Will Dennis Prager Ever Do Something Constructive About Marriage Rates?

 

I don’t know of a more obsessed marriage seller who doesn’t directly make money off of weddings (as far as I know) than radio talk show host, author, and columnist Dennis Prager. 

When he’s hosting his radio show, it seems like more often than not, he’ll throw in at least a comment, if not a whole hour, trying to convince people to marry. A brief comment might be asserting men exist to be a walking ATM and butler for a woman (not the way he words it, but what he’s saying) or lamenting that younger generations don’t share his affection for marriage.

He’ll state the fact that more Americans under the age of 40 have never been married than ever before, in a way that makes it clear he expects his audience to take such news as shocking and tragic.

He has repeatedly said it’s better for a person to have married and divorced than have never married.

This obsession of his appears, based on his own words, to have its origin in him noticing as early as he could remember how husbands in his religious congregation got to wear a shawl. He cites that a common Jewish prayer for a newborn/infant is for them to someday marry. (When that prayer originated, marriage was almost a completely different thing than it is today.)

It’s to the point I suspect his support for religion is based on its encouragement of marriage, rather than his support for marriage emanating from his religious faith. He probably asks in his head in reaction to any bit of news, “Will this encourage or discourage marriage?”

He’s very proud that there are people who tell him they married because of his selling of marriage. Maybe they did? Or maybe they would have married otherwise. But he’ll never tell you if someone who said they married because of him later says it was the biggest mistake they ever made, if they’d even tell him. Statistically it’s almost a certainty that listeners who’ve bought into his marriage sales pitches have subsequently divorced.

But again, he doesn’t see divorcing as a problem. He sees marriage like a job. People are obligated to get a job, but they can leave a job or fire an employee who isn’t fulfilling their roles.

Other things people should keep in mind as he does his sales pitch:

• He’s been divorced twice. He doesn’t see the divorce the same way many of his devoutly religious listeners do.
• He doesn’t think people should avoid marrying someone with prior children (Dr. Laura constantly preaches against bringing your new lover around your minor children, and I agree with her)
• He thinks wives shouldn’t let mood be the sole factor in determining when they have sex with their husband; many people consider that advocating marital rape.
• He’s wealthy. He lives in one of the most expensive cities in the Los Angeles area. He has a national radio show. He’s a paid speaker and pitchman.
• He doesn’t eat home cooked (at his home) meals. Everything he eats wasn’t prepared by his current wife or a cook they hired; rather, it’s almost always from a restaurant. Very few of his listeners can live like that.
• He travels a lot, so it isn’t like he’s having to go home and deal with a spouse at home day in and day out.
• When he was growing up, his married father had a subscription to Playboy. This wasn’t a hidden thing. Dennis resolved not to marry a woman who couldn’t accept male sexual nature, which Dennis has made clear includes accepting that husbands enjoy looking at other women, whereas many of his listeners think that’s akin to adultery.
• Speaking of adultery, he doesn’t think cheating should automatically end the marriage (I agree, but many of his listeners don’t).

As with anyone else, Dennis telling people they should marry isn’t going to reverse the trend of a decrease in marriages. Dennis needs to have an eloquent marriage strike proponent on his program to address what’s really going on and why. Things have to change before the marriage rate will increase consistently again. Prager U doesn’t have a single video advocating for changes to family law; it has multiple videos trying to fool men into signing a terrible state contract.

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