David Weldon: “I just want to stress the point that you were just making, that the burden of this so often does fall to the women…”

“I just want to stress the point that you were just making, that the burden of this so often does fall to the women, particularly when marriages fail. Much of the consequences of that falls to the women because, frequently, they do end up with the children and they have the added responsibility of raising the kids. For the government to be establishing and maintaining tax policies that discourage marriage, to me, borders on criminal. The people who, more often than not, pay the real price for this are the wives, the mothers, and obviously the people who are really paying the price are the kids. I was going through earlier some of the statistics on the impact on children. I have this chart here, and it is really very, very dramatic if you actually look at the numbers: 72 percent of juvenile murderers coming out of broken homes or single-parent homes; 60 percent of rapists; three of four teen suicides; twice as likely to drop out of school. It has an impact on the parents. The parents have shorter life expectancy, poorer health, lower economic well-being. Let me just say there are a lot of single moms and single dads who do a great job, and I meet them every day in my district. My hat is off to them, and I applaud them and their work. Many, many great Americans have been raised by very many heroic single parents going it alone; but as any one of them will testify to you, it is much, much harder.”