Free Republic

The heinous intrusions into our lives as a result of ObamaCare swell each day. Now, in true Marxist form, the ludicrously named "Affordable Care Act" mounts an all-out attack on marriage. In 2010, in a Web Memo, the Heritage Foundation pointed out that Under the bill, couples would face massive financial penalties if they marry or remain married. Conversely, couples who cohabit without marriage are given highly preferential financial treatment. If the Senate bill becomes law, saying 'I do' would cost some couples over $10,000 per year. In fact, the "... anti-marriage penalties and heavy 'cohabitation bonuses [were] built into...

SANTA MONICA (CBSLA.com) — So-called “love contracts” between couples, or written agreements that detail specific promises partners make to each other in a relationship, are growing in popularity, but they may have no legal standing. Toni Mantus and Gregg Sullivan said they hired an attorney to draft their contract, which breaks down how much time they’ll devote to shared hobbies and how often they will have sex. “I promise that our date night is gonna be a weekend date and our sex life stays active,” said Toni. “It’s nice to have a contract and say, ‘Look, we did agree to...

So you think there are advantages to living together rather than getting married. Before you close your mind any tighter on the issue, check out these five myths:Myth #1 Living together first will tell us if we are right for one another.No it won't. You are comparing apples to oranges. Just because one tastes good or bad to you doesn't mean the other will taste the same. Marriage is a totally different proposition than simply living together. Marriage is built upon a promise before God to remain faithful to one another. Living together involves no such promise. You could...

... In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce. But that belief is contradicted by experience. Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to...

As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren't in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now. Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly. The decline of marriage seems especially dramatic in comparison to the way things were 50 years ago. In 1960, almost half of 18-...

A speech by Don Feder at Ave Maria University, September 20, 2011 Hollywood has a penchant for blowing things up – especially the world. Since the 1950s, apocalyptic movies (which come with a variety of special effects) have been all the rage. We’ve met our doom through nuclear war (“On The Beach,” “The Day After”), a worldwide super-plague (“Twelve Monkeys” “The Stand”), global warming (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “Waterworld,”), the earth’s core over-heating (“2012,” “The Core”), overpopulation (“Soylent Green”), a comet striking the earth (“Deep Impact,” “Armageddon”), sentient machines taking over (the “Terminator” and “Matrix” series), rampaging simians (the “Planet...

"He's a good dad to our kids, but was always criticizing me," Terry complained. "I couldn't do anything right, in his mind at least. Thirteen years was enough. I figured it would only get worse, so I left." Like most marriages that end in divorce, Terry's marriage began happily enough. And it ended not because of a serious transgression like adultery, abuse, or substance use, but because the couple's personal relationship deteriorated and they gave up. They gave in to two marriage-killing habits: criticism and pessimism. A number of years ago, marriage expert John Gottman identified four relationship patterns that...

Data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau shows married couples have found themselves in a new position: They're no longer the majority. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/05/28/national/a120003D10.DTL#ixzz1NhCuEF25

The Archbishop of York has given his backing to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s decision to live together before marriage.The Archbishop of York backed Prince William and Kate Middleton’s decision to live together before marriage, saying that many modern couples want to “test the milk before they buy the cow”. Dr John Sentamu argued that the royal couple’s public commitment to live their lives together today would be more important than their past. But Anglican traditionalists criticised the Archbishop, the second most senior cleric in the Church of England, for failing to reinforce Christian teaching which prohibits sex outside marriage....

Did you ever notice that there is a different tone and feel to a wedding and the celebration that follows when a couple has been living together prior to taking their vows? Something is missing. Oh, it’s not the guests, the music, the cake, or the decorations. There is always plenty of that to go around. But something is lacking. I will go so far as to say that there is a special look that is absent in the way a co-habitating bride and groom even look at each other. There is no anticipation and no excitement of a new...

Many of New Mexico's Catholics were reminded during Mass last weekend that unmarried couples who cohabitate are living in "a state of mortal sin and may not receive Holy Communion." Archbishop Michael Sheehan told priests to read the letter he wrote stating that only two lifestyles are acceptable: "a single life of chastity, or the union of a man and woman in the Sacrament of Matrimony." The message stops short of directing priests to deny communion to unmarried people who are living together. Instead, Sheehan urges those "living in cohabitation" to abstain from taking the consecrated bread and wine during...

We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life. Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail women's: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year, women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships. [snip] What many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If women were more fully in...

*** The black community's 72 percent rate eclipses that of most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008, the most recent year for which government figures are available. The rate for the overall U.S. population was 41 percent. This issue entered the public consciousness in 1965, when a now famous government report by future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described a "tangle of pathology" among blacks that fed a 24 percent black "illegitimacy" rate. The white rate then was 4 percent....

The results presented in this article replicate findings from previous research: Women who cohabit prior to marriage or who have premarital sex have an increased likelihood of marital disruption. Considering the joint effects of premarital cohabitation and premarital sex, as well as histories of premarital relationships, extends previous research. The most salient finding from this analysis is that women whose intimate premarital relationships are limited to their husbands—either premarital sex alone or premarital cohabitation—do not experience an increased risk of divorce. It is only women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship who have an elevated risk of marital...

Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together. The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found. The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a...

Marriage rates are at an all-time low, a fact that has ramifications for all of us. Most people have no clue about the differences between marriage and cohabitation, thus they are completely blasé about a trend that undermines one of the basic foundations of civil society. I developed the following chart to note the significant differences between the two relationships. The number of couples in the United States who are "living together" without marriage has increased nearly 1,000 percent since 1970. Living together has become the "normative experience," with nearly 50 percent of young adults aged twenty to forty cohabiting....

Wednesday July 15, 2009 Study Confirms Cohabitation Leads To Higher Chance Of Divorce and Lower Relationship Quality By Thaddeus M. BaklinskiWASHINGTON, July 15, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A new study published in the Journal of Family Psychology shows that couples who live together before getting engaged and/or married are more likely to get divorced than those who don't move in together until engagement or marriage, and that couples who live together before engagement report lower satisfaction in their marriages.Using a random telephone survey of 1,050 men and women married within the past 10 years, the current study replicated previous findings regarding the...

It is amazing now to think back on the fact that Fulton J. Sheen, a Catholic archbishop, had a weekly TV show that was vastly popular in the 50s and 60s, in which he defended the Catholic faith. We used to watch it every week when my grandma could convince my uncle to give up watching equally popular comedian Milton Berle on another channel. According to Wikipedia, when Sheen won an Emmy, Berle quipped, 'He's got better writers.'" I came upon Sheen's book Three to Get Married on Amazon just now when I was browsing in reaction to the...

We need some commonsense ways to cut down on welfare abuse. If the people could decide, I bet we would find lots of ways to keep the welfare system on the level. As it is now, welfare is in the hands of a self- perpetuating Democrat liberal system which keeps both recipients and welfare workers dependent on the Dem party. Most of the people on welfare are "single moms" and kids. Ever wonder how many of these "single moms" are actually single? With the permissive attitudes that abound today, do you think that most of these "single moms" are actually...

With rents in many cities skyrocketing, men and women marrying later and a divorce rate for first-time marriages that hovers at about 45%, it's no wonder more American couples are deciding to shack up. There were an estimated 6,017,462 unmarried-partner households in the U.S. in 2006, according to the Census' latest research. This number includes 779,867 same-sex households. When the Census began measuring unmarried partners in 1996, there were only 2,858,000 opposite-sex couples. Though you likely know at least one cohabiting pair, unlike their married and single peers, unmarried couples are not an easy group to quantify. They cannot check...