This entire issue has become a pet peeve of mine. As a single male of advancing years with a, shall we say, sometimes less than macho demeanor, I have been mistaken many times in my life for a homosexual, and have indeed had gay friends and considered myself for years to be pretty progressive on the issue of homosexuality.  What I have most decidedly never been is a homophobe.  Indeed, the term itself is sort of ridiculous, and I think it good to clarify that not only do I not fear homosexuals, in most cases I actively enjoy them as people.  I don't have to like their sex habits, and I don't have to care.  So for years, I didn't care.  Live and let live, right?  It's the American way.

In the last decade, any hint of resistance to the idea of gay marriage has garnered anyone, no matter their previous beliefs or attitudes, the label of bigot by gays who are quite frankly lying when they make the comparison to race and gender to support their political agenda. One does not have a male or female "orientation", or a African or Caucasian or Asian "orientation". Race and gender are physical traits. Homosexuality, whether it is an "orientation" or not, whether it is a choice or not, is expressed as a behavior, and we are none of use required to check our brains at the door when discussing this issue.

I am sick to death of it. Marriage? Benefits? Why? To what possible social goal do we extol the virtues of an abnormal, if not clinically so, sexual orientation or behavior? You can live together, you can have sex together. You can even be married under any spiritual tradition that accepts this for gays. Why the perks? What need for sharing benefits, and why would any sane person want to set themselves up for the inevitable extension of divorce law into their lives should they decide to part?

I think it is nothing more fancy than a direct attack on freedom of religion. By selling this issue as a civil rights issue, leftists (who have been directly involved in the gay rights movement from its inception) hope to place a permanent wedge between the Christian religion, which cannot with any honesty condone homosexuality, and the government.

It's nothing noble. It's the hardball politics of destruction at its utter worst

Let me see if I cannot put this into a cogent form.

The problem with the Socialist tendencies in our Democratic party is that these are people attempting to take money ostensibly to help with economic inequity, and instead they use it primarily to garner votes from a constituency they have created from illegal immigration and extensive social engineering.

Having seen, in my own lifetime, the benefits of workfare and the disaster of welfare, the idea that we are slipping back into that previous unaccountable model is indeed offensive to me.

However, the Republicans, or conservatives if you will, have scant reason to complain.  They have likewise undermined the economic well being of this nation by encouraging false fears, arguing immigration alone is the cause of low wages when in fact, if other safeguards were in place it would simply mean that people who sneak in would have wages the same as a citizen until they were deported.  They have capitulated entirely to business interests who happily outsource labor to markets where economic disparities and even outright government abuse keeps wages artificially low, thus helping to further damage the economy here at home.  Worst of all, they have refused to keep responsible oversight here at home, with the end result that no matter how you try to slice it, the housing and credit scandals began fully on the Republican watch, and were largely the result of typical Republican "deregulation", albeit with the complicit aid of certain Democrats, most notably Bill Clinton.

Things can be done to reform regulation that would make our economy more egalitarian without resorting to large scale power and money grabs by the government.  Through proper regulation, limited liability could always come at the price of including safeguards for labor that would make the concept of the union obsolete.  It would require absolutely no government usurpation of the open market.  Coupled with some workfare financed by progressive taxation, the economy would begin to very naturally function in a way beneficial to all, as the natural rewards would go out to those who thought and organized in terms of social progress rather than individual progress, and yet this would be equally as self serving as our current system.  

You simply remove the rewards for hoarding and replace them with rewards for enlarging ones power through the most complete and efficient utilization of human resources possible.

When wealth and power accumulates into the hands of the very few, they lost any real motivation to keep investing or inventing.  That is the problem we are observing now.  That's the problem things like the Jubile were designed to address in the Old Testament.

testHere's an article that I hope is not lost.  I saw it, commented, and then noted it was removed from the main page for contributors' articles.

http://townhall.com/Columnists/RogerSchlesinger/2009/06/16/what_is_apr

I believe the real problem here is not in nomenclature, but rather in the industry itself simply operating poorly. This is hugely important because this is really the fundamental cause of our current economic situation.  For whatever reason, people simply did not believe there would ever, ever be an economic pull back in the real estate industry, and when it happened the entire business model of real estate sales and investment was turned on its ear.

I don't really understand the point of the article.  Is it to ban variable rates, or what? If the rates were up around 13% a variable rate might be a really good deal. In fact, folks might refuse to buy without the option. Use of the APR or not is irrelevant. What happened was twofold -- people were being shoe horned into things they could not afford because the people doing the loans thought they could make a profit on repos and resale, and these risky investments were never separated from more conventional (and easily identifiable) sorts of loans, thus poisoning the entire world credit market.

