Divorce, Big Cultural Issue
Divorce is the next big cultural issue to be faced by this
society. After a bit of a rocky start (remember Murphy Brown?),
we have now successfully established that unwed parenting is
often harmful and destructive. You don’t hear today, as you
did five years ago, cheery assurances that single-parent families
are part of the “new family structure”. Instead, across
the political spectrum, you find acknowledgment that the
two-parent family must be restored and strengthened.
But while unwed child-bearing took center stage, divorce was
relegated to the shadows. Why? Its
footprints are everywhere. The application form for my son’s
preschool asks for the fathers’ name, mother’s name,
father’s address and mother’s address. When an American
pilot is rescued in Bosnia, we find a young man who is every inch
the central casting image of the American flyer, except for one
new wrinkle — we hear from his mother and his father
separately. Hallmark markets cards for divorced fathers to send
to their children.
Divorce is such an accepted part of the national landscape that
even cultural crusaders have sometimes held their fire. To
condemn divorce is to rebuke not just strangers but your sister,
your cousins, your best friend and yourself.
The wreckage divorce has created in the lives of children is too
massive to be denied. Conservatives, particularly those who
specialize in thwarting the aims of homosexual activists, must
confront the truth that heterosexual divorce creates more havoc
in our society than homosexual unions. I don’t believe that
homosexuals should have the “right” to marry or adopt
children. But if you accept the statistic that homosexuals, gay
and lesbian, amount to no more than 1% to 2% of the population
— not the 10% they claim — and recognize that the
subset of homosexuals who want to be parents is quite small, then
their conduct (what ever you think of it) is really peripheral.
Arguably, men have benefited from liberalized divorce laws and
customs far more than women. For every woman freed from a
tyrannical husband, there were 10 men who traded in their
40-something wife for a younger model. And while men’s
incomes tend to rise following a divorce, women’s tend to
fall.
By Mona Charen