Strengthening Marriage

A Case for Strengthening Marriage, By Hon. Leah Ward Sears, Chief Justice, Georgia Supreme Court The Washington Post, Monday, October 30, 2006; Page A17 is set out below in its entirety. In the coming weeks and months we will report on initiatives, some local, focusing on strengthening marriage, funded by new federal grants. The AAML has also spent considerable energy and resources on strengthening marriage, which we have and will continue to report. We will also explore over the long term what constitutes a family. While traditional marriage makes things tidy for our court system and represents an ideal for most people, in the face of changing times, we must also recognize the changing definition of family and how future generations of children can thrive.
"For the first time in history, less than half of U.S. households are headed by married couples. And on Sept. 29, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data showing that almost 36 percent of all births are the result of unmarried childbearing, the highest percentage ever recorded.
In family law, as in the rest of American society, there is an intensifying debate about how we should respond to this kind of news. Should law and society actively seek new ways to support marriage? Or should family law strive to be marriage-neutral by providing more rights and benefits to its alternatives, such as cohabitation and single parenthood?
Some family law experts argue that our most pressing need is to find ways to equally support a wide variety of family forms. For example, the respected American Law Institute, an organization of judges, lawyers and legal scholars that periodically drafts model laws and other proposals for legal reform, has proposed a new set of laws that promotes this "family diversity model." In "Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution," some ALI scholars argue that family law should focus less on trying to channel people into marriage and more on being "fair" to people in different relationships -- in other words, that it should take families as it finds them.
I am not a law professor. But from where I sit as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, a family law that fails to encourage marriage ignores the fact that marriage has long been associated with an impressively broad array of positive outcomes for children and adults alike. Experts who contend that we need to move "beyond marriage" say they are only responding to the facts. But here is one major fact: High rates of family fragmentation hurt children.
For example, studies have consistently shown that children raised outside marriage suffer disproportionately from physical and mental illness; are more likely to drop out of school, abuse drugs or