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| AP/Salon |
The Marriage Vow was created by the conservative Christian organiztion The Family Leader as a way for political candidates and others to secure its support. Rejected by
Mitt Romney, the pledge has been signed by
Michele Bachmann and
Rick Santorum.
Although the group recently dropped controversial language implying that black children were better off as slaves, I think it's important to read the Vow in its original form, as the authors intended. Click
here to view the press release and document - complete with footnotes - as released by The Family Leader.
The Marriage Vow
A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY
Faithful monogamy is at the very heart of a designed and purposeful order -- as conveyed by Jewish and Christian Scripture, by Classical Philosophers, by Natural Law, and by the American Founders -- upon which our concepts of Creator-endowed human rights, racial justice and gender equality all depend.
Enduring marital fidelity between one man and one woman protects innocent children, vulnerable women, the rights of fathers, the stability of families, and the liberties of all American citizens under our republican form of government. Our exceptional and free society simply cannot endure without the transmission of personal virtue, from one generation to the next, by means of nurturing, nuclear families comprised of sexually-faithful husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. We acknowledge and regret the widespread hypocrisy of many who defend marriage yet turn a blind eye toward the epidemic of infidelity and the anemic condition of marriages in their own communities. Unmistakably, the Institution of Marriage in America is in great crisis:
- Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.
- LBJ’s 1965 War on Poverty was triggered in part by the famous “Moynihan Report” finding that the black out-of-wedlock birthrate had hit 26%; today, the white rate exceeds that, the overall rate is 41%, and over 70% of African-American babies are born to single parents -- a prime sociological indicator for poverty, pathology and prison regardless of race or ethnicity.
- About one million U.S. children suffer through divorce each year -- the outcome of about half of all first marriages and about 60 percent of remarriages, disproportionately affecting economically-vulnerable families.
- The taxpayer-borne social costs of family fragmentation exceeds $112 billion per year, especially when all costs to the justice system are recognized.
- Social protections, especially for women and children, have been evaporating as we have collectively “debased the currency” of marriage. This debasement continues as a function of adultery; “quickie divorce;” physical and verbal spousal abuse; non-committal co-habitation; exemplary infidelity and “unwed cheating” among celebrities, sports figures and politicians; anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender and eye color; as well as anti-scientific bias which holds, against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general, optimizes individual or public health.
