As the children handed green egg-filled plates back to Hastert, I asked Miles Johnson, age 5, what he thought of the food. He claimed not to eat pork, and he didn't much like the color of the eggs. "Why couldn't they have red eggs, or yellow eggs?" he kept asking, not quite grasping the theme.
As a final act, the ample Hastert accepted a shirt and a certificate from the NEA and the Cat. After assuring the children that the large shirt would fit, the speaker made a gracious exit. Back to the work of the American people.
Date: Thurs, March 11, 1999 10:00:50 AM
From: mlynch@reasondc.org
Subj: Shacking Up
Shacking up was the subject. The Heritage Foundation was the location. "Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know about Cohabitation before Marriage," a report from The National Marriage Project, provided the evidence.
The report's conclusion, according to my luncheon invitation, is that "living together before marriage increases the risk of breaking up after marriage." This is completely counterintuitive. It's akin to a market research firm claiming that individuals who test-drove cars before purchasing them are less satisfied with their vehicles than individuals who made the commitment to 60 monthly payments after viewing only the shiny exterior. When I explained the idea to my lovely wife, she said, "That's ridiculous."
It's less ridiculous, however, if you consider the source. If the marketing firm were working for a Web-based retailer that maintained neither an inventory nor a showroom, one might expect the anti-test-drive finding. Similarly, an institution dedicated to virgin nuptials might find cohabitation deleterious. Or the claim could be true. To investigate, I once again found myself in the Heritage Foundation's Van Andel Center for a luncheon presentation.
David Popenoe, a Rutgers sociologist and the report's co-author, led with a few jokes. "The only people who seem to want to marry today are Catholic priests and homosexuals," he said, to a room of chuckles. He then told us both his daughters had cohabited before their still-successful marriages and thought he was "nuts" to do this study. He also tried to distance himself from claims of bias, saying he'd once been banned from a Catholic radio station because in his book, Life Without Fathers, he'd given a muted endorsement to shacking up, recognizing that sex outside of marriage is a fact of life. Back then Wade Horn of the National Fatherhood Initiative, who sat two seats over today, had asked him, "Why are you so in favor of cohabitation?"
Well, Wade, he's not any more. Ac-cording to Popenoe's report, which assembles the findings of prior studies but includes no original research, shacking up leads to broken marriages, beaten women, and abused children. Popenoe called cohabitation a "stealth trend," noting that 30 years ago nobody was cohabiting "except people maybe in a trailer park." Today, it's over 50 percent of the people who eventually get married, and climbing.
The divorce statistic, near as I can tell from reading the report, is based on a 1992 study that itself was based on a 1987 data set that found a 46 percent higher risk of divorce for couples who shack up before marriage. In his talk, Popenoe claimed it was a "confirmed empirical generalization that cohabitation leads to an increased risk of divorce." Yet his study says merely that it "is beginning to take on the status...of an empirical generalization"--a difference with a distinction, and here we see how advocates work.
I do not doubt the figure from the 1987 data set, but it's not too relevant to the report's purpose, which is to tell young adults not to shack up lest they wind up divorced. The study didn't single out young adults, or look at young adults who cohabited vs. those who didn't. It compared a broad cross-section of people who lived together to an equally broad pool of those who didn't, mixing widely different populations. Popenoe and co-author Barbara Dafoe Whitehead even admit that as more young adults cohabit, the risk of divorce among those who've lived in sin is falling.
As I listened to Popenoe, I wrote a series of questions: "How many cohabitors have been divorced already before cohabiting?" "Are there different groups cohabiting: young, never-married adults; middle-aged; already divorced, etc.?" "Are there differences between men and women?" "He says divorce rate is related to age of marriage. But might the age of marriage be related to cohabitation?"
His answer to my first question was that he didn't know. Second: definitely, but the groups weren't broken out in studies. Third: didn't know. The last question was the real stumper.
Why do we care about the issue at all? For many in the Heritage room, it's disgust with premarital sex, homosexual sex, sex which leads to an orgasm but not a child, erections outside of the bounds of wedlock, short skirts in the workplace, etc. According to the study's authors, however, it's because of divorce.
And both Whitehead and Popenoe agreed that the biggest factor affecting risk of divorce is the age of first marriage--the later the wedding, the longer the marriage. It stands to reason, although I am told it hasn't been empirically tested, that cohabitation for at least some young adults is a short-term substitute for marriage and works to push back the age of first marriage. But if marrying later mitigates divorce, and cohabitation enables people to marry later, it's hard to see how cohabitation increases divorce.
The reason both relationships could be true, I imagine, is that the studies are dealing with disparate groups: Older, poorer, already divorced folks who then live with someone else are more likely to divorce than non-cohabitors. Younger people who live together and thereby postpone the age of first marriage may in fact be less likely to divorce.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
nfl jerseys|11.15.10 @ 3:22AM|#
xtstgrgf