Someone please tell me how this relates to APR, variable rates, or anything else under the sun except greed and utter stupidity.

Conservative thinkers have taken to blaming Obama worship for a whole variety of things.  I think it's high time we put aside the issue and moved on to things we have more control over.

Folks. Obama did not win this election by any huge margin. Liberals just in general are given to the sort of emotional idol worship that we see in some quarters, and have heaped it on Kennedy for decades. Few who admire Reagan do so by kissing his statues and weeping. Speaking in generalities, it's the nature of the beast.  Beatles fans cry for Lenin; Zeppelin fans roar for Bonham.  Certain types of folks react to their environment in certain ways.  All of this Obama "worship" is merely the result of the immature mindset and latent belief that there are hidden, almost magical solutions to real problems intrinsic to all devoted leftists.  It's lamentable, but nothing new.

That's not the problem with the broad middle though, and conservatives better get this through their heads quickly.

The majority of this nation that still supports Obama does so because conservatives continue to demonize simple, working class people and belittle their role in the health and welfare of this nation. If big government policies are not going to help, what you need is a cogent plan for making progressive economic changes without the government running the show completely. One way or the other, money needs to stop accumulating in the hands of a tiny minority and begin again to circulate naturally.

Too large a percentage of wealth in too few hands results in the same kind of totalitarianism you complain of in Obama. People have seen through the laissez-faire capitalist's argument.

We need balanced, well thought out regulation where the means of production are privately owned, but the government has the resources necessary to prevent abuses. It's really just that simple.

Stop blaming Obama.

Gay rights activists claim that marriage is not about family, children, and financial issues unique to men and women.  When you point out that this is in fact exactly what marriage is about, and what it always has been about, they claim that this is a weak argument because it merely appeals to old, tired traditions that have no current use in a modern and enlightened society.

The argument is demonstrably not, "it's always been done that way." No one has shown that there is no longer a need to regulate heterosexual sex and the resultant children in some way to ensure the child is taken care of and the finances are arranged fairly. No one has shown how a gay couple, who will either never have children, or if they do will have them in such a controlled way that they can negotiate every aspect of who takes care of what, is the same as a male and female couple for whom at the very least the role of mother and father are defined during child bearing, and generally speaking beyond that in various tangible ways.

No one has shown how these roles are obsolete. Indeed, despite repetition of the same assertion about marriage changing, no one has really shown any fundamental way that it has.

What has been shown is that many liberals will just repeat the charge, "you are making an argument from tradition."

Appeal to tradition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Study the actual use of this term, "appeal to tradition."  We who oppose gay marriage are not arguing that traditional marriage values were proven right at their inception.We're arguing that marriage by definition has been about kids and finances. Whether or not this was the correct way to go is not necessary to refute the oft stated opinion that marriage has nothing to do with kids and finances.

Now I move on to the assertion that marriage is no longer about kids and finances. Well, in fact, if you look at the laws governing marriage, they are indeed about kids and finances, or more precisely, the laws about dissolving a marriage are about kids and finances.

If we move on to the assertion that marriage is not MOSTLY about kids and finances. Again, looking at the laws governing the institution, all of them are about kids and finances.

How about the assertion, "marriage is also about love and romance." Looking at the laws governing the issue, none of them are about love and romance.

How about, "marriage is a spiritual issue that the government has no business interfering with."

In that case, we look at the laws preventing people from getting spiritual marriages within their own faith traditions. Such laws are nonexistent.

So, we know from the past that marriage was about kids and finances, we know the laws currently on the books, so much as they exist, are about kids and finances, and we know that there are no limits on spiritual marriages.

We know that homosexuals come by their children, if they have any at all, in a functionally different way than heterosexuals, and we know that they have more control over this than heterosexuals do.

We know that homosexuals, as far as gender inequalities are concerned, do not have any legal issues. We know that gender inequalities exist in every heterosexual marriage.

We know that for the most part, homosexuals come into a relationship with independent lives, and leave that relationship equally independent. If there have been any decisions for one to, for example, sacrifice career and stay at home, this is fully negotiable between them, and any financial issues can easily be negotiated along with such decisions. We know with heterosexual couples, no matter how hard they may wish it to be otherwise, women are always going to be the ones getting pregnant, and men are by extension more often going to be the ones in a situation to maintain an uninterrupted career. We know that women still make less than men on average, and sometimes even make less than men for doing the same job.

