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I guess we all knew this day was coming. Once the secular schools started allowing purple hair and sex education classes, once the feminazis started forcing women to talk back to their husbands, and once bill cliton set an example for fornicators everywhere, it was bound to happen.
What can we, as True Christians, learn from this crisis?
For first time, unmarried households reign in US
WASHINGTON (AFP) - It is by no means dead, but for the first time, a new survey has shown that traditional marriage has ceased to be the preferred living arrangement in the majority of US households.
The shift, reported by the US Census Bureau in its 2005 American Community Survey, could herald a sea change in every facet of American life -- from family law to national politics and its current emphasis on family values.
The findings, which were released in August but largely escaped public attention until now because of the large volume of data, indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.
More than 14 million of them were headed by single women, another five million by single men, while 36.7 million belonged to a category described as "nonfamily households," a term that experts said referred primarily to gay or heterosexual couples cohabiting out of formal wedlock.
In addition, there were more than 30 million unmarried men and women living alone, who are not categorized as families, the Census Bureau reported.
By comparison, the number of traditional households with married couples at their core stood at slightly more than 55.2 million, or 49.8 percent of the total.
Unmarried couples gravitated toward big cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the farm states in the Great Plains and rural communities of the Midwest and West remained bastions of traditionalism, according to the survey.
The trend represented a dramatic change from just six years ago, when married couples made up 52 percent of 105.5 million American households.
It indicated that efforts by President George W. Bush and his allies, who over the past five years have made a concerted effort to shore up traditional marriage and families through tax breaks, special legislation and church-sponsored campaigns is bearing little fruit.
Douglas Besharov, a sociologist with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said it is difficult for the traditional family to emerge unscathed after three and a half decades of divorce rates reaching 50percent and five decades out-of-wedlock births.
He predicted that cohabitation and temporary relationships between people were likely to dominated America's social landscape for years to come.
In the opinion of Stephanie Coontz, who heads the Council on Contemporary Families, growing life expectancy as well as women's earning potential are impacting the traditional marriage in unexpected ways.
If before World War II the typical American marriage ended with the death of one partner within a few years after the last child had left home, she pointed out in the journal, that today couples can look forward to spending more than two decades together in an empty nest.
"The growing length of time partners spend with only each other for company, in some instances, has made individuals less willing to put up with an unhappy marriage, while women's economic independence makes it less essential for them to do so," Coontz wrote.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - It is by no means dead, but for the first time, a new survey has shown that traditional marriage has ceased to be the preferred living arrangement in the majority of US households.
The shift, reported by the US Census Bureau in its 2005 American Community Survey, could herald a sea change in every facet of American life -- from family law to national politics and its current emphasis on family values.
The findings, which were released in August but largely escaped public attention until now because of the large volume of data, indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.
More than 14 million of them were headed by single women, another five million by single men, while 36.7 million belonged to a category described as "nonfamily households," a term that experts said referred primarily to gay or heterosexual couples cohabiting out of formal wedlock.
In addition, there were more than 30 million unmarried men and women living alone, who are not categorized as families, the Census Bureau reported.
By comparison, the number of traditional households with married couples at their core stood at slightly more than 55.2 million, or 49.8 percent of the total.
Unmarried couples gravitated toward big cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the farm states in the Great Plains and rural communities of the Midwest and West remained bastions of traditionalism, according to the survey.
The trend represented a dramatic change from just six years ago, when married couples made up 52 percent of 105.5 million American households.
It indicated that efforts by President George W. Bush and his allies, who over the past five years have made a concerted effort to shore up traditional marriage and families through tax breaks, special legislation and church-sponsored campaigns is bearing little fruit.
Douglas Besharov, a sociologist with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said it is difficult for the traditional family to emerge unscathed after three and a half decades of divorce rates reaching 50percent and five decades out-of-wedlock births.
He predicted that cohabitation and temporary relationships between people were likely to dominated America's social landscape for years to come.
In the opinion of Stephanie Coontz, who heads the Council on Contemporary Families, growing life expectancy as well as women's earning potential are impacting the traditional marriage in unexpected ways.
If before World War II the typical American marriage ended with the death of one partner within a few years after the last child had left home, she pointed out in the journal, that today couples can look forward to spending more than two decades together in an empty nest.
"The growing length of time partners spend with only each other for company, in some instances, has made individuals less willing to put up with an unhappy marriage, while women's economic independence makes it less essential for them to do so," Coontz wrote.
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