Marriage

Child marriage is alive and well among the Yemeni-Americans in Dearborn, but education may finally erode that social norm.

This week we learned, via BuzzFeed, about a new trend in weddings: bouncy castles. A wedding company has opened an initially successful line of wedding-themed inflatable trampolines. Photos depict shoeless groomsmen and bridesmaids bouncing and giggling like first-graders at a birthday bash.

For a few weeks now, Nashville mayor Megan Barry has been embroiled in quite the sex scandal. It seems Barry has been engaged in an affair with the police sergeant who was the head of her security detail. (Both are married.) For an added layer of unseemliness, Barry seems to have taken a lot of…

Happy Valentine’s Day. Before you celebrate by heading out and swiping right, let’s have a talk about marriage.

The first season of the Netflix show Stranger Things, released last year, immediately plunged its protagonists into danger. In the first episode we see 12-year-old Will Byers, one of a quartet of Dungeons & Dragons-playing nerds, waylaid by a dark shape on his way home along the wooded back roads…

Say what you will about her husband the president, The Scrapbook believes that First Lady Melania Trump is just fine. Gracious, charming, conscientious, and decorative, she has carried out her public duties with conspicuous aplomb.

Say what you will about her husband the president, The Scrapbook believes that First Lady Melania Trump is just fine. Gracious, charming, conscientious, and decorative, she has carried out her public duties with conspicuous aplomb.

A few years ago, some friends of mine, weekend musicians, started jamming together and formed a cover band called the Porch Lights. To be honest, their big world tour is a bit slow in developing. Conquering the globe one backyard at a time, they haven’t quite made it outside of our neighborhood,…

A few years ago, some friends of mine, weekend musicians, started jamming together and formed a cover band called the Porch Lights. To be honest, their big world tour is a bit slow in developing. Conquering the globe one backyard at a time, they haven’t quite made it outside of our neighborhood,…

Even if you hold no religious beliefs, you might want to consider adopting some simply for the sake of your wedding. That’s the conclusion I reached after attending several secular nuptial ceremonies in the years after college. There was little worse than listening to vows that had been made up by…

Even if you hold no religious beliefs, you might want to consider adopting some simply for the sake of your wedding. That’s the conclusion I reached after attending several secular nuptial ceremonies in the years after college. There was little worse than listening to vows that had been made up by…

There's a scene in the Brock Landers documentary—the movie-within-a-movie tucked away inside Boogie Nights—where Dirk Diggler explains how his work in adult films is actually a public service:

Whenever I’m driving with my wife, I have this nasty habit of smacking her in the face. No, it's not because of the innumerable times she says, "It's green. You can go now." Or "Slow down, there's a stop sign." It's not even when she thinks I don't see the car in front of me braking and yells, "Oh,…

Traditional marriage is in big trouble in the United States. Between 1960 and 2011, the share of white adults 18 and older who were married declined by 25 percent, while the declines for Hispanic and black adults were 35 percent and 50 percent respectively. 

On the first page of this enjoyable double biography, Daisy Hay quotes the Mister-half of her titular couple as having said, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” 

The lone bright spot last week was the release of Ryan Anderson's much-anticipated (by me, at least) book on Obergefell and the future of marriage. It's called Truth Overruled: The future of marriage and religious freedom and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If you were on social media last week, you no doubt heard about the new contract being promoted to college students by the activists at the Affirmative Consent Project in their effort to beat back the supposed “rape culture” on U.S. campuses. The group suggested that amorous couples, after signing…

Look, it's not the end of the world.  

Speaking at an LGBT event tonight at the White House, President Obama took credit for liberal LGBT progress since he took office six-and-a-half years ago. 

During President Obama's tenure, religious Americans have been increasingly marginalized by an administration that can be intolerant or at least unaccomodating of beliefs that conflict with its policies, regulations, or legislative goals. Perhaps most notably, President Obama campaigned by…

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan officiated a same-sex marriage over the weekend, the Associated Press reports. It was her first.

The administration for children and families, part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), issued guidance in a memo on Wednesday regarding application of the federal government's policy on same-sex spouses/marriages to all Head Start and Early Head Start programs.  

The American Military Partner Association (AMPA) held its first National Gala Dinner in Washington Sunday, and the Department of Defense used the opportunity to tout the rapid advances the military is making in erasing gender distinctions in policies regarding military spouses and partners. As…

Richard V. Reeves has written in The Atlantic a confident and illuminating account of the state of marriage in America today.  College-educated American men and women “are reinventing marriage as a child-rearing machine for a post-feminist society and a knowledge economy.”  On this front, the…

In an article published a couple days ago, Time magazine endorses "Polyandry," which Merriam-Webster defines as "the state or practice of having more than one husband or male mate at one time."

Every time you think that we've finally touched bottom on Obamacare, some new problem emerges. So what began merely as a dysfunctional website became a broken and mis-designed system. When it turned out that lots of people were paying more for their plans, it then turned out that others were having…

The other day, I picked up my guitar and didn’t know what to play. This is happening more and more, and I guess it’s because I pick up the guitar less and less. When I was 15, I could strum my way through the entire Beatles catalogue, half the songs on classic rock radio, and any number of…

While everyone else has spent the last few days obsessing about Gravity, the government shutdown, and the real possibility that the NFC East division champ will have six wins, it’s quietly been an interesting week for sociology nerds who think about marriage.

As the debate over gay marriage began heating up, supporters of the idea insisted that it was a matter of basic libertarianism. “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t have one,” went the bumper-sticker-turned-rallying-cry. Of course, it was never going to be that simple with regard to something as…

Last month The Scrapbook reported on a slightly arcane, but important, change being proposed for the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual survey conducted by the Census Bureau; it goes out to 3 million households and is one of the most robust tools we have for gathering demographic data…

Whatever one’s views on gay marriage, it is appropriate — in a sense — that this issue, which was illegitimately thrust onto the scene by willful judges at the state level, has now been illegitimately advanced by willful judges at the federal level.  Accordingly, gay marriage has been propelled…

The Supreme Court’s rulings on gay marriage effectively leave the issue very much alive in state and national politics. The four justices appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama clearly would declare a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in a heartbeat, if they were to get a fifth…

President Bill Clinton released a statement, together with his wife Hillary Clinton, hailing the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, a bill he signed into law in 1996.

Much will be written about Chief Justice Roberts's opinion for the court in Hollingsworth v. Perry, holding that supporters of California's Proposition 8 lacked constitutional "standing" to defend in federal court California's ballot initiative against same-sex marriage. (Whether or not same-sex…

President Obama called the plaintiffs of the Prop. 8 Supreme Court case while they were being interviewed on MSNBC:

The Wall Street Journal reports:

A key line from the Supreme Court's decision on the Defense of Marriage Act. "DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty."

A key line from the Supreme Court's decision on the Defense of Marriage Act. "DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty."

'Time was when the whole of life went forward in the family,” the historian Peter Laslett once wrote, “in a circle of loved, familiar faces. .  .  . That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors.” Laslett was writing in 1965, as he lamented the decline of the family over…

In a commencement ceremony address to Morehouse College yesterday in Atlanta, President Obama made a joke at his wife Michelle's expense.

President Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law in 1996, is now set to be honored a gay lobbying group in Los Angeles.

Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation debated CNN's Piers Morgan and his guest, Suze Orman, about same-sex marriage Tuesday night. Morgan concluded the debate by saying he found Anderson's position "a bit offensive." "It's not fair, it's not tolerant, it's not American," said the British-born…

Nelson Lund, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on California’s Proposition 8, which defines marriage as being between couples of the opposite sex. Today they’re hearing them on the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman at the federal level. Like Roe…

Gary Bauer debated Nicolle Wallace yesterday on Fox News over the issue of same-sex marriage and the courts:

In a speech near his Chicago home today, President Barack Obama got personal. He talked of the importance of family, using himself and his own experience as an example.

Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, told the New York Times that his wife offered to stay married to him, if he was planning to run for president. The first couple of Colorado is currently separated.

I’m burning with envy. Here I’ve been plugging away of late in places like Oklahoma City and Scottsdale. Meanwhile, both Susan Mary Alsop and Kati Marton, heroines of two ostensibly different books, had a much better idea. The only possible way to provoke interest in their surprisingly similar…

Perhaps the finest book ever written on the natural complementarity of the sexes and on marriage as the core building block of civil society was written by a Swiss who was then living in France.  (The book is Emile, and the author is Jean-Jacques Rousseau.)  So when Robert Oscar Lopez writes at the…

The Campaign for Working Families, Gary Bauer's Super PAC, is launching a new ad today in North Carolina:

Worth watching: Jeffrey Bell on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this morning, making the (contrarian) case for the importance of social issues in this year's campaign. For more on this, take a look at his fine book, along with his recent articles in THE WEEKLY STANDARD: here, here, and here.

Last week, at the beach with my family, I deliberately ignored all newspapers. Not for the reason most people do—because print is dead. But because whenever I’m surrounded by salt -water, steamed crabs, and even mediocre fishing, I tend to hold that true happiness is having no idea what chronically…

Mitt Romney's hosting a campaign event at Jeffco Fairgrounds in Golden, Colorado around lunchtime today, and a quick scan of Chick-fil-A's website shows several locations within fifteen miles or so of the Romney event. So it should be easy for Romney to stop at a Chick-fil-A for a photo-op (and a…

Pastor Rick Warren reported last night on Twitter that fast food chain Chick-fil-A "set a world record" yesterday. His claim is based off a phone call he had with Dan Cathy, the COO of Chick-fil-A who ignited a culture war when he expressed his preference for traditional marriage. 

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has told Chick-fil-A that the fast-food company is not welcome in his town because "Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago values." In other words, because Chick-fil-A ownership believes in traditional marriage, it shouldn't bother opening up shop in Chicago.

Over the weekend Jason DeParle had a long, interesting piece on marriage in the New York Times. The gist of the piece is this couplet: (1) Marriage is a key driver of economic prosperity for families and married parents are more likely to have prosperous, healthy, stable families than single…

The New York Times gushingly describes how President Obama’s unique background — he’s “a man from many worlds,” “a transcender of tribes,” and, yes, “a former constitutional law professor” — has allowed him to unearth a creative “middle way” on the question of redefining marriage.  That “middle…

Vice President Joe Biden is at least part of the reason President Barack Obama came out in favor of same sex marriage yesterday, the president admitted in the interview on the issue with ABC's Robin Roberts:

This morning on ABC, President Obama said that he thinks same sex marriage should be allowed. "I've just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married," the president said.

President Obama was never likely going to win in North Carolina without a big win nationally. Yet his campaign insisted on pretending so, going so far as to locate the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.  Now, on the heels of North Carolinians having handed a resounding victory to…

The debate over same sex “marriage” has engaged the heartfelt feelings and convictions of millions of Americans. Then there is Barack Obama.

Here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD we are prostrate with admiration! President Obama's sudden reversal of opinion on gay marriage was, by any measure, an incredibly gutsy thing to do.

The U.S. is divided on gay marriage, as on many issues. But the gulf of the cultural divide on this particular issue is striking.

Yesterday’s overwhelming approval of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions by the voters of North Carolina underlines the growing likelihood that the issue will be a major factor in the 2012 presidential election. Consider the following circumstances:

One aspect of President Obama's philosophically revealing — and mock-worthy — "Julia" web ad doesn't seem to have garnered as much attention as one might have expected. Just as Julia's life of government dependency isn't likely to inspire a new set of books along the lines of the celebration of…

At a Politico breakfast this morning, Los Angeles mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, the Democratic convention chair, said the Democratic party's platform should include same sex marriage:

Your Paul Ryan-Ron Wyden Medicare Round-up: Josh Barro urges "On Medicare, Save Money Now"; Ben Domenech has "Eight Answers from Paul Ryan"; Phil Klein discusses "Ryan's bombshell Medicare compromise"; and James Pethokoukis on "My Q&A with Paul Ryan on his new Medicare reform plan."

Mitt Romney released a new ad Tuesday that touted the fact that the former Massachusetts governor has been married to the same woman for 42 years and has been a member of the same church his entire life. 

During Herman Cain’s generally strong performance on Meet the Press on Sunday, David Gregory asked him, “Would you seek a constitutional ban for same sex marriage?” Cain replied, “I wouldn’t seek a constitutional ban for same sex marriage, but I am pro-traditional marriage.” Gregory followed up:…

"Global race on to match U.S. drone capabilities"

"Thirteen Clear Factual Errors" in that Time magazine cover story on the Constitution.

Krauthammer: "What Obama did to Israel"

Ellen and Edith

Rich Lowry: 

When Judge Vaughn Walker struck down California's constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on the grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, some argued that what really mattered in the decision were Walkers findings of fact--which supposedly prove there is no…