We know from psychology that men and women fulfill different roles in a heterosexual family. We know homosexuals will not be able to fill those roles. One of the two will be excluded.

Everything we know from antiquity to the present dictates that there are indeed differences between gay and heterosexual couples as they pertain to living together, having a child, raising that child, and separating from one another. There are actually almost no similarities between gay couples and heterosexual couples other than the fact that they have sex and feel emotions.

This is not what the law concerning marriage is about.

Add to that the atrocious damage done to our society by high divorce rates brought on by sexually libertine behavior introduced from the exact same political influences as the ones now pushing gay marriage, and what I see is a big, flashing red warning sign stating, "DO NOT ENTER".

We've been here before. We've actually been here dozens of times over the past few decades where divorce, sex, porn, and other moral issues related to sex have been sold to us as progress, and instead have done great damage.

In response to this, what we often hear is, "well, that's just an argument from tradition," from people who do not use the phrase in the same way as it has traditionally been used.

I think the traditional understanding of what an argument from tradition is holds.

This is only the most recent step in a trend that has been going on all my life.  Stop blaming the blacks and the gays and the Jews.  Stop blaming the white, effete liberal elite.  It is the natural outcome of your own hatred of God.

If you acknowledge a higher power, you also acknowledge you are not that power.  Liberals have a very clear and demonstrable record of denying precisely that power, and this denial expresses itself in their willingness to flaunt the will of the governed for the sake of enslaving us all bit by bit.  Had you truly any concern about this attack on God and all that is decent, we would not be here right now.  Where have you all been for the last 50 years?

Whether homosexuality is a choice or not, whether it is genetic or not, whether it is a "mental illness" or not, it is filthy sexual behavior not to be tolerated in decent society.  There's your first mistake.  You sat by and let it happen because you have no sense of urgency when it comes to defending common decency and even the most basic morality.  After all, you celebrated quite enthusiastically the rise of pornography and the skyrocketing rate of divorce and illegitimacy.  Certainly the wholesale slaughter of millions of unborn babies did not rouse you to decisive action.  What did you think?  That after normalizing one of the most historically denigrated and debased forms of sexual perversion, the liberals were going to stop there?  When have they ever stopped pushing for more and more filth?  The filthier and more helpless the population, the more government programs are needed to "help" (control) the population.  Where were the mass demonstrations?  Where is the new political party that will stand for both working people's livelihoods AND working people's values?  It's certainly not in THIS Republican party.

Ultimately, you have no one but yourselves to blame.  The same lack of concern for common decency that characterizes the economy of this nation -- the glorification of the rich, the worship of Mammon -- that led directly to the economic debacle we are now living through, is the exact same lack of concern for decency that leads to the exaltation of perverse sex to the level of a civil right.  You've had decades to take a real stand both in terms of economics and in terms of moral decency.  The liberals are outworking you.  They have a united cause -- indecency in both economics and culture.  You seem to enjoy picking and choosing which forms of decency you will stand for, and which you will let slide.  You don't really care, or this would simply not be true.

And, since you do not care about right and wrong enough to fight for it at every turn, you lose the privilege of living in a society that benefits from the natural outcome of doing things correctly.  Worse is coming.  Just keep sitting on your duffs and wait for it -- it's coming.  The plight of the North Koreans is not something that cannot happen anywhere else.  It will become the way of the entire world.  All you have to do is keep sitting there like lumps, and let it happen.  It most assuredly will.  

I have been intending to do research into the nature of our medical community's support of gay activism for some time. For example, it has often seemed to me that it was largely a political decision to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses.

What I have come to discover is that it has always been political as to what psychiatrists and psychologists choose to regard as a problem and what is not. My conclusion then is that medicine should withdraw from the field of politics in the sense that we should minimize the extent to which science declares something moral, ethical, or normal outside of practices within their own field.

My first reading on this specific topic was Homosexuality and American Psychiatry – The Politics of Diagnosis by Ronald Bayer. One of the recurring themes in the book is that the decision to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) II was to a great extent, perhaps even exclusively, a matter of political activism and not one based on science. Mr. Bayer is sympathetic to the gay agenda at least inasmuch as he seems supportive of the cause of removal of the behavior from the DSM. There is little room for criticism of his views based on any supposed political opposition to liberal causes.

