in 2014 only 46 percent of adults agreed with the statement, “Society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority,” according to PEW Research.

That's far too high, if we're referring to individuals. Most men should NOT marry nor have children until our laws and culture stop punishing husbands and fathers.

women, even liberal ones, tend to not want to marry men who make less money than they do.

It's almost like what we now call marriage is mostly a wealth transfer mechanism.

On the other, a generally anti-male, anti-father court system that makes marrying the wrong woman among the most tragic life decisions a man can make. Add no-fault divorce, the decline of traditional morals and the “marriage penalty” tax into the mix, and it’s almost like marriage these days is set up to fail.

Kudos to him for mentioning the underlined things. But in most cases, there is no right woman, and even the right woman can be flipped by a trauma or hormonal flux.

Yet Tucker also noted how, interestingly, marriage is alive and well among rich people,

It's almost like women prefer wealthy men!

There were comments.
Mybrid Wonderful:

After the advent of the automobile a new marriage trend started to occur. Men were abandoning their families. The got in the car, drove hundreds or thousands of miles, and then settled down. The only problem was the women left behind couldn't file for divorce based upon laws at the time. After the end of WWII things got out of hand, mostly because an inadvertent affect of the GI bill and overseas deployment exposing men to whole new world views. By the 1950s judges were tired having no options for these women. They couldn't remarry to establish income even if they had a potential husband in mind. Thus it is that no fault divorce was born. Over the course of the next thirty years technology revamped society and the social order via frozen ready-pack meals, convenience appliances like the especially washer and dryer, and the pill. A fascinating paper to read is the elimination of the "stranger". Stranger is a word and concept found in every culture. Up until 1900 the average person lived-and-died within a thirty mile radius. A stranger was a threat and seen as such. Then the automobile happened and then again the Federal Freeway system. By the late 1970s the concept of stranger was completely eliminated in America. This is an unprecedented human phenomena. Eliminating the stranger means local mores and morals were obliterated. All marriages rely on community pressure. This pressure was removed. Finally, the final nail in the coffin of the American family was the invention of the microwave oven. Up until then families still practiced a family evening meal. Once the microwave oven became widely used the family meals vanished. The demise of the American family has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with the advent of new technology. As such if you have identified the wrong cause of any problem, in this case liberals, then whatever solution you have to bear on the wrong cause will have zero effect.

Magic Man:

Marriage will return when the hopelessly corrupt family court racket goes away, but "tradcons" don't want to talk about that elephant in the room.

Marriage is just a huge liability for young men today. You have a 50/50 chance of getting divorced, and the overwhelming majority of divorces are initiated by the wife because she wants the check. Courts rarely award joint custody, which these "strong, independent women" fight tooth and nail against because they want the check. The woman almost always gets custody...because she wants the check.

Of course, the typical young womew nowadays loves to tell men she's a "tradcon"...right up until the moment when she's married and has a legally enforceable claim on his income. Then the chameleon transforms.

If a young man who marries a "tradcon" woman is lucky enough not to be divorced and lost his children, he's still likely going to spend the rest of his life supporting a woman who completely lost interest in him right after (if not during) the honeymoon. Once upon a time a man could divorce a woman like that, but now he loses the shirt off his back in a divorce, so he just has to live with it.

But no so-called conservative is ever going to mention the elephant in the room.

RotoFan42:

The Christian folks did not get involved in solemnizing marriages until the 1200s or so. Yes, the concept of marriage existed before then, but the notion of connecting it to something from church is a much later notion.

Divorce, once the Church got involved, became a lot more complex (witness the Vatholic church’s ongoing discomfort with it). But it was a push for the capability to divorce that broke the Church of England from Catholicism. And the various sects of Christianity remain divided on the issue (and on other issues such as ministers marrying and plural marriage). It seems we really need to save marriage from the church (but they make so much money from hosting weddings it seems unlikely).

As to the other observed trends apparently the author doesn’t know history back before 1950.

Until the early 1900s childbirth remained a very risky thing, lots of women died in childbirth and lots of children did not survive to become adults (many children did not get names until turning 1 to make sure they would live).

The world mostly consisted of farming and support activities until the Industrial revolution started to change that in the 1850s. Up until then, raising a family required at a least two parents and even better an extended family (a village).

So, society evolved mechanisms to join women to new families (marriage) as creating children within the same family group was bad for the gene pool. To make sure women would not be thrown out the relationship became like a contract and the expectation was that women would bear lots of children to deal with the health issues mentioned above.

Then came the industrial and health revolutions and we found that children mostly lived and could be supported with much smaller family units, and this has changed marriage. NO LEFTIES needed to see these shifts.

*****

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