Families with Mother and Father are Best

To say that marriage, for example, is just one of a spectrum of lifestyles that individuals may choose is not only to state an empirical fact but to evade the question of the consequences that follow from these various lifestyle choices, not only to the individuals who choose them but for others, including a whole society.  Marriage and other living arrangements, after all, can produce children -- people who did not have a choice of what kind of living arrangement to be born into and raised within.  Empirical consequences of raising children in different lifestyles include not only higher rates of poverty in single-parent homes and costs to taxpayers who end up having to support many children raised in such homes, but also other third parties who become victims of higher crime rates by people who were raised in single-parent homes.  When poverty rates among black married couples have been in single digits, every year since 1994, this suggests that some lifestyle choices are not only different from others but produce better consequences.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p. 224