What Dr. Bayer reveals in this book is that in the early 70's, homosexuals took advantage of communist “progressive” popularity in our nation's leftist subculture to assume for their own purposes the status of victim of the Capitalist system. He sets the stage by noting that there were challenges to the idea of homosexuality being any sort of disorder well before the DSM was changed. The most convincing argument to me was the fact that there had been an undercurrent of academics, Thomas Szasz and others of like mind, claiming that much of psychiatry was merely the result of the medicalization of what was in fact merely odd behavior. Some would even resist the phrase “odd behavior” itself. In short, psychiatry had come alongside society and declared certain unpopular behaviors “sick” simply because society disapproved when in fact there was nothing intrinsically wrong with them.

I find myself in agreement with this as far as it goes. This issue has grown, coming out of the shadows of “counterculture” and into our hospitals and classrooms. We all experience more and more pressure to conform to some predetermined “medical” norm or ideal, and I for one am not comfortable with medicine's growing power over us, and government's growing power over medicine. It is merely another conformation of the ages old trap of having those who decide what is right or wrong also enforce what is right or wrong without the populace having anything to say on the matter. In short, it bypasses the separation of church and state by replacing “church” with “psychiatry”.

What, then, disturbs me at all about the removal of homosexuality, or any other “illness” that does no direct harm to the supposedly ill, nor to those around them, from the DSM? It is that the APA never acknowledges that this is what they did. Indeed, the DSM is still replete with the sorts of “illnesses” that the anti-psychiatrists discuss. Instead, it is claimed repeatedly that new discoveries in psychiatry led to the change. This leads to a false perception that there has been some growing body of knowledge about homosexuality that backs the decision, made for purely scientific reasons, to remove homosexuality per se from the DSM. Few things could be further from the truth. What actually happened was that liberal psychiatrists made a political move and have systematically influenced the intrinsically subjective field of psychiatric diagnosis ever since in order to make that move appear prescient rather than merely expedient.

In his book, Bayer expounds on pages 132 and 133 on the details of how all of this was done in utterly irregular fashion and without one person specializing in homosexuality having anything to do with the 1973 decision. The sorts of political forces at work to effect this change were staggeringly left of center.

“Emerging from the battles between the police and the homosexuals of Greenwich Village was the Gay Liberation Front. (GLF), a radical organization that sought to make its opposition to the social order manifest through the assumption of a name evocative of the communist struggle in Vietnam against American military intervention.” (Bayer, p. 93)

“Our oppression as homosexuals stems from the same source as other repressed groups: the restrictive, competitive social roles necessitated by a capitalist economy and a ruling elite.” (Bayer, p. 94)

Red Butterfly, “Gay Liberation”, p.12

Not all gay activists are avowed Communists obviously, but it is telling that these were the original political allies of gay activists, and this was their mindset leading up to the protests and interventions that led to the changes in psychiatry's views on homosexuality. Nor was this merely a bunch of talk from gays who in actuality never made a real impact on the issue. Repeated protests expressing violent disregard for any sense of the rights of people to peaceably assemble led directly to the inclusion of an all gay panel in a 1971 APA conference. What sort of protests?

At a panel on transsexualism and homosexuality, Irving Bieber experienced his first face-to-face denunciation. Having become accustomed to the written attacks of those who had labeled him Public Enemy Number One, he was still unprepared for the kind of rage that greeted him. His efforts to explain his position to his challengers were met with derisive laughter. Since the norms of civility were considered mere convention designed to mute outrage, it was not difficult for a protester to call him a “motherf*er.” “I've read your book, Dr. Bieber, and if that book talked about black people the way it talked about homosexuals you'd be drawn and quartered and you'd deserve it.” (Bayer, p.102-103)

Having not yet read Bieber or any of the others who held what until 1973 was the official professional opinion on homosexuality, I can not defend or attack the work of those psychiatrists. What I will repeat is that there was a tendency then, as now, to subsume a number of issues more appropriately matters of public policy, or perhaps matters of personal preference only, and formulate methods whereby the medical community could dictate what was and was not “proper”. This led to some very improper treatment of homosexuals indeed, including what was referred to as “aversion therapy”. Some of you may be familiar with the practice of sitting a smoker in front of a mirror and forcing them to chain smoke until they vomit. This sort of “treatment” enjoys precious little success in situations where a person later leaves the clinical environment and is all too aware that they do not have to smoke until they puke. Likewise, reports as to the effectiveness of such therapy for homosexuality have been grim, from what I have been given to understand.

Still, this is not the picture of a process being moved along by emerging science. It is a picture of a group of activists putting their feet down and demanding change no matter what science may have to say about the subject.

