I missed the New York Times latest attack on marriage, but fortunately Thomas Sowell didn’t:
“The Times defined ‘women’ to include females as young as 16 and counted widows, who of course could not be widows unless they had once had a husband. Wives whose husbands were away in the military, or in prison, were also counted among women not living with a husband.
“With such creative definitions, it turned out that 51 percent of ‘women’ were not living with a husband. That made it ‘most’ women and created a ‘news’ story suggesting that these women were not married. In reality, only one fourth of women have never married, even when you count girls as young as 16.
“While the data quoted in the New York Times story were about women who were not living with a husband, there were quotes in the story about women who rejected marriage.”
The elite types who work at the Times make enough money and have enough of what used to be called advantages they their kids won’t (immediately) be harmed if marriage declines — but others children, whose parents lack the their habits and discipline of your typical sharp elbowed Timesperson, will. Yes, marriage is in trouble, even without the false statistics making it seem worse, as Kay Hymowitz’s “Marriage and Caste in America” shows. But Hymowitz shows that it is the underclass that liberals profess to care about that suffers most when parents aren’t married.