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Hillary Clinton Wants To Rebuild Communities Without Marriage

by Summer August 9, 2023 0 comments

By: Summer

Do you agree or disagree with Hillary Clinton’s vision for addressing loneliness in America?

America, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warns us, is suffering from an “epidemic of loneliness.”

According to a recent surgeon general advisory, people disconnected from family and friends face a greater risk of suffering from “heart disease, dementia, depression, and stroke,” Clinton tells us.

“We must work together to restitch our unraveling social fabric,” Clinton writes, “to rebuild Americans’ trust in one another, our democracy, and our shared future.”

To accomplish this, Clinton endorses the “historic legislation enacted by Biden and the Democrats” to “modernize infrastructure, bring supply chains home, and boost manufacturing.” Clinton further recommends “pro-family policies such as paid leave” and “investments in public transit.”

Nowhere in her 3,500-word essay, however, does Clinton mention the word “marriage” once. She does note that the rate of young adults who report suffering from loneliness has gone up every year since 1976, but she never manages to connect that fact to the reality that that is also when marriage entered its steep decline.

Maybe Clinton just doesn’t know how radically the family has fallen apart in the last 50 years. From the first census of the United States to 1960, about 80% of all households were led by a married couple. That percentage started falling in the 1960s, accelerated in the ’70s, and fell below 50% in 2010. Now just 45% of all households include a married couple. Meanwhile the percentage of people living alone has never been higher.

Clinton doesn’t seem to care about this historic decline in marriage.

She should.

Clinton manages to cite the work of Raj Chetty, whose work she correctly notes “shows how the decline of social connections between people of different classes and backgrounds — has significantly reduced economic mobility in America.”

And Chetty is right: Economic mobility has fallen. But do you know what factor best predicts economic mobility in any given neighborhood? Well, the top factor is household income. On average, poor neighborhoods continued to be poor. But not all poor neighborhoods are alike.

Some neighborhoods have more minorities, some have more white people, some are more densely populated, and others have better education and employment rates. But none of those factors proved to be as strong as this one: the percentage of single-parent households in a neighborhood. More than race, education, and employment, the number of children being raised without two parents was the biggest factor in predicting rates of social mobility.

And there is no institution on Earth better at ensuring there are two loving parents in a home than marriage.

Why Clinton doesn’t want to even mention the word “marriage,” let alone advocate policies to make it easier for people to get and stay married, is a mystery. Maybe it is because married families vote overwhelmingly for Republicans and no one benefits more from the destruction of the family than the Democratic Party.

Source: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/hillary-clinton-wants-to-rebuild-communities-without-marriage