“To those who had so boldly challenged the professional authority of psychiatry it was clear that only the threat of disorder or even violence had been able to create the conditions out of which such a dialogue could occur. The lesson would not be forgotten.” (Bayer, p. 104)

The activists found a willing ally in Robert Spitzer. Despite the fact that the board in charge of nomenclature was headed by Henry Brill, Spitzer took an active and decisive roll during the period leading up to the 1973 change in DSM II. It's worth noting that no one on this board was an expert on homosexuality, and that no steps were taken to invite the opinions of practitioners who were considered experts on homosexuality. In contrast, when Brill, frustrated by Spitzer's usurpation of the process and mindful of the irregular methods being used to force this decision on the psychiatric world, asked for a stratified sample of APA members to be taken to at least get a sense of where the profession as a whole stood on the matter, he was rejected. He was refused because, in the words of Russell Monroe, “you don't devise nomenclature through a vote.” (Bayer, P. 137)

Apparently you do, since the decision was made by vote of the Committee on Nomenclature while it was actively resisting the efforts of experts on this subject to be heard. After pressuring the Committee on Nomenclature for a hearing, some psychiatrists did indeed get a chance to discuss the issue before the vote – right before the vote. Charles Socarides tried to beat back the attack on the established status quo. His Task Force's work was ultimately rejected because it relied too heavily on “psychoanalytic theory” despite the fact that the council stressed that the clinical conclusions of the Task Force about the pathological status of homosexuals was acceptable. Having found no professional reason to question the Task Force's work, they merely swept aside psychoanalytic theory and ignored the only smidge of actual professional science that had been introduced into the process. Continuing in his resistance, Socarides accused the panel of New York with colluding with the national leadership of the APA. The only response from the New York contingent's Robert Osnos was that the New York branch had been reluctant to embrace the Task Force findings because of its controversial nature. Collusion or cowardice?  Either way, it was a political decision and not a scientific one. (Bayer, p. 115)

As I will note later, the issue was eventually raised up to the membership in general, with the gay activists using their inside influence with the liberal leadership to influence the vote itself.

The extent to which the issue was clouded by political activism can be seen in the absurd suggestions that were being bandied about at the same time. Apparently not satisfied with merely removing homosexuality per se from the list of psychiatric ailments, some psychiatrists, such as Ronald Gent, suggested that homosexuality was essentially indistinguishable from heterosexuality.

Ronald Gold sent a letter to the Council on Research and Development stating heterosexuals too could be in conflict over the sexual orientations, and characterized any idea that homosexuality was “suboptimal” as putting gays at the risk of being treated for internalizing, “effects of anti-homosexual bigotry.” (Bayer, p. 131)

Spitzer went on to present “religious fanaticism,” vegetarianism, and celibacy, among others, as similarly “odd behaviors” comparable to homosexuality. (Bayer, p. 127)

There were indeed criteria for declaring something a disorder even in the eyes of Spitzer.

“His restricted definition of mental disorders, articulated after he had decided that homosexuality had been inappropriately classified, entailed two elements: For a behavior to be termed a psychiatric disorder it had to be regularly accompanied by subjective distress and/or 'some generalized impairment is social effectiveness or functioning.'” (Bayer, p. 127 )

My mind reels at the thought that homosexuality somehow does not meet this standard at the very least in the event that the homosexual him or herself complains about the orientation. The utter inability to attain suitable heterosexual functioning to ever have a family does not entail “some generalized impairment in social effectiveness or functioning?” Did the APA just decide that having a normal family was not at all related to effective social functioning even in cases when the prospective patient deems that it is?

The aforementioned popular referendum was therefore invoked due to outrage over the decision and its irregular methodology. A letter was sent out supporting the nomenclature change that was initiated by Kent Robinson after being contacted by gay activists. It was also payed for and administered by The National Gay Task Force. The letter did not acknowledge it had been sent under such circumstances. (Bayer, p. 145)

In Report Ad Hoc Committee to Investigate the Conduct and the Referendum, Recommendations, 1C and 1D, the ad hoc committee stated that questions of science should be “discussed” by experts, but that the Board of Directors need not pay any attention to these experts. “...neither they nor the membership in its entirety should be put into the position of deciding scientific questions by vote.”

