Sam Brownback: “What I want to do is back up and say, Why is this institution even significant to us as a country? Why would a governing…”

“What I want to do is back up and say, Why is this institution even significant to us as a country? Why would a governing body be interested in marriage at all? Isn't this just simply a private matter? What I want to do is go through, on a factual basis, and outline and make clear why marriage is so important to a government. At the end of the day, it comes back to raising children in a society to be productive, good, strong, healthy citizens, and the best setting to do that in is between two married biological parents, if at all possible, male and female. That is what all the statistical studies show. That is what the sociological studies show. It turns out that if you have strong families, at the end of the day you are going to need less government infrastructure and support for them. If you have a very weakened family structure, you are going to need a lot more governmental structure to surround that child to make up for the lack of two dedicated male-female biological parents.”