If Marriage is Dead, We're All Dead!

Marketing scams are bad enough, but how do we protect ourselves from the falsehoods of men of science and scholarship?

by Azriel Winnett

Inevitably, I'm going to tread on someone's sensitivities. If I arouse your ire, I apologize in advance.

But I must have the courage of my convictions, and I am speaking from the heart.

This is the age of instant information. If you're looking to buy a rather unusual widget, and you aren't getting too far with the local yellow pages, you might find two dozen suppliers on the Internet within the blink of an eyelid. If you wake up one morning to find you're suffering from some kind of rare disease, you could have expert opinions from medical authorities in five different countries e-mailed to you before the end of the day.

Misinformation travels fastest

Unfortunately, as fast as information travels, misinformation seems to travel even faster. And the faster misinformation travels, the lower our threshold of credibility falls. When, they say, hundreds of people received an e-mail recently purporting to originate from IBM, and offering good money to those who would forward it to their friends, far too many fell for the scam, hook, line and sinker.

And if we are so easily taken in by such patently bogus claims, how do we protect ourselves from the errors of very knowledgeable,persuasive - but very far from infallible - men of science and scholarship?

When two psychologists published the results of their "research" (note my use of quotation marks) recently, eyebrows were raised in many circles. Their shallow conclusions, disproved by a mass of scientific evidence, may ordinarily have attracted little attention, especially since the authors openly stated that their alleged research had been designed to support a specific political agenda.

But what set tongues wagging was the fact that it appeared in a publication no less prestigious than the official journal of the American Psychological Association. Therein lies the danger.

Deconstructing the Essential Father by Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach sets out to prove that fathers are really not important to the healthy development of children. They do concede that two adults are probably better than one in the average household in which children are being nurtured. But any adults, they say, should do the trick, presumably even strangers!

Tossing fathers into the trash can?

And not being content to toss fathers onto the trash can of irrelevancy, these learned authors go on to imply that they are downright dangerous. They warn of "the potential costs of father presence" and especially their propensity to fritter away family resources on "gambling, purchasing alcohol, cigarettes, or other nonessential commodities", thereby "actually increasing women's workload and stress level."

Their contempt for the role of the father in the life of a child understandably leads our two researchers to a second conclusion: marriage is for the birds. "We do not find," they assert, "any empirical support that marriage enhances fathering or that marriage civilizes men and protects children."

This sweeping assertion swiftly attracted a telling rejoinder from Wade Horn, a much-published psychologist and president of the National Fatherhood Initiative.

"That statement -'we do not find any empirical evidence' - can only be true if they have never read the scientific literature," Dr Horn pointed out.

"There is a whole literature attesting to the importance of fathers and marriage. Married fathers spend far more time with their children, on average, than those that aren't married.

Decades of research on the effects of marriage show that men tend to drink less, use drugs less, carouse less, and work harder when they become husbands. As for protecting children, countless studies have found that children do better when they grow up in a two-parent married household than in any other setting."

I suppose I could talk about this subject all day, but I promised not to.

I'll just say this. Of course, we're not living in an ideal world. Sometimes, marriages just don't work out. Not all fathers are a credit to their calling.

Sometimes, it happens that mothers have no choice but to bring up their children on their own. (Of course, this happens to fathers, too). I salute and admire the thousands of single parents who are doing such a superb job in the most trying circumstances.

The real cornerstone

But all this doesn't detract one iota from the essential truth and the reality of the situation.

Fathers are indispensable not only to the physical, but also to the emotional and spiritual wellbeing of their children. (Interestingly, we often see this even where a father has died, in the way his memory is revered in the family.)

And it is the traditional family that is the cornerstone of any stable society. Theoretically, of course, the human race doesn't need the institution of marriage, as we know it, to be able to reproduce itself.

But we aren't animals, and we need to live - not just exist.

If marriage is dead, we're all dead. We don't stand a dog's chance without it.

Well.... what do you say?

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