Yet this is exactly what happened, and there was no effort at all to go back and correct the situation. Not only this, but the results of the referendum, which as noted above were influenced by a letter sent directly from gay activists yet appearing to be a letter recommending the science behind the decision, were documented as being reversed just four years later. In a survey of 10,000 taken in 1977 by Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, 69% of psychiatrists believe that homosexuality usually represented a pathological adaptation. 70% believed problems experienced by homosexuals were a result of personal conflicts and not stigmatization. (Bayer, p.167)

So, four years later, there still was no “emerging science” to support the nomenclature change, at least in the opinion of the vast majority of psychiatrists.

This massive difference from the referendum could be the result of cooling sensibilities toward the reform, or it could represent the effect of the misleading mail sent out under the auspices of the leadership, motivated by gay activists and the leadership's self professed liberalism. It was acknowledged by both sides that the leadership was liberal (Bayer, p. 149-151) probably because, at the time, “liberal” had not acquired the negative connotation it has suffered over recent years. In hindsight, the importance of this to the question of whether or not political pressure had anything to do with the decision to declassify homosexuality per se as a mental illness cannot be overemphasized.

Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides continued to be targets of militant homosexuals in their lectures, but the militants apparently recognized an ally in Spitzer and abstained from the sort of interference that had characterized the previous nomenclature discussion when he pushed homosexual behavior further into the recesses of Psychiatric nomenclature while chairing the next Committee on Nomenclature. (Bayer, p. 178)

To this day, despite all the hooplah about the normality of homosexuality in the eyes of psychiatry, there is still mention of it in the current DSM. In a section marked, "Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified," if a person complains of, "...persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation," treatment can still be given. And so, at long last, the absurd effort to make homosexuality appear as if it were the behavioral peer of heterosexuality was realized. One wonders how many heterosexuals in the history of psychiatry have ever complained of such a thing, but problems with homosexual orientation that are manifestly related to the orientation are not labelled as "homosexual” anymore.

At the end of his book, Bayer begins to lay out the reasoning for why he believes that, despite the politics involved, this was a good outcome. The argument rests on the idea that “sickness” is a human concept. He believes that given this, psychiatry, by its very nature, must from time to time make subjective, political decisions as to how it is going to proceed. This argument either ignores or dismisses another obvious and much more productive tack that medical professionals could take. They could concentrate on classifying things in terms of their frequency of occurrence and their own ability to treat a given symptom without expressing any judgment one way or the other on these issues apart from whether or not a potential patient complains about the prospective ailment. It would be the more strictly neutral and scientific approach.

The disadvantage is that it does nothing to increase the marketability of psychiatry to admit that some potential ailments simply exhaust their resources, nor is it in the interests of psychiatrists to let go of the political power they have garnered from their ongoing alliance with the left.  In being raised up as experts, they are empowered by leftists to influence society ethically and morally despite the fact that their field of expertise lends them no particular insight into ethics and morality to begin with.

As a product of a broken home, I experienced first hand the very simple and straight forward difficulties regarding broken homes.  Mine was a fairly ideal situation as far as such things go, but there was very real jealousy and resentment from both my biological and step parents alike as my very existence complicated their lives.  I have met folks with much worse experiences as well.

I'm surprised that more people from my generation are not more concerned about this sort of thing.

When birth control began to allow people to have sex without children, people began to push back marriage to their 20's for economic reasons, and economics is driving the breakdown of traditional marriage.  If you'll recall your history (or even literature), "kids" were getting married in their teens. That's because they are not kids folks, however much you may like to think of them as such. Expecting people to abstain from sex for a decade or more after hitting puberty is unrealistic, and indeed cruel.

Furthermore, I believe the emotional state of young men and women is such that they are much more susceptible to falling in love to a depth that motivates lifelong commitment.  It is easy to point at failed marriages of the young and state that this is not true, but are those failures not more the result of a lack of opportunity for our young men and women just starting out?  Don't you remember how very strong the feelings were at that age, and how you felt you wanted to be with someone forever?  In the past, once these feelings were allowed to consummate themselves, we held them accountable for the promises they made, and we had a place for them in society so that they could support the family.  This is the model for making families actually work.

You won't find many supporters of going back to early marriages, high wage entry level jobs, and penalties for out of wedlock sex though.  As far as conservatives are concerned, it seems if you don't go $40k+ in debt and finish college, you deserve a go nowhere, dead end, low wage job for life.  Half of all wage earners in America as of our last census made $20,000 or less, yet conservatives act as if the fix is just to chastise people more severely for making relatively minor mistakes.

Oh my goodness, Billy and Suzy are 18 and having sex?!

Folks...?  this aint cuttin' it.