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Marriage is the true civil rights issue of our time
Washington Examiner July 05, 12:00 AM July 05, 12:01 AM Video Embed
“America is an idea, an idea unique in the world,” President Joe Biden said last week when responding to the Supreme Court’s decision to end race-based admissions preferences in universities. “An idea of hope and opportunity, of possibilities, of giving everyone a fair shot, of leaving no one behind.”
The United States is not giving everyone a fair shot. Far too many are being left behind. But what we’re lacking isn’t codified racial preferences.
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Our wealth gap is growing, and millions of children are being deprived of equal opportunity because one of our nation’s foundational institutions is failing: People are getting married less than ever.
According to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data released last week, a record high 25% of 40-year-olds have never been married. The collapse of marriage has not affected all communities equally. It is poor and black communities that have suffered the most.
Until the marriage crisis is addressed, the opportunity gap will only widen.
For all the controversy that the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision generated, the reality is that the elite institutions that use race-based admissions educate less than 5% of all college students. This fact does not diminish the very real harm these discriminatory policies inflict on the mostly Asian American students denied admissions to elite institutions, but it does illustrate why affirmative action has failed to bring widespread prosperity to black communities.
As the Pew study notes, almost half (46%) of all black 40-year-olds alive today have never been married. This compares to just 20% of white people and 17% of Asians. Considering the high percentage of black people who have never been married by age 40, it should not be surprising that a higher percentage of black children are born to unmarried mothers. According to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data available, 70% of black children are born to an unmarried mother compared to just 28% of whites and 13% of Asians.
This huge gap in marriage ends up causing significant differences in educational success as children age. One Harvard study found that both black and white children who never had a father in the home by the time they reached 18 had an identical 58% chance of graduating from high school on time. That same study found that for every year there was a father in the home, for both black and white children, a child’s chance of graduating from high school went up, although the effect of having two parents in the home was stronger for white children.
After 18 years of having two parents in the home, a black child’s chance of graduating high school rises nearly 20 points, to 77%. If Biden and the Democrats want more black children to graduate high school, helping keep two parents in the home should be one of their top priorities. And there is no institution on the face of the Earth that has a better track record of keeping two parents in a home than marriage.
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Other than Democratic elites, no one needs to be lectured about the value of marriage. Black Americans already value the ideal of marriage, often more than white people. A 2019 Pew poll found that just 52% of white people said society was better off if long-term couples got married, compared to 61% of black people. Unfortunately, our nation’s social safety net programs, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, Food Stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and even Obamacare subsidies, all include harsh marriage penalties that make it harder for working-class people of all communities to get and stay married.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can make marriage a priority in federal policy. Opportunity would be more widely available, and far fewer children would be left behind. But first, we have to acknowledge that marriage matters and is the civil rights issue of our time.
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