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My name is Jordan. I grew up in Idaho, and lived there most of my life. I have had the opportunity to serve people in Peru, Latvia, and the USA. During a trip to Latvia, I met a girl, and after returning home, I fell deeply in love with her. As travel there is expensive and I am still in college (meaning moneyless), my girlfriend and I have mostly kept our love alive over Skype and other chat clients. She is coming this June on a fiancee visa, and we plan to be married shortly after her entry.
I have no prior film experience, but I strongly feel that film has the potential to change and touch the masses. My video was my first attempt at serious filmmaking. I hope you enjoy it.
~Jordan
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Study after study confirms that children do best when raised by a married couple, and worse when reared by a cohabiting couple. Yet the ACLU has been pursuing a legal campaign against states that have adoption laws which favor married couples. And just last month the Arkansas Supreme Court bought the ACLU argument and struck down laws that banned adoption by cohabiters. But there is some good news: At the end of the month, Arizona's governor approved a law giving preference to marriage couples. Brad Wilcox explains.
by W. Bradford Wilcox, Ruth Institute Advisory Board Member, Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. He is also an adoptive father.
Cohabitation does not serve the "best interest" of children, regardless of what the courts say.
In just one month last year, Tyari Smith Sr. of suburban New Orleans shot and killed his 2-year-old son, Tyari Smith Jr., and his girlfriend, Marie Chavez, because she was considering leaving him and heading back home to California. A week later, 4-month-old Aiden Caro was thrown into a couch by his mother's boyfriend, Samuel Harris, when Harris could not get him to stop crying. Shortly thereafter, the Louisville baby stopped crying forever. The next week, in Gaston, South Carolina, 5-month-old Joshua Dial was shaken by his mother's boyfriend "in a manner so violent that the baby immediately lost consciousness and suffered severe brain trauma," according to local police reports. Joshua died soon thereafter.
Are these tragic cases of fatal child abuse around the nation in one month just random expressions of the dark side of the human condition? Not according to a recent federal study of child abuse and neglect, the Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect.
This new federal study indicates that these cases are simply the tip of the abuse iceberg in American life. According to the report, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are about 11 times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents. Likewise, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are six times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, one of the most dangerous places for a child in America to find himself in is a home that includes an unrelated male boyfriend--especially when that boyfriend is left to care for a child by himself.
But children living with their own father and mother do not fare much better if their parents are only cohabiting. The federal study of child abuse found that children living with their cohabiting parents are more than four times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than their peers living in a home headed by their married parents. And they are three times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, a child is not much safer when she is living in a home with her parents if her parents' relationship does not enjoy the legal, social, and moral status and guidance that marriage confers on relationships.
This latest study confirms what a mounting body of social science has been telling us for some time now. The science tells us that children are not only more likely to thrive but are also more likely to simply survive when they are raised in an intact home headed by their married parents, rather than in a home headed by a cohabiting couple. For instance, a 2005 study of fatal child abuse in Missouri found that children living with their mother's boyfriends were more than 45 times more likely to be killed than were children living with their married mother and father.
Cohabitation is also associated with other non-fatal pathologies among children. A 2002 study from the Urban Institute found that 15.7 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds in cohabiting families experienced serious emotional problems (e.g., depression, feelings of inferiority, etc.), compared to just 3.5 percent of children in families headed by married biological or adoptive parents. A 2008 study of more than 12,000 adolescents from across the United States found that teenagers living in a cohabiting household were 116 percent more likely to smoke marijuana, compared to teens living in an intact, married family. And so it goes.
One reason that children do not tend to thrive in cohabiting households, besides the abuse factor, is that these homes are much more unstable than are married households. One recent University of Michigan study found that children born to cohabiting parents were 119 percent more likely to see their parents break up than children born to married parents. And, as anyone who has children can attest, children do not do well when they are exposed to changing routines, homes, and, especially, caretakers.
This growing body of new research has been deliberately ignored by the ACLU, which has been engaged in a longstanding legal campaign to gut state laws designed to support and strengthen marriage as the preferred relationship for the bearing, rearing, and adoption of children. This month in Arkansas, for instance, the ACLU convinced the Arkansas Supreme Court, in Cole v. Arkansas, to strike down a state law that prohibits cohabiting couples from adopting or fostering children. The ACLU argued that the Arkansas law violated federal and state constitutional rights to privacy and served "no child welfare purpose at all." The Arkansas Supreme Court bought this argument, ruling that the Arkansas law, Act 1, violated cohabitors' "fundamental right to privacy... to engage in private, consensual, noncommercial intimacy in the privacy of their homes."
Keep reading.
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