The Marriage Movement
A Statement of Principles
Institute for American Values
Why We Come Together
We come together as supporters of something new, a grass-roots movement to strengthen marriage. We come together to give the public voice and direction to this new movement - to explain our intentions, specify our goals, and seek the support of our fellow citizens.
We are teachers and scholars, marriage counselors and marriage educators. We are judges, divorce lawyers, and legal reformers. We are clinicians, service providers, policy analysts, social workers, women's leaders, religious leaders, and advocates for responsible fatherhood. We are people of faith, asking God's blessing in the great task before us. We are agnostics and humanists, committed to moral and spiritual progress. We are women and men, liberals and conservatives, of different races and ethnic groups. We come together to pursue a common goal. We come together for a marriage movement.
We come together because the divorce revolution has failed. Contrary to the hopes of many Americans in the 1970s, high divorce rates have proved no panacea for family dysfunction. Divorced parents can fight, too, and sometimes even abandon their children altogether. Children of divorce must cope with new emotional and logistical difficulties at the same time that parents are often overwhelmed by new emotional, time, and financial problems. Even in the best of circumstances, children miss their fathers when living with mothers, and their mothers when living with fathers.
Nostalgia for the high hopes of the 1970s should not blind us to the hard truths discovered over the past thirty years: When marriages fail, children suffer. For many, the suffering continues for years. For some, it never ends. Children suffer when marriages between parents do not take place, when parents divorce, and when spouses fail to create a "good-enough" family bond. We recognize that there are abusive marriages that should end in separation or divorce. We firmly believe that every family raising children deserves respect and support. Yet at the same time, we cannot forget that not every family form is equally likely to protect children's well-being.
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