February 16, 2024
Marriage is Key to Living Your Best Life
America is living in a time of rising anti-marriage sentiment. Voices on the political fringes—both left and right—claim that “there is no advantage to marriage in the Western world for a man” or that divorce is “liberating, pointing the way toward a different life that leaves everyone better off, including children.” Too many men and women, especially…
February 15, 2024
Sacred Sex
A Sociologist of Religion on Protestants, Porn, and the ‘Purity Industrial Complex’”—so read the title of a recent New Yorker interview in which Isaac Chotiner asked sociologist Samuel Perry about the nexus between religion, pornography, and marriage among evangelical Protestants. You can probably guess how the Christian faith came off in this mainstream media outlet. Not well. The New Yorker interview left…
February 14, 2024
Want To Slash Your Risk For Divorce? Start Going To Church
Faith is bad for families. That is often the message that comes out of our pop culture, corporate media, and social media. A Daily Beast headline tells us “Religious Kids are Jerks.” The Nation asks, “Is Conservative Christianity Bad for Marriage?” and offers this answer: “Research Says Yes.” Online influencers like Pearl Davis suggest Christianity does little to stabilize marriage. Put…
February 14, 2024
Valentine’s Day Marred By Loneliness Crisis
This Valentine’s Day, the news is awash with stories of loneliness and atomisation among adults across the West. Though clinical attention has focused on this brewing crisis, the remedies are often misplaced. Last year, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on this new national problem, which was exacerbated by the Covid lockdowns. Following his appointment to the…
February 14, 2024
Why You Should Get Married
Isn’t marriage a trap, mostly for men? Don’t most married couples end up getting divorced? And aren’t most men happier when they’re single? These are the kind of questions I get from young men whenever I make the case for marriage at speaking events at colleges and high schools across the nation—recently in North Carolina,…
February 7, 2024
To Save Local Journalism, Update The Public Broadcasting Act
During his time as the U.S. ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson wrote that if he faced a choice between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Jefferson would be disappointed with today’s trends. Increasingly, we are seeing government without newspapers, especially at the local level, where…
January 31, 2024
How Should State and Local Governments Respond to Illegal Retail Cannabis?
Introduction Legal cannabis has become a fact of life in much of the United States. The District of Columbia and 24 states now permit the sale of recreational marijuana; they, and 14 additional states, also permit marijuana sale for supposedly medical purposes. Of course, the Food and Drug Administration has not actually approved marijuana for…
January 16, 2024
Dry January Should Be Drug Free
There is nothing at all objectionable about the Dry (or semi-dry) January idea. The National Institute on Alcoholism reports that there were some 13,000 drunk-driving-related deaths in 2021—and that, overall, some 140,000 annual deaths can be linked to excessive drinking. For those who drink too much, drinking less is an obvious benefit. What makes the movement notable,…
December 15, 2023
Pro-Family Policy Priorities for States
Introduction America’s system of federalism means that the is- sues that most directly impact the lives of parents and families are often most appropriately dealt with at the state level. While many conversations about how to make family life more affordable and achiev- able in the U.S. tend to focus on the federal tax code,…
December 13, 2023
Stronger Families, Safer Streets
The debate about how best to respond to urban crime—a debate that has become more important in light of recent increases in violent crime and homicide in many cities across America—has tended to focus on two perspectives. The first prioritizes tackling the “social structural factors” (unemployment, economic inequality, poverty, etc.) that are